This essay is meant to be a abstract or overview of my work ... no person else knows it properly sufficient to do such a task. There are over 12 self-printed books, https://site-rips.club/ 100 essays and 270 movies on YouTube.

For books, go right here: Joel A. Wendt's Theory of Everything Emporium where books might be on-demand printed at price, and in lots of instances downloaded as e-books totally free.

Like T.H. White’s version of the wizard Merlin, I appear to stay in an odd relationship to time.

Six years ago I died - twice - on the same day. I noticed no white lights, and only woke into consciousness (for which I have recollections) about two and a third days later. Three of my 5 grownup youngsters had been sitting around me within the hospital room. They informed me I had been waking up briefly, after which going again into unconsciousness a number of instances. I didn't remember any of those earlier awakenings.

Somehow I used to be not shocked to have died. Nor, to be alive.

I’ve had an odd life, at least for my part. I'm 73 at the time I am scripting this, and won’t actually let myself think about residing previous the subsequent second. I do carry on living, however since my loss of life over six years in the past, I don’t let myself put off things I do know need doing (by my very own lights).

I’ve written and self published over a dozen books and a hundred essays, and created over 270 movies for YouTube. Everything is available for free on my web site: Shapes within the Fire. I’ll forgo the stories of efforts and mailings to get printed in an everyday approach - they largely failed. A couple of essays received printed in obscure magazines. Friends obtained free copies of books for Christmas.

I’ve been writing and considering for a very long time - since each time in my late 20‘s. It was extra of an avocation or a interest, after which ... at age 31, in 1971, I modified and became a very different personality. Those particulars are found here: Biographical Necessity, but usually are not important to this essay.

In 2003, when i retired on social safety (after working the final three years in a light industrial manufacturing unit), I created a enterprise card, which learn: "social philosopher ... and occasional fool". I had thought for a time that the people who were members of a society/group called "The Anthroposophical Society" might have a use for my work and my different talents. In this I used to be mistaken. I stored writing anyway, numerous it being a vital examination of that Society.

Mostly for work in life I've washed dishes, cooked in restaurants, and labored in the sphere of mental health. I do have a B.A. in pre-seminary, and a J.D. in law. I fell out of the center class within the late ‘60‘s, which is an irrelevant story here. Although this "fall" did contain drug addiction, I've been clean and sober for 27 years. It's the tale of my avocation as a thinker that issues me now.

That being the case I discover myself in this odd state of affairs of getting created the corpus of a work of thought, which no one is studying. Oh, a few individuals read elements of it, but in the main the whole is simply identified to me. Facing that fact has led me to realize that if I need there to be an enough abstract of this work, I’ll have to write it myself. Thus, this so-referred to as obituary.

I'm most definitely not writing right here an autobiography, by the way. This is just a abstract of my life as a thinker - as a "social philosopher ... and occasional fool". It is that work that I search to explicate, and maybe give some order to, for it appeared in bits and pieces over many a long time. No one but me will be capable to make the needed whole of it, or attend to its that means in the larger scheme of things - whether it is to have any that means there in any respect.

It's entirely attainable that I'll cross away, largely unread, and what I’ve completed will probably be subsumed into the continued cultural debris of our Age. Others, perhaps, will not discover it a work worthy of being remarked upon, or remembered. I, nonetheless, value it. I spent an excessive amount of my inside life giving delivery to it, and to some degree robbed my children and wives and girlfriends of some attention they could have in any other case deserved, however which they lost to my obsessions relating to the ideas that make up this work.

I don’t apologize for this. I don’t remorse it. It is who I'm - a thinker about life and that means and the unusual corners of the intellect to which few writers have devoted themselves. I used to want fame, or not less than to be of service and identified. I am happy now to have simply achieved the art of this considering-work to the best of my potential. I summarize it now, as a result of I acknowledge there may be no one on the market who could do such a abstract - without prejudice.

Am I biased and egotistical? Certainly. Why not, for if the work delivers what I am about to say it delivers, then it's a work deserving of being remembered and maybe discovered useful. I do have fans who see me typically as smart, so I'll settle for that judgment after which now make this abstract of the work, in the style I hope will be most helpful to those that hassle to learn this faux "obituary".

I hope to additionally make an oral model of this for YouTube, however always the longer term doesn't wish to be pinned down. It's the winter of 2013/2014, and i want my "hobbies" to keep me firm. Ideas are my associates in a means most people cannot even imagine. Not to say I lack for human companionship - I've a wonderful girlfriend who I dwell with, and five youngsters and a grandchild - all young adults and older. I live in New England with my girlfriend and the others dwell in California. We speak on the telephone, and often visit in particular person.

