Anthroposophical Society in America Los Angeles Branch

We Need Your LA Branch 2021 Financial Support

Rudolf Steiner team — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 05:18:52 +0000

September 2021

Dear Members and Friends,

2020 and 2021 have been challenging, enlightening, and perhaps anxious years for all of us. The pandemic has forced us into an isolation that is unprecedented in our lifetime. For many of us the gratitude we feel at being able to meet again is profound. In the past eighteen months our Los Angeles Branch meetings and activities were greatly curtailed, but if you received your autumn calendar you know that activities are resuming in earnest.

We are reaching out to you at this time because our Branch is facing another challenge, one that is mandated by our government. As many of you know our Branch is very fortunate for two reasons: there are very few Anthroposophical branches in the United States that own their own building in which to meet, hear lectures, see Eurythmy performances, and hold study groups. And, we are also especially privileged in having rental property that helps us pay for maintenance and repairs on our building, so we don’t need to be constantly fundraising. This is a real blessing!

As a Not-For-Profit organization we qualify for tax exemption only if we can demonstrate that we receive a minimum of $10,000 in donations annually. We do this through membership dues and admission donations to our branch activities. Because we have been shuttered for more than eighteen months, we have a significant “fundraising” shortfall. Our estimated Property Tax could be approximately $8,750 or more each year if we don’t meet the $10,000 donation requirement.

We are appealing to you to help us raise $10,000 and avoid paying $8,750 in taxes. Realistically, it is only us, members and friends, who find value in the programs and community that our Branch provides. The funds that are contributed will be used for programming. We could direct the money to bring in speakers like Craig Holdrege from the Nature Institute, or Brian Gray from Wise Cosmos, or Christine Gruwez, author and lecturer. We could use the money we all contribute to fund a conference on meditation, medicine or Bio-Dynamics. The important thing is that we all benefit from each other’s generosity. Instead of paying taxes we will be joining together to provide spiritual nourishment for the cultural environment of Los Angeles.

Anthroposophy helps make sense of what is happening in the world. If you find yourself frustrated because you don’t know how to help overcome the overwhelming challenges we are facing, this is our opportunity to make a difference. If you find benefit from listening to speakers, participating in Eurythmy, exchanging ideas, coming together for Festivals, and being in a community of spiritual seekers, please consider making a gift to the Anthroposophical Foundation of California today. Your gift will absolutely make a difference!

Because this appeal is so important, we are asking each of us to consider donating between $35 - $150 before December 15th, 2021.

It is easy to donate:

Online: Go to our Donate page.

By check: Please make checks payable to the Anthroposophical Foundation of California, and mail to our branch at 110 Martin Alley, Pasadena CA 91105.

Thank you for your warm enthusiasm for your Anthroposophical Branch, and for joining in building a Spiritual Cultural Community with your tax-deductible gift.

Sincerely,

Bari Borsky, Linda Connell, Lori Daub, Samuel Glaze, Joan Jaeckel, Roman Janczak, Eloise Krivosheia, Roger Rindge, and Anne Saldo

Trustees for the Anthroposophical Foundation of California

At the turn of 2018

Rudolf Steiner team — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 22:24:05 +0000

Letter from John Bloom, General Secretary

I am beginning 2018 with an enlivened sense of gratitude for the depth of soul and thinking that permeates those working in and through the Anthroposophical Society. In my first year as General Secretary, I have been graciously received at numerous branches, organizations, and events, and been part of a General Council that is moving with clarity of purpose and values for the future of the Society. I get to work with a group of inspired Leadership Team members managing the day-to-day work of the Society with joy; they have the will to meet many challenges and take on initiative with limited resources. Engagement, exploration, and asking the hard questions are all part and parcel of the work of reconciling the inheritance we have received from Rudolf Steiner, and standing for Anthroposophia and her wisdom as we meet what is coming toward us.

Few would argue with the observation that the climate, meteorological and metaphysical, is adumbrating the cultural, political, and economic conditions in which we are asked to be of service to both the material and spiritual world. At the same time, one key phrase from the Foundation Stone—“so that good may become”—carries in it a reminder of why we are here in the first place. Each day I reflect on my actions and interactions with the question: Did I do everything possible today so that good may become of it, whether that is near or far away in time? My sense from meeting so many of you (and there are many more to go) is that love is a profound motivator across our membership—even when there are existential questions about the US and worldwide Society.

