Organisational
and individual development
and
the State of the Planet:
“People!” (as the saying goes) “You can’t live with them and you cant live without them!” Indeed, how many of us can even live with ourselves for any length of time. I know of a school for individual-spiritual development in Scotland that is committed to the experiential exploration of the human being within the context of the Unity of Existence. (1) They have a retreat house, built into the side of a lonely hillside. Here the student spends a week on their own with no books and no distractions. Just you and God face to face, so to speak, for a week. I can just imagine what kind of ‘stuff’ percolates up from the sediment of the soul during such an initiation ritual. I may definitely prefer the wonderful distraction of other people to bounce my attention off rather than spend a week purely with myself!
Yet if I spend too long with other people or get too close,
or am obliged to form some kind of relationship to them, then all too soon there
is the potential for conflict simmering just below the surface, ready to rise
up. So even here I cannot actually escape having my carefully crafted persona
disturbed as the light of attention penetrates and stirs up my murky depths!
I would say that most of what passes for human social etiquette is an
attempt to keep all those little emotionally suppressed ‘land-mines’, from
being inadvertently (or deliberately) triggered by others and by ourselves.
Human conflict! What can we do about it! In the past it was
fairly simple for society to dictate what was acceptable or unacceptable
behaviour, to define what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’. But today, with
the merging of cultures and the increasing fracturing of thinking into ever more
diverse ‘points of view’, this is increasingly difficult to do. The
government’s response to the problem in the UK is to increasingly declare
spontaneous human interaction illegal (on Heath & safety grounds). Every
activity and event where humans are to meet must be pre-checked and pre-scripted
in order to avoid the unforeseen. This cramps the possibility for spontaneous
encounter. And maybe it is more than this. It is almost as if there is an
implicit political doctrine that spontaneity is, by its very nature to be
avoided (that we can’t be trusted with it) and that in order to facilitate
‘healthy’ human interaction an officially approved ‘script’ of behaviour
must be followed. (An approach that has attracted the phrase ‘politically
correct’). Avoiding conflict by avoiding communicating is patently not a
solution. If the ‘land mines’ are buried in the fields where our crops are
growing we still have to go there to make our harvest, or else starve. We
don’t want to starve socially, neither do we want to be blown up all the time.
We therefore have to find a way to locate the triggers and defuse the mines, in
order to deal with the underlying causes of conflict.
So can we explore these underlying causes in such a way as
to begin to develop a methodology to help us constructively manage human
communication and human conflict, which seem to be so increasingly and
inextricably bound together?
Eric Berne,
the celebrated American psychologist and author of the book ‘Games People
Play’ (2) observed that a huge percentage of day to day human interaction
consisted of long term strategies to re-constitute (but not redeem) and re-live
old trauma patterns often dating back to childhood or even before. Coenraad van
Houten, the pioneer of the ‘New Adult Learning Movement’ (3) once commented
that whilst the disagreements arising in the meeting of colleagues might, on the
surface, be about how to finalise ‘the new timetable’, this is often serves
as a foil for the manefestation of more, deep-seated, ongoing subconscious feuds
that have nothing to do with the matter at hand. The fact, for example, that in
a past life I was a Templar Knight and you were the French official who burnt me
at the stake!
To look into the concept of reincarnation with regards to
disputes can be quite instructive. I
once saw a TV play called ‘The Stone Tapes’, in which a film crew, filming a
murder drama in a castle picked up a constant background hissing on the tape at
the end of the days recordings. When they slowed it down it became a girl’s
scream. Using their equipment they were able to image the ghost of this girl
running down the stone steps screaming. The story punch line was the discovery
that she was screaming at a still more ancient horrific event, which was encoded
in the very stones of the wall.
Overlays triggering overlays, leading to repeating patterns
and cycles of behaviour whose motivation for further repetition is the very
impulse to repeat itself, simply because it has happened before. This is a very
‘astral’ phenomenon and a common feature of all our soul lives.
