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Good Mountain Press Presents DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#167
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~ In Memoriam: Virginia "Gee" Hatchett (1920-2016) ~~~~
~~~~~~~~ [ Del's First Mother-in-Law ] ~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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WELCOME TO   DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#167   July, 2016
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Quote for the Independence Month of July:

Books are all about going on. All the way. To our common destination. To which none of us wants to go ignorant and alone. Hence, into the dark, we write.
Nancy Mairs, in Voice Lessons

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DIGESTWORLD

GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS Presents ISSUE#167 for July, 2016

                  Archived DIGESTWORLD Issues

             Table of Contents

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

4. Cajun Story
5. Recipe or Household Hint for July, 2016 from Bobby Jeaux: Sardine Paté
6. Poem from The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: "Remember the Future"
7. Reviews and Articles featured for July:

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#167
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ON THE WEB  
~ ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ~
2000: INAUGURAL YEAR: Jun  
#1 Jul  #2, Aug  #3, Sept  #4, Oct  #5, Nov  #6, Dec  #7
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2004: Jan #44, Feb #45, Mar #46, Apr #47, May #48, Jun #49, Jul #50, Aug #51, Sep #52, Oct #53, Nov #54, Dec #55
2005: Jan#051,Feb#052,Mar#053,Apr#054,May#055,Jun#056,Jul#057,Aug#058,Sep#059,Oct#05a,Nov#05b,Dec#05c
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2008: Jan#081,Feb#082,Mar#083,Apr#084,May#085,Jun#086,Jul#087,Aug#088,Sep#089,Oct#08a,Nov#08b,Dec#08c
2009: Jan#091,Feb#092,Mar#093,Apr#094,May#095,Jun#096,Jul#097,Aug#098,Sep#099,Oct#09a,Nov#09b,Dec#09c
2010: Jan#101,Feb#102,Mar#103,Apr#104,May#105,Jun#106,Jul#107,Aug#108,Sep#109,Oct#10a,Nov#10b,Dec#10c
2011: Jan#111,Feb#112,Mar#113,Apr#114,May#115,Jun#116,Jul#117,Aug#118,Sep#119,Oct#11a,Nov#11b,Dec#11c
2012: Jan#121,Feb#122,Mar#123,Apr#124,May#125,Jun#126,Jul#127,Aug#128,Sep#129,Oct#12a,Nov#12b,Dec#12c
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2015: Jan#151,Feb#152,Mar#153,Apr#154,May#155,Jun#156,Jul#157,Aug#158,Sep#159,Oct#15a,Nov#15b,Dec#15c
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2019: Jan#191,Feb#192,Mar#193,Apr#194,May#195,Jun#196,Jul#197,Aug#198,Sep#199,Oct#19a

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1. July 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 Oysters.
"Oysters" at http://www.doyletics.com/images/160612vj.jpg

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2. HONORED READERS FOR July:
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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 July, 2016:

Kathy Johnson in New Orleans

Lindsay Starr in California

Congratulations, Kathy and Lindsay!


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3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:


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Out Our Way:

BAMBOOZLED TALES

 Each morning that I bring in the garbage can from the street, I usually walk across to inspect the two bamboo plants that I transplanted from the bamboo thicket on either side of this open view of the new drainage culvert. The Parish removed about a hundred feet of thick bamboo to put in the large culvert to help drain the suburban area across the bayou. Nothing much to look at or listen to except occasional Spanish festivals at the Hispanic Church nearby. Someone planted a nice row of bamboo plants about two years ago and forgot about them, so they dried up and died. I decided to plant a couple smaller shoots and keep them watered until their roots find the water table themselves. After a couple of months I was proud of my work, until one week, the two plants seemed to have disappeared! I walked over and found that some of the CITY of GRETNA's idiotic weed-whackers had tried to eliminate my two transplanted bamboos! The tall one was collapsed over about 8 inches above the ground showing the scars of its battle to survive the weed-whacking hacks. I clipped it below the bend to give room for new shoots to come up. I made a "BAMBOO PLANT" label for each of the two sticks, taped them securely, and hammered them into the ground next to the two bamboo plants. Would that protect them, I wondered, but, not leaving anything to chance I kept ever vigilant for the whackers return. I was ready to take an early morning shower one morning when I heard some mowing taking place, and it was definitely not our landscape guys four days early, so I opened the blinds and sure enough, there was the tell-tale bright yellow-green vest of the Gretna butchers with their obscenely noisy and noisome machines.

I quickly donned my clothes and short-stopped the whacker before he reached my two transplants. "I didn't cut down your bamboo," he said. "Well, someone did," I replied and dragged him to the killing zone. "I never make sharp cuts like that," he said. I explained that I did that to help it grow back. After had I painfully got him to accept the foul deed he or another oblivious whacker like himself had done, I walked back to my gardening table and took two white flags on a wire stand and marked my two bamboos again. Next step, if this whacky destruction continues, is for me to notify Mayor Belinda Constant to take care of the problem. Maybe then Gretna will stop trying to stop me from doing effectively what they couldn't do at all on their own to re-establish the bamboo curtain across the ugly drainage site. Compared to computer glitches, bureaucratic glitches are even more exasperating because they are human-caused, aren't they?

My first batch of green beans and potatoes went bad when the Morton "Season-All" top poured about a half-cup of seasoning into the pot. The beans were perfect and only needed a bit of seasoning. Usually the seasoned salt is slow coming out of the tiny holes, so I gave it a hard shake after opening the top and to my horror I discovered my mistake! I had opened the spoon-out top and it had poured way too much seasonings into the pot. I immediately taped that side of the jar closed so this could never happen again, and then I spooned out the affected beans and potatoes, then poured as much liquid as I could down the drain and added water. That helped, but it never tasted the same again, and eventually I threw it all away. My older jar was McCormick's "Season-All" and you had to screw off the top to sprinkle. If you ever needed a big spoonful (I never do), you could lift off the plastic top with sprinkle holes. Luckily I had another batch of potatoes from the garden and I fixed a new pot of green beans and potatoes the following week.

This month when I drove away from the Brandt Collision place after they had taken a week to replace the skin on the rear passenger door, there was a Service Car Soon light appearing on the dashboard. Coincidence or connection with what Brandt did to my car?

It was time for my summer oil change, so I figured they would take care of the light. They did. The light is off now. What I found out was that they could tell me that 150 miles earlier the battery had died and been re-charged. Did you know they could do that on 2010 and later autos? I didn't. Well, I checked the mileage on my records and sure enough, it happened while my Maxima was at the Collision Center. Probably left the door open all day or something. I was relieved because to that point the most likely cause of the trouble light would have been a Bad Oxygen Sensor that job runs over a hundred dollars for each one and there are five or six, so far as I know. Several had gone bad on my 2000 Maxima. The good news for me was that I was able to get into and out of a dealership service bay for under $100, a rarity these days. In fact the oil change didn't cost me more than abominably slow, in my experience, 5-Minute-Oil-Change places. Plus I got a free car wash in the bargain.

STUPOR REGIONALS

The subtitle for this section could be A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Omaha, because LSU beat Rice twice in the Baton Rouge Regional to get to the Super Regional on its home field, and well, then a funny thing happened. About four years ago LSU was on its way to the College World Series in Omaha and stumbled into a STONY BROOK and didn't make it. This year LSU got mired in the swamps of COASTAL CAROLINA! As his wife liked to exclaim on the radio, "T'aint funny, McGee!"

Watched LSU play, two nights in a row from 8 PM until past midnight and each time we lost, unable to mount a big enough rally to carry us past the bottom of the ninth batting by the designated Home Team Coastal Carolina University. When LSU was home team in the first game we ended up three runs short at the bottom of the ninth. This flipping of a coin to choose the home team for Super Regionals is flipping crazy! A National-Seeded Home Team like LSU should be home team for ALL its games in a Regional and Super-Regional. Works that way for NBA, NFL and MBL playoffs, why not for College World Series playoffs?

Del and I survived the long, torturous Regional and Super Regional games by watching on NETFLIX Streaming various Wild Continent documentaries on a right side SmartTV. Makes for interesting fare during inning and pitching changes. Helps to keep us awake into the early morning hours of rain-delays and extra inning games of which we had a few this year.

We are proud of our primarily freshman team who were battling back like seasoned veterans by the end of the season. All those freshmen will be back, locked and loaded for next season.

Good news is that Football Season Has Officially Begun! Stow away the Rally Caps and Rally Possums for another year; time to get out the football jerseys and Heisman statistics!

MAY IS BLACKBERRIES, JUNE IS CREOLE TOMATOES, JULY IS FIGS

In New Orleans, April is Festival Time, French Quarter, Jazz Festivals, and numerous other reasons to get together to eat good, listen to good music, dance and have fun! Come May, the weather gets warmer and the focus is on food: oyster festivals, crawfish festivals, every kind of Louisiana food festival fills everyone's weekends. For us, this year, the blackberry harvest was late due to the late Easter on March 27 caused by the late Full Moon right before the Spring Equinox. All harvests were almost a month past normal time. It is June 20, 2016 as I type these words and we still have one blooming Easter Lily in our garden. Blackberries usually ripen here in early April and they began on May 1 this year and we picked them until the first of June. Now, in the middle of June, the first Creole Tomatoes are getting tasty and available. These usually kick off the first of June.

Our cucumbers were late also but are making up for their tardiness by their size and quantity. We rarely go to see a friend without a couple of cucumbers in hand. Here's an example of the comments we get about the cucumbers, "The cucumbers are delicious and HUGE! We are enjoying them. Armand and Patty." Each night we have either sliced Creole tomatoes in Del's special sauce (Wishbone Italian dressing and Blue Plate Mayo). We slice tomatoes over the bowl so all their juices flow into sauce, then add the Creole Sauce and marinate them for an hour or two in the fridge. We peel and slice the cucumbers and sprinkle them with salt, black pepper, and toss them with a bit of white vinegar. Sometimes we have both, sometimes as side dishes, sometimes as our main course. Creole tomatoes are so good, we rarely leave New Orleans in June each year.

LAPTOP MISERIES @#$%^*&~?

Notice how the title above looks almost like MINISERIES? It felt like a lugubrious miniseries on this one morning when I decided it was time for me to pay the license fee for the FTP program I use on a daily basis on my PC on Windows 7 but wouldn't work on my Windows 10 Lenovo Laptop. With a possible trip to Orange Beach coming up, I need to be able update my website and my 30 day trial period for the FTP program had expired. If I'm going to pay, it's best for me to be home. What should have taken only ten minutes took almost 3 hours! But I have learned never to do an upgrade on-line without clearing a few hours ahead of me. Worst thing is to have to leave during an upgrade and have an inadvertent power failure and reboot take place. Your trusty PC or LT could become a boat anchor if that happened.

Paying took a few minutes. Getting the thing to work took several hours. Gal in Sales helped me get my license activated, but the FTP still would not run. She switched me to Technician who was stumped for a while, and then had me Run it as Administrator. It ran. After he hung up, I practiced what he did so I could learn how to do it on my lonesome.

First the Right Click on taskbar icon, but only AFTER you rest your cursor on FTP icon and a second icon comes up to the right of the left-side Task Bar. Then you go down to Properties and select the RUN as ADMINISTRATOR option. That did it, but not after a chamberpot of reboots and cuss words!

Did you realize that we now have a Nanny State of Microsoft? Can't even just run an FTP program without knowing how to be an Administrator in the bizarre Window 10 system! Along the way of doing this I also figured out to get Internet Explorer to take over from the crappy EDGE browser which tries to take over without a by-your-leave. You need to go to the Options at far right to do the hand-off to IE. More crap than a hippopotamus drops daily into the Zambesi River! I was exhausted after all this labyrinthine folderol. A simple on-line-license payment and run-the-application turned into a glitch-filled four-hour stint! But it's done.

One more problem to make my Lenovo trip ready: my LT was stuck in the Run-in-Optimized mode and the battery was stuck at 59%. The option to switch to Full Power, like before a five hour road trip, is GONE! ! ! ! Ask Google, you say? HAH! I did and got nothing but confusing bafflegab. On my own, I found Lenovo Settings and Under Battery a switch I had NEVER seen before for Battery Conservation. I clicked and IMMEDIATELY my battery began to charge above 59%. So now I can get my battery fully-charged before going on a long trip in case there are no power outlets. (I pinned Settings to the Task Bar till I'm confident in finding it again.) WHEW! Another hour to solve a minor problem which should never have occurred in the first place. There was a very visible and handy Battery Mode option on the Lenovo the last time I used it. Where did it go? Out. What did it do? Nothing! I finished by running a 100% power test and after that worked I returned the Lenovo LT to its normal Battery Conservation mode of 59% which is fine for at home on the charging station.

THREE FRIENDS HAVE PASSED

Uncle Bob's wife Edna Legendre died and we will attend her funeral there later. A Hahnville classmate of mine, Ann Kadak died in Virginia. Harold Meaker, a member of my club died. We ask your prayers along with ours for their souls.

LAST MINUTE EVENTS

Del had lunch at Commander's Palace with our sister-in-law Karen, and I had lunch with three friends at the Live Oak Grill, Jim Webb, Barlow, and Frank Arneman. This was a quiet stay-at-home month with lots of good eating.

In the last week, we drove to Picayune, Mississippi to attend the funeral of Edna Merle Gross Legendre, the wife of Del's Uncle Bob Legendre. We got to see Del's Legendre cousins, both Bob's and Gladys's offspring. Was a beautiful sunny day with white clouds and the Picayune City Hall was a photo op waiting for me. The priest Fr. Nick did a great homily in the small St. Paul's Episcopal church whose service had a choir and almost a dozen parishioners assisting the priest.

On the 25th we attended a 70th Birthday Celebration for Duke Eversmeyer at the famous Rock-n-Bowl Lanes and Music venue in its new location at Carrolton & Earhart. The place was noisy, but the food was good, and we saw friends both from my club and from Del's Warren Easton Class of which Duke was a member.

A BLESSED EVENT

One last event happened on June 28, 2016 when Abigail Adele Upton had her Coming Out Party in Alexandria, Louisiana about 6:58 AM CDT. CLICK HERE! to see first photos we took of her, including her eyes wide open. Her mother Katie is recovering well. We drove up to the hospital and arrived about four hours after the baby was delivered. Three new grandparents were there: Kim and Wes Gralapp (Katie's parents) and Jane Duncan (Stephen's mother). Abigail's older brother Ben showed up an hour or so after we arrived, and did not seem much impressed about his new sister, but loved the new toys his Grandfather unwrapped for him. After some coaxing, the 14-month-old Ben got close enough to touch his sister. Abigail's Uncle Thomas showed up for a quick photo op and everyone got a chance to hold the hours old Abigail. Katie nursed her baby a couple of times, but she was clearly a bit tired as well as happy about the ordeal she endured. The pediatrician hopped into the room looking a bit like Peewee Herman and gave Abigail a quick once-over inspection and approval.

My intrepid photographer for DIGESTWORLD worked hard and long to get a photo of Abigail's eyes completely open. Del and I agree they look to be a deep blue. She is truly a beauty and a joy to hold. This is first girl born to Del's side of our merged family for about 26 years, and we expect little Abigail to be a big hit at future family gatherings.

EVERY GOOD THING MUST COME TO A NEW BEGINNING

The past month of June has been wonderful with ample afternoon showers to keep our lawn and gardens watered and the temperatures down. One rainy day the temperature hovered at 74 in the mid-afternoon. We're enjoying the rainy weather more because there are no LSU baseball game affected by rain and lightning. It's been a slow month as far as flashy events to report on in these pages, but the rest of the summer will be full of fun and photos. Till we meet again in August, enjoy your early Summer weather. Whatever you do, wherever in the world you and yours reside, Remember our earnest wish for this God sent year of 2016:

MAY THE WORLD BECOME PEACEFUL AND SERENE IN TWENTY-SIXTEEN

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Quotes Selected from quotes.htm this month:

  • When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
    Jonathan Swift

  • Reality is more profound than whatever human beings may often be willing to encompass with their thinking.
    Rudolf Steiner, Austrian Philosopher (1860-1925)

  • Teachers as artists of education must approach children as artists of life.
    Rudolf Steiner, Founder of Waldorf School System (1860-1925)

  • The only thing that matters is whether what I say can stand the test of a true knowledge of the human being.
    Rudolf Steiner, Metaphysician (1860-1925)

  • Now in the course of modern civilization, humankind has gradually lost the habit of reading nature and, most of all, human nature. Our natural science is not reading nature but mere spelling.
    Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist (1860-1925)
  • New Stuff on Website:
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    Want to see some SIGNS of our TIMES? Click on this new Tidbit and read along.
    EXAMPLE: "I'm Still Hot. It Just Comes in Flashes Now!"
