anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews

7/30/2019 Anthroposophical and Transpersonal Worldviews

1/9

Anthroposophical and Transpersonal Worldviews

Robert McDermott

Robert McDermott, PhD, was president and is currently professor of philosophy and

religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He was formerly professor and

chair of the department of philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY. His publicationsinclude Radhakrishnan, The Essential Aurobindo, and The Essential Steiner.

This essay is a revised version of a section of an essay entitled My TranspersonalWorldview, written for a forthcoming volume called The Collected Works of Ken

Wilber.

~

I am often accused by my East Coast friends of having gone Californian, and by mySan Francisco Bay Area friends of being still very East Coast. Neither characterization

is intended as a compliment. Reference points for New York academic life tend to be the

canonical tradition from Socrates to Godimer whereas comparable reference points for

the Bay Area transpersonal community tend to be Asian spiritual teachers; meditationtechniques; goddess, shamanic and Jungian symbols; astrological archetypes and

Enneagram points. When I appear to my East Coast friends as too Californian, it isbecause of my delight in the varieties of spirit manifest in transpersonal psychologists

and artists, in the eighty dharma centers in the Bay Area, sacred medicine researchers,

teachers of biography, eco-feminists, multi-traditional mystics, organizational experts,and astrologers. Anthroposophy is not ordinarily listed in such a catalogue, and there are

excellent reasons why it should not be, as well as reasons why it should be -- hence this

essay.

For my transpersonal colleagues I am too much an Anthroposophist and for my

Anthroposophical colleagues I appear too involved in Hinduism, Buddhism, and TheNew Paradigm. My Anthroposophy is very East Coast, and perhaps necessarily so. Myversion of Anthroposophy includes Krishna and Buddha, but also tends to include

references to the European Christian tradition. Anthroposophy has Japanese and Israeli

adherents, but non-western and non-Christian voices are not yet as audible asAnthroposophical teachers who look and sound Christian. Furthermore, anyone who

accepts Rudolf Steiners spiritual-scientific research accepts a Christo-centric view of

history and evolution of consciousness. Such a view can, and perhaps will, offer an

alternative perspective to Christianity, but it is difficult to imagine a Christo-centric viewof the history of the earth and humanity which does not closely resemble and overlap

with the view of Christ offered, however imperfectly, by Christianity.

This essay is an attempt to explain why I admit to holding both sides of the polarities

introduced above. In this essay I recommend the complementarity of East Coast and West

Coast thinking as well as Anthroposophical and transpersonal world views. I am gratefulfor my fifty years in heady New York and for the past ten years in the transpersonal

community of the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay issues from my primary

commitment to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and from my secondary

commitment to the varieties of transpersonal dharma and practice. The sociological


2/9

difference of East and West Coast is interesting to observe for its subtle influence but the

deeper topic is the spiritual paradigm represented by Anthroposophical and the

transpersonal teachings and practices.

While it would be misleading to say that Anthroposophy embodies East Coast and

transpersonal embodies Bay Area sensibilities, the turn of the twentieth centuryEuropean origin of Anthroposophy and the Asian and pagan origin of the transpersonal

worldview continue to affect all who touch one or the other. For ten years I have been

trying to integrate the best features of the transpersonal experience, worldview, andpractices with Anthroposophy and to introduce Anthroposophical thinking and practice

into the transpersonal community. My spiritual home, however, for the past twenty-five

years, and no doubt longer in both directions, has been and will be Anthroposophy.

As my Anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews overlap substantially but not

entirely, this essay aims to express a transpersonal Anthroposophy and almost equally an

Anthroposophical transpersonalism. As with all comparisons, it is the differences that get

disproportionate attention. I will also indicate the strength of the Jewish and Christianelements in East Coast thinking, and the corresponding emphasis in the transpersonal

community on a light-paradigm Buddhism -- or, negatively, away from Jewish andChristian monotheism, creationism, and messianism. Entirely consistent with my

Anthroposophical worldview, my thinking has been and no doubt will remain Mahayanist

and incarnational. I attend to the Krishna of the Bhagavadgita, not only of theMahabharata; to Buddha of the Mahayana tradition, not only Gotama of the Theravada

tradition; and to Christ of the John-Logos tradition, not only Jesus of the western

humanist tradition.

