Rudolf Steiner’s Multi-pronged Legacy

0:01 Jon
Welcome to the Ted O'Neill program. Season 5!

This is the Ted O'Neill Program where we explore the science and philosophies for performance optimization, and the elevation of the human experience from the mind of Ted O'Neill with Jon Leon Guerrero.

0:30
So before Season 4, you had indicated there was a potential for sophomore slump maybe. They're coming out of the gate. Season 3 was all things PPT, segment by segment, episode by episode carving out space for that entire model to have a home somewhere. Any thoughts before Season 5?

0:50 Jon
Well, it seems like that motivator works to some degree, so I guess I can't try that trick again.

0:57 Ted
Alright, so here we are in Season 5. So we've had five weeks off, Johnny and I spent the majority of that time in Bora Bora with some other luck that happened. So we're just working on other stuff. So here we are. This season is kind of a two fold approach. So last season, we had a huge response to the works from Robert Lawler, specifically the book sacred geometry. I think we got more feedback both from our members at Diablo actually as well as outside on those episodes. And so what I want to do for part of this season is we're gonna go over influential books or books that were influential to all things that happen in the Lifted Academy landscape, from the Emotional Sobriety movement, to Paraphysical training, to the trainings that happen on Diablo Barbell, etc. That's going to be one component of this. The other is going to be diving into some very unusual facts. Things on the surface might not seem like facts, but in fact, are facts. All of this is designed to get us thinking outside of the habituated norm of day to day where we live within this framework and think in a very boxton habituated way. So, here we go. Now, in addition to all this great stuff as we launch we have a special guest today, Amanda Creighton, who was very special and massively influential to all the things that that happened at lifted Academy and I would say, you know, oftentimes when things get done, people say it takes a whole team. Well Amanda is kind of a team and then of herself within the work that she gets done for us. So I'm happy to have her here. The book we're going to dive into today is from Rudolf Steiner, that may or may not be a familiar name to people who engage in this podcast, this program so to speak. And briefly, I'm going to go over my background of Rudolf Steiner because I've been a student of metaphysics since the early 90s. So 30 plus years, and I think I came across Steiner probably 30 years ago. I don't even remember what book it was. And I read some of it and I thought, wow, this is great. I kind of tossed it aside, and that was that and I spent the majority of those early years more focused on the works of Neville Goddard and Emmett Fox and Joseph Murphy. And only now later to come back to Steiner's work kind of just happenstance. I ordered a book from Amazon. It showed up and I dug into this book, which is today's book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. So anyone who spends any time at “Diablo actual” or knows me can tell just by the very title of that book why I ordered it.

4:03 Jon
or that you ordered it?

4:03 Ted
Or that I ordered it? Yes. So this is what we're gonna get into but you know Steiner is a guy who passed away almost 100 years ago. And that was you know, when I started looking into him a little bit after buying this particular book and going through it, I was pretty blown away because there's so much out there about him. His fingerprint is kind of all over the world. And I don't have any direct experience with any of that. And that's why Amanda's on.

4:36 Jon
But we know somebody who does.

4:37 Ted
Yeah, so I'm gonna let Amanda talk a little bit about Steiner before we get into reviewing this book. And then most importantly, this season, all the things we talked about are gonna stretch your brain, you're used to that. They're gonna challenge you in different ways. They're gonna expose you to new or different ideas. And all of this, we're going to bring back to the eminently practical bit by bit so we're not just going to go out into the ether and hang out there. We're always going to pull this back into what this means, for your life right here right now? Or maybe even under the squat bar,

5:12 Jon
You know, I don't know that we're going to have to do that for a lot of people because they do put it together. But it will be fun just to remind everybody that ultimately, this podcast is typically gravitated toward by people who like to lift things.

5:29 Ted
There we go. Yes.

5:31 Jon
So, before you give your practical knowledge of his work, I just want to fill everybody in on a few things about Rudolf Steiner. First, he was an Austrian who was born, I believe, in 1861. And he died roughly 90 something years ago, but he left behind a number of things because he was an esotericist as some people refer to him.

6:00 Ted
I'm sometimes called an esoterrorist, by the way.

6:04 Jon
So yeah, it's, I think, a natural progression. Some people refer to him as an occultist. He was definitely into math and the sciences and he was very interestingly, a writer whose language holds up. You know, we do read some of the texts that are many decades old, and a lot of times you can tell in the language and sometimes it's charming. But when you read Steiner, he uses the same kind of language we would hear from very deep thinkers of today. So that's a lot of fun. Please tell us about your experience.

6:42 Amanda
Well, I did not meet the man in person, of course, as none of us did. But I met Rudolf Steiner through children who had been influenced by his philosophical frameworks initially, and that opened a doorway. So one of the things he's left behind is a whole educational system called Waldorf Schools and worldwide his philosophical framework is called Anthroposophy. And last I checked there were somewhere between 70 and 100,000 practitioners of Anthroposophy in the world, so this isn't like a massive group of people. But it feels almost like a mystery school.

7:29 Jon
Yeah, that the etymology of Anthroposophy is human wisdom.

7:41 Amanda
Perfect. That's it. So these young children that I met who had been through the Waldorf schools, I noticed he had a lot more human wisdom than we could say. I mean, they were extraordinary young people who felt like they had cultivated a soulful and spiritual life. And I thought how you didn't go to a regular school, like what's going on here and so that began my exploration and I met their parents and I've toured these schools and I have many friends who will only send their school their children to Waldorf Academy because they're in place to cultivate not just the knowledge base, not just the intellect but to have what I call entering the four rooms every day. The physical, the mental, emotional, and the spiritual parts of every person are lifted in these places. And so you know, it's very in line with our mission here at Lifted Academy, but we're wanting to do that with adults and children. And so it's not only Waldorf Academy, then I was invited to the Eurythmy dances where you attain a higher alignment through movement practices, so he left behind that. I have certainly planted trees and cow horns and fed the fairies. For anyone who really gets into this you will understand what I mean on biodynamic farms, because there's a whole way of doing farming practices that produces bigger food, better food, more holistic food, you know, you can buy about economic raspberries in some stores. In the Bay Area I've seen them but it's not like organic food. So it's not a classification that many people ascribe to because it's so much kind of intention around it and it's in alignment with moon cycles and you know, he had a big connection with the sky and the stars and the way that things move in the larger picture. So Ted can talk all about that once we get into that podcast. So, you know, the eurythmy dance and Anthroposophical work, you know, the Waldorf schools themselves, and then there's this whole other, I'm not going to pull the name of it out, but he also left behind an imprint where in which they've set up communities all over the world to support people with disabilities to live with able bodied people, and work together and live together in these communities. So I've visited several of these communities. I'm forgetting the name of them right now. But so he's left this like a broad imprint on the world, but It's not mainstream. You wouldn't hear of him. Not many people know of him, but the core of it is that all parts of a person need to be lifted up. So I think it's perfect that this is how we're kicking off season five. Way to go Ted!



10:40 Ted
magically dropped into our laps here as things are prone to happen. He was also an architect.

10:51 Jon
There were many pursuits of his that a person could make their singular pursuit. And he, interestingly, unlocked all of these things because as a teenager, I think he was 14 years old. He found a book on geometry. And he made this connection between geometry which we hadn't yet identified as being sacred, but he had made this connection between geometry and I think this was the beginning of his esotericism because he realized that through geometry, we could express as humans something that was higher than we were like we could access higher ideals and make them into real things or make sense of real things. So that also speaks in even greater detail to some of the things that we address.

11:44 Amanda
And it makes sense to me that that was that when he was 14, because he has also been a big influence on the field of psychology and childhood development, where he's outlined the stages of human development from early childhood to middle childhood to adult early adolescence, which we all know those terms. Again, his languaging is very accessible, which I like. And one of the things that happens is every student stays with the same teacher for eight years. And then you switch for the next eight years. So there's these, you know, 16 years but it's like these deep, connected developmental cycles where you're in a process and I feel like that also happens at Lifted where we go deep, this is not about taking the next cool course and learning a few things and walking away. You know, with you Ted, we go, we go deeeep.

12:38 Ted
Yes, and for those who are geometrically or musically inclined, in Amanda's talking about eight year cycles, eight, the number eight would symbolize the second octave, right in music as we know it, and say, for example, the major scale, the eighth note is the first note and one octave higher. So that would make sense logically. So Steiner, I think, had this broad vision,

13:03 Jon
Or the second half of the musical phrase.

13:04 Ted
Yeah, right. And so all this amazing work. He was able to decode and then put out in the world and to me, it was kind of a shocking revelation that 30 years ago, I had this introduction and didn't go anywhere with it, pursued other paths and just now coming back to this, being able to look at this massive footprint he left but then as Amanda said, you know, there's this very small, seemingly small, you know, 100,000 people who practice this in the day to day, and that's one of the things one of the big thrusts behind Lifted Academy right now. I'm gonna talk about this for one second before we move forward. And that's all through time. We see where there's this advancement toward higher ideals. And there's a very small percentage of people who seem to really take this and, and run with it, pass just a cursory knowledge of Oh, that's a neat idea or that's an interesting dinner conversation and the number always seems to be like less than 1%. And everywhere in my research on anything having to do with high achievement, or the way that we're built as human beings. There's this repeating fractal of somewhere between 1/10 of 1% to 1%. On how things work at the higher level. So a big push of our mission is to get this out there at a time in the world where I believe things are more urgent to do so where we can send this message to a much greater percent of people than 1%. So we can take that kind of one percenter concept and make this more accessible through all the different means physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically.