Do you seek the highest, the greatest?
The plant can be your teacher:
what it is without volition
you can be willfully—that’s it!
Friedrich Schiller
The plant is coaxed up and out of the soil by the Sun, and its unfolding seems so effortless. But, alas, we human beings do not experience any automatic spiritual development. What a plant does on one level, we must express on another but the key ingredient is our own effort. We must strive and, on a soul level, become like the plant in our very willpower itself. Grace met by an unreceptive soul is as useless as light encountered by an uprooted plant. If a plant cannot receive the light, the same light scorches it. Likewise, the soul that does not by its own free activity photosynthesize grace, is blistered by its own inactivity. This means we must will to do what is not our inborn instinct, but rather, of our own volition, fixing our attention on our spiritual Sun until this willful striving becomes second nature to us. As Steiner suggests, we must come to think our willing and will our thinking. That one line merits much contemplation.
Grace met by an unreceptive soul is as useless as light encountered by an uprooted plant.
As St. Paul writes, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.”1 On the contrary, our thoughts must become focused and volitional – attentive only to that which we willfully choose. This is what is elsewhere called “single-pointed” focus in meditative practice, but something carried throughout our daily waking life. Our willed actions, by contrast, must conform to spiritual concepts and living ideals. Such a person begins to live from the dynamics of the spiritual world rather than bodily prejudices.
1 of 4: Root
As individuals, the unqualified human “I” is the center of our being. It is from this dark ineffable center that we each emerge. As infants, we begin as “all sense organ”2 and absorb everything and copy everything we experience. The biological process is how we become a member of our species and society, but to become free individuals, the cultural “umbilical cord” must at a certain point be cut. In anthroposophy, the fullness of the individual is born out of the soil of one’s culture and reaches the fullness of freedom by transcending the very conditions in which the individual grows. An American will still speak English, and a German will still speak German, but at the summit of free individuality, minds meet in being able to think living concepts no longer constrained to mere cultural preconceptions. This summit is more of a plateau where we can meet. It does not mean total enlightenment, but rather an ever-greater possibility of the growth of freedom. We do not ever possess absolute freedom, but we can always draw closer to it and continue to shed misinterpretations. As long as we are embodied beings, we cannot shed all preconceptions. As such, we each remain perpetual human becomings. If a plant is unable to overcome inherited geological conditions, it simply fails to be its fullest self.
As a child develops from the head first, the root of the plant emerges first as a pip from the seed. The soul, too, is “rooted” in the physical world as long as its feelings of value are entirely drawn from the world of sensuality and how externalities stimulate emotions. When our feelings of value are not drawn from the surfaces of things (“maya”) and how they enchant our senses, but rather from the unifying spiritual ideas that provide their holistic meaning, then appearances are redeemed and our source of meaning descends from the spiritual world above.
As Steiner says, “We find the strongest life force in the root nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalization from below upward.”3 This is a paradoxical statement because if you look at a root, it is the densest and woodiest part of a plant. “The root is rich in salts, the flower in light. People knew much more of this in the past. This is why they called the principle to be found in the flower ‘phosphorus’.”4 What this means is that the most voracious hunger is in the root, actively assimilating water, salts, and humus and in that activity hardening. In the soil is the greatest life potential and the plant “dies” into its form through its growth. Growth itself is a kind of kinetic energy while the ethericity accumulated in the soil is potential energy.
In the entire process of growth, there is a dying into crystalline form. When a plant reaches its culmination, it produces a new individuality – the seed. As Alan Chadwick says, “the seed is utmost idée and least metamorphosis.”5 As a pure idea, the seed is pure potential. As the plant matures, this potential is used up and the plant becomes actual. To become young again, pure potential must emerge out of our crystalline actuality.
Each time you save a seed in the garden, the seed adapts and evolves. Likewise, when our physical bodies die – assuming we have blossomed spiritually and produced a new I-seed – our individuality also has evolved. All of human life is organized like a plant towards the production of a renewed I-seed.
Steiner says of the plant: “if we take account not only the dynamics of warmth and light and of light conditions in the year when the plant is growing, but starting from the root base ourselves on the dynamics of light and warmth at least in the year before…”6 And, similarly, “That which spreads out through the brain is a highly advanced heap of manure.”7 What forms the brain (or the root) is drawn directly from the world by means of nourishment. Beyond the root “brain” the plant becomes more and more refined until it is predominantly composed of air and light. “[I]n the head we have cosmic forces; while in the system of metabolism and limbs we have to do with earthly forces — cosmic substances and earthly forces.”8 This is simply that the root is composed most of the physical material it absorbs directly, whereas the leaves and flowers of a plant are “inhaled” from the cosmos – air, light, and subtle substantiality. Steiner extends this image to our organs: the brain being our root and the other organs being centers of “breathing” by which we assimilate substantiality. Much in the way that a plant breathes in the air in combination with light to build its form, our organs assimilate what they need from their surrounding atmosphere in combination with the radiant energy contained in our food. Likewise, within the human being, we are rooted in the sensual world but unfold to spiritual heights within.
A sprawled leaf, many-fingered, its radial
ridges limber, green — but curled,
tattered, pocked, the brown palm
nibbled by insects, nestled in by worms:
One leaf of a tree that’s one tree of a forest,
that’s the branch of the vein of a leaf
of a tree. Perpetual worlds
within, upon, above the world, the world
a leaf within a wilderness of worlds
— May Swenson, “Flying Home from Utah”
2 of 4: Leaf
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