As it has been the aim of my dharma for approximately thirty years to transform my

personal life in the light of the Mahayana and the transpersonal, I sought the guidance,

first, of Sri Aurobindo, whom I have long considered the foremost spiritual teacher ofmodern India. Without revising that assessment, I turned for guidance to Rudolf Steiner,

whom I consider the foremost spiritual guide of the West -- and perhaps of this historical

period. It seems to me that Steiner has given a more comprehensive spiritual teachingthan anyone else of the last several centuries. I have been working both at deepening my

Anthroposophical work as such, and also at creating relationships between my

Anthroposophical discipline and the spiritual work of diverse individuals and groups,

many of whom are transpersonalists.

The transpersonal movement is based on a panoply of non-ordinary experiences,

including those derived from psychotropics and psychedelics, meditation, shamanicpractices, intuition, rituals, spiritual journeys, artistic activities, and organizational

transformation -- a truly radical empiricism and one deepened by traditions of practice.

The entire transpersonal movement has issued primarily from psychology, the mosttranspersonally advanced western discipline from the 1960s to the present. The

transpersonal movement in turn continues to influence psychology and allied disciplines

on behalf of a conception of psyche as profound and proactive. Not properly an ism or a

community, transpersonal is an adjective prefixed to a loose confederacy of ideas,


3/9


4/9

esoteric and exoteric components, continuous with the western Rosicrucian esoteric

tradition, in service of these beings.

Anthroposophy is also linked properly and comprehensively to the karmic biography of

Rudolf Steiner, an initiate whose teachings and spiritual mission are right for this time.

Rudolf Steiner (18611925) was a European initiate who brought a modem scientificmethod to the study of spiritual realities. Science commanded his attention and respect,

but he also taught methods by which to break through its perceived boundaries to a direct

knowledge of spirit. Steiner exemplified and taught a way of thinking which is capable ofaccessing spiritual reality and serves as an antidote to the restrictions on thinking placed

so effectively by modern Western epistemology. Steiners method fully integrates feeling

and willing, activity and receptivity. The esoteric research that Steiner conducted in later

life led to many practical initiatives such as biodynamic farming and Waldorf education.His epistemology, as theory and practice, provides the necessary foundation to all of his

work on behalf of spiritual and cultural renewal. The Anthroposophical Society that

Steiner founded is a modern mystery school continuous with the mystery centers of

Egypt and Greece, but using western scientific sensibility and open to all who seekknowledge of higher worlds.

Secondly, my Anthroposophical worldview affirms a full hierarchy and pantheon of real,

distinctive, and collaborative spiritual beings, including Krishna, Buddha and Christ,

angels and archangels, the tempters Lucifer and Ahriman, and the great spiritual leadersof humanity. Steiners accounts of these beings and their influence provide us an

opportunity to approach, to contemplate, and to make relationships with higher beings.

Such specificity, however, can lead to inflated claims of familiarity. Religious

fundamentalists have a tendency to regard their images of such beings as the beingsthemselves, thereby falling into idolatry, a sin warned against in the Hebrew Scriptures,

the New Testament, and the Quran. A similar opportunity and temptation attends our

relationships to spiritual leaders of humanity -- e.g., Abraham and Moses; John theEvangelist and Mary the Mother; Sankara, Ramanuja, and Sri Ramakrishna; Shantidev

and Dogen; Augustine and Aquinas; Dante and St. Francis, as well as Rudolf Steiner.

While the personalities and achievements of these figures offer unlimited opportunity forintellectual speculation, it is their essential karmic mission and significance that is

efficacious for our spiritual striving.

