My initial experience with reading the social media posts from the group sites was interesting, but I felt more estranged from authenticate connection with other anthroposophists than before entering and participating in the group.  I found this odd and inexplicable.  Then while researching online education, as a part of my profession, I found out that online communication is an oxymoron. 

    Courts don’t consider texts or emails as “confirmed communication”.  Online communication was seldom found to happen unless speech and streaming video were included.  Typing words online to people with whom you do not have an actual relationship does not mean you have communicated.  In fact, the opposite was found to be true. 

     

    The more students tried to “communicate” with online mentors, the more they got frustrated.  After years of trying to use online, computer adapted, high tech interfaces for adjudicated youth across American detention facilities – online education for adjudicated youth was abandoned because it didn’t work.  It often worked in the opposite direction and students became alienated, agitated, moody, hostile, distant, and started to regress in their rehabilitation.  In other words, online attempts at communication produced negative behaviors and mental and psychological pathologies. 

    At this point, for most juvenile and adult prisons, and most recently in public schools, – the social media interface is banned. Too many problems arose even in online education, so we (a national group of educators) suggested going back to “true human interaction” and away from “the supposed efficacy of online and computer assisted systems to support education or rehabilitation.” Another misnomer is that “slow” students benefited by online access to high tech educational support.  It was the opposite, both the high scoring and low scoring students had great difficulty with “non-human” systems for different reasons. What was seemingly universal was that online “communication” triggered asocial behaviors and more aggressive behavior. 

     Our group then studied the known “technological pathologies” that were being noted in these facilities across America.  Test groups were given online access to “screened” sites for educational purposes.  Again, severe antisocial and asocial behaviors seemed to be directly related to length of time on the system.  We were prison school superintendents, and frankly we didn’t care what the supposed “research” by vested interests had to say.  We were developing case studies and interactive research to try to help these students in any way we could because to date no one had been successful in educating these children.

 

My Experience on Facebook

     What I have experienced in the last few weeks on “anthroposophical Facebook groups” reinforces what our studies in schools showed us.  Social media promotes bipolar behavior, incites anger to people that the user does not even know (unresolvable anger since they are only a “virtual person”), and regresses social behaviors leading to isolation, depression, the need to strike out irrationally, negative ego reinforcement, frustration, confusion, and depression.  Then, due to seeming bipolar behavior responses – the cycle begins again unendingly. 

     These “illnesses” born through frustrated attempts at online communication seem to exist quite actively in groups with the name “anthroposophy” in the title.  I believe the titles are often the very opposite of what they indicate – they are anti-anthroposophical and allow and encourage anti-Steiner remarks and anthropop-bashing as natural outcroppings of an Ahrimanic system that can only produce grey spider thoughts, not true living Imaginations filled with wisdom and warmth. 

    Adriana is the best at actually bringing a fresh spirit of personal integrity, truth and love into her statements online – which are very clearly offered in the spirit of Christ, Steiner and his teachings.  She doesn’t have to be the bipolar “defender of the faith” or a “pope” of her own church, or a “saint of anthropsophy,” just a true human being struggling with her experience of spirit and its relationship to Steiner and all other teachings that she knows. 

   For instance, on one of her recent posts, she commented from her own experience. The post did not demand authentication, citations, research or prior authority, supposed spiritual signs, the stamp of orthodoxy, the claim of superior incarnations, the claim to be Steiner, or a demand for Dornