Archives for April 2014

No Fault

April 11, 2014 By Amelia Leave a Comment

We humans are story makers and often there are struggles between whose story will be the dominant one. Many times there are stories which are denied a voice, but also stories which can be accepted too readily without knowing a fuller picture. If we can learn to hold back from judgment often inexplicable events can become understandable. So perhaps acting to redeem wrongs is enough without judging the supposed wrongdoer when the fuller picture is not clear. We all are potentially agents of good and evil and very good at deceiving ourselves so it is easy to find fault. What if we led a no-fault life — a life where we were not concerned in finding fault or condemning others, but where we focused instead on healing and creating what is good?

On Reforming Psychopaths

April 11, 2014 By Amelia Leave a Comment

Famous psychopath Ted Bundy

A recent TED talk came out that seeks to rehabilitate psychopaths, in part through restorative justice. Here is my response to that talk.

I am all for restorative justice in carefully supervised settings. I am also for rehabilitating inmates and giving them life and work skills, rather than just warehousing them. Yet it still a very open question regarding whether psychopaths are able to change, and also, whether people with constricted amygdalas are able to make significant changes in their emotional responses. So far, the research paints a pretty bleak picture. Check out the work on children of psychopaths–even in this population, it takes extremely concerted ongoing effort throughout child development to produce an adult with a near-normal facility with empathy.

As someone who has worked with individuals who have difficulty experiencing empathy, I can only say that these situations are very hard to treat to bring lasting change. Of course, there is always hope. But please don’t underestimate the intense daily effort and teamwork required in these situations. It takes more than a village; it takes a village that cares and is willing to dedicate resources to rehabilitating these folks. Let us not be caught up in an ivory-tower Luciferic illusion that all can be brought to healing through purely spiritual methods. Intense hard work, hour by hour, in interpersonal settings is required. This in turn requires caretakers that are basically willing to be abused in the process of effecting change for their clients. This in itself is a mighty practice in astral cleansing for the caregivers. And even then, change is in slow, small increments, requiring a fierce dedication to hope. Learning to discern the astral/etheric/physical dynamics of psychological disorders is only one step (and one that I don’t think very much research has been done on in real circumstances). Effecting change requires repetition of salutatory habits and experiences, sometimes requiring years before effects begin to noticeably impact the physical body (& brain). This, I believe, is a Manichaean path, and it is not an easy road to travel.

On Matter

April 11, 2014 By Amelia Leave a Comment

Carbon atom

Matter is Spirit incarnate. Matter can turn into Spirit. Spirit can turn into matter. We know from modern experiments in physics, that the behavior of the tiniest constituents of matter changes based on the presence of the observer. Certain subatomic particles seem able to influence each other across vast distances, and be in more than one place at one time. Physicists can’t really describe these subatomic particles as matter–they are activity, waveforms, potentials. They embody interactive dynamics.

Thought is spiritual activity. There is a world of thought-forms so to speak, and there is the world of archetypes. From these thought-forms, forces are drawn in or attracted which can result in a process of materialization under certain conditions. When mankind has learnt to understand the lawful processes that underlie these transformations, he is able to bring matter into creation, either experimentally/with mechanical or chemical processes, or eventually through the forces of thought itself.

There are already those who have been able to manifest matter through inner processes of thought and meditation. Although I have not seen this in person, I do believe the manifestations to be true in some instances.

It seems to me that it is just a matter of time before certain groups acquire such knowledge. So the urgent question lies in the development of selflessness.

The particular instance I have been aware of where materialization took place, was done in selflessness, in pursuit of truth, and in line with the individual’s earthly spiritual work. I imagine it is because of her particular karma that she was able to do so. She has not continued to manifest, since that is not the point of her work. One must have an inner dedication and love to the material involved for the secrets of its manifestation to be made accessible to one, I imagine. To me, this implies lifetimes of true seeking into the inner working of involution/materialization. It is not something any old person can do. Yet the time will come, when mankind will approach ever closer to these secrets. Already, we can blast atoms apart, and even blast subatomic particles apart. This is power indeed. Clearly, there is an urgent need for the development of a structure of ethics around using such forces.

Also, those who work with biodynamics and healing, are becoming conversant in the processes of spirit into matter and matter into spirit.

Matter is a gift to humankind; it enables our development. We must learn to give it the respect and gratitude it deserves, and to hold the sanctity of its creation. A time will come when humankind no longer needs the resistance of solid matter; then, other realms of experience will provide a basis for our conscious existence.

Have No Fear

April 11, 2014 By Amelia Leave a Comment

Michael in Scorpio by David Newbatt

We must eradicate from the soul

All fear and terror

Of what comes to meet the human being

From out of the future.

We must acquire serenity In all feelings and sensations about the future.

And, we must think only:

That whatever may come Is given to us by a world direction full of wisdom.

It is part of what we must learn in this age;

Namely, to love out of pure trust,

Without any security in outward existence.

Trust in the ever-present help of the supersensible worlds,

Truly, nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us.

Let us discipline our will

And let us seek the awakening

From within ourselves

Every morning and every evening.

~Rudolf Steiner

On Disasters

April 11, 2014 By Amelia Leave a Comment

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of much of what happens in life, such as all the recent human and natural disasters.

Are we really powerless against what confronts us in life? Steiner asks this question in Lecture 3 of Man as a Being of Sense and Perception. He says life is a battle against natural necessity. Man is free in the life of ideas (which we have access to through the death forces working in us). He states that human becoming counteracts natural causality. What we make with our freedom, what we create with our ideas, expresses our power in the world. It is because of natural causality that we are free. With our freedom, we have the power to create a moral world.

Here’s a snippet from the end of the lecture:

But whence comes the impotence which results in such a tragic attitude to life! It comes from the fact that civilised humanity has for centuries allowed itself to become entangled in certain abstractions, in intellectualism. The most this intellectualism can say is that natural necessity deludes us by strange methods with a feeling of freedom, but that there is no freedom. It exists only in our ideas. We are powerless in the face of necessity. Then comes the important question ? is that truest? And now you see that the lectures I have been giving for weeks actually all lead up to the question: “Are we really powerless? Are we really so impotent in the face of this contradiction?” Remember how I said that we have in our lives not only an ascending development, but a declining one; that our intellectual life is not bound up with the forces of growth, but with the forces of death, the forces of decay; that in order to develop intelligence we need to die. You will remember how I showed here several weeks ago the significance of the fact that certain elements with specific affinities and valencies ? carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur ? combine to form protein. They do so not by ordinary chemical combination, but on the, contrary by becoming utterly chaotic. You will then see that all these studies are leading up to this ? to make it clear to you that what I have told you is not just a theoretical contradiction, but an actual process in human nature. We are not here merely in order, through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the real process ? we have the process of human development, of human becoming, as the thing in us that itself counteracts natural causality, and human life as consisting in a battle against it. And the expression of this struggle, which goes on all the while to dissolve the physical synthesis, the chemical synthesis, to analyse it again? The expression of this analytic life in us is summed up in the awareness: “I am free.” What I have just put before you in a few words ? the study of the human process of becoming as a process of combat against natural causality, as a reversal of natural causality ? we shall make the subject of forthcoming lectures.

–Rudolf Steiner, Man as a Being of Sense and Perception