The Foundation Stone Meditation: From Personal Healing to Effective Collaboration.       By Robert McKay

16 Jun The Foundation Stone Meditation: From Personal Healing to Effective Collaboration.       By Robert McKay

[Adapted from my brief talk given on Friday, May 15, 2020 at the Anthroposophical Society in Canada Annual General Meeting and Conference.]

Robert McKay

Like many of you, I am on a voyage of discovery with the Foundation Stone Meditation and I don’t know where this voyage is taking me. I am certainly not qualified to explain this meditation in all its magnificence. I can offer to you some photos I have taken along the way so far. I have been asked to speak for only 15 minutes so I will not be able to go into this too deeply. Hopefully these snapshots will spark a useful discussion.

I want to start with the question: “What is a mantric meditation?” I think it is important to note that a mantric verse is not poem. It is not created in the way a person composes a poem. The creation of a true mantric verse begins in an encounter between an initiate and a spiritual being or beings. It has its origins in fiery experience on the other side of the threshold. The initiate must then bring the essence of this spiritual experience back into object consciousness and then render it into words.

What then does the meditant have when receiving such a creation from the initiate? You can think of it in various ways. It is helpful to think of it as a musical score that the meditant needs to learn how to play, within herself. Like with any piece of music, this requires practice. With a meditation like the Foundation Stone, you need to memorize it and then work to bring it alive in yourself over and over again. All this takes effort. But eventually, you get past the mechanics to the point where you can shift your focus to the music you are creating. It can also help to think of it as a bridge back to the very source in the spiritual world where the meditation came from.

As you play the piece in your soul, you gradually create an offering to the spiritual world that forms a bridge or portal. When this offering is rich enough, when one has put sufficient work into it, you will begin to feel the power of a spiritual being flowing back to you across this bridge. At this point the meditation becomes alive for you and your journey with it truly begins. The more energy and consistency you can bring to this, the more interesting the voyage.

The analogy can be extended (based on a thought from Grant Davis): through the meditation you meet the composer of the very melody you are learning to play. As this spiritual being, in whose power the mantric verse has its source, takes up the conductor’s baton, you begin to follow in your playing, and from then on you never really know where you are going, or what will happen next.

So finally, you can think of a mantric verse as a key that opens an occult door, enabling you to receive blessings from the spiritual world. Such a key is a magical object that gains its power through your efforts to work with it in reverence. This is a good place to begin in thinking about the Foundation Stone Meditation. It is right and good to approach this magical key – this great gift to Society members – in a mood of reverence.

Let’s begin with some simple observations of the structure of the great mantra. It has four sections, or panels as they are sometimes called. The first three have to do with the great soul forces – willing, feeling and thinking. The fourth points to the turning point of time: to the pivot from the Great Fall to the beginning of humanity’s ascent back home, back into the spiritual world.

The first three panels have a common structure. They each begin with a 12 line first stanza. These first stanzas all share a common form and address a soul force in us, first at the level of the microcosm, and then transitioning to the spiritual through the connection between our “I am” and the Divine “I am”. Each panel then has a second stanza that is 7 lines long. In these second stanzas, the same soul force is viewed but from the perspective of the macrocosm. It is as if we move through our “I am” into the Divine “I am” and can now see the origins and true meaning of the soul force in question. The underlying reality of willing, feeling and thinking is revealed to us from lofty spiritual heights. This is followed by 2 lines that express an appeal or entreaty which is repeated identically for all three panels. All of this – the morphology of the mantric verse; its shape, if you will, is of great significance when working with the meditation.

Let’s look at how this works with a focus on the second panel, which addresses the soul force of feeling. We’ll take it line by line.

The first three panels all begin with the same clarion call: “Soul of Man!” or “Human Soul!” if you prefer. This call can assume a potent force when you work with it inwardly. It can strike one as something like a wake up call, like the morning trumpet blast to rouse the soldiers – “the reveille”. As an aside, it is interesting to ask: “Who is speaking to us in this way? Who addresses our soul? Who has the right to call us into awareness in this way?”

After this call, each panel addresses a particular soul force, first linking it to its expression in the corresponding bodily systems, in the case of the second panel we hear:

      Soul of Man!