My colleague General Secretaries from around the world are in this same exploration. One hundred years later, what does it mean to be an Anthroposophical Society? Is it about the preservation and promulgation of our legacy? Is it about letting go of the past, of old forms, and seeking the emergent out of spiritual scientific research? Can we tolerate the risk of such experimentation? And finally, and most important for the future, can we cherish the evolving body of wisdom founded by Rudolf Steiner in such a way that it is an invitation to the next generation?

If we cannot find a way to do this soon, no good will become of all the generative work of our predecessors and those who have followed and made anthroposophy their own. The practical work around the world as well as in the US—Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and all the other fields—has touched thousands of people who have experienced something of anthroposophy’s gifts. Some have been transformed by those experiences. Ask any Waldorf parent if they are the same after being a parent in a Waldorf school for three years or more. They will attribute that change to the values and practices of the teachers and school, though they may not necessarily understand the source of those practices. Of course, the risk to anthroposophy is that the practical organizations lose their deep connection to Rudolf Steiner’s insights and do not continue to evolve them. This is why one important focus of the Society is tending this wellspring and continuing to cultivate a connection to anthroposophy in individuals working in those organizations.

The spirit of the Society seems to become more evident wherever there is engagement—at this year’s AGM in Phoenix, in branch and regional gatherings, in numerous webinars and through some of the extraordinary financial gifts we have received. On a more personal note I have received over 160 thoughtful individual responses to General Secretary postings, which have been forwarded frequently. This just tells me that we as a Society want to be engaged in conversation, to reach out of our comfort zone to meet others who share an interest or just need to be seen and met. Such engagement is a form of cultural activism so needed in the world today. I feel most heartened when I hear colleagues speak not out of theory or beliefs, but rather out of self-knowledge and direct experience of life. It is in this realm that we can all truly meet as equals and, through that meeting, come to understand that individuality is actually a shared revelation. This creates a real and sustainable foundation for serving the world.

We can change the climate. Inner warmth is ours to enkindle and to share where it is wanted and needed. With warmth of relationships we can meet the uncertainties of the future, locally and globally, and continue to serve the spiritual world— which is waiting for us to get over the shadows of the past and the materialism of the present. William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: “What’s past is prologue.” The past foreshadows the present and possibly, but not necessarily, the future. We know we have choices to make, this is the destiny question. Let’s make all those choices so that good may become. Otherwise we risk the future as our epilogue.

Wishing you inspiration from the Holy Nights and a fruitful 2018.

In gratitude,

John Bloom

Theme of the Year 2017/18

Rudolf Steiner team — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 01:51:10 +0000

Light and Warmth for the Human Soul

How can the Foundation Stone Mediation promote peaceability – a hundred years after the birth of the social threefolding impulse?

Dear members of the Anthroposophical Society, dear supporters of the anthroposophical movement, dear friends!
In recent years we have approached the questions of self-knowledge and world knowledge from various angles in our work, asking also about the mission of evil in the evolution of the spiritual (or consciousness) soul. Current events, with the constant increase of wars, terror attacks, social tensions as well as the concentration of political power in the hands of individuals, affect us in existential ways. The loss of reality that comes with digitalization as well as new technologies which even presage the end of humanity confront us more urgently than ever with the question as to our true inner essence and spiritual destiny. How we think of ourselves – whether we see ourselves as animals or machines – will determine our reality.
The experience of the Goetheanum World Conference, which was attended by around 800 people from all over the world who embarked together on a searching, future-oriented process, was permeated by the Foundation Stone Meditation. The positive response we received has confirmed our endeavour to devote our work in the coming years – with annually changing emphasis – on the Foundation Stone Meditation, in the attempt to develop an inner organ of self- and world knowledge. Rudolf Steiner pronounced this “new Apollonian word” of the “Know Yourself” for the first time on 25 December 1923, when he presented the result of his spiritual investigation of the human being, after a maturation period of over thirty years, clothed in the mantric words of the Foundation Stone Meditation.