    Thanks to Mark Parker for sending this Tidbit along 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.Chapter: Rainbows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar,
    we continue with a poem from the Rainbows Chapter of his second book of Poetry,
    Rainbows & Shadows (1995).Written for my mother's 50th Anniversary Dinner where my brothers and sister (and spouses) were all present. I read it aloud and later had it framed for her. She has it on the wall in her den. I tried to capture the feeling of birth order in each of my siblings, who, all younger than I, could not feel what it was like to be an only child. In fact, I had an older sister who survived for only a day, so I was not the oldest child either. How much of my parents expectations and anxieties for me were flavored by having lost their first child, I can only guess.

          Happiness Is Having A Mother

    Happiness is having a mother
            Who loves and cares for you
                    as her only child.

    Happiness is having a mother
            Who loves and cares for you
                   even though you've a
                           bigger brother.

    Happiness is having a mother
           Who loves and cares for you
                  even though there are
                          two bigger brothers about.

    Happiness is having a mother
           Who loves you and treats you special
                  even though you are
                          the smallest of four boys.

    Happiness is having a mother
           Who loves you and teaches
                  you how to survive
                          in a world surrounded
                               by four bigger brothers.

    Happiness is having a mother
           Who loves you and raises you
                  when other mothers her age
                          are content with just
                               having grandchildren.

    Happiness is having a mother like you.


    2. Chapter: Shadows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar,
    we continue with a poem from the Shadows Chapter of his second book of Poetry,
    Rainbows & Shadows (1995): Golden Rule II.This poem was inspired by page 545 of the Course in Miracles Textbook and was written in the margins of page 545 on June 27, 1992. It is a re-write of the Golden Rule into a slightly different form that is consonant with the Course in Miracles. The key quote is, "The secret of salvation is this: That you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true."

                      Golden Rule II

    You are doing unto yourself

           what you think others

           are doing unto you.




    3. Chapter: Rainbows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar,
    we continue with a poem from the Rainbows Chapter of his second book of Poetry,
    Rainbows & Shadows (1995).

          The Rest of Your Light

    This is the first day
           of the rest of your light —

    Shining through the one-way mirror
           of consciousness

    In which you have only seen
           the reflection of the mundane world
            up until now.

    May the spirit ray
           as light from out of you —

    The light of wisdom a-quiver
           in your livingness

    Glowing through a living screen
           as a springtime mist of love
                   from now on.




    4. Chapter: Shadows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar,
    we continue with a poem from the Shadows Chapter of his second book of Poetry,
    Rainbows & Shadows (1995). At 37,000 Feet: This poem written on August 28, 1977. Inspired by flying at 37,000 en route to AHP conference in Berkeley. I wrote it originally in a letter to Del, whom I was dating then. The poem, as it appears here, has been edited to shorten it and make it more readable, but is otherwise unchanged. I like it for its strong images, particularly in the last stanza.

                      At 37,000 Feet

    In the space between and before dreams
           poetry
           through me,

    Rhyme and rhythm peal and echo
           through the footless halls of time.

    Here in this endless cavern
           ceiling above the mist
           we fly,

    Roaming and foaming
            the bobbing nutshell
                   of being.

    Deep within the center
           hoof beats follow
           and hollow our skulls,

    Thoughts and memories
           an afternoon
                   of maggots.

    "Follow, Follow!" A seductive voice
           oozes from the darkness,

    A tangible fullness,
           the licorice Jell-O

    Of this scare of night lumps.





    5. Chapter: Rainbows

    This month, as we near the completion of Bobby's first book of Poetry, Flowers of Shanidar,
    we continue with a poem from the Rainbows Chapter of his second book of Poetry,
    Rainbows & Shadows (1995).This poem was written on June 1, 1992. It was first written on page 10 of Jung's "Alchemical Studies" on Dec 3, 1991. It was first written simply as a note inspired by reading the first 10 pages of the book. This was later written as a poem to say something directly that I have only hinted at in my other writings. It is the clearest statement to date I have made on my concept of God.

          Collective Unconscious

    The term collective unconscious
           is a name

    For the apparent similarities
           and simultaneities

    Among human psyches
           due to their common access
           to the mutual communication plenum

    That we commonly call God.





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

    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.):
    "Wild Strawberries" (1957) beautiful and crisp image of this classic Bergman Black & White film. A 78-year-old actor/director plays the same star role in film. Bibi Anderssen and Max von Sydow show up. Do watch the Introduction first and the 15 minute home movies of director on 16mm. Sets the stage for this amazing movie. Men over 75 should watch this movie. For them it is a DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Wildlike" (2014)
    Fourteen-year-old girl runs away from abusing uncle during her summer stay in Alaska and hikes through Denali with Bruce Greenwood figuring his life out who helps her gently to figure her own life out. Slow, no much action or dialogue, but Alaskan scenery speaks volumes.
    "Soundless" (2004)
    a stealthy hit man gets hit on by a gorgeous blonde - can this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? A DON'T MISS HIT !
    "Joy" (2015)
    lived in a dysfunctional family, had a dysfunctional marriage, and was always mopping up the messes for everybody else. So she invented a mop which sold millions and had to single-handedly fight to protect her patent, earning her name the hard way. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong" (2016)
    but it's yesterday in L. A. and time to fall in love today!
    "Waiting for Forever" (2010)
    is Will for Emma, following her just to be in her space till one day she might find him.
    "A War" (2016)
    A Danish soldier in Afghanistan, Claus left his headquarters to lead his demoralized men out on patrols and calling in an air strike to save a dying soldier, he is court-martialed for killing civilians. Did Claus have a Positive Id of enemy in the compound he ordered destroyed or not?
    "45 Years" (2015) for Tom Courtenay it's been 45 years since a lovely flame died and smoke still gets in his eyes.
    "If I Were You" (2012)
    here's what I would do, yeah, but not if you knew I were sleeping with your husband. Well-scripted, all-out funny, crazy-ass movie. A DON'T MISS HIT! ! !
    "The Fundamentals of Caring" (2016)
    Paul Rudd takes a crash course in caring and his first job is a doozy: a teenage boy with MD, a sassy mouth, and a love of practical jokes which makes the boy who cried Wolf! appear an amateur! A road trip in which they add a run away girl and a pregnant one is full of challenges.

    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.

    "Faces in the Crowd" (2011) is about face-blindness but filled with script blindness.
    "Eye in the Sky" (2007)
    a young girl joins a surveillance team to catch a jewelry heist gang. A DON'T MISS HIT !
    "Creative Control" (2016)
    creates a dystopian vision of the future where people talk and don't do much else. A B&W with only glimpses of color in the sexy avatar. A senseless waste of good pixels!

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

    "One More Time" (2016) Chris Walken as a fading crooner who wants one more hit while his teenage 31-year-old daughter wants to hit him. Can peace ever come to this "I'm gonna die soon." father? Can an aging singer live his life all over again?
    "Enemy" (2013) Double dumb as Jake meets his double.
    "Colonia" S016)
    Secret torture prison & cult from which Lena and Hans try to escape and have it shut down. A chiling experiment in Chile.
    "Program" (2016)
    Tour d'Lance gets no awards for his Program's expert avoidance of drug use detection by technology, lies, and deceit.
    "Gods of Egypt" (2016)
    get lost in a video game and survive anyway.
    "The Fool" (2015)
    in a Russian slum, a plumber called to fix a leak art 2 am on a winter's morning determines that the 1-story apartment building is collapsing and sends all Mayor and her minions scurrying to cover their asses.
    "The Heiress" (1949)
    Montgomery Clift as a handsome wastrel intent on helping a homely heiress spend her upcoming fortune. Set in Washington Square with Ralph Richardson as Clift's to-be father-in-law, a role he would reprise as Zhivago's father-in-law decades later.
    "The Sheltering Sky" (1990)
    Debra Winger and John Malkovich wander through North Africa seeking love, life, and death, finding some of each. They collect a lot of flies along the way. If you like dry, dusty scenery and horrendous living conditions, you may like this movie.
    "Twice Born" (2012)
    being born in war-torn Zagreb is problematic, Pietro thinks he knows his mother and father, Penelope Cruz knows she adopted him and thinks she know who his father was. A trip down memory lane reveals a lot secrets for everyone.

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    4. STORY:
    == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==

    Le Boudreaux Cajun Cottage, drawn by and Copyright 2011 by Paulette Purser , Used by Permission
    Thanks to Tee-Paul from Opelousas for this one!



    Boudreaux and Broussard were watching a Jacques Cousteau special on PBS.

    Broussard turned to his friend and said, "Boudreaux, ya got any guess why dem guys wit' the scuba tanks on jump backwards from de boat into de water?"

    Boudreaux said, "Mais, Cooyon! Dat's cause if dey jumped forward, dey would land in de boat!"

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    5.Recipe for July, 2016 from Bobby Jeaux:
    (click links to see photo of ingredients, preparation steps)
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    Sardine Paté Sandwich

    Background on Sardine Paté: The Beach Cliff Sardines with Hot Green Chilies (clearly Jalapeno Peppers slices) have been a favorite of mine for decades. Never cared for regular sardines, but the spicy peppers give these a nice kick. Usually I dumped them out of the tin into a small plate and put a fat sardine over a Triscuit or other cracker as a quick, impromptu meal. Several years ago, Del began removing the peppers and the spine of the sardine and making a paste or paté for sandwiches. Also very tasty. Here's how you can do it in a minute or two.

    Ingredients
    Beach Cliff Sardines with Hot Green Chilies
    Half of a large spoon of Zatarain's Creole Mustard
    2 Large spoons of Blue Plate Mayonnaise
    Pepperidge Farm Whole Grain bread

    Preparation
    Open sardine tin, dump contents onto a plate. Remove the peppers slices and the back bones of the sardines and discard.

    Sardine Paté Making Instructions
    Place cleaned sardines into small bowl. Mash the sardines into uniform consistency. Add two large spoons of mayonnaise. One half spoon of creole mustard. Mix together and it's ready to serve.

    Serving Suggestion
    Open face sandwiches work well. Use Whole Wheat bread. One slice for two half sandwiches. Toast and spread evenly across one slice and divide in two.

    Other options
    The pate also works well on Triscuit or Ritz crackers and can produce quick, last-minute canopés.



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    6. POETRY by BOBBY from The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

        Remember the Future

    Ever feel a zing
           when you try on a ring?

    If you try to decipher
           the meaning of the thing

    You call up images
           of memory's vestiges

    And get nowhere fast nohow.

    The reason for the zing
           is a future thing

    Poured into feeling
           inside of you now.

    If you want to know the future,
           Forget the look of the ring —
           the answer is in the zing!

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    7. REVIEWS and ARTICLES for July:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    For our Good Readers, here are the reviews and articles featured this month. The first and second reviews this month will be ones which were never published in early DIGESTWORLD ISSUES and will be of interest to our DIGESTWORLD Readers. The rest of the items 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: The Spirit of the Waldorf School, GA#297 by Rudolf Steiner

    Recently I came across a series of twenty-six volumes of Steiner lectures devoted to Education and found that I had already read and written detailed studies (reviews) of nine of them. I compiled these into a list to be included with each of the reviews, so that anyone reading one of these book reviews on education can easily find the other reviews and the entire list of names of the books. After identifying those books left to study, I ordered all those that were available and have begun working on them. This volume will be the tenth one to be reviewed and you can determine at any time in the future which of the 26 volumes have been reviewed: each one with an underlined title has been reviewed.

    Why am I reviewing these volumes about education? I am certainly interested in education, having taken four post-graduate courses in the field and a lot of independent study of my own. But that's not the whole story: each set of Steiner's lectures I study contain mind-boggling concepts, one I have not encountered anywhere before. Take for example, Manifestations of Karma, which I recently reviewed. In it, I discovered that Steiner had created the equivalent of Einstein's Energy =Mass*c2 by sharing his insight which equates Soul and Love, which I dare to give as this equation: Love = Soul*c2. The expression c2 means the speed of light squared. The speed of light is a very large number, which, when multiplied by itself, becomes an enormous number.

    Einstein came to understand that each tiny particle of Mass was an enormous amount of Energy compressed, I. e., there was no Mass as we understand a material particle but, instead, there were two forms of Energy: expanded energy (Energy) and compressed energy (Mass) and c2 was the ratio of their compression.

    Steiner came to understand that each particle of Soul was an enormous amount of Love compressed, that what we understand as our Soul is an agglutination of an enormous amount of Love. It seems likely to me that ratio of Love to Soul is the same c2 factor which relates Energy to Mass. Compress Energy and you get Mass; compress Love and you get Soul. This allows us to understand why a baby born without receiving Love will invariably die, for the lack of nourishment for its Soul(1).

    What I saw in these 17 lectures series on education was the possibility of further revelations by Steiner as he helped teachers in the Waldorf Schools to assimilate anthroposophy to assist them in facilitating the growth of their students into full human beings. If a teacher does not allow love to flourish in the lives of young children in their classrooms, how can they develop into soul-filled adults? And how can Steiner inspire educators to allow love to flourish unless he embodies love in his presentations to them. This point was expressed quite well in the Translators' Note on page ix as Lathe and Whittaker describe Rudolf Steiner as a "man filled with warmth for his audience, enthusiasm for his task and a clear sense of the urgency, even the desperation, of modern times." The translators strove to convey the impression that Steiner was speaking to a 1994 American audience, and "to find words that would ring true to the American ear as well as to the American eye."

    These two excellent writers went on to describe in their Introduction (page xi) the conditions of post-WWI Germany thus, "Shame slouched where pride once strode." Rudolf Steiner at the time was attempting to persuade the movers and shakers of the new Germany to evolve into a Threefold Society to instead of repeating the gross mistakes which led the people into the Great War. No one would listen to him, and finally he understood the reason: education, the lack of.

    [page xii] He concluded that no one could hear him because the education people had been given left them unable to consider, and therefore unable to work with, anything not based on familiar routine.

    Emil Molt, Director of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company, was a student of Rudolf Steiner and wished for a reformation of German society after listening to Steiner speak in November 1918. After requests to do so by some of his workers, he resolved to form a school for his factory workers' children, and enlisted Steiner's help. Here was a way to develop ears for people to hear, develop people with ears and minds open to ideas for reforming society.

    [page xiv] The goal of this education was that, through living inner work guided by the insights of Rudolf Steiner, the teachers would develop in the children such power of thought, such depth of feeling, such strength of will that they would emerge from their school years as full members of the Human Community, able to meet and transform the world.

    In Herbert Hahn's Foreword, he leads us to see Emil Molt as a gallant surfer on the crest of the Great Wave of the Threefold Society who lands safely on the beach intent on forming a school which can create adults who could understand the principles which led Steiner to his threefolding concept. Hahn writes about what was important to Steiner:

    [page 5] He did not see the renewal of pedagogy as one social reform among many. He saw it as the source of social renewal for the coming generations of young people.

    We stand here almost a hundred years later and observe that Waldorf Schools are open and thriving, hundreds of them, all around the world. We can read in these lectures how Steiner approached the founding of the Waldorf school system, not by expressing empty phrases, but inspiring concerned educators to look beyond the empty phrase, that is, talk without content, to the needs of the growing children. He reminds us of the horrendous effects of the empty phrase which led the world into war. By empty phrase he seems to refer to the various diatribes hurled back and forth by various countries which eventually led to war. From a small beginning the battles grew as various treaties of support forced more and more countries into battle with each other until the battles grew into a World War.

    [page 10, 11] And into this reign of the empty phrase has been woven the most terrible event that has occurred in world history — the horrible catastrophe of the war in the past years! Just think about how closely the empty phrase is connected with this catastrophe! Think about the role it has played, and you will arrive at a truly dismaying judgment about the reign of the empty phrase in our time.

    Here's the empty phrase about education which Steiner focuses on, "What is important is not the subject matter, but the pupil." He regrets having to use the phrase, but he explains what he means by it. He definitely does not mean that we pour the subject into the minds of students, like one pours water from a pitcher into a glass. Instead we use the subject matter as a means of shaping the pupil. The subject matter is secondary to the primary goal of forming the will, feeling, and intellect of the pupil.

    [page 11] We want to use the subject matter in our Waldorf School in such a way that at each stage of instruction it will serve to improve the human development of the pupil regarding the formation of the will, feeling and intellect, rather than serving to provide superficial knowledge. We should not offer each subject for the sole purpose of imparting knowledge. The teaching of a subject should become an art in the hands of the teachers. The way we treat a subject should enable the children to grow into life and fill their proper place.

    Educators should not strive to put knowledge into children as one might put savings into a piggy bank, but rather they should strive to give children dancing lessons in life. Each child comes with a predisposition to a certain kind of dancing, of moving in and through their life, and the teacher's job is to encourage the child to find their tendencies and to express it in their life.

    If we tell a story to our children before bedtime, they will have all sorts of feelings arise in them and we do best if we allow them to take these feelings to sleep with them. Steiner says we should avoid giving explanations after telling children stories, but rather we should allow them to take those feelings home with them.

    [page 38] You destroy everything you want to achieve through telling the story by following it with interpretations. Children want to take stories in through feeling. Without outwardly showing it, they are dreadfully affected in their innermost being if they must listen afterwards to the often quite boring explanations.

