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Excerpt from class: Foundations of Spiritual Psychology I
Spiritual Psychology as a Grail Psychology

Spiritual Psychology as a Grail Psychology

  1. The Imagination of the Grail
    1. imaged as a vessel; vessel has the quality of receiving and the quality of giving forth what one needs
    2. ancient mysteries of the concave object; have to do with the relationship between the Earthly and the Divine
    3. Earth-mound cave at New Grange in Ireland; over 6000 years old
    4. description of what happened in the interior of those caves
  2. On Sacred Vessels of Plenty
    1. Buddhist - focuses on the rice bowl as a sacred object of meditation
    2. Taoist - focuses on the three-legged cauldron of Bronze - the I-Ching
    3. Jew- passes the Seder cup, which contained knowledge of the Cabala, the sacred word of the Divine
    4. Christian - takes communion from the Chalice

      Other sacred Vessels:

    5. Irish - Dagda's Cauldron; could feed an entire army without becoming empty
    6. Nordic - Vessel of Sinnreger; contains wisdom and inspiration
    7. Welch - Basket of Gwyddno Gahanhir; place food for one person in the basket; sustenance for a hundred.
    8. The Chalice of the Last Supper - Joseph of Aramathea
  3. Worlfram Von Eschenbach's Parzival
    1. written down in the 12th century A.D. a story, an initiation document for the time of the consciousness soul
    2. a new understanding of the Grail; no longer an outer object that mediates between the human and the divine
    3. The Grail is now each and every individual, who is called to go through the process of inner development to form themselves into a vessel - of receiving and giving creative love
    4. Parzival is not a work of literature; an initiation document; instructions on this process, written in the form of a veiled story; the source of the story
    5. How we will approach this story: we will not explicate the whole of the story; will be concerned with different parts in each of the weeks of the course
    6. a text to be lived with for a very long time; note, Freud does not explicate the Oedipus Myth; Jung does not explicate the Eros/Psyche myth; we are not engaged in mythical analysis or literary criticism; let the whole imagination of the story live within; the begin to work at speaking the psyche-logos within the whole of the imagination.
Excerpt from Class: Foundations of Spiritual Psychology II
Technologies of Imagination

Sources: Where Steiner works with dreams: The Life of the Soul (pamphlet); "The Psychological Expression of the Unconscious" in Spiritual Research: Methods and Research (Steinerbooks); The Evolution of Consciousness (Anthroposophic Press).

Working with Dream Pictures

  1. Description of the dream; like images on an empty canvas - but there is no canvas; dream is the canvas, the painter, and the painting, all at once.
  2. What dreams picture: a) events directly related to waking life; b) events that resemble those of bodily perception in the waking world; c) fantasic events and beings - but still presented as if a bodily perception in waking life; dreams resemble perception in the waking world - this tells us that the body is involved in dreaming; but in addition, a further element is the creating activity of dreaming; need to distinguish dream content and dream activity.
  3. The creating activity of psychic/soul life; a continuum - dream -- fantasy -- memory --- thought --- perception; continuum from realm of most free creating activity to most bound creating activity; working with creating activity of dreaming can strengthen consciousness of the creating activity going on in other phenomena of soul life, and creating can thus work into the world.
  4. The content of the dream cannot be taken as an indication of the creating element in dreams; even when dream content is unusual; dream pictures not related to external events, not necessarily archetypal (e.g. dream of a galloping horse; wake up to clicking of the clock); dream content also often pictures bodily processes (e.g. dream of walking by a white picket fence with broken tops - may symbolize aching teeth); dream content also often pictures instinctual level of soul (e.g. slaying of a monster); N.B. all forms of dream interpretation confuse the activity of dreaming and the content of dreams; in order to get to the activity, it is necessary to go from the content to the image to the activity

