Subscribe now

The Shift Under Vicente Fox and the Move to Unilateral Autonomy

In 2000, the PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 71 years to Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party). During his campaign, Fox claimed he could resolve the “Chiapas problem” in fifteen minutes. He promised to present the San Andrés Accords to Congress for approval. Instead, he submitted a heavily diluted version that stripped key provisions on indigenous autonomy, self-determination, and resource control.

This watered-down reform was opposed by the Zapatistas, every major indigenous organization in Mexico, and broad sectors of civil society involved in the original negotiations. Nevertheless, it passed Congress: unanimously in the Senate (including votes from the left-wing PRD party), in the House, and ratified by three-quarters of the states. The PRD leader who guided the vote later became the party’s president. Around this time, the Zapatistas severed all contact with the PRD.

In anticipation of the vote, the Zapatistas organized their first large caravan outside Zapatista territory, sending delegations to Mexico City. The journey took two weeks, with about eight stops per day. A participant recalled: “We’d drive through small towns without planned events, and campesinos would come down from the mountains, set up a stage, and thousands would gather to demand we stop. We’re talking about literally millions—probably tens of millions—of people participating across the route.” A massive meeting in Mexico City’s Zócalo drew at least 300,000 people packed shoulder-to-shoulder.

The Zapatistas were invited to speak in congressional debates. Everyone expected Subcomandante Marcos to address them, but they sent a single woman comandante instead—a creative act of defiance. Congress then approved the diluted accords, seen as a slap in the face.

From this point, the Zapatistas abandoned dealings with the federal or state government and implemented their own autonomy unilaterally. They entered a period of deliberation (often called “hibernation” by outsiders) until 2003.

The Caracoles and Councils of Good Government

In 2003, the Zapatistas announced the Caracoles—social, political, cultural, and economic centers of Zapatismo. There were initially five (later adjusted in structure). Each oversees several autonomous municipalities through a Junta de Buen Gobierno (Council of Good Government). These juntas implement autonomy, with each responsible for five to ten municipalities (varying in size from a few to dozens of communities).

Communities and municipalities select junta members, who serve in rotation (typically seven to ten present at a time, circulating every week or so, repeating every five to six weeks). An oversight commission monitors to ensure decisions align with autonomy principles. This is not representative democracy; the juntas are administrative bodies that consult communities constantly.

The juntas handle everything a government does, including justice. Non-Zapatista community members often seek their judgments because the system has built a reputation for fairness and non-bias. Zapatistas established their own markets for internal trade, avoiding external systems, and invested heavily in education—nearly every community now has primary access, with secondary schools producing teachers. The curriculum treats teachers as partners, not bosses, and integrates intellectual and manual work (rejecting capitalist separation of mind and body). Health centers in each Caracol offer free checkups (charging only non-Zapatistas for medicine), combining Western medicine, surgery, labs, and traditional herbal remedies—contrasting sharply with discriminatory government hospitals.

No one lives permanently in the Caracoles; people stay temporarily and rotate to prevent power concentration. This ensures true autonomy: permanent politicization, community control, and no elite dominance.

Around 2002–2003, the Zapatistas consolidated internally, distinguishing true supporters from mixed or opportunistic projects (e.g., some cooperatives benefiting from Zapatista “mythology” without adhering to discipline like rejecting government aid or contributing when needed). Many such groups distanced themselves.

Subscribe now

Ongoing Struggles and the Anti-State Philosophy

The struggle for community support remains fluid. The government uses resources (corn, concrete floors, medicine, money) to buy votes and convert Zapatista or undecided communities, often right before elections. This has succeeded in some areas, but Zapatismo expands in others through justice, inspiration, or community provision. It’s impossible to declare a clear “winner” amid constant shifts, heavy state/paramilitary pressure in some zones, and grassroots gains in others.

Zapatismo has never been state-oriented. Most revolutionary movements in the capitalist era (past 200 years) aimed to seize and replace the state with a “better” one. The Zapatistas seek to make the state irrelevant—to let it wither away by building parallel, self-sustaining structures. States as we know them have only existed for 250–400 years; assuming their inevitability is a product of upbringing.

This challenges Americans especially: we see the state as eternal and change via NGOs (top-down experts analyzing and prescribing) rather than community-based movements from below. NGOs often add bureaucracy; Zapatismo organizes from the most oppressed, asking what they need without intermediaries.

Their NAFTA critique is community-focused: day-to-day needs (water, health, safety) over abstract policy demands. They don’t petition the U.S. state—they aim to render it irrelevant through local autonomy.

The Future of Zapatismo as Process

What’s the future of Zapatismo? Will it expand or fade? This view is flawed. Zapatismo isn’t a static “thing” with continuity or extinction. American education trains us to think in fixed objects, but dialectics—viewing the world as processes and relationships—fits better. As a process of autonomy and unfolding resistance, Zapatismo is just beginning. History moves across generations, not years; its impact will continue long-term.

Subscribe now

Exploitation and Expansion of Marxist Concepts

Exploitation is very important in Marxism, and the Zapatistas have expanded the concept beyond what Marx described. They speak of the four wheels of capitalism: exploitation, despojo (expropriation—the closest translation, meaning the theft or stripping away of everything from others), discrimination, and repression. In this way, they have rediscovered several Marxist ideas, but really they analyzed their own lives and arrived at conclusions similar to Marx’s.

The first Zapatista revolution occurred in 1992–1993 with the development and eventual proclamation of the Women’s Revolutionary Indigenous Law (Ley Revolucionaria de Mujeres). The female leadership within the EZLN—often young women between 14 and 18 years old—organized this internal transformation. When these women left their communities to join the guerrilla group, they experienced a completely different social reality. In traditional communities, women had historically been treated as second-class citizens. In the EZLN, however, women took on important roles, and many became comandantas (the highest positions in the EZLN).

Upon returning to their communities, these women consulted with other oppressed women and drafted the Women’s Revolutionary Indigenous Law. This law consists of ten key points, including:

• The right to participate in the revolutionary struggle at any level their will and capacity allow.

• The right to work and receive a just salary.

• The right to decide the number of children they have and when to have them.

• Bans on forced marriage, violence against women (including beatings or mistreatment), and alcohol abuse (which often led to domestic violence in communities).

• Rights to education, health care, and leadership positions in the organization and military.

Alcohol consumption was banned entirely in Zapatista communities due to its devastating effects on families, particularly women. This internal “uprising” addressed gender inequality and marked a profound shift.

In 1993, the EZLN consulted every Zapatista community over a nine-month period about whether to launch an armed uprising. A few communities did not participate. The leadership then set the date for January 1, 1994—the same day NAFTA took effect—as a symbolic statement against neoliberalism and capitalist exploitation.

The fighting between the Zapatistas and the Mexican Army lasted about 12 days (January 1–12, 1994). The Zapatistas took over major urban centers in eastern Chiapas (including San Cristóbal de las Casas, Ocosingo, and others) and about half of Rancho Nuevo, the largest military base in Chiapas. There is a famous unconfirmed story that many indigenous workers at Rancho Nuevo told their non-indigenous counterparts to spend New Year’s Eve at home with their families. According to the tale, at one point the indigenous simply changed uniforms and took over half the base. Many of the more advanced weapons (such as AK-47s) in the Zapatista arsenal reportedly came from this takeover.

The uprising was a complete surprise—not only to the state and federal Mexican government but also to most of the Mexican public—highlighting how isolated indigenous communities were. It is remarkable that hundreds of thousands of indigenous people across communities knew the uprising was coming, yet it remained secret from the rest of Mexico.

Subscribe now

The Zapatistas hoped their 1994 uprising would spark an international call to arms for all oppressed peoples, potentially leading to a march on Mexico City. It did not ignite widespread revolutionary action elsewhere, forcing the Zapatistas to rethink their strategy.

This was deeply embarrassing to the army and government. In response, the military bombed not only EZLN forces in urban areas but women and children left in the communities. In the first ten days, around 145–300 people were killed (the vast majority indigenous/Zapatista). Massive demonstrations erupted in Mexico City, including three in the Zócalo between January 1 and January 12, each drawing over 100,000 people demanding an end to the massacre. Under this pressure, the army declared a ceasefire on January 12.

This led to initial negotiations, which began briefly in March 1994 but broke down quickly. The first substantial talks were the San Andrés Accords, starting in 1995 and culminating in the signing on February 16, 1996. Originally envisioned as five separate rounds (starting with indigenous rights and autonomy, then implementing each as a confidence-building measure), the Zapatistas arrived with 10 comandantes but brought 600 people from Mexican civil society (organized since the August 1994 National Democratic Convention in Zapatista territory, attended by about 8,000 in the jungle). This convention incorporated demands from across Mexico—indigenous groups, students, campesinos, urban workers, and women—into the negotiations.

The government was surprised when broad sectors of civil society appeared. They employed a carrot-and-stick strategy: negotiations as the carrot, and military pressure as the stick. On February 9, 1995, the army launched a major invasion of virtually every Zapatista community in Chiapas.

Here’s an account from an American solidarity worker in Chiapas at the time: “On February 10, 1995, we took a delegation and tried to enter a heavily invaded region. We were stopped at a checkpoint and not allowed further—this was completely illegal, as there was no declaration of war, Mexico was formally at peace, and residents/visitors had the right to travel freely. We returned to San Cristóbal, linked up with delegations from Spain, Italy, three PRD congressmen, and a group from UNAM (National University of Mexico City). That evening, we held a press conference declaring we would enter the area the next day, walking if necessary. With about 60–70 people (including journalists), we approached the same checkpoint and insisted on crossing. After an hour of negotiations, the troops let us pass. We were the first civilian group—national or international—to reach the midst of the invasion. Troops were as surprised as we were. We traveled in VW vans down narrow dirt roads, passing military convoys of up to 60 vehicles and 5,000 troops. We spent days documenting the invasion.”

This large-scale operation covered much of Chiapas. The military often encamped on community edges (in churches or schools), conducted daily patrols, harassed residents, stole market goods, and used rape as a tool of intimidation. Many indigenous women were assaulted. This became known as low-intensity warfare—devastating, demoralizing daily oppression that continued from 1995 until around 2000. Such tactics were taught at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in Georgia; between 1995 and 1998, Mexicans formed the largest contingent of trainees there, learning counterinsurgency strategies. Before the uprising, few Mexican officers had trained in the U.S.

Estimates suggest up to 70,000 troops (about one-third of the Mexican military) were involved in Chiapas, though exact numbers vary. Low-intensity warfare was the government’s main “stick” against the Zapatistas.

Amid this, the San Andrés Accords negotiations continued until signing in February 1996. It was a peace agreement, not legislation. Both sides formed a commission (COCOPA, with members from seven political parties) to translate the accords into constitutional/legal reforms for federal implementation. Both agreed to accept the commission’s proposals. These emerged months later; the Zapatistas reluctantly accepted them, but the government rejected them. By then, the second round of talks had begun, but the Zapatistas walked out, arguing the government had broken its word. There has been no formal contact between Zapatista leadership and the Mexican government since.

Subscribe now

With negotiations abandoned, the government relied solely on the “stick.” The Zapatistas shifted to implementing autonomy unilaterally. They established 36 autonomous municipalities, each with its own parallel government—a direct challenge to federal and state control over Chiapas.

In spring 1998, the federal government viewed these as a threat and launched massive operations: thousands of soldiers, state/federal police, and paramilitary groups moved from one municipality to the next, dismantling governments and arresting leaders. They seized three without EZLN physical response. On the fourth, the EZLN fought back, with nine deaths in the clash—this halted the tactic.

Throughout this period (especially post-1995 invasion), the military organized paramilitary groups. These have roots in the 1950s–1960s, when landowners and cattle ranchers maintained private “white guards” for protection. Today’s groups are larger, include bought-off indigenous people, and sometimes Mexican soldiers in changed uniforms. This fueled ongoing violence, including harassment and massacres targeting Zapatista sympathizers.

Another story from a solidarity worker: “Five days after the community returned from the highlands (where they had been hiding during the invasion), I brought a caravan of four vehicles with ten tons of food and medical supplies. We had to pass through a PRI-aligned community to reach the Zapatista-supported one. In the PRI community, we were attacked. We locked the doors, and the indigenous guides from the Zapatista community hid under the bus seats. About 20 people stood in front of the trucks. I instructed the drivers to move very slowly—about half a mile per hour—without hitting anyone but to keep going. We pushed through, surrounded by 500 or 600 indigenous people aligned with the PRI.”

The PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) was the ruling party in Mexico for about 70 years, and many indigenous communities in Chiapas historically aligned with it for access to resources.

“When we finally reached the Zapatista community half an hour later, the local military commander arrived. He was fairly reasonable, but another commander showed up about fifteen minutes later and started questioning why we were there, pushing us around. The community later identified the second commander as also the leader of the local paramilitary group in the region. The first promised an escort out the next day, and the second eventually agreed—but the escort never came. On the way back through the PRI community, it was deserted—no one in sight at 10 a.m. in a place with 800 people and 200 houses. Suddenly shots rang out; they were firing at us. We sped down the bumpy road at about 30 mph. One school bus in the caravan had a bullet hole in the back, at head height for the driver on the left side. It was clear what they intended, and the close relationship between paramilitaries and the military in that region was obvious.”

Another stark example of paramilitary violence is the Acteal Massacre. On December 22, 1997, dozens of men dressed in black uniforms and armed with high-powered weapons entered Acteal, where 200–300 refugees (mostly from displaced indigenous communities) had gathered, many in the chapel for prayer. The attackers—members of the paramilitary group Máscara Roja—opened fire on the unarmed civilians, including women, children, and pregnant women. The assault lasted about five hours, leaving 45 dead (including mutilated bodies and cases of pregnant women whose wombs were torn open) and 25 wounded.

Witnesses who fled contacted the Justice Vicar in San Cristóbal de las Casas one hour into the attack. He alerted the Chiapas Secretary of Government, who later reported that “everything was normal” in the area. State police were stationed at a checkpoint just a few hundred meters away but did not intervene, even after fleeing victims and neighbors informed them (The Mexican government formally acknowledged its role and apologized in 2020, though justice remains incomplete for many).

What the military could not do openly during the day, paramilitaries carried out at night. Many lives were lost, homes burned, and people forced from their communities. The correlation between paramilitaries and the military is well-documented through numerous cases, not isolated incidents.

continued next week…

Subscribe now

There are three roots to Zapatismo: the indigenous roots that stretch back more than 500 years, the roots in the Catholic Church which extend back to Bishop Samuel Ruiz in the mid-1960s, and urban Mexican guerrilla movements like the FLN which came to Chiapas in the 1970s and 1980s.

The best documented of these three roots is the Catholic Church because it has the most resources (money, cultural reach, and influence). The FLN is the second best known, and it is comprised mainly of urban middle-class intellectuals. Of course, the part of the story with the least documented history—almost none—is the indigenous peoples themselves. This is often the case with social movements: the leaders are spotlighted, but the actual body of people behind the movement is never fully explained. How has their thinking developed? What is their history? How have they developed as people? How have they developed through their communities?

Four major indigenous groups are involved in Zapatismo, all of whom are descended from the Mayans. Each speaks their own unique indigenous language. Their rebellion goes back about 517 years to the arrival of the Europeans. Mexico couldn’t deal with its indigenous population like the United States did (to basically exterminate them). This is because there were far more indigenous people than Spanish settlers, and indigenous culture was deeply established in Mexican society. So instead, there was intermarriage and various alliances, but rebellions persisted. The Zapatistas were not the first indigenous people to rebel, and they probably won’t be the last.

In San Andrés, in the highlands of Chiapas, there is a predominantly indigenous town with a population of around 20,000 people. In the 1960s, it was dominated by large landowners. About 5 or 6 powerful families controlled huge amounts of land around the town, which indigenous peoples worked on.

These rebellions were primarily over land. Land was the centerpiece of what the Europeans sought and wanted to control. Chiapas soil is very rich in resources. There is abundant fresh water there (Chiapas supplies about 30% of Mexico’s surface water and has major reserves). It also has oil, uranium, and valuable forestry resources (expensive and rare hardwoods) that interested Europeans. The Europeans mostly took over land in the lowland region, by riverbanks, for the richest and most accessible areas. They seized the lowlands because they were the most populated by indigenous peoples, who were then forced into the highland region.

Subscribe now

In indigenous families, when the father dies, the sons split the land; these families are usually large (6–10 children). So indigenous families in the now highly populated highland region of Chiapas quickly ran out of land to live off. As a result, starting in the 1950s but continuing into the 1980s, there was a migration of indigenous youth heading into the lowlands (rainforest).

This migration was very similar to the westward migration in U.S. history from the eastern to the western parts of America. These lowland areas had very few roads and minimal government presence. This made the regions feel somewhat like the Wild West, and some still do. The lowlands were mixed indigenous communities (with different Mayan-rooted languages and customs). They were largely unused before the indigenous migrated there because it was tropical rainforest. Landowning ranchers followed the migration into the lowlands, but in a tropical rainforest the topsoil is very thin. To use the soil effectively, it must be carefully rotated every year, but ranchers often exhausted it in a few years and moved on. Once roads were built in the lowlands/rainforest, loggers came for the wood.

In 1960, Bishop Samuel Ruiz arrived in Chiapas. By his own admission, he was initially a very conservative Catholic bishop. It took him about three or four years to explore the indigenous communities, learn their languages, and understand what they were up to politically and socially. He was radicalized very quickly. He became a leading proponent (and perhaps the only one in Mexico at that time) of Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology holds that people shouldn’t have to endure suffering while alive, and that people should strive to build God’s realm on Earth. This was a revolutionary concept because it encouraged active measures against oppression and exploitation. It alarmed political elites in Latin America and parts of the Catholic Church hierarchy, as it taught people to stand up for their beliefs.

In every Latin American revolution, the Catholic Church has split between conservatives and Liberation Theology believers who risk their necks for revolutionaries.

Samuel Ruiz began a process of politicizing and organizing the communities. He also started appointing and educating deacons who weren’t officially recognized by the Catholic Church but performed priestly duties while organizing the indigenous. He trained around seven or eight thousand deacons.

The Vatican did not support this—the Pope and the Mexican government threatened the Bishop on more than one occasion. He received regular death threats. On one occasion in 1995, his cathedral in San Cristóbal de las Casas was attacked by hundreds of ranchers and business leaders (who trace their lineage back to the Spaniards). They accused Ruiz of supporting the rebellion. About 200 indigenous people stood in front of the church, locking arms to protect it, and endured thrown objects like water, feces, paint, rocks, and bottles. Many were injured. The police did not intervene, as the attackers included or were backed by powerful local figures.

So the Catholic Church had begun organizing at a community-based level and influencing the indigenous people. They helped not just with religious matters but also with social issues: control of land, markets, water, and any other community concerns. This stemmed from Liberation Theology. Previously, if indigenous people lacked water, the Church’s stance was essentially, “That’s your lot in life—endure it, and when you die, you’ll go to heaven and won’t have to deal with it.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Catholic Church aligned itself with many political organizations that often had military elements. These groups came from urban centers in Mexico—Monterrey and Mexico City—and opposed the Mexican government’s oppression. Two signal events (though not the sole reasons) fueled guerrilla organization in Chiapas: the 1968 massacre in Mexico City leading up to the Olympic Games, in which mainly students were killed, and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (often dated to October 2, 1968, with estimates of hundreds killed by police, army, and paramilitary groups aligned with figures like Luis Echeverría, who later became President).

These events and the broader oppression led many young Mexicans to abandon hope in the political system or institutional reform. They formed political-military guerrilla groups, mainly in urban areas, composed of students and middle-class youth. In the mid-1970s, there were as many as 50 active such groups in Mexico. Some were Marxist-Leninist, some Maoist, and some Trotskyist.

These various revolutionary tendencies were a trend in Mexican society. They often sent organizers to southern Mexico, the poorest region, in which the poorest state is Chiapas. Marxism critiques capitalism, and believed there would be a spontaneous uprising against capitalism due to absolute poverty conditions, as he observed in 1850s–1880s England with terrible slum living standards—people working 14–18 hours a day, seven days a week, with poor sanitation.

Marx thought these conditions were so horrible that people would rise up. He was wrong. Most of the time, people endure their conditions and don’t revolt. So it fell to Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao to turn the analysis into strategy. Maoists focused on organizing from the countryside, while Marxist-Leninists built small cadres of middle-class intellectuals to lead.

Subscribe now

The Maoists were the first to reach the indigenous communities and aligned with Bishop Samuel Ruiz. The FLN (Forces of National Liberation), a guerrilla group from Monterrey, began coming to Chiapas in the late 1970s and sent more organizers in the early to mid-1980s. They interacted with indigenous groups. There was a mesh of organizers: the FLN and those under Bishop Ruiz from the Catholic Church. The Church organizers were moving beyond official teachings toward discussing revolt. The FLN provided access to arms. These groups eventually merged to form the Zapatistas.

On November 17, 1983, the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) was founded. Reportedly, there were six initial members: three indigenous people and three mestizo/urban Mexicans. It grew quickly, with the majority of participants being indigenous.

The interaction between Marxist-Leninist-influenced revolutionaries and the indigenous is interesting. The indigenous had no idea who Marx or Lenin was, but through discussions with the FLN, they found common ground: both understood exploitation, both critiqued capitalism strongly, both saw it as the problem (not the solution) and as the enemy. So they came together to form Zapatismo. It cannot be called pure Marxism, Leninism, or solely indigenous thinking—it was a meld of all this, plus Catholic Liberation Theology. They organized from the 1980s into the early 1990s.

The Zapatistas have their own analysis of the world, not directly influenced by Marx or others. But much of it coincides with (and re-vindicates) Marxist analysis. For instance, they have their own concept of commodity fetishism, explained this way:

“We often see nice bags of coffee in the grocery store, but when we buy that bag of coffee we don’t see the sweat of our indigenous brothers and sisters that went into producing it, and we don’t see the middleman who paid little for it, and we don’t see the children of the campesino dying because they don’t have enough money for decent medical care. We don’t see any of that—all we see is this nice bag of coffee.”

This is Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, presented in very simple and humble terms. So the indigenous never read about commodity fetishism, but they’ve arrived at the same conclusions through lived experience.

continued next week…

Weimar is pristine, a cherished heritage of German culture that profoundly shaped Rudolf Steiner in his youth. Viewing the bed in which Goethe died, the room in which he wrote, the garden house he retreated to, the river he swam in—we become intimate with Goethe. Just as we meet an author through their work or art, we meet them through the places they inhabit. Past energies linger in spaces, objects, and artifacts, serving as portals to what occurred and, through connecting to the past, to what futures might unfold. Though less thoroughly, we also visited sites tied to Schiller and Nietzsche, figures important not only for Weimar’s story but to Rudolf Steiner as well.

Subscribe now

We traced every place in Weimar where Steiner lived, even his first brief stay in an apartment overlooking the garden wall of Goethe’s house. Peter Selg’s biography helped prepare us. I was touched that Steiner arrived in Weimar at roughly my current age then, thirty-one, and struggled intensely during those years. What a relief to know he faced such deep internal discontent in his thirties, when I had half-expected life to feel more “figured out” by now.

From Steiner’s letters, we learn he felt profoundly lost during his time in Weimar; longing to contribute virtue to a society unprepared to receive and acknowledge his gifts. His early writings met rejection from academic circles; a professorship never materialized. Looking back, it is striking that a man of such potential devoted so many years largely to editing and organizing the work of others. What patience it must have required of Steiner to balance his own momentous mission with the stewardship of other’s legacies. It is incredible that a key culminator of German Idealism’s gifts should arrive at one of its greatest heritage sites only to encounter profound difficulty. Knowing Germany’s 20th-century trajectory, and Weimar’s symbolic role in the Third Reich, perhaps Steiner’s suffering was as much with the future as with the past.

Just outside of Weimar we visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Here we bore witness to the violent reality of World War II and the corruption of the human soul. I felt horror at the despair and humiliation endured by victims, yet found myself perceiving more acutely the consciousness that enabled the perpetrators. Then it struck me—these perceptions of perpetrators and victims alike are self-perception. Fear, hatred, and doubt are potentials within all humanity, shadows that can overtake the soul.

This horror echoed in my own story through the genocide, theft, and brutalization of Native Americans. Fellow students reflected on traumas from their own homelands. How can these histories be healed when the consciousness that created it is not over yet?

In Buchenwald, civilians endured violence, humiliation and starvation: dying behind fences while guards went about living their lives. This dynamic of deprivation and dehumanization continues today, as in Gaza, where innocent women and children starve to death.

Through initiation science, every human being becomes parent to every child—beyond nation, tribe, or heredity. Love will not permit the fallacy of separation. The being of love demands no less.

Subscribe now

Returning from Buchenwald’s forested outskirts to Weimar, we saw how the Nazis claimed the city as a spiritual center, their large buildings still looming. This juxtaposition—of Weimar’s creative, idealistic spring flowing through Steiner and Anthroposophy, and then into the concentration camp—awakened me to how much of the Anthroposophical Society and its initiatives still inhabit a pre-World War II consciousness. It’s easy, immersed in Steiner’s writings, to overlook how profoundly events after Rudolf Steiner’s death in 1925 have reshaped Central Europe.

Steiner himself adapted immensely to the transformation of conditions after World War I. So we must imagine that the results of Steiner’s spiritual research, particularly his indications about the mission of European folk souls, have evolved over the past century.

Steiner spoke of Central Europe as a potential spiritual center for our age, with German as the globally utilized spiritual language akin to Sanskrit in earlier epochs. The catastrophic historical events of the 20th century after Rudolf Steiner’s death suggest that any assumed role that Central Europe and the German language could have must be reexamined, not presumed.

Rudolf Steiner came to fulfill the modern mission of Central Europe just before the entire world forsook all things Central European in disgust of the Nazis. Anthroposophy became a diamond in the rough—a light before a time of greatest darkness.

Weimar revealed the greatness of the Central European gift; Buchenwald demonstrated how severely the circumstances had changed. In the aftermath, nationalism becomes a great hindrance for the Anthroposophical Movement, rather than a condition through which something greater could be born. We must honor and continue the gifts of Rudolf Steiner—cosmic wisdom—and not over-sympathize with the vehicle: culture.

When radiant light,

Meets the darkness of the abyss,

Morality,

By way of color,

Can become.

Subscribe now

At the midpoint of a particularly significant year for the Anthroposophic Society, while deep in contemplation over his time as a student at the Goetheanum, Ezra Sullivan receives a profound gift.

For five days, from the evening of the summer solstice through St. John’s Day weekend, a group of fifty Youth Section coworkers gathered at the Goetheanum. This marks the beginning of a new era for the Youth Section under the leadership of Nathaniel Williams. The gathering was a call for young people working in Anthroposophy to find a future together. I received just such a future calling. For me, it was the fruit of the gathering and I am taking it as deep inspiration leading to the 100th anniversary of the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference of 1923.

The opening night of the gathering, held on the summer solstice, coincided with the final presentations and graduation of my cohort in the Foundation Studies year at the Goetheanum. A closing such as this one can suddenly thrust open a door, sometimes too forcefully, to that which will come from the future. The culmination of my study year had me in a deeply contemplative mood, reflecting on the study program as a whole, my time in Dornach, and the state of the Anthroposophical Society. When I think back on it now, this moment of inner inquiry had prepared me to enter the St. John’s events with an extra eye, open for receiving.

Interestingly, the Youth Section gathering coincided with a St. John’s conference hosted by the General Section. These two events were hosted at the same time and had roughly the same number of attendees: two starkly different groups going through St. John’s Day “together” at the Goetheanum. The youth gathering was comprised of young people while the St. John’s conference attendees were much older; the youth gathering was highly multicultural, and thus held entirely in English, whereas the General Section’s conference was almost exclusively in German

As the youth gathering closed its final session on the night before St. John’s Day, a massive thunderstorm broke out with violent gusts of wind and an intense downpour of hard rain. This kept us socializing in our shelter on top of the hill, as we waited for better weather before descending to the Youth Section for dinner.

After the storm passed, we set out, hearts aflutter in the high summer mood of social and cultural exchange. Then we saw it: a tree down. A massive trunk of the scarlet beech tree that stands off the southwest corner of the carpentry shop above the Goetheanum had broken off. It had fallen perfectly, striking only one millimeter of the bench that sat beneath it. From there, we peered downhill to the Felsli.

The Felsli is a piece of landscape art in the open field southwest of the Goetheanum. It plays an important role in the landscape. The Goetheanum and Haus Duldeck sit on a ridge that runs east to west, extending out from the main ridge, which runs north to south, down into the valley below. The Felsli sits on the furthermost tip of the east-west ridge, looking out over the valley below to the west, the last point of movement through this landscape. It is a movement that begins with Haus Shuurman, peaks at the Goetheanum, passes by Haus Duldeck, and finally culminates at the Felsli.

“Landscape art” is too academic of a label for the Felsli—it’s a shrine, made of earth and stone. So much more could be said about the Felsli, but I will stay with the two linden trees planted at its center and the oak off to the side, which were standing at the time of the first Goetheanum. I believe the oak was already mature, and the two lindens were planted together about 120 years ago. One linden grew faster and overshadowed the other.

Subscribe now

I’d heard a special story during my study year: lindens are a St. John’s tree. The story tells that at midsummer, St. John was sad as the farmers scythed the pastures for winter animal feed because the bees and other pollen-seeking critters would want for food. At midsummer, most of the trees and shrubs have already finished flowering, and with the meadows mowed, what would the bees eat? Jesus then gave the linden tree the most magnificent flowers, full of effervescent pollen, which open in their fullest bounty around St. John’s day. The Felsli linden trees were at the height of their flowering glory! When the linden is in flower, the whole crown becomes alive, vibrating with the movement, heat, and sound of bees and accompanied by the sweetest smell. This linden tree, at the center of the Felsli, stood at the height of its rhythm of expansion into the cosmos, absolutely ecstatic in its great offering, with a healthy crown full of lush green leaves and flowers.

And, like the scarlet beech, it fell during the momentous St. John’s thunderstorm. The Youth Section coworkers were some of the very first to come across it, along with the Goetheanum caretakers. Despite its lush appearance, the tree was not healthy. It had rotted nearly all the way through! The entire center was soft and decayed from fungus and only the cambium, or inner bark, was alive. Although I had spent much time at the Felsli, I had never noticed that this linden tree in the center branched into three separate trunks about 12 feet above the ground. All three trunks, a trinity, had fallen towards the Goetheanum, a St. John’s Day offering

The timing of this offering is meaningful. In 2023, we are living through the 100th anniversary of the most significant year for the history of the Anthroposophical Society. 1923 began with the destruction of an initiation temple, the first Goetheanum, and ended with the refounding of the Society, to my mind Rudolf Steiner’s single greatest deed. When, at the middle point between the anniversaries of these two great events, a tree at the center of a sacred shrine falls at the steps of the Goetheanum, I take note. As I live through this year with an engaged heart, these potent and explicit symbols have come to meet me: the spiritual striving of the youth, the devotion of the ageing membership, St. John, the wind, the rain, the linden flowers, and the rotten heartwood.

As we face internal division, persecution, financial hardship, and a crisis of leadership, we might see Rudolf Steiner standing amidst the ashes of the first Goetheanum, in a deep, open inquiry into the future of the Society, and follow his journey, the Society’s journey, as well as our own journeys through the year toward the resolution to refound the Society. To begin again—it’s a trial, a task, an open question. Can we be refounded? Can we renew?

May we allow this year,

To shake us to the core.

This is a true calling.

Honouring the old,

As it crumbles to the ground.

Death becomes life.

Starting with the heart,

New growth can begin.

The rest will indeed follow.

Subscribe now

On December 31st, 2022 I participated in the night watch of the Goetheanum. It was the 100 year anniversary of the burning of the first Goetheanum. The first Goetheanum was a jewel from the spiritual world for human beings to experience what human culture could be when we decide to endeavor our humanity. It was tragically burned down, by arson, on the night of New Years Eve 1922. It was a fire initiation for Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Society, who had spent ten years working on the building. Much more information can be found on the events elsewhere, I would like to relay my experience here.

The Goetheanum decided to hold a night watch in which free events were scheduled throughout the night and into the morning. I signed on to volunteer for the night watch, and received free entry to the Christmas Conference which occurred in the days before. My post was to help the farmer and gardener of the Goetheanum garden park tend to various fire pits which were arranged around the Goetheanum. I was given this job because I am by profession a farmer, and my lack of German language makes me an unideal candidate to interact with the mostly German speaking public.

The night began a bit spooky because of the ever present bang! and pop! of celebratory fireworks putting me on edge. It felt like a war zone, but as the crowd filled in the space the fireworks became background noise.

Next the fires flushed the atmosphere around the building in smoke, which was in a way appropriate. The elements were present. An older coworker remarked that when she first saw the smoke her heart sank as at first glance it looked like the red smoke, which reportedly was seen from the melting of the glass windows of the first Goetheanum. “Not the red smoke!”

Given the circumstances I expected a solemn event with imaginations flooding us of a community 100 years ago in absolute tragedy as they spent the night watching the smoke unfurl from the building, then fire emerge from the cupola, the columns standing amongst the fallen cupola until the last column, Jupiter, fell. But the night was really anything but solemn. It was festive and joyous! How happy we were to be together, united in anthroposophy, enjoying lectures, eurythmy, music, exhibits, food, and conversation. Standing around the fire, making new friends and watching the stars on that clear warm winter night.

Subscribe now

Although the night was in commemoration of the first Goetheanum, it also became a celebration of the second Goetheanum. It was lit up on all sides, quite possibly for the first time ever. And I tell you, it was so beautiful. My appreciation for this building deepened tremendously. How grateful we all felt to have this building! The reverence for those founding anthroposophists who after such devastation, rebuilt again. Their deed, the inner work it must have entailed, created a force which was truly palpable that night.

A last note on the night, the sheer amount of people. It warmed our hearts and teared up many an eye to see the main hall full of people for the midnight eurythmy performance. Standing room only, and people turned away at the door. Especially after the pandemic, and almost total loss of community gathering spaces, the people filling the hall was a light that shined into infinite depths.

I was the last one to tend the fires, as the morning sun rose over the hill. I went through the entire night without sleep, no coffee as fuel but only the interest in the night watch to feed my fire. I came back the next night, to look again at the Goetheanum. The fire pit was still there. I stared into the ashes and coals of the pit, and imagined the immensity of ash that must have been produced by the burning of the first Goetheanum.

I reached into the ash and grabbed a handful of this ceremonial fire. I spread them where Rudolf Steiner’s ashes, and many other early anthroposophists, were buried. As I finished the circle of ashes around the burial site I felt a strong etheric pulsation, and I kneeled down to the earth.

Gratitude to be a ceremonial tender of this sacred space. The forces Rudolf Steiner brought are here, working, breathing, dreaming, and feeling.

Then I went back to the Goetheanum, to the fire pit, and looked back into the ashes. As I reached my hand into the ash I reached into the ashes of the first Goetheanum. Substance transformed on the most relevant level of existence. I took two handfuls, and walked spreading them in a circle around the Goetheanum.

A sheath. A beginning.

To be in this world with such love.

To serve a sacrifice so total.

I will stand in this light. I will think into these depths.

I love the purification of this fire.

I, Ezra Sullivan, have decided to leave my position, as Farm Director, at Sunfield Farm.

Good luck.

Ha! Nah, I’ll say more.

But I am going to treat you as community, and tell you my real story. Which might seem odd in this context, but I have some news to break on you. Waldorf education and Biodynamic agriculture were created to foster initiates. What is an initiate? A human being who has resolved to meet their humanity. To understand myself so that I can give myself in freedom.

Sunfield will be with me always. At Sunfield I reached the culmination of my task in young adulthood. Since eighteen years old I have had a mission: to become intimate, beyond conception, with nature. On these fields, pastures and forests I developed myself, and came to know many aspects and forces. I gave my activity to the animals, plants and soils who in kind, shared their wisdom with me.

Then, in the last year or so everything changed. In my personal life, I lost a love, and at Sunfield I faced a heightened opposition to what the nature spirits and I were aspiring to manifest. I felt a tide shifting, and then last summer I took a fortuitous trip to my childhood home. There, in ritual with a mentor, my ancestors began to speak. I realized that my mission was more in reaction to a wound than a true expression of my individuality.

By knowing the past, I began my future.

May we foster reverence for the struggle, as it is the medium from which inspiration can grow.

Blessings on your work!

Farmer Ezra

“How satisfying it is to know that the first and most important meeting with a being of the suprasensory world is a meeting with the full reality of our own being which will, in turn, lead us onward in our development!”

—Rudolf Steiner, The Threshold of the Spiritual World

“If I put on a magician’s cloak and asked people to perform the craziest exercise, like running up some mountain at midnight to do something nonsensical, believe me, they would all do it! Everyone would be chasing after me. But to spend years of effort to overcome and set aside perhaps just one character weakness or bad habit – that’s just not interesting, is it? People simply don’t believe that a single change in their own character – such as a vain person admitting his vanity and becoming ashamed of it – could possibly have more impact on their spiritual progress than listening to hundreds of lectures or committing all of my lecture cycles to memory […].”

—Adelheid Petersen, Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner

Subscribe now

Upon beholding the vivid and uncompromisingly truthful experience of my being, a tendency arises to turn away from the spiritual world and the reality of myself, back towards the material world. Often this tendency is more powerful than the will forces which are available to me.

Rudolf Steiner advises us to cognize the tendency to turn away. When faced with a shadow that is seemingly impossible to illuminate, cognition is a pathway to engage the will to change. It is a new theory of change beyond force, abstention, or compulsion—call it cognition, attention, or call it love.

Inspired by the quotes above I put this question to myself: when do I find myself falling short of my best intentions? How can my will become more strongly engaged? Where does my aspiration meet an immovable force? For my study project at the Goetheanum, a Free School of Spiritual Scientific Research, I decided to experiment with controlling my thoughts because the concentration exercise recommended by Steiner was difficult for me. I had been consistently failing in my attempts at it for eight years. Twice a year, I dedicated five minutes to this exercise every day for one month, and during this month I would repeatedly (and pathetically) avoid it. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed the strengthening experience from Rudolf Steiner’s other “basic” exercises: controlling the will, balancing sorrow and joy, open-mindedness, positivity, and inner harmony. But this control of thinking exercise was to the point of being undoable for me.

