Despite that Considering The Universe blog has had a marked lack of recent activity, it doesn’t follow that it’s creators have stopped “considering” recently– in fact we’ve done quite a lot of considering and are psyched to start blogging about it all.

During the holidays I had the pleasure of attending an Anthroposophy meeting where we practiced Goethean Conversation.

Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy (to quote Wikepedia) that is based on the writings and teachings of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner is a philosopher and spiritualist who describes an objective and intellectually knowable spirit realm. He wrote and taught methods (like inner cultivation and meditation) which allow a student to directly access and experience this spiritual world. We’re quite interested in Steiner here at CtU and recommend his teachings.

At the meeting I met several people who regularly interact in this realm and “see” spiritual beings and realms. While I didn’t get a chance to ask them much about their experiences, I did talk briefly to one woman. She said she found her connection to this higher realm quite beneficial but that her purpose in life was to learn other lessons, lessons unrrelated to her gift of spiritual “seeing.”

During the meeting we followed a procedure for speaking based on the article, The Art of Goethean Conversation, we had all read about the importance of ritualized speech.

In her article, Marjorie Spock (who is Dr. Spock’s sister) writes about the purpose of ritualized speech:

[Goethean conversation's purpose] is to call forth a fullness of spiritual life, not to stage displays of intellectual fireworks…Instead, they strive to enter the sunward realm of living thoughts where a thinker uses all of himself as a tool of knowledge, where, in the manner of his thinking, he takes part as a creative spirit in the ongoing process of the cosmos…

Lesser types of interchange never do this: they remain mere mentalizing, speculation, argument, a recounting of experience, an offering of opinion, a reporting. At their worst, a mindless associative rambling…While most of these lesser forms of exchange can be made to serve useful purposes, the fact that they remain on this side of the threshold condemns them to spiritual barrenness.

 

She describes how speech brings us closer to spiritual realms:

True conversations have another power. As the participants strive to enter the world of living thoughts together, each attunes his intuitive perception to the theme. He does so in the special atmosphere engendered by approaching the threshold of the spiritual world, a mood of supernatural attentive listening, of the most receptive openness to the life of thought into which he and his companions are now entering.

 

She goes on to describe more in depth reasons for why and how this use of speech is so powerful. While we had some success using ritualized speech during the Anthroposophy meeting and it certainly was an intriguing exercise, I don’t know that it “worked” as meaningfully as Majorie or Goethe envisioned during this particular meeting. However, the concepts around speech that Majorie touches on are particularly relevant and important and I have had experiences where ritualized speech creates a powerful atmosphere.

I could write many essays about the importance of speech, but for now briefly consider the following. “Right Speech” is regarded as the hardest part of the Buddhist Eight fold path, in fact the Buddha was said to have spent most of his past lives working on “Right Speech.” Just think about what you spend most of your waking hours doing, if not thinking. Probably speaking, or writing. Even when we are listening, we are evaluating what we hear and crafting our responses. Even thoughts can often be viewed as part of speech. I wrote an article about the importance of silence here, that just briefly describes an important spiritual practice found in almost all world religions. It makes sense to me then, that ritualized speech or using speech in a particular manner could powerfully influence our relationship to the spiritual world. Prayer, religious chants, benedictions, incantations and even singing are all methods of the major religions that use speech to bring us closer to God.

Even if we didn’t create a perfectly compelling spiritual atmosphere using the Goethean Converstation format during the Anthroposophy meeting, we did use speech in a different (a more sacred) manner. This practice became a powerful example to illustrate how often we use speech mindlessly, without noticing the power it actually has.