Excerpt from class: Hear-Aches
Spiritual Psychology of the Broken Heart

  1. We wish to spend our time together relating from the region of the heart. We mean, the organ of the heart and also the feeling of the heart. Our heads will be engaged, too, but only and always in such a manner that the connection with the heart is not bypassed. By relating through the region of the heart, we do not mean emoting for emoting sake, or sentimentality, or speaking the most intimate details of our lives, or being over-personalistic, but rather, a quite conscious act of moving our consciousness to the region of the heart, be present to what it is like to be in that region, and then, work to speak only what can be transferred directly from the region of the heart to the region of the head. So, we will be engaged in speaking and in thinking, but the source of speaking and thinking is different than usual.
  2. Exercise on moving consciousness to the region of the heart.
    1. This first little exercise comes from the people at a place called HeartMath. They do quite interesting work, scientific studies on heart rate variability, showing how variability evens out when you move to the heart, and also how moving to the region of the heart brings harmony among heart and brain. Figure 1 is an example of their findings.
    2. One of the main exercises from these people is called "Freeze Frame". I don't much like the simplistic way they come up with clever little things, but the exercise is good, something to be done numerous times through the day. (This exercise can be found in: The Heartmath Solution, Doc Childre and Howard Martin, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). Here is the exercise:
      1. Bring back into your consciousness and your feeling an inner image of a situation in which you feel stress. Don't start with the biggest, most emotionally charged issue that you have. Write a brief description of that stressful situation.
      2. Then, write down what you have been going through around this situation: thoughts that keep recurring, feelings, and reactions that keep surfacing - whether anger, frustration, worry, impatience, burnout.
      3. Once the feeling of stress is present, close your eyes and shift your consciousness to the region of your heart. Imagine that you are breathing through the heart to help you keep your attention focused in that region. Do not do anything but be present to the feeling in the region of your heart. Keep your focus there for about a minute, if you can.
      4. Ask your heart what might be a better response to the stressful situation than the one you have been making. Then, after a few moments, write down this heart-intuition response.
  3. Overview of this gathering
    1. heart meditations
    2. heart as the spiritual organ of the body
    3. metaphors of the heart
    4. alchemical image-meditations
    5. When heart is made subservient to head
    6. When heart is made subservient to emotions
    7. Harmonizing heart and head
    8. Opening Circulation with the heavens
  4. The "I Am" Meditation ( This meditation is from Rudolf Steiner, and can be found in: Guidance in Esoteric Training)

Excerpt from class: The Spiritual Psychology of Service

Our conversations together concerning the spiritual psychology of service take us into relatively unknown places of our soul and spirit. We all certainly have an understanding of what it means to serve, and we do so all of the time, some more and some less. Each of us could, with no trouble, say what we mean by service; that seems easier to do, for example, than each of us saying what we mean by soul or by spirit. However, this common sense understanding of service as doing something for someone else, holding in abeyance our own self-interests, barely scratches the surface.

  1. We want to inquire into the soul conditions that make serving possible; Indeed, we shall have to develop a different understanding of soul than as that mysterious, inner factor that makes possible genuinely experiencing life rather than just going through the event; and different than Jung's notion of the psyche as the spontaneous production of images, archetypal images, which give shape to our individual personality. The understanding of soul as it comes to us through depth psychology is that soul, when entered into a conscious way, moves us to realize our individuality; when soul remains not-conscious, then we live our lives belonging to the masses. From this view of soul, only a limited view of service can be derived.
  2. We want to inquire into the ways that power inserts itself into nearly all acts of serving. When we contemplate serving we see that it inevitably involves a relationship between power and weakness. If this polarity is taken into serving, however, then we risk serving only in order either to experience or to maintain a sense of power. First, we will have to look at how power works in terms of the different capacities of soul life - power in knowing, power in feeling, power in acting. The question of power centers around how the ego of psychological life (not the spiritual ego as in "I", the individual spirit) is involved in serving. It is always there, and it is better to recognize how it works than to pretend that we can step out of ego in order to serve. But, there is also power in weakness, and we shall have to look into how that power works, in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
  3. We want to inquire into the ways that serving can become a new social form. We do not want to confine the notion of serving to the helping professions. We want to look at how serving is the primary way in which soul seeks to function in the world. Service, we want to try and demonstrate, constitutes the new mysteries.,
  4. We want to inquire into the ways that serving, the deeper soul and spiritual sense of serving, always occurs at the moment it occurs. It is created in the moment, not something brought already formed to situations. This understanding of serving relates back to point A. above, but extends it.
  5. As we develop an imagination of serving, one constantly pressing concern will be present. Because serving involves the will, involves doing something, not just talking about it, the question of how to go about serving with soul will also occupy us. However, we will not approach this question in a technical way. Techniques for doing better in serving will not be the focus of our work, though the methods through which we serve, hopefully, will be enhanced.

Excerpt from class: The Spiritual Psychology of Work

Reading Job Symptoms: Job Addiction

The right relationship between work and life is by no means simple. Since a true imagination of work is more or less absent in the world, for most of us, our jobs are considered as separate from our life; when we go to a job in the morning, we put our life on hold; and when we come home in the evening, life resumes. Whether this characterization is true or not, it is true that this is what we feel. I remember when I was young, in my twenties, trying to decide on a career. At the time, I was seriously considering becoming a geophysical engineer. I distinctly remember a momment of true horror when I imagined what that career would actually be like. I had a terrible premonition of sitting in a large room with row after row of drawing tables and desks, working on some small problem, seeking for a solution to something, the significance of which would be completely unknown to me. I imagined doing this day after day, year after year. The imagination made me nauseous. Even though I had a strong attraction to the study of the earth and of minerals, it was very clear to me in that moment that I could never do this kind of work. I could simply not work in that kind of situation, and something within me made that very clear. What I most feared was that my life would be separated from my work, and I could not stand such a thought. Thus, I began a long search for a vocation, a search that is still in process, a search that has become increasingly more clear only in the past few years. But even now, I cannot say that I know what I am doing, primarily because there is nothing outside of what I am doing that from day to day affirms that the work I do belongs to the world. I make no salary, have no retirement plan, am not on a career ladder, am not covered by any benefits, do not work regular hours, do not have a daily place to go to work, do not get raises, have no title. At the same time, I work virtually all of the time. If I had a job, I would definitely be called a workaholic. Yet, I am not addicted. What is the difference?

Let us look for a moment at job addiction. Matthew Fox has recently written a fine book on work, The REinvention of Work. He indicates that the difference between work and job addiction revolves around whether the burdens that accompany our work are greater or lesser than the joy that results from it. If the burdens of work do not result in joy, then we are on the way to job addiction if the line between job and life become blurred. Notice, Fox does not say anything about external reward. Taking on the burdens of a job without joy may result in external rewards such as increased salary, advancement, and praise by the employer. These external rewards, particularly salary advancement, may seem to make it possible to buy more of life, but this false view of life takes one even further into the circle of job addiction. One learns to work harder, rewards oneself with material things, which require more work to sustain and increase. While it is possible for one's work to be fully the same as one's life, it is not possible for one's job to be one's life in a healthy way. Fox then specifies three soul qualities that comprise joy in work; delight, creativity, and transformation. Job addiction lacks these three qualities. One cannot make their job their life; one can make a work their life.

Job addiction may be looked at from yet another viewpoint, from the viewpoint of the doubles of delight, creativity, and transformation. An addiction of any sort occurs when something external produces sensations that resemble those brought about through development of inner capacities. Since these sensations, however, disappear when the external means of generating them are not present, we become addicted to those external things. Thus, job addiction produces certain sensations that resemble delight, creativity and transformation, but in fact are doubles of these qualities. I suggest that the three doubles of delight, creativity, and transformation are pleasure, power, and accomplishment. Job addiction carries with it a certain sensation of pleasure. It is the pleasure of repetition and sameness, of doing the same thing over and over, which gives one the sense of being in control, while in fact, one is being controlled. It is the pleasure of feeling that one is the master while in fact one has been mastered.. Power is related to this sensation of pleasure. While it is tremendously important to take true hold of one's power, in the instance of job addiction the power is completely illusory. Rather than allowing a sacred power to enter into one's work, producing unplanned-for transformations, in work addiction, one needs to feel a sense of power, of control, usually over a very very small domain that nonetheless is exaggeratedly imagined as being of tremendous importance. Thus, people who are work addicted set up their own little kingdoms. And then, rather than transformation, instead of finding oneself continually changed by what one does, a person addicted to work lives in the illusion of having accomplished something in the world. What is accomplished, however, cannot be anything really new, but is only the imposition of a form on others.

Excerpt from class: Re-Visioning Ego
The Spiritual Psychology of the Gospel of St. John

At the very end of the work, The Gospel of St. John and its Relation to the Other Gospels, Rudolf Steiner briefly goes through the kind of development necessary to come to dwell with the Word. Each of the steps of this development correspond to an image in the Gospel of St. John. While there is a certain risk in going into the process of this development here, it is necessary to do so in order to help make clear that something has to be done if we are to develop the capacity to be present to the Word. While the Word is given, is present and in the world, available to all, we can sleep through this presence, and will sleep through it unless we do something to wake up and keep awake. The risk is that the process that we will now describe will be understood in a religious sense, something for practicing Christians, rather than a process necessary for all human beings to go through. Then, there is another risk, too. We are going to describe this process(and suggest some exercises) from the viewpoint of spiritual psychology. This point of view will not be a reduction of the process, but rather a speaking of the process as it goes on within the soul and can be experienced. Thus, we are here going to take the process out of the purely spiritual realm and look at it from the spiritual/psychological point of view.

