By Fred
In response to While Waldorf Schools Adhere to Rudolph Steiner’s Doctrines, His White Supremacist Theories Are Not Taught, this is from “Soul Economy” — Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on Waldorf education:
“Please understand that a Waldorf school—or any school that might spring from the anthroposophic movement—would never wish to teach anthroposophy as it exists today. I would consider this the worst thing we could do. Anthroposophy in its present form is a subject for adults and, as you can see from the color of their hair, often quite mature adults.”
This injunction will have been taken deeply to heart by any teacher schooled in the Waldorf approach: teaching anthroposophy itself is “THE WORST THING” we could do!
Anyone who breaks with this dictum, and starts teaching all the Steiner esoteric material in a Waldorf school, is either incompetent or is a deliberate stooge and provocation.
I highly recommended elsewhere that anyone wanting to make the first acquaintance with anthroposophy could start with “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”:
Steiner describes in this book how, as one progresses down the spiritual path, one becomes aware of group souls, nation souls, race souls, family souls, which all play a part in carrying human life forward.
When you reach a certain point on the path of initiation, Steiner says, you are shown how these group souls have guided you thus far, and he teaches you to respect them and their traditions, even as you now take charge of your own destiny.
However much you may want to feel part of “humanity as a whole”, he says, you need to understand your own particular origins and respect them.
Steiner really and truly was not a racist.
I feel he treated each soul that came before him exactly as he found them — but he was deeply aware of the realities of different races, how these differences came about, and how they tend to evolve. No one who is scared of the truth should find anything offensive about his revelations in this regard.
I wasn’t aware of painting the walls of different classes in different colors, but here, really and seriously, Steiner is at his best and is worth taking very seriously. Check out the work of Theo Gimbel, who carried further Steiner’s ideas on color therapy:
You can check out two case study cures by Gimbel here:
Read “Soul Economy” and you’ll find the most detailed descriptions of how a child’s emotions, attention, energy and developmental focus change from year to year.
If Steiner says that particular colors are suitable for a particular age, well, I’m not clairvoyant, and unless there is a strong contraindication, I would go exactly with what Steiner recommends.
Here is an anecdote, however. The last high school I ever taught at, in 1994, had a very erratic headteacher, a businesswoman with no degree or teaching qualification.
She told me herself the following story: she was very angry one day, and decided that if she was angry, no one else should be peaceful.
So she ordered the staff room painted basically fire engine red (I was told the actual shade was “Coral Pink”, but believe me, it was flaming red). And I can assure you, it worked.
I knew many rancorous staff rooms, with lots of conflicts, but I never saw anything like that school.
The school counselor painted her office walls soothing dark green, specifically as an antidote to the staff room. I left that school after just a month, because of all the conflict there — kids were assaulting each other in the classroom in front of me. But the worst fights were in the staff room.
I had a book by Theo Gimbel (unfortunately not to hand) in which he showed treatment of septic wounds that had not responded to antibiotics. He illuminated the wounds with red LED light of a specific frequency, and healed potentially fatal injuries that doctors had been completely unable to cure.
I am 100% certain, as antibiotic resistance spreads and superbugs flourish in hospitals, that color therapy will come into its own, in the not-too-distant future; and anthroposophical medicine will lead the way.
Someone was making fun of Steiner because he said the heart was not really a pump — he says it’s actually more of a dam.
When they first created an artificial heart machine, to take over the pumping of blood during heart surgery, they found that by far the most immediate and important function they had to duplicate, was a damming effect, rather than a pumping one. Go check it out.
One thing about “Soul Economy”: it contains one of Steiner’s most important descriptions of how nerves function. He insists that there are no “motor nerves” as opposed to “sensory nerves”.
He said that all nerves are actually sensory, only some of them are providing the brain with information on the internal systems of the body — how the muscles are acting, where the bones are — while others bring information about the outside world. The actual impulses that drive bodily motion come from the “will” system, which is entirely autonomous of the nerves.
Now, this has exactly been borne out by contemporary neuroscience and MRI scans.
They find that the supposedly conscious decision-making region of the brain only lights up AFTER you’ve moved your finger. Some people (the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams springs to mind) have taken this scientific finding as absolute proof that we don’t have free will — we only make up some excuse after our instinctive system has made us do something.
