...growing in what is.

This from The New Experience of the Supersensible by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon

St. Paul came to realize that an enemy attacked human evolution, and that this enemy is the source of error on the Earth… Only in a world in which the human being could be influenced by the Ahrimanic forces—so Paul now felt—could the error occur that led to the death on the cross. And now, when he understood this, he realized for the first time the truth of esoteric Christianity. The assimilation of death into life: this is the secret of Golgotha. Previously man knew life without death; now he learned to know death as part of life, as an experience that strengthens life… Humanity must strengthen its life, if it wants to pass through death and yet live. And death means, in this connection… the intellect… the intellect makes us inwardly cold, makes us inwardly dead. The intellect paralyses us. Man must truly feel it, that man lives not when man thinks, that man wastes his life in dead mental pictures, and that man must have strong life in himself in order to feel creative life in the dead mental pictures… This I tried to do in my Philosophy of Freedom. This Philosophy of Freedom is in reality a moral conception that should be a preparation for the vitalization of dead thinking through moral impulse, in order to bring it to resurrection.

GA 211, lecture of 2 April, 1922

(untranslated, taken from

The New Experience of the Supersensible,

Jesaiah Ben-Aharon

Now if we read once again the Appendix to the Philosophy of Freedom, added when Steiner brought out the new edition in 1918. Here he addresses the question as to how we know within the context of the human encounter. Perhaps we can see something of the dying in the extinguishing. It's a bit lengthy, and its the most precise esoteric description of what happens in the human encounter that I have found.

What is it, in the first instance, that I have before me when I confront another person? The most immediate thing is the bodily appearance of the other person as given to me in sense perception; then, perhaps, the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so on. I do not merely stare at all this, but it sets my thinking activity in motion. Through the thinking with which I confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, transparent to the mind. I am bound to admit that when I grasp the percept with my thinking, it is not at all the same thing as appeared to the outer senses. In what is a direct appearance to the senses, something else is indirectly revealed. The mere sense appearance extinguishes itself at the same time as it confronts me. But what it reveals through this extinguishing compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking as long as I am under its influence, and to put its thinking in the place of mine. I then grasp its thinking in my thinking as an experience like my own. I have really perceived another person's thinking. The immediate percept, extinguishing itself as sense appearance, is grasped by my thinking, and this is a process lying wholly within my consciousness and consisting in this, that the other person's thinking takes the place of mine. Through the self-extinction of the sense appearance, the separation between the two spheres of consciousness is actually overcome. This expresses itself in my consciousness through the fact that while experiencing the content of another person's consciousness I experience my own consciousness as little as I experience it in dreamless sleep. Just as in dreamless sleep my waking consciousness is eliminated, so in my perceiving of the content of another person's consciousness the content of my own is eliminated. The illusion that it is not so only comes about because in perceiving the other person, firstly, the extinction of the content of one's own consciousness gives place not to unconsciousness, as it does in sleep, but to the content of the other person's consciousness, and secondly, the alternations between extinguishing and lighting up again of my own self-consciousness follow too rapidly to be generally noticed.

The Philosophy of Freedom

Rudolf Steiner

It’s the best I can do this evening. Something more is calling, another draft, something more of my own thinking in relationship to these quotes, something of the future is asking to arise…A final quote:

Social processes are death processes. Part of our ego-relatedness has to die and more than that. What is social is so difficult for us because we do not want to die. In GA 73/1973/178 Steiner considers the dying processes (in contrast to the growth processes) as in organic nature, “a bridge between that part of nature that we understand and the social spheres of life that need to be understood.” Thus, our social future is brought about at the expense of our social death processes. These occur at the beginning of the Archetypal Social Phenomenon. In one perceives the process of falling asleep, then one “learns to understand the significance of dying for the human being.” As we allow another to put us to sleep, we therefore “die.” Physical death removes our sheaths one by one. Similarly the social process is one of progressive disposing. Steiner cites Max Stirner’s words in GA 30/1961/144: “Only when nothing is said about you and you are merely named are you recognized as you: as long as something is being said about you, you are merely being recognized as something.” As we awaken in the other, we have an experience which is repeated and magnified in dying. When you have passed through the portal of death, “you are forced to live in the other person, if I express it in this way.” Then one experiences what one has done to him, and this life outside of oneself “makes the future compensation occur” (GA 236/1977/102f).

p. 167-168

The Mysteries of Social Encounters

Dieter Brüll

And the Steiner verse from the national conference:

We are a bridge

Between what is past

And future existence;

The present is an instant:

Is momentary bridge.