    If the teacher wishes to give helpful explanatory material, they do best if they give this material before the story.

    [page 38] You must try to provide an explanation first. When you want to tell the children a story such as "The Wolf and the Lamb," simply speak with the children about the wolf's and the lamb's characteristics. (We could also apply this to plant life.) As much as possible, speak of these characteristics in relationship to people. Gather everything that you feel will help the children form pictures and feelings that will then resonate when you read the story. If, in an exciting preliminary talk, you offer what you would give afterward as an explanation, then you do not kill the sensations as you would in giving that explanation afterward. On the contrary, you enliven them. If the children have first heard what the teacher has to say about the wolf and the lamb, then their sensations will be all the more lively, and they will have all the more delight in the story.

    Each individual child will leave for home having had different reactions to the story which will live inside of them. Giving explanations after telling the story squelches the feelings, the delight, and all the various sensations, replacing them with some abstract explanation. This is a disservice to the children and quite the opposition of education, the very essence of which is educare — to draw out of the children their individuals feelings, reactions, and understandings.

    [page 38, 39 italics added] When they hear the story, you must bring them to the heights of their souls for them to understand it. This process must conclude in reading the story, telling the tale, doing nothing more than allowing the children's sensations, already evoked, to take their course. You must allow the children to take their feelings home.

    Anthroposophy is the study of the full human being, in body, soul, and spirit and part of that study brings us to understand that the human being has aspects of every animal inside. As humans evolved, we went through the stage of animal evolution during the Moon epoch, we went through the stage of animal evolution during the Sun epoch, and this knowledge can best be imparted to children not as abstract statements, but in a very practical way.

    [page 39] Particularly in the study of nature, we should not begin with the idea of nature as something external to humans, but always begin with humanity itself; we should always put people in the center.

    When dealing with lower animals, such as the squid, how can we keep the human as the center of the child's focus? Well, children are human beings, so if we say the squid is all head, the children can relate to that, as each one of them has a head.

    [page 40] Let's say that we give the child the chance to see a squid. Then, always using the appropriate terms, we go on to show with which parts of the ideal human the squid is most closely related. The child can quickly understand that the squid is most closely related to the human head. It is in reality so: the lower animals have only simple forms, but the human head repeats the forms that find their simplest expression in the lower animals. The human head is only endowed in a more complicated way than the lower animals. What we find in the higher animals, for example, mammals, can only be compared with what we find in the human torso. We should not compare the higher animals with the human head, but with the torso. If we go on to the human limbs, then we must say, "Look at the human limbs; in their form they are uniquely human. The way the arms and hands are formed -- as appendages to the body in which the soul-spirit in us can move freely — such a pair of limbs is not found anywhere in the entire animal kingdom!" If we speak of the monkey's four hands, this is really an improper manner of speaking since their nature is to serve in holding, in moving the body along. In the human we see a remarkable differentiation of the hands and feet, the arms and legs. What makes a human really a human? Certainly not the head; it is only a more perfect form of what we find already in the lower animals. What we find in the lower animals is further developed in the human head. What makes a human, human, what puts the human far above the animal world, are the limbs.

    Each teacher must find ways of bringing these things to their children so that they can learn over time about animals by relating them to corresponding parts and functions of human beings. The human being is already known intimately by the child through its own experience. It also achieves a moral goal by balancing the importance of the heads and the limbs of humans.

    [page 40, 41] Our present moral culture is so often spoiled because people are so proud and arrogant concerning the head. Whereas, people could be proud of their limbs that serve to work, that serve to put them in the world of social order.

    If you give good definitions to children, they will hold those definitions, and since definitions are by nature stiff, the children will grow up into stiff adults. If you say something to a stiff adult, you are likely to get this response back, "I know that!" What they really know is some definition they accepted as a child which they deem as sufficient for the rest of their life. Ask such a child what a lion is and they will give you a definition of a lion they heard from some so-called teacher. They think they know what a lion is, but all they know is a stiff, lifeless definition of a lion. What children need more than stiff definitions are unanswered questions, good questions about possibilities, good questions which will live inside of them and find answers later in life, good answers which will live inside of them. A question such as this, "Why does a lion lie down for a long time after a meal?" Humans don't need to do this, but lions do. Why is that so?

    [page 47] If we want to bring ideas to a child, we will depict them from as many points of view as possible. We will not say, "What is a lion? A lion is such and such." Rather, we will depict a lion from may different points of view — we will instill living, moving ideas that will then live with the child. In this regard, modern education does much damage.

    Alfred Korzybski famously wrote, "The map is not the territory." After spending a year studying his Science and Sanity, I was still holding that sentence as an unanswered question, and in the forty years since, it still brings life and understanding to me. Maps act as stiff definitions; they create stiff people who constantly stumble against hard realities because of their stiff definitions or maps. Per Holst who grew up in Norway told me that his Boy Scout handbook on map-reading said, "If the terrain differs from the map, believe the terrain." If your map says there's a level plain ahead of you and your eyes see a steep cliff alongside a fiord, do not step forward. Believe the terrain!

    If you assume something to be true and act on that assumption, you are believing the map, and it may differ from the terrain drastically. Maps operate in so many ways in our lives that we are rarely aware of them, until something goes wrong. Steiner strove in his Waldorf School to instill in children the living ideas that help them to grow and prosper.

    If you regulate the play of children, for example, you are applying a map, a goal, and then it is no longer play. Coerced play is not play.

    [page 47, 48] There is today, for instance, so much nonsense concerning the importance of play in the education of children. In considering the importance of play, we often forget the most important thing, namely that if play is strongly regulated and children are made to direct their play toward a particular goal, then it is no longer play The essence of play is that it is free. If, however, you make play really play, as is necessary for instruction, then you will not fall prey to the foolish expression, "Instruction should be just a game." Then you will look for the essential in the rhythm that comes into the life of the child when you allow play and work to alternate.

    One can only wonder how little focus parents have on the manual dexterity of their children. Fathers are the butt of many jokes in comic strips and most often because of some lack of manual dexterity. They destroy plumbing doing a simple J-trap replacement, they burn supper and have to order pizza, they fall off a roof putting up a satellite dish, etc, etc. In a comic strip this morning a father goes to set a mouse trap and we hear a loud snap! The son asks what his dad caught, and his mom answers, "His finger." I rarely find this funny because my father had a physical and manual dexterity that I absorbed. I have set many mouse traps and never caught my finger in one. Steiner helps me to understand that my choice of father for this lifetime gave me someone to teach me physical dexterity which led my own development of will.

    [page 49] We can give children a foundation for directing the intellect toward the spirit only insofar as we practice a development of will, even if we develop it only as physical dexterity. That so few people today tend to direct the intellect toward the spirit can only be a consequence of the fact that the will was so incorrectly trained during childhood.

    That so many comics portray fathers as inept in physical dexterity and therefore weak-willed is an indictment on our state-controlled school systems and a powerful incentive for parents to place their children in Waldorf Schools.

    [page 49] You see how necessary it is in modern times that we come to a new understanding of humanity. This understanding can be the basis for a new way of educating, as much as this is possible within all the constraints that exist today. Because modern science does not comprehend these things, we must create something that leads in this direction through the Waldorf School.

    Children today go to school in a hurry to get out, and then wonder what to do after they graduate. They miss the essence of the Commencement ceremony, whose name means that life outside of school is ready to commence, to begin. "But what are we to do, they think, without any teachers to tell us to do?" Few actually think that, but it would be an excellent unanswered question for new graduates to hold. No one has shaped such children to expect that learning to learn is a lifelong occupation, one which, if done poorly or not at all, can lead to a sad, empty, and unhappy life.

    [page 50, 51] Think about the importance of what the teacher represent to the growing child. Basically, we people here on earth, if we are not to become petrified in one of the stages in our life, must continually learn from life. But, first we must learn to learn from life. Children must learn to learn from life in school so that, in later life, their dead ideas do not keep them from learning from life; so that, as adults, they are not petrified. What keeps eating at people today is that school gave them too little. Those who see through our deplorable social conditions know that they are largely connected with what I have just described. People do not have that inner hold on life that can come only when the right material is taught at the right time in school. Life remains closed if school does not give us the strength to open it. This is only possible if, in the early school years the teacher is the representation of life itself. . . . Children meet life through the teacher. The teacher stands before the child as, later, life stands there. Life must be concentrated in the teacher.

    The word Liberal, which referred to a supporter of free trade, limited government, and unencumbered individual freedom, has come to mean the opposite of its original meaning. Isn't there a truth-in-meaning law that some Liberal would support? Things haven't changed in a hundred years, have they?

    [page 54] Today, our antisocial life has come so far that people express opposites with the same words. That is what makes it so difficult to understand one another. Someone who truly thinks socially, thinks very differently from modern people satisfied with the old traditions. In the same way, we must think fundamentally differently about teaching and education when we attempt to solve the educational social question in a particular instance. We must think differently from those who believe we can base this change on their traditional educational methods. Truly, today we must think and perceive more thoroughly than many believe. In addition, we must be clear that we cannot create something new out of the old educational and scientific methods; education and science must themselves change.

    Can education improve if it remains in the grip of natural science? Education as we've known it for centuries is based on natural science, a materialistic science which ignores the living capabilities of human beings. These educators treat individual humans as if they were molecules in a chemical solution: each one completely identical with no individual characteristics. Education that is based on natural science tends to treat children like identical molecules, separating them only by general characteristics, grade level, sex, IQs, etc, in other words, as things that can be tested for and graded, like the quality of ball bearings from a factory. These educators are taught what the essence of natural science dictates. Waldorf teachers are held to a higher standard: they are to look for the essence of humanity in each child.

    [page 55] Our new teachers also must carry another conviction in their souls, namely, that from the time children enter school we may teach them only what the essence of humanity dictates. In this sense we want to found a unified school in the truest sense of the word. All we want to know in the growing child is the developing human being. We want to learn from the nature of the developing child how children want to develop themselves as human beings, that is, how their nature, how their essence should develop to become truly human.

    Don't all educators consider the distinct personalities of the children? Sure, about the same way chemists consider the distinctive properties, e.g., of ammonium nitrate and calcium carbonate molecules. They treat all the molecules of a given chemical alike and want to identify equivalent distinctive properties of children via testing so they can treat them as groups rather than individuals.

    [page 55] "That is just what we also want," the old teachers and educators of teachers tell us. "We have always tried to teach people, to consider, for example, the distinct personalities of the children."
           Yes, we must reply, you have striven to train children to be what you perceived human beings to be, the kind of people you thought were necessary for the old political and economic life. We cannot do anything with this idea of 'human beings"; and the future of humanity will not know what to do with it nor want to know.

    And where did the old teachers and educators of teachers learn how to deal with children? They got it from the swollen morass of academic asses over the centuries before Steiner's time. Their maps are no longer useful for modern times.

    [page 56] The first thing needed for the educational system of the future is a new understanding of humanity. The understanding of humanity that has swollen up out of the morass of materialism in the last centuries and has been dressed up in our higher schools of learning as the basis of human nature cannot be the basis of the art of education in the future.

    We need a GPS locator for every individual child, not a Handbook of Properties such as chemists and physicists use, whose values have hardly changed for centuries. The teacher becomes the GPS locator, not pinpointing longitude and latitude of each child, but the predominate mixture of temperaments of each child.

    Over the past centuries until today, educators strove to develop the thinking of their students and students were left alone to develop their feeling and willing. What is needed is focus and implementation of all three aspects of the full human being, and it must start at the earliest grade level.

    [page 56] Today we study the true essence of human thought, so we can train the child in the right kind of thinking. We study the true basis of real human feeling, so that in the genuinely social community people bring forth justice based upon true human feeling. We study the essence of human will, so that this human will can embrace and permeate the newly formed economic life of the future. We do not study people in a materialistic, one-sided way; we study the body, soul, and spirit of the human being, so that our teachers can train the body, soul and spirit of human beings.

    What can be the difference between two teachers if they both have the same academic training? All the difference in the world. One teacher can approach the job mechanically and make no connection with the children. The other teacher can communicate the lesson wordlessly while engaging the children's rapt attention.

    [page 60] What makes such a difference? The teacher who makes such an adverse impression on the children goes into the school only to, as the saying goes, earn a living — in order to live. That teacher has acquired the superficial ability to drill the children, but goes just as unwillingly to school as the children and is just as happy when school ends. That teacher does the job mechanically.

    What the first teacher communicates wordlessly is their own dislike for being in school and the students absorb that quickly. The other teacher creates a lesson plan to ensure their understanding of the material, and that understanding flows wordlessly into their students as the teachers shares the material with them(2).

    From dead science can only come dead lecturing — that's what Steiner says in this next passage. The best way to enliven a lecture is to educator teachers from an early age in Waldorf schools. Steiner was faced with a bootstrap problem. How to create Waldorf teachers from adults not schooled in a Waldorf school? By a combination of astute selection and intensive training he quickly gathered adept teachers for the initial Waldorf school. This book contains some of the initial lectures he gave to Waldorf teachers as part of this bootstrap endeavor.

    [page 60] I am not surprised that the majority of today's teachers view their work mechanically. Their understanding of humanity comes from the dead science that has arisen out of the industrial statist and capitalist life of the past three or four centuries. That science has resulted in a dead art of education, at best a wistful form of education. We are striving for the understanding of humanity that we need to create the art of teaching in the Waldorf School. This vision of humanity, this understanding of humanity, so penetrates the human being that of itself it generates enthusiasm, inspiration, love. Our aim is that the understanding of humanity that enters our heads should saturate our actions and feelings as well. Real science is not just the dead knowledge so often taught today, but a knowledge that fills a person with love for the subject of that knowledge.

    In my grade school education in public school during th mid-1940s, we had no art classes. Maybe some colored crayons and a coloring books of pre-drawn figures to fill in, but nothing that would constitute true art as an expression coming out of me. What I did was fill in the dead lecture time with surreptitious drawings, doodling in the pages of my notebook while I pretended to be paying attention. Yes, I paid attention to stuff I heard that was new to me, but that took only about 20% of my time as best I can recall. One activity I did a lot was to scribble a continuous line down the margin of a page with lots of angles and shapes. Then I would look for faces in a short portion of the scribbled line and draw out the face. Often I'd end with 7 to 10 different faces on that line. I didn't know that by my doodling I was building up my will power, up until now.

    The North American Indians did not have a written language before the white settlers came to their continent. Seeing the whites's writings, they saw a lot of "little devils" all lined up on a page. Our Native Americans had a very strong will power, and they sensed intuitively that the little devils were destructive to the will power of the whites.

    [page 61] Our children will learn to read and write from life itself. This is our intention. We will not pedantically force them to write letters that for every child at first seem all the same. They need not learn it as an abstract thing, as letters were for the North American Indians when the Europeans came. It is true, isn't it? The Europeans destroyed the North American Indians down to the root. One of the last chiefs of the North American Indian tribes destroyed by the Europeans tells that the white man, the paleface, came to put the dark man and all he stood for under the earth. "The dark man had certain advantages over the palefaces," the chief then continued; "he did not have the little devils on paper."

    By showing children how writing comes from drawing, they will learn quickly and grow up as strong-willed adults.

    [page 63] These people will have learned to think; these people will have learned to correctly feel; and these people will have learned to properly use their will. . . . We should make the child a true person.

    Free education is an empty phrase, Steiner says. My basic motto is that anything you get free is worth less than you paid for it. There is always a cost, not matter how well hidden in taxes, via inflation, or by outright fraud. To say something is free, rightly understood, is a fraud, i.e., "without a basis in reality". We cannot provide education without cost. If anyone thought it was possible, Steiner asked how:

    [page 64] I would like to know how we can, in fact, do this. We just deceive ourselves, since we must pay for education. It cannot be free of cost — that is only "possible" through the deception of taxes or such things. We make up such phrases, which do no have any basis in reality.

    A week before opening the first Waldorf school, Steiner said two things could happen: 1) Resistance could prevent the Emil Molt ideas from being implemented and the school would disintegrate. 2) The ideals could become customary and people will say, "Something really practical was put into the world!" (Page 69) Lucky for the 21st Century the second of these came to pass and Waldorf Schools are found all over the world.

    Steiner's earnest prayer has come to fruition and is growing every year.

    [page 69] May it prosper! May it thrive, so that those who see this blossoming decide to do that same in many different place. Of course, only when, and may it be as soon as possible, the same takes place out of the same spirit in many place, only then can what should come out of the Waldorf School come out of it. Then soon many more will follow. The free spirit will rule and a free social training and educational system will spread over the civilized earth.

    Steiner says we each have certain capacities for spiritual knowledge sleeping in us. (Page 76) If this is the case, those capacities must have been active in us previously or else how could they be sleeping now? And if they're sleeping, it must be possible for them to be awakened, makes sense? What are these three stages?

    [page 76] If you look at my book How To Know Higher Worlds, you will see that I describe those stages of supersensible knowledge that people can attain through the development of certain capacities sleeping within them: 1) the Imaginative stage of knowledge, 2) the stage of Inspiration and 3) the stage of true Intuition(3).

    How did these capacities first appear in humans and why did they later go to sleep? These first appear as growth forces in humans between birth and the age of 21, and afterward they will sleep unless we consciously awaken them. The highest stage, that of Intuition, is at work in babies until 7, the age of teeth change. During this time, children are very intuitive and imitate whatever happens around them. After seven, children will be inspired by and follow the orders of their adult caregivers. After 14, the onset of sexual maturity, young adults will imagine doing things out of their own power and judgment, often resisting adult authorities during their teenage years. These three stages of growth forces are crucial for development into an adult, and thereafter they become latent forces for further spiritual growth such as the development of supersensory perception as Steiner outlines in How to Know Higher Worlds.

    [page 77, 78] These forces really exist. The forces that in a certain sense cause the crystallization of the second set of teeth out of human nature, a meaningful conclusion to the stage of human development ending at age seven, really exist. The forces that work mysteriously on that part of human beings that is connected with growth and the unfolding of human nature until age fourteen really exist. These forces are real; they are active. But after the completion of physical development (around the age of twenty), where are these inner spiritual forces that have acted upon our physical form? They still exist; they are still there. These inner forces fall asleep, just as the forces we use in our everyday life, our everyday work from waking to sleeping, fall asleep and become dormant while we sleep. The forces of human nature that blazed during childhood and youth, the forces that fired the developmental changes that transform children into adults, and everything connected with these changes, fall asleep around the age of twenty. Those who look at the whole human being know that at the very moment when human beings reach this point, the forces that acted in the child, in the youth, step back into the innermost part of human nature. These forces go to sleep.

    These are three levels of bootstrap forces which raise mere living matter into a human being. Having completed three growth functions, they lie dormant until a given individual calls upon them. Why is this so? It is a safety mechanism, basically. Similar to a parent not allowing an eleven-year-old boy to drive a high-powered Ferrari! There no shortcuts to growing up. Likewise there are no shortcuts to spiritual knowledge. Those who seek shortcuts to spiritual growth, by taking LSD or other mind-altering substances, will endanger themselves and others, just as a small boy driving a Ferrari at high speed on a city street. Steiner says on page 78, "The forces we use until the age of twenty-one for growing and forming the inner organs become inflexible, just critical intellect." In other words, when a force stops working as a growth force for our inner organs, it turns into an inflexible, merely critical intellect, but at age 21, it becomes available as an inner force of spiritual perception. This happens in three stages.

    The first is Imagination, second is Inspiration, and third is Intuition(4). Note how the stages develop in the reverse order in and adult from the order in which they appeared as growth forces in the pre-adult human being. Note how this is the teenager stage of growth force which goes to sleep after 21, but which can be re-activated consciously as an inner spiritual perception or supersensible knowledge.

    [page 78, 79 Imagination] It becomes an imaginary inner force, a power of the soul, no longer so strong as it was earlier when it had to guide human formation. If we can find it sleeping in human nature, this power that once was a formative force but after the age of twenty no longer is, if we develop it so it exists with the same strength as before, then, acting now through love, it becomes Imaginative power. People attain a capacity to see the world not only through abstract concepts, but in pictures that are alive, just as dreams are alive, and that represent reality just as our abstract concepts do. The same force that previously acted upon the healthy developing human to form the capacity to love, can enable us to see such pictures of the world and to reach the first stage of supersensible knowledge. We can awaken this human capacity and plunge it deeper into our surroundings than normal thinking and normal sensing can go.

    The second stage is Inspiration. The growth forces which became active from teeth-change-to-puberty become quiescent, go to sleep, after the age of 14. They can be resurrected consciously as the inner spiritual perception of Inspiration after 21.

    [page 79] Then we can go further, since the forces that cause the important formative changes from approximately seven years of age, from the change of teeth, until sexual maturity, are also sleeping in us. These forces sleep deeper under the surface of normal soul life than the forces I just characterized as Imaginative. When we reawaken these idle formative capacities, when we call these spiritual powers out of their sleep, they become the forces of Inspiration. These teach us that Imaginative pictures are filled with spiritual content, that these pictures, which appear to be dreams but really are not, reflect a spiritual reality that exists in our surroundings, outside ourselves.

    The third stage is Intuition. These are the deepest, most unconscious forces of growth from birth until teeth change, after which it goes quiescent, sleeping until called into action by the adult human as supersensible knowledge after age 21.

    [page 79]These formative forces that were active in the first years of life have withdrawn themselves most deeply from external life. If we bring them forth again in later life and imbue them with Imagination and Inspiration, we will then have the Intuitive powers of supersensible knowledge. These are the powers that enable us to delve into the reality of the spiritual world in the same way that we can delve into the physical world through the senses and the will usually associated with the body.

    With these three powers, an adult human being is able to gain access to the supersensible world using the most normal of all forces: the growth forces from birth to twenty-one. Yes, all three of these forces become dormant after age 21 when their growth functions are completed, but they can be re-activated to allow the spiritual world to open up to us in a safe, completely conscious fashion.

    Should we discard our sense-perceptual understanding of human beings and adopt a supersensible understanding? No, we shouldn't. Steiner emphasizes this as he helps Waldorf schools develop a living pedagogy to supplement the abstract-logical pedagogy which came down to us over the past centuries.

    [page 84] This supersensible perception of human beings does not at all ignore sense-perceptible understanding — it takes it fully into account. The sense-perceptible view of human beings, with all its understanding of anatomy, physiology, and so forth, treats people as an abstraction. Supersensible perception adds the spirit-soul element, while at the same time taking sense-perceptible knowledge fully into account. It observes the whole person, with emphasis upon the development of the whole person.
           [page 86] Think about it for a moment. Consider how close the sources of pedagogical art are to what grows in the child when supersensible knowledge controls and directs what the teacher brings to the child! We should not search for new abstract ideas nor clever new rules in what we refer to as social pedagogical effectiveness. What we should search for is that the living should replace the dead, the concrete should replace the abstract.

    Holding an unanswered question(5) can be a fruitful source of understandings over time. The person who replies to some new source of knowledge with a perfunctory, "I know that!", has little chance of acquiring new understandings. They aimlessly become a person of whom one can say after their death, "They spent their life perfecting their faults." How can teachers avoid stultifying their pupils? Teach them things which will stretch their understanding instead of fit neatly inside what they already know.

    [page 88] Now, if you only teach children what they can understand, then you neglect what can be the most beautiful thing in human life. If you always want to stoop to the level of what the children can already comprehend, then you do not know what it means later in life, perhaps at the age of thirty or thirty-five, to look back upon what you were taught in school. You do not understand what it means to have been taught something that you did not fully comprehend because you were not yet mature enough. But it comes up again. Now you notice that you are more mature, because you now understand it. Such a re-living of what has been taught forms the real connection between the time in school and the whole rest of life. It is immensely valuable to hear much in school that we cannot fully comprehend until we re-experience it later in life. We rob the children of this possibility when, with banal instruction, we stoop to the level of the child's understanding.

    Spiritual science, rightly understood, is not abstract, but something that enters directly into living humans. It is the basis upon which Waldorf schools have been formed, a basis in truly practical life. (Page 95) Steiner closes Lecture 4 with this set of axioms, each of which should fill an reasonable person with one or more unanswered questions (Page 98):

    1) Seek the truly practical material life, but seek it such that it does not numb you to the Spirit working in it.

    2) Seek the Spirit, but seek it not in supersensible lust, out of supersensible egotism; seek it because you want to become selfless in practical life, selfless in the material world.

    3) Turn to the old maxim: Never Spirit without matter, never matter without Spirit!

    And he adds:

    [page 98] Do this so that you can say, "We want to perform all material deeds in the light of the Spirit, and we want to seek the light of the Spirit in such a way that it develops warmth within us for our practical deeds."

    At the turn of the twentieth century, a spate of spirit channels appeared and became very popular, offering all kinds of advice and insight from the spiritual world. Steiner eschews such advice, calling it a "final decadent outstreaming of a desire for an abstract spiritual life." Note that he was referring to the kind of spiritualism popular in the beginning of the twentieth century, characterized by table-tipping, seances, and sleeping prophets like Edgar Casey, etal. These fell out of fashion by mid-century, only to be replaced by the very popular Seth, Ramtha, Lazaris, etal in the 1980s, who remain mostly as memories in the twenty-first century.

    [page 105] The science of the spirit cannot speak of a spirit that partakes of guest appearances that have nothing to do with external reality, and are called forth simply to convince passive people that spirit exists. The science of the spirit cannot speak of such a spirit. Spiritual science can speak only of the spirit that in truth participates in every material effect and every material event. It speaks of the spirit with which people can connect themselves in order to master external reality.

    On page 106 Steiner gives us a story of a young girl who limped regardless of how people tried to get rid of the limping. He says, "The reason the child limped was that she had an older sibling who, due to a diseased leg, actually had cause to limp!" She limped because between birth and seven she imitated the way her sibling walked. Much of what passes as pedagogy today evolved over the centuries by imitating a limping pedagogy based solely on physical science. A modern pedagogy must be based on spiritual science and physical science. The Waldorf school system is bringing a new pedagogy which will overcome the absurdities of the old pedagogy, much as modern science since Copernicus and Galileo has overcome the absurdities of the earlier sciences of astronomy and mechanics.

    [page 116] In the same way, the knowledge of the three stages of life, their basic forces and their transformation into Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition through spiritual science will become a matter of course.

    Steiner was never hypnotized by the masses's cry for bread during his time; he saw it rightly as a cry for spirit.

    [page 122, 123] We have to see through the cry for bread, to see that it is nothing other than a modern cry for the spirit. Only out of an understanding of the true spirit can come the social strength of will that can properly provide tools for bread production. The point is not to cry for programs, but to turn rightly to human faculties, to turn to the strength of human activity. That means to correctly understand people, so that hey find their proper place in life and can work in the most efficient way to feed their families, to work for the whole life of their fellow human beings.

    Rightly understood, this would require the implementation of Steiner's 3-fold society, but as he and Emil Molt realized, there was a dire need for spiritually-based education before such three-foldness would be accepted and implemented in society.

    For over forty years now, I have disliked wax fruit and wondered why. During a visit to a friend's house in California, I admired how his wife kept fresh fruit in a bowl in their kitchen. I returned with a resolve to do the same thing in our kitchen. I found a beautiful Portofino Pear bowl which has become our fruit bowl ever since. It requires tending on a weekly basis, but it repays my attention by its natural beauty and its constant availability of fresh, live fruit to eat and use in salads and desserts. In a humorous fashion, Steiner explains my own dislike for wax fruit.

    [page 126, edited] An outrageously inept thing often occurs that is the expression of bad taste. You show someone, let's say, an apple that you find particularly pleasing, beautifully polished, and so forth. Then, they say, "It's as pretty as if it were made out of wax!" It's impossible to think of something more outrageously inept than when someone compares something from nature with an artificial thing, regardless of how good this artificial thing is!

    Steiner was pointing out that an imitation of nature can never be real art. The map (wax apple) cannot reach or exceed the territory (real apple). Art that claims to be lifelike fails to reach the status of true art. And a pedagogy which claims to follow a hide-bound tradition fails to reach the level of a living pedagogy for human beings.

    [page 128] You must understand what it means not to practice a learned pedagogy from memory, but to invent at each moment the individual methods that this child needs.

    Art without creativity is kitsch; it is not effective in inspiring awe in an art lover. Similarly, a pedagogy without creativity cannot reach the living human being. A teacher must "invent at each moment the individual methods that this child needs." (Page 128)

    If you have ever been present at a lecture in which the speaker reads entirely from notes, you might have been reminded of a wax apple which promised more than it delivered in your presence. What gives life to a speaker's words is the immediacy, the unexpected, the thrill of discovery by the speaker of the right metaphor, the right words to express ideas in a living fashion.

    Many people present at Steiner's lectures have commented that he seems always to shape his lectures to the wants and needs of those present, as if he sensed their unanswered questions and found a way to include an answer to them in the course of his already planned lecturers. The best examples of Steiner doing this in the series of "From . . . to . . ." lectures he gave to workers at the Goetheanum in Dornach(6).

    [page 128] There have been times, and probably still will be, when I have lectured on the same theme week after week. I do not think anyone can say that I have ever spoken about the same theme in the same way. When you speak from the spirit, your concern is to create something immediate. It is not at all possible in the normal sense to memorize what comes from the spirit, because it must continuously develop in direct contact with life.

    Memorized speeches are map; extemporaneous speeches are territory, as unique as a real apple appears next to a wax apple.

    [page 128, 129] The true spirit must at all times be a creator. In the same way, education carried by the spirit must be a continuously creative art.
           There will be no blessing upon our elementary schools, and there will also be no healing in our school systems, until education becomes a continuously living, creating art, carried by true love and those intangibles of which I have spoken.

    We begin to comprehend why the centuries-old pedagogy which fills our non-Waldorf schools fails to meet the needs of our students and creates adults who so often live stilted, loveless lives and work in equally dismal work environments.

    [page 131] . . . because the unifying spirit is something concretely alive, we cannot understand it by encompassing it with abstract concepts, with ideology. We must resolve to seek the living spirit. We can only seek it, though, if, with a certain intellectual modesty, we find the bridge between the sleeping inner human forces that are of a spiritual nature and the spirit that lives in nature, in human life, in the whole cosmos.

    The eye cannot see itself except by reflection. These seem like a tautology, but rarely do we use the eye to see itself; most of the time we ignore its presence so long as it is working normally. Our human self is that way when it comes to the methods of natural science, we forget ourselves in the scientific method and along with it we forget everything connected with human life. One example of this came to my mind in studying the process of digestion. Steiner explains that food we digest must be converted into living nutrients before it can enter the blood stream or else it will act as a poison(7). Has anyone ever told you that you poison yourself when you eat and that your body undertakes to change the dead chemicals of your food into living nutrients before it can process the nourishment you need without killing you? Kind of an important insight, don't you think? But the typical doctor or medical researcher is oblivious of this, so far as I know, always assuming that chemicals are chemicals, always dead substances that one can analyze the constituents of with a mass spectrometer.

    It would likely shock these highly trained medical personnel if we told them that they knew as much about human beings as a five-year-old child can know about the world from reading Goethe's lyrical poetry. The child may be able to read all the words and still make no sense of the realities Goethe is writing about.

    [page] 134] Suppose we put a book of Goethe's lyrical poetry in the hands of a five-year-old child. This book of Goethe's poems contains a whole world. The child will take the book in hand and play around with it, but will not perceive anything that actually speaks to people from this volume. However, we can develop the child, that is, we can develop the soul powers sleeping in the child, so that in ten or twelve years the child can really take from the volume what it contains.

    Why does Steiner tell us this story? Because it would take a similar amount of training for average medical professionals of our day to come to understand the spiritual processes of the human being which are otherwise as transparent to them as our eyes are to us. Like any 21-year-old, these professionals have powers sleeping within them which they can awaken, if they will take over their own development.

    [page 134, 135] We need this attitude if we are to find our way to the science of the spirit. We must be able to say to ourselves that even the most careful education of our intellect, of our methods of observation and experimentation, brings us only so far. From there on, we can take over our own development. From that stage on, we can develop the previously sleeping forces ourselves. Then we will become aware that previously we stood in the same relationship to the external nature of our spirit-soul being, particularly the essence of our humanity, as the five-year-old child to the volume of Goethe's lyrical poetry. In essence and in principle, everything depends upon a decision for intellectual modesty, so that we can find our way to the science of the spirit.

    Most medical professionals do not form a picture of their patient's body, soul, and spirit interweaving each other, but focus mostly on the body's functions and try not to upset the soul of their patient. To Steiner this is a skewed materialistic view of human life, one not suited to medical doctors or educators.

    [page 136] Usually people observe the different manifestations of human life much too superficially, both physiologically and biologically. People do not form a picture of the whole human being in which the body, soul, and spirit intertwiningly affect one another. If you wish to teach and educate children as they need, you must form such a picture.

    Why should children change dramatically at 7, 14, and 21? Isn't it said that Nature takes no leaps? Yes, but wrongly so. Look at the green leaves on a plant, one identical leaf after another, then suddenly the topmost leaf changes shape and color and becomes a flower! That's a dramatic leap! For a child, as dramatic as getting new teeth at age 7. Then, the multicolored flower develops a fruit containing the seeds of reproduction, another dramatic leap! For a new teenage, as dramatic as voice deepening in boys and menarche for girls, both signs that they are now able to reproduce. Yes, human life does undergo leaps at critical points in life. And a spiritual science inspired pedagogy will produce teachers who understand this as their pupils grow and mature through these stages. It is the reason which Waldorf teachers remain with a class over the first 8 grades: they get to observe these changes in each child and facilitate their passage into maturity. The Waldorf teacher approaches each child as a divine riddle to be solved at each hour, not as an empty bucket for knowledge to be poured into.