I additionally speak to those that will not be visible - spirits, if you will. Here is one thing I wrote as part of a not too long ago completed novel (American Phoenix):  T’ requested the Captain: "what is spirit, to your thinking". The Captain replied: "something you can’t see ... its invisible, and because its invisible it might not even exist, right?" T’ continued: "Do you've got a self, or one thing you consider as a ‘self’?" "Yes" "Can I see it? Is it your physique?" After a pause, "No". "How are you aware its not your body?" "I’m unsure. Its simply that my self and my physique usually are not the identical things. My self is more ... private somehow. My body serves my self, but my self doesn’t serve my body. I drag my physique around. I make it do issues it doesn’t want to do. I suppose that’s the key - my being able to make my body do stuff it - the flesh - doesn’t want to do. I can override pain and tiredness. Hunger. I run it, it doesn’t run me." "Can you see Aryee’s self, or Valentine’s?" After one other pause, "No". "But we treat each other as if we had this ‘self’, yes?" "Yes." "So, we are able to see each others physical physique with our physical sense organs, but only with our pondering and feeling can we ‘see’ this self. Yes?" "Yes" "Do you see me or others do that thing we call ‘thinking’?" "No." "Yet, it is with this invisible thinking/feeling that you already know you've a self, and with this invisible considering/feeling that you simply believe others too have a self. Yes?" "Yes" "So self is invisible precisely like spirit, and pondering perceives this invisible spirit in us and in others. Yes?" "Yes" "Could something be more easy?""

*

Then there is this: The Grandmother Tree, a report about communion with nature beings.

I write lots about pondering. Have made a study of it for decades. Perhaps I ought to start there.

One day I used to be reflecting (certainly one of a dozen completely different modes of pondering) upon the varied transformations of my pondering life, which had taken many a long time to come up. These transformations have been circuitously intended, but arose as a type of pure consequence of another types of internal activity, which is likely to be known as "moral" in nature.

Now by "moral" I do not mean any virtue described in a e-book, Holy or in any other case. Nor a commandment supposed to return from God, either. I invent this free-moral-exercise within the situation of the second. It's moral because it comes from the need of my will to do the nice, and due to the insights of my heart - of my feeling life - which then influences my pondering by in effect "warming" it. Cold-hearted abstract considering doesn't give us "the good". Will the great and assume with the heart would be the cliche.

If you assume I'm placing myself up as some kind of ethical example, this is not the case. I do know my flaws and dangerous habits in addition to anyone. I'm simply writing about a kind of inside effort, with considering, that changes the character of the product of thinking. Kind of like someone with a skill, who makes art on a stage, but then in their non-public life they remain pretty human and unusual. My writing, and its related considering, is my art on the stage of a web page. Even then this art is often uneven. In life and in a lot of private relationships, I might be just as goofy as anybody else.

As early as 1986 I described my then practice as follows:

In what follows are only the barest indications. The reader very much needs to experience their own activity and its penalties, forming their own conclusions as to which goals and what processes are most fitted for them. a) Preparation: these are exercises, equivalent to these practices accountable for ideas, developing internal quiet (meditation follow plays a task here) and so forth. Its like the stretching one should do before starting critical physical exercise. b) Sacrifice of ideas: letting go preconceptions; overcoming habitual patterns. Nothing will stop new thoughts from arising, as simply as already believing one knows the answer. c) Refining the question: the ethical atmosphere, why can we want to know; reality gathering and image forming. It is an creative exercise. What ethical colour do I paint my soul, what factual supplies do I collect as I put together to form a picture - i.e. think in all that that act can suggest. d) Offering the question: acknowledging Presence, and not needing a solution. Tomberg urges us to learn to suppose on our knees. e) Thinking as a spiritual Eucharist: receiving and beauty. We don't suppose alone. It thinks in and with me (Steiner). f) Attitude: sobriety and play."

I known as this apply: Sacramental Thinking, and thus began a development of practices which have been over time cataloged in numerous essays (earliest first): pragmatic ethical psychology; The idea of Mind: a Christian meditator considers the issue of consciousness; The Meaning of Earth Existence within the Age of the Consciousness Soul; In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship; Speaking Truth to Power: Inwardly, within the realm of mind, also known as: soul and spirit; The thought of the thought-world; and, Cowboy Bebop - and the physics of thought as moral artwork.

There is a e-book containing all of the above essays: Sacramental Thinking.

What I was discovering (after having been inspired on this path of soul-research by Rudolf Steiner), through what's principally a scientific and empirical investigation of my very own inwardness, was that my thoughts was a doorway to the spirit. And, that the spirit was as real as the world visible to my senses.

In truth, thought and thinking are much more real, in a means, than the objects of the sense world. I made them and i might observe myself make them. The outer world came to me already made - achieved. Thoughts and considering were solely rooted in my very own creative activity.

This finally lead me to writing a book as a form of end result of my life’s work in 2010: The Art of God: an actual principle of Everything. In that ebook, which is basically a textual content on social science, following the instance of Goethe’s Theory of Color, I focus on the disconnect between science and religion, and resolve it. Like a lot of my work, few of my contemporaries will learn it.

Goethe’s methodology of pondering performs a job here, however to get to that story we need to first borrow a picture from the above essays.

Thinking, within the technique of producing thought, has an object. We intend to think about one thing. The above essays chart a course of growth within the strategies of pondering itself, the place various ethical renunciations happen. We sacrifice one thing, and by that inner moral work of sacrifice (and its associated life-trial), thinking acquires new capacities. Goethe, in his studies of the Plant, observed that it too underwent processes of metamorphosis, where one thing was sacrificed or renounced. He known as this facet of the residing element of the Plant: dying and changing into.

So, in trying back over a few years of inside work, which could not be directed towards a particular finish as a result of I had but no thought of such an end, I found that I had 3 times sacrificed one thing in the way I oriented my considering activity.

The first sacrifice involved my instinctive emotions of liking and disliking, or what some call sympathy and antipathy. In my empirical studies of my very own inwardness (soul) I had noticed that ideas took a shape primarily based upon these instinctive emotions. I wrote somewhere: Thought is a flower rooted within the soul-soil of feeling, and filled from within by the blossoming life of the will-in-pondering.

If I took away (sacrificed/renounced) the instinctive emotions of liking and disliking, and replaced these with a consciously created cultivated feeling (corresponding to marvel and awe), then the product of the thinking exercise changed. It also helped to follow Goethe, and use my imagination - my image considering capability - on purpose and with self-discipline. He known as the doing of this: exact sensorial fantasy. We recreate the object of thought as a sequence of internal photos that change over time.

Thinking-about then became considering-with. I realized that the thing of thought had its personal story, whether or not it was an individual or something else. If I recreated in my picture pondering (imagination) this story (which modifications over time), then a new and deeper understanding of the item of thought arose. If I am enthusiastic about an individual, we name this: learning to walk in another’s shoes.

The second sacrifice/renunciation involved previous ideas. Anything thought in the past needed to be let go or the truly new thought was inhibited from appearing. If I pulled an already existing thought from memory, this grew to become a form of ghost appearing in between my pondering "I", and the article of thought.

This known as, after the educating in the Gospels: changing into poor in spirit. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3) Thus Goethe’s dying and becoming becomes an act of will within the life of the mind. We then move from considering-with to thinking-inside. The interior of the item of thought begins to mild up in the mind’s eye. This is greater than studying to walk in another’s sneakers, but is relatively true and self-consciously willed empathy. We don’t just understand someone higher, we begin to really know them.

The third sacrifice/renunciation includes our "self". We let go the pure egocentric facet of seeing the world at all times from our particular person viewpoint. These renunciations don't grow to be habits, by the way in which. Rather they turn into first skill, then craft and eventually art. They require our acutely aware consideration and intention (the need-in-thinking) with a view to manifest.

As a consequence of those three renunciations, and the related and growing skill to love more and more deeply, the gap between self and other dissolves. Thinking-about grow to be thinking-with turns into pondering-inside and then lastly thinking-as. Our point of view changes and we begin to see actuality from the point of view of the other - of the Thou.

An important level right here is to comprehend that while the above is described as requiring a whole lot of inner "work", the actual fact is that as we develop these arts we begin to see that in every single place many individuals naturally do this. What I developed consciously over many years of empirical analysis into the true nature of thinking is usually given to most people (within the kind they most want it) by life itself.

For a superb understanding of this, look to the artwork of the movies by Clint Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. There you will notice what artists perceive as already happening in various methods in the conventional trials of life. All somebody like me does is give names to those internal adjustments. That’s why its useful to see me as a "scientist" of the spirit. I do research and solely end up describing intimately something that already exists. I don’t invent it, I simply invent its identify. That is what poets and philosophers do - invent new names.

Now one of the discoveries that is feasible right here is that there is something that may be referred to as: the thought-world. Like the sense world, which our physical senses see and know, the thought-world is seen and known through our thinking activity, as that activity grows increasingly self-directed and awake. Like a fish swims in water, all of us swim in the oceans of the thought-world with out really noticing this truth of our spiritual surroundings in any respect.

Part of the issue to perceiving this thought-world comes from fashionable tradition, which beneath the affect of scientific materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit) tells the story of our true nature as if our consciousness was separate from the remainder of actuality, and even then solely a function of the activity of an isolated materials brain. That mind scientists see the world this fashion is understandable - we will assume-with their work - however they're incorrect. For a more detailed discussion of this, see: "I am not my mind: the map shouldn't be the territory".

With a purpose to deal with the related difficult questions, I then took the religious or spiritual facet of existence, and positioned it "inside" the scientific enterprise by offering an alternate principle to that of the massive Bang and Darwinian Evolution in my book: The Art of God: an precise idea of Everything. The aim of that e-book is to simply accept the fact that science follows a legitimate technique of data - one that is appropriate to our Age. The question that e-book seeks to reply is whether or not or not it is feasible to create a greater "explanation" of the which means of human existence than the one at present provided by science alone. Only those who trouble to learn that guide will find their way to the required nuances.

At the identical time, there was a journey involved earlier than that book might be written, and that story comes next ...

As a kind of introduction to this a part of my "obituary", the reader needs to understand that I didn't work alone. I had an excessive amount of help and inspiration, both outwardly and inwardly.

For instance, I typically write at present of what I call: the counter-Copernican revolution. Natural science arose from the Copernican revolution, by which thinkers within the 15th and 16th Century challenged the views of the Roman Catholic Church as regards the nature of the world and the cosmos. The tip results of this "revolution", after about 500 years, was the view that every one is matter, there is no spirit. For many this has come to imply that God is useless, and the neo-atheists are correct: religion has it horribly incorrect.

This view too we can suppose-with, in order to know it. But not everyone followed where the main stream of natural science went. The Romantics and the Transcendentalists, for instance, didn't purchase it that there was no spirit. In my works that is dealt with in some element.

Like the unique Copernican revolution, the counter-Copernican revolution, which is in its infancy now, is on this beginning recognized only to some. The wider world accepts the dominant paradigm, though in this case the dominant paradigm comes from Science slightly than from the Catholic Church. I have a library with many books not simply rejecting many views widespread right this moment to natural science, however truly advancing human data and understanding in a Way the original revolution did. Let me give an odd example.

Much of my conscious self-education began in the practically 14 years I spent residing in the final area of Berkeley, California in the late ‘60‘s, through the ‘70‘s and into the early ‘80‘s. One day I happened upon a bit of pamphlet known as: On the Absence of Disorder in Nature, by a man named David Shiang. I did not understand this ebook though its stuck in my reminiscence and then a few years in the past, after a conversation with me about my memories of this booklet, my woman pal found Shiang’s work via a Google search. I had misremembered his last title, spelling it Chang, and thus never discovered it by myself. I immediately ordered his latest e book: God Doesn't Play Dice, which is a part of a quote from Einstein.

In that book Shiang, who's a graduate of MIT, writes about what to him is a logical drawback with the ideas underlying indeterminacy in physics. In Chapter Five, for instance, Shaing gives a detailed dialogue of these people who created this idea, and what they really stated about it. But earlier than that, Shaing lays out the logical problem, which I'll try to summarize. Understand that this is comparable in character to Galileo discovering the moons of Jupiter, and thus turning the other way up the whole of the Roman Church’s cosmological views. Shaing is dismembering the fundamental thinking in trendy physics which requires likelihood theories.

By the way in which, I don’t agree with every little thing he says in this e book. He makes conclusions about social life and human interior life which can be in error. Now to the logical downside:

Take a easy experiment: flipping a coin. We flip a coin a thousand times. We report each result. Perhaps we get heads 512 instances and tails 488 times. Then, in pondering and writing about this question of "coin flipping" we introduce the idea that once we flip the coin there is a slightly higher than 50% chance the coin will be heads. That very thought says Shaing is just not appropriate. There isn't a slightly larger than 50% probability of something.

After we flip the coin it will do what it does. There shall be a outcome, and only the result is empirically actual. The idea of "chance" shouldn't be empirically real - it's simply something we made up because we have been confused about what nature does. From the place got here our confusion?

We assumed that as a result of we could not know all the factors effecting the coin flip, which then made it unpredictable to our minds, that nature was subsequently not predictable. This was a logical mistake. We mistakenly took a restrict to our notion as a reflection of a real side of the natural world. However the restrict to our perception, whereas itself real, did not reflect the true actuality of nature. Only the result of the coin flip (the experiment) reveals that actuality.

From this simple logical error physics launched into all of its theoretical research a non-empirical conclusion. Nature is never indeterminate. We simply can’t all the time predict it, because our perceptions are limited, even with all of the know-how at our disposal. Yes, I do know. All sorts of very good folks imagine it and imagine they prove it with their experiments. Indeterminacy is a type of Myth, and has developed into a huge trade dedicated to an obscure arithmetic that tries to nail down nature - a nature that steadfastly follows its personal rules, not our fancies.

Just think about human social habits. Very unpredictable. Probability theories are useless there. They really solely work in fields where we are looking at the smallest features of matter, which aspects (if we predict fastidiously about them) have also been invented. In order for us to pressure on nature our personal Myth, we have to slam bits and items of stuff together at large velocities, after which choose apart the debris as if nature made these parts that method in the first place. We need to get back to studying from nature - and cease imposing our fancies on its empirical reality. For some further perception into this problem, learn my: "Electricity and the Spirit in Nature".

The entire of the counter-Copernican revolution is coming from the minds of individuals and communities that have seen all manner of logical errors launched into science in the course of the years of the seeming triumph of scientific materialism (all is matter, there is no such thing as a spirit). I have read many of these books and that i work in that stream of thought, which is hardly identified at all in the 21st Century - but. My ebook The Art of God refers to many of those works. Spirit may be found in nature, right within our own minds - it could not be closer.

