Still Alice, Still Steiner

Rudolf Steiner had a great appreciation of “the Easter mysteries” and always comes to my mind around Easter. I read him a lot at one time in my life and still find him very helpful in the spiritual quest, despite there being certain things he writes about which are difficult for me to understand, such as the bits about re-incarnation, the etheric body, and Atlantis. Still, I think that a study his life, works, and writings is well worth the time and effort, and I have kept coming back to him over the years.

I recently read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and some Steiner commentary on it in The Mysteries of the Holy Grail, from Arthur and Parzival to Modern Initiation, Compiled and edited by Matthew Barton, 2010.

Here is a nice sample of Steiner:

“When someone becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops certain forces in his soul which, in this incarnation, may render him very acute when discussing materialistic ideas; yet certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has only absorbed these, typical, dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces required to build up the human organism. The 'cleverer' a person is by the standards of our day, and the closer his intellectual attunement to them, the more of an imbecile he will be in a later incarnation. Those categories and concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and the ideas which constitute it, set up a configuration in the soul which may be ever so fine intellectually but lack the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it; and to be unable to make use of the brain while in the physical body is to be an imbecile.”

I think it is possible to get a lot out of his statements like that, even if we use the word “incarnation” to mean just a particular phase of our present life on Earth. In fact, we often do use the word in that sense, such as when I myself refer to my previous life as a bookseller or as a sociologist.

But there is another reason that Steiner was in my mind today: I saw the contemporarily highly popular film entitled “Still Alice.” Alice is stricken with Alzheimer's Disease in the story, and we witness her decline from being highly capable and intellectual to basic incompetence, not to say imbecility.

But her daughter relates a spiritual vision to her in the last scene, the essence of which is that this isn't all there is, that we are spirits, and that we still exist beyond this. “Nothing is ever lost,” the daughter tells Alice.

I walked home from the theater in bright sunshine, with harbingers of spring all around, the first buds on trees, with Easter on its way, thinking of my dear old friend, Betty Stocks, whom I lost to Alzheimer's not long ago. Those last words just felt right, rang right, in every way!

"This God-damned Dog and Pony Show"

My father was very angry at the way he was treated in his last few days before his death at the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, and referred to the situation as "this God-damned dog and pony show.”

An article in the NY Times, "Doctors Strive to Do Less Harm by Inattentive Care," and the comments on it this morning remind me very much of his experience.

Dad's vocabulary was dated, and it could easily appear to the unperceptive that he was being harsh, due to his being under stress, rather than as being truthful regardless of the consequences on the occasion of death.

But I think he was precisely, validly, on the mark. The comments on the NY Times article are in today's vocabulary and emotionally "careful," but clearly confirm my own serious experience of this last year with the medical industry.

The comments on articles and letters to the editors are usually the most interesting and helpful parts of newspapers for me, although not always.

Here is one comment on this article:

Paxinmano

Rhinebeck, NY

"... and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage." This from the oath all doctors swear, the Hippocratic oath. Or was that the hypocritic oath? Ah close enough. You can see how they might have gotten it confused. This is 2015 and doctors are finally thinking from "the patients perspective" instead of their own perspectives. Well, wonders will never cease as my grandmother used to say...

What goes through my mind now is that the horror of the last forty years of programmatic societal selfishness has been so extreme and relentless and radical, that people are being forced to face it and to rethink it. The fact that the NY Times has been running a series of articles like this one brings hope that this might be true.

Reminders by Cenk Uygur, President Obama, and The Medical Industry

I woke up this morning with an old familiar question in mind: Why is it I so easily lose sight of how backwards, upside down, the situation is?

Cenk Uygur's column

Cenk Uygur

on Brian Williams and the Media a couple days ago is what caused the question to be in my mind during the night. His column is well worth reading. It's like President Obama's recent talk on the ghastly history and Pride of so many people who have considered themselves to be “Christians.”

The remarks by Cenk and the President are obviously and undeniably true. But, as Mark Twain put it, we are able to stumble over the truth, then get up and run along as if nothing had happened.

These two reminders of the absurdity, or whatever it should be called – the insanity? - are just the easiest examples that come to mind immediately right now. I've also been dealing with the medical industry during the past weeks, too, and have had to go through the reawakening for the umpteenth time to the reality that we are more likely to be harmed by it than helped by it.

I don't admire insanity, I don't like it, and I believe it's destructive to everyone who does it. Better just to go ahead and to die than to participate in it, I say, and then, at that very point, I become just so grateful and pleased that I have been allowed to live as long as I have, without having been killed or even being put in prison.

How Frugal Is the Chariot that Bears the Human Soul

This little poem of Emily Dickinson has had a big place in my mind since I first read it a couple months ago. I've thought of it every day since then.

     There is no Frigate like a Book
     To take us Lands away
     Nor any Coursers like a Page
     Of Prancing Poetry -
     This Traverse may the poorest take
     Without oppress of Toll -
     How frugal is the Chariot
     That bears the Human Soul -

I have seen, having been both bookseller and teacher for many years, how much a book can mean to a life, particularly the life of a young person.

That talk of “the human soul” brings so much light and mystery and hope. It rarely occurs in financial and material affairs, or in scientific and academic discourse, and is light as a feather.