    [page 154] This is the goal of spiritual science. It does not desire to be something foreign and distant from the world. It desires to be a leaven that can permeate all the capacities and tasks of life. It is with this attitude that I attempt to speak from spiritual science about the various areas of life and attempt to affect them. Also, do not attribute to arrogance what I have said today about the relationship of spiritual science to pedagogy. Rather, attribute it to an attitude rooted in the conviction that, particularly now, we must learn much about the spirit if we are to be spiritually effective in life. Attribute it to an attitude that desires to work in an honest and upright manner in the differing areas of life, that wishes to work in the most magnificent, the most noble, the most important area of life — in the teaching and shaping of human beings.

    Surely there must be some rules for Waldorf teachers, you must be thinking. Yes, there is one: understand the rule through the specific case. The individual comes before the general rule and teachers learn how to apply that rule in a wise manner to foster the growth of the individual student.

    [page 165] To guide educationally each individual child by interpreting general ideas, we must acquire, through a particular spiritual knowledge, an eye for what cannot be included as a specific case under a general rule — for that rule first must be understood through the specific case. Unlike the model of normal cognition, the spiritual knowledge meant here does not lead to a set of general ideas and to their utilization in specific cases. Rather it brings people to a certain condition of the soul, so that they may, through observation, experience the particular case in its individuality.

    Reducing class size seems to be a goal of so many school systems, but paradoxically Waldorf schools are able to manage large class sizes while giving individual attention when required. Once a teacher has grouped a class so that the various temperaments are together, the rough edges of each temperament are smoothed out by rubbing against each other(8). The sanguine become less obstreperous among other sanguines, for example. But everything creating an involved and orderly class flows out from the teacher.

    [page 167] The spiritual understanding reveals itself in the entire demeanor of the teacher. It will give character to each word, to everything done by the teacher. Under the guidance of the teacher, the children will become inwardly active. The teacher's general conduct will affect the children in such a way that they do not need to be forced into activity.

    [page 170] Through a teacher who understands the soul, who understands people, the totality of social life affects the new generation struggling into life. People will emerge from this school fully prepared for life.

    Spiritual science and pedagogy not only mix together, but they both prosper in each other's presence. Together they create teachers who understand human nature and inspire their pupils to do the same, while in school and later in life outside of school. What more can we ask of teachers than this?



    ---------------------------- Footnotes -----------------------------------------

    Footnote 1.
    See in this review my discussion of Frederick the Great's ill-fated experiments in which all the babies died: Manifestations of Karma.

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    Footnote 2.
    See my The Live Lecturer in the Classroom essay.

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    Footnote 3.
    These thee stages of supersensible knowledge and the spiritual growth forces in human beings are capitalized to distinguish them from the ordinary human processes we know as imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

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    Footnote 4.
    See Footnote(3) re consistent use of Capitalization for these three growth forces and stages of supersensible perception.

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    Footnote 5.
    See "What is the power of an unanswered question?" here.

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    Footnote 6.
    All seven of these books I have reviewed, and each review links to the other books in the series. Here's the first in the series chronologically: From Crystals to Crocodiles.

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    Footnote 7.
    See Physiology and Healing, GA#314.

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    Footnote 8.
    Read about the four temperaments: melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric as characteristics of pupils viewed in the Waldorf teacher's macroscope here in The Spiritual Ground of Education. Return to text directly before Footnote 8.
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    Click Here for a List of 25 books of Waldorf Education Lectures by Rudolf Steiner

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



    2.) ARJ2: Anthroposophy and the Inner Life, GA#234 by Rudolf Steiner

    In this series of lectures, Rudolf Steiner starts back at the beginning and explains anthroposophy to his audience and via transcription to us. On Page 68, he says, " I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years. " On Page 82, he relates that, to his spiritual way of perceiving, "the past is continually present; the present moment is, at the same time, a real eternity."(1) Steiner suggests, in effect, that we can learn to see eternity in the present moment. If the past is continually present, then the earlier forms of consciousness are available to us right now. We had to lose those instinctive forms of early spiritual consciousness in order to develop our intellect, and now it's time to combine spiritual consciousness with our modern intellect.

    [page 82] What I am explaining to you was once the content of instinctive forms of consciousness. If we really understand ancient records we find a consciousness of this fourfold composition of man and his connection with the cosmos. But this knowledge has been lost to man for many centuries; otherwise he could not have developed the intellect he has today. But we have now reached the point in human evolution when we must again advance from the physical to the spiritual.

    In the Editor's Preface, Owen Barfield sees this book as a book of travel rather than the guide book that Theosophy provides.

    [page 9] It is no longer simply the objective facts and events, but the way in which the soul tentatively begins to experience these, which the lecturer makes such earnest efforts to convey. We have exchanged a guide book for a book of travel. The one who has been there re-creates his experience for the benefit of those who have not, trying with every device at his disposal to reveal what it actually felt like.

    Barfield tells us that Steiner strived to bring esoteric or hidden knowledge into the light of day and make it into public knowledge available to everyone. His goal was to communicate this esoteric knowledge in an exoteric way to each one of us alive today, some eighty years after these lectures.

    [page 12] Is this an esoteric or an exoteric work? Certainly it will be more readily appreciated by readers who have worked through other approaches to be found in the books and lecture-cycles and perhaps especially in the Leading Thoughts. Yet it is the whole aim and character of Spiritual Science, as Rudolf Steiner developed it, to endeavor to be esoteric in an exoteric way. For that was what he believed the crisis of the twentieth century demands. And I doubt if he ever struggled harder to combine the two qualities than in these nine lectures given at the end of his life. Thus, although he was addressing members of the Anthroposophical Society, I believe that he had his gaze fixed on Western man in general, and I hope that an increasing number of those who are as yet unacquainted with any of his teaching may find in this book (and it can only be done by intensive application) a convincing proof of the immense fund of wisdom, insight and knowledge from which these teachings spring.

    If we possess traces of instinctive consciousness, how might it show itself? Perhaps by some feeling in our heart that we do not belong to the world, but rather we spring from something other than the physical world we perceive around us.

    [page 17] Thus man is confronted by the world he sees, senses and studies, and about which he constructs his science. It provides him with the basis for his artistic activities and the grounds for his religious worship. It confronts him; and he stands on the earth, feeling in the depths of his soul: I do not belong to this world; there must be another from whose magic womb I have sprung in my present form. To what world do I belong? This sounds in men's hearts today. It is a comprehensive question; and if men are not satisfied with what the sciences give them, it is because this question is there and the sciences are far from touching it. Where is the world to which man really belongs? - for it is not the visible world.

    One of the effects of nutrients which Steiner brought home to me was that the food we eat must be completely destroyed or changed in its form before it becomes part of our body. The process of digestion of the material we eat begins with saliva in the mouth, proceeds in the stomach and intestines aided by other organs, and is finally brought into a form which can be absorbed as nutrients in our body. Anything which cannot undergo this transformation is either a poison or a waste product. To understand how life-giving food is transformed in our living body, one need only contemplate what would become of food we had eaten if we died immediately upon eating it - it would simply decompose as our body does likewise. We are beings who can convert into living flesh the natural products of our environment which would die if left alone.

    [page 17, 18] Every bit of food I put into my mouth, every sip of water comes from the visible world to which I do not belong at all. I cannot live without this world; and yet, if I have just eaten a morsel of some substance (which must, of course be part of the visible world) and pass immediately afterwards through the gate of death, this morsel becomes at once part of the destructive forces of the visible world. It does not do so within me while I live; hence my own being must be preserving it therefrom. Yet my own being is nowhere to be found outside, in the visible world. What, then, do I do with the morsel of food, the drink of water, I take into my mouth? Who am I who receive the substances of Nature and transform them? Who am I? . . . When I enter into relationship with the visible world I not only walk in darkness, I act in the dark without knowing who is acting, or who the being is that I designate as myself. I surrender to the visible world, yet I do not belong to it.

    If we do not belong to the visible world, where is the world to which we belong? Where are we to find it? If we only believe our eyes, and this other world is not visible, what are we to believe? If this non-visible world exists, then where is it? These questions puzzled me and I walked in darkness until I found answers to these questions in Steiner's works. Like Nasruddin who had lost his key in his house, but was searching for his lost key outside under a lamp "because there was more light", I had been looking for answers where there was light, but not where I had lost the answer which was within myself. Most human beings of this world are still looking out there for answers which they had lost within. So, like Nasruddin, they are destined to crawl around on the ground under the only light they can find and search in the one place they will never find that for which they seek.

    [page 18] All this lifts man out of the visible world, letting him appear to himself as a member of a quite different one. But the great riddle, the anxious doubt confronts him: where is the world to which I belong? The more human civilization has advanced and men have learnt to think intensively, the more anxiously have they felt this question. It is deep-seated in men's hearts today, and divides the civilized world into two classes. There are those who repress this question, smother it, do not bring it to clarity within them. But they suffer from it nevertheless, as from a terrible longing to solve this riddle of man. Others deaden themselves in face of this question, doping themselves with all sorts of things in outer life. But in so deadening themselves they kill within them the secure feeling of their own being. Emptiness comes over their souls. This feeling of emptiness is present in the subconsciousness of countless human beings today.

    In the visible-to-our-eyes world, we harvest only the surfaces of things, and yet, when we do that with our own bodies, we know that what we see in the mirror hides a deep reality which we sense within. We know that the surface and flesh of our bodies will one day decompose and return to the body of the Earth and that what we really are within is not visible. In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells us the Fox's Secret, "It is only with the heart that we see rightly that what is essential is invisible to the eye." We are like the waves appearing and disappearing on the surface of the ocean, hiding what animates them into existence.

    [page 21] So it is with the soul life of man. Images, thoughts, feelings and impulses of will surge up; waves everywhere. One of the waves emerges in a thought, in a feeling, in an act of volition. The ego is within, but concealed by the thoughts, or feelings, or impulses of will, as the water conceals what is living in the wave. At the place where man can only say: "There my own self surges up," he is confronted by mere semblance; he does not know what he himself is. His true being is certainly there and is inwardly felt and experienced, but this 'semblance' in the soul conceals it, as the water of the wave the unknown living thing from the depths of the sea. Man feels his own true being hidden by the unreal images of his own soul. Moreover, it is as if he wanted continually to hold fast to his own existence, as if he would lay hold of it at some point, for he knows it is there. Yet, at the very moment when he would grasp it, it eludes him. Man is not able, within the fluctuating life of his soul, to grasp the real being he knows himself to be. And when he discovers that this surging, unreal life of his soul has something to do with that other world presented by nature, he is more than ever perplexed.

    Steiner spells out the two puzzles which confront us as human beings in the present time:

    [page 22] Thus, from two directions, searching questions confront man today. One of these questions arises when he becomes aware that:

    Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him;

    the other when he sees:

    The human soul exists, but Nature can only approach this human soul by becoming mere semblance.

    Steiner subsequently provides ample answers for these puzzles through his exoteric science of esoteric knowledge, anthroposophy. He provides answers to the longing and questioning human heart which, though it loves Nature, cannot find its true home inside Nature. Steiner speaks openly and exoterically of knowledge which had been centuries earlier shared only privately and esoterically.

    [page 24, 25] Anthroposophy comes forward as such knowledge, and would speak about the world and man so that such knowledge may arise again - knowledge that can be understood by modern consciousness, as ancient science, art and religion were understood by ancient consciousness. Anthroposophy receives its mighty task from the voice of the human heart itself, and is no more than what humanity is longing for today. Because of this, Anthroposophy will have to live. It answers to what man most fervidly longs for, both for his outer and inner life. "Can there be such a world-conception today?" one may ask. [Anthroposophy] has to supply the answer. It must find the way to let the hearts of men speak from out of their deepest longings; then they will experience the deepest longing for the answers.

    Steiner begins Lecture 2 by explaining how anyone can discern the difference between the world and the human being. The world destroys the physical body of the human being after the process what we call death, which is actually the passing of the human being through the gates of death into the spiritual world. Without the presence of the human being in it, the physical body, which is made up of the materials of Nature, will be destroyed by Nature.

    [page 26] Yesterday I had to show how we can observe ourselves in two ways, and how the riddle of the world and of man confronts us from both directions. If we look once more at what we found yesterday, we see, on the one hand, the human physical body, perceived - at first - in the same way as the external, physical world. We call it the physical body because it stands before our physical senses just as the external, physical world. At the same time, however, we must call to mind the great difference between the two. Indeed, yesterday we had to recognize this great difference from the fact that man, on passing through the gate of death, must surrender his physical body to the elements of the external, physical world; and these destroy it. The action of external Nature upon the human physical body is destructive, not constructive. So we must look quite outside the physical world for what gives the human physical body its shape between birth (or conception) and death. We must speak, to begin with, of another world which builds up this human body that external, physical Nature can only destroy.

    The beginning and ending of our human physical body is in the physical world. But something happens within the human body that is not of the physical world. Steiner gives us the example of blood as something that cannot be investigated external to the human body. We know that doctors today can route blood out of the human body and back inside it during open heart surgery, and they can extract blood and infuse it into another human body. But the mystery of what the blood does once inside a particular human body remains.

    Doctors use abstract concepts drawn from the examination of blood on a slide under a microscope to say that they understand what that blood did when it was living inside a human body. But they use a gross materialistic simplification, and while it might be practical for certain medical procedures, it tells us nothing about the living blood inside a living human being.

    [page 27] So we are compelled to say: Whatever the inner processes going on in the human body may be, their beginning and end are related to the external, physical world.
           Materialistic science, however, draws from this fact a conclusion that cannot be drawn at all. Though we see how man, through eating, drinking and breathing, takes in substances from the external physical world and gives these same substances back again, in expiration, in excretion or at death, we can only say that we have here to do with a beginning and an end. We have not determined the intermediary processes within the physical body.
           We speak so glibly of the blood man bears within him; but has anyone ever investigated the blood within the living human organism itself? This cannot be done with physical means at all. We have no right to draw the materialistic conclusion that what enters the body and leaves it again was also within it.

    Anyone who studies Steiner for very long inevitably comes to understand that the human being is a microcosm of the macrocosm. It means that each human has undergone the whole process of evolution that the Earth has undergone during its evolution, and in daily life, does the same. On a microcosmic scale, each time one eats something, digests it, incorporates its nutritive portion into one's body, and excretes the waste portion, one recapitulates an action that the Earth itself has done on a macrocosmic scale.

    [page 28] If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys - or transforms - what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say "transforms".)

    At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the substances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which something within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.

    And yet, we have something within us that the Earth once had, but no longer has. Materialistic science, because it only examines dead material, such as blood between two glass plates of a microscope's slide, cannot discover this something because it is not dead nor is it materialistic. But it is present in each of us today, just as it was millions of years ago present in the Earth during an early stage of its macrocosmic evolution. What this something is can only be found by meditation and, when we find it, it appears to us as what Steiner calls "a second man", the human etheric body. (Pages 30, 31)

    [page 31] I now look again at man, and the very same impression that the primeval condition of the earth made upon me, is now made by the "second human being" man carries within him. Further: the very same impression is made upon me when I behold, not stones, but plants. Thus I am led to speak, with some justification, of an "etheric body" as well as the physical. Once the earth was ether; out of this ether it has become what it is today in its inorganic, lifeless constituents. The plants, however, still bear within them the former primeval condition of the earth. And I myself bear within me, as a second man, the human "etheric body".

    Here we have witnessed, in short, Steiner developing the concept of the etheric body of the human being, the second of its four basic constituent parts: physical, etheric, astral, and I (Ego) of the human during Earth evolution.

    [page 31] I now look again at man, and the very same impression that the primeval condition of the earth made upon me, is now made by the "second human being" man carries within him. Further: the very same impression is made upon me when I behold, not stones, but plants. Thus I am led to speak, with some justification, of an "etheric body" as well as the physical. Once the earth was ether; out of this ether it has become what it is today in its inorganic, lifeless constituents. The plants, however, still bear within them the former primeval condition of the earth. And I myself bear within me, as a second man, the human "etheric body".

    The etheric body we find in us, waking and sleeping, involved as it is in digesting or transforming our food, but there is a "third-man" which is involved with us only during our waking states, our astral body. We can understand from Steiner's presentation of this how it is that the etheric body remains, but the astral body leaves during sleep.

    [page 32] But now something further is revealed. We see the minerals free from ether, and the plants endowed with it. At the same time, however, we learn to see ether everywhere. It is still there today, filling cosmic space. In the external, mineral kingdom alone it plays no part; still, it is everywhere. When I simply lift this piece of chalk, I observe all sorts of things happening in the ether. Indeed, lifting a piece of chalk is a complicated process. My hand develops a certain force, but this force is only present in me in the waking state, not when I am asleep. If I follow what the ether does in transmuting food-stuffs, I find this going on during both waking and sleeping states. One might doubt this in the case of man, if one were superficial, but not in the case of snakes; they sleep in order to digest. But what takes place through my raising an arm can only take place in the waking state. The etheric body gives no help here. Nevertheless if I only lift the chalk I must overcome etheric forces - I must work upon the ether. My own etheric body cannot do this. I must bear within me a "third man" who can.
