Everything must be new.

While reading Rudolf Steiner’s “Whitsun: The Festival of the Free Individuality" (1), three points shine out: First, that the Christ Impulse lives within each of us, and can be deepened, but only through our incarnations on Earth.  We must incarnate again and again to find new Christ-inspired ideas, feelings, and will impulses appropriate to the time. Second, that this Impulse is deepened through striving to perfect ourselves.  Steiner says, “The more we perfect ourselves, the more we can feel that the Holy Spirit speaks out of our inner being” (2). Thirdly, that through the Holy Spirit each one of us can speak out of the Christ Impulse, through our unique individualities.

I will admit I struggled with all three of these points.  What is the Christ Impulse living within us? What does it feel like? This question has lived with me for a long time.  Back in the late 1990s, when I was new to anthroposophy and considering membership in the Sacramento Christian Community, I had a conversation with one of the priests, Franziska Hesse.  The question I remember asking was, “How do we know if we feel the presence of the Christ within us?” Her answer: “That’s a good question to have.”

The second point gave me pause because I have struggled mightily with perfectionism. This tendency may have been with me pre-birth: I dimly-sense a previous life as a medieval mystic monk, striving, striving, striving for purification. In this current life, I’m an adoptee, and I felt survival depended on being perfect.  A driving belief was “If I’m not perfectly perfect, they’ll send me back.”  When I discovered anthroposophy in my thirties, the focus shifted from behaving perfectly to the ideal of achieving absolute purification of my subtle bodies.  I repeatedly fail on both counts.

The third point tripped me up because of the paradox I couldn’t resolve.  I’m not sure how to locate the Christ Impulse within and I can’t hope to be perfect; yet Steiner seems to say that the Holy Spirit can speak out of the Christ Impulse through human beings. But does this mean even with our imperfections?

With this in mind, I want to share a bit about being a member of several Circles (3) of biography and social art (BSA) facilitators. I’ve belonged to the Heartland Circle (BSA facilitators based in the Midwest) since 2016. More recently I’ve become co-leader of a Trauma/Transformation Circle and a Spiritual Research Circle.  I’m a participant in a Karma and Biography Circle. And I joined a year-long exploration of Parsifal, that incorporated BSA exercises within a Circle.  I’m beginning to understand that these Circles are efforts to “practice Whitsun” in our time.  I will briefly describe how I am experiencing Steiner’s three points when engaging in “Circle work.”

We gather on Zoom.  Each Circle has a specific format, which helps to hold the space.  (It differs from Circle to Circle.) There is shared leadership.  Each person is given a chance to speak.  We ensure time is used equitably.  There is a commitment to confidentiality.  Courage and vulnerability are often on display:  We do not hesitate to bring difficult topics or questions or interpersonal challenges into Circle work.  As a group we practice true listening: Setting aside judgmental thoughts, quieting habitual verbal responses and facial expressions, and striving to be fully present.  We don’t interpret or analyze. We practice meaningful biography and social art, dependent on sound Goethean phenomenological practices (4).  How we are together matters.

Regarding the Whitsun experience, first: More and more, when I am in a Circle, as a speaker, I become aware of an impulse to share a particular thought or idea or experience; one that might differ greatly from what I thought I’d say. This inner impulse to speak feels like a “not-I” impulse.  It’s not a leap to follow where that feeling leads: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

Second: More and more, when I am in a Circle, I feel inspired.  I receive new impulses, new ideas.  I see things in a new way.  I feel and see our individual strivings to learn, to grow, to be better.  Moving away from my previous pursuits of perfection, I instead behold the beauty of the striving human being. Circle work is about developing the capacity to perceive the Christ ideal before us, the Archetype of the Human Being, beckoning to us from the end of the Seventh Epoch.  It’s about having the courage to say out loud to other human beings, “This is how I’m not there yet,” and feeling, hearing, and seeing their listening, their support and acceptance. 

Third: More and more, when I am in a Circle, as a listener, I become aware that the person speaking is expressing something to which I can completely relate.  I understand what she’s saying, even though her experience is uniquely hers, and I have no experience similar to hers.  I feel and hear and see the effect of my Impulse-driven words on others in the group, and I feel the effects of others’ words on me.  Out of our flawed humanity, our wounds, our failures—our strengths and joys, too—Light shines through; Warmth surrounds us.  Perceiving this Light and Warmth is HEALING! A revelation of the Christ Impulse!