The radiant light of thoughts
Many members have been working with the Foundation Stone Meditation at a deeper level for some time. A fresh approach to this meditation can help us to embrace the impulses connected with the laying of the Foundation Stone in 1923 in a new way and thus prepare the ground for harmonious and active collaboration. When we work meditatively with the Foundation Stone, a “light of thoughts shines towards us” and enables us to draw new inspiration for our actions from the “spirit holding sway in the radiant light of thoughts around the dodecahedral stone of love”. In the next years we would like to devote ourselves to the spirit of the Foundation Stone and encourage the striving for a deeper understanding of the threefold human being – of body, soul and spirit – through inner practice.
While there is a wealth of spiritual knowledge that has already been passed down to us, it is essential today that each individual ‘I’ finds and experiences the original impulse anew. For this to happen, self-knowledge must not remain a subjective act, limited to the understanding of one’s own individuality, but we must seek to understand what is universally human in us and in others.

The transformative power of the Foundation Stone
The objectivity of the Foundation Stone’s spirit light can transform the anthroposophical life. Rudolf Steiner saw the Foundation Stone as the ground on which individuals can erect a “building” together. In the years ahead we would like to use the three great exercises of “Spirit-Recalling”, “Spirit-Awareness” and Spirit Beholding” as the basis of our working together. Every year we will introduce a new emphasis within this overall theme.
Without neglecting the development of the spiritual (or consciousness) soul, working on the Foundation Stone can inspire elements of a socially effective and healing culture of the Spirit-Self. The three exercises must not be misunderstood as fixed spiritual techniques, however. They inspire spiritual life in three spheres and help us to develop the individual and social dimensions of Spirit Recalling, Spirit Awareness and Spirit Beholding, each of which constitutes a separate whole. Next year we will focus on Spirit Recalling in particular. May the forces we can draw from the source be our guiding star!

Threefold practice
The appeal to the “human soul” addresses us as human beings in a threefold way. The three dimensions, in which we learn to feel ourselves cosmically embedded, connect us with the “Father-Spirit of the Heights”, the “Christ-Will encircling us” and the “Spirit’s world-thoughts”. This sense of being connected can gradually evolve as we respond through practice to the threefold call.
Who is it that speaks to us in this way? Who asks us to carry out these exercises? As we practise we become aware of basic orientations of soul and spirit, and we are gradually led to a knowledge that encompasses our earthly and cosmic being. This knowledge will increasingly form the foundation for new insights, feelings, experiences and actions in the world, with other human beings.

“Practise Spirit-Recalling”
The very first invocation, “practise Spirit-Recalling”, inspires a wealth of questions, moods and exercises. Remembering is the central soul activity of the ‘I’. When we focus on our memories, a wide landscape, built up in the course of our life, appears to the inner eye. Memories give us identity: we feel as individualities with our own distinctive biography that began at a particular point in our life on earth and evolves towards a point that is still concealed from us.
In the cycle that accompanied the Christmas Conference (“World History and the Mysteries in the Light of Anthroposophy”) Rudolf Steiner looks at the memory of early humanity, inviting us to consider entirely different soul configurations: post-Atlantean humanity needed to set up signs, or memorials, on earth to help them remember. In a later period memory became rhythmic and, with the beginning of Greek philosophy, our present temporal memory emerged. Could it be that even today we may find different forms of memory spread out across the world, and could these forms of memory aid us in discovering and understanding other forms of consciousness? Anthroposophy asks us to give a spiritual direction to our memory through practising.
In the context of the Christmas Conference Rudolf Steiner mentioned exercises for the enhancement of memory. In the lecture cycle “Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres” he recommends that we meditate on an event in our childhood or youth. This memory exercise can help us to feel at one with nature and to experience the sunrise in a new way. As we enter ever more deeply into this experience, we can meet the first hierarchy in the radiance of the rising sun and establish a new relationship with the world of the Father. A spiritualized form of recall is now possible.
In extending our gaze beyond the boundary of birth we enhance memory. We may ask ourselves what decisions were made before birth that have led to our present incarnation. This is not about speculating or about finding out about our own karmic past, but about awakening to other origins and destinies, because they determine our work, our encounters and relationships in an essential way and confront us with challenges as we try to live and work together, especially when we meet people with whom we don’t seem to “gel” or feel an affinity. Within the Anthroposophical Society we are called upon to work together as a community. A rightly cultivated memory can make us open for new ways of working together, for a new “sun karma” that will be a precondition for us to create a new culture of humaneness.