In fact, this phenomenon is pointing to the true autonomy and independence of the will; but you need to interpret the results correctly. Of course, Western medicine has absolutely no clue about any of this, and the idea of an autonomous “will” system that acts throughout the body is rejected without thought.
Anthroposophy 101 teaches that the human has three completely autonomous systems that operate together:
(1) Thinking;
(2) Feeling; and
(3) Willing.
Separating these activities, so you can feel something without these feelings affecting your thinking about it, or your will to alter it, is the first part of esoteric training. If you undertake these exercises, you find the reality of what Steiner is talking about.
This threefolding is very characteristic of anthroposophy. It also finds expression in Steiner’s Threefold Commonwealth, his concept of how social life should be arranged so as to minimize conflicts and contradictions.
For me, this is the absolute solution to the crises we are facing in social life across this planet, with contemporary politics completely unable to respond (witness the Yellow Jacket movement in France).
I honestly believe it’s the only possible solution to the manifold problems we face on this planet.
Again, Steiner foresaw all the problems of globalization in his World Economy lectures — he literally asks, when the world becomes one trading bloc, how will we balance our imports and exports, since we are not trading with Mars?
And the solution is the Threefold Social Order, not as a programme, but as a sane and rational separation of powers into their appropriate realms. This has particularly deep implications for education, and you can’t understand what Steiner is pushing for in this realm, unless you broaden your vision to take in the whole of society.
The thing is: there was a massive schism in the anthroposophical movement that fractured it right from the outset. This is one reason for the furtiveness and mystery. I don’t know much about the story, but you can read a very interesting account of it here, from the late British anthroposophist Stanley Messenger.
Messenger suggests very strongly (at the end) that we need to recognize that anthroposophy has really failed to set the world alight the way it was supposed to. And he argues that we should release Steiner from the “tragic karma” of this movement, saying that Steiner himself has moved on to far different realms, leaving people trapped and floundering in a clearly incomplete structure. I really think there’s something to this argument.
However, I’ve been reading first-hand accounts of people who worked with Steiner.
At a crucial stage, he threw everything into promoting the Threefold Social Order, trying to get it on the world agenda. He had a magazine of this name, wrote a book about it, gave innumerable lectures about it.
His fantastic “Lectures on Lecturing” use the Threefold Social Order as a source of examples.
Someone said to him, “Why do you put so much energy into this idea, when it seems doomed to fail?” — and Steiner answered: Sometimes an idea is premature, but for that very reason, you have to try to put it out all the more strongly.
I’m certain that the time has finally come for the Threefold Social Order (TSO) to be put on the global agenda, it’s truly now or never, with all this chaos in the world. Where I would fault Messenger is that he doesn’t stress the Threefold Commonwealth, and for me, this is the big test as to whether someone really understands what Rudolf Steiner was about.
The thing about the TSO is that it applies at the very personal level, as well as at the level of nations.
You have three separate identities:
- a political identity
- an economic identity
- and a spiritual or cultural identity.
The first is governed by the idea of equality: we are all equal before the law, we all have an equal right to be heard on matters that affect us. Note: not freedom of speech rules here, but EQUALITY of speech.
In the economic realm, where we all have to work together to survive, the watchword is fraternity, the sense of being part of a family, an organic community, in which we all have duties.
And in the cultural realm, the watchword is freedom — the liberty to practice your beliefs and to educate your children the way you want.
Liberty, equality, fraternity: but each in its own realm, so that contradictions are avoided.
You do NOT use the school system to enforce “equality”, for example, this is simply insane.
And you do not use the economic system to exert a political influence, the way the Marxists want.
Yes, there is an administration of things and goods and services, the way Engels described it; but this domain is its entire concern, it doesn’t exert an influence over the schools, or over the political laws.
You can try threefolding yourself, right away.
Insist on your equal rights within the political process. Be a positive and professional coworker and a conscientious consumer within the economic world. And in the cultural and religious realm, exercise your beliefs, without insisting on having “equal” representation, just as long as you are free to live your culture.
