Secondly we have social groups, interaction groups. People move not to study but to meet each other. The group meets to meet, to have a good time or to help each other. In the social group there is no subject of study, nor does it matter what is said, but the interaction, that is what counts. A third possibility is group action. The action group establishes objectives that are external to the work group. They may be teachers who want to run a Waldorf school, they may also want to run a farm or make a garden. They want to do something that is not within the group but outside the world. In a group of ten people, for example, let's say there are three who want to work, three who want to study and four who want to meet each other. This group may not work very well. For group life, people have to agree on the character of the group, what is the objective? Is the objective of each person the same as that of the group? The study group, the interaction group and the action group, all have their place and significance. First, in a group the expectations of different people must be at the same level. It is better to talk about it the first half hour than to continue at different levels of expectation and aspiration. No really good and reasonable group develops their lives if their members have conflicting goals. Second: What are the laws for work in the type of group chosen? There are different laws pertaining to the life of the groups depending on whether it is an interaction or action study group. People generally do not worry about this, they simply act. They arrive and say: let's study, be social or work. However, when people meet and say, we are going to do something, the laws that govern their group's action must be known. They are different from those that govern the study group. Third, a rather rare thing. When the goals of the group change, is everyone aware of the change? Do you want to penetrate the whole world in the new group situation? Often a group starts as a simple study group, then changes. Around 40% of the members form a social group, while 20% want to penetrate the action and the remaining 40% want to continue being a study group. There is a lot of tension and dissatisfaction, discussions that arise from the fact that the group started on one level and then changed. No one was aware of it.
Steiner after the founding congress ceremony said: Anthroposophy should lead to exercises with karma He did not want to say that people went to his house and locked himself in his small room and meditated on their previous lives. In this way, surely, illusions penetrate into the soul. Practical exercise with karma means meeting others because other people tell me what I am. Steiner taught that even the initiate cannot penetrate his own incarnations. Other people have to reveal them to them. Finding ourselves with other people, their own personal path, their own current becomes increasingly clear. Consider first the study group. Steiner says that study is the first step in the path of knowledge. The study is the first step in internal development. When we try to take that first step, it is reasonable to do it in a group, if it can be found. It is useful to find another person who is interested in the same subject as me. Let's say that I am interested in the cathedral of Chartres and I find another person also interested; then we say: let's meet to study it. Studying together is satisfactory and you always have something else to take with you if you are studying only; this is a gift. But there is a danger. When the objective of the group is the study, each member is more or less egocentric. Each member wants to take something from a new insight, each member wants to understand things better than before. However, the study is a preparation, it is a first step. Before becoming spiritual, before being able to give something, it must be accumulated. One cannot give what one does not have. One has to accumulate an inner vision and real spiritual knowledge. One must study; After studying you can take the next step, give something to other people. Another danger of group study is intellectual selfishness: this can mean the gathering of more and more conferences without ever getting enough. More and more, a danger of intellectualism and dissatisfaction. I really know something, but I would like to know all the things that exist under the stars. This may be true for people who work in a study group, one must be careful about this intellectual selfishness. The conference group is one in which things are divided in such a way that one member speaks and others listen. This is also a form of study. Conferences are useful because when someone has worked a certain subject for many years, they can explain it to a group of interested people, but when the lectures are pedantic or distorted, then difficulties arise around the speaker's vanity. When a group has the habit of the conference, the following occurs: the audience, the public or members get used to listening, somehow they develop a certain passivity, they become so to speak, in a consumer league, not in a workgroup. In anthroposophical life, for example there are old groups that have been meeting for thirty years every Thursday afternoon. They read their lectures and listen to someone who explains the meaning, when they are asked to become active or to discuss a problem, they encounter great difficulties.
One of the things that young members of the anthroposophical society in the Netherlands say is: when we get to the groups, nobody greets us. We try to find a chair, we sit and feel very alone. The talks are interesting we go home. We feel completely frozen in a social sense although very inspired in an intellectual or spiritual way. But we are empty in the heart region. In that case something must be done. In Holland a group of members tried to be aware of the arrival of new people, talk to them, ask them and introduce them. Steiner thought it was very important that people be received. Meet someone who goes to them and talks to them. At Waldorf School, in the afternoon dedicated to parents, he always set up what he called a smile committee. He said: you and you will form the smile committee this afternoon. This meant that a member received the parents greeted them, said some pleasant words, accompanied them to their place providing them with a feeling of welcome. This is not an empty thing is something from real life. One positive thing in the life of the group is to learn that the other members study very differently. They have other interests, they feel other values, they look for other ways. One expands the horizon itself when in a group. When one sees how the same content of the same conference is studied in totally different ways, it is not worth fighting for the right method. To fight for the right method is to do what old Tobias did. Old Tobias was always right, he always had the right method and so he was blinded to what was around him. If one only says my method is the only correct one and all the others are not, then one becomes blind to their surroundings. For the study group, what is the internal path? The inner path is the Eightfold Path, working with the sixteen petal chakra. This is the path of the Buddha. The eight things that must be worked on the eightfold path are: The right image The Eightfold Path in your overall vision means finding the right balance between the soul and the world.
