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 In the continuation, Robert Karp, Elizabeth Wirsching and John Beck share their insights.
What Inspires Me….
Robert Karp
I am inspired by the growing, worldwide movement of human beings who are waking up to the spirit and pioneering a new path of responsible planetary citizenship. The opportunity to work in and learn from this community at this time is a profound privilege and keeps me going in the face of all the tragedies of our world. There are so many inspiring tributaries of this worldwide awakening of conscience and consciousness, so many inspiring people! For example, there are human beings on the earth today by the thousands who are awakening:
* To the true reality of money and economics and pioneering new forms of currency, trade, ownership and capital flow;
* To the true reality of nature and pioneering new ways of seeing into her mysteries and working with her invisible beings;
* To the true reality of health and pioneering new forms of therapy, healing and medicine;
* To the true reality of beauty and pioneering new forms of theater, painting, architecture, movement and all the arts;
* To the true reality of community and pioneering new forms of social, political and organizational transformation;
* To the true reality of food and pioneering new approaches to farming, nutrition, and agricultural trade;
* To the true reality of spirit and pioneering new forms of cognition, worship, ritual and self transformation;
This list could go on and on!
I feel in this worldwide movement the quickening of the higher self of humanity and I am inspired by the sense that anthroposophy can and must help support and strengthen these forces of the good. Rather than stand back and judge all that is imperfect in these emergent new born efforts, we must have the humility to jump in with both feet and prove our worth arm in arm with our colleagues, whether or not they have any conscious relationship to anthroposophy. This, in turn, inspires my own efforts at self-development and self transformation, for I am deeply aware that only if I work every day to overcome my own weaknesses and failings and birth my own higher self’s capacities and callings can I possibly realize this aim.
I am also inspired by the awareness that the whole Anthroposophical Society is currently undergoing a period of deep metamorphosis, including the daughter movements. The horizontal inspiration that derived from the earthly life of Rudolf Steiner and the early founders of the movement is steadily growing weaker and this creates the necessity and the opportunity that we find a vertical relationship to this inspiration, not only as individuals but as communities and as a community.
This to me was and is the prophetic calling of the Christmas Conference of 1923, namely to form a free community, a harmony of hearts, that is in a living, vertical relationship to the spiritual world, thus freeing Rudolf Steiner to walk and work amongst us as a friend, teacher and colleague. As we free Rudolf Steiner from being either our pope or conscience, as we transform the forms of the movement that were suitable for the first third of the 20th century, as we each find our own creative relationship to anthroposophia and our rightful place in the world, we will begin to find the way to make the contribution we are called to make—as a movement—to the present time. And suddenly, our movement will become visible again to the rest of the world.
I am also inspired by the inner knowing that we are living in the age when this great transformation within our movement and within the wider world must come to a special culmination…when the higher self of humanity must become strong enough to win the upper hand over the lower self of humanity. What a privilege to be alive, to be able to be active in this decisive time.
In a certain way I am also inspired by suffering, by the awareness that at any given time of the day immense waves of suffering are moving across the planet. I feel a great sense of responsibility as a westerner and as an American for this suffering. My brother John was killed in a plane crash when I was 27 (and he was 30) and one of the fruits of this experience is that I became aware that every time a tragic death occurs through war or through natural or man-made catastrophes or “accidents,” there are dozens and sometimes hundreds and even thousands of people who are plunged into unspeakable grief. At that time I was shown how this grief ripples out across the spiritual organism of the earth like furrows ploughed in hardened soil. And I saw that only free human deeds, inspired by the spirit, can accomplish this same loosening of the organism of the earth without the need for the spilling of innocent human blood…
 Most recently, I have become deeply inspired by young people. The young people in their teens, twenties and thirties who are finding inspiration in anthroposophy are so much more mature than I was at that age. I think there is something significant about this group of young people who are coming of age at this time. I am more and more convinced that our anthroposophical activities must be based on the work of inter-generational teams if we going to find the courage and inspiration we need to achieve a cultural breakthrough.
Finally, I am inspired by farmers! Don’t ask me why, but farmers are my heroes. Perhaps it is because I am deeply aware of the incredible attack on nature and on the integrity of our food supply taking place at this time. I hope some day I can stand on the earth with the same courage, trust, dignity and authenticity as the organic, biodynamic and sustainable farmers with whom I have been privileged to work and serve every day for the last fifteen years.
Go farmers!
“To be unsure is a blessing.”
Elizabeth Wirsching
Youth Section / Goetheanum
Sparkling Moments
Looking back to my childhood I can see some sparkling moments where some of my life’s motives were present. Like walking the beach as a little child, on the shore where the ocean meets the beach. I remember the “sucking” sound that made me turn around and discover my own footprints in the sand, after a while, washed away by the waves. “This is me” I said to myself. “I was there and now I am here,” echoed in my soul. Later on in life, this transformed into an imaginative picture where: Every human being leaves his or her footprints upon the earth.
The Good Will
In high school I once wrote my thesis on the sentence: “Good deeds are saving the world!” uttered by a famous Norwegian writer Björnstjerne Björnson just before he died. I remember the mood I had while writing and the conviction that “deeds of good will” belong to humanity and are independent of politics, religion and culture. It is something the world needs and says yes to. This mood I later found reading Rudolf Steiner’s works.
Working in the YouthSection for about nine years I always felt inspired by meeting young people who have the fire of initiative within themselves and of realizing their ideas, be it on a smaller or larger scale. I am always surprised by how simple the solution of giving support is: Talking with one another out of genuine interest, supporting each other through listening and exchanging advice. Stepping back inwardly to leave the other person and myself free. Real honest initiatives have this surprising capacity to grow from nothing to include, in a short time, many others throughout the world. Like a magnet attracting dust, supporting the described Good Will: The world’s will meets my “I will;” something wills in me that is greater than me.
Pregnancy
One of the questions I am most often asked is: “What is the task of the Youth Section?” I would answer out of what I thought was the task of the Youth in the world, and not solely limited to the Youth Section as such. My image has to do with pregnancy. Imagine the world as a globe and around the globe there is a sphere where all “unborn” ideas, initiatives and impulses are living: “The world is always pregnant” I call this image. The Youth is especially connected to this pregnancy as they have spent less time on earth and they still carry images from this pregnancy within their souls. Images they saw before being born. On earth they search for these images, for places and friends to help their images come through. The YouthSection as such is a place where they can develop themselves, their impulses and make them reality (real/realize them). The connection to pregnancy is not only limited to Youth. Anyone who is open at heart may recognize these youth forces; support them with warm attention and interest, helping “the birth” process. They very often connect and support youth initiatives and play a very important role for youth. Thus youth work is not only about youth. For Rudolf Steiner this “bridging between generations” was one of the main focuses for the Youth Section. Pregnancy is a time when new impulses are warmed up, becoming mature before being born. People of goodwill are inspired by this sphere of pregnancy.
Changing words
Sometimes I like to change words we use a lot. One of them is the word “future.” When we talk about the future, we often talk about something that has possibilities maybe often in an abstract way. That’s why I think “not yet” is a good alternative to “future.” It gives a substance to the word future and more intentionality. Youthwork has a lot to do with what is “not yet” manifest, trusting in something, that is not yet born. It is a challenge because this “not yet” has no name, has no physical, structured or philosophical support. It is “in the air,” dependent on trust and will. This “not yet” has no traditions, no habits and brings a new possibility into the world. It is like a newborn child so different from its siblings.
The good thing about being unsure
If I should summarize why I do what I do, or say it in another way: being unsure is what keeps me going.
 Being unsure is for me a profound capacity and quality. It lets me ask questions, lets initiatives grow in a free way, it requires an open mind and an inner attitude of flexibility, moving from one step to the next without knowing where the next step is leading to or going to bring. At a certain point the uncertainty will grow into visibility and I will be responsible for something I have created out of myself. This is for me a modern path of initiation.
Norway, September 2009.
Sowing the Word, Seeing My Path
John Harris Beck
Already daunted by the wreckage of our civilization, many of us have been shaped further by shipwrecks in family circumstances. Later on, these may be re-cognized as sound gestures of biographical architecture, repaying dull feelings of loss with affirmations of purpose. In my own “Saturn years,” I have become conscious of how such life patterns’ peculiar vectors inspired me to battles both social and solitary.