Can you imagine a Threefold Commonwealth in the USA: the economic parliament in Chicago, where Dow Jones is based and the real economic wheels turn, ask any gangster; the legislative parliament in Washington, DC, to maintain some use for all those fancy buildings; and maybe the cultural parliament in New Orleans, home of the one art form America gave the world, i.e. jazz.
For its iniquities, I would say that New York has disqualified itself as either a financial or a cultural centre.
There’s a theory that the “threefold order” is actually the way the Illuminati rules the world, it’s divided into three autonomous sectors, Money, Military and Media — “military” including the entire political process, and “media” including all cultural affairs.
Only they do it behind the scenes and in secret. If the democratic process was really threefolded, so it was all done in the open, well, we would have a completely different world.
However nuts you think Steiner was, you can look at this proposal of his, and you’ll see, it solves all the great problems of the day we are facing, by allowing them to be addressed in the appropriate forum.
Don’t tell me it’s “impractical” — what we’ve got now is “impractical”, the wheels are coming off in a big way. You show me concepts that are adequate to the issues. Otherwise, look at the issues the TSO addresses, and explain how YOU would deal with them otherwise.
Right now, Bernie Sanders is causing all hell with the Democrats, because working-class people are responding to a candidate who takes their concerns seriously. Take a look, and you’ll see that Steiner aimed his book on the Threefold Social Order straight at the working class, trying to get concepts into their heads that would take them beyond Marxism.
This is still the issue of the day.
Bernie is a sign of the times. But we need to go much further than his New Deal thinking, which is now so Old Deal. And nothing of any use will come from the left or the liberals, for sure.
So it’s time for an idea from the far-out realms of the discourse, and I think Steiner may yet achieve the prominence he deserves.
Hey Fred, tell us how Bernie Sanders wife drove a Vermont college into the ground and walked away with a 200,000 dollar severance package!
Jane Sanders and the Messy Demise of a Vermont College
A local Republican grandee financed a commercial in 2014 attacking Ms. Sanders’s $200,000 severance as a “golden parachute.”
Finally, the top Trump campaign official in Vermont filed a complaint, leading to a federal inquiry that examined whether Ms. Sanders had inflated donor commitments to secure a bank loan for the property, and whether her husband had pressured the bank to make the loan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/jane-omeara-sanders-burlington-college.html
Right now, Bernie Sanders is causing all hell with the Democrats, because working-class people are responding to a candidate who takes their concerns seriously
Umm no Freddy, you are wrong…no surprise. Working class are responding to President Trump because he is doing what he promised and they love a good economy that has an abundance of jobs with rising wages because of the competitive job market. Bernie resonates with some young people and deadbeats because he promises them free stuff with working class peoples money.
Lovely, the blog has been hijacked by a closet Muslim (anoyfaker) and a closet Marxist (Fred the Red).
I agree except for one small point.
Fred is an Out and Proud Red.
Wow, I’m used to being misunderstood, but when I talk about seeing beyond Marxist idiocies, I somehow become Fred the Red.
The point I was making is this: Steiner was first and most deeply concerned with the working class and their anger and frustration. Remember, this was 1918, and a Communist revolution in Germany did not seem impossible. If you read the Threefold Social Order (and I have a first English edition, dated 1920) you’ll see it’s aimed, right from the beginning, at the working-class intellectual. Steiner’s trying to show just how shallow and useless Marxist thinking is, in solving the problems of the day.
I’m just pointing to Bernie Sanders to say: those issues are still alive, and they are seeing an old-style Marxist lead the Democratic poll. I said very clearly, no new ideas or anything worthwhile is going to come from the left, the “liberals”, they are too caught up in their own echo chamber. So new thinking will have to come from another direction.
I’m a foreigner, OK, but I managed to VOTE for Donald Trump, in an international poll that pitted him against Hillary Clinton. I can’t find it online now, but Donald Trump won that global poll hands down, and I felt it was a significant predictor of his success. And I’m really proud to have managed to vote for him. I supported Donald Trump on social media right through the 2016 election, saying we needed a maverick to break through the political logjam. I’ve continued to support Trump on everything except his manic rolling out of 5G without any standards or testing, and his appointment of an absolute industry stooge, Ajit Pai, to the FCC.