The task of knowing the essential spiritual work of contemporary spiritual teachers iseven more challenging because it is so difficult to penetrate to the spiritual realities of

human beings who are familiar in ordinary ways. Among the spiritual leaders of global

import in the twentieth century, I would include Sri Aurobindo, M.K. Gandhi, HisHoliness the Dalai Lama and Rudolf Steiner. Close behind these I would mention Black

Elk, Swami Yogananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Simone Weil, Pierre

Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, C.G. Jung, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, MartinLuther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Ram Dass. I

mention these names in the hope that such exemplars of the divine-human dialogue will

give credibility and encouragement to our seeking and striving. The divine continues to

reveal and manifest in myriad ways, and none so helpfully as in the lives of our


5/9

contemporaries. The study of these figures and their esoteric-spiritual tasks is part of the

discernment of karma.

For each of these, and others, I want to know the innermost core of their spiritual life, of

their connection to the spiritual world, immanently and transcendentally considered. To

meet such figures in their spiritual import is to engage in real, as opposed to nominal,knowing. It is to know the objective reality rather than the mere name, the surface, the

conventional signification. Steiners esoteric epistemology is both a monism and a

realism: a monism in that he defines reality as spirit, and matter as an expression of spirit;a realism in that spirit manifests a vast plurality of real beings and spiritual realities.

These beings are all knowable, but only by effort. Steiner observes the medieval

theological concept of adequatio: the level of knowing must meet the level of the object

to be known. As Goethe observed, light created the eye just as spiritual light created thespiritual eye. To know the spiritual reality of beings past or present, physical and

discarnate, requires spiritual -- or realist, not nominalist -- knowing.

Although it would be difficult, and rather to the side of the purpose of this essay, togeneralize on the degree to which leading transpersonalist works can be said to be

nominalist, I do believe that transpersonal thinkers partake of this nominalism more thanI would want to do. Contemporary thought generally, and perhaps particularly

psychological thought, regards as constructs of psyche precisely the spiritual ideals,

events and individuals that I regard as spiritual facts, as realities that are mediated by, butalso transcend, psyche. Among the many kinds of beings to which I ascribe ontological

reality -- not infrequently to the dismay of readers and colleagues -- are angels and

bodhisattvas; ideals such as Love, Truth, and Freedom; the etheric bodies of planets,

animals, and human beings; and the Christ surrounding the Earth.

Names such as Krishna, Buddha, and Christ -- and others, such as Brahman and Divine

Mother -- designate single beings, and experiences of them result in quite differentdescriptions of their characteristics and activities. These higher spiritual beings are

experienced by human beings in a wide variety of valid transpersonal ways. By their

relative vastness and relative perfection, these beings are closer to the singular divinesource than any personal life, human community, or earthly existent. Because accounts of

higher beings, including those given by Rudolf Steiner, are mediated by the limitations of

human capacities, they are inevitably partial and inadequate.

I see the trans-personal and the trans-sensory as accessible and knowable by human effort

and grace. The essential task of our time is to establish a noetic relationship between the

immanent and transcendent, the supersensible and sensory. If artists, instead ofpsychologists, had initiated and articulated the transpersonal movement, its impact would

have been more focused on the development of positive capacities and less on therapy.

Steiner worked extensively with the arts because he considered art to be the mosteffective way of establishing a relationship between the supersensory and the world of

the senses.


6/9

An ideal approach to the supersensible seems to me to include, in addition to artistic

activity (including speaking and writing), highly individual experiences such as those

celebrated in James Varieties of Religious Experience, and community experiences suchas those celebrated in the religious philosophy of Josiah Royce. Just as an individual

person is necessarily part of many communities, and is unintelligible apart from them,

higher spiritual beings whom I and others aspire to know have their being as part ofsupersensible communities.

Third, it makes a decisive difference for ones worldview if one adopts a perennialist orevolutionary framework for the interpretation not only of the past, present, and future,

and equally of ones spiritual discipline. I accept in broad outline the evolutionism of

Steiner, including particularly the significance of Christ in the evolution of the earth and

humanity. This framework might be the most important divide between Anthroposophyand virtually all transpersonal perspectives. In Steiners view, truths, such as those of the

great religious traditions, are not permanently true, and certainly not true in the same

ways, as one historical epoch succeeds another. The truth, meaning, and effectiveness of

ideas, as well as beings, including higher beings, are all decisively affected by theirevolving contexts.

Steiners account of the evolution of consciousness is not a simple modern Western view

of progress, such that later is better; it is a double process. As human consciousness has

expanded and deepened with respect to knowledge, complexity, and inventiveness, andcontinues to do so, it will continue, proportionately and appropriately, to lose the

intimacy and directness of its relationship to the divine. In Steiners double evolutionary

process, earlier consciousness (shamanic, for example) means closer to spiritual realities

and later consciousness (particularly modern Western) means more alienated,individualized, and materialistic. This problem of modern Western alienated

consciousness, however, provides the opportunity for humanity to share freely and

deliberately in the creation of spiritual-sensory relationships.

As humanity lost its spiritual home and innate capacities (which Owen Barfield refers to

as original participation), it also gained capacities. In the course of several millennia ofhuman development, humanity experienced greater independence from the divine and

thereby realized correspondingly greater opportunities for deliberate relationships

between the human and divine. Steiner considered the twentieth century to be a time of

exceptional spiritual darkness -- and thereby an exceptional opportunity for thedevelopment of human wisdom and human will. To meet this challenge, Steiner

bequeathed a host of spiritual insights and practices under the heading of Anthroposophy

or spiritual science.

Steiners account of the evolution of consciousness does not commit what Ken Wilber

refers to as the pre/trans fallacy -- i.e., it does not reduce or prefer the pre-personal to thetrans-personal (by whatever terms). Steiner essentially holds that even though the present

might be terrible and the past might appear to be ideal, earlier modes of consciousness

should nevertheless not be confused with, nor preferred to, contemporary modes of

consciousness. Similarly, higher modes of consciousness, though perhaps painful or


7/9

terrifying, should nevertheless neither be reduced to nor sacrificed in favor of lower

modes of consciousness.

Steiner developed and recommended as a spiritual exercise a discipline, which he called

symptomatology, for the study of the characteristics of each age, event, and biography

under review. Steiners advice concerning the karma of consciousness is analogous toKrishnas advice to Arjuna -- namely, that despite the pain of Arjunas duty as a warrior

in the line of battle, it was nevertheless right for him to do his own caste duty, however

poorly, than to do well the duty of another caste. So too, it is better to face the task of thisage, which Steiner takes to be the cultivation of free and loving thinking, than to revert to

the consciousness of a previous age.

Fourth, I see the Christ as the central event in the evolution of consciousness. I amconvinced that Steiners rendering of the evolution of consciousness will need to be very

significantly extended so as to include, for their respective contributions, shamanic and

indigenous consciousness, east Asian thought, and the vast research generated by a half

century of anthropology, but I am not inclined to reduce or revise Steiners account of therole of Christ in cosmic and human history which he refers to as the Mystery of

Golgotha. The transpersonal movement, by contrast, seems as focused on the spiritualteachings of Asia as the Theosophists of the past century and a quarter. The transpersonal

movement has exhibited a natural preference for Buddhism, and particularly for forms of

Buddhism with a light paradigmatic commitment.

The life of Jesus seems to me to have been an instrument similar to that of Gotama. After

approximately fifteen years with little or no conscious relationship to the reality of Christ,

I began to absorb the voluminous and unique teachings on Christ to be found in thewritings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner. As a result of these works, supplemented by the

writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths, I now view with

gratitude the union of Jesus and Christ for three years that made possible a redemptivesacrifice on behalf of the evolution of human, and particularly Western, consciousness. If

I do not fully accept the fundamental premise of Buddhism (particularly the first of the

four noble truths -- that all existence is dukkha) it is at least partly because the goodnews of the Incarnation described in the New Testament, and particularly its double

message of vulnerability and forgiveness, keeps breaking in.