My biography has certain complications in it. I have a talent, and can't claim to always correctly use that expertise, but at the identical time it is evident that I've a gift, and this present is as much liable for what I do as is my own will and different efforts. Mozart was born Mozart - what he made (or not) of that reward is one thing else. There may be just a little book of mine, that I famous above: Biographical Necessity, that covers some of these personal questions of expertise and so forth.

The unfolding of my private journey to turning into a "social philosopher ... and occasional fool" involved visiting number of territories and landscapes in the thought-world. Consequently, and due to the "moral" components I used to be discovering in pondering, and since I used to be raised a Christian, it became essential to think about Christianity on many occasions. On my webpage Shapes within the Fire, there's a whole section devoted my books and essays on Christianity.

It was truly during these journeys within the realm of ideas that I began to extra clearly experience it as a "world" - as a place, purely spiritual in nature, however at the identical time not merely an extension of my thoughts as I had been taught by my culture to pre-conceive it. There was "otherness" current, which is described intimately in the above essays on thought and pondering. I was assembly the "wind" ("The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you can't inform the place it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everybody born of the Spirit." John 3: 8).

Within the youth of my physique and soul, an encounter was had with modern kinds of considering in regards to the Gospels - a faculty course was taken in the brand new Testament. This course was arid and intellectual, tying its pondering to scholarly analysis into dead languages and weird issues of interpretation. The magic and mystery of the Gospels my physique and soul knew as a toddler was not present. I finished the course very dis-satisfied and wanted to know why.

Eventually I got here to know that Christianity had been cut up into two streams - the stream of the Shepherds and the stream of the Kings. The Shepherds were believers and often emphasised unchangeable systems of perception/religion of their doctrines. St. Paul bears quite a lot of blame right here. The Kings’ stream (represented in the beginning-story by the "wise males from the East") practiced gnosis or the direct knowledge of the divine thriller. The Kings knew instantly from their "star", whereas the Shepherds needed to be instructed by an Angel.

The Kings disciplines have been all made into heresies by the Roman Church, and their libraries were burned, and their teachers and members murdered, in the event that they failed to agree with Catholic doctrine and dogma. We all know some of the names of those Kings/gnosis Ways: the Essenes; the Gnostics; the Manicheans; the followers of the Tarot in the fifteenth Century; the Rosicrucians; the Romantics; the Transcendentalists; and these days the Anthroposophists.

Only as the Church, and its belief/faith successors, lost social energy to the aristocrats of blood, did the Church’s skill to murder heretics wane. They are nonetheless often shunned and ignored.

In an effort to heal the cut up between these streams I wrote a e-book throughout this time of research and understanding, that was self printed in 2003: "the Way of the Fool: the acutely aware growth of our human character, and the future of Christianity - each to be born out of the natural union of religion and Gnosis"

In that e-book I wrote about the true Second Coming of Christ, which the Kings’ Way named Anthroposophy referred to as: the Return of Christ in the Ethereal. This Ethereal is another title for the thought-world, the realm the place one can be taught to really feel within the activity of the personal mind the wind or Holy Spirit. Toward the tip of the best way of the Fool I wrote of a Second Eucharist within the Ethereal, that was going down for a few consciously, and for many instinctively. On this Second Eucharist, which does not change the unique however moderately provides an additional dimension, an inside Rite is enacted when we create the moral out of ourselves, where within this Rite Christ offers His personal Being, within the type of Holy Breath (see Acts), as assist for our wills as we undergo the trials of life in the biography. Details of this Second Eucharist are in many locations in my major books, in an essay called: The Meaning of Earth Existence within the Age of the Consciousness Soul, which is also the first essay in my Living Thinking in Action.

By the way, please don't confuse what I imply by the term: Christ, with what most Christians mean. We don't agree.

Christ has always been accessible to us, but solely across the 1930‘s have we been ready, in our personal consciousness, to forge this assembly - this Second Coming within the Ethereal or thought-world - out of our personal forces. This fact naturally leads us to taking a look at what is known as within the counter-Copernican revolution: the evolution of consciousness.

One of the best fashionable thinker on the evolution of consciousness is Owen Barfield (1898-1997), and in his book: Saving the appearance: a examine in Idolatry, Barfield describes the scenario this way: Generally human beings right this moment assume that our kind of consciousness is strictly the same as the consciousness of individuals up to now. Once we query that assumption however, and actually start to analyze it, all the evidence is otherwise.

Barfield did most of his analysis via the examine of words and languages. The which means of phrases adjustments over time, and he showed in lots of books (akin to Speaker’s Meaning; or History in English Words), that these modifications in meaning directly offered us with how consciousness itself was evolving. For instance, as near in time to us as the 14th and fifteenth Centuries a form of participatory consciousness died out and was replaced by what those in the sector sometimes call: the onlooker separation. The Copernican revolution comes into existence because of this modification of consciousness.