The real imagination is only constructed when one has traveled a path about the object of study and has found at least twelve different points of view from which to consider it but at least twelve, says Steiner. In a group of twelve people, there should be a possibility that the twelve points of view can be raised. When the group is older, there are even more possibilities. This is the challenge: Think. Listen to another person who has understood it in an absolutely different way. This is the fruit of the study group. The second type of group is the social group, work is not a specific issue but the group itself. How is this possible? I must tell you that I have learned this in a group of young people in their thirties. It was not a mentally oriented group. I liked to know things, I liked to study. He had a scientific interest, but he was not very interested in other people in a general way yes, but not really. I thought I was doing very well in Anthroposophy and then I met a group of young people who were working together on what for me was a rather strange way. They were a very mixed group of people; there were students from different faculties and workers. One was employed by a post office. There was a young woman who was not mentally retarded as it might seem, but it was a Borderline case. They were all studying together, working the metamorphosis of Goethe plants. The first Sunday of each month they met throughout the day. At first they did Euritmia, then they worked on the plants. They went out and tried to find plants, examine them and see where the forces of light and those of the vital ether acted. In the afternoon they returned and studied something else about the subject. When a member of the group did not understand a thing, they stopped and said: we cannot continue until this person has understood. The delayed girl was fundamentally the one who didn't understand. Most of the groups would have preferred to avoid this difficulty. She delayed the group a lot but the group didn't care about that. They said if we lose one of our members the group will have failed. A convoy does not go beyond where the slowest of its ships arrives. We have to stop by the slower ship and stay together.
For twenty-five years she has been one of the most famous instructors in our country. People come to her to learn how she does it and why a certain type of morality arises in such a group. The members of the group really care about each other, their main priority is not study, this is only an instrument, they wanted to be a group, help each other, make progress in social life. When a social group is built members can be dependent on each other. Many people do not like this, but the members must be aware of each other. When you approach another person, what do you see? What is the first thing you find? The first thing you see is not the education he or she has had, the history of his life, his feelings, or efforts. When one meets more deeply with one person, one enters the other's old karma. What is present in the wraps? The physical body, the etheric and the astral body, is the history of life, of this life and of the previous ones. What does it mean to deal with double the other person? In a social context the first thing that one becomes aware of is the old Adam and the old Eve. Everything in the person comes from previous lives and the history of his life, double, is just the concentration of that old karma. When he has to learn to look behind the double and wonder what it is that I strive to get after that double. the double may seem a bit strange One says, I would not like to relate to this person. Really then one learns to know her. You can learn in a group to look through or behind the doubles. Then we find the self that strives to develop a future, a better situation, a higher life. When people live together for a long time in a closed situation and each day they have to meet, this clashing of the doubles can become a form of psychosis. People become very psychotic as a result of contact with each other. We call this in psychiatry as submarine psychosis. When people have to live together in high numbers, twenty or thirty in a very narrow space, the way one of them does this or that, those little things irritate one in such a way that he can say: if you don't stop I will kill you. When one encounters something in life, it means clashing with another person's double; What is irritating is not the self that strives, but the old Adam, double. Something fixed is always doing the same things, always acting the same way, always saying the same things. In group life, one can practice the following as an exercise. I want to meet these ten people with whom I am working. This does not mean penetrating their private life or asking them intimate questions, it always brings us back to double. Try to find the point where this person speaks from his Self. What do you really want to get in life? Where are your deepest aspirations? When you know them one knows something about the other, about the I of the other as someone who is struggling. Trying to get in touch with another person's I is something that brings us the beautiful fruits that can arise from a social group. Naturally there are many dangers, of sentimentality, of irritation, of oppression, of hatred, and the withdrawal of some people. In the US, people do not like to face these issues. They like all things to be nice and warm and not to penetrate something unpleasant, but to live in a way that some are not irritated by others.
Thought control This is the goal and the fruit of the Sixfold Path . A quiet understanding means being able to understand the other person. For this there must be tranquility in one's own heart, the soul itself must be calm so that it can perceive what is coming from the other soul. The great development path for the current human race is, according to Steiner (the Eightfold Path was followed by Buddha), the Sixth Path is the path of the present man. Developing those qualities is a way of developing social skills. It is the way to develop the Moral Fantasy, the Moral Imagination. It is a way to develop Inspiration. Being aware of the Self behind the double of the other, one is really on the path of Inspiration. When one looks at a child and loves the child, one can simply love the beautiful hair, the pleasant voice. Soft skin, but you can also learn to love the Self that is behind the child and that is striving towards its development. And this is already a path within the path of Imagination. No instructor can be a good teacher without having developed a certain degree of Inspiration. This is the great gift of people who have to work with children. The third type of group is the initiative working group. This group meets to follow initiatives or to carry out actions. What can a working group be? It is not simply when ten or twenty people are taking action. An action group must first be a group, which means finding some way, whether through study, either through practice or through the development of social skills, to be a group and then this group is able to establish a objective in the world. When the group wishes to establish a goal in the world, it can then be an instrument for social construction. The hierarchies can penetrate it, it can be an organism of the spiritual world. A work group that really is a group can be an organism for the spiritual world. When a group has surpassed the old karmic forces, each of its members strives to seek the spiritual selves of each of the other people in the group; He strives to develop what the ego of the other desires on his spiritual level, not what his various envelopes desire. So it is an action group really working from intuition. Hierarchies can then work through the group; the group becomes an instrument of the Hierarchies. The I is situated in it but the group works from intuition. New karma is built, it is solar karma. The old karma is lunar karma and came through the lunar gate in earthly life. The forces of the old karma are arranged in such a way that they penetrate the life of the person born. This is the old karma, the lunar karma. But during the life that begins through the activity of the Self, a new solar karma that radiates into the future is being built, it is the karma that will develop in later lives. It is the Fivefold Path of the development of the ten-pin chakra.
The first step is to learn to command sensory perceptions. The second is to control the fantasies, control them and ask where they come from. Thirdly, in our entire life we experience a great amount of unconscious perceptions that come to us through the ears, eyes and also through the magnetic forces of the earth. We have to build armor to the soul against unconscious perceptions. Fourth, avoid accepting things without thinking about them. You listen to all kinds of things and read them in the newspapers; All kinds of things that are accepted without thinking. We have to learn to live in such a way that the things that come to us are clear, so that one should think about them. In addition to these four levels, Steiner added the firm self-discipline. This means that people who are in a work group have to find a way to contribute, they have to accept the other as the other is and give them possibilities and space to work. Each member has to keep their negative aspects to themselves and must work on them individually, put all those things together, then we have the old karma. This old karma is made up of all the things we know or can do; We have skills and knowledge, this comes from our old karma. We fear meeting, meeting other people and taking the other in our own life. We cannot meet other people when we do not assume them. When we have assumed the other person in our own life and made it part of it, then the new karma penetrates through our will. This is karma for the future. One can talk about groups in this way. In the study group the old karma is revealed, in the social group the old karma is fixed and in the work group new karma is formed. Practically then, when we work in a group we ask ourselves, what is the objective of this group? What are we doing? Is the group aware of what it is doing? Is everyone at the same level of expectation? Bernard Lievegoed -> SEEN AT: http://www.revistabiosofia.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=303&Itemid=55 |
When we work together, the goal may be the study of Spiritual Science. The subject of the study is that on which our effort is exerted fundamentally. This may be the essential task of the group. If a person is interested in one thing, he can naturally study it alone, but may want to penetrate deeper. So look for other people who are also interested and then study together. They manage to go further than when each one studies separately. Such a group clearly works on a conceptual level, on a level of intellectual content.
What should we get and learn in different groups? Group life and group work is a way of practicing karmic understanding. Each encounter with another person is a practical exercise in karma. Who am I? Who is the other?
The positive aspect of the conferences is that they give the possibility of listening in condensed form the work of someone who has researched a subject for many years. The audience receives what lives in the soul of the other and what that soul has worked.
Steiner worked with very young people. Some groups of young Germans, in 1923, came to Steiner and said: We have formed our groups of young students, how should we work together, Doctor Steiner? Then Steiner said to them: For the love of God. Let there be no talks. Yes, they said, but we are young people. How can we talk about our hidden experiences if we don't have them? Yes, Steiner said, you have them daily, what happens is that you let them go unnoticed. Finding a person and seeing that he is a human being is a first step to the imagination. Without imagination one cannot distinguish if someone is a statue or a human being. He may move, but when he does not move, he looks with his eyes and then sees a self, is a person. Or when we say this person is sad or this other is happy, it is by the force of the imagination. One can have deep imaginations about the work of the spiritual world in the physical world, so that they seem like an image, when one has found its right balance. When that correct balance is not there, the imagination is simply an illusion. You think you are doing something, but the soul and the world are simply out of balance. Following the Octuple Path means practicing in the forms of the Eightfold Path. Practice in the group of people who study. Such a group enters into a discussion during the study, so that one says: I have read a phrase by Stciner and I understand it this way. He tries to describe the way he understands it. Then another says: I have understood it in a very different way but it must not be said that you are not right, only to say that you have understood it in a different way. Let us recognize these two points of view.
They asked me on one occasion to go with them and tell them about some things about plants. I had to study in this area. At first I was really irritated by this form of work, I didn't want to go back. But I realized that something was happening, I saw how a sphere of morality grew in this group and I saw how the girl grew and lost her shyness. She continued and studied. She came to examine herself as a kindergarten instructor and now she is very successful.
In The knowledge of the higher worlds, Steiner speaks about this ten-lotus lotus and the Fivefold Path that leads into the future. The Sixfold Path (which leads to social life) has to do with interpersonal relationships in the life of here and now. The Fivefold Path leads to the future, but what is the Fivefold Path?
