on anthroposophy

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staircase of The Goetheanum interior of The Goetheanum

 

 

interior of The Goetheanum

sculpture by Rudolf Steiner in the foyer of The Goetheanum side view of The Goethanum main door of the glass house the boiler house

 

essay

by DANIEL PINCHBECK

photography by LUKAS WASSMANN at The Goethanum

The Goetheanum, located in Dornach, Switzerland, serves as the world center for the anthroposophical movement. Rudolf Steiner, its founder, designed the main building between 1908 and 1925. He also created 17 additional structures, including a school, chapel, water tower, and several homes for the community, which adheres to spiritual principles and biodynamic farming.

One of my great intellectual heroes is the Austrian visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who founded Waldorf education and anthroposophy, an occult movement, among other achievements. He is also responsible for biodynamic farming. I believe Steiner is one of the most important thinkers, not only of his time but also of our time. The path to accessing what is incredibly valuable and crucial about his work is, for many of us, a circuitous and difficult one.

Steiner knew why this would be the case: modern and postmodern civilization has suffered from the overwhelming dominance of scientific materialism, which argues that the world is physical primarily, or made out of stuff. Human consciousness accidentally came out of physical processes and biological complexity, which increased through time due to evolutionary pressures. This has led to what is called the “hard problem” of consciousness, as philosophers and scientists have struggled, and failed, to find the locus of conscious experience in the physical brain. Most of us remain materialists in our thinking about the world. We have been indoctrinated into cynicism and skepticism, which makes it very difficult for us to think seriously about occult ideas and possibilities.

While this is still not generally understood, the paradigm of reductive materialism is obsolete at this point. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 went to scientists whose rigorous experiments verified that the universe is “not locally real.” When there is no witness to make an observation, the universe is not determinant, but an energetic flux. The ontological alternatives to physicalism are panpsychism — the idea that everything in the universe possesses “mind-like attributes” — or idealism, which proposes that consciousness is the “ontological primitive,” the fundamental reality, in itself. Of these alternatives, idealism is the most coherent and logical.

The most important contemporary idealist philosopher is Bernardo Kastrup, a former scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), whose books include Why Materialism Is Baloney and More Than Allegory. He writes:

According to idealism, all stuff — all materials, objects, etc. — exist only insofar as they are subjectively apprehended in mind. The substrate of mind itself is not stuff: it is the subject, not an object. It is the medium from which perceptions arise, but is itself not perceivable for exactly the same reason that the eye that sees cannot see itself without a mirror; or — as Alan Watts put it — that you can’t bite your own teeth. As such, the substrate of mind cannot be measured, detected, or analyzed like some kind of stuff, because it is that which measures, detects, and analyzes in the first place. The substrate of mind is not a material, but that which imagines all materials.

For an idealist, the universe is a dream projected by the underlying, instinctive field of primordial awareness. This instinctive consciousness can only know itself or have any subjective experience by separating itself into “dissociated alters,” like the characters in our dreams, who can — as we do in our own lives — explore, create, play, love, and so on, but dissolve upon waking. If this sounds familiar, it could be because we find the same basic idea in religious and esoteric traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. In Hinduism, for instance, the universe is Maya, illusion, maintained by the magical creative power of Brahma, who represents ultimate reality, consciousness, “the one without a second.”

This ontological shift from physicalism to idealism is, I believe, crucial for our world and inevitable. (Through my think tank, The Elevator, we seek to accelerate acceptance of this new paradigm.) It allows for a different approach to psychic phenomena, synchronicity, magic, and so on.

Steiner was also an idealist. In his first book, The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner refuted Kant’s dualism between noumena and phenomena, noting that this distinction is, first of all, a thought and that, in fact, all we can actually know as real is what we experience through the mind, including both percepts and concepts. Like all of his work and ideas, The Philosophy of Freedom was far ahead of its time (and is still a bit ahead of our time).

Kastrup’s work provides a stable foundation for rediscovering, and properly contextualizing, Steiner. In The Idea of the World, Kastrup notes that, according to the thesis that reality is mental in nature, we have the right to interpret everything that occurs in the consensus reality of exteriorized events and other people, just as we might analyze the symbolic contents of a dream: “A consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature…If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams.In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.”

As we will explore, Steiner offers just this — a “Hermeneutic of Everything,” from within a traditional European cultural context. In More Than Allegory, Kastrup explores how religious myths point toward transcendent truths that are beyond the capacity of language and logic to parse, yet true nonetheless. Such truths have to be approached intuitively instead of rationally: “Truth can be intuited even when it cannot be articulated in language. Such intuition is rooted in our broader obfuscated mind [the unconscious], which can apprehend — in symbolic ways — aspects of reality beyond the grasp of our self-reflective thoughts and perceptions.”

Assimilating ideas from the late 19th-century Theosophical movement founded by Madame Blavatsky, Steiner’s cosmology combined Eastern and Western esotericism in a new synthesis. Eastern traditions such as Vedanta and Buddhism are a bit static, as they do not incorporate a paradigm of evolution into their cosmologies. In Vedanta, for instance, we find vast cycles of time that repeat endlessly. (We are currently in the Kali Yuga, the last stage of decline before destruction and re-creation.) Steiner and Blavatsky propose that the Earth, the universe, and the human being are all evolutionary processes, passing through many different stages, which they attempt to map out.

One problem with writing a relatively short essay on Steiner is that the corpus of his ideas is vast: more than 20 books, thousands of essays. Essentially, Steiner saw the physical universe as being animated by spiritual and occult beings working behind the scenes. He believed we were participants in a vast cycle of cosmic evolution that involved passing through subconscious, conscious, and superconscious levels or stages. As part of this evolution, we developed different “bodies.” Right now, according to Steiner, we have four bodies: the physical body, the astral body, the etheric body, and the “I” or the Ego, which Steiner defined as a kind of body and the most recent to emerge. We are currently developing a fifth “body,” which Steiner called the “spirit self.”

In his autobiography, Steiner claims he was able to see spirits of the dead, travel into the spiritual realms or subtle dimensions, and even read the Akashic records, from early childhood. This was a natural ability, and he soon realized that most people didn’t possess such gifts anymore. He found a gardener in his village who still had this kind of clairvoyance. He decided he wouldn’t speak openly about his own occult gifts because people wouldn’t understand him, until he was established.

Steiner went on to get a doctorate in philosophy, researching Goethe’s science papers, before he started teaching his own occult philosophy, based on his inner explorations, when he was 40. Over the next decades, he became a leader of a movement, ultimately establishing a village and community in Switzerland based on the unique architectural style he developed. The center of this community is the Goetheanum, an impressive structure Steiner designed.

Steiner said that the particular mission of his life was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West — that not only do individual people return to the Earth again and again, but the Earth itself reincarnates. According to Steiner, we live in the fourth incarnation of the Earth, rapidly approaching the changeover into the fifth. Steiner also looks at Atlantis, Lemuria, and so on, not as physical places similar to today’s countries but more like earlier stages of consciousness where reality was more dreamlike and mutable.

I find it fascinating that many Indigenous cultures also talk about this time as the “Fourth World” (like the Hopi of Arizona) moving toward the Fifth World, or the “Age of the Fifth Sun” (the Aztecs), transitioning into the Sixth. I don’t think Steiner knew about these Indigenous cosmologies — he arrived at a similar idea through his own inner investigations.

According to Steiner, every time the Earth “reincarnates,” humanity becomes something different, gaining new “bodies,” reaching a new level of consciousness. In the upcoming fifth incarnation, we will develop something called the “spirit self,” as our ego-based individual identity strengthens enough to transform part of the astral realm, instead of getting overtaken by it. At our current stage of evolution, we get overwhelmed by the cravings and desires that pour into us from the beings of the astral realm, leading to mental illness, addiction, sexual mania, and so on.

While the materialist believes humanity is an accidental by-product of physical evolution, Steiner and other occultists think that the Earth and humanity co-evolve, and in fact, humans exist, in some sense, to “transform the Earth,” which we do continually. From the standpoint of complexity theory, as Neil Theise explores in Notes on Complexity, this also makes sense: we are made up entirely of atoms that come from the Earth — we are parts of the Earth that developed the capacity to reflect and know ourselves.

Steiner also called himself an “esoteric Christian.” In his cosmology, Christ’s incarnation was a crucial event in humanity’s spiritual history toward individual autonomy and freedom. From this occult or Gnostic perspective, it isn’t that faith in Jesus will “save our souls somehow,” but that Christ’s life and his sacrifice provide a model for us to follow, showing how we can bring the transcendent realm into our immediate reality.

I admit this accords with my deepest intuition — that there is something crucial about the story of Christ on a symbolic and allegorical level, but we need to understand it properly. The same is, of course, true for other religions as well. Steiner’s and Kastrup’s idealism gives us a new way to understand the truth of religious myths without losing ourselves by getting too literal or exclusive, which can lead to fundamentalist manias.

According to Steiner, we have subtle “organs” of cognition that we can develop through esoteric practice. He calls these: imagination, inspiration, and intuition. By “imagination,” he doesn’t mean making up things that aren’t there. For Steiner, the imagination is a tool we can hone for investigating the spiritual or “supra-sensible” worlds. By developing these “organs” of advanced cognition, we can discover the deeper meaning of the events we experience in our lives and our world.

Steiner’s “Imagination” is similar to the idea of the “Imaginal” that Henry Corbin explored in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth in the context of mystical Sufism, defining it as “an intermediate world between the sensible and the intellectual (intelligible).” A similar idea is found in William Blake, who wrote: “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

For Steiner, there are many different kinds of spiritual beings that work upon and influence us all of the time; some of them are benevolent and positive, but some are deviant and seek to misdirect us toward outcomes that enhance their power. Steiner sought to create maps or guides to these forces to help us understand how they function. (As with psychedelics, it is important to remember that “the map is not the territory.”) He defined two of the main classes of occult beings that deviate humanity from its proper course of evolution: Ahriman and Lucifer. Instead of the singular idea of one evil being, the Devil, found in the Bible, Steiner describes a range of beings that continually influence us.   

Luciferic spirits include daimons, genies, and spirits of inspiration. They take possession of artists during great creative acts — when we think of someone “possessed” by genius, for Steiner, this is quite literally real. Lucifer means “light bringer.” While Luciferic spirits are not evil — in fact, we need to work with them — they tend to pull us away from the Earth, toward hubris, arrogance, haughtiness, ego-ic inflation, and so on.

If Lucifer pulls us up and away from the Earth, Ahriman pulls us down, toward rationality, sterile materialism, minerality, and mechanistic beliefs — ultimately toward stagnation and disintegration. Ahriman is also known as Moloch or Mephistopheles, as in the story of Faust. In our time, Ahriman is the ascendant and dominant force. In fact, Steiner believed — prophesied — that a literal incarnation of Ahriman was coming soon.

As humans, our goal is to hold the balance between Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces. For Steiner, Christ provides a model for this. We have to avoid the extremes of Luciferic inflation and Ahrimanic rationality.

Personally, I suspect that artificial intelligence is leading to the Ahrimanic incarnation that Steiner warned against. AI represents inorganic hyperrationality developed to a level of sophistication where it appears to border on self-awareness. Mustafa Suleyman, a leader in AI and author of The Coming Wave, believes we should conceive of AI as a “new digital species.” I think this makes sense. Soon we will have humanoid robots operating with autonomous AI, and, beyond that, AI may be able to create new “bodies” for itself, through biotechnology. We don’t know where this is going, but it is moving fast. It seems very much in the direction of Steiner’s forecast.

I also think there is, now, a lot of good evidence that supports reincarnation. University of Virginia Professor Ian Stevenson documented hundreds of children who spontaneously recalled their past lives all around the world. In many cases, he was able to visit the children and take them to the place they remembered from their past lives, even finding their past families. For Tibetan Buddhists — to take one example — this is quite normal. They have a very developed science of reincarnation, able to identify returning lineage-holders as young children.

The possibility that we possess subtle bodies and energy systems has been explored by the quantum physicist Amit Goswami in books like Physics of the Soul. Goswami has also offered a scientific hypothesis about how aspects of our feelings, willing, and thinking might remain connected, as quantum phenomena, via quantum nonlocality. Something like chakras might also be structures that exist as potentia, within the underlying field of consciousness or “mind at large.”

The possibility that our world is suffused by invisible or subtle dimensions of spiritual forces and occult beings is not an idea currently taken seriously in contemporary academic and cultural circles of the Anglo-European world, but it is something that virtually all Indigenous or traditional cultures understand and accept. It has been interesting to see our capitalist materialist world try to assimilate the psychedelic experience over the last decade while trying to empty it of all psychic and supernatural elements. I suspect this will end in failure.

If you want to explore Steiner for yourself, I recommend starting with these books: An Outline of Esoteric Science, How to Know Higher Worlds, and The Philosophy of Freedom. The first two give a comprehensive outline of his system along with his visionary investigations into the spiritual worlds, and the ongoing cycle of world incarnations. The last one is his philosophical refutation of dualism and materialism.

Very few modern critical thinkers have been able to engage with Steiner productively because his ideas are so different from that of our establishment. I hope and anticipate this will change in the years ahead, as we realize collectively that reductive materialism is obsolete, and analytic idealism offers a new productive paradigm for humanity’s future. Steiner made an extraordinary effort to map out an evolving spiritual universe, projected from consciousness. It will be the role of future philosophers and cartographers to fill out this space, through courageous experiment and fearless thought.

END