Awakening to Community: Lecture 1 (1923 - Rudolf Steiner)

INTRODUCTION

A century ago, in 1923, Rudolf Steiner gave a ten-part series of lectures called ‘Awakening to Community’. I’m following an impulse over the coming weeks to record my voice and share each of these lectures. Each lecture is very different. I’m not editing these, some words I will stumble on or mispronounce, and I’m learning about the nuances of recording the lectures as I go.

This is Lecture 1.

With each recording, I will include this same introduction, the audio for the lecture, maybe some writing about the current lecture or a quote, and the link to the transcript.

I imagine the experience will vary, listener to listener, and that some of the content may seem trivial (yet was relevant to that present moment in time). Nonetheless, I have felt the impulse for a while to simply use my voice as an instrument here to share breadcrumbs throughout time that vibrate puzzle pieces of the Mystery School tradition and, ultimately, the bigger story of being incarnate souls on Earth.

There is something so simple about sharing what has already been shared before, but just doing it in a new moment in time and space.

The word 'apocalypse' has come to mean many things, but the Greek word 'apokálypsis' is more closely linked to 'revelation'. In many ways, I do feel our current apocalypse or any perceived 'end' is merely the revelation of that which already is. The creative act takes places in the forgetting, the remembering, and the liminal space between.

Like any true revelation that would play out in a classic drama, the climactic moment tends to be something that is already known but cannot be known until the right moment of its unveiling. This is the nature of soul history through human civilization on Earth - it is not necessarily a linear game from A to B.

I would urge every listener to strip away any words and perhaps listen as if you were hearing musicians play music in a pub in a foreign country…listen for the universal. Forget the words Mystery School or Anthroposophical Society or whatever and track where any sense of separation can come up, whether it’s activated by something on the outside or something on the inside. After all, this is how this narrator perceives the true root of WWIII is — one between the inner worlds and the outer worlds.

One of the most beautiful things about Steiner (which I feel is so direly important for today) was his ability to stand, strive, and suffer in the process of forming the Anthroposophical Society, yet painstakingly being a bridge between the lived experience of the present moment human heart and the universal language of the soul.

Steiner gave hundreds of lectures and was very much a prolific, creative channel - one of many individual cells throughout time - transmitting his unique human/soul art as a thread between the inner worlds and the outer worlds. Many know Steiner for the creation of his education programs, biodynamic gardening, architecture, etc. In many ways, the Mysteries that he was connected to—as foundations for his creations—became increasingly veiled (as they did, generally, throughout time), symbiotic with how the outer culture of materialism and individuality moved away from valuing the soul—a source of destruction in a way, but in another way, also a sort of evolutionary veiling in a longer process of unveiling. This in itself could be said to be the perfect progression in a deeper creative act, a perfectly formed tension point between the inner worlds and the outer worlds.

One of my main intentions here with this impulse is to keep creating an archeological framework between the inner worlds and the outer worlds—between moments of tangible, outer history of creativity and the blooming of the soul’s remembering here, now, inwardly.

It’s a given that part of this impulse has to do with what inspires me, Jonathan, personally. There’s the creative joy and opportunity of being able to remember the soul and the universal in everything and, at the same time, there are individuals who’ve emerged throughout time whose lives have centered around, inwardly and outwardly, turning specifically to the mysteries of the soul. That turning toward can take on many different names, experiences, groups, religions, etc. One can easily wrap dogma, identity and materiality around it. Yet we are constantly being invited into the tension of being the universal, while having a magnifying glass shone more and more and more into a very specific, creative note that IS indeed played by an individual, a group, a tradition…so they all may converge as the singularity they all are anyway.

With all the polarities up in the world today, I feel we need to find our own discipline (same root as disciple) and precision in our relationship to the soul, the universal, and our own present experience with the outer world in a sea of polarity and collective breakdown. The three are extremely related.

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LECTURE 1: Awakening to Community (January 23, 1923 - Dornach, Switzerland)

”Words of grief. A challenge to search our consciences. The need to develop an awareness of responsibility.”

Transcript: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA257/English/AP1974/19230123p01.html

“The Goetheanum whose ruins are now so painful to behold had become in this sense a powerful means of expressing what the true nature of the Anthroposophical Movement is. We tried to carry our intention of keeping to the universally human into every least detail of the building. We strove to achieve pure art, for such a striving is profoundly part of the anthroposophical impulse. So the Goetheanum became a means of communicating the lofty concerns of the Anthroposophical Society even to people who had no interest in the Society as such.”

This lecture was given by Steiner right during the weeks after the first Goetheanum building in Dornach was burned down. To this day, the facts are not clear as to what happened, though a lot of evidence pointed to arson and a sense that the Nazis did it. But the mystery remains. It brings images into my psyche of the fire and fate of the Library of Alexandria around 48 BCE.

There is something deeply touching about feeling the lineage of this building/centre/temple and the humans gathered around the tragedy of it getting destroyed.

It is such a significant, wholly universal, snapshot in time of the many tales and moments and myths of the human pillars—stewards of the mysteries and embodied forms of the mysteries themselves—standing in that unique tension point between Heaven and Earth, who’ve watched the temples rise and fall time and time again. And perhaps we can each relate to knowing both sides of that coin.

Just one year after the Goetheanum was destroyed, Nicolas Roerich created his ‘Signs of Christ’ painting in 1924. It speaks to the story, captured by Helena Roerich in ‘Leaves of Morya’s Garden II’ (released in 1925) where Morya is speaking with Christ in the desert, sharing about what might be ahead, and the words are said:

”When by human feet and human hands the Temple will be built…”

So we return to this moment in 1923, the first lecture Steiner gave in ‘Awakening to Community’ after the Goetheanum was burned down. We’re brought straight into the aftermath of this event, into the collective heart of the Anthroposophical Society, and into the heart of Steiner himself. The building was constructed in the midst of World War I and it was destroyed during a time when the world was still very much in a process of recovering from the war.

There are some beautiful parts of this lecture where Steiner is speaking into the relationship between Child and Parent in terms of the group. While he’s speaking about this in relation to the microcosm of the Anthroposophical Society and its members, he’s also speaking about the macrocosm of souls and identities individuating from the larger eco-system of Life they’re part of—he’s speaking into something so universal here, around the healthy and unhealthy dynamics of individualism and how each soul expresses in its ‘specialization’ while still staying connected to the interdependent umbilical cord of true soul community.

I am so moved by Steiner’s will, his direction forward in riding that razor edge line between localizing the universal into one’s life, one’s community, and aligning the principles of the soul directly with the physical infrastructures of the buildings, homes, temples, and societies we create…

This final quote is from another lecture Steiner gave two years prior, in 1921, on ‘The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum’ :

"…It had to be so, that in a place where that which stands behind the anthroposophical movement resounds in thoughts, resounds in words and ideas, is also revealed in the forms which surround the listeners, in the paintings which speak down from the walls.

This is how it has always been when a civilisation, a culture wanted to manifest itself in the world. The content of such a culture does not form one-sidedly, but forms a cosmic or human totality. And the individual fields, science, art, etc., appear only as the individual members of such a totality, just as in an organism the individual members appear as born out of the totality of the organism.

Therefore, the anthroposophical movement had to create its own artistic style, just as it had to create a certain way of expressing itself in ideas. The latter is still little considered today. It is, for example, necessary that anthroposophical spiritual-science should be expressed in a different way from what has hitherto been customarily contained in human civilisation…”