{"id":1932,"date":"2015-06-02T15:39:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-02T19:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.asc.wdtest.info\/en\/2015\/06\/02\/"},"modified":"2015-06-02T15:39:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T19:39:00","slug":"1932","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/1932\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Associated Germinal Moments from the May 2015 AGM in Toronto<\/span> <\/o:p><\/span><\/h2>\n
by Richard Chomko<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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As a member who hasn\u2019t been to many AGMs lately but used to go to them 20 years ago, I felt called to this last one partly because it was happening in my own backyard. However, as I still needed to attend to the Village Market Friday night and Saturday (where I am the manager), I joined the proceedings only at 4 pm Saturday.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Reflecting on the weekend, my first intimation of the conference was seeing strange anthroposophists (i.e. not from around here) wandering the halls of Hesperus. These arrivals from afar, this convergence, awoke in me a certain feeling. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Unlike the centrifugal, radiating process of death and dissolution, this coming together of so many from so far, in a centripetal gesture, brought a feeling of engendering, of coming into being, that augured well for the days to follow. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Jumping in at the Jump Gate<\/b><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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For me, the conference proper began with Bert Chase\u2019s time travel retrospective of mankind\u2019s journey, from the eons of spiritual antiquity to the post-modern day. All that and a discussion of the being of Christian Rosenkreutz and his relationship with Rudolf Steiner, over the past ages of human development. Although Bert\u2019s presentation echoed much that I knew already, I found it refreshing in its breadth and majesty.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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From the Head to the Heart<\/b><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Then followed Jonah Evans\u2019 talk about practical Christianity in social life. How do we regard and think about those with whom we disagree or are in conflict? Do we inwardly dismiss them and separate ourselves from them? Or can we be willing to stay with the pain of the conflict and strive to love the person in spite of our disagreement? <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Jonah has been the Christian Community priest here in Toronto now for nearly two years. As a regular participant in one of his study groups I find that he has a unique ability to bring these first principles of Christianity down to a personal level.  <\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Art-ography<\/b><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Further underlining the theme of \u201cmaking it personal\u201d was the series of artistic biography exercises, interspersed with the talks. These involved working in groups of three to identify difficult situations each of us had experienced in our relationship with others in the society and distilling those into descriptions, key words, and finally, \u201csentences\u201d. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Another part of this was a process of two people working together to draw a visual image inspired by what they saw in the soul gesture of the third person, as illuminated by the biographical experience he or she had chosen to explore. A selection of the resulting images accompany this report. And the prose and poetic distillations (the “sentences”) of some of the participants follow at the end. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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I can’t comment on the experience of the collaborative art since I was in the only group with two instead of three people. But I felt the willingness to deal with these relationship shadows was appropriate, bracing and lent a certain gravitas to the conference.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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At the conclusion of the process, Regine Kurek asked us to combine our selected key words into \u201ca sentence\u201d; I joked that, like in a court, the \u201csentencing\u201d comes at the end.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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You\u2019re With Me<\/b><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Saturday night\u2019s Eurythmy gave me a new appreciation of the colour-fringing effect of after-image colours which appeared to my gaze at the edges of the strongly coloured Eurythmists moving against a dark background. Somehow I\u2019d never noticed that before. And of course I also enjoyed the Eurythmy, as Eurythmy.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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I was glad to be able to add this observation about colour fringing to my (never before published) General Theory of Veil Eurythmy. According to this theory, one of the ways in which Eurythmy works is by by overloading what I\u2019ll call the world constructing engine of the mind, leading to a glitch in the matrix \u2014  <\/span>a partial, momentary, breakdown of maya, of the illusory world of appearances. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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It\u2019s like I\u2019m looking, I\u2019m watching, I\u2019m trying to follow all the movements, all the changes \u2014 the moving Eurythmists, the flowing veils, but I just can\u2019t keep with it all and it doesn\u2019t fall into any pattern that I can call up placeholders for from my mental library. There comes a moment in what I\u2019ll call \u201cgood Eurthymy\u201d when I become aware that the mental picture I construct of the world that\u2019s \u201cout there\u201d, is fraying a little at the edges. And the awareness of the fraying reminds me that the world I \u201csee\u201d is a mental construct. Am I the only one who experiences this? <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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The digital video analogy of this effect I\u2019m describing would be a too-low bit rate (not enough data space) resulting in \u201cmacro blocking\u201d, or the inability of the system to resolve detail in a scene in which a lot is changing and moving. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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The Sentencing<\/b><\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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So, in conclusion, here are some of the \u201csentences\u201d from the biography sessions:<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cYou are brave \u2014 let go of your constricting self \u2014 connect with energetic compassion and patience to your radiant self which is revealed in the world.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cIt is astonishing! To be intimately human is being one in and with the world.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cAwakening to insight through embracing coherence, leads to overarching understanding.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cEach heart\u2019s darkness and light brings freedom for love.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cBe brave in time to love one another.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cMay the other enliven and awaken me to perception and insight.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cBy openness we resolve karma where light in darkness meets all human in one world\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cI live in the stream of time<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
I live in the present<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Relating to another feeling<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Express yourself<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Is there judging<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Remembering self to behold the others<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
New light in my darkness\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cFriends in high places the key to interpersonal conflict with friends.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cLet the mood<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
breathe<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Release the intricate<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
journey to now.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Open now out,<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
way out.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
Behold the other.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Associated Germinal Moments from the May 2015 AGM in Toronto  by Richard Chomko As a member who hasn\u2019t been to many AGMs lately but used to go to them 20 years ago, I felt called to this last one partly because it was happening in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthroposophy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}