I read Solzhenitsyn starting in 1971, and from that time on was a deep opponent of Marxism and Stalinism specifically. I’ve fought against it all my life, while never losing my basic sympathy for the working class. My father was a union organizer, with a true working class background in the railways, and I have always had faith in the working-class intellectual. My father utterly despised the Communists for fucking up his union work, he never forgave them, so I had a VERY unusual grounding in leftist politics.
As I started researching “outcomes-based” education, around 1998, I became aware of Hillary Clinton’s role in this appalling mind-control program, and I’ve really hated and despised that woman ever since. I did absolutely everything I could on social media to help destroy her in 2016. I had a silver bullet against her attack goons, the word “Ranbaxy” — the Indian manufacturer of the fake and degraded AIDS drugs that the Clintons peddled in the Third World, a special gift of Bill Clinton. Drugs with human hair and bits of glass in them, OK? And I just had to say “Ranbaxy”, and all the vicious trolls would disappear, as if by magic, I felt like Harry Potter with a spell.
I tweeted Kellyanne Conway with smoking-gun proof that Bill Clinton had indeed fathered a child, Danney Williams, with a black prostitute in Arkansas. While Bill Clinton was busy being inaugurated as President in 1993, a pardon was being signed in Little Rock for a drug offender, whose father had very noisily been putting out the story of Clinton’s bastard child. The son, who is dead now, had written a confession of sorts, in which he directly confirmed the story that he was pardoned to save Bill Clinton. This was a smoking gun that no one has picked up, but I tried to give it to the Trump campaign, and to Danney Williams, for that matter.
If these are the actions of a Red, they are only those of someone who was absolutely rejoicing with each state that turned Red on the election map in 2016. Tuning across the channels, and watching all the glum faces as the pundits realised that Trump had won, and that Hillary had lost, was one of the greatest feelings I’ve had in my life, it was certainly the best laugh I’ve had in decades.
I will wager that none of you, not a single one, has directly and face-to-face fought with as many actual Marxists as I have, over the decades. I have a sister-in-law from England, who told me that the only problem with Stalin was that he didn’t kill enough kulaks, for example. She supported all of Mao’s purges, and when Deng took over, was horrified above all that everyone didn’t have to dress up in a Mao jacket any more, they could wear what they wanted. She said she would never forgive Deng for this. Of course, she wears the trendiest jeans she can find, but for the peasants and workers, there must be a drab uniform.
So yeah, I know the Marxists inside out, but in America, it seems that just knowing about the left makes you one of them. You are very, very wrong. You have to know your enemy. Way back in the 1970s, I also read Arthur Koestler’s book “The God that Failed”, essays by former Marxists who had seen through the lies. In that book, Koestler said, you will NEVER beat the left without help from people from the inside, who understand the mindset.
You’re not allowed to talk about Koestler any more, he was another serial rapist of course, but he was prepared to tackle the taboo subjects — his book “The Thirteenth Tribe” is still a classic in exposing the fact that most Jews have absolutely no historical connection with the Hebrew tribe or any other Semites from the Middle East, they are converts from Khazaria.
For me, one of the greatest things about the Threefold Social Order is that it exposes just how shallow Marxism is. You can see the whole of Marxist thought dealt with comprehensively and definitively, trashed once and for all. Steiner was adamant that there had to be private property. The one thing he said, though, was that LAND cannot be bought and sold: access to land is a RIGHT, and is therefore to be allocated by the Rights Parliament, the legal apparatus, rather than the economic apparatus.
Think about this, please. In old Turkish “key law”, you didn’t buy land or property: you bought the KEY that allowed you access to the land or the property. This is very wise: it is recognising that what is being granted is a RIGHT. You can’t pick up the land and carry it out of the shop with you. You carry the key.
Read Steiner’s “World Economy” and you’ll find an amazing analysis of how monetizing land fucks up the organic cycle of money, and sees imbalances and distortions build up in an economy. It’s the blueprint for all these big crashes, there’s a property bubble underlying all of them, and it’s all because land is treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold. Steiner shows that conquest and force generally underlies possession of land, straight power grabs back there in history, and how economic relations that are based on power and conquest naturally lead to “rents” arising in the economy. And he explains how rents tend to rise, and how this creates distortions in price.