In 1955 another American psychologist (Kelly) (4)
discovered that the predictability of future outcomes serves as a more
fundamental motivating impulse than the desire for success and well-being. In
other words, the known outcome is usually preferable to the unknown, even if
that unknown outcome may lead to a better quality of life. This may help to
explain why simply removing someone from an abusive situation and cleaning him
or her up does little to ensure that they will not re-create the same abusive
patterning once the external attention is lifted. In other words, what we say we
want to do or support and what we actually do are often two completely different
things. This links back to Eric Berne’s (anti)social ‘games’ which are
always based around complicit mutual abuse, even if it is simply the abuse of
wasting someone else’s/the groups time (and the other people allowing it).
Many people put in great amounts of time and effort to
bring into the world the archetypal ideal school, farm, medical institution or
production facility, etc, yet on the other hand we are ‘programmed’ with all
of those mutually and self-abusive feelings, impulses and behaviour patterns
which again and again seem to fatally undermine our best efforts to ‘move
forward’. Many of these are now enshrined in our social and economic
institutions which make our required efforts to bring about better things even
harder but that should not blind us from recognising the many ways that we
succeed in undermining our own best efforts.
So where do we look for the source of this problem? Rudolf
Steiner offers an interesting picture that may help. Taking a journey back
through the mists of time to the pre-Atlantean (5) era, defined by Steiner as
Lemuria (6), we arrive at a moment when humanity (still largely in a spiritual
form) had reached a critical phase in the development of self-consciousness. At
precisely this time a spiritual being, who did not have our best interests at
heart, (Lucifer) intervened in our evolution, giving us a strong awareness of
the forces and sensations coursing through our metabolism but at the cost of our
ability to perceive the purer eternal living spiritual archetypes. The nature of
these spirit archetypes is one of eternal endurance through harmonisation
(perceived today as inspiring imaginations), whilst the nature of the impulses
arising out of the metabolic system are compelling, mutually self-cancelling and
thereby temporary. This whole situation is recounted allegorically in what the
Bible’s Old Testament refers to as the temptation in the Garden of Eden. The
guiding impulse of civilisation ever since that time has concentrated on this
battle between our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ natures. I think that, in many
ways, this battle is, already ‘lost’. But, there is here a paradox which, if
understood rightly, can be a source of tremendous renewing energies
Steiner attributes the end of Lemurian times to negative
environmental feedback (volcanic eruptions) brought about by uncoordinated human
passion expressed at an ‘elemental’ (7) level. Human soul forces had a
direct effect on the elemental world and environment. Today we are also
experiencing an environmental crisis of global proportions, triggered, we are
told, by ‘global warming’ It is worth noting that this may well be as a
result of dredging up the remains of those old Lemurian life forces (now in the
form of oil and gas) and pumping them out into the atmosphere through our modern
machines. For whilst we create and use our machines for the most rational of
purposes, namely to help liberate humankind from the drudgery of routine human
physical labour and to free up time for the pursuit of higher development
(quality of life, in today’s terminology), there is no longer any real human
control over the collective process. It has gathered a momentum of its own which
seems unstoppable and which, in many ways echoes the picture Steiner gives of
the catastrophe which occurred during Lemurian times. So, whilst we are clever in consciously creating machines to
work for us, we are asleep to the deeper implications of the effects of there
use.
Most of what is produced for human consumption serves only
to provide our ‘lower’ senses with cheap and temporary stimulation, often to
the long-term detriment of our constitution and the health of our planet.
But this time there is a difference. Steiner’s picture
has shown that during Lemuria the human metabolism was manipulated by external
forces and consequently ‘overheated’. By which I mean that the metabolic
forces directed through and by humanity got out of control and became a source
of uncontrollable explosive force. [Add a further sentence to explain and
underline what you mean here] (This led, during the succeeding age of Atlantisean
and subsequent times, to a concentration on the development of the forces of
self-reflection, memory and thinking within humanity, in order to serve as a
check and counterbalance to the passions arising from our metabolic nature and
which previously, had wreaked such havoc when left to run out of control. Now
the emphasis was on self-restraint and the development of community forms and
structures that restrained uncontrolled behaviour. The ability to self-check and
self-censor ones ‘natural’ impulses became the hallmark of civilised
behaviour. The gradual development of memory and thinking therefore served, as a
cooling and checking counterpoint to the impulsive exercising of human will.