Spirit become soul

In enfolding matter

Is from the past;

Soul becoming spirit

In germinal vessels

Is on the path to the future.

Grasp what is to come

Through what is past;

Have hope of what is growing

Through what has emerged.

And so apprehend

Existence in growing;

And so apprehend

What is growing in what is.

—Rudolf Steiner

Die and become!

Too much like the weather here in the Northeast, I’m oscillating between sunny, golden days and days of dark, gloom…and the first pre-Halloween, multi-inch snowfall since the Civil War! Yesterday it began snowing midday. We were finishing up an intimate little training session at the Brooklyn Waldorf School. We had planned to return to Yorktown Heights, to Cat’s mother’s home for Saturday evening and Sunday before returning to the school to work on Monday morning with staff and teachers.

We took the train to Croton-Harmon, skirting along the Hudson River. Snow fell and thick vapors rose off the wind-rolled waters. When we came out of the station, there were no taxis. In fact, there were to be no taxis. As the snow accumulated on branches still aleaf, it began snapping limbs and dropping them on the earth below. Roads, slick and sloppy, began collecting pileups of cars round hidden bends and on steep hills.

We had no choice but to buy a ticket back to the city, lug our bags back through Grand Central, wind our way with and against every other soul navigating the trek over to the S-train to Union Station where we boarded the C-train. We’ve come to know the C-train this trip. It’s the local train that stops at Franklin Street, the nearest station to the Brooklyn Waldorf School new location. It’s a ride all its own, in my experience, such as it is. Riding the C-train is like traveling down a rabbit warren gravel road in a cheek-to-jowl tin can. Still we both nearly slept through our stop. If one of us hadn’t wakened with a jolt, we’d still be riding out somewhere beyond Euclid, Queens and the Mad Hatter!

I was in a dark brood. There was a dying going on and the seed pouches were yet unnamed. A chapter—I nearly was so grandiose as to say era—was ending, the golden few years of traveling out into the world, off to Australia, New Zealand and Korea, called to and calling at many a foreign port and vale to share my trainings, off on a journey where what I was saying and doing was recreated anew at every stop, where dying was easy and birthing filled with enthusiasm. What a different dying that was!

We’re here in Brooklyn, Cat and I, returning to the Brooklyn Waldorf School once again. This is the third year I’ve come to the school, at least twice each year. This school has shared in my own becoming over that time and has over and again given me the chance, the opportunity, the gift of sharing that becoming. We’ve traveled together an arc of unfolding, building on each session, then seeing the fruits coming out of what we’ve done. Cat had joined that journey this last year, coming as a witness a year ago January and, then in June, she shared her Playback, unfolding her work as a contribution to enlivening the social atmosphere and work.

We were meant to come in August but, in the teeth of the Irene’s threat, we backed down and postponed our visit until this weekend. As it turns out, we’ll meet on Halloween.

Death is in the air; it’s there in my brood. And though this only occurred to me yesterday, a week or so ago, I began mulling and weaving together some thoughts and quotes relating to death and our social work.

Die and become! The social forces are death forces. Empathy is so difficult because it is a dying. The plant dies; the future seeds endure. All knowledge is wrested from death. If time reverses after death, is that true after empathic knowing? How do we die willingly? How does one span dying into seeding? What need die that we might perceive what is growing in what is? And the new Michaelic yoga?

And then this poem that has been a treasure since I first shared it with a fourth grade back in 1986, Russet Leaves by Brien Masters:

Russet leaves! Russet leaves! Triumphant on high,

Touched by the crimson summer’s sky,

Embers aloft, as the dragon’s wide eye,

Russet leaves, fear ye, fear ye to die?

Nay child! Nay child! To die fear we never,

We fear neither besom, nor blast of the weather;

We rejoice when the scowling squall snips our frail tether:

Nay child! We’ll pelter down, pelter together.

Russet leaves! Russet leaves! Stout oak’s trumpet choir,

Shrink you not from the clay and the dung of the byre,

To be muted and choked in the smoldering fire;

Russet leaves will you bow, bow deep as the mire?

Yea child! Yea child! We’ll gladly be tossed,

And rotted and ditched, or crunched by Jack Frost,

Or sandwiched ‘twixt layers of kitchen compost:

Spring’s green voice will proclaim: We never are lost!