           Now this third man who can move, who can lift things, including his own limbs is not to be found - to begin with - in anything similar in external Nature. Nevertheless external Nature, which is everywhere permeated by ether, enters into relation with this "force-man" - let us call him - into whom man himself pours the force of his will.

    Material scientists are likened by Steiner to someone who opens a good book and studies the shapes of the letters, unable to extract the meaning which is contained in the book, in other words, someone who examines the content of the book instead of reading it for meaning. A biologist who examines Nature this way is like the butterfly collector who studies butterflies by pinning them on a wallboard for examination. Are the puzzles of living organisms made truly less puzzling by scientists who examine specimens of dead organisms and categorize them by size, shape, weight, color, and other sensory-based data?

    [page 36] When man confronts Nature today he usually only studies what is lifeless. Even what is living in plants is only studied by applying to them the laws of substances as discovered in his laboratory. He omits to study growth; he neglects the life in his plants. Present-day science really studies plants as one who picks up a book and observes the forms of the letters, but does not read. Science, today, studies all things in this way.
           Indeed, if you open a book but cannot read, the forms must appear very puzzling. You cannot really understand why there is here a form like this: 'b', then 'a', then 'l', then 'd', i.e. bald. What are these forms doing side by side? That is, indeed, a riddle. The way of regarding things that I have put before you is really learning to read in the world and in man. By "learning to read" we come gradually near to the solution of our riddles.

    Doctors used to say salt was necessary and good for humans to have in their food. Then it was thought to be bad, then good, and now it's considered bad again. So we see all kinds of low-salt labels on food or low-sodium which is a euphemism for low-salt. There are even labels which specify "no sodium" on food items, such as water, which normally don't have salt in them! The amount of protein in a healthy diet has changed also. I wasn't aware of this until Steiner brought it to my attention. Obesity is a problem in the world today, especially in America, and yet the amount of protein the average person eats per day exceeds what is required, about twenty grams of protein a day for an already healthy person. I have added the dates so you can place the below quotation in time. In recent decades leading up to 2007, there were people who went on "High Protein diets" where they ate only protein-rich foods exclusively. One can imagine the results such a lifestyle for even a short length time had on their longevity. A healthy life calls for balancing the quantity and types of foods one consumes and not responding to the latest fads of materialistic thinkers, no matter what kind of degrees they have behind their names.

    [page 37] If we go back twenty years (1900), we find that experiments showed man to require at least one hundred and twenty grams of protein a day; otherwise he could not live. That was "science" twenty years ago. What is "science" today? Today (1924) twenty to fifty grams are sufficient. At that time it was "science" that one would become ill - under-nourished - if one did not get these one hundred and twenty grams of protein. Today science says it is injurious to one's health to take more than fifty grams at the most; one can get along quite well with twenty grams. If one takes more, putrefying substances form in the intestines and auto-intoxication, self-poisoning, is set up. Thus it is harmful to take more than fifty grams of protein. That is science today.

    Once one becomes accustomed to eating small amounts of food, one develops an instinct which is reliable as to what kinds and how much food one can eat. One simply turns away from food automatically which one's body does not need and thereby one maintains a natural healthy state. No diet book or popular fad can provide us, via their materialistic calculations and arguments, with the wisdom that a healthy body already contains naturally if unimpeded by over-eating in any form. People who overeat are more susceptible to infections of every kind.

    [page 37, 38] Today we know that man gets the requisite amount of protein from any kind of diet. If he simply eats sufficient potatoes - he need not eat many - along with a little butter, he obtains the requisite amount of protein. Today it is scientifically certain that this is so. Moreover, it is a fact that a man who fills himself with one hundred and twenty grams of protein acquires a very uncertain appetite. If, on the other hand, he keeps to a diet which provides him with twenty grams of protein, and happens, once in a while, to take food with less, and which would therefore under-nourish him, he turns from it. His instinct in regard to food becomes reliable. Of course, there are still under-nourished people, but this has other causes and certainly does not come from a deficiency of protein. On the other hand, there are certainly numerous people suffering from auto-intoxication and many other things because they are over-fed with protein.
          I do not want to speak now of infectious diseases, but will just mention that people are most susceptible to so-called infection when they take one hundred and twenty grams of protein a day. If they only take twenty grams, they will only be infected with great difficulty.

    Scientists make calculations which can be quite precise and correct and yet very wrong. Steiner explains how the calculations of geologists can be very wrong by analogy to using calculations on the state of the human heart. They can estimate what the heart was like in a certain person three years ago. But using the same kind of calculation, one could extrapolate backwards three hundred years and determine what the man's heart would have been like only the man wouldn't have been alive. I heard about thirty years ago that if one has a tooth pulled that one's life expectancy is reduced by two years. My father had all his teeth pulled when he was thirty-nine and he is still alive at age 89! How could he have lost 64 years of his life and still lived as long as he has? Given the assumptions upon which calculations are made, they are accurate, but otherwise they are flat wrong.

    As I was reading this next passage, I received some family photos from a friend, Carol Hicks, which showed a wall-hanging of the Sun being held in the arms of and being kissed by the Moon. If the Moon points to our karmic past and the Sun to our future, then the sculpture would signify that our past is continually kissing our future. The sculpture represents artistically our destiny approaching us from our past ("our inner-moon existence") in our present and embracing our future (our "sun-element").

    [page 44, 45] Everyone knows, or can, at least, know, that the sun not only wakens us every morning, calling us from darkness to light, but is the source of the forces of growth within us, including those of the soul. That which works in these soul-forces from out of the past is connected with the moon, but that which works within the present and which we shall only really acquire in the future through our own free choice, depends on the sun.

           The moon points to our past, the sun to the future. We look up to the two luminaries, that of the day and that of the night, and observe the relationship between them, for they send us the same light. Then we look into ourselves and observe all that is woven into our destiny through past experiences undergone as men; in this we see our inner moon-existence. And in all that continually approaches us in the present and determines our destiny, in all that works on from the present into the future we see the sun-element. We see how past and future are weaving together in human destiny.

    We stumble upon someone in mid-life and it seems to us many years later we had been on a path to meet this person and that all of our previous steps had been required for this meeting to take place. Naturally we traversed those steps without any consciousness of them leading up to this fateful meeting. It was that inner-moon in us leading us without our knowing why.

    [page 45] One may say, indeed, that people find their way to one another from the most distant places to meet about half-way through their lives. It is as if they had arranged all their ways with this end in view. Of course, they could not have done this consciously, for they had not seen one another before - or, at least, had not formed such a judgment of one another as would make their meeting significant. All these things take place in the unconscious. We travel paths leading to important turning points, or periods in our lives, and do so in deep unconsciousness. It is from these depths that - in the first place - destiny is woven.

    We wander along a path, but at some point, the "point of action", the Sun appears and our past kisses our future in the present. This happens with every meeting. Often we get a "love at first sight" flush of feeling, a wave of feeling from our future-to-be, which helps us to trigger the action necessary, but many times that flush of feeling is ignored because messages from the future are not recognized as a reality, up until now(2).

    [page 46] One may say, indeed, that people find their way to one another from the most distant places to meet about half-way through their lives. It is as if they had arranged all their ways with this end in view. Of course, they could not have done this consciously, for they had not seen one another before - or, at least, had not formed such a judgment of one another as would make their meeting significant. All these things take place in the unconscious. We travel paths leading to important turning points, or periods in our lives, and do so in deep unconsciousness. It is from these depths that - in the first place - destiny is woven.

    Steiner explains how we can each distinguish for ourselves whether our connection with someone is due to old karma (some connection from a previous lifetime) or to new karma (some connection in this lifetime which will be revisited in a future lifetime). Basically old karma causes us to act at a deeper level (out of our soul) than new karma (out of our intellect). If we like someone with our intellect or artistic sense, that's new karma. If we are compelled to act, the person is affecting our will and deeper level of soul, and that's old karma. (Page 47)

    [page 48] . . . everyone can have direct, first-hand knowledge of these things. He can study his destiny with understanding. That peculiar, intimate, inner relationship in which another person speaks from within us - as it were - indicates ties of destiny from the past. If I feel that someone 'grips' me, not merely in my senses and intellect but inwardly, so that my will is engaged in the very way he grips me, he is connected with me by ties of destiny from the past. Such ties can be felt with a finer, more intimate sense.

    Steiner explains that our dreams can also provide us with a clue as whether someone represents old karma or new karma. He says that if we dream of someone upon first meeting them, that's old karma, but if we do not ever dream of some persons, they represent new karma. (page 49)

    In this next passage we learn more about the "third man" inside of us, the human astral body. Since this "astral man" exists as a stream of air which one can hear with one's inner, musical ear, one can remember its nature by recalling the musical piece known as "The Third Man Theme."

    [page 67] Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

    (1) the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

    (2) the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder) - in moving, plastic images,

    (3) the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

    "Every word was once a live metaphor," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Over time and repetitive usage, the live metaphor turns into a single word or, if a phrase, into a flattened cliché. This is the common evolution of language and we, in our abstract consciousness, lose the vibrant meaning the metaphor possessed in its origin. Steiner tells us in the next passage that language comes from the spiritual world through a process called inspiration, similar to the way we inhale air into our bodies, and for this reason the process of breathing itself is also called inspiration. We attend to our "third man" when we tune our inner hearing and allow ourselves "to be filled with inspirations from without."

    [page 68] Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, fed them to contain.

    Doesn't it seem strange that materialist science knows so little about how matter really works? They seem to know only about how matter interacts with matter as if matter were nothing more than a bowling alley of things bouncing against one and another!(3) When two people smile at each other or kiss each other, surely there is more of interest than the measurement of the widening of their oral apertures or the calculation of the forces exerted at the impact of their faces?

    [page 72] It is the tragedy of materialism that it knows nothing of matter - how matter actually works in the several domains of life. The remarkable thing about materialism is just its ignorance of matter. It knows nothing at all about the way matter works, for one does not learn this until one is able to attend to the spiritual that is active in matter and is represented by the forces.

    Look at the physical body of a twenty-year-old man and you see it exactly as it is in the present. But look at his etheric body and you can see everything which happened to his etheric body since before conception. You see it when he began to descend to Earth "from his pre-earthly life to this present life on earth, and, just before he was conceived by his parents, draw together etheric substance from the general cosmic ether to build his etheric body." Thus the physical body is a "space-organism" and the etheric body a "time-organism." But the astral body is different in a special way from either the physical or etheric bodies. When one looks at it with "inspired" knowledge, one can say to oneself:

    [page 75] What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time - let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance - a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind - it need not move forward that its light may shine here.
           So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched out a feeler.
           That, you will say, is a difficult conception. Well, so it is.

    It may be complicated, but Steiner tells us in effect, "That's how it is: deal with it." In the next passage, Steiner summarizes how we live in each of our four human bodies and each's extension in time:

    [page 79] Man has his physical body through which he lives at each moment in the present physical earth. He has his etheric body through which he lives continually in a time-process extending back to a little before his birth, when he drew together this etheric body out of the general cosmic ether. He has his astral body through which his life extends over the whole period between his last death and his last descent to earth. And he has his ego through which he reaches back into his previous life on earth.

    Ancient human beings were able to perceive spiritual realities such as one's past lives directly simply by looking at you. They could see your face in a previous incarnation appearing behind you and up slightly. People such as the Egyptians have left behind paintings which show a person's head, and behind it appears a second countenance, less clearly painted, and behind it a third even less clear.

    Steiner says that we owe our moral impulses in this incarnation to the ego of our immediately previous incarnation. We feel obligated to act and cannot figure out why - it is the "man behind us" who binds us to act morally.

    [page 81] I have spoken of this riddle. I said, we feel ourselves morally determined by certain impulses given us in a purely spiritual way. We want to carry them out. But we cannot, to begin with, understand how that to which we feel ourselves morally bound shoots into our muscles . . . . Our moral impulses act indirectly, through the ego of our last incarnation. Here the connection between the moral and the physical is first found. It cannot be found by merely studying the present world of Nature and man as a section of it.

    What is the difference between our Ego body and our ego? Obviously our little ego is specific for this lifetime and the Ego body carries on and evolves in the time between death and a new birth. Steiner clarifies the differences for us, telling us what we would find by using our inspired knowledge:

    [page 89] What man calls his ego in ordinary life is, of course, a mere thought. But it is the ego of man's past lives on earth that is active in him here. In the whole course of these processes, especially of the warmth-processes, you perceive the real ego, working from times long past. Between death and a new birth this ego has undergone an evolution in time; it now works in an entirely spiritual way.

    But the Ego body also works in a physical way, that is, on the physical body, on the warmth processes which have worked within human physical bodies from the beginning. Again we can observe the following with inspiration or inspired knowledge:

    [page 89] Moreover, you now perceive that the ego has changed its field of action. It was active within, working upon the breath provided by the mere respiratory process; but now you perceive, from without, the further stages of the warmth-processes that the ego has elaborated from the respiratory processes. You behold the real, active ego of man, working from primeval times and organizing him.

    With our inspired knowledge we can witness directly the Ego and astral bodies leaving our physical and etheric bodies on the bed during sleep.

    [page 89] You now begin to know that the ego and astral body have actually left the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. They are outside, and now do and experience from without what they otherwise do and experience from within. In ordinary consciousness the ego and astral organizations are still too weak, too little evolved, to experience this consciously. "Inspiration" really only consists in inwardly organizing them so that they are able to perceive what is otherwise imperceptible.
           Thus we must actually say: Through "inspiration" we come to know the astral body of man, through "intuition", the ego. During sleep, intuition and inspiration are suppressed in the ego and astral body; when they are awakened, man, through them, beholds himself from without. Let us see what this really means.

    Recall how Steiner said that the past is always present in us. This seems not to be true for our waking consciousness, but it is true for our sleeping consciousness. It is commonly known that out-of-body experiences occur, but it is thought by materialists to be due to some aberration of personality, etc. How shocked they would be to know that it actually happens to them every time they fall asleep. Thankfully they are not aware of this happening nightly to them because their peace of mind would disrupted if they suddenly had to let go of their cherished beliefs that material world is all that exists.

    [page 90] Now, to sleep means nothing else than to lead back your consciousness, which is otherwise in the physical body, and to accompany it yourself. Sleep is really a return in time to what I described as past for ordinary consciousness, though nevertheless there. You see, if one really wants to understand the Spiritual, one must acquire different concepts from those one is accustomed to apply in ordinary life. One must actually realize that every sleep is a return to the regions traversed before birth - or, indeed, to former incarnations. During sleep one actually experiences, though without grasping it, what belongs to one's pre-earthly state and earlier incarnations.

          Our concept of time must undergo a complete change. If we ask where a man is when asleep, the reply must be: he is actually in his pre-earthly state, or has returned to his former lives on earth. When talking simply we say: he is 'outside' his body. The reality is as I have explained. It is this that manifests as the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping.

    All thoughts and perceptions make impressions in the etheric body, but the thought always occurs in the present moment, it is not stored. When a thought occurs which seems to have been stored, what we are experiencing is an act of memory being transformed into a thought. Thoughts are like the waves above a deep ocean inside of us.

    [page 92, 93] Between waking up and falling asleep we move about the world, receiving impressions from all sides. We only attend to a few, but they all attend to us. It is a rich world that lives in the depths of our being, but only some few fragments are received into our thoughts. This world is like a deep ocean confined within us. The mental presentations of memory surge up like single waves, but the ocean remains within. It has not been given us by the physical world, nor can the physical world take it away. When man sheds his physical body, this whole world is there, bound up with his etheric body. Upon this all his experiences have been impressed, and these man bears within him immediately after death. In a certain sense, they are 'rolled up' in him.

    It is from these rolled up or impressed memories within the human etheric body that the process of kamaloca proceeds. This is known from many people who have nearly drowned or had other near-death experiences: they view a moving tableau or diorama of their life to date. It is usually said, "My life passed before my eyes." In this next passage Steiner describes this process in some details that I have found nowhere else, so it is important to study it carefully and meditate upon it.

    [page 93] Now man's first experience, immediately after death, is of everything that has made its impression upon him. Not only the ordinary shreds of memory which arise during earthly consciousness, but his whole earthly life, with all that has 'impressed' him stands before him now. But he would have to remain in eternal contemplation of this earthly life of his if something else did not happen to his etheric body, something different from what happens to the physical body through the earth and its forces. The earthly elements take over the physical body and destroy it; the cosmic ether, working (as I told you) from the periphery, streams in and dispels in all directions what has been impressed upon the etheric body. Thus man's next experience is as follows: During earthly life many, many things have made their impression upon me. All this has entered my etheric body. I now survey it, but it becomes more and more indistinct. It is as if I were looking at a tree that had made a strong impression upon me during my life. At first I see it life-size, as when it made its impression upon me from physical space. But it now grows, becomes larger and more shadowy; it becomes larger and larger, gigantic but more and more shadowy. Now it is like that with a human being whom I have learnt to know in his physical form. Immediately after death I have him before me as he impressed himself upon my etheric body. He now increases in size, becomes more and more shadowy. Everything grows, becomes more and more shadowy until it fills the whole universe, becomes thereby quite shadowy, and completely disappears.