The consciousness of the disciples of Christ was not in any respect like our consciousness. The further we go up to now, the extra the significant the variations. In the best way of the Fool, where I tried to help the Shepherd’s stream (folks of perception and religion) grow to be aware of the significance of the King’s stream (individuals of direct data of the divine), understanding these changes (evolution) of consciousness over time is essential.

I used to be additionally intimately spiritually concerned with the fact that the Anthroposophical Society, which was meant to be a King’s stream neighborhood, had fallen on laborious instances in Europe throughout the Wars with which the twentieth Century started. That Society’s founder, Rudolf Steiner, suffered, at the members hands, the loss of his introducing them to a scientific and empirical research of the thoughts, and of pondering - Steiner dying too younger in consequence. This then necessitated for me (ninety years later) the writing of the guide (self revealed in 2008): American Anthroposophy - an introduction. As a celebration of the American Soul’s distinctive potential to contribute to the future of Anthroposophy, and to the future of world culture, the book makes an attempt to deal with the many underlying issues and difficulties in the Anthroposophical Society, as well as with a view to symbolize a model of the new Mystery of Thinking acceptable for the American Soul.

I have additionally written a long essay on the present failure for the Aristotelians and the Platonists, within the Anthroposophical Society, to properly meet: "The Potential Mission of the Anthroposophical Society within the Early Centuries of the Third Millennium", which understanding of this Potential Mission is intimately connected to first totally understanding: the Culmination*

This makes then my main works: the way of the Fool (2003 - an offering to mainstream Christianity); American Anthroposophy (2008 - an providing to essential stream Anthroposophy); which grow to be the necessary preparations for the later end result of my thinking in: The Art of God: an precise concept of Everything (2010 - an providing to the legitimate impulses manifesting in the brand new atheists).

These are primarily books concerning the spiritual life of humanity from a fashionable perspective. Most of the over 100 essays I've written have dealt with varied particulars peripheral to these main accomplishments and included, for example, such writings as were related to the differences between Eastern cultural spiritual practices and Western cultural spiritual practices (corresponding to Anthroposophy): this and that - a meditation on the Four Noble Truths; West and East; Transcendentalism Comes of Age; and, Zen Anthroposophy.

I additionally had to deal with various questions regarding fashionable Christianity, with such essays as: Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church - by deepening our understanding of the third Fatima Prophecy; Barack Obama and the truth of the anti-Christ spirit - what may happen if you start to insert reason into Christian discourse, on questions of public life; and, Sex, Porn, and the Return of the Divine Feminine.

Then there is this: "waltzing and weeping by the rivers of the holy grail".

As well as there was the query of the meaning of evil, handled in lots of places, but most explicitly in my The Mystery of Evil in the light of the Sermon on the Mount, which is either a very small e-book, or a very long essay. It is a companion piece to The Art of God, because in that e-book I could not take the time to go into sure details as regards the problem of evil.

Work on the problem of evil came into my life in a pure means, as a result of I'm an addict in recovery (since 1987), having taken an curiosity in hallucinogens and ganja (the Sanskrit phrase for marijuana) throughout my years residing close to Berkeley. Research into the nature of the mind and of considering leads eventually to a confrontation with our dark side - one thing which various traditions call the double; the doppleganger; the shadow; and so forth. These will not be easy issues, and I’ll depart the reader to their very own devices and the study of The Mystery of Evil, which introduces these problems in a straight ahead trend.

During all of this time, I was not unmindful of what was occurring in our political and social life. So I applied the brand new Thinking to these questions, however saved out of these writings any purely spiritual matters as had been taken up in my three previously talked about main works. This resulted in another quick e book or long essay: Uncommon Sense: the degeneration, and the redemption, of political life in America; a group of essays: On the nature of Public Life; and, around the time of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, a 60 page booklet: Economic and Social Rebellion. My newest efforts on this regard is work on a screenplay known as: Consent. It is meant to be a form of fashionable model of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and right here is the website being developed to illuminate these ideas: "I - an individual human being - now not Consent".

Also in 2009/2010 I started the work of taking my written works and creating for them an oral form, which has since resulted within the making of over 270 movies for YouTube. I knew that many young folks weren't taking to books very simply, so the ideas that I cared about appeared to want an oral expression. These movies take up numerous themes, of which the most well-liked is: On Becoming an actual Wizard.

In creating that video-theme I had in thoughts the many readers of the Harry Potter collection of books, and felt that those books, while of worth in their own proper, did probably not admire that there was more to wizardry then having a talent, waving a magic wand and shouting some unusual words. So within the very first video I defined that the phrase wizard actually meant smart-head and wise-coronary heart in order that if someone actually wanted to be a wizard they must pursue wisdom.

This video work has had over 190,000 visits, with 70,000 of these going to the wizard theme. There is a fast die-off as regards "wizards" and such, with perhaps slightly much less then 9,000 guests going to the second video (there are over 30 in all on the wizard-theme, and less then a 1,000 have endured the whole thing). YouTube permits for questions to be asked, and I have been able to answer these when it seemed appropriate. Many young folks (and a few which are more mature) seem largely excited about fantastical magical powers, and since my life in the course of the Berkeley years included a examine of the magic/hermetic science of Franz Bardon, I've once in a while been in a position to help people with their confusions here. For some details on my encounterss with varied Ways to the Spirit, go right here: Five Paths to the Spirit.

A couple of members and buddies of the Anthroposophical Society do take an curiosity in my other writings, but so far (despite some small efforts of my own), my finest work: The Art of God is largely unknown. I have plans to increase those efforts as regards The Art of God, in varied methods as I'm in a position. But, in the primary I am content material to have written it. Like a number of my work it really belongs to the future.

It is usually attainable to write down of the "spiritual" or "political-social" utilizing brief fiction: "The Zen Potter"; "Albert, in fugue"; and, "Counting Coup", are good examples.

This then is a abstract of the results of my thought-life. Books, essays and videos on considerably grand and wondrous themes. The whole system of thought is internally consistent, although different purposes required completely different kinds of language usages. Additionally it is very natural, with ideas and ideas naturally growing out of previous concepts and concepts - all linked to interior developments in the abilities, crafts, and arts of thinking in the new Way.

I'm not accomplished. There is always extra to be taught, and to think concerning. I wouldn’t thoughts living several extra decades, but don’t anticipate to do so. At least I wouldn’t mind if my physique doesn’t get too cranky. Who knows what makes use of Divine Providence (what moderns name: the Universe) would possibly discover for a "social philosopher ... and occasional fool"?

What's major import of The Art of God: an precise principle of Everything?

In a sure means all we have to do is describe social actuality carefully, in an effort to see that human existence is The Art of God. Our essential drawback, however, is in how we describe the interior psychological facet of the human being. The human being has each an outer sense showing reality, and an interior spiritual showing reality. The two go together and can’t truly be separated.

Yet, as a result of we have not studied human inner life with the same empirical discipline as we now have studied outer material existence, our present day sciences get confused. Our behavior is to study this inside existence not directly, such that the brain scientist measures the electrical patterns of the brain, whereas the psychological scientist observes the behavioral patterns of his/her subjects. But each those disciplines make the identical methodological error - they don’t examine their very own inside empirically. Yet, everyone can do this - examine the personal inwardness empirically.

That direct empirical study of ones own insides changes the whole lot. Emerson: The American Scholar: "For the intuition is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds..."

Most brain scientists and psychologists pay the greatest consideration to the mode of thinking we name: discursive - that interior wording/self-dialogue we all assume is us pondering. The mind is actually a far richer and mostly unexplored territory. That’s why I started far above by first relating my works on thinking and thought.

In addition, as steered, one begins after a time to have direct contact with the divine thriller, which is as properly a rich area one can discover. Once we go there ...

It becomes soon apparent that God does probably not concern him/herself with what human beings believe to be necessary, equivalent to history or religion or philosophy or science and so forth. The principle object of God’s Love is the person human being. Once we see that, we see the core of matters sublime. A thug in a brothel in Thailand is just as vital to God as is an Abraham Lincoln. Recall, if you will, the teaching in the Gospels recommending we be more involved over the misplaced sheep, than all the ones already within the fold.

Now we can surprise about how this works out in apply, so we've the foolish film with Jim Carrey, Bruce Almighty, which exhibits Bruce getting tens of millions upon millions of prayers in his laptop. That’s as a result of we fail to understand that God exists outdoors of Time and Space - in Eternity. God has all of Eternity to pay attention to each single human life.

Further, the human spirit is immortal - we have now many many lives; and Divine Justice is profound due to this. In the cultural East this is called: karma. Those, corresponding to Rudolf Steiner, who do analysis on the real nature of the afterlife, report that when we die our consciousness will not be extinguished, however undergoes a protracted means of metamorphosis that begins with remembering the newest life, after which goes on to being made conscious of how our actions affected others. We expertise, at first of the afterlife, what others felt because of our deeds. Only after drawing out these fruits of the just passed existence, do we start to get prepared for the following one.

I may go into higher element, however as there are lots of nuances and lots of understandable questions, my e book The Art of God had to go into loads of various topics, as well as deal with the points of view of fashionable materialistic (all is matter, there is no spirit) science.

The main level right here is to understand that everybody with a roughly intact mental life can examine their very own thoughts and find via that study the fact of spirit. We will have a science of the spirit (which is simultaneous religious and inventive). Eventually, the culmination of my thought life, in the book The Art of God: an actual principle of Everything, is in a position to supply an explanatory theory of our shared human expertise that is way superior to the concepts of the massive Bang and Darwinian macro-evolution.