The control of thoughts exercise requires setting time aside from everyday life to concentrate on one object. The length of time suggested depends on the capacity of the individual and their life circumstances: it is important to find an amount of time that is doable yet still challenging. Even thirty seconds could be a start, and the amount of time dedicated can increase as capacities are strengthened. When we are too tired or distracted to perform the exercise, it is better to abstain until better conditions present themselves than to perform it poorly.

As a rule, the object should be as simple as possible, say a spoon or paperclip. When the object is not interesting, only our inner decision and effort are what maintain concentration. A human-made object is preferable to an object created by nature because the creation of an inorganic object can be more confidently cognized.

The essence of concentration is to stay on the theme. All daily concerns, sense impressions, and unrelated concepts are distractions from the exercise. I found that, initially, the distractions are intense and overpowering from two directions: above and below. Thoughts appear which are so fascinating that they pull me up into their realms of spiritual light. In contrast, my body suddenly manifests urgent needs to shift, scratch, or relax. I must look through, or over, these distractions, back into the theme. Distractions are aspects of ourselves that we have not yet mastered, coming into conscious experience. We cannot master that which we are unconscious of, so we can be grateful for becoming aware of distractions.

Georg Kühlewind suggests doing the exercise as if sitting down to practice an instrument. This changed my approach and reminded me of a similar activity that I had positive associations with: I realized that the concentration exercise is like the imagination games I played as a child. I would spend hours imagining conversations, battles, and dramatic events. I remembered the level of uninterrupted concentration that I achieved during my childhood imaginations. This realization brought me confidence through self-recognition and gave more levity to the practice.

Every day I changed the focus, alternating between shape, function, and idea. For “shape”, I began by working through the different physical aspects of the spoon imaginatively, cognizing every angle and detail. For “function”, I considered the manufacturing of the spoon, the experience of its use in the hand, the utilitarian purposes for different aspects of its design, and the impulse behind the original creation. Why have a spoon anyway? Finally, for “idea”, I moved in the direction of contemplation, which involves thinking through the theme directly rather than thinking around the theme, as in concentration. Here, the particulars of the object are transcended into the general formative idea: I imagine different spoons and dissolve the image over and over again until the archetypal idea of the spoon begins to resonate within me as strongly as a sense-perceptible object.

Subscribe now

The focus on the idea itself is a half step from concentration to contemplation, or thinking the theme. I attempt to access the essence of the idea itself beyond its manifestation as a physical object or its representation in a word or image. To do this, I have to step outside of space and time and into creation. It’s the same “place” in consciousness that the child experiences when they take in a new idea or that the inventor experiences when she realizes an idea from potential to manifestation. This is an unusual experience, to go to the beginning of cognition and experience an idea that I’ve already known. I simultaneously create and perceive in light.

When these exercises began, they were filled with words and fast-moving imaginations that held my focus together, but as my capacity for focus increased and the nature of distractions became better understood, the words started to dissipate and the images simplified. As my attention-giving capacity increased, the content decreased.

By keeping the same theme of practice over a long period of time, the differentiation between remembering past thoughts and thinking in the present became more and more evident. Remembering past thoughts is a distraction from the exercise. The objective is thinking as both activity and perception, which happens in the present and not as a memory exercise. When I can think the same thoughts every day without the use of memory, it actually becomes fun. I begin to play.

After a time, thanks to Kühlewind, I became aware of the bridge to monism that this exercise presents. To perform the exercise, we often fragment ourselves into one who has willed the thinking and another who actually performs the concentration. It is a subtle but powerful realization. Is there a self who has stepped back from the theme to compel the execution of the exercise? The aim of the exercise is not willed thinking, but the will living in the thinking. As Georg Kühlewind said in The Schooling of Consciousness, “The more I notice what I do, the less I do it.” One way to achieve this is to bring attention to this aspect of the exercise by repeated false starts until we can experience a unified consciousness.

This seemingly excruciatingly dull exercise became a pathway to developing treasured capacities. I came to know thinking as an act—not as a means to an end but as an end within itself. It wasn’t easy, but it was achievable once I came to face the self who couldn’t do the exercise. Every day, as I sat down to the exercise, I experienced two beings: the one who had never wanted to do this and the one who had already decided to do it.

Subscribe now

I was seeking to understand how attention itself is given, no matter the theme. At the same time, I was running away from the concentration exercise, which was the very activity that could give me a living experience of attention. What we seek is veiled in the very thing which we struggle to face.

Cognition is the key to shadow work. Here is a potent theory of change, especially when the tendency to turn away overpowers the will. The world “becomes” through love, not force. When I give my attention, I begin to consciously relate. From intimate relationship arises new depths of understanding. After understanding, we are graced with forgiveness. Here the threshold to love is opened. When love is present, the will is effortlessly available. Then, I marry the self to the world, and become.

Giving attention,

Creates

Intimacy,

Understanding,

Forgiveness,

Love,

World-Becoming.

Introduction

The Threefold Colab is a new initiative of the Threefold Educational Foundation and School in Chestnut Ridge, New York. Threefold Educational Foundation – a 140-acre community, campus, and farm only twenty miles from Manhattan – has been bringing the teachings of anthroposophy into practice since 1926, by hosting initiatives in education, spiritual scientific research, agriculture, and the arts. Twelve unique institutions, and several neighboring ones, find their home within the context of Threefold, all united in the pursuit of a modern path of initiation.

The Threefold Colab is an affiliate of the Youth Section of the School for Spiritual Science, and will serve as a key focal point for the work of the Youth Section in North America. The School of Spiritual Science was founded in 1923, to be a new impulse in human society, for the creation and development of spiritual research. The School has its headquarters at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, and is supported by the General Anthroposophical Society which comprises thirty-seven country societies, and 42,000 members. The School is composed of twelve sections, with the Youth Section serving the spiritual striving of the youth.

At this time, the Anthroposophical Movement is facing a major crisis of succession. Of the 42,000 members of the Anthroposophical Society globally, about 4% are under the age of 40. And of the 20,000 members of the School for Spiritual Science, there are 300 members under the age of 40. This crisis extends to the initiatives, where the Waldorf Schools have been experiencing a chronically low supply of new teachers for many years. Meanwhile, the average age among the hundreds of participants at Rudolf Steiner’s final address at Michaelmas of 1924 was thirty years old. Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven was thirty years old when he was appointed by Rudolf Steiner to be the first General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands. Finally, the average age of the original Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society in 1923 was forty-six years old. New generations are not coming to the movement because what is being offered is not captivating to them.

The mission of the Colab is to renew anthroposophy into a meaningful, legible, and practical movement for today. Anthroposophy is a path of knowing, of sourcing spiritual wisdom. Often the path can be mistaken for the destination, but the origin and destination of most spiritual traditions is universal truth. Anthroposophy’s mission is to support the human soul through initiation. Initiation is a path of self-knowledge in which knowledge becomes wisdom through the birth of the true self, love. The process of initiation prepares the individual to give more, and more in freedom and service to justice.

“Justice is the human soul finding a place to return. Justice is the day after a long night.”

Orland Bishop

The greatest injustice, the ultimate conspiracy, that humanity faces today is materialism. Young individuals are often the most at risk, and on the frontlines, in this battle with materialistic forces seeking to dominate attention and meaning. The signs of struggle appear as social isolation, screen addiction, and mental health crises. But the Earth and the stars are conspiring for human beings to experience the realities prepared to become, through love. We become truly human when we choose to give our life energies to light and love rather than desire and mistrust. It is as simple as doing what one knows to be true, to develop the willingness to be ourselves.

The Colab creates a co-working space in which young adults are mentored and empowered to develop the seeds they bring to sow into the earth. Our vision for the work of the Youth Section is not to sequester young folks off to the side where they do superficial activities, but to be a welcoming party for the future of the Anthroposophical Movement. The Youth Section is not exclusively for those who are not yet ready to engage directly in the teachings of anthroposophy. The way anthroposophy is taught and represented, not anthroposophy itself, has to change to meet a new time. The Youth Section has this capacity: to create new thinking, art, and initiatives and host everyone in our creations.

The vision of the Threefold Colab is a continuity of creation founded in love. To do this we renew and transform the declining forms of society and culture so that the past can give to the future. When we truly engage in a transformation process, we don’t know what will come out on the other end. When a free act is not for outcome, ultimately, in creation, there is no protection for our expectations or the status quo.. Transformation goes beyond intention, and even beyond receptivity, into a third faculty of the human soul: creation. The processes of transformation are not one thing becoming another through conscious intention, conscious activity doesn’t necessarily mean knowing what one will do before one does it. Transformation involves a certain degree of improvisation because to truly step into creation is to enter the unknown. In Genesis, the darkness was created for a distinct purpose: To provide a schooling of consciousness for the light to move towards its highest form of expression.

Subscribe now

The Threefold Colab Programs

Three distinct initiatives: the Residency Program, The Anthroposophy Course (all-ages), and a venue to host activities organized by local young adults.

Residency Program

Beginning September 2025, Threefold invites young adults to participate in a transformative residential experience in the Lower Hudson Valley of New York State. The Colab is essentially an opportunity to explore a holistic lifestyle in a spiritually oriented community. The program offers accompaniment, mentorship, networking, and friendship. Residents will work out of their own initiative on their individual project, contribute toward Youth Section team operations, and work on the hyperlocal level in on-the-ground service work.

Residents are accepted on a rolling basis, each with their own individual commitment period. The program is half-time, tuition free; housing is available for rent in private rooms with shared kitchen/bathroom.

The Colab stands on three interconnected pillars:

1. Study: Developing an inner capacity for meaning

2. Initiative: Creating projects that address contemporary challenges

3. Service: Grounding wisdom in practical community engagement

Study invites the development of understanding in pursuit of becoming a better steward of the earth’s potential. Much of the study sessions are conversations in which we create community with Rudolf Steiner, and other teachers, through their writings. At the core of the pedagogical approach is to incorporate the foundations of spiritual science and the needs of the individuals present. In addition to horizontal learning, the program hosts experienced practitioners as visiting faculty.

The study program serves the development of three archetypal faculties of the human soul. In the development of our faculty of thinking, we explore epistemology, in pursuit of living thinking as a spiritual activity. For the faculty of feeling, the arts are explored with hands-on projects in eurythmy, speech and drama, sculpture, painting, music, etc. Finally, for the will faculty of the human soul, we bring in both the practical fields and the exploration of self-knowledge through inner exercises. In practical activities, residents delve into agriculture, herbalism, education, Goethean science, etc. Self-knowledge through inner exercises refers to exercising in the gymnasium of the soul by strengthening our muscles of concentration, contemplation and meditation.

The heart of the Colab is initiative, which we engage through creating societal transformation by researching and developing spiritual, scientific and artistic initiatives and questions. The program supports the unique expression of each resident, as well as providing projects for the Colab team to accomplish together. Every project has a research or inner component as well as a social and outer aspect. First we identify where our personal gifts meet the world’s needs, provide mentorship, peer-to-peer collegial support, and community feedback through regular sharing opportunities with the wider community. Finally, our accomplishments are amplified across the Global Youth Section Network.

The free initiative can manifest in various ways: a touring theater act, a massive conference, land art projects involving masonry and carpentry, hosting intimate community conversations on polarizing topics, incubating social enterprises, etc.

Service grounds esoteric study in practical reality while developing capacities for collaboration, resourcefulness, and discipline. Through our work lives, residents participate on the operational level of community life, learning new skills, and developing new capacities. Service work connects the residents with the various institutions within Threefold Community and the neighboring Foundations, giving everyone a diversity of interaction and relationship.

Potential projects include: biodynamic farming, demolition(!), elder care at the Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Foundation, painting houses, landscaping, cleaning, entrepreneurship in artisan crafts (pottery, candlemaking, woodwork), etc.

Beginning Anthroposophy: The Threefold Intro Course

An all-ages, part-time course which meets on twelve Saturdays from October through March. We explore anthroposophy through conversations in community with esoteric texts, lectures, and hands-on artistic experience. The course gives participants a broad view of the various paths and initiatives streaming out of anthroposophy. Anyone, of any age, seeking a greater understanding of the threefold nature of the human being - body, soul and spirit - and how to put this wisdom into practice is welcome!

Activity & Event Space

Finally, the event and activity space for young adults living and working at Threefold and the Fellowship Foundations. Activities range from book study groups to music jam nights. Additionally, a place of hospitality for casual unannounced social time and visitors. Stop by, meet a new friend or bring an old friend, have a cup of tea, and be welcome.