           This lasts some days. Everything has become gigantic and shadowy, thereby diminishing in intensity. Man sheds his second corpse; or, strictly speaking, the cosmos takes it from him. He is now in his ego and astral body. What had been impressed upon his etheric body is now within the cosmos; it has flowed out into the cosmos. We see the working of the universe behind the veils of our existence.

    The famous script called Desiderata has this wonderful phrase in it which seems resonate with everyone who hears it, even though few understand it, up until now.

    You are a child of the universe,
    no less than the trees & the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

    Perhaps this next passage of Steiner's lecture will illuminate us as to the reason for the deep feeling the passage arises in us.

    [page 94] We now stand in the universe and say to ourselves, as we consider, first of all, this experience with our etheric body: truly, we are not only here for ourselves; the universe has its own intentions in regard to us. It has put us here that its own content may pass through us and be received again in the form into which we can transmute it. As human beings we are not here for our own ends alone; in respect to our etheric body, for example, we are here for the universe. The universe needs us because, through us, it 'fulfils' itself - fills itself again and again with its own content. There is an interchange, not of substance but of thoughts between the universe and man. The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives then back again in a humanized condition. We are not here for ourselves alone; we are here for the sake of the universe.

    We complete our review of this book of Steiner's lectures with a caveat issued by Rudolf Steiner himself. He has said this many times in other lectures in various ways, but never as explicitly as he does in this lecture. He has reached the penultimate year of his life, so all the other times he said it, he was younger and one does find the precise words to communicate after long practice. Like a doctor of medicine may call his work a "practice", so also a lecturer or a writer may call his work a practice, because everything he writes or says something he has the advantage of having practiced writing or saying it many times before and this time will be his best effort. Words, Steiner clearly understands, are flattened live metaphors and they can only serve to communicate to those who will take the effort to convert the flat words into a living reality in themselves. Only that way can we, from the words of Rudolf Steiner, begin to experience directly the spiritual worlds within ourselves.

    [page 95] Theoretical Anthroposophy is a photograph of what Anthroposophy intends to be. It intends to be a living presence; it really wants to use words, concepts and ideas in order that something living may shine down from the spiritual world into the physical. Anthroposophy does not only want to impart knowledge; it seeks to awaken life. This it can do; though, of course, to feel life we must bring life to meet it.

    In the movie of about twenty years ago titled, "Ghost", we witness as two evil protagonists die on screen and out of the shadows come dark spirit beings who drag the dead away screaming as if their very existence were threatened by the dark things. We will each come face to face with such spirits after death if we have in some way hindered the evolution of humankind.

    [page 129] On entering the world of spiritual beings, however, we do not merely meet the ideal judgment that we are of little worth in respect of any fault or disgraceful deed we have committed; we feel the gaze of these beings resting upon us as if it would annihilate our very being. In respect of all we have done that is valuable, the gaze of these beings falls upon us as if we first attained thereby our full reality as psycho-spiritual beings. Our reality depends upon our value. Should we have hindered the evolution that was intended in the spiritual world, it is as if darkness were robbing us of our very existence. If we have done something in accordance with the evolution of the spiritual world, and its effects continue, it is as if light were calling us to fresh spiritual life. We experience all I have described and enter the realm of spirit beings. This enhances our consciousness in the spiritual world and keeps us awake. Through all the demands made upon us there, we realize that we have won something in the universe in regard to our own reality.

    These lectures present in only 130 pages a deep look into the major points of Steiner's spiritual science, and even though it may be a reprise for some, there will be nuggets of mind-boggling concepts and details or rephrasing for all who read these lectures. The nuggets will be spiritual food to be ingested and digested over the coming years as one works oneself on the way to the light of the spiritual world.

    ----------------- Footnotes -----------------

    Footnote 1. Compare this to what William Blake wrote when he suggested that you learn "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour."

    Return to text directly before Footnote 1.

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    Footnote 2. These "flush of recognition" feelings constitute a process I call "Remember the Future" and have embodied the process in Matherne's Rule #36, where I elaborate on the process and give examples from my own life where it has worked for me and others I know.

    Return to text directly before Footnote 2.
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    Footnote 3. This metaphor of a bowling alley as describing the work of material science comes from this fine book The Marriage of Sense and Thought — Imaginative Participation in Science by Stephen Edelglass etal, in which the authors describe how science can fruitfully wed its bowling alley roots of human senses with the imaginative participation of human thought.

    Return to text directly before Footnote 3.

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



    3.) ARJ2: The Trauma of Birth by Otto Rank

    Rank lays out his goal for this book in the Preface thus:

    [page xiii] In attempting to reconstruct for the first time from analytic experiences the to all appearances purely physical birth trauma with its prodigious psychical consequences for the whole development of mankind, we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical.

    In my review of Rank's work of over fifty years ago, I will attempt to show how the nascent science of doyletics simplifies our understanding of birth trauma and bypasses the tortuous path of psychoanalysis on the road to achieving an ecology of the psyche. The fundamental tenet of doyletics is that before five years old all novel physical body states (called doyles) are stored for later retrieval. They are stored as memories that are non-cognitive or pre-thought. Once the human brain reaches full-size at three years old, it begins to store cognitive memories for the first time and by five years old cognitive storage has replaced doylic storage of memories. Later tracing of doyles can result in the converting of the doylic memory into cognitive memory with the net effect that upon the presentation of a stimulus that previously triggered a change of physical body state (a doyle), instead of the doyle arising, a cognitive memory is presented to the mind.

    The Unconscious of Freud's was a way he constructed of talking about the doyles that were stored in an individual during the birth trauma. One can be said to be unconscious of what happened during one's birth, since one has no recall of images, sounds, smells, tastes or feelings consciously. (The few exceptions are very interesting cases of precocious cognitive memory capability that will dealt with elsewhere.) But the doyles are conscious when they are triggered in us, we have only lost their referent, the experience to which they refer, the original event of their storage.

    We have only the physical body state, the doyle, and we are unconscious of the rest of the event. All the aspects that we as adults past the age of five call memory are missing! We have neither visual recall, nor auditory, nor smell, nor taste components of a memory from that time, but instead, when the doyle is triggered, we experience the doyle directly as a change in the state of our physical body: some muscle tension, some autonomic nervous system change (e.g., respiration or heart rate change), or some proprioceptive sensation of a change of position that corresponds exactly to the original event.

    Given our natural propensity to create meaning to an event that happens to us, when these doyles arise in us, we attempt to search our memory banks and from those conscious memory banks we create plausible explanations and act on those symbolic replacements for those seemingly un-retrievable original events. Joseph Breuer in his treatment of Anna O. in 1881 originated what his patient referred to as the talking cure or jokingly as chimney sweeping. Sigmund Freud picked up Breuer's method and extended it to what came to be called "psycho-analysis". By the use of free association patients are led over many sessions to eventually be free of their disturbing symptoms.

    The symptoms are simply doyles from the time before five years old which can be effectively removed in about fifteen minutes by a person doing a simple doyle trace. Before the technology of recognizing and tracing doyles became available, in Freud and Rank's time, the only alternative was extensive psychoanalysis and the fifteen minutes could easily become fifteen years in psychoanalysis, since the analysis part required many sessions before the analyst could accidentally lead the patient down a particular path that would produce a doyle trace, that is, the person would be holding the doyle as they placed their mind back before the storage of the doyle took place. As soon as that happened the offending doyle would be replaced with a cognitive memory, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, and the doyle would never be triggered again. The patient would be considered healed of that problem by the analyst.

    The ultimate solution is the separation from the analyst wherein the male patient repeats with better success his separation from his mother.

    [page 5] But this is by no means to be taken metaphorically in any way - not even in the psychological sense. For in the analytic situation the patient repeats, biologically, as it were, the period of pregnancy, and at the conclusion of the analysis - i. e., the re-separation from the substitute object - he repeats his own birth for the most part quite faithfully in all its details. The analysis finally turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma.

    When the doyles associated with his birth are traced during the analysis, the separation from his substitute mother is achievable without creating the very onerous feelings and affect that led him originally to come into analysis. Given that during birth one is confronted with a myriad of novel doyles, it not surprising that following Freud, Rank would take the birth trauma as the font of all anxiety.

    [page 11] We shall take as our guiding principle Freud's statement that all anxiety goes back originally to the anxiety at birth.

    Thus, when we leave a child alone in a dark room, the stimulus is similar to being back in the womb and the doyles stored during birth are triggered, and the child, if it experienced doyles of anxiety at birth, will re-experience those same doyles. Extend the metaphor of the dark room to other aspects of birth and you find a similar anxiety present in small rooms, tunnels, traveling, etc. The sitting in a small cabin in a car or train and being carried along has all the stimuli associated with being in one's mother's womb as she walked or rode along. If during a walk, e.g., one's mother slipped to the ground and her heart started pounding in fear that she had hurt her baby in her womb, later when one experiences a similar fall during turbulence in an airplane, one will experience that same heart-pounding anxiety and call it a fear of flying.

    One's time in the womb can be considered to be pleasure-laden until the onset of the birth process during which any doyles of anxiety felt by the mother will be acquired by the child and associated with its birth.

    [page 13] As the analysis of childish phobias has clearly shown, the size or fatness (circumference of the body) of the animals causing fear refers to the state of pregnancy of which the child, as we can show, has more than a vague memory.

    To translate this passage into doylic terms: the stimulus from seeing a large animal such as a horse or a cow triggers doyles of the latter stages of pregnancy which are most apt to be anxiety-laden. Large animals trigger doyles of the later stages of pregnancy and small animals, ones that can disappear completely into holes, to the earlier stages of pregnancy. Rank acknowledges the presence of doyles or physical body states by saying the child has "more than a vague memory" - what the child has is stored doyles that may be triggered by appropriate stimuli. If the triggering is done during a dream, such as a doyle stored during the later anxiety-laden portion of pregnancy, a dream image of a large animal will be created in the dream. The same image that would create anxiety during the day, such as seeing a large animal, will be created during the dream of the same person if the anxiety is experienced during a dream.

    If a person is dreaming and some memory triggers a doyle of fright, they experience the fright in real-time, awake, and call it a nightmare. But what if a doyle appears during sleep and the mind creates the image that goes with the doyle by way of justifying the sleeping one's experience? Doyles in sleep lead to images in dreams, just as images in dreams lead to doyles during sleep, in fact they all happen at the same time.

    One Saturday morning I awoke from a dream in which I ate and enjoyed sauerkraut! Not a remarkable dream for most people, but for someone who had never eaten sauerkraut because they couldn't stand the taste, it was amazing! I told Del that we were going to Bailey's in the Fairmont Hotel that night to have a Reuben sandwich with lots of sauerkraut. I knew that if I could enjoy eating sauerkraut in a dream, then my doyles previously associated with eating sauerkraut were gone, probably erased during an earlier doyle trace. I was right. I ate my first Reuben sandwich and have enjoyed them ever since! I took a trip to Germany later and ate sauerkraut. I've started buying cans of it from the A&P and now eat it regularly - all because I paid attention to a change that took place apparently only within a dream.

    In his chapter on sexual gratification, Rank talks about the child wanting to recover its memory of being in its mother's womb, and he attributes the child's inability to do this to repression, all the while the only memories that the child could store at the time were doyles and their presence in the child and adult's life may be rampant and pervasive. The Freudians insist that memories can only be in cognitive or conceptual form and label as "repression" the lack of success of retrieving such a cognitive memory. In searching for the purloined letter in all the hidden places of the libido and psyche they miss its presentation in full view in the doylic responses of the child and the adult patients.

    [page 30] This can express itself in the child's manifold ways and peculiarities (always asking questions), proving that it seeks in itself for the lost memory of its earlier place of abode, which, in consequence of an extremely intense repression, it cannot find.

    This always asking questions by children is similar to the events that occur in an adult's life where life seems ever to create circumstances that trigger doyles until we learn from them, i.e., trace and erase the unwanted doyles. Then the events of life seem to change, and one receives the impression that these events existed solely to allow one to recover some doylic memory and place it into conceptual memory so as to remove the unwanted doyles. Rank in his chapter on Heroic Compensation states it quite well:

    [page 107] As we recognized in the neurotic a human being who cannot, without harm, overcome the primal affect of anxiety arising in the birth trauma, so the hero represents the type who, being free from anxiety, seeks to overcome an apparently specially severe birth trauma by a compensatory repetition of it in his deeds.

    Restating this in doyletic terms, the neurotic has a long, painful birth process during which a myriad of negative and painful doyles are stored in the one who is later to be confronted by these doyles as an adult in a myriad of everyday situations that will trigger these doyles. On the other hand the hero has the opposite kind of birth - torn or excised out of the mother's womb, the hero's trauma is removal from the paradisiacal state in the womb without a transition, with the result that the hero feels covered with a permanent uterus and thus invulnerable. MacDuff in MacBeth was one such hero, and the eponymous example is Julius Caesar, who was cut out of his mother's womb in an operation that now bears his name, Caesarian. The hero strives in the world to feel the very pain in the physical world without that the neurotic strives to avoid feeling from the psychical world within.

    [page 51] Further, all neurotic disturbances in breathing (asthma), which repeat the feeling of suffocation, relate directly to the physical reproductions of the birth trauma. The extensive use of the neurotic headache (migraine) goes back to the specially painful part allotted to the head in parturition . . .

    In several cases of asthma that I've encountered the asthmatic person as a child was subjected to severe restriction of breathing by a well-meaning medical person. In one case it occurred during a tonsillectomy and another case the dentist was holding his hands over the child's nose to get it to open its mouth. In these two cases the child was under five and suffered with severe asthma attacks as an adult. Rank shows his understanding of the etiology of asthma in breathing restrictions, but assumes it must be related to parturition, that is, a birth trauma, whereas from the science of doyletics we can show that any breathing restriction event up to age five may lead to asthma. A similar case can be made for migraine headaches since I know personally of two cases in which migraines were traced to traumas occurring at the ages of three and four years old.

    There are a few examples where the neurotic disease parallels the organic disease, such as narcolepsy and encephalitis, in both of which the symptom is that of a return to embryonal sleep. Rank points out how the presence of the neurotic disease may prevent the development of the real disease.

    [page 59] And one actually has the impression, from very many purely organic sufferings, that they save the individual - if one may so express it - from the luxury of a neurosis formation. But it would be more correct to say that the neurosis is a more pretentious substitute for a banal organic suffering. One is not frequently astonished to see how it is precisely a neurosis, with its 'counterfeit' physical symptoms, that prevents the development of any real disease of the same organ, just because it is a substitute for it.

    In Rudolf Steiner's works he often directs our attention to the two sides of the Devil that he calls Lucifer and Ahriman. Luciferian influences tend to make one into a moral automaton, and Ahrimanic influences encourage one to become free, but amoral. Can it be that the neurotic disease is due to the Luciferian influences? Does Lucifer save man from clutches of a real disease by providing a "pretentious substitute" for it, i.e., a neurosis?

    Think of an old-fashioned balance scale. Put too much Luciferian influences into one side and you get a person with a neurosis, the counterfeit of illness. Neurosis is an old-fashioned word, but no other one works so well to describe the pervasive counterfeit of illnesses that plague so many people today.

    Put too much Ahrimanic influence into the other side of the scale and you get this prosperous materialist who is too busy to attend to their family, their spouse, their soul, and their only hope is to acquire a real disease - a scary or painful one that will get their attention and make it difficult for them to continue their break-neck schedule, a schedule that would, unhindered, result in a loss of soul - but not a disease that would prematurely terminate their karmic working-out of matters during this lifetime on Earth. The result is that they will get better, and usually will have to continue taking medicine, which has the salubrious effect of constantly reminding them of the disease and hopefully, to slow down.

    The mood changes that are currently called bipolar disorder, that were earlier called manic-depressive, and in Rank's time were called circular insanity (cyclothymia) can be seen as flip-flop doyles, that is, doyles that are teamed together so that a manic doyle leads to a depressive doyle which leads back to a manic doyle. One obvious source of such doyles is in the pre-birth pleasure state that was followed by the parturition trauma. Any doyle stored after birth that resembles the pre-birth state could become a trigger for the pre-birth doyle to arise.

    [page 62] The manic stage frequently following the depressive is physically distinguished, on the other hand, by the post-natal liveliness and movement, whilst the feeling of extreme happiness and blessedness conforms to the pre-natal libido gratification.

    In the cosmology of Rudolf Steiner, one finds that cosmogenesis parallels ontogenesis. That the progressive stages of the embryo in the womb maps the progress of the evolution of the cosmos. The first stage of existing in warmth, followed by warmth and light, then floating in water, and finally at birth, existing in the mineral physicality of a human body mirrors the evolution of the cosmos from the Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and Earth stages. [See ARJ: Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical World .] Note in the passage below how Rank treats the truths of cosmology and cosmogenesis as if they were "nothing but" misinterpretations of the events of one's birth. This a powerful example of how reductionist thinking can create the very processes it claims to find in nature.

