by Colin Wilson
He seems to have been unaware that this was the end; he told Marie Steiner (they had married in 1914) that he was improving gradually, and that it was imperative that he should get back to work soon. But his suffering became increasingly intense. Outside, he could hear the sounds coming from the workshop, and the noise of the workmen building the new Goetheanum. Then, towards the end of March 1925, the pain suddenly ceased, and he became peaceful and relaxed. On 30 March he folded his hands over his breast, closed his eyes, and died.
* * *
*Quoted from Work Arising from the Life of Rudolf Steiner, edited by John Davy, p. 132.
Nine
Postscript: Steiner's Achievement
IT IS easy to see why Anthroposophists regard Steiner as the greatest man of the twentieth century, and are inclined to dismiss the idea that he was anything less than perfect. A man who worked so hard and so unselfishly could not be the charlatan portrayed by his enemies. But for the rest of us, it is rather more difficult to arrive at an impartial judgement. Beyond all doubt he was no confidence trickster, no fake messiah driven by an urge to self-aggrandisement. But when we try to arrive at a balanced assessment of what he was, the exercise becomes increasingly frustrating.
The most satisfactory method of approach is to try to grasp the essence of Steiner's achievement. What did he have to say that distinguishes him from all other thinkers of the twentieth century?
The answer lies in that recognition we have discussed at some length in the opening chapter: that the ‘spirit world’ is actually man's inner world. He is saying, in effect: the bird is a creature of the air; the fish is a creature of the water; the worm is a creature of the earth. But man is essentially a creature of the mind. His true home is a world inside himself. It is true that we have to live in the external world; but, as we saw in the first chapter, we have to retreat inside ourselves if we are to grasp this outer world.
Most of us find it difficult to ‘retreat’ very far into that inner world; the external world and its problems keep on dragging us back. Steiner seems to have had an altogether extraordinary capacity for descending into his inner world. And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the ‘spiritual world’, and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.
But how is it possible to make use of this insight? Here it is necessary for me to speak from personal experience. I have found that, since I began to immerse myself in the life and ideas of Rudolf Steiner, his ‘central assertion’ has assumed an increasing importance in my attitude towards my own experience. Most of us find that life is a struggle between our feeling of personal individuality and the overwhelming reality of the world around us. The world seems so much bigger and more important than we are. This feeling increases when we are tired or discouraged; at such times, we feel ‘stranded’ in the external world, like a jelly fish cast up on the beach by the tide. And when this happens, we experience the profoundly discouraging sensation that the external world is ‘all there is’—that it is the only reality.
Yet we know, deep down, that this is untrue. We only have to be reminded of that inner world by some smell or taste, or by a line of poetry or a few bars of music, to experience a strange inner flood of warmth and strength, the feeling Proust experienced when he tasted the cake dipped in tea, and which made him write: ‘I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal…’.
Proust devoted his enormous novel to exploring the problem: How can this feeling be restored at will? Rudolf Steiner had discovered the answer. His early studies of geometry and science had taught him the ‘trick’ of withdrawing deep inside himself, until it dawned on him that the inner realm is a world in itself, an ‘alternative reality’, so to speak. Once he knew this, he took care not to forget it. He devoted a certain amount of time every day to reminding himself of this truth.
In effect, Steiner's recognition could be compared to the spray carried around by asthma sufferers to ward off attacks. We are all subject to attacks of ‘contingency’. The answer lies in developing the trick of reminding oneself of the existence of that inner realm.
I have found that it is best to do this when I am not actually tired, but merely relaxed, or even slightly bored. Most of us experience a certain boredom, a sense of ‘taking for granted’, when we are on our way home, because we are looking forward to getting there, and the interval between now and then seems rather tiresome. This, I have found, is an excellent time for practising Steiner's trick of ‘withdrawal’, of reminding myself that this is not ‘all there is’, but that the entrance to an enormous Aladdin's cave lies just inside the threshold of my mind.
