2010/26

Gary Lachman: Rudolf Steiner (236p.)

Some of you may have a child attending a Waldorf/Steiner school, where an education is provided based upon the principles of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, education being just one shoot from the very fruitful Anthroposophy tree.

Whereas most esoteric movements draw from the East, and although intimately linked to Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy (itself Hindu-inspired), Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy was the product mainly of German Idealism (Hegel, Fichte, Schelling), and of the influence of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and as such presents a genuine western ‘spiritual’ movement, mind over matter.

Picture the curriculum of a student in a western European country (attending for instance a regular high school) as a book: all the pages on the right-hand side are missing (the East); the pages on the left-hand side are incomplete, and only mention Judeo-Christianity, Greek-Roman antiquity, and science, at the exclusion of everything else. I’ve been to school in Belgium for more than 20 years, and can’t remember a single teacher ever mentioning Steiner.

‘Why care?’ you could say. Well, either you do or you don’t. I’d rather not be able to pick (sic) from a complete catalogue. (Besides Steiner being a great potential antidote to the mental and moral cul-de-sac our society is in.) And I like Steiner’s unrelenting focus on the active participation of the individual in the world, and this through the faculties of the mind.

Another great effort by Gary Lachman, founder and bass player to New Wave band Blondie.