So yes, land is a communal asset, as is the air we breathe. Having the RIGHT to a piece of land: that is the truest way to escape Communism, and this was exactly why Stalin exterminated the kulaks, because they could live independently, they could not be forced into factories and communal farms, in the way that people who have nothing can be forced. So again, just because Steiner advocates communal ownership of land, don’t think he’s a Communist. He railed against the Soviet Union at every opportunity he could, and said of the Reds: wherever you find people talking about “human rights”, you can be certain that human rights will be the most abused.
Jeez. Seriously, people, you have to get out of your knee-jerk mode, and broaden your thinking. Don’t be so quick to label someone. Here’s a confession: the reason I’m posting on Frank Report is that I’ve been almost completely unable to post on the QResearch forum since it returned from the dead. I love that forum, because once you cut through the clutter and blizzard of shills and trolls and bots, there’s a really smart and dedicated (not to mention funny) band of researchers who are determined to destroy Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and I support them 100%. There are atrocious criminals and abusers among the Republicans, for sure, but for me, the clearest and most present danger to the entire world is the liberal elite in the USA. They are so smug, so arrogant, they think they are by definition the cleverest and the best. I always knew, even as a teenager back in the 1970s, that one day I would be seeking allies among the American right, the small-government semi-anarchic right, not the Nazis, who are actually socialists. And so it came to pass, with Donald Trump, and again, I’m very proud to have openly and vocally backed him through the 2016 election, and again now for 2020. I even agree with him 100% on climate change, it’s a hoax, and I’ve seen this from the inside.
Although I still say: if Trump’s going to drain the swamp, then the FCC is the worst swamp monster in the whole bog, and he has failed outright there. This is just the single most critical issue for me, with the rollout of 5G, and on the single most critical matter, Trump scores an epic fail. So the fight continues.
Here’s an anecdote, if we’re going to do anecdotalism: a branch of my extended family sent their kids to Waldorf school. The kids now openly say say it was a cult – yes, they use the “c” word itself – and challenge their parents for having sent them. Unfortunately, as insightful as they are, the girls in particular seem to have been badly damaged, and are so plagued by psychological problems and psycho-somatic illnesses that I fear they will not even really be able to live on their own as adults (they left or were taken out of Waldorf as things became untenable, and are now in special educational programs for young adults in need of extra support and structure).
Fred, I expect you’ll explain that away as not possibly having anything to do with Waldorf, or at least being due to the school not properly applying Steiner’s teachings. But if I’d told you instead that the girls were doing fabulously, you’d have assumed that was surely the fruit of Steiner’s work – right?
And just because there may be some validity to principles such as colors being calming, doesn’t by extension apply to the leap that somehow Steiner’s peculiar, convoluted color philosophy has any particular validity. That’s a fallacy – apparently logic isn’t taught in Waldorf or Anthroposophy – well recognized as an unsupported leap, and in particular one frequently found in cult indoctrination and apologetics.
I get that you’re well-versed in defending Steiner as having been right regarding all the things that he might seem obviously to have been wrong about, or that just don’t seem to make sense in the 21st century. You indeed seem unable to address the possibility that he could have been wrong about anything, which is sort of the working definition of culty adherence to a guru – just what we see playing out with Lauren Salzman, for instance.
And your claim that “Steiner really and truly was not a racist….but he was deeply aware of the realities of different races” smacks of just the sort of “yes, but” (or “but, yes”) disingenuousness that I was referring to. Are you thus confirming that you believe in Steiner’s teaching that different souls incarnate in different races depending on how advanced they are, even though you claim that is neither racist, nor potentially harmful when used as a basis for dealing with children in an educational environment?
Anyway, let’s go back to a basic reminder of Steiner’s “word salad” nuttery – keeping in mind that modern science has shown that race is actually a false construct, and that genetics in particular has shown that there are far fewer actual differences between various members of the human race than once thought:
The Occult Significance of Blood (1907)
“who gains power over a man’s blood gains power over the man, and that blood is ‘a very special fluid’ because it is that about which, so to speak, the real fight must be waged, when it comes to a struggle concerning the man between good and evil.
….