Today we could say that the pendulum has swung too far the
other way and that to a large extent we have become cold and calculating in the
exercise of our will forces, especially in the Western world. You could say that
to the extent that the planet is warming up outside we are cooling down on the
inside as we increasingly ‘re-wire’ our collective central nervous system
(technological and industrial infrastructure) to directly operate our
‘muscles’ (the machines that do our bidding), bypassing the heart and its
connection to a healthy feeling life.
The heart occupies a place between the polarity of thinking
and willing. This middle realm is the realm of feeling and the human soul is
predominantly an organ of feeling. It sits between the spirit-body (accessible
through thinking) and the physical body (accessible through outer sensation and
stimulation of physical movement). In the Steiner school curriculum it is the
will body which is first informally educated (from birth to c7). The beginning
of formal education works predominantly on the feeling life, whilst the thinking
(14+) is the last of the three faculties to be formally trained. This is no
accident but an educational act of great genius, for in many ways the cultural
priority with which we approach life must now be ‘reversed’. That ascetic
gesture, which has informed human civilisation for so long, and which has led to
the development of modern thinking, has served its purpose too well and has led
to a form of suppression of the feeling life which disconnect us from our will
forces. As a result human passion is suppressed, on the one hand, by a human
scientific outlook, which confines itself to a purely intellectual manipulation
of physical matter, and on the other by a religious-spiritual outlook that
venerates the postponement of emotional fulfilment to ‘the next life’. The
consequence of this is that by continuing to implicitly demonise our ‘lower’
nature (feeling expressed through will/will expressed with feeling) Western
society is subjecting itself to an outmoded form of asceticism which
disenfranchises human beings from developing healthy forms of emotional
expression which, in turn, could
truly harmonise thinking and willing, and which would thereby begin to give us
the personal and social tools necessary to help simultaneously restrain our
mechanical habits of consumption and to cultivate a truly inspired spiritual
life.
Instead there is a wild thirst for constant sensation and
superficial stimulation in order to mask the inner emptiness created by the lack
of true human encounter. It is as if, as a species, we are trying to consume our
own body (the earth) because we can no longer feel anything in or through it.
This has reached such a point that speculation on the end of humanity is now
publicly voiced. (8)
Christ did not seek to avoid this end but embraced its inevitability thereby reversing its momentum. Death is the result of too great a separation between the differing dynamic of the spiritual and the physical worlds. When the strain upon that which links the two together, namely the human soul, becomes too great there is a snapping (death) of the connection. (9) In order to save and redeem our world – and our soul life – the process of death must now be managed and redeemed internally before it overwhelms us externally. The source of strength to do this no longer lives in the ancient decree that bids us to deny ourselves for the ‘greater good’. That ‘greater good’ has long since become an abstraction that no longer embodies the reality of living human experience. We can no longer afford to wait for a greater authority to save us. We must become that greater good to each other. We must become saviours to each other and thereby to ourselves.
But if we are no longer able to rely upon outer ideology
and dictats to sustain us, then from where can we draw our strength? To do this
we must learn to mine the dark-depths of our own souls and to bring out of these
souls depths the light, which is trapped within. We must face the dark creatures
(creations that we have helped to form over time) that live there within us and,
like the Greek godess Persehone, bring them back up into the light, in order to
subject them to searingly honest scrutiny. To help us in this, new social forms
are needed whereby peer-to-peer scrutiny can take place in a social atmosphere
which that is non-judgemental and safe (10) – for we are not here to judge
each others faults but to redeem them for each other. The creation of sympathy
and empathy for our shared humanity is inevitable when we work in this way. We
must begin to establish methodologies for working in this way within our social
life. I would go so far as to say that this is now the main task of the social
life. The collective debt, which we owe to each other for actions perpetrated in
the past, is far too great to be paid off with the material riches of the earth
but only by finding the light of the Redeemed Spirit, which slumbers at the core
of all our souls can we bring things to a new balance.
If we do not address this issue urgently then all our
social interactions will remain at and feed the level of the ‘Great Game’.
(11) They will not get beyond the positioning, strategy and counter strategy
that currently constitutes most of human interaction including in our
institutions.
I have tried here to sketch something of the key dynamic working at the core of the current social and interpersonal crisis of human relationship. Perhaps in a future article we could explore some of these new ways of working. For readers who would like to take this a little further more immediately I make some recommend suggestions at the end of the endnotes to investigate, although they are by no means exhaustive of approaches beginning to happen around the world.