Review and Spirit-Beholding
The review asks us to develop our will and our thinking at the same time. The fourth verse of the Foundation Stone Meditation can therefore be seen as a practical exercise in spirit-recalling that takes us back to the “turning point of time”, the original Christ impulse, which gives light and warmth to our souls, keeps the darkness from taking over and enables us to behold the spirit. The review allows us to exercise our will by giving us the opportunity to go beyond the ordinary memory – which is merely a repeating of the past – and to acquire the ability to actually move in time. Recalling then means entering the realm of the timeless ether.
We are not meant to dwell on our own thoughts and views when we look back, but on what comes to meet us in the outside world, in reverse order, so that our will can tear itself away from the physical. We expand into the world around us and experience how this world has formed us and what we have become through it.
This kind of review, which can gradually become spirit-recalling, enables us to meet others in an imaginative way. The will effort involved in the review exercise promotes spirit-beholding. Because we have cultivated spirit-recalling, others can become image in us and express themselves imaginatively in spirit-beholding. And more than that: we find in this activity the foundations of the modern initiation experience.

How thinking becomes vision
Rudolf Steiner explained the transition from thinking to vision through will application in more general terms. When we make a true thinking effort, by adopting and practising a thought organism as outlined in The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4), our thinking becomes free. At the same time, our will needs to become transparent to us. As long as we are ruled by obscure will impulses and as long as we refrain from gaining clarity about our own will, our thinking will remain philosophical. If we become more and more transparent to ourselves, however, through exercises such as reviews, and if we learn to behold the spiritual world through our will being, once it has become transparent, our thinking will become vision. By practising spirit-recalling we will become able to achieve spirit-beholding and receive impulses for our actions from the spiritual world. In taking this step of working on the Foundation Stone Meditation together, out of the whole of anthroposophy, we hope to bring these fundamental exercises to life.

Christiane Haid, Goetheanum Leadership, and Jaap Sijmons, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands

^{1 Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, GA 173b, lecture of 13 November 1917.

2 Rudolf Steiner, GA 260, p. 65 and 69.

3 Rudolf Steiner, GA 260, p. 280f.

4 Cf. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science, chapter 2 (The makeup of the human being).

5 Rudolf Steiner, GA 234, lecture of 10 February 1924 (on the fourfold metamorphosis of recollection).

6 Rudolf Steiner, GA 232, lecture of 23 November 1923.

7 Rudolf Steiner, GA 240, lecture of 25 January 1924.

8 Rudolf Steiner, GA 186, Lecture of 7 December 1918, p. 124-129.

9 See bibliographical notes in Rudolf Steiner, Strengthening the Will: the Review Exercises. Edited and introduced by Martina Maria Sam, Forest Row 2010, tr. Matthew Barton, chapter 5}

Recommended reading:
Rudolf Steiner: The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society 1923-1924, GA 260, Hudson NY 1990, tr. J. Collis, M. Wilson. Lecture of 25 December 1923, 10 a.m.
Rudolf Steiner: Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, GA 232, Forest Row 2013, tr. P. Wehrle. Lecture of 23 November 1923
Rudolf Steiner: World History and the Mysteries in the Light of Anthroposophy, GA 233, London 1997, tr. G. Adams. Lectures of 24 and 25 December 1923
Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophy and the Inner Life. An Esoteric Introduction, GA 234, Bristol 1994, tr. V. Compton-Burnett. Lecture of 10 February 1924
Rudolf Steiner: Karmic Relationships, GA 240, London 1975, tr. D. Osmond. Lecture of 25 January 1924
Rudolf Steiner: Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 152, Great Barrington 2006, tr. M. Miller. Lecture of 7 March 1914