Occult investigation shows decisively that all the things which surround us in this world — the mineral foundation, the vegetable covering, and the animal world — should be regarded as the physiognomical expression, or the ‘below,’ of an ‘above’ or spirit life lying behind them. From the point of view taken by occultism, the things presented to us in the sense world can only be rightly understood if our knowledge includes cognition of the ‘above,’ the spiritual archetype, the original Spiritual Beings, whence all things manifest have proceeded.
….
Questions of great importance are pressing upon us these days; questions dealing with the education, not alone of the young, but of entire nations … such questions are illuminated as soon as we recognize the nature of the spiritual essence which lies at the back of our blood. Who can deny that this question is closely linked to that of race, which at the present time is once more coming markedly to the front? Yet this question of race is one that we can never understand until we understand the mysteries of the blood and of the results accruing from the mingling of the blood of different races.
….
To what extent are uncivilized peoples capable of becoming civilized? How can an utterly barbaric savage become civilized? And in what way ought we to deal with them?”
If that sounds reminiscent of German Nazi theory about blood and race, they are indeed related – through Steiner’s connections with occult groups. Shall we get into Steiner’s Rite of Memphis-Misraim lodge, and its connections to the Thule Society that spawned the Nazi party? (And, yes, the Nazis ultimately cracked down on Waldorf Schools – at the point they were settling scores with erstwhile allies come to be seen as rivals for power and influence, in what can be viewed as more of an internecine conflict).
Next up: Should we consider that Raniere may have been Steiner’s reincarnation and successor? Fred, have you worked through his teachings to see what wisdom might be contained within, since they apparently attracted more interest in North America than Anthroposophy itself?
Steiner was asked once about “special needs” students, kids who are severely challenged, and what their story is. He thought for a little while, and replied that every single genius in history that he had investigated, where he had gone back and examined their past lives — every single one had at least one incarnation in which they were a simpleton or mentally disabled.
This is not to say that every mentally challenged child is a genius in the making, of course. It just shows that different people have different needs in different incarnations.
A mentally retarded child is born into a privileged family in America; a genius child is born to a poverty-stricken family in India. If you are in America now, you are part of the globally dominant culture. Make the most of it. If you’re born in a slum in Brazil: make the most of that. Just understand, you are not where you are by accident, as the atheists would have you believe.
We’ve been caught in a cycle of reincarnations that sees us sinking more and more into materiality, particularly in the West, and Steiner is offering a specifically Western, Christian way out of this trap. He’s adamant that ancient Eastern methods are not appropriate for modern Western people. I tried for years to get information about Steiner, and people were — as has been pointed out — often very vague and evasive. If someone had said to me, Steiner is propagating true Grail Christianity, an esoteric Western path to higher knowledge and salvation, at least I would have had some idea.
As far as Waldorf schools go: if the stories you tell are true, then this was absolutely a rotten school that did not at all follow the guidelines laid down by Steiner. I’ve known dozens of graduates of Waldorf schools, they all loved their experiences there, except that they said it was not a great preparation for the ugly world outside. And in this, Steiner would have been disappointed, as he strongly felt that a practical education for life in the real world was a vital part of Waldorf schooling.
As to whether anthroposophy is a “cult” or not: the question is, do you accept Steiner’s statement that he personally investigated every single thing he talks about, using his own clairvoyant powers? Or do you think he’s a liar and charlatan? Check out the details of his life, the myriad people he helped, and make up your own mind as to whether he seems to be a liar. He says: you may not see what I’m seeing, but you can test what I say for its logical consistency and for the insights it gives.
For example: Steiner says that underlying the physical body is an etheric body, a dynamic and living “blueprint” that directs all organic processes. He says, if a person’s leg goes to sleep, he — as a clairvoyant — can literally see the etheric leg levitating and rising away from the body. And then when the etheric body is reintegrated, you get a feeling of a rush of bubbles, pins and needles.
You can take descriptions like this, and correlate them with your own experience, and gradually — really gradually — you start noticing things that you had never seen before.
Steiner says: you may not have clairvoyant insight; but when you take the descriptions of someone who does possess supersensible vision, and think about these ideas, and let these pictures play in your mind, you are really and truly working in the spiritual world, and you can see for yourself whether these ideas bear fruit. The Threefold Social Order is exactly one such concept, and it makes perfect rational sense to me.