    [page 73] When analytically adjusted psychiatrists have recognized that the content of the psychosis is "cosmologic," we need not avoid the next step, that of analysis of cosmology itself, for then we shall find that it is nothing other than the infantile recollection of one's own birth projected on to Nature.

    In this next passage Rank says that postures occurring during analysis cannot have been known by the analysands. What he means by known is knowing via conscious, cognitive memory - but doyles are known only by their affect and are not cognitive memories. Doyles can be demonstrated to be valid, non-cognitive memories triggered by reminiscences, especially the type that occur during analysis.

    [page 83, 84] But in reality, as opposed to phantasy, in dream formation there occur during analysis many definite but quite unconscious reminiscences or reproductions of the individual intrauterine posture, or peculiarities relating to one's own birth. These could arise from no conscious memory or phantasy formation, because they could not be known previously by anyone.

    If anyone has spent much time around inventors, especially inventors of free energy machines as I have, the following words of Rank will certainly ring true. No one else but the inventor is ever good enough to manufacture the energy machine, and one suspects that there is some hidden and therefore neurotic agenda such as Rank suggests.

    [page 100] This is shown from the analysis of the mania to invent, which Kielholz has attempted in an interesting work. In some of his cases it is obvious that the patient who wishes to discover perpetuum mobile or squaring of the circle wants in this way to solve the problem of permanently dwelling in and fitting into the mother's womb. In other cases of electrical inventions (apparatus though which run warm unseen currents), etc., a detailed study of the patients' delusions ought to show clearly their importance as a reaction to the birth trauma.

    In the chapter Religious Sublimation, Rank attempts to reduce all spiritual symbolism to "nothing-but" attempts to return to the womb. In a footnote on page 117 he attempts to ridicule astrology by calling it the "first doctrine of the birth trauma" and stating further that the "entire being and fate of man is determined by what occurs (in heaven) at the moment of his birth." Any astrologer will tell you that what occurs in the heavens at every moment of a person's life is interconnected with the person. Not understanding the spiritual relationship of the heavens and Earth makes it possible to treat the two as unconnected realities brought together by chance. Rank offers an example of a materialistic cosmology that is actually no cosmology at all.

    In mystery schools over the ages, initiates undergo a death-like trance for three to four days and when they return from this state, they are changed - able to see spiritual realities for the first time. On page 120, he describes a Hindu initiation in which the initiate is covered first with a robe representing the amnion and then covered with a black antelope skin representing the womb. For three days he is curled up into an embryonal position with his fists clenched until finally he is reborn. From a doyletics perspective this can be seen to represent an intense doyle trace in which all or most of the doyles that a person acquired during the birth trauma are erased. These birth doyles are what anchor us to the physical world, releasing them allows the initiate to see again into the spiritual world.

    In his penultimate chapter Psychoanalytical Knowledge, Rank lays out his case for having solved all the riddles of humanity thus:

    [page 183] We believe we have shown, in a bird's-eye view of the essential achievements and developments of civilization, that not only all socially valuable, even over-valued, creations of man but even the fact of becoming man, arise from a specific reaction to the birth trauma, and, finally, that recognition of this through the psychoanalytic method is due to the most complete removal as yet achieved of the primal repression, through the overcoming of the primal resistance, anxiety.

    It is not for me, an innocent in the area of psychoanalysis, to criticize or cast aspersions on the merits of this field of endeavor - its accomplishments speak for itself well enough, both in its successes and in its failures. It was certainly a pioneer in providing relief to people who were troubled and to its credit provided that relief without the use of drugs and medications. In many ways psychoanalysis is similar to the selective propagation of plants and breeding of animals that existed for hundreds of years before Gregor Johann Mendel laid the foundation for the science of genetics in his landmark article in 1866. Mendel's work, when it was finally recognized thirty-four years later, gave the mathematical precision to genetics that led to our understanding of the genetic code and eventually to the ingenious genetic engineering feats of today. One example is the new technique of splicing genes to reduce angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels in tumors, thus killing the tumors without harmful radiation, poisonous drugs, or invasive surgery.

    Rank acknowledges that the decisive point in the history of psychoanalysis was Breuer's discovery. The material in quotes below is taken from Freud writing in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, page 289.

    [page 185] Breuer's starting-point was "the fundamental fact that the symptoms of hysterical patients depend on impressive but forgotten scenes of their life (traumata), the therapy based on it causing them to remember and to reproduce these experiences under hypnosis (catharsis), and the consequent fragment of theory, that these symptoms correspond to an abnormal use of undischarged quantities of excitation (conversion)."

    This understanding of Breuer's has so infiltrated the psychology of the present day that it formed the background for Doyle Henderson's thinking in the early days when he puzzled over how he might remove the unwanted emotions of fear and anxiety from his life and others. As an instrument engineer he knew about sensors, and was startled when he came across the statement that there are no pain sensors in the human brain! "How is it possible that I can, by thinking about a memory, feel pain?" he thought. One day in a cafeteria with some friends, he suddenly got a flash and exclaimed that he knew how it happened. He said, "I know how people remember feelings. The brain recreates the body state." In other words, the settings of the sensors, which originally registered the pain, were stored somewhere in the brain system and later, upon the appropriate trigger, the brain system sent those settings to the senors so that the body would experience the pain re-created as if it were happening in real-time. This explains why when a woman says, "Your words hurt me," what she really means, in doyletics terms, is that what you did caused her brain system to re-create the painful body state that she had stored a long time ago.

    As Henderson struggled to utilize this insight of his, he tried using Breuer's techniques of hypnosis, age regression, and such. What he found was that the so-called symptoms that Freud talked of above were simply re-created, re-evoked memories, not cognitive or conceptual memories, but physical body states that were re-evoked by the brain system sending these previously stored sensor settings out to the body as the only way it has to recover and present the memory to the body, at the time it presents it. Henderson found that once the original event was accessed during a trace [an age regression technique], if you went back in time before the original event, the physical body state was gone. Not only that, but for ever afterward, the symptom had disappeared as if by magic. What he and I have hypothesized is that the physical body state memory is replaced by a cognitive or conceptual memory, either of the original event or the tracing event itself, and thereafter when the appropriate trigger is fired off, the cognitive memory is served up rather than the physical body state, and thus the so-called symptom disappears permanently.

    There was no repression - that was merely a way that psychoanalysts had of talking about these magically stored and re-created memories that human beings have as a natural capability by virtue of their phylogeny and ontogeny.

    [page 185] What lies in between is the psychology of the Unconscious created by Freud alone, namely, the first psychology which at all deserves this independent name, since the academic psychology originating from philosophical speculation gradually encroached more and more on to medical ground (philosophy of the senses, neurology, anatomy of the brain.)

    It should be clear to the reader by now that the nascent science of doyletics as I've sketched it for you in this review will certainly encroach on the medical ground, dealing as it does with the sensory receptors as well as the neural anatomy and structure of the brain system. From the neurological research of Joseph LeDoux [See ARJ: The Emotional Brain .] we catch a strong hint that the portion of the brain known as the limbic system, in particular the two almond-shaped amygdalas, provides the pattern recognition, storage, and retrieval capabilities required for handling those primitive components of feelings and emotions that we have labeled doyles for convenience. It seems much more natural to consider that doyles are primitive memories stored and retrieved by a primitive portion of the brain, the limbic system, rather than to describe them as being due to the "abnormal use of undischarged quantities of excitation" as in the first page 185 quote above.

    To my mind, psychoanalysis makes the ultimate use of the fallacy of "followed by, therefore caused by" in ascribing, as Otto Rank does in this book, all the faith, the foibles, and the creativity of humankind that must naturally follow one's birth to the birth act itself. Doyles are stored from as early as two months after conception until the human reaches the age of five years old, an age referred to as the Memory Transition Age [MTA] in doyletics because it represents the age beyond which no novel doyles are ever stored again. If a child doesn't store a particular component doyle of joy or sadness by age five, it never will. Obviously there are very strong doyles that are stored during parturition because the process of birth is strenuous for both mother and the child. But to focus one's analysis only upon the birth trauma itself is limit one's usefulness to the analysand and extend the process of analysis and its cost without a concomitant benefit.

    This analysis of psychoanalysis in the light of the new science of doyletics, I hope, will allow the reader to look with new eyes at the many facets of human life that the proffered explanations by psychoanalysts obfuscate more than they enlighten. For example, to the extent that one's death or dying process mimics one's birth, to that extent the birth doyles will be evoked. Plus the reader will be able to view aspects of human life that psychoanalysis cannot touch - so far as I know - such as providing understanding of the autistic person. To the extent that a child before the age of five stores memories of events as cognitive-type memories instead of doyles, which autistic children can apparently do, that child will not have access to the physical body states associated with that event: they will not be able to respond with smooth speech (speech is a doyle), nor to modulate their voice (doyles modulate speech by creating feeling tone), nor to feel joy or happiness appropriately (having no doyles for the components of those emotions stored). From doyletics we receive the insight that autistic children are not retarded, but rather advanced human beings being raised by normal people who don't recognize the special care that autistic children require at a very early age. One cannot wait until five to recognize autism - it will be too late for all practical purposes for the child.

    Best of all doyletics provides the benefits of the removal of unwanted physical body states (neurotic symptoms) during a period of time measured in seconds instead of the years required by psychoanalysis. Who would choose a process that requires an analyst and years when offered an option that requires no one else and can be done in minutes and seconds? Read this description of the removal of doyles from neurotics - it describes that something must exist, and that something we can henceforth understand in a far simpler way than ever before, that something is doyles.

    [page 200] On the other hand, analytic experience shows that something must exist which makes it possible to an extensive degree to free highly neurotic human beings from the excessive dominance of their Unconscious and put them in a position to live as those do who are not neurotic.

    By means of a conscious doyle trace, one is able to convert an unwanted doyle into a cognitive memory and be free of the unpleasant neurotic symptom. Plus by operating alone, one is free of the danger of having the analyst confuse her understanding and knowledge with the knowledge and understanding of the analysand, with all the chances for disaster that such confusion entails. Understanding and knowledge is not enough for the removal of an unwanted doyle, the understanding and knowledge must be arrived at during the process of a trace so that the doyle is being accessed while trace proceeds to before a pre-MTA original event. If and only if this process is utilized, whether during the course of psychoanalysis, hot seat therapy in Gestalt work, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming technique, or any other therapeutic analysis or process, will the doyle be permanently removed from all contexts in which it may later otherwise appear.

    A few words seem appropriate here about transference and its crucial role in creating and confirming the "cure" of the analysand.

    [page 213, 214] Thus it is a matter of allowing the patient, who in his neurosis has fled back to the mother fixation, to repeat and to understand the birth trauma and its solution during the analysis in the transference, without allowing him the unconscious reproduction of the same in the severance from the therapist.

    Simply put, unless the analysand is able to leave the analyst without firing off the doyles it formerly had fired off by its mother, which have by the end of the analysis been transferred to the analyst (i.e., by transference), the analysis is by definition not over. Back to the drawing board to attempt to remove those doyles once more. No wonder analysis, without a systematic doyle removal mechanism that works quickly and easily, can continue for years and sometimes terminates without a cure of even the simplest of neurotic symptoms.

    [page 214] All this results by means of the technique of association and of interpretation, developed by Freud, whereby we use our own Unconscious as the main way leading to the patient's Unconscious. This is the only means by which we can operate on his libido.

    What doyletics provides is a means by which one can remove one's own consciously recognized and traced doyles to achieve permanent removal of neurotic symptoms without requiring analysis and interpretation by someone else. Thus one may avoid completely the danger-fraught path of having someone else analyze and operate on one's libido.

    [page 216] Though consciousness is but a feeble weapon, it is the only one accessible to us in the fight against neurosis.

    That is excellent advice and applies equally well to doyletics. One needs a teacher, not a midwife or analyst, to help one learn to recognize the arising of a doyle, to show one how to do an unassisted doyle trace on the doyles once one recognizes them.

    This is an excellent book that holds up well fifty years after it was written. We know a lot more about psychotherapy today than was known in Rank's day, but his insights into the processes of psychoanalysis are as valuable today as when they were first written. His creating the birth trauma of parturition as the centerpiece or focal point for beginning one's path from neurosis into normality is appropriate and valuable and lucidly written. This book should be part of the armamentarium of any person who wishes to learn more about the subtlest of subjects one can study, the human psyche.



    ---------------------------- Reference Links for The Trauma of Birth ---------------

    A Reference Page of Material written by Bobby Matherne on the trauma of birth
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/ttoblinks.htm

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/ttobrev.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 Drinks to a Sign in the Crescent City Brewhouse 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 or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

    This month the good Padre enjoys a Beer:


    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 Chris in Corpus Christi, TX. Re: Cajun Joke in DW#166:
      Carla said, "Yeah, Chris, you already know how to fish!"

  • EMAIL from Rod in Lafayette, LA:
    Hey Bobby,
    Hope you and Del are feeling good.
    I really enjoyed this month's issue. Your pictures are great. Flower pics the best.
    Hope you have a great summer.
    Tell Del Hi for me. Rod
  • EMAIL from Grady in Italy:
    Bobby,

    Thanks, as always. I got a good laugh out of "Coming soon — another error". I enjoyed your "Age of Aquariums" and "Freedom on the Half Shell". I am in Europe now and I look forward to seeing you and Del when I return.

    Grady

  • EMAIL from Tony Celino:
    Bobby:

    Glad you and Del were able to make it to the West Jeff HS reunion. As always there is never enough time to spend with everyone and since I wanted to take a lot of photos for the memory I was constantly on the move. Have included a photo in this message.

    Take care and I hope your cruise is the most fantastic one ever. Let me know. We leave in one week for a six week drive trip West going on Route 66 and more. It should be fun.

    Let's get together sometimes for lunch.
    Tony

  • EMAIL from Barbara:
    Bobby, enjoyed the flowers, butterflies, poetry, coverage of Derby Day, all the other things in this month's edition — Adele is a good model for your photos — and you make me feel like a star.

    I sincerely appreciate you and Adele helping me to get back into the mainstream of the normal world — and look forward to making a killing in the stock market in the investment club with Adele.

    — Cheers, Barbara

  • EMAIL from 2nd Cousin Suzanne Ruth:
    Beautiful cucumbers !!!! Ours have been coming in also, but not that pretty . . . New Orleans is south of us and you would think that doesn't make much difference, but it does. . . . .Suzanne Ruth

  • EMAIL from Good Reader Betty Chowning:
    Hi Bobby,
    I think this was the longest digest ever! It was chocked full of so many beautiful things, but my favorite, of course, is to see the both of you. The Derby fillies in their hats and outfits were outstanding and beautiful.
           You may not like this, but I also like DQ ice cream hot fudge sundaes and we add about a teaspoon of bourbon on top of that — is that ever tasty! The blackberries looks so pretty and good. I think it is too soon for real ones around here, but I buy them at Sam's.
    Thank goodness Kenny loves fruit, with blueberries and blackberries being his favorite. So happy you are all doing well and life is good.
    Keep it up! Betty

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Reply from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Dear Betty, Thanks for the good words! Yes, DW#166 was the largest ever DIGESTWORLD Issue, 10% larger than previous largest issue. The reviews were long, and, thankfully, I had enough photos to fill the issue. May have to use some leftover from the last day of May, Joan of Arc's Feast Day and others to flesh out the bottom two reviews.
            It was a lot of hard work. After the Issue was put to bed, my staff signed a petition for me to give them a long vacation this summer. I may have to do the summer issues all by myself with my intrepid sleep-in Copy-Editor Del.

    warm regards,
    Bobby

  • 3. Poem from Freedom on the Half Shell: "Road of Freedom"

    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:


    Road of Freedom

    I find the road of freedom
    To be in a sorry state.
    Here, where little traffic seems to come,
    Weeds grow in wild profusion
    Where free men trod of late.

    Nearby the highway of coercion
    Spews noxious fumes into the air
    From super-regulated engines
    And auto-mobile passions
    Sounding with a syncopated blare.

    Is the former the road that Frost preferred,
    That path by ancestors forsaken,
    When they in congress deeply erred
    And freedom in the tomb of law interred
    Alongside the dormant road not taken?


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    9. CLOSING NOTES:
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    Thanks to all of you Good Readers for providing the Chemistry which has made this site a Glowing Success. — Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to reprint your emails and show photos of you and by you on this website — you're looking good! As of June 1, 2019, it enters its 20th year of publication. The DIGESTWORLD Issues and the rest of the doyletics website pages have received over 21.6 MILLION VISITORS ! ! !

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    My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get the reader comfortable with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner Reviews are more detailed and my intention is to bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.

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    10. GRATITUDE - in Three Easy Steps:
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    Maintaining a website requires time and money, and apart from sending a donation to the Doyletics Foundation, there are several ways you can show your gratitude and support our efforts to keep doyletics.com on-line.

    One would be for you to buy a copy of my Dolphin Novel, The SPIZZNET File. Books May be ordered in hardback or paperback form from Xlbiris the Publisher here:

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