Our Vision & Call to Action

The Threefold Colab is radically rethinking how society could reflect the nobility of the human soul. This is a beginning toward developing new forms of idealistic community that support human beings in realizing their humanity. We create a space for hospitality, engaged learning, meaningful work, biodynamic meals, seasonal festivals, exploring, creating, and transforming ourselves and our understanding together.

We believe that together, we can create the conditions for a new generation of spiritually awakened, practically skilled, and socially engaged young people to lead us forward. And to make the pathway to Anthroposophy financially accessible for all, we are currently seeking co-investment partnerships.

Please visit the website for more information: threefold.org/youth

After living in South America for three years, I discovered that my task had to be fulfilled back in North America. Quickly after coming home, Michael Phillips’ work entered my life. I arrived home in the late fall, and spent my first winter pruning orchards outside of Yosemite in Sonora, California. Here I found The Apple Grower in a farmer’s library, and devoured it immediately.

Michael Phillips’ first work was an important experience for me. I was full of questions on how culture in the US was meeting this question of agriculture for the future, and in The Apple Grower I found resonance. The book covered the gamut of siting, selecting varietals, planting, care, and harvest for the organic orchardist. I resonated with the cultural impulse shown through the depiction of the apple orchard and cider house as a community meeting place.

The Apple Grower’s explanation of spraying protocol was not so appealing to me. I had seen conventional organic spraying done in South America and Northern California, and I had an immediate distaste for it. The products were far too foreign for me, and the ideology of it worked so strongly against the natural forces present in the orchard. I was searching for a more homegrown, gentler solution.

A couple of months later, I saw Michael Phillips speak, for the first and only time, at the Eco-Farm Conference in January of 2014. At this time, I was testing the waters of the organic movement, and I couldn’t quite locate the agrarian soulfulness that I had come to know and love in South American village life. For me, Michael Phillips’ keynote, and especially the invocation he closed with, was my agrarian homecoming to the US.

Subscribe now

Then I read The Holistic Orchard, and I was captivated by how the content became alive in his writing. There was so much evolution from the first to second book, which inspired me about the potential of a human being to transform and innovate. He started with a conventional organic approach in The Apple Grower to really present a future direction for organic agriculture in The Holistic Orchard. Phillips showcased an in-depth, scientific research-based, deeply poetic and yet accessible window into the soul of the orchard. His writing enabled me to see with much greater depth what was happening on so many levels. The Holistic Orchard expanded my framework so that I could develop new, broader questions.

Still, I couldn’t quite get on board with the spray regime. Phillips’ new approach moved towards infusing the orchard with life, rather than killing the bad guys. This I liked, but I still had an instinctive aversion towards these sprays. In South America, I had experienced an agriculture largely without the use of products foreign to the farm organism, and I remained devoted to this perspective.

In this same period, I was deepening my relationship with Biodynamics. Through procuring ingredients for the Biodynamic Preparations and observing the transformations of substance, I was able to fully participate in the elemental processes of the medicine I was applying to the farm. This was deeply meaningful.

It was important for me to build a bridge between Phillips’ spray regime and my own Biodynamic sprays and compost preparations. Thus, I felt deeply touched when, towards the end of his life, Phillips increasingly spoke and wrote about Biodynamics. Especially in the content that he produced for Stella Natura over the past few years. Michael built the bridge too. He brought his deep wisdom, penetrating curiosity, and pleasing poetry to understanding Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course, and regularly referred to the deep relevance of this contribution toward the holistic agriculture movement.

In 2014, I used Michael Phillips’ online community orchard network to connect with two amazing homesteaders outside of Eugene, Oregon. They have become second parents to me, my Pacific Northwest homesteader parents. Michael’s online community provided me with the opportunity to fulfill important destiny connections. Together with my new friends, I sought out scionwood and grafted hundreds of apple trees, culminating in many new orchards for their homestead, but also my first orchard in Washington State. In 2018, I planted about one and a half acres of sandy gravelly ground with apples, 70 trees comprising 50 different cultivars. A very eclectic orchard, including all types, colors, and shapes of apples, all planted on seedling rootstock, which necessitates large spacing between plants. The orchard is laid out on clear and straight rows for ease of access. Every tree has a shrub planted in between, within the row, as well as herbs and flowers in the surrounding tree ring to boost diversity.

Only planted four years ago, the orchard is in its beginning. After having worked, witnessed, and conceptualized many orchards in various systems and periods of development, it feels exciting to be starting a new story. What will this orchard tell us? Waiting for the apples to produce feels like I have friends living in these trees, and they are eagerly waiting to present themselves to me as well. We are intimate with each other. I am in these apples to come, and they too are within me, as I eagerly wait, patiently making this orchard sacred. From the rosy pink wood, we will cast our buds in the spring. And I know Michael Phillips, who died in January of 2022, will be there too.

My relationship with growing apples began in 2011, in Tunuyán, Argentina, right at the base of the Andes Mountains. On a bitterly cold late fall day, I joined a crew of WWOOF volunteers to harvest the last of the Granny Smiths. The orchard was primarily Red Delicious, but Granny Smiths were planted every so often for pollination. The Red Delicious apples were used for pressing apple juice and fermenting vinegar, and the Granny Smiths were stored in the root cellar for winter’s eating. See, if you let a few good frosts fall on the Granny Smith, the green changes in places to slight pink, and the flavor expands from sour to sweet.

I was eighteen years old, and I had a strong trust that my guiding spirit was leading me towards an unfolding biography that would integrate nature with spirituality. I knew immediately that this farm held keys for my future. Here I met the orchard. Here I met Maria Thun’s calendar, natural building, romance, gardening, dancing, and here I met community. An agrarian community founded to host new ideas.

But back to the apples. There were roughly twelve acres planted into apple trees. Half the orchard was 40 years old, and was kept in relatively standard organic practice: cover crops, regular irrigation during the growing season, annual pruning to an open vase system, composted manure applications, understory mowing, occasional soil cultivation, and the thinning of fruit. This was the most productive part of the apple orchard. The open vase pruning system lends itself well to three-ladder-position harvesting, which enables speed of harvest. The rows and understory were neatly maintained with mowing and cultivation, enabling ease of access for the orchardists to work. In this system, the input and output were both high, and it drove a small business. The work was accomplished with volunteers and extended family, which enabled other, more spiritual, cultural projects to exist in the surrounding time.

The other half of the apple orchard was roughly one hundred years old. This half was cared for in an entirely different manner, inspired by the natural farming writings of Masanobu Fukuoka. The only input into this orchard system was flood irrigation. Meaning, the trees were never pruned, no compost or other fertilizers were applied, fruit was not thinned, the soil was never disturbed, and the understory was never mowed.

The trees in the second half of the orchard, or what we can call the old orchard, were tall. All the trees were grafted onto a standard, probably seedling, rootstock. Which means that the trees could grow to their full height and were not inhibited in growth and form by the rootstock.

Since this old orchard had been abandoned for decades before the family bought the farm, about one third of the original old trees had died back. In their places, the seedling rootstock had thrown up new trees. As you may know, every apple seed is a genetic individual. Plant every seed from an apple and you will have that many entirely unique apple cultivars! Each of these seedling trees was unique, and most were delicious: red, green, yellow, keepers, saucers, juicers, cider apples, and dessert apples. The diversity these apples brought was starkly evident amidst the panorama of the Red Delicious and scattered Granny Smith orchard.

The understory of the old orchard was an important feature; here too, diversity was widely noted. Grass, small shrubs, vines, large swaths of herbaceous biennials claimed their territories, and so on. The insects and animal life abounded as well! Here the native bees could be found, foxes and local honey bees thronged to this rewilded patch of orchard.

When we worked in the young orchard, tasks were clear, like the lines of the trees. Work was quick and effective. The crew dutifully felt like cogs in a well-oiled system, moving the apples to the juicing room, and there was purpose in this work. But once we experienced the old orchard, its quality engrossed us, and we knew something was missing in the young orchard.

The entire system interacted with us in a more complex way. Harvesting was a rewilding experience, and a lesson in the cultivation of patience. Longer, heavy ladders were used, and finding their feet amidst the thick underbrush was exhausting. You could barely walk a straight line through it. One had to traverse fallen trees, ant hills, dense undergrowth, and uneven ground. Many apples were lost to the underbrush; perhaps these “lost” apples were an important part of the fertility cycle of the old orchard. Accompanying the lack of thinning the fruit, harvest was strongly biennial in nature, leading to boom-and-bust years of production. In the old orchard, the apples were fewer and smaller, yet their flavors were far more interesting. This complexity held a warmth of heart, which matched our humanity in a certain way.

These two different systems of management were employed for a variety of reasons. Originally, the farm family did not have enough time, energy, or capital to “restore” or replant the old half of the orchard. So leaving it be was a decision made from necessity. Over time, the “old” orchard became a place of philosophical discourse. What is the relationship between humanity and nature? How do our actions affect outcome? How can outcome be measured? When can humanity reach into nature and make a medicine, and when does humanity’s reach into nature make a poison? This discourse was a guiding stream in our lives during this time. It was an open question that this farm hosted, and around thirty or so volunteers every year visited to experience it.

Continued next time…

Subscribe now

Moving from the intellectual to the spiritual faculty of the human soul is an essential step in finding The Light Between.

The intellect often hosts a critique, a separation, focusing on what is done less than perfect or simply left undone. This prevents me from truly meeting my colleagues. Here is where the adversaries infiltrate human society, they inhabit the space in between us, when we cast each other away.

Inquiring beyond the intellect, a knowing beyond the mind, I find an activity which does justice to who I really am, it is in fact a liberation of the I am. In this field, perception and cognition are identical, experience has meaning again; it is radiant, ever flexible and alive. This level of attention is a birth of the true self, a baptism through the water mysteries of living thinking.

Here in this transition, we find an essential rite of passage from the intellect to the spiritual soul, the sacrament of forgiveness. I can no longer cast judgements onto others, informed by mere corpses of knowledge. I discover that self-knowledge is not self-interest, it is for service, not power, and it putrefies unless we give ourselves to others. To be clear we are not asked to give the knowledge, but ourselves, that which is enriched by the knowledge, to others. This is an act of love. To prepare ourselves to stand in front of another and be open to what I don’t know. Because the Logos inhabits the weakest part of the other human being, but the adversaries want us to mistake it as an inconvenience to our own motives.

Distracted by the betrayal, we say but this happened and it hurts me. So why do it? Why forgive? That is like asking why you should be you. You’re here, so why not do what you know to be true, to forgive. Not for outcome, but in freedom with the superconscious forces of light and love. If there was a why, then it would not be forgiveness.

How do we do it? I think that if the how could be given, it would have already been given. So we prepare and practice, which requires discipline, faith and a certain degree of improvisation.

It is time for a risk, to move from content and information to capacities and experience, from culture and all the other inheritances to cosmic wisdom. We could come together in such a way that it becomes a speaking, a speaking which sets the world free. Free for what? Free to host a beginning which resolves our separate realities.

The individualistic stream of intention must be cultivated, and then surrendered to host the other with receptivity. To truly become a human being, is to know love. And it is not the kind of love that we only give to those we like.

Subscribe now

The Light Between humans can enter in mysterious and unexpected ways. Here is a story that I feel compelled to tell from my life, as an example of the light which can exist between individuals.

From 18 to 21 years old I lived in South America, and towards the end of my time there I had an interaction with an elderly Quechua woman for which I am eternally grateful for. Her action changed me as if a chemical reaction had taken place, an alchemical process of radical change.

To give some context, it was 2013, and I had embarked on a bicycle trip from La Paz, Bolivia to Cusco, Peru after training for a few weeks up some pretty treacherous mountain paths outside of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Much of this trip was at high elevation (12,000 feet or so) through the Altiplano region, around Lake Titicaca, and then up the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

In a sense at this period in my life I was blissfully directionless. My main aim was to walk the path in front of me as it was being presented. I was following a certain vision I had at that time of melting into the landscape through transcendent experiments in consciousness. I definitely had no intention of returning to the United States, as I felt that governments in developed countries far too limited free initiative.

During my trip I made many connections and friends after my wallet had been stolen, and befriending and begging became my only option for food and shelter. Then my bicycle brakes broke and I was only relying on my front brakes, which was another test of courage as I navigated the many hills. I am coming towards the end of my ten day trip, just a day or so from Cusco, and my knee develops this incredible pain. I tried working with it, breathing with it, dissolving it, but no - it persists. Such that I finally stop, without mental participation or any conscious decision making. My body pulls the bike over to the side of the road.

And there I am, in a rural village in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, standing right by this rock wall which comes up to my waist. On the other side I am looking over a field of recently harvested maize in which a group of folks are working through piles of harvest. I end up spending the day with them as we all sit around together chucking and grading the maize harvest.