Michael Hallam lives
and works in Lancaster as a freelance writer, lecturer and consultant,
specialising in the relationship between personal development and organisational
development. (12)
End Notes
(1) the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education www.beshara.org
(2) Eric Berne M.D. ‘Father’ of Transactional analysis and the author of ‘Games People Play’, a systematic classification of the many human ‘games’ we play on each other, some of them lasting for years and entirely predictable once you get to know them. Most of human worldly ‘experience’ is based upon learning to spot such games in others and to avoid/play them. ISBN number 0 14 002768 8
(3) The New Adult Learning Movement, which recognises the fact that adult educators, when teaching in a way which is living and transformative, inevitably ‘bring things up’ in their students. It thereby attempts to teach appropriate counselling skills in addition to mere subject knowledge. www.nalm.net
(4) Founder of ‘Personal Construct Theory’
(5) Ice- ages
(6) The Pre-Cambrian era of the Dinosaurs
(7) Connected with the living vital and to some extent, self-aware forces of nature.
(8) James Lovelock. Is a very celebrated recent example.
(9) Of course the forces of death kicks in long before actual physical death takes place and are related to the multiple imbalances that build up within our constitution. Mentally death begins when we stop believing that ‘impossible’ things can happen, when we stop believing that we can change things for the better and thereby give up on our destiny.
(10)
South Africa’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ process conducted after
the end of the aprtheid regime, inspired by the compassionate example of Nelsod
Mandella and Desmond Tuttu, is a case in point.
(11) The Great Game was the term used to describe the social manipulations and machinations of the European powers, leading up to and culminating in the Great World War (part I)
(12) Michael Hallam. www.threefolding.com, mike @threefolding.com
Some
suggestions to investigate:
* I have recently become aware of the work of the aptly named Persephone Institute, (now running courses at Hawkwood College, near Stroud in England), which has devised a methodology for working with and liberating a person from the ‘underworld of the soul’, those traumatised forces in all of us which predispose us to repeatedly play out the same fruitless patterns of behaviour in our lives and which undermine our own happiness and our own effectiveness. (Persephone, according to Greek myth, was the daughter of Demeter, carried off, or lured, into hell by Pluto to subsequently spend half of her existence in the dark and half in the light. The parallels between Christ’s mother Mary (who remained pure) and the being of Mary Magdaleine (a redeemed temple prostitute) are interesting in this respect, as is the correlation with Steiner’s account of the development of the human being during what he refers to as the ‘ancient Moon’ period of earth evolution and which was recapitulated during the Lemurian era). For further details on the underlying principles of the Persephone institute (www.persephone-institute.com) and for details of future courses, visit the Hawkwood College website (www.hawkwoodcollege.co.uk). For detailed reading matter go to www.threefolding.com/psychosophy/psychosophy.htm
* The ‘Ways to Quality’ (WTQ) initiative, is the
research and educational ‘arm’ of ‘Qualitat’, a Swiss-based quality
management organisation. WTQ investigates in detail the anatomy of the new
people-led initiatives that are so characteristic of the Anthroposophical
movement. Through Qualitat, they have authority to regulate and assess
institutions operating out of an Anthroposophical impulse in Switzerland and
some parts of Germany. One of the more pertinent findings of WTQ is the fact
that the ongoing health of modern initiatives rests in finding the dynamic
balance between organisational development and self-development, that the
individual serves the organisation as the organisation serves the needs of the
individual and vice versa. Ways to Quality (www.sozialimpulse.de/index.htm) now
run a training course in the UK. For details contact Rudolf Kirst 01923 265151
email odiliakirst@yahoo.co.uk
* ‘The Human Soul and Spirit and the Opposing Powers’
by John Canning, (Camphill Books ISBN 1 897839 23 5 ) is a wonderfully clear
piece of research of Steiner’s indications, correlating the souls unconscious
depths with the more traditional dynamics of thinking feeling and willing. The
result is a very clear classification of the various types of distortion of
human nature that can arise from a merely two-sided approach to life.
*Also worth seeing is the Swedish film “As it is in
Heaven”, (Swedish title ‘Sa som I Himmelen’ (2005) directed by Kay Pollak
which is definitely worth more than 1000 words.