25 May Interview with Paul Hodgkins with Geraldine Snowden and Robert McKay December 2019 Part 2
Continued from April edition:
PH: I had a funny meeting with the founding teacher in Ottawa. Philip was his name. He was an older man, a melancholic. Paul introduced me to him and explained to him I was wondering which class my son should go into because his birthday was on the borderline. Philip said that it doesn’t depend on the birthday but depends on the conception date. Those conceived before Christmas are in a group that have a relationship with Christ and those conceived after Christmas are in another group that has a different relationship with Christ. I later did a survey in the school of children with borderline birthdays and it was amazing how it confirmed what Philip said. But can you imagine someone now speaking like this to a prospective parent? Philip seemed to have no social awareness about making such a statement. He just told you straight out what he believed. Of course, I thought, “He’s for me! This is a guy who is going to tell it like it is!”
So, we put our son in the school and Philip asked me to take a classroom because a teacher was sick. He was running an on-going training program for the teachers so I participated in that and the following year did what was a called an in-service training. The year after that I was offered the Grade 1 class. That was the only class that I took through eight year. So I became a teacher at the school and he became my mentor. When I asked him a question he would often say, “What would be the point of my telling you that? Go and find out for yourself. Go and strive for the answer for it is the striving that teaches not the answers.” One time he asked me how’s it going and I told him I was having some classroom management issues. He asked me, “Well how prepared are you?” It was a rhetorical question. He knew I wasn’t well prepared.
Then, 24 years ago, we moved to Richmond Hill and I taught part-time at the Toronto Waldorf School, then at the Halton Waldorf School and after that I was a supply teacher back at the Toronto Waldorf School. I think they would have liked me to take on a full-time position but Arlene Thorn was pressing on me more and more to teach some adult courses. We were struggling financially to keep our children in the school and Arlene said I will make it possible for you to earn enough to pay the school fees if you will give up your working with the school.
At some point while I was getting into primarily teaching adults, I was in a study group and we were studying the Philosophy of Freedom. I got a call from Timothy Cox who was working for the Steiner Centre at the time, asking if I would give a course on the Philosophy of Freedom. I don’t know how he knew our group was studying that book. Just the day before he called, I had decided on the one hand I was not free and on the other hand I was filled to overflowing with useless knowledge. I had put aside all my other belief systems – Plato, science, Catholicism, Buddhism – I had replaced all these with a huge anthroposophical belief system but I was still not really free in my thinking. In a sense, I had my leg over the balcony. When Timothy asked if I would provide three mornings on the Philosophy of Freedom I immediately said yes! I don’t know what I was thinking! I put the phone down and thought, “What have I done?” So then I had to study the book intensely. Through this work, I had an awakening. I became aware of myself as a spiritual being. To cut a long story short, I gave the course and became famous over night. Who would be so stupid to give a course on the Philosophy of Freedom. It was the book no one understood. So that was it.
Paul at the blackboard teaching Foundations Studies at the Rudolf Steiner Centre Toronto (Photo: Richard Chomko)
Then I began teaching adults more and more. Wendy Brown who had just started Foundation Studies at the Steiner Centre, asked me if I would come in one morning and talk about the Philosophy of Freedom. So I did that. In the following year she asked me to join the steering committee for the Foundations Studies Program at the Steiner Centre. The committee met every week to form the course. I became a key figure in it over time. This would have been about 15 years ago.
I have done very little other study since then. I had a need to experience something that was spiritually real. Ideas had now become real for me and I experienced thinking as the essential spiritual activity. Goethe was the first modern phenomenologist. Goethe observed with an open mind. He didn’t come to any conclusions. When you observe with an open mind, you invite meaning to come from the spiritual and connect itself with what you are observing in the material. That is how Goethe discovered the archetypal plant. Unless you keep it open, your own thinking can get in the way of this kind of invitation – show yourself to me – but the showing doesn’t come from the physical plant over there but from the spiritual realm. Steiner’s book, The Philosophy of Freedom, is also a phenomenology but the phenomenon being observed is thinking itself. It is the phenomenon of all phenomena! That has been my practice.
RM: Can you say a little bit about the role of feeling in this sort of observation?
PH: Our feeling life is very much there but subtly hidden behind our thinking in the form of our feeling for truth. When we strive to observe like this, we are relying in fact on our feeling for truth. Our feeling can confirm the truth of what is coming to us from the spiritual world.
People often want to link intuition with feeling and they are actually right to do so. When you have this intuitive knowing it resonates in a sense of certainty in your feeling. It is not just an intellectual certainty. Insights achieved in this way, give rise to the feeling of certainty that you are experiencing the truth. Of course, you have to be careful. Some people just want a feel-good experience. A lot of people seeking the spirit just want to have a feel-good experience. That is a trap. That just tells you about your own sympathies and antipathies. This all takes practice.
Really, to work with Goethean observation you have to come to it again and again and again. For example, take the example of observing some challenge in your life. Out of this observation may first come a thought, a moral intuition but only when you come to it again and again and again can it become warm. The warmth comes from the heart which is the regulator of our warmth form, our warmth system. This repeated work pulls the moral intuition, which is a thought, gradually into the heart’s sphere. That is really what heart thinking is. When a moral intuition is pulled into the heart warmth, when it is permeated with warmth, it can become a motivator. It then affects your feelings and will very strongly in a moralistic way then and enables moral action. You can then try to execute a moral deed. Even then, it is not always right. You may realize that you have somehow got it wrong and need to go back and cycle through again. So it is a three step process, in the Philosophy of Freedom it is moral intuition, moral imagination and moral action. In Knowledge of the Higher World and Its Attainment, it is imagination, inspiration and intuition. So the middle one is the inspiring one. It is the heart forces that inspire you.
In my work, teaching adults, I am not looking at the same phenomena that Goethe was looking at, for instance. I have tried to bring this way of observing to my teaching by morally sensing the needs of the group in front of me. This has led me to work on myself as well. I have found that the cause of all ills is immorality and the healing of all ills is morality. As I am close to my death now, I can see that I have been far from moral in my life. Very far. I mean I am not morally a monster like Stalin or someone of that ilk, but in many smaller ways…well, I have a long way to go to become truly moral. And moreover, I can’t do it by myself.
In Foundation Studies, I have often said what was once experienced as the spiritual is now experiencing itself in the human being. So it is not humans becoming spiritual, it is the spiritual become human. Where am I going with this…oh, yes…so the organizing principle behind what we experienced – all of those spiritual experiences, all of those spiritual beings that once showed themselves to us once upon a time – the organizing principle behind all of those is the Christ. The spiritual has to experience itself in the human being, for the human being to properly become human. One can say, in a way, “I” cannot become moral. Not by oneself. Only, as Paul says, not “I” but Christ in me. But there is no way to invite Christ in except by striving. It is a two way street.
St. Paul says I know what I should do but I don’t do it. I know what is good but I am not good. Then he says not I but Christ in me. That doesn’t mean you raise your consciousness to a Christ-like level. Some people want the Christ Being to be a human man with a higher consciousness. It is not that. In Christ a divine consciousness came into a human. In a way, this is something we can be given if we are moral enough to take it on. Then it can show itself individually. This is all very complicated for me—for my tiny mind!
If you take Goethe’s plant—the archetypal plant—it is only one but it shows itself to you in many ways. It shows itself in any plant form you could think of. And so it is with the Christ Being as the logos of humanity. It can show itself in the human being, in any number of individuals. This has only just started. It is the beginning of an eventual outcome where we will all show this Christ logos, each in an individual way.
I am totally okay with dying. As I hinted at earlier, I am not so okay with being dead. I will have to meet myself and my immorality clearly in the face, along with my lack of awakeness. In the spiritual world after death, you eventually meet spiritual beings who think in you. You see your life from their point of you. The more awake you can be in that process the better. I don’t think I am going to be very awake there. I have experienced quite a bit of self-loathing recently—not in a morbid way; I am not morbid about it all. I am willing to take on my karma. I am willing to try to make up for what I have done wrong and I am willing to bear that to the best of my ability, even if it is painful. But I know from experience that I am not always going to do that. I can look back on my life and I can see where I have opted out of the right thing to do. Every case of immorality is an attempt to avoid consciousness of the spiritual. There has been a lot of petty immorality in my life – petty, little selfish thoughts and actions. Lying and stuff like that. Most of us do these things. When I sit and think of them, I see they add up and add up. There has been an entire lifetime of them.
I have taken a little bit of anthroposophy and made myself good at it but I know I will be coming back. And I think we will come back together. You know, when I was sick in Vietnam, I think Steiner came to me! He just approached me and I had the impression that he has unconditional love for all of us—for the least of us in his care, or perhaps it is better to say, on his path—and that is because standing behind him was this huge figure of unconditional love.
I think he is building a following—I don’t want to say army—he is building a following to come back to earth to fight a battle in a way. There is going to be a strong materialistic impulse that is going to have to be met. I think all of us are going to have to come back to be a part of that and it won’t be easy. I am sure we will all come back.
Robert, you’ve talked and have spoken about this. You have mentioned you see the meditative path as a kind of team work.
RM: Yes, that idea came clear to me after seeing the Mystery Dramas down in Ann Arbor. We are working together in ways we are not even conscious of. Someone, who in one incarnation you are butting heads with or having some real difficulty with, is the very person who in the next incarnation makes it possible for you to accomplish some pivotal task. Our destinies are deeply intertwined. So every step we can take, as you say, to face up to our immorality, every step we can take to improve, we are not just helping ourselves, we are helping the team.
PH: I got that too from the first Mystery Drama. I love how in the last scene of the first drama, they all come together and say what contribution they are going to make but then you know they are going to come back to earth and in some case be butting heads again. But yes, to realize how the person I am struggling with is also connected to making my destiny possible is a good approach…to see that we are a team…
RM: An honour to be on the team with you sir!
GS: Before we finish up, I want to say that having you as a teacher in the Foundations Program was so important to me. It really led me to love Steiner. Reading Steiner is so amazing. It’s subtle but I can see as I keep reading, it is making changes in the way I think and feel. I have you to thank for making that possible for me.
PH: Thank you for saying that.
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