BD Digest #20
Liturgy of the season
with Max Leyf
THIRTY-FIFTH WEEK OF THE YEAR
35. Kann ich das Sein erkennen,
Daß es sich wiederfindet
Im Seelenschaffensdrange?
Ich fühle, daß mir Macht verlieh’n,
Das eigne Selbst dem Weltenselbst
Als Glied bescheiden einzuleben.
∇∆
CAN I that presence recognize
that in knowing is also known,
couched within the striving soul
and her creative drive?
enthused I feel, made stronger, more alive
by a power in me more than mine:
the All-in-All works through my hands.
The Second week of the Advent season we seek …..
“Light of the plants,
Plants that reach up to the Sun,
and in the breeze dance.”
Weekly Moon & Star Astro forecast:
December’s Thun Biodynamic Astronomical Almanac highlights one final planetary trine in 2025, this one occurring on Thursday December 11th, with the planets Mercury who is just entering Scorpio, and Neptune in Pisces. According to the Biodynamic almanac Neptune went Retrograde on July 4th 2025.
On December tenth, Neptune returns to Prograde (direct) motion for the first time in six months.
In the early hours of December 12th, Moon will be in harmonious opposition with Saturn followed by Moon in opposition to Neptune.
To activate the beneficial energy and effects of the planetary alignments, an application of a biodynamic preparation such as the BD Buffalo Soil Activator, the Biodynamic barrel compound, and even chamomile (BD #503) or Valerian (BD #507) on December 11th would be timely. The action of the various biodynamic preparations become more efficient, effective and impressive when used with the best of the times in the biodynamic almanac and with the best of our own intentions.
Thinking Differently
One of the hardest things these days is thinking differently about something. Steiner warns us that materialistic thinking – really a form of hardened imagination – can only think what it already believes. We can see this everywhere that factions develop and hard lines between groups thinking in silos emerge. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” People often cannot even entertain something provisionally unless it is part of their belief system. Moreover, the problem with materialism is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if we treat people like they are robots, they will become more like automatons. If we treat soil as if it’s a dead substrate, it becomes a dead substrate in which only NPK thinking works! There is no such thing as a “neutral” gaze. We are either sapping energy from what we behold or we are giving energy to it. If we treat the farm as if it is a living organism, guess what? It becomes a dynamic ecosystem able to maintain a kind of independent homeostasis – a bioreactor of abundance. But to get to this we have to start by thinking in a new way. Stewart likes to use the phrase “as if” because anything that follows can be accepted as a poetic flourish: treat the soil as if it is really alive and see what happens. As Jeff Poppen (the “Barefoot Farmer”) quoted Alex Podolinsky at the 50th ACRES USA conference, we should plow as gently as if we were turning over a baby. Treat the soil as if it contains a delicate kind of life and see what lovely things can emerge from it! Begin with as if and soon you’ll find it becomes true for you.
One of the most influential biodynamic pioneers, Ehrienfried Phieffer, tells us:
“Farmers who wish to convert their farm according to biodynamic views must first work on themselves and learn to think in different ways. This is the greatest difficulty involved in introducing marked innovations; people would love to have an instant recipe for getting their work done without having to use their own inner activity. This is impossible, of course, in practical areas of life such as farming, gardening, and forestry. As human beings, we are the strongest natural force that guides and directs the beginning, middle, and end of the natural growth process; our capacity is the final, decisive factor.”
In The Face of the Earth, Pfeiffer addresses this sclerotic imagination. He explains that it’s no longer enough to have recipes in text because people lack the vital forces necessary to bring dead text to life. Instead, people need to see it in action, and then they can copy it. You see how big a problem this is? Reading is not an intellectual process at all. In fact, the need for pictures in text is a further sign of the poverty of our imaginations. To read and experience images and color from what we read is an act of resurrection. There is no such thing as neutral reading. Yes, text by itself is “dead” – but it is dead the way a dormant seed is dead. It is awaiting the gift of vitality from the reader to unfold its beautiful form. Revivifying text is a sacrifice of one’s own blood, you could say, to let those words live again in your own soul:
“This book cannot be read the way people ordinarily read books in this day and age. In some respects, its readers will have to work their way through each page and even each single sentence the hard way. This was done deliberately; it is the only way this book can become what it is intended to be for the reader. Simply reading it through is as good as not reading it at all. The spiritual scientific truths it contains must be experienced; that is the only way they can be of value.”1
While we may seek an easy recipe for getting our work done, the possibility of advancing our work through developing soul capacities, is one of the richest areas of research for the biodynamic practitioner. But in reality, the “secret ingredient” to the biodynamic preparations is you. It’s not enough to do word-for-word what a recipe says. There’s always nuance and context to consider. Someone making sourdough bread learns that some days extra water is needed, other days more flour. Sometimes the bread takes longer to proof. It’s not enough to leave it for X minutes or to restrict oneself to including a certain amount of each ingredient. The biodynamic preparations are just as nuanced, but that nuance is only learned by following the original recipe religiously because life – “nuance” – will always interject itself.
Legend tells us that the best fertilizer is the farmer’s footstep. This walking of the land is a time when we can gain awareness and insights, revelations are revealed. What images or imaginations might you perceive? What secrets will the land whisper? As Black Elk says, “As you walk upon the sacred earth, treat each step as a prayer.” If we walk the earth in such a way that we are giving attention to it, we are already enhancing our relationship with it and everything that follows is improved. As Simone Weil writes, “Attention is the purest form of generosity.” This merits much contemplation, but at the heart of this is that the divine world and everything we cherish is what we give our attention to. Our capacity to develop upright morality in farming, how we treat our soils, our plants and animals is tested, almost every day. It is never enough to rest on our laurels. How well we did yesterday – or last year – or even in a previous lifetime, does not limit what we need to do today.
One of the best ways to work on improving the Earth, and our gardens, is by developing spiritual soul capacity for bettering the world around us. This begins with the sacrifice of attention. If we only care about how something affects ourselves, that is narcissism. But to really know something else, we must love it, which means setting aside myself. As George Washington Carver said, “If you love anything, it will share its secrets with you.” Love is not vague affection or sympathy, it is actively willing the good of the other, even at one’s own expense. The service a parent offers a child, or a priest offers the community, is love. In English, we have so few words for different kinds of love. We can say I love burgers, I love my dog, and I love my son. We instinctively know the differences between these. But we’re talking here about the latter kind. Loving the farm as a child. In Sanskrit, there are nearly 100 nuanced terms for kinds of love. Ancient Persian has 80. Ancient Greek has three. In English, we only have one. Perhaps we could say that in the English-speaking world, we have a crisis of the heart.
Here we enter an interesting realm: the daily work and the nightly work. When our imagination (our heart) is disciplined, our dreams become more regular and orderly. You can almost say that we go, in our dreams, to a “place” that is where our hearts already were in waking life. As we learn to regulate where our heart is, our dreams also change accordingly. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. At night, we enter the dream world and interact more directly with the spiritual world all around us, without the sheath of the body which we leave behind slumbering in our beds. The practice of cultivating the inner flame of spiritual life, and even biodynamics, extends by taking things that need attention into the realm of sleep. Waldorf educators focus special importance on breathing and quality of sleep. “Each time we allow these things to sleep and then reawaken them, they gain greater potency.”2
What does sleep have to do with Biodynamic Agriculture or Waldorf education, or any other of Rudolph Steiner’s posthumous endeavors?
What we develop by spending more conscious time in the realm between the stars at night is what can be termed a “light body.” This can variously be described as the remarkable presence of a holy person, the special radiant “aura” of someone who is particularly giving, or a “halo” commonly depicted around the heads of saints.
In biodynamics, we take the libidinous force contained in flowers and introduce it to the roots of plants. Stewart likes to point out that this is directly analogous to the process at work in kundalini yoga. Steiner himself says that “Humanity’s ascent takes place through the overcoming of physical love, the regulation of the breathing process, and the development of kundalini light.”3 We do the exact same thing with biodynamics: we ennoble our plants and gardens and give them, so to speak, a “halo.”
Steiner’s vision of the future of Earth is that it become an “etheric star” but as with much of his poetic language, there are many levels to this. Earth, in Steiner’s idiosyncratic language, is not the planet we live on, but the domain of human freedom. If we human beings were not here with consciousness on the Earth, the Earth would not exist as Earth. It would still be here, but would never be recognized as a consciously sacred place. Each of us, with our own physical bodies, is a forerunner of a future in which we will no longer need to be divided by religious lines, but will meet “at the top of the mountain.” Steiner’s terminology describes this as the return of Christ “in the etheric,” which is the return of the Messiah, not as a single individual among individuals – not as, say, Krishnamurti – but as the brotherhood of all humanity. In Buddhism, the Buddha-to-come is Maitreya, whose name comes from the Sanskrit term, Mitra (मित्र), which means “Friend.” When we are all unified in being friends to the spiritual world, the Second Coming will be social. Even Marxists, however misguided their programs may be, share the germ of the dream of a messianic future in which all will be united in friendship. Now, friends are not always “nice” – as the Buddha said, the greatest gift someone can give is correction. That Jesus flogged bankers and drove animals out of the temple did not make him less of a friend, but more of one.
The question becomes one of bees as an early image of how we, as individuals, shall act: “The whole hive is in reality permeated with love. The individual bees renounce love in manifold ways, and thus develop love throughout the whole hive. One only begins to understand the life of the bees when one knows that the bee lives in an atmosphere completely pervaded by love.”4 By the conscious sacrifice of one kind of erotic love, harmonious social love can be born. This is the kundalini process by which the reproductive power is sublimated and we become “like sympathetic people in human society, who have a favourable influence by their mere presence and not by anything they say.”5
The physical world of minerals is the precipitates out of something subtler. Enzo Nastati makes reference to the “condensation of the imponderables.” In fact, according to alchemists like Paracelsus, veins of gold in the Earth replenish themselves if left alone. There something “takes root” out of the invisible world, which as we know is the vast majority of reality.
The fire of life composes its physical forms with air, water, and mineral salts – fire, air, water, and earth. In these dense physical forms, our task is to take what is the “lowest” of all creation – the dead mineral earth – and bring it back into the realm of life. Biodynamics is nothing short of an act of resurrection. The revivification of the mineral world brings liveliness back to what had settled into itself and stopped participating in the cosmic dance.
When a tree grows it uses its life body to build up the physical framework, the support structure with the minerals available. Imagine a potter’s wheel. The physical dry clay must be moistened, moulded, and moved upwards – and first the potter must moisten his fingertips, often with oil (alchemical sulfur). This rhythmic activity draws upwards the physical-mineral elements, much as a tree is mounded-up earthly material. As long as this process continues to unfold, the tree is alive – when it stops, and begins to dry out, it “dies” into a corpse of its previously dynamic form – wood. What remains behind is the ghost of the structural elements and a residue of the life force in the combustible qualities remaining in that matter.
As we enter the Winter of the year, we physically experience the longest nights of the year, as the Sun’s light shortens daily. Above ground plants appear to “die” but below ground there is an intensified life process to keep them alive during winter. As vitality is withdrawn from the periphery, an inner warmth is kindled within. As with yoga, where the attention is withdrawn from the peripheral nervous system and turned inwards, the radiance of the summer Sun can now be born within the soul itself. As Angelus Silesius writes, “If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally.”
This is where the heart of anthroposophy is not about believing this or that, or even doing this or that. There are many people who are true anthroposophists at heart (but would never call themselves such) and many “anthroposophists” who have nothing of the anthroposophical spirit. As Shams of Tabriz says, “The more learned a person is, the more distant he is from the goal. No matter how advanced such a person’s thought becomes, still he remains far from the goal. This is the work of the heart, not the work of the head.”6
Living wisdom is a disposition of the heart, and one that is variously labeled, but it is a deportment of the imaginative soul to the recognition of the reality of the Other. As a hadith says, “The faithful are mirrors for the faithful.” And as it is written, the light has shone in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it. Like perceives like. If we each act however we wish, following our own bliss with no regard for others, that endlessly scalable misery. If we each really loved our neighbor as our true self, and lived that way, it would be infinitely scalable goodness where no one is left behind.
The old mode of initiation was to feel ourselves as individual “points” isolated from others. But the next task is shifting our “center of gravity” outside ourselves, into the space between each other. The enlightenment of the arhat is temporary – and illusory. There is an enormous karmic consequence to dissolving one’s personal karma and choosing to try to abandon humanity to its own devices. True enlightenment will only ever be together with others, which is why the bodhisattva swears to return “until the last blade of grass is redeemed.”
In the second week of the Advent season, it is time to perceive and work on the light of the etheric life. The light that moves in the plants, the light that animates Earthly existence.
In cultivating ongoing conversation with the realm of the spiritual world we offer new opportunities in this earthly development. The great plant breeders of old knew this and worked with the world of the stars to co-create new plant varieties. Consider Luther Burbank, to whom Yogananda dedicated his Autobiography of a Yogi: “to an American saint” who was able to create the potato most of us still eat today, as well as to convince a cactus to stop producing spines – not by selective breeding but by intimate conversation with the plant. Now is the time to reflect on this year’s successes and failures, and to sift the mud of experience for whatever eternal flecks of gold they may contain.
With the turning of the Season, winters approach, and the end of one growing year, shifting towards the new year ahead, now is the time for inward reflection on what we would like our futures to become. What do I want to grow? How will it look?
How can I best plan my Garden? What pest pressures did we experience last year, and how can we harmoniously prepare for more balance this season. What are the soil issues you experience? What would you like to have as an outcome for your future gardens? If we remember Pfeiffer’s words, “as human beings, we are the strongest natural force that guides and directs the beginning, middle, and end of the natural growth process; our capacity is the final, decisive factor.”
Powers of manifestation, with untold potential capacities are dormant within us until awakened and used.
The advent season is time to thank the light that permeates the plant world, and makes growth and life possible.
Go Biodynamic
For Life!
Steiner, Rudolf, introduction to Theosophy
Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons I, Number 9, (GA266, Berlin, 5-6-1906)
R. Steiner, Bees, Lecture I (GA351, 3 February 1923, Dornach)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course (GA327,13 June, 1924 Koberwitz)
Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s Sun, pg 14.
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Yes! I found this collaborative expression quite moving. Thank you for the heartfelt sharing.
A beautiful inspirational article, read here on a sunny summer Advent morning in New Zealand. Thank you🙏