There are lots of things Steiner says that I just don’t understand at all, that seem like complete nonsense. I’ve learned to keep reading and wait — eventually, you see how it all ties together. I will never take a Steiner saying that I don’t understand and repeat it mindlessly. Taking isolated statements out of context is just really, REALLY stupid with a body of work like anthroposophy. I’ve been reading obsessively in this field for over 30 years and I’ve still barely scratched the surface.
With issues like colour therapy, where I’ve followed up on Theo Gimbel’s work, where I’ve seen for myself the drastic effect a painted wall can have on a school: I am very happy to trust Steiner and repeat what he says.
So, here’s an analogy. There’s a mountain, and from the top of this mountain, you can see the whole landscape around you. You find someone who has repeatedly climbed that mountain, examined the topography in every detail, and has also described the very long and arduous path up this mountain. If you believe that this person is a credible observer (and that’s really the only “belief” you need) then you can start taking those descriptions of the landscape seriously, and try to understand what it looks like from above. You can start exploring the lower reaches of the mountain for yourself and see whether your guide’s descriptions are accurate. If you find clear contradictions in what’s said — then there’s a problem. I’ve never, ever, found the least contradiction or inconsistency with Steiner’s thought. The more I read, the more I see the underlying logic, and the more I find that the obscure bits fall into place.
I never act on something Steiner said, until I feel I understand it; but I’ve never spotted a single mistake he made, in terms of contradicting himself or giving inconsistent descriptions.
Rudolf Steiner made exactly one strategic mistake that I can identify: he clearly died too soon. He predicted often that 1933 would be the big crunch year for Germany, in which the nation would make a choice for good or evil that would change the destiny of the entire world. We know now that this is the exact year Adolf Hitler came to power. The thing was: Steiner clearly expected to be alive himself, in 1933, to offer an alternative.
Maybe he made a mistake in building his epic Goetheanum out of wood, so that it could be burned down. When they found smoke coming from behind a panel in the building, they were definitely wrong to break it open and allow the air to reach the flames. There’s no doubt that the shock of this building’s destruction affected Steiner’s health and precipitated his early death. There were many premonitions that this building would go up in flames; Steiner would not use his occult faculties to “cheat” and avoid what was ultimately a karmic necessity. Steiner was doing far too much, far too soon; and he paid the price with his life.
So now there’s a big concrete building in Dornach, Switzerland, still with the original wooden sculpture of Christ Jesus as the Universal Representative of Man that Hitler was apparently trying to have destroyed when the Nazis burned down the building. (I do believe it was arson, just from the story as to where the fire broke out.) You can be 100% certain that Dornach has been infiltrated by Jesuits and satanists of various cloths, absolutely certain. I have tried to expose this here. You have to find your own way into Steiner, using his own words as far as possible, and watching out very carefully for the stooges and shills and character assassins who have infiltrated the movement.
Seriously: if anyone gives me details of an abusive Waldorf school, I will personally do my utmost to investigate and expose them, I’ll do it right here. I’ve said over and again, exercise total due diligence in checking out any Waldorf school.
However, I’ll just describe one Waldorf school I visited, outside London, back in 1988, I was looking for a job. This school not only took special needs students; it took kids that had been rejected by every other “special” school in the country, really hard cases. Kids who would shit themselves in class and scream “Fuck you” endlessly at the teachers. All of this was contained and managed with very great patience and genuine love, along with a healthy dose of German discipline. I decided that I was not in a stable enough space to join this school, not having a work permit or permission to stay in England; but I was left with the very greatest respect for the teachers I saw there.
There’s no arguing that Rudolf Steiner’s thought needs to be recast and reworked so that it’s more accessible to people of the 21st century; but Steiner was pointing to this very time as one of the most crucial in all human history, when we face the incarnation of the most dread Antichrist of any era, who I am certain is now in incarnation. Steiner said he would be born in the USA in the last half of the 20th century, and would manifest on the world stage in the third decade of the 21st. You can see all the signs, plain as day, if you’re familiar with them. The whole rise of machine intelligence and a world-wide web crawling with bots is exactly what Steiner predicted. And for me, this is what really makes Rudolf Steiner relevant. When this Antichrist hits the world, the shock will be way beyond anything this planet has experienced before; it will make all other tyrannies look tame. 5G is the perfect platform for this Beast of the Apocalypse; and 2020 is the year slated for its global rollout. So I’m not kidding when I say the time is here, Satan is hard by the door.
Are you prepared psychologically, spiritually, for such an advent? There are virtually no material preparations you can make. So yes, at one level, anthroposophy can be seen as a doomsday cult, no mistake. But it’s advising you to create organic compost heaps, not stockpile guns, if you want to survive.
Fred, the kids in question are highly intelligent and very talented, and the offspring of resilient and successful parents.
You’ve admitted that Waldorf does a poor job of preparing kids for the real world – effectively conceding an obvious systemic problem, that you can’t really address the implications of – such as that Steiner got things wrong about what developing children really need – due to your indoctrination and rigid orthodoxy.
That’s the culty mindset, believing in an infallible, all-seeing guru – in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary.
But again, along those lines, what if Raniere is Steiner’s reincarnation and successor, and you are just blind to the brilliant truth of that, in the same way that us ignoramuses fail to appreciate Steiner’s eternal genius?
I’ll address other points, in the newer post that Frank made of this.
So Fred thinks the answer to all our problems lies with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Bolshevik Bernie.
It’s time to educate Fred about Communism.
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the first acts of the new Soviet State were the creation of a Secret Police called the Cheka and the establishment of prisons and labor camps across Russia.
Here is a map of the prison camps and prisons.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Gulag_Location_Map.svg
As many as 25 million people were fed into the Soviet prison system.
“Calculations, by the historian Orlando Figes, refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953.[19] A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4–5 million passed through labour colonies, plus 3.5 million who were already in, or who had been sent to, labour settlements.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
“The Solovki prison camp, the first corrective labor camp constructed after the revolution, was established in 1918”
Estimates are that 1.5 to 1.7 million people perished in the Gulag.
Oh, but there is more.
The Soviet government confiscated the grain grown by farmers without compensation.
Wealthy farmers were called Kulaks and forced to give up their lands.
What made one a wealthy farmer?
Owning two pigs, a cow and a horse.
Farmers were placed in labor camps.
As a result, the richest farmlands in Russia and Ukraine were plagued by famine.
“A severe famine of 1931–1933 swept across many different regions in the Soviet Union. During this time, it is estimated that around six to seven million people starved to death.”
The Ukrainians even have a name for Communist-caused famine.
Holodomor
The Holodomor “to kill by starvation” was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine,[6][7][8] and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine[9] or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33.[10] It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.
A U.N. joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished.
The term Holodomor emphasizes the famine’s man-made and intentional aspects, such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement.
“Prisoners in the camps faced harsh working conditions. One Soviet report stated that, in early 1933, up to 15% of the prison population in Soviet Uzbekistan died monthly. During this time, prisoners were getting around 300 calories (1,300 kJ) worth of food a day. ”
Even Keith Raniere allowed his slaves to get 500 to 800 calories per day.
Maybe Fred should be put on a 300 calorie per day diet for a time since it did such wonders for the Soviet prisoners.
What did the Soviet slave labor build?
Canals, the Moscow Metro and Moscow State University.
Built at a price of millions of deaths.
The head of the Soviet Secret Police in the forties and fifties was a sexual pervert named Laventia Beria.
Beria was infamous for raping young women and girls.
Beria attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “our Himmler”
At Beria’s trial in 1953, it became known that he had committed numerous rapes during the years he was NKVD chief.[24] Simon Sebag-Montefiore, a biographer of Stalin, concluded the information “reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity.
Evidence suggests that not only did Beria abduct and rape women, but that some were also murdered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#Sexual_predator
If Fred thinks Communism is the answer, then Fred is crazier than Keith Raniere.
The Soviets also targeted those who were educated, such as doctors, lawyers, business people, and military officers, because the educated people would know how to organize others and resist the dictatorship, which put the Soviets in a very vulverable position when WWII started, because hardly anybody was around who knew how to wage a successful war. Too bad it’s mainly uneducated buffoons making comments here, or there would have been much more help for Frank against NXIVM and me against Amway and other MLM scams. LOL
Steiner will never become well-known.