      You live in the beat of heart and lung

You will note that with reference to our soul, the word “live” and the reference to the physical organs of heart and lung, we have the astral, etheric and physical sheaths represented.

The next two lines express an essential aspect of the nature of the soul force in question, in this case of our feeling life. Let’s hear these first four lines together:

      Soul of Man!

      You live in the beat of heart and lung

      which leads you through the rhythm of time

      into the feeling of your own soul-being.

I want to point out two things here.  First, note the linkage between the life of feeling and the passage of time. The first panel relating to the will refers to space: we need a world, a stage on which to act. The third panel relating to thinking refers to eternity, to the source of all thought in the eternal spirit realm. This second panel relating to feeling refers to the rhythm of time, which we experience most vividly in the passing moment. Our feelings are lived through in time. It reminds me of a few lines from one of Rilke’s poems:

Let everything happen to you:

      beauty and terror.

      Just keep going.

      No feeling is final.

The second thing to note is the intimacy in the words “into the feeling of your own soul-being”. Here we have the most individualized moment of the entire mantric verse. Here you find yourself most alone in a certain sense; for you are in your own unique flow of feeling as it arises within you.

Then – and again this is true of all three panels – comes what you might think of as a medicinal or prescriptive exercise and its potential healing result. With regard to the second panel, it is as if to say, “Yes you have a feeling life but to heal it, to bring it into alignment with the spirit, there is something you must do! If your feeling life is going to help your ‘I am’ become what it can become, there is a certain kind of work you must undertake in this feeling life. This work is required if you are to be found worthy to enter the spiritual world.” Let’s hear these next 8 lines altogether:

Practise spirit-contemplating

      in balance of soul

      where in the surging deeds

      of cosmic evolution

      your own I unite

      unto the I of the world

      And you will truly feel

      In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Here is set for us the great challenge of mastery of the feeling life! The challenge has two dimensions as I see it. First, to find balance in the surging – to find an emotional steadiness in which you can be with things without being capsized. Emotional steadiness is not emotional deadness. Calm is different than a lack of feeling. From a state of calm we can move, as guided by the spirit, to any other feeling and then return to calm. Emotional balance makes it possible to contemplate the spirit. In such contemplation we are certainly lifted into to the most intense feelings – sublime joy, bitter pain, intense fear, deepest longing – for as long as the spirit moves us. But this must not overwhelm us; we must have the strength to return to a balance of soul.

It is worth noting that here we have to do with an activity in the passing moment; in the present. In the first panel to do with the will, the exercise has to do with remembering or recalling. In the third panel to do with thinking, the exercise has to do with visioning, which can have a future orientation or perhaps a sense of the eternal. Here, in the second panel, we are learning to “be with” or even “be within” the spirit in the present.

Achieving balance amidst the surging is, however, only setting the stage for how feeling plays its role in the unfolding of our “I am”. Spirit-contemplating in this rich sense enables us to “unite our I with the I of the world”. In this way, we grow beyond ourselves. Increasingly our feelings become less about ourselves. We are more aware of the needs of the other; we come to feel ourselves as a link in the whole of life. A psychotherapist colleague of mine once remarked that as people develop they become both more unique and more the same. I understood what he meant about the uniqueness but not about the sameness. He explained that as people develop the power of love grows in their souls and love makes us all more the same. When we have love in our hearts we are more likely to understand each other better and are more likely to treat each other in similar and kind ways. I think this is right. The more our “I am” unites with the “I of the world”, the more we harmonize. It is not a loss of uniqueness but a bringing of uniqueness into harmony. Think of an orchestra, where each player must practice alone for many hours, but then come together in harmony through the composer’s idea and the conductor’s leadership.

Let’s turn now to the second stanza of the second panel which can be read as follows:

      For the Christ will in the encircling rounds holds sway

      In cosmic rhythms bestowing grace upon souls:

      Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai

      Let from the east be fired,

      What through the west is forming,

      Speaking:

      In Christo morimur.

We have moved from the microcosm, through connecting our “I” with the “I of the world”, into the macrocosm. I will add only a few comments about this second stanza. Most of our karma arises out of evil in our feeling life. If our feelings were only good, we might still create karma through errors in thought or action, but who can deny that egotism finds its wellspring in our feelings? It is thoughts and actions that arise out of our egoistic feelings that create most of our problems. So, in this panel about the force of feeling, we find the Lord of Karma and all the planetary motions in which we live both while on earth and in our life between lives. This is the great machinery of our communal passion play. In one of the Class mantras, we find the statement, “By the power of a God are we led here and death stands at this journey’s end”. We are held by iron necessity in our karma. But in this iron necessity, we are being cared for, even though we cannot always see or experience caring through our suffering. Working through the karma meditations, we can come to feel how we are being blessed even in life’s most difficult moments. Suffering, illness, death and all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” manifest the gods’ determination not to lose us; not to forsake us to the darkness.  If we listen carefully, to our karma, we can finally hear a loving voice speaking softly to us: “Try again little one, try again.”

I do not have much insight yet into the meaning of “Let from the east be fired, what through the west is forming.” What is being formed? What east and west is meant here? For now in meditation, I hold the idea in consciousness soul that with our work on our astral, on our soul forces – through the ennoblement of willing, feeling and thinking – we contribute to the co-creation of our Spirit Self, leading eventually to our birth into the spiritual world. Spirit Self is forming. And I think that all of humanity, the east and the west, are engaged in this work. Perhaps in the discussion afterward someone else can shed more light on the meaning of these lines.

Lastly, for all of the first three panels, come the final two lines, the petition:

      This the elemental beings hear in east, west, north and south

      May human beings hear it!

In meditation, these two lines also resound forcefully. We are immersed in the elemental kingdom; it borders us on all sides. The beings of that world are waiting for us to wake up. Expectant, hopeful, earnest – only our awakening can help these beings rightfully fulfill the purpose of their existence. And again, I would ask whose voice is it that offers this hopeful pray, so full of longing?

            May human beings hear it!

Does it come from the same source that called us to alertness at the being of each panel? I can imagine that all of us can join in this prayer. All of us can hope that human beings will awaken to what we truly are and find ourselves finally worthy to face the Guardian and cross the threshold into spirit fields of light.

This great meditation is meant for us, for the members of the Anthroposophical Society. Through working with it, we can empower ourselves to move from being a group of individuals who, out of the most complex karmic pasts, often have complaints or dissatisfactions with each other, to become a group of people in whom the power of wisdom, love and sacrifice grows effective – transforming our disjointed efforts into a creative symphony of achievement for all of humanity.

As challenging as it is to face up to it, we anthroposophists are meant to become those referred to in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘by their fruits you will know them’. No one can deny that our great teacher Dr. Rudolf Steiner was fruitful! We are called on to become creative and effective as well. We are called upon to be people of initiative! The Foundation Stone Meditation offers us the power to become fruitful first by helping each of us to heal our willing, our feeling and our thinking forces. The meditation then goes on in the surprising and deeply moving fourth panel, to show us how to bring our healed souls into collaborative work as a Michaelic community so that, in the great words of the verse:

            Good may become

            What from our hearts we would found

            And our heads direct

            With focused will.

Let me wrap up by reading a part of what our great teacher said at the closing of the 1923/24 Christmas Conference:

My dear friends, yesterday was the anniversary of the day on which we saw the tongues of flame devouring our old Goetheanum. Today we may hope — since a year ago we did not allow even the flames to distract us from continuing with our work — today we may hope that when the physical Goetheanum stands here once more we shall have worked in such a way that the physical Goetheanum is only the external symbol for our spiritual Goetheanum which we want to take with us as an idea as we now go out into the world.

We have here laid the Foundation Stone. On this Foundation Stone shall be erected the building whose individual stones will be the work achieved in all our groups by the individuals outside in the wide world. Let us now look in spirit at this work and become conscious of the responsibility about which I have spoken today, of our responsibility towards the human being who stands before the Guardian of the Threshold and has to be refused entry into the spiritual world.

Certainly it should never occur to us to feel anything but the deepest pain and the deepest sorrow about what happened to us a year ago. But let us not forget that everything in the world that has any stature has been born out of pain. So let us transform our pain so that out of it may arise a strong and shining Anthroposophical Society by dint, my dear friends, of your work.