The results of this exercise were more interesting than I expected. I found that I not only ceased to feel ‘contingent’, but that my powers of endurance seemed to be considerably increased. I have noticed this particularly when walking along a very long beach not far from my home, a beach whose soft sand seems to absorb a great deal of energy. I usually plod along stoically, looking forward to getting back home and pouring myself a glass of wine. But when practising the ‘Steiner exercise’ (as I came to call it), I was suddenly indifferent to the aching in my legs. It no longer mattered.
This led to a further insight which I think is worth mentioning. I suspect that we quite unconsciously increase our fatigue by the mere act of being aware of it. If I am on a long walk, and I begin to feel tired, then the mere recognition that I am tired induces a kind of ‘negative feedback’. We all know how easily this can happen when we are feeling thoroughly miserable and discouraged; the sense of discouragement can turn into an avalanche that suddenly overwhelms us. My observations during the ‘Steiner exercise’ made me aware that, quite unconsciously, we do this all the time, and that merely withdrawing slightly into that ‘inner world’ breaks the negative circuit and releases strength that was otherwise being allowed to run down a kind of mental drain.
I feel that this provides an important clue to Steiner. Looking at the sheer volume of his work—it must run to nearly a million pages—one receives an impression of a cataract of mental energy. As a writer, I am aware of how much mental energy it takes to write a book. Steiner's mind seems to have been in full flood all the time; it never stopped. In order to form an estimate of that intellectual Niagara, one merely has to look at the 1,600 pages of Karmic Relationships, delivered between February and September 1924, and to realize that these were only a fraction of the lectures he delivered in that period. Then glance at any chapter of Wachsmuth's Life, and see how many lectures he delivered during an average year. One's first reaction is to say: ‘The man never stopped thinking.’ But all this is not mere ‘thinking’. Thinking is the activity we find so abundantly in Bertrand Russell, or Karl Marx, or Sartre, an activity that demands constant pauses for reflection. It seems obvious that Steiner was carried along by a flood of intuitions. Wachsmuth says repeatedly that when Steiner spoke about some event in history, he seemed to be seeing what he was describing.
To call this ‘active imagination’ sounds slightly derogatory, until one grasps what Jung actually meant by the term. For Jung, the ‘psychic world’ (i.e. world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.
One of the best examples of ‘active imagination’ is the curious ability known as psychometry, which was briefly discussed in the opening chapter. Certain people have the ability to hold an object in their hands and to ‘see’ images from its past history. In recent decades it has even been found to be a valuable aid to archaeology. A remarkable Polish psychic, Stefan Ossowiecki, was told by a friend about Rudolf Steiner and the ‘Akasic records’, and decided to make a systematic attempt to ‘read’ them. In association with Professor Stanislaw Poniatowski, of the University of Warsaw, he conducted a detailed series of experiments on prehistoric objects that again and again revealed
incredible accuracy.*
But all good psychometrists freely admit that they can easily be confused by the thoughts and expectations of other people, or by their own. Most psychometrists insist on being told nothing whatever about the object they are about to handle, in case this influences what they ‘see’.
The evidence suggests that Steiner was a psychometrist of a very high order—Maeterlinck went straight to the point when he said that Steiner used a ‘transcendental psychometry’. Unfortunately, he never undertook a series of controlled experiments, so it is quite impossible for us to know how many of his visions of the past were genuine, and how many—like the one at Tintagel—were partly imagination. Even so it is important to recognize that the Tintagel experience was not necessarily pure imagination. The Roman general Artorius is associated with Cornwall, as the large number of Arthurian place names testify.* Nothing is more likely than that there was some association between Artorius and the Celtic monastery that occupied the Tintagel site in Arthur's lifetime. But when Wachsmuth says: ‘He described to us in living pictures—pointing with his hand to the various parts of the castle—where the hall of the Round Table had once been, the rooms of the king and his knights,’ we are justified in assuming that he was being influenced by his literary knowledge of the legend.