Subscribe now

I get invited to dinner in a house next to the field and end up sleeping in the field with the patriarch in a little hut for honoring the spirits, and for watching over the harvest to protect it from thieves. The family is very warm and we speak of many things in their thatched roof house with open fire. I am served a warming soup for dinner and breakfast of light chicken broth, yerba buena, fava bean, and quinoa. The whole time I am eating and talking with the father and son, the mother is kind of minding her own business consumed in the running of the house. I had assumed that she didn’t speak Spanish, which is common for that area, as she never addressed me but spoke with the others in Quechua.

The two men leave for work and school leaving me to finish my breakfast alone with the woman. As I get up, and bid her farewell, readying myself to hop on the bicycle again. I had planned to somehow get access to my bank account in Cusco, fix up the bicycle, and continue north up the Andes Mountain Range to Ecuador. As I am raising my hand in greeting toward the woman she approaches me. Slowly she walks across the room with her eyes dead centered on mine, and her hands in front of her heart, palm to palm, in prayer. She says, “Vaya a tu casa, a tu familia, a tu tierra, regresa a tu casa, a tu familia, a tu tierra…” (return to your home, to your family, to place…) over and over again like a mantram. With tears in her eyes, she reached her hands up onto my shoulders.

I was in shock. It was as if a Sun came in the room, or maybe it was as if she was Mother Mary and I Jesus, the Son. We became elevated into a mythological realm, or even beyond the mythological into the superconscious realms - that wasn’t my life. I can’t recall actually saying anything but, “gracias” over and over again in response. Then I stumble out of the house and onto my bicycle.

Instantly, I knew: homeward bound. I returned to Los Angeles, California later that year and reconstituted my life in North America where my home is, where my family is, and where my place is.

My experience going into and coming out of the “Sophia Rising Conference”, hosted by the Anthroposophical Society in America in Santa Fe, New Mexico—April 2022.

As is often the case, the streams of energy I brought into the event are only subtly connected to the streams which I took with me afterwards. What I brought was worked through unconsciously whilst what I take with me afterwards is a surprise, a gift.

Having studied Anthroposophy since 2014, I was curious to participate in my first official Anthroposophical Society hosted conference. During the first seven years of study, I kept my relationship to Anthroposophy direct, intimate, and largely anonymous. It felt important to protect what I was cultivating. As I started to delve more deeply into the history of the Society I became more interested in experiencing the current day state.

Attending the conference meant putting my perpetually busy farming lifestyle on hold. I was also inspired to do this by the conference’s focus on the feminine. Since my difficult separation and divorce the year before, being led through the weekend by female leadership felt just right for my biography. My Saturn return has led me into deep exploration of my deceased grandmother, birth story, childhood night terrors and the intricate relationship between the three.

On the other side of the convergence…

Amongst many things, the convergence gave me an undeniable experience of levity amidst the reality of ever increasing uncertainty. I experienced communion, both with the tangible, visible community and the subtle, invisible one.

Subscribe now

I’d like to relate my Odysseus-esque story of return.

My returning flight from Phoenix to Seattle was delayed, and I spent one night suspended between one place and another. Over the course of the 16 hours spent in purgatory I was informed of an unraveling story back home.

Job, a neighbor, informed me that one of the homesteaders living in the hills behind the farm lost a goat to a cougar. The next morning Job says the Department of Fish and Wildlife are covering the hillside of second growth coniferous forest with dogs in search of the cougar.

As I roamed the streaming corridors of anonymity in the airport, the cougar was with me as a second sight.

I am set to board the metal bird box home, and I look to my screen for the latest from Job. The cougar was tree’d by the dogs and hit by a booming volley of gunfire that resounded through the entire valley. He was a young male injured by a run in with an automobile. He must have been forced to take the homesteader’s goat in a state of desperation.

Look, see it. The land I farm is the East-West border between an urban growth area and thousands of acres of working forest land with rural residential sprinkled about to the North and South. Towering Western Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Big Leaf Maple and Red Alder pour over the hillside down into the pastoral farmland I steward and then into a small rural urban sprawl of antique stores, lumber yards and auto shops. In this transition zone that is the farm, wild animals, mostly young males pushed out of evolving family dynamics, overlap with the post modern human experience. Often they come here to die.

While I was in Santa Fe, this young male feline was hit by a car, killed a goat and hid out in the forest. He was pursued, cornered and shot during his endeavor to reconcile his role in the world.

I arrived at home in the middle of the night and emerged from the cabin early the next morning to view the quality of the dew collected on the land. Out and about to the cows. As I pass over the fast regrowing spring pasture the cows left to recover in the days before, I can hear the grass growing back, springing back to the center of the Sun. The steer has grown considerably over the five days I was absent. He’s coming into his frame, and I can rest well assured that he’ll be ready for harvest at the end of the forage flush this summer. My favorite calf from last spring approaches me for a chin scratch. Behind the calf, I notice her mother has started bagging up in earnest. Looks like the next crop of calves are well on their way. I rub the cows’ sides and see my hands covered in the familiar grease from their coats. I smile, I am home.

Up from the pastures my gaze rests on the hill, where I sleep. The hill where these young wild males make impact with the hard reality of the sacrifices a domesticated, sedentary populace necessitates.

I identify the young feline within me: too immature for the task at hand, left out of the circle and experiencing violent desperation amidst this intensely trying moment of sacrifice.

To make sacred.

To inhabit the limited experience of a physical body,

While my heart whispers to me that there is more.

More to feeling, more to thinking, and more to doing.

There is a place outside of place, a time beyond time.

Life is a beginning.

My task is to allow the heart to make this sacred.

To sacrifice.

I bring the entire world within, into the depth of soul I feel.

They might just have to tree and shoot every one of us.

“If you can’t solve your own problems you have no right to offer a solution to the world.”

— Bernard Lievegoed

I attended the Extraordinary General Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in January 2023 as the youngest participant, at 30 years old. The experience deepened my understanding of the inner tasks tied to the social question—moving from initial unsettlement, through empathy, toward a recognition of individuality, community, and courage.

The Meeting as Experienced

The member comment period on the Weleda motion brought a wide range of voices. Speakers expressed concerns about Weleda’s direction, the Anthroposophical Society’s relationship with Weleda, governance, financial transparency, and broader alignment with anthroposophic principles. Some comments also touched on external entities like the World Health Organization. Many participants applauded these expressions of mistrust and critique.

I felt deeply unsettled by the tone and intensity of much of what was said. The concern, at times sharp and unrelenting, seemed to lack the warmth and collaborative spirit I associate with the Anthroposophical Society’s intention. Yet I also recognized that these voices arose from genuine care for anthroposophy’s future—whether about protecting its initiatives or ensuring integrity in partnerships.

Subscribe now

From Unsettlement to Empathy

As the meeting unfolded, I empathized with the leadership of the Society. They navigated the comments with grace, humor, and heart, even as the room filled with strong opinions. Witnessing how a small, but vocal, group of the global membership engages left me wondering:

How do we steer through such moments of tension without losing heartfelt collaboration?

Can the sails be righted to catch a forward wind?

It touched a deep wound: as a teenager in Los Angeles, I had turned away from conventional institutions that felt false. At 18, I found meditation, spirituality, and eventually Rudolf Steiner—a path that became my own. To encounter what felt like a misaligned way of being in community—now within the very movement I had chosen—was an existential moment.

Subscribe now

Seeing the Circle

Through conversations afterward with trusted contacts, the picture grew more complex. I realized everyone stands at a different point on the circle. It is not simply us vs. them, right vs. wrong. People I deeply respect held fiercely different views—some aligned with the concerns raised, others sharing my unsettlement, and many positions in between.

How could good people I know be in such opposing places? My love for them would not allow my intellect to judge them so easily. Seeing the inner nature of these staunch positions invited me to observe my own. In holding my reaction so tightly, I was compromising my own uprightness. What is this judgment but a surrender of will to the very forces that seek to fragment and divide?

Factionalism weakens the whole.

Standpoints become a cancer in the community’s body.

A Practice of Perception

“This planet is about love, and not the kind of love that only gives to those we like.”

— Orland Bishop

To do justice to this, I turn toward “they” and ask: What ails thee? True justice means looking into another’s eyes without turning away. I had quickly judged the voices in the hall, but when close friends revealed similar positions, judgment lost its footing. Our heart-connection allowed me to try a new practice: to fill my soul with theirs and seek to understand the oppositional force.

To truly perceive the other leads to understanding. Judgment as an oppositional force dissolves in the light of genuine perception. This act opens a new force: to die to what is mine or yours—and from there, to begin.

To choose beginning is Anthroposophy. An activity of love—not politeness, formality, or tradition. Sometimes love overturns the tables of the money-lenders at the temple. To bear the error, the ignorance, the arrogance, the violence, the trespass—directly into the innermost of my soul.

Through the trespass lies wisdom.

Not in spite of error,

but through error,

lies the transformation of the soul.

Error is initiation.

The intention of this piece is to examine the question of the consumption of meat and harvest of animals for human consumption. What light can anthroposophy, “the path for human beings to find their humanity,” offer?

On the one hand, Rudolf Steiner frequently touted the spiritual benefits of vegetarianism, and on the other, he instigated a new approach to agriculture, now called Biodynamics, which involves the slaughter of animals. Why have many anthroposophists chosen a vegetarian diet? And, why have most biodynamic farmers chosen to eat, raise, and market meat?

In Lecture 8 of Steiner’s Agriculture Course, we find a key example of the paradox: “The real advantage of the vegetarian mode of life is that it makes us stronger because we draw forth from the organism forces which would otherwise be lying fallow there... If we only eat plant food, these forces are called into activity to lift the plant up to human nature. If, on the other hand, we eat animal food from the outset, these forces are left latent in the organism... Now let us come to the question, how should we fatten animals?... Oh, the pigs, the fat pigs and sows—what heavenly creatures they are!” Here Rudolf Steiner espouses the advantage of a vegetarian mode of life and in the next paragraph goes on to explain how to fatten a pig!

How are we to respond? Lest we overlook, Steiner actually begins the whole statement with: “Thus there are two sides to every question, and we must realize how all these things are individualized. We cannot give hard and fast principles.”

Karl König elaborates on Steiner’s statement above: “If we eat plant food, we have to carry out the transformation from the vegetable to the animal, and then from the animal to the human; we go through a double sequence of stages, and in so doing we employ forces which otherwise remain dormant.” Are König and Steiner pointing to some easy access to spiritual development? Hardly. Rudolf Steiner once told a friend: “If I put on a magician’s cloak and asked people to perform the craziest exercise, like running up some mountain at midnight to do something nonsensical, believe me, they would all do it! Everyone would be chasing after me. But to spend years of effort to overcome and set aside perhaps just one character weakness or bad habit—that’s just not interesting, is it? People simply don’t believe that a single change in their own character—such as a vain person admitting his vanity and becoming ashamed of it—could possibly have more impact on their spiritual progress than listening to hundreds of lectures or committing all of my lecture cycles to memory [...].”(1)

König continues, “It would, however, be misguided to eat only plants just because this utilizes more forces. There should be no sectarianism in nutrition, no single valid point of view. We need to cultivate insight so that we gradually learn to discern whether we have sufficient forces available to be able to take in plant nourishment and to digest it consistently, or whether we are so tired and weakened that we don’t have the necessary forces at our disposal to digest vegetable food.”

This discernment must be honored as an individually held choice. As an aid to our discernment, we must face the fact of the degeneration of humanity since leaving traditional diets behind. Industrialized consciousness has created broken soils, de-cultured plants, and suffering animals. Weston A. Price and Sally Fallon Morell have documented the consequences of leaving traditional diets behind. Every healthy traditional culture Weston A. Price encountered consumed animal foods, and those who didn’t regularly have access to them showed the effects of decay and degeneration.

Yet anthroposophy indicates that traditional wisdom is in a process of decline, and will not serve as the path forward for human society. Traditional diets can help serve as a model to start with, but the task is to attune the diet for the individual. Ultimately, there are as many ideal diets as there are human beings on the earth. For a choice to be taken freely it must emanate from the inner depths rather than from an outside influence, including the teachings of Rudolf Steiner!

Now to the question of the morality of harvesting animals. Steiner never conceptualized a healthy farm without the harvesting of animals. The preparations to be added to the compost, which are central to the biodynamic work, involve the harvesting of the animals to use various parts as sheaths. The anthroposophic farm brings human, animal, plant, and mineral realms into dynamic relationship. Life and death are one of the most important dynamics to work with in the present age.

Here I will explicitly cite and respond to some of the specific points that have been raised from vegetarians.

The livestock’s natural life is cut short long before its normal life span is completed. Natural life? If your elderly goat had anything close to a “natural life” it would be torn apart by coyotes. When livestock are domesticated, the human takes on the role as overseer of the natural order. In nature, the vast majority of animals die young. The farm follows the same natural order of population control by harvesting young and/or lesser animals for consumption. In animal husbandry every bull calf that is lesser than the supreme bull is harvested, and when a heifer starts looking better than a cow, the cow is replaced. Farmers see the potential in the herd and pull it out into manifestation through observation and action.

