Mantras from my childhood
In a recent podcast discussion on Finding Harmony, one of the proposed questions we did not get around to discussing was:
“You were a Steiner student, is that right? Could you describe how that might shaped you and your way of thinking?”
I was quite looking forward to talking about this because the influence was significant, the similarities and differences between yogic and anthroposophical world views is fascinating and I recently found myself after a 30 year journey on a path of yoga that took me far away, back where I went to school, in Forest Row, a place that was an epicentre of Waldorf education and many other Anthroposophical activities.
Human freedom is, perhaps, the central theme in Steiner’s thought but his idea of freedom is a radical one. It concerns not so much the physical liberty to do as one wishes, but rather the capacity to think for oneself - to be able to come to clear and independent perceptions, understanding and self determination without being manipulated or influenced by other people’s ideas.
As such, one essential idea in education is to give a child space to grow from within - to honour and nurture the individuality of each child.
Rather than prepare children to fit into pre-established pigeon holes, students were encouraged to find their own truth, to formulate an individual life and career. Without doubt that gave me the confidence to think outside the box, to follow my own intuitions and to not conform to societal views and behaviour just because everyone else does.
The first 8 years of Waldorf education are guided by one primary teacher. As such, I was extremely lucky: my class teacher, Peter Clark, set the bar so high that finding further teachers I could respect was extremely challenging.
Steiner warned against the guru-sisya relationship that had been the method of transmission in the old world: each must find the inner teacher - the Kali Yuga had rendered this relationship extremely dangerous and inappropriate for our time. So a central theme for me in my teaching has always been an attempt to respect the freedom of a student and to avoid developing the kind of co-dependency and power dynamic inherent in the guru system: that was extremely challenging in the context of the Mysore style teaching - which is by nature dependent on the guru-sisya type relationship.
Mantras from my childhood
Steiner's view of the natural world is similar to the yogic view: he recognized 4 categories of nature - mineral, organic, animal and human - which form the physical, pranic, mental and intellectual bodies.
Just as the Upanishads declare, he saw that our bodies do not "belong" to us, we are not separate from the natural world - it lives within us - we have mineral, organic and animal features that are absorbed from the environment. I have to say that i am extremely grateful for my Waldorf education for many reasons.
As children we recited a morning verse that reminded us of our connection with nature every day:
I look into the world
Wherein there shines the sun,
Wherein there gleam the stars,
Wherein there lie the stones.
Where living grow the plants,
Where feeling live the beasts,
And wherein man ensouled
A dwelling to spirit gives.
I look into the soul
That liveth me within:
God’s spirit lives and weaves
In light of sun and soul,
In breadths of worlds without,
In depth of soul within.
Steiner evidently understood the importance of being connected to the environment, to the natural world, and to honour and value it. He also saw how the human being was composed of a number of bodies or components that correlated to those external features - the rocks, rivers etc and the human physical body, the plant life and the pranic body, the animal and the mind, the soul, the spirit… all these factors are part of his and the yogic view.
Head, Heart and Hands - Thinking, Feeling and Will
Another important feature of Steiner’s thought is his observation of the three-fold nature of the human being and the development of each aspect: the head/thought, heart/feeling and limbs/will through education and life. In order to be a healthy and harmonious human being, one needs to develop each of the three spheres: intellectual, artistic and practical.
Spiritual Practice
Perhaps Steiner’s most important work on spiritual practice is called: Knowledge of Higher worlds and How to Attain It. In this book he sets out a six fold and an eight fold (Buddhist) path.
One of the first things he says is that there is no entry into the spiritual world except through the gateway of humility: spiritual knowledge shrinks from arrogance, greed and premature grasping.
He also suggests that the nature of the spiritual world is so different from this that the prejudices we hold pertaining to this world prevent us from perceiving in the next: he suggests that although one must make the best efforts to understand in depth and with clarity, one should also have the capacity to let go of that thought instantly in the recognition that it was inaccurate. He suggests a sort of detached conviction that can be reversed or changed without difficulty.
He spoke about the necessity of cultivating equanimity, a strong will and what he called free thinking: most of the time thought has its own momentum and defies our abilities to channel it with intention and clarity. In order to develop freedom, which for him is synonymous with spiritual evolution, one needs to develop an absolute control over this process - for this, the cultivation of abstract thinking and meditation are required.
World View - Darshana
Steiner’s spiritual philosophy looks like an amalgam of traditions: a bit of Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, Zoroastrianism, Christianity etc. all blended together: he saw at the heart of each religion, an essential and identical practice and realization: meditation and the intuition of the spiritual nature of the human being.
He saw parallels between different epochs in human history and the stages of development in a human being as it matures and also identified a series of seven year cycles in human development that underlies his ideas about primary and secondary education.
Kali Yuga and the New Age of Light
While the yoga tradition sees the this current Kali Yuga as an age of darkness and degradation of humanity, Western teachers have been speaking of a new age of light. Perhaps India’s spiritual culture has reached a low point while something new is rising in the West. Steiner spoke about the development of new human capacities that were a part of natural human evolution and could be developed through meditation and spiritual practice.
He spoke about the possibility of developing clairvoyance and similar capacities through meditation. Interestingly, the yoga tradition says one should shun these capacities (siddhis) that may arise through practice because they are a diversion on the path to realization. But I was attracted to Steiner’s meditations exactly because I was fascinated with this possibility and when I went to India to study yoga, my purpose was to support myself in those practices. So I started practicing yoga with the express, though ill advised (according to Indian tradition), interest in developing siddhis.
I was also fascinated by yoga as a system: my exploration of yoga was experimental. I wanted to see if worked, how it worked, for another purpose. I was an outsider, a researcher for the first few years. After a while, I realized I would never be able to understand yoga without immersing myself in it fully. It was almost as if I had to go deep undercover in order absorb what I needed.
While I have always sought to teach yoga from the source, it has never been a matter of religious conviction for me: it has seemed to be my duty to present the yogic views and techniques as accurately as I could but with the suggestion to students to try and see if they worked - not as a matter of faith but of experimentation and personal experience.
It is a very large subject, but in essence, Steiner’s views are very close to those of yoga - my interest in Anthroposophy brought me to yoga with an openness to the spiritual aspects but also with a certain outsider’s perspective that perhaps allowed me to be a bit more objective.