Let this be background and context for the following post…

The Future in Boding

Does time only travel in the direction from past to future? It is certainly the only direction we ordinarily ever think about time. It's an endless string of present moments arising and falling away into the past. Yet, within the life of the soul, there are clear indications that there is something of the nature of time that approaches us from the future in that we have fear of what might happen, hope that it won't, interest in what will happen, and devotion to that which emerge in time in those little beings we call our grandchildren. All that we long for, all that we desire has something suggestive that there may, in fact, be not only one direction in which time flows, but two.

The idea living in the word ahnung, or boding, certainly suggests this as well.

Karl Konig writes: "'Ahnung' ('boding') is a strange word. It expresses an elusive feeling, which in certain--usually rather special--moments of life, touches our daytime consciousness. This feeling is sometimes so powerful it condenses into a mood in which anxiety and fear may be mixed. It is then a boding of an approaching ill, the boding of a sickness and much else."

Let us remember from our last post A.C. Harwood's wish for this boding, that it recover its neutral meaning and--these are my words--overcome its common association with "an approaching ill," and so forth.

Konig continues: "But a foreboding may also flit quickly by, overpowered by the daily rush of thoughts and impressions, and reappear in the soul only when that which was foreseen has happened. What is this 'boding' in the realm of the soul? Is it feeling, willing, mental image? Is it an emotion like anger or fear?"

"'Boding' is also 'an awareness of conditions and circumstances that are not clearly apprehended. As well as misleading, mood-dependent self-deceptions, there are bodings which bring intuitively-senses objective realities into consciousness.' One may also have a boding of the solution of a task or a problem, and yet still not reach the answer."

"Thus the awareness of boding belongs in a region of our experience which may be characterized as a kind of pre-consciousness. Boding is not an unconscious experience, yet it is not conscious either, nor is it similar to dreaming. It is a condition which indicates to us something which is already present, but which we cannot yet apprehend with clear consciousness. It is an activity which indicates to the soul something that nevertheless remains hidden from it."

Here we come closer to the inspiration and impulse to adopt The Bode Well as our blog name. We are interested in that which lies just on the edge of consciousness, that which is listening in to the stream of meaning that approaches from out of the future, and specifically in the context of the human encounter. I'm interested in the inner activity of trying to bring that which we call boding into clearer consciousness, and in doing so, in a kind of reversal of the will, seek access to the well or wellspring from which boding arises in service of the human encounter.

There we've taken a further step...into that which is seeking to be spoken, toward that which wants to be made visible, into the approaching stream.

Why The Bode Well?

Why The Bode Well? Is it because that's what we long to do, bring something that bodes well for the world? Is it about the well from which boding surfaces?

Very curious fact! It was more than ten years ago, much earlier in my life with computers and the internet. I'd taken and tired of my first moniker--gorjohn--the name I customarily entered as my user ID when asked to register online. That one came from a nickname my older brother had for me when we were kids--Gorgeous George. I needed a new one. But what?

I must have been reading Karl Konig's Commentary on Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul. There's nothing else that can account for such a strange choice. I chose bodewell and have used it ever since. It's my moniker for Skype, my Yahoo groups ID, the login ID for my website and so on. Over the years, I would sometimes cringe, thinking it a little silly, and came to forget, in fact, from whence it had come. That is, until just recently.

My newlywed wife and collaborator, Cat, took up working with verses earlier in the spring. Seeing her interest, I dug up other translations for her. Then, one day, I remembered Konig's book and dug it out of a box. Once it was out and visible, I picked it up to remind of what I had read now these many years ago. It was then that I discovered a whole chapter on "The word 'Ahnung' (boding) in Rudolf Steiner's 'Calendar of the Soul.'" That's the actual title of the second chapter of his Commentary!

In that second chapter, Konig explores nine times the word 'ahnung' appears in the Calendar and follows the A.C. Harwood's translation where he renders 'ahnung' as 'boding' and even writes the following in the notes in the beginning:

"The rendering of two words calls for special comment: Ahnung with its verb ahnen, and dumpf. The former has no very good equivalent in English. In the Calendar it is almost a technical term for that profound surmising, divining, presaging power, or inkling, which everyone knows in some degree, but which is not much recognized in modern psychology. I have felt it important that one word should be used throughout for this power, a word capable of taking a verbal form, and I finally decided to employ the word boding, or sometimes foreboding, in its original neutral sense, which it has not entirely lost and which it may perhaps still recover. I believe that in its sound it suggests better than other words something deep, inward, powerful and mysterious."

Konig takes these indications along with Harwood's translation and develops them further, following the nine verses and their movement through the year. Because of their close accompanying of our relationship's history, we were drawn further into the mystery of this word, boding.

That's a scratch on the surface. To go more deeply, I'll want to build up some supporting thoughts in further posts.

John