I believe that this kind of Circle work is what’s needed now, in our Consciousness Soul era.  It provides an antidote to what ails us, individually, socially, culturally.  It is work for the future.  And it is available now, to ALL, if we will but practice together.

1 Steiner, Festivals and their Meanings, Whitsun lecture given in Hamburg on Whitsunday, 1910

2 Ibid

3 “Circle” is capitalized throughout to indicate the sacred nature of these meetings.

4 See, for example, Marjorie Spock, The Art of Goethean Conversation, 1978, St. George Publications

May our feeling penetrate into the center of our heart and seek, in love,

to unite itself with human beings seeking the same goal, with Spirit Beings who …

Not long ago, I tuned into On Being with Krista Tippet and caught an interview with the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (originally aired in 2016). At one point, Kimmerer totally surprised me by saying she had “photosynthesis envy.” She went on: “The ability to take these non-living elements of the world—air and light and water—and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world, to turn them into medicine … we cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have.”  Wonderful to consider.

And, as a biography worker, as an anthroposophist, I know that human beings can approach this kind of creativity (recognizing we have miles to go to reach the perfection plants possess). I know absolutely that human beings are able to turn Spirit Light into “food” and “medicine,” by our capacity for conversation, through a will to engage together in sound living thinking coupled with moral development. In our time, when experienced through conscious, carefully crafted social processes, when we recall and share life events through thoughtfully designed exercises—that is, take seriously what is commonly called biography work—conversation offers nourishment and healing in a very concrete way.  

Rudolf Steiner describes what occurs esoterically when living thinking or imagination, streaming from below up, meets moral inspiration and intuition, streaming from above down:  “In the region of the heart there is a continuous transformation of the blood into delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland.” Steiner goes on to describe how “life forces bound in the blood are released from space for sense alertness, emotional tinging of sense experience, and memory (the intellectual element)”—the very components of biography work, the stuff of biographical conversation—and how this “little sea of light” reveals something about the wellbeing of an individual. “This process—the etherization of the blood—may be perceived in the human being during waking life.”   

The stream from heart to head is met by “supersensible forces of a moral-aesthetic nature,” streaming from above down, from spirit world to human being, and finds its esoteric reality in the circadian rhythm of sleeping and waking, "a kind of light metabolism” that exquisitely reflects the cycle of the sun (daily and seasonally). We know that quality sleep matters to our wellbeing: and when we say we will “take something into our sleep” we mean, at least in part, and essentially, that we intend to bring greater consciousness to the meeting place of our experience and Spirit Beings who

… bearing grace, strengthening us from realms of light, and illuminating our love …

not only 

... gaze down upon ... 

us but long to join us in a true social association. It might serve to consider more carefully what Goethe understood—what he meant for us to understand—when he wrote: “What is more precious than light? Conversation.”  Today, this wonder is seeded by 

… our earnest heart-felt striving.

If we could, wouldn’t we encourage the flow of such life forces found in the etherization of the blood? Wouldn’t we wish to enhance the vibrancy of these streams? What would happen if we took the decision to work together toward maturing this phenomenon in the interest of individual and social wellbeing? 

While the creativity of plants as described by Kimmerer gives pause, I marvel at the incredible potential for co-creativity indicated by the interaction of these streams, where conversation may play a part in the etherization of the blood, may become nourishment and healing. The possibility seems to ask quite a lot of us:  We need practice in bringing interest, enthusiasm, humility, gentleness, forgiveness, the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps needed most in our time is a commitment to the development of new skills, to new ways of being together. 

A coordinated will to adopt and practice prescribed social activity (not unlike disciplined individual meditation) heightens the possibility of shared spiritual experience—of seeing the highest in one another. What’s more: Crafting thoughtful, artful, skill-building spaces may be preparation for perceiving the Etheric Christ. Altogether, a human rendering of photosynthesis, if you will. 

Steiner. R., Verse for America

Steiner, R., The Etherization of the Blood; Basel, Oct. 4, 1911.

Steiner R., How to Meet the Soul Needs of our Time; Zurich, Oct. 10, 1916.

von Goethe, J.W. (1991) The Green Snake and Beautiful Lily; Steiner Books.

Rohen, J.W. (2007) Functional Morphology: The Dynamic Wholeness of the Human Organism; Adonis Press.

Prokofieff, S. (2007) The Esoteric Significance of Spiritual Work in Anthroposophical Groups and 

the Future of the Anthroposophical Society; Temple Lodge.