Where Steiner's real importance is concerned, all this is irrelevant. Bernard Shaw pointed out that the miracles are irrelevant to the teachings of Jesus. ‘To say “You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of a cataract” would have been…the proposition of an idiot.’ And Shaw quotes Rousseau as saying: ‘Get rid of the miracles and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ.’ He argues that Jesus did his best to keep the miracles quiet because he realized that they would distract attention from what he really had to say. This is undoubtedly why Steiner reserved his lectures on karma and allied ‘occult’ subjects for a small circle of followers; he knew they would only distract attention from his basic teaching on freedom, on the reality of the ‘inner world’, on man's immense hidden powers of creativity.
Steiner was not, after all, a man whose claim to attention lay in ‘psychic powers’ or contact with hidden masters. It lay in the ideas that are to be found in his books on Goethe, in The Philosophy of Freedom, and in the Autobiography. Steiner claimed that what he was saying in those books was the foundation for his later ideas. Yet the truth is that we may decide to ignore the later ideas, or to study them in a spirit of purely intellectual curiosity, without detracting in any way from our sense of the importance of these early books.
It has been my own experience that, once Steiner's basic ideas are understood, everything else falls into place. Problems only arise if we approach Steiner through the ‘esoteric’ teachings that he himself tried to limit to intimate friends and convinced Anthroposophists. If we begin with Cosmic Memory or Karmic Relationships, the result is likely to be confusion followed by scepticism. We want to know how he claims to know all these things, and he offers no clue. So it is easy to make the assumption that his ‘readings’ from the Akashic records are pure invention. If we once conclude that he is dishonest, then it becomes equally plain that the turning point came in 1900, when he decided to swallow the doctrines of Theosophy to gain an audience—rather as a poor man might marry an ugly but wealthy widow. The next step is to feel that a man who could compromise his intellectual honesty to this extent must have been a fraud—or at least a lightweight—from the beginning.
Presumably a person who has arrived at this conclusion would never make the attempt to read the Autobiography or Goethe's Theory of Knowledge. And this would be a pity, for these two books, the first and last Steiner wrote, make it immediately clear that this man was far too serious a thinker to be dismissed in this way. It would be possible to construct a whole philosophy upon this single sentence from the Goethe book: ‘When one who has a rich mental life sees a thousand things which are nothing to the mentally poor, this shows as clearly as sunlight that the content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our minds, and that we receive from without merely the empty form.’
Take this as our starting point, and we begin to see Steiner from a completely different point of view. He was a man who was born into a world dominated by scientific materialism. His objection to this materialism was not merely intellectual, or even egotistical (the feeling ‘If the world is wholly material, then I can't be very important’). It was the feeling that man is cut off from his inner powers by this superficial attitude. This is why Steiner shouted at his friend at the Vienna railway station: ‘Please note that you never say “my brain thinks”, “my brain sees”, “my brain walks”…The fact is, you are lying when you say “I”…’. A man who believes that thinking is merely some chemical activity of the brain will never make the effort to create a masterpiece.
The problem is that man is trapped in a vision of himself as a nobody, a nonentity. Gurdjieff would have said that this is because so-called waking consciousness is actually a disguised form of sleep. Steiner would have put it slightly differently, and said that it is a problem of ‘forgetfulness’. Human beings have forgotten that they are free.
The different diagnoses lead to different remedies. For Gurdjieff, man needs to be shaken awake; he needs an ‘alarm clock’. The threat of death, for example, instantly wakes him up. The problem is that the ‘robot’, the mechanical part of us, tends to do most of our living for us. Gurdjieff's answer was to maintain a high level of self-discipline—for example, incredibly complicated physical movements—that would suppress the robot. But even this is not a permanent solution; consciousness is continually falling asleep again.
Steiner's answer is, by comparison, far more optimistic. If man has forgotten that he is free, his problem is simply to remind himself. Like Faust, he needs to remember that
The spirit world is never closed;
Your heart is dead, your senses sleep…
To grasp the essence of Steiner, we only need to re-read that opening scene in Faust, where the overworked scholar, depressed and exhausted, feels tempted to commit suicide. But as he raises the poison to his lips, the Easter Bells begin to ring, bringing back a flood of memories of childhood—the ‘Proust effect’. And Faust dissolves into tears of happiness, remembering that life is infinitely complex and infinitely exciting.
Hermann Hesse captured the same vision in his own version of Faust, the novel Steppenwolf. The hero is another bored scholar who suspects that life is a malicious joke. He broods on suicide. Then, as he sits in a tavern, eating his evening meal with a glass of Moselle, he experiences pure delight: ‘A refreshing laughter rose in me…It soared aloft like a soap bubble…and then softly burst…The golden trail was blazed, and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart and the stars…’.
It is as if the doorway to an inner Aladdin's cave has swung open. He realizes that human beings possess a sense of reality, a certain faculty that gives us access to reality. (I have elsewhere called this ‘Faculty X’.)
We can see that the real problem of Faust and Steppenwolf is that they have not only allowed themselves to forget this ‘other’ reality—Mozart and the stars—but that they have gone to the other extreme, and constructed a mental vision that is based on the feeling that life is stupid and futile.
How can they combat this negative insight? Gurdjieff would say: by constructing elaborate ‘alarm clocks’ and accepting ‘intentional suffering’. But there is obviously a more straightforward solution. If I really want to remember something, then I can do so. I can sit and think about Faust and Proust and Steppenwolf, until my gloom has evaporated and I realize that the ‘negative insight’ is a mixture of muddle-headedness and self-pity. If I do this often enough, I shall gradually cease to become subject to apathy and discouragement. I shall realize that the objective facts of human existence justify immense optimism, and that the main thing that prevents us from grasping this is simply childishness, a failu
re to grow up.
There was another respect in which Steiner was more optimistic than Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff said that man is deluded to believe he has an ‘essential ego’, a real ‘I’. The truth, said Gurdjieff, is that man has hundreds of ‘I's’, and they keep replacing one another with bewildering rapidity, so man is like a country that has never known a stable government. Steiner would agree that there is an element of truth in this, but he would argue that it is not a fundamental problem. According to Steiner, the existence of an ‘I’ is precisely what distinguishes man from the lower animals. We might compare a dog or cat to a group of travelling musicians who wander through the streets playing more or less in unison; but man is an orchestra with a conductor. The travelling players make a perfectly good job of ‘Home, sweet home’. But only the orchestra can do justice to Beethoven's ninth symphony.
The problem, according to Steiner, is that man continues to behave as if he were a group of travelling musicians; he never attempts anything more ambitious than ‘Home, sweet home’. Why? Because the conductor is sitting among the orchestra, smoking a cigarette, unaware that he is the conductor. It is only in certain moments of excitement or crisis that he remembers who he is, and seizes the baton. Then the orchestra responds by playing magnificently. If he made them practise every day, the results would clearly be superb.
Again, we can see that it is a problem of forgetfulness rather than ‘sleep’. If the conductor makes a habit of rehearsing twice a day, the problem will vanish.
Steiner goes further than this—and this is his own central contribution to modern thought. He states that once we have made a habit of remembering Mozart and the stars, we shall find ourselves developing powers of ‘spiritual vision’. We shall never again feel ourselves to be helpless victims of the external world. At present, man is subject to misery, distress, and mental strain because he keeps drifting into a kind of short-sightedness and forgetfulness. Any serious crisis makes him see how lucky he is, and that the problems that normally oppress him are sheer trivialities. He merely has to learn to grasp this so he will never forget it. And, as we all know, it is quite easy to do this if you tell yourself it really matters. When that is accomplished, says Steiner, we shall not only cease to be subject to anxiety and fatigue, but will find ourselves standing on the threshold of a new spiritual world, and developing powers that we never even suspected we possessed.