  1. John 13:1-17; The Washing of Feet - Read this passage.
  2. The spiritual/psychological sense of the washing of the feet is that an essential practice in coming to be able to experience the Word in more than a fleeting way is that we are required to care for the soul of others. As we walk through life, we pick up a lot of psychic dirt, just as in the time of Christ, walking on the dusty roads, the feet needed a lot of washing(remember, there was a lot of camel do-do around). Just as the feet need repeated cleansing, so does the soul. The feet are the most humble part of the body. The soul is found in the place of humility. If we have trouble with our feet, we cannot get around and do what needs to be done. If we have trouble with our soul, we cannot get spiritually around and do what needs to be done.
  3. How do we care for the soul of others? We do not have to be psychotherapists. It has to do with paying attention to the soul level of our relationship with others. When we relate with another person, it is almost always at the ego level of ordinary consciousness. To relate to the soul has to do with being conscious, in relation with the other person, of what we can do, how we might serve the soul of the person - not after the interaction with the other person is over, but right there in the middle of the interaction, in the moment that it is going on. It also has to do with speaking to the soul of the other person, which requires an inner level of silence, of stillness, that enables us to be present to the soul level. It also has to do with being present, in our relationships, to what is going on between us besides the content of our connection. This does not mean analyzing, looking for something behind what is going on, but rather, being aware of the pain, the hurt, the longing, the needing, the self-enclosedness--- without in any way being swept into that level, but noticing it, inwardly acknowledging it. Most important, giving care to the soul of others is a silent gesture that indicates to that soul that we owe our existence to this other person, to the soul of the other; it is a gesture of bending down and, in effect, saying to the person, without saying anything verbally, that their soul is extremely significant.
  4. What does care of the soul of others do? It humbles us, constantly. And, in so doing, we are moved to the domain of the soul. Without this humbling, we operate above our neighbor, often not knowing that we are doing so. And, if we are not ourselves in soul, we cannot be present to the activity of the Word.
  5. The significant new psychological direction given through this passage of the Gospel of St. John is that the primary spiritual/psychological act is that of attending the soul of others and that through soul attention to others we come into the being of our own soul. Now, it is extremely important to know how to do this so that we are not just approaching others out of our own needs and not knowing that this is what we are doing.
  6. John 19: 1-4; The Scourging; Read this passage
  7. The spiritual/psychological sense of taking up the practice of living in the image of the scourging is the practice of gradually learning to remain inwardly free. There are two ways in which we lose inner freedom. We can be pulled into one or another kind of fantasy which removes us from the world; or we can be pulled into astute observation and manipulation of others and of the world with the purpose of bringing about something in the world that we think should happen. Both of these pulls are ways in which we seek to avoid, to bypass whatever the world brings to us to have to meet. To meet what the world gives us, to stand steadfast instead of trying to get above it or to bend it around the way we want, is the experience of scourging. To stand steadfast in and with what we are given is a strengthening of the connection of ordinary consciousness with the spiritual worlds. This develops the capacity to be present in body, soul, and spirit to the Word; it develops the capacity of conscious intuition. It is extremely important that we stand in and with what we are given to be and do in a conscious way. This way of being is not resignation, nor is it an egotistic, self-centered kind of suffering in which we are every moment aware of how difficult our life is. This stance is first one of being able to realize that we are always in one fantasy or another, and developing gradually the capacity to have some awareness of what that fantasy is. Then, this stance is also one of being able to realize that we are always trying to control our circumstances and gradually developing the capacity to have some awareness of the ways in which we do this. Once we have a vivid feeling of how these two pulls work in our lives, we can then work toward, not their elimination, but of standing firm in relation what meets us without trying to handle what comes toward us through one of these directions of distraction.
  8. Notice the many and various ways in which we have great difficulty in bearing what we are given to bear. Imagine what it would be like to stop projecting, to stop fanciful wishing, to stop trying to figure out how we can win, but to do so without some pathological sense of resignation. Practice in bearing what we are given to bear orients us toward being able to be present to the act of the Word.
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