My family home was in the dry and empty square that calls itself the “cowboy state.” Economic success was a fading memory, but both sides of my family knew books, music, art, science, gardening. We were leavened by a mix of free-thinking protestant liberalism, tough old Calvinist roots, scientific agnosticism, Zen Buddhism, and Christian Science. A year after I was born, my mother, (child and grandchild of doctors), had her spinal cord chemically burned. Denial and deceit amplified the medical blunder: “That you’re in pain and can’t feel your legs and fall down, is hysteria; it’s all in your head.” My earliest memory is as a witness to this banal evildoing, from men who had been family friends. Evil, though, was not the error, not the thirty years of pain and debility ahead; it was simply the lie.
I hid feelings in accordance with WASP tribal customs and erased memories. Old things mysteriously spoke to me as if I should know them, and I was tuned to grownup life before starting grade school. Around age ten I got the librarian’s attention, pulling Dostoevsky (my first spiritual teacher) off the shelf, then Autobiography of a Yogi, and finally Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich followed by Hitler’s Mein Kampf. That era seemed terribly and mysteriously important, a lava flow of sickly, strident evil.
Finishing high school away from home woke me up to thinking. Harvard in the tear-gas years was a letdown, but I met my second spiritual teacher, Gustav Mahler. The sixties were emotion and music and protest, and the visionary passion of Leonard Bernstein gave currency to Mahler, a striving giant who reached up like an alpine climber from social decay and looming disaster to resurrection, cosmic love and, finally, the meeting of consciousness with death. Young Steiner heard young Mahler conduct and noted decades later that wonderful imaginations had issued from the tip of his baton.
I had inclined toward the family history in politics, but being gay, which at the time was viewed as pathetic, distasteful, and dangerous, ruled that out. Another cause appeared, public broadcasting. Great hopes were placed in this last child of LBJ’s Great Society. It was meant to be a national communications service which would inform well and truly, inspire and uplift with arts and humanities, and open up science to all. Born in 1968, the effort to kill it began the next year.
Television was quite totalitarian in those days before the Internet or even cable tv. America’s propaganda was ever so much smarter than that of the bolshies and nazis. Boosterish and deftly ruthless, its only god was the dollar. But FM radio was a blast of cultural freedom, and the new mostly FM public radio swept me along. Managing its decrepit city-owned flagship stations in New York, at thirty my knack for big ideas (like a nightly black cultural service on our tv channel) helped it get its footing. And then at age thirty-three I was burnt out, nowhere, in the abyss. And the thought came, “You should write a book for the millennium.”
Understanding millenniums calls for ideas bigger than one sees in a lifetime. Expanding toward this timescale led me to Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, The World Future Society, Carlos Castaneda, the I Ching, and Rudolf Steiner’s Esoteric Science. My social idealism found its new home in trying to grasp Steiner’s initiative: the groundworks for a new global civilization of conscience, brought out at just that moment when human evolution had become a matter of free choices. Years passed as I built up my sense of this picture. Technology work at a big bank paid the bills as communications meshed with computer networks until, shazam, there was the Internet. I gave the other half of my life to Anthroposophy NYC, trying to make anthroposophy visible in the world’s communications hub. “People skills” and “emotional intelligence” were needed, not just ideas.
Saturn years. They start from the third lunar node, just before the fifty-sixth birthday, when you sense again your plan for this life. These years have been unexpectedly kind. The heart was still alive in its canopic jar. I joined the open hearted seekers working with Nicanor Perlas and Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. Four years managing the New York Open Center exposed me to the hopes and sufferings of the “cultural creatives,” a movement Steiner had described in 1923.
 Today. The USA’s anthroposophical society needed a publications person; but updating technology, and even tone and idiom and urgency, must also build community. And what wants to live in that community? Can we form, together, a picture of anthroposophy’s core being? Its stupendous cosmic meaning and its utterly intimate healing and inspiring touch?
For now the publication evolves quite nakedly with each printed issue, sounding notes and listening for echoes. And the millennium book, now also a web project, will come early next year. Words to speak anew the immense challenge: to evolve our selves so that humanity can evolve. To see a new heaven and new earth as already here—so to bring them into general view. I recognize now, my life has always pointed to this battle, this communion.
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