Let me finish this with copying from that book its "list of themes", so as to offer some hints:

Table of Contents (as it had been)

(This vortex-like construction may be very fluid and in constant motion, such that we are going to come round to the same basic conceptual space over time, in search of with every new expertise a deeper examination. In a method a form of recent conceptual vocabulary has to be prepared, such that over the interval of the different experiences, all will hopefully develop into increasingly useful. Simultaneously, as we build new concepts, we will in the same gesture need to dismantle others.

Page numbers are usually not given, although I can understand why somebody may need them. They are partly technically an issue in web self-publishing due to the conversion of an rtf. file to a PDF doc, which conversion alters the paging considerably. But the principle purpose is that this ebook will not be written like a scholarly work it all. It is written to be experienced, and the reader is free to arrange that expertise in any way they see match, and shouldn't be confined to any arbitrary scheme of mine. The titles under merely symbolize the place in a sure mood I felt like delineating a change of theme, and these titles then have extra of a relationship to artistic musical and poetic notation then any extra academic or standard system of order.

Once extra, as regards the vortex metaphor: the upper boundaries of a vortex are wider, and the speed of circulation slower for these objects caught up in that side of its nature. Because the vortex-tornado deepens it narrows nearly to a degree, the place the velocity and drive which is lively there is at its most. So also then with the journey via this ebook - a gradual intensification is intended in terms of the appliance of this books nature on the processes of the reader’s thoughts.)

- dedication - introduction - starting with a concept of God - the Shaman sees Wholes - back to our pursuit of a idea of God - the concept of God - the shape of the social political world of humanity - some limits to natural science - a transition - the questions of Why and Time - the Mystery of Evil as elements of How and Why - some ideas on the necessary, yet short-term, superficial nature of those discussions - God in Time and Space - the totality of the order of the macro-social world as an Embodiment of the Word - further limits of the current truth-buildings in natural science - the issue of human freedom - the battle itself has meaning - ... and make an advanced synthesis of the previous thoughts - a slight shift of emphasis - time, house and spiritual causality - the idea of Evolution, its limits and biases - the bones ... an alternative rationalization - ... some facets of an actual science of the thoughts - the appearance of the free ethical particular person in human social-political life - interlude and recapitulation - extra elements of the nature of thought and pondering - social life, within the biography, as a artistic invention - the self-aware spirit as an artist in life - evidence and proof of God, in addition to some proposed experiments and tests ... or, the now we’ve acquired him section,’cause he is never ever going to be ready to try this - oblique proof of God - direct evidence of God - a brand new path to the spirit, elaborated in three elements: 1) The misconception of Cosmic Space as appears within the Ideas of Modern Astronomy 2) The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul 3) In Joyful Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship

Please keep in "mind" that this book is usually "about" social science and human existence - all these troublesome to foretell (but necessarily determinant as soon as we choose to act) and messy points of life and relationships and politics and religions and Everything. The book is an precise principle of Everything and tackles matters the weird arithmetic of theoretical physicists doesn’t even start to contemplate at all - reminiscent of the quality and which means of existence. I lately wrote an extended "Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science", which describes in some detail processes occurring over many decades of self-improvement and social contemplation.

One further thought: the Divine Mystery. Theologically speaking, Christians have been introduced to the Mystery of the Trinity - the Three in a single. In more ancient times, prior religions/spiritual conceptions at the least had some Idea of a Creator, typically also with a threefold nature (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, for example). The future Idea of the Diving Mystery will likely be six-fold: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Mother, Daughter, Holy Soul. Six features manifesting from something that was once a Unity, is now divided, and ultimately will return as soon as extra to a Unity. Throughout the "division" all that is will Evolve, and the new free/voluntary/participated Unity shall be vastly unlike the unique. Right now one Approach to see this Divine Mystery, in its Christ the Creator side, is that this Mystery is co-in depth with all Time and all Space, ... or what Rudolf Steiner called: the "Cosmic" Christ. When we actually respect the earthly social-political-spiritual existence of humanity, we will become conscious that it takes place within - inside of - the Being of the "Cosmic" Christ. All that's, ... all that has manifested as spirit and matter, is inside/inside this aspect of the Six-Fold Divine Mystery ... the "Cosmic" Christ. That "teaching" is to be the next part of the evolution of Christianity itself, as a Religion that is simultaneously Art and Science. Anthroposophy, which entails a metamorphosis of the mind, that I am naming: "the Rising of the Sun in the Mind", is to play a task in growing these human capacities that will led individual human beings to grow to be capable of expertise this "Cosmic" Christ.

I totally anticipate the reader who endures the trials of the book: the Art of God, to study to see previous the massive Bang and macro-Darwinian evolution. Meanwhile, I wait to exhale from the physical and to inhale into the spiritual, not less than until the following life, once i hope we will all meet again - God prepared and if the creek doesn’t rise.