Some, or many people approach Rudolf Steiner's works briefly and then say many and varied phrases that don't describe him at all.
Let's take a look at his Landscape.
Steiner formed his works, his substance, from the materials of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Some features of this time were the end phases of Theosophy, the early phases of Technocracy, and the past era of Goethe.
Living in Germany, then Switzerland, among the cultural figures of the spiritual and intellectual past, his intelligences formed the tributaries of previous flows of thought. His work, a job he undertook, was to translate the elements of his knowledge, blended with that of his predecessors into substance for the time of the early 20th century. And also for a future, that is now, a hundred years later this early 21st century.
The 21st Century, an arid dry time of intellectual and cultural pollution lacking solution.
For a reader to put a book down and say it is too difficult or confusing is not a reflection of the writer of the book. It is a reflection of the reader. Not everyone is ready for or resonant with every writer or every book.
In our current day of hall of mirrors platforms we can see so many distortions around us that we become overwhelmed by what it is looking directly back at us. Chaos? If we leave these halls of mirrors and wander off to a natural stream to sit on a rock, our thoughts can resume a natural rhythm and find the ebb and flow in a coherent scene.
In this modern landscape which has been formed by electricity and dams, roads and traffic jams, it is hard place to meet with Steiner. Or, Emerson, or Bohm. But they are the solid rocks we can sit on at the bank of the river.
Steiner, in my world, can be likened to water. You can dive in from a high cliff, a diving board, a surf board, and you can sink, drown in the depth of his deliverances, his whirlpools of knowledge. OR, you can comprehend the buoyancy of watery works which hold you as you commit to learning how to swim in his deep river of confluences.
If you are disciplined and able to stay afloat, you will learn much of unseen worlds only encountered in the deep end.
And if you exercise this ability you may begin to explore the depths of the elements shaping our landscapes, both seen and unseen. The reflections we see before diving in are only on the surface, showing just that, the surface.
We must dive in to gain the depth on knowledge that emerges as our mind submerges.
A diver, a Jaques Cousteau, doesn't pay heed to what surface dwellers say about the deep. A diver has seen it and experienced it singly, for oneself.
If you want to Know what is real you must be disciplined. Drop your surface devices in the hall of mirrors receptacles for recycling. Learn to breath deeply and in your own way. Go beyond the surface. Come up for air as needed.
Water, like Steiner, is the mediating element that flows above and below. How many times have you heard this new modern phrase 'atmospheric river' on the weather reports.
Water is the connecting element that obeys the laws of nature on earth, but also transcends these same laws as the force evaporates and is distilled in its upward rising.
"Water, as mediator between the centric and universal forces, setting them in balance and interweaving them with its very substance, reveals the activity of the heavens on earth." -Theodor Schwenk
Before mirrors we saw our reflections in water. We still can if the pool is clear and calm.