I consider my personal life to be intensely important not, as I ordinarily think, because itis mine, but, as I know transpersonally, because it expresses, however dimly, the reality

of Logos -- Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Tao. I am relatively more awake to the reality

and transformative power of Logos-Christ in history and enveloping the earth, and ofBuddha, the preeminent source of wisdom and compassion prior to Christ, and less

awake to other spiritual beings, such as Tao and Brahman, and beings to be contacted in

shamanic journeys. As a result of study and meditative reflection, I can say that Buddhaand Christ are real to me, but far less vivid for me than I would want them to be. Such

beings are more real for me than they presumably are for those who subscribe to a

standard modem or postmodern paradigm, but less real for me than they are for those


8/9

whom William James referred to as the experts -- converts, mystics, saints, Gnostics,

sages, and initiates.

Fifth, just as transpersonal thinkers and teachers are currently attempting to revision

psychology, so might they attempt to revision religious traditions as we know them. To

do so, transpersonal thinkers who often sound dismissive of religious traditions mightheed Huston Smith (whose exposition of religious traditions seems to me unsurpassed in

our time) in seeing in these traditions what he refers to as the traction of history. Now

and in the future, religious traditions -- including particularly Asian traditions aboutwhich transpersonalists tend to be reactively uncritical -- must die not to their rich

diversity, sources, or institutions, but to their penchant for atavism, misogyny, and

intolerance. Let pragmatism and pluralism help religious traditions replace anachronistic

and dogmatic prescriptions in favor of tolerance needed both by adherents of religioustraditions and by those who might be adherents if religious communities more faithfully

exhibited their espoused ideals.

The first of many positive consequences of this change would be the general acceptanceof the yogas that Krishna taught in the Bhagavadgita: spiritual thinking, selfless action,

worship, and meditation. A second consequence would be the general acceptance of thedharma of Buddha and his followers. The life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, made

luminous by suffering, and his teachings made efficacious by compassion, might then

serve as evidence that spirit manifests itself for all humankind. A third such consequencewould be the general acknowledgment that the Christ (Logos), through Its incarnation in

Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament and witnessed currently by a third of the human

community, decisively brought and continues to bring redemptive grace into human

consciousness and into the earth.

Religious traditions can trivialize and distort by dogma and idolatry, but they can also

sustain the mysterious relationship between the spiritual and the human. In my view, thespiritual has broken through with particular force and depth in at least these instances-but

in many others as well: the revelation of YHWH as I AM to Moses; the revelation of

the yogas by Krishna to Arjuna recounted in the Bhagavadgita; the way of overcomingsuffering by Buddha; the life and teachings of Christ from his baptism through His

resurrection and the descent of the Spirit; the reality of the Avalokiteshvara (the

bodhisattva of compassion) in the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth incarnation of the

Dalai Lama.

It is an essential component of my Anthroposophy (as well as a karmically significant

part of biography) that I find deep exoteric and esoteric truths in life and reality of Christ,some of which have been saved and others distorted by Christianity. I hold that as human

beings we are born of the Ground of Being (traditionally called the Father), die and

resurrect through the Logos, and are drawn to the future by the Spirit. I am convinced thatthe persons of the Trinity should no longer be understood in gender terms and that the

divine feminine is emerging in our time from a deeply spiritual, ontologically real source.


9/9

Because I need help in my effort to experience, understand and express the reality of

Christ and other higher beings who work in harmony with Christ on behalf of humanity

and the earth, I practice some of Steiners many recommendations -- such as meditation,working with mantras, esoteric reading, and regular invocation of the dead -- helpful for

developing a noetic relationship with the spiritual in the universe. I supplement my

Anthroposophical practice by participation in the Christian sacramental life madepossible by Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Experience of the Christian sacraments,

particularly when deepened by scholarship, can be profoundly revelatory of a positive

relationship between the sensory and the supersensory realms.

anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews

Documents