Perhaps it took someone who could contemplate many paths at once, and lay those out and say, ‘Guys, it’s okay; even you people who wanna zig when everyone else is zagging, even you have a path with me’.
Thus may my conversation with Daniel be summed up, wherein we discuss many shared experiences when it comes to reading and studying Rudolf Steiner.
Topics Covered + other Quotable Daniel Quotes from E10:
Cool accents/Disassociating from our every-day thinking to understand text originally written in a foreign language
Our everyday life is more or less dominated by very sophisticated speakers these days who have a lot of very catchy phrases that are ear worms, that people tend to repeat.
When things are hard to understand, our focus sharpens.
Suspension of disbelief/by-passing our natural skepticism (rebellious streak) when reading Steiner
Someone tells us that we just have to go left, there’s no doubt about it, then every fiber of our being is gonna say, ‘We’re taking a right-hand turn’.
Foundationally and fundamentally, Steiner’s message is about human freedom.
Post-modernism and ‘critical thinking’ learned in art school
What we were reading…let’s just say it was kinda heady intellectual um, junk. We were more or less trained to read it but read it with the idea that you’re there to take it down a notch.
(on coming to Steiner later in life) Once I was confronted with the totality and the depth of the work…it was a little bit of a challenge to myself, actually, to not want to beat it up, and instead I said, Let me see if I can just understand the words that are on the page.
Using your intuition
Many, many texts in many, many domains want to tell you from the outside in what to work, think or feel.
Coming across TRUTH
Everything that I’ve encountered up until Steiner has a piece of the truth. And then Steiner’s able to put it into a context and a framework…has a view, has a perspective that is inclusive of all the good things I’ve ever heard of before.
So many other streams or approaches or frameworks for thinking about the world that we live in and the supersensible world work on a theory of exclusion.
The balm of reading Steiner/Letting go of long-held contrarianism/‘Yes-and’
Steiner being very comfortable with ‘mystery’ /Grappling with text in study group
A clear-cut answer: …not only is it not given, but it may not be available at all.
Bring your best game to work on this text, and bring everything that you have about your own life experience, the world as you know it, the intuition you have, and your feeling of right and wrong and how things work.
Steiner study as a deeply positive pursuit
You have to go through your life eyes wide open, and you have to do this work with your eyes wide open. And do not enter a kind of goofy trance state, and don’t save it just for Sunday morning.
Where does the knowledge come from? (PSE8)
The demonstration of mastery is on its face apparent.
Space-Time vs Time-Space
What Steiner has to say just almost immediately aligns with the real experience once you let all the trappings and the crap [in your own thinking] fall away and you go to what is universally accepted, like this life flashing before your eyes thing.
People mentions in this episode: Paul Emberson, Dennis Klocek, Bastiaan Baan
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