Humane meat production, in the end, is rooted in the betrayal of a trusting and vulnerable friend. As a farmer, I only eat my friends. From birth through slaughter and consumption, good farmers love their animals, and hold them as sacred. What is consumption but an opportunity for communion? Orland Bishop has said that sacrifice means to make sacred. The act of harvest, when done in a sacred manner, is an act consecrated in love. It is an act that speaks so intimately to the role of the human being on this earth as steward. Remorse over the killing of an animal is more a result of a fractured culture that is afraid of death. Placing death-phobia within a spiritual movement that refers to those that have crossed the threshold as, “the so-called dead,” is a head-scratcher. The dead are in fact with us. They have never left. Lives appear to be taken from a viewpoint centered only on what physical sensory perception between birth and death can behold.

It is feasible that the animals can be retained for their necessary manure and permitted to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm. Who conducted that feasibility study? Where do all the excess animals go? Eventually, given the size of the land holding, and assuming animals are bred back frequently, the land will become quickly overcrowded. In this picture, there can no longer be birth because of the inability to face death. Without death there is no life.

Abstraction is certainly at the heart of this issue of vegetarianism and the sacred tending of the animals. Farmers tend their animals for generations, through birth and death. The future impulses of sacred tending of animals will not come from an armchair, but instead from those most intimate with the animals themselves, the farmers.

Subscribe now

1. Adelheid Petersen, Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner. König, Nutrition from Earth and Cosmos, Floris Books (2015)

This research project places the reverse ritual, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner, as an essential key towards the School for Spiritual Science’s further research. A primary presupposition of this project is that ritual, or cultic, work is essential for anthroposophy to have any further operative significance. We are now at an important turning point, which calls for a deepening of esotericism.

“Just as a person wakes up in the right way in everyday life through the natural world surrounding him . . ., so do we wake up rightly at a higher level in the encounter with the soul-spirit of our fellow human beings. That is where the first true understanding of anthroposophy sets in. Yes, it is indeed necessary to base our understanding of anthroposophy on what can be called a waking up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of another person.”

Subscribe now

This project began during the centennial commemoration of the burning of the First Goetheanum. It became evident that what had created the conditions for that event had not yet been overcome, and thus the movement continues to face the same obstacles. So I began studying the Awakening to Community lecture series again, as here, Rudolf Steiner addresses the internal issues of the Anthroposophical Society, and how these led to the burning of the First Goetheanum. What is the meaning of the attack(s)? And what is the possibility for transformation such that the Anthroposophical Movement can flourish? The task includes solitary aspects—deferring to individual development—and collective or social aspects. Through the study, we found the description of the reverse ritual as the dynamic relation between the social and solitary tasks, a ritual for idealistic community building.

“[What we perceive in the sense-world during our time together] comes alive when it is properly permeated with our will and feeling. When we radiate will through our inner being and infuse it with enthusiasm, we carry our idealized sense experience in a direction exactly opposite to that taken when we embody the supersensible in the ritual of the [religious] cultus.”

The reverse ritual starts where the traditional ritual ends, communion, and works in the opposite direction, although it is in no way opposed; that is, there is no conflict in an individual having a developed practice of both the traditional and reverse ritual. The communion that the reverse ritual begins with is a cognitive act. An idea becomes an experience—the cognitive activity lifts that which has fallen. Cognitive communion: a fully awakened, realized, crossing of the threshold into the singular body of the cosmos. This level of communion brings spiritual will and feeling into the very physical experience of the individual, such that the living experience of the physical world is transubstantiated into the spiritual. The first step, from separate physical body to singular cosmic body, beginning in cognition and then reaching into the very depths of the will, is a preparation for the second step: the transformation of the life body from the subjective to the objective. The profane becomes the sacred. The personal experience of life becomes the one great experience of humanity: the Etheric Christ

The third step, the offering, is enacted through listening and speaking. In listening, the will is offered, sacrificed, toward the thinking of another. The listener gives their will, with complete radical acceptance— free from outcome—to another’s thinking and speaking. The will is that which has been cultivated through the individual’s initiation path, what “belongs” to oneself. In the offering, we are given the opportunity to step into a new paradigm: what is mine is yours. I give you my will. Use it how you will. Here, self-development becomes ennobled and elevated in service toward another.

In this step of offering, noticing the presence of sympathy and antipathy is a useful way to ascertain when the divine will is absent. The quality of listening creates a chalice just before the manifest, or spoken, word. The chalice is founded in reverence, a portal, active in the creativity before speech, and before thoughts—pre-cognitive. The Logos becomes a direct observation, a co-creativity.

The portal, or chalice, of the offering hosts and invites new thinking. The new thinking consists of revelations; the Gospels become renewed on earth as they are in heaven. The activity of the divinities manifesting in our human community through conversation—the renewal of the Gospels—is the fourth and final step.

“If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: The community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated so that they may be present in the congregation. In contrast, the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into supersensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases, that is what creates community.”

To present research results in relation to the reverse ritual requires careful consideration because one of the main elements of it is the transformation of results-based activities, that is, the Western mind. The spiritual experiences of the reverse ritual are entirely protected, as in meditation, such that every individual gets exactly what they are prepared to reach.

“Divine powers are present in sense-perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being spoken of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, and our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, so that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening.”

My observation from working with the reverse ritual is that through this practice, what is truly seeking to be worked through within any given group of individuals can actually take place in a much more efficient and effective manner than is otherwise the case. The ritual engages an active presence that can speak from the spirit directly without the abstraction and “pre-plannedness” that is often encountered in social environments. This active presence requires preparation, not planning. Essentially, the reverse ritual opens a possibility for emergence rather than speculation. This is an emergent methodology for gatherings to become operative rather than speculative, that is, effective. Rudolf Steiner consistently warned anthroposophists about the risk of intellectualizing spiritual-scientific research—research that one can experience as quite comfortable and easy to agree with intellectually. But to actually unfold spiritual-scientific research, with the spiritual soul, is quite another matter.

Subscribe now

There have been multiple five-day intensives working with the ritual every day for six to eight hours in Ireland at Lisa Romero’s home. There has also been a group of younger folks working with the reverse ritual monthly at the Threefold Youth House in Spring Valley, NY. Moreover, Last August at the “Space, Time, and Human Heart” Conference, Claus-Peter Roeh and Ezra Sullivan led two introductory and experiential sessions on the reverse ritual. This cultic work has been at the center of Claus-Peter and Ezra’s collaboration with Research Colloquiums on the First Class, some details of which will be published in the Spring 2026 issue of the newsletter of the General Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

In addition to the small-group work, there have been explorations leading larger groups into the reverse ritual. At the “Light in the Depths: A Youth(ish) Gathering”—Easter of 2025—with the Anthroposophical Society in Ireland, we attempted a reverse ritual conversation with 110 participants in an underground temple at an inter-faith peace center. Furthermore, the “Beyond Woke & Anti-Woke: What Does Anthroposophy Have to Offer” initiative has presented the reverse ritual as the central key to the depolarization work we are doing through creating regional gatherings about contemporary social questions (Detroit, MI—October 2025; Threefold—May 23-25, 2026; California/Oregon in Autumn 2026). The reverse ritual will also be a key feature of the “Remembering our Shared Future Conference” in Cape Town, South Africa—Easter of 2026, “Entering into Responsibility: A First Class Research Colloquium” at Threefold—June 8-11, 2026, “Turning from Stillness to Growth: A First Class Research Colloquium” at Summerfield Waldorf in California—June 12-14, 2026, the North American Youth Section Conference— “COURAGE: From Idea to Initiative”—in Fair Oaks, CA August 3-7 2026, and “Cynefin: Communities of the Future” in Wales for Michaelmas of 2026 with the UK Youth Section. Each gathering will explore the reverse ritual, often beginning with small groups (6-12) and working toward large groups (40-150 people).

Quotes from Awakening to Community (SteinerBooks, 1975), lecture 6 & 9, given on February 27, 1923 in Stuttgart (GA 257).

In 2000, a group of young, enterprising Waldorf educators working in Jefferson County, Washington, joined forces to bring into existence a shared vision: a Waldorf school on a working Biodynamic farm. The educational values of the farm were envisioned to be more than simply for the enrolled students: the farm would provide educational opportunities in sustainable agriculture and land stewardship for people of all ages outside of the immediate school community.

In 2002, a centrally-located, eighty-one-acre abandoned dairy farm came on the market. The original intent of the sale was for housing development, but Sunfield managed to raise the necessary funds for the purchase of the land. The money was provided by the PCC Farmland Trust, USDA Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program, Jefferson County Conservation Future Fund, and many individual loans and donations.

Sunfield comprises three interdependent realms: a Biodynamic farm, Waldorf school, and community education program.

FARM

The farm is composed of twenty-six acres of forest, forty-two acres fields and pasture, and eight acres of wetlands. The forest sits on a ridge overlooking the rest of the farm. Sunfield’s first selective timber harvest is currently being planned to supply timbers and siding for a new livestock barn in partnership with the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. The pastures and wetlands are rotationally grazed by beef cattle, fiber sheep, dairy goats, and laying hens.

Every animal plays an important role on the farm.

The beef cattle are the main mowers, moving every day or two in the spring and summer to fresh grass. Windrow compost piles are made every spring from the manure we muck out from the barns when the animals have returned to pasture. Our cattle herd is essential for making biodynamic preparations. The sheep provide fiber that is processed into roving, yarn, and locs for Sunfield School’s handwork and crafting classes and is sold to local shops and from our onsite farm stand. Biologically, the sheep mainly serve the purpose of cleaning up weeds and less palatable forage our cows won’t touch. The dairy goats prevent pioneering shrubs and trees from invading our pastures, as well as provide milk and chevre for the farm staff and interns. The laying hens are kept mainly for educational purposes, providing younger students meaningful interaction with the farm animals. The compost pile and pastures benefit from the chicken manure and the farm staff enjoys the eggs and old stew hens.

In Lecture Two of the Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner said, “This will necessitate our developing a proper science of the number of animals of a given sort which we need for a given kind of farm.” I would add: “considering the constantly evolving mosaic of humans, animals, and landscape”—this is also an art! If we keep too many goats, they can quickly work themselves out of a job by clearing out all woody species and weeds. When goats are kept solely on grass pastures they are no longer able to fully express themselves (jumping onto a small tree to hold down for their friends and family, for example), are exposed to a larger parasite load than they are accustomed to, and do not receive the correct nutrition requirements. This can create an unhealthy imbalance for the farm organism. Exclusive grazing of fiber sheep can rob the soil of precious nutrients, but without enough sheep, weedy pastures can proliferate. Too many cows run out of green grass in meager, dry August months, and, in such a circumstance, we would have to bring the cows off pasture and feed out hay.

Steiner continues with a statement that is very easily missed, but just as important: “Such a science will arise in good time, as soon as we begin to have any knowledge again of the inner forces concerned.” I’ve only spoken of the outer actions involved in keeping a balance of livestock numbers, but nothing of the inner forces. How tempting it is to focus only on what we can sense physically and ignore our underdeveloped spiritual senses. This is where the spiritual/cultural realm of the school has a great healing offering to the economic realm of the farm. We want all these different animals because they offer forces and gestures from the entire zodiac. All together they give a complete experience. What a loss it would be if our deep bedding system for our ruminants did not have the hens squawking and scratching all winter long—and not just biologically!

We must give credence to the inner forces and what they offer. Organization, observation, planning, spreadsheets, etc., are an important part of finding the balance, but so is earnest daily meditation. The farmer takes the farm into themselves, and a deep intimacy is consciously cultivated that guides the organism into balance. A harmonious recognition of both inner and outer is the redemptive medicine that we are all so longing for.

Sunfield Farm cultivates ten acres of Class I soil in a rotation of vegetables, cover crop, grazing, and grain. Two acres of fields are cultivated every year for seed production produce, jack-o-lanterns, and a flower CSA. The Biodynamic certified seeds are sold to Turtle Tree Seed Initiative, as well as variety trials with the Organic Seed Alliance. The produce is sold primarily through Sunfield’s on-site farm stand and, with support from charitable giving, donated to regional food pantries. The seed work has proven to be a potent platform for our students to learn about the natural world. Also, the challenge of hand threshing burdock seed builds a strong character.

Achieving high-quality vegetable or flower seed production demands an extensive study of and connection to the plant. We have found that when the plant is taken through its full life cycle, many more layers of expression are manifested and deeper intimacy is gained. It is similar to buying weaner pigs year after year without ever keeping a sow: with so many aspects of the process out of sight, the being is not as apparent. Then, of course, whenever we save a seed, consciously or unconsciously, we are selecting traits and shaping the plant. We watch the plant shapeshift and transform over several generations, iterations, mutations, crosses, and selections. And a new cultivar mustn’t start with any abstract academic notions, but with something as simple as: “Those pointy carrots keep getting stuck in our crates. Let’s save the rounded ones this year for seed.”

Like many farms, the soil at Sunfield was abused from overgrazing and the wetland complex was highly altered. The fields tend to be either excessively drained sand and gravel or poorly drained clay with hardpan compaction zones throughout. Wind whips throughout the property, wicking off all the moisture on site. How can we revive this farm? Becoming a Biodynamic farm is a multigenerational process. Sunfield is using several different techniques to resurrect the dynamic relationships of the life processes on the farm.

Our County’s Soil Conservation District recently purchased a Yeoman’s plow that we use to circulate the water to where it normally doesn’t flow and to break up compact soil layers. The Yeoman’s plow will be used in combination with the application of the biodynamics preparations. For broad-scale application of the preparations, we recently obtained a mechanical potentizer and boom sprayer that can cover ten to fifteen acres with a single batch.

Biochar is an age-old amendment that boosts soil health. Sunfield produces charcoal from old fence posts, rotted lumber, tree tops, and branches. The charcoal becomes biochar when mixed into the livestock barn’s deep bedding system, goes to the compost, and then eventually to the fields, pastures, and orchards.

The wind will be mitigated by numerous windbreak shelterbelt hedgerows strategically planted throughout the farm. As these hedgerows break the wind, they will also provide wildlife and pollinator habitat. The hedgerows are the blood of the farm. The hedges boost oxygen, equalize pest and infection by increasing biodiversity, and reduce stress by blocking wind.

Subscribe now

Several pastures are being planted with rows of apple, chestnut, and hazelnut. Rather than compete with deep bottom valley farms and their abundant forage production, we have to ask, “What is our advantage over the other farms?” We can use some of our excessively well-drained gravelly pastures for trees. Valley farms can not easily accommodate these orchard crops.

We have begun management intensive grazing, leaving behind a century-long practice of stock grazing. We intensively manage the balance of animal disturbance and pasture rest to optimize animal, plant, and mineral health. This requires establishing our electric fence infrastructure so that we can eventually move the ruminants every single day during the grazing season with ease.

Lastly, a wetland restoration project is in the design and development phase. Sunfield’s central wetland complex is the aquifer recharge for the main potable water source of our rural county. When the previous farmers developed the property as a farm, they drained, ditched, and diked the wetlands so their sixty holstein cows could go out to graze in the spring. Then they put in a six-inch irrigation pipe throughout the farm to grow green grass on the drained wetlands throughout the summer. The previous practices demanded it be dry when it was wet and wet when it was dry! The expense of installation and maintenance of the irrigation system was immense. This also demanded operating a pump to bring water from fifty feet below ground onto the surface of the Earth, where half of the water would evaporate before reaching the ground. This was both uneconomical and un-agroecological.

Sunfield seeks to restore the hydrological functions of the wetland system by recreating the water retention landscape that this land once was. Although this project could remove some agricultural land from production, the raised water table throughout the summer should increase overall agriculture production in the long term. The increased presence of waterfowl, blue heron, osprey, amphibians, etc., will create immense benefits, both qualitative and quantitative. The restored wetland complex will be planted with a working buffer that will benefit wildlife with habitat and forage, animals with forage and shade, pollinator food, and humans with a harvest of cash crops. The increased clean water infiltration to the aquifer will also benefit our growing municipality’s public water system.

These steps will undoubtedly lead to other steps and systems. I hope that, in a decade, Sunfield will have evolved so far beyond these systems and steps that we will look back and shake our heads at what we used to do. We know the potential of Sunfield, and we hope to help that potential become manifest.

SCHOOL

Sunfield Waldorf School came to the farm in the fall of 2007, thanks to a loan to develop school infrastructure. The school has grown over many years and now has parent-child classes, two preschools, two kindergartens, and grade school classes (first through eighth grade). There are currently 145 students enrolled at the school. Sunfield is an associate member of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) and the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN). Although Sunfield is set in a small rural county with limited financial resources, we have never put a cap on our adjusted tuition program, and 40 percent of our grade school families participate in this program.

The school is successfully integrated into the farm. The participants in the parent-child classes visit the animals as part of their class rhythm. Early childhood students venture out every morning, rain or shine, into the magical lands (such as the ferny woods, the land beyond, the anty woods, the aspen woods, and the land of bridges). When Sunfield students enter grade school, they enter into a more formal relationship with the farm through a daily agricultural arts class. This daily class brings the whole grade school together in greeting and seasonal song before splitting into groups. Every teacher holds a group: crafters, gardeners, farmers, shepherds, land stewards, chickens, and goat herders. These mixed-aged groups rotate through the chores once a month, while the first grade maintains chicken chores. The crafters work with whatever is available in season: fiber, broom corn, wreaths, dye plants, etc. The gardeners work in the vegetable fields and orchards, weeding, planting, harvesting, threshing, propagating, and winnowing. The farmers spread compost and wood chips, tend to the beef cattle, and respond to the seasonal needs of the farm. The shepherds tend to our fiber sheep, and the goat herders milk daily. The land stewards is an ecology-centered group that removes invasive plants, propagates native plants for new plantings, and learns about the biological systems on the farm.

Subscribe now

COMMUNITY EDUCATION PROGRAM

Sunfield’s Community Education Program has been serving Jefferson County’s underserved rural population over the last fifteen years. Sunfield has hosted regional high school students to spend the summer learning how to operate, plan, and design the farm under the mentorship of a farm educator. The farm has a long-standing history of serving regional food pantries as well. We have hosted Evergreen College ag students, Americorps crews, permaculture design students, and many other groups for workshops in land stewardship.

Sunfield hosts a Visiting Schools Program that offers free field trips to public school students. The visiting students are exposed to food and fiber activities, which foster curiosity in the natural world.

Sunfield’s year round 4-H program gives children the chance to foster a deeper connection and relationship with the farm animals, and eventually tests their skills and knowledge of animal husbandry at the Jefferson County Fair.

Sunfield hosts up to four farm interns every year, April through October, with an option for a smaller group to stay through the winter with a lighter workload. The farm provides the interns with a solid foundation in theory and weekly field trips to complement the hands-on work.

CONCLUSION

Sunfield Land for Learning has agency. Like all of us, Sunfield is a complex and complicated being with its own unique wounds. Wounds are sheaths that hold medicine. The medicine, which will further manifest the Earth’s potential, wishes to be delivered. The blossoming imaginative consciousness of the school’s students offers a constant flux of cleansing, and the land’s rhythms meet them with grounding. Sunfield faculty, staff, board, students, parents, alumni, animals, wetlands, plants, topsoil, wind, and bedrock are collaboratively painting a picture together. Everyday we rise to meet the world—the issues and obstacles present themselves constantly—but we earnestly cultivate inner sun forces of love that empower us to face anything and everything.

Subscribe now

What is the impact of Ethical Individualism on romantic relationships? When a romantic interest is encountered, any value judgments, desires, or predeterminations obscure the true encounter between the two meeting. This includes: “I want a family,” “I don’t want kids,” “I only want long term,” “I want short term,” “I am monogamous,” “I am polyamorous.” To truly encounter another, clear every single concept that lies between. It is a process of peeling back every layer of the given. Why? For the not-given to speak. Then I can do what is truly human and create meaning, letting the future speak. Childhood conditioning, “moon” or past karma, and any other cobwebs are cleared for what is truly imminent in the moment when I meet another.

If all the wants, desires, and dogmas around romantic relationship are removed, what is left? Well, the other person and myself. What a concept! We are left with one question: What are the two of us to do together? Relationship becomes a mystery drama, the school of love for which the capacities in the human soul have descended for training. Liberate romantic relationships from all the unfreedoms: instincts, desire, cultural conditioning, and physiology. Relationality can become about the human spirit’s love for your future, which begs the question: How can I help you do what you came here to do? Without concern for outcome and how that may affect me. Will love be there tomorrow? Yes. Will the other be there tomorrow? Imagine a relationship in which the partnership holds the evolution of both individuals as the most sacred thing, rather than certainty and security.

New relationship forms like polyamory are a necessary exploration for many to free the human soul from the bounds of unconsciously followed tradition. But these forms, too, have become unfree. If any of the past is brought into the space between us, it only clouds our judgment and capacities for discernment. The past can block the future. Instead, live into the present unfolding of what is becoming between you and I. Anything else blocks the ordering of karma and is not appropriate for the unfolding of “sun karma,” of future. Polyamory, monogamy, and celibacy are all possible paths, but relationality is truly found in the heart, not the intellect. Of course, agreements can be made and kept for as long as they feel true. Here I use “feeling” in reference to an objective sense for truth, not a subjective feeling.

This approach to romantic relationships is the redemption of the Western Mind, which wants to figure everything out first. The new paradigm is: there is no prescription, there is no “how”. If the outcome was already known it wouldn’t be life, it wouldn’t be learning, it wouldn’t be evolution, it wouldn’t be a fantastic ordeal of a story. The conscious activity that is now being asked for is to know what I do while I do it, not before. Creativity is improvised even if the act has been done twenty thousand times before. A musician cannot remember how to play a symphony beautifully, the remembered thoughts, the preparation, is sacrificed in the act of creativity. Romantic relationship is one of the most sacred lessons which the mind will never know and can never figure out. Humanity is moving away from manifestation and even intentionality, and instead opening to a certain quality of faith—faith for future. How can the intellect be sacrificed to the knowing activity in the heart? The ego, everyday self, must be annihilated for the birth of the true self.

As the trials of initiation are encountered, the seeker eventually meets the earth trial which asks: Will you give your life in service toward the beloved community of the earth? The seeker remains with the earth until every being is redeemed. The family can be a vessel for this beloved community, a microcosm, but the vessel must not become an insular distortion of the earth trial’s universal humanitarian lesson.

Humanity can develop the capacity to read the world, to read life. The esoteric schooling called life speaks. And if life is not held to a standard or notion which has fallen and isn’t truly relevant toward the present, then the ordeal of our life becomes education, becomes curiosity, becomes love. And not that life is not suffered. But a capacity is developed for a creative love which is the pathway to a more human future. Today love is a conspiratorial act of transformation, and to be in love is to be in intimate relation with the sacred earth.

Unconsciousness

Becomes intentional manifestation

Becomes humble receptivity

Becomes creative love

I am God’s will on earth as thou art in heaven

Open the human soul

To hold more and more of the beloved

And suffer it

Suffer life

Because the suffering itself is

Love ordering karma

Ethical Individualism is a new paradigm in the evolution of human consciousness, based on human beings awakening the slumbering capacity to realize their humanity. To become truly human means to create meaning out of an intuitive capacity to know right and wrong—morality. The outer moral laws that guided human beings’ ethical decisions are now largely irrelevant, and morality must be accessed as a spiritual reality through the super-sensible organ of the heart. This capacity is not a given; in fact, it is the one step which cannot be taken for us. This is what the Mysteries do: they offer one what cannot be handled so that a new capacity can be developed. Ethical Individualism calls upon a transformation of every aspect of society, which of course includes romantic relationships.

In the past, the majority of people were not capable of making ethical decisions out of their own consciousness. This lack of capacity was compensated for by the introduction of strong moral codes, which were reinforced through rituals, rhythms, and mythology. This was a beautiful development, as the cultural, tribal, and societal forms truly held people’s sense of purpose and meaning.

As consciousness developed, humans became more individuated and conscious of ourselves as an “I.” With individuation, the outward dogma or moral codes became chains for the human soul, and this process is creating chaos because the fabric of society is shifting so fundamentally. Yes, with a tightly held culture, there was a deep sense of belonging. But with the birth of the true self, or “I,” a more solitary nature complements the collective task of belonging. Race, gender, ethnicity, and nation-state become more and more recognized as the semblance of identity than our eternal nature. There is the realization that human beings do not come from any particular place or time, but that people have come to place and time.

The experience of individualism in everyday human consciousness makes many pre-existing societal forms obsolete. In its role of bringing outer codes of right and wrong to human society, religion is no longer needed. Morality must now come from within the human being as an intuitive capacity rather than an outward structure, like the Ten Commandments. This new inner experience of morality is the foundation stone of the new human society. The mystery centers have moved from the physical temples into the human heart as super-sensible organ. The heart is the access point for the spirit, and no longer dependent exclusively on mediators like priests, texts, traditional rituals, etc. This paradigm leads to the dissolution of relevancy for every dogma that exists as every human being becomes a sun, a centerpoint. There is no conceptual framework to adhere to. Through an intuitive capacity for cognizing morality, a capacity for Ethical Individualism develops, arising as a choice point in the present moment. Ethical Individualism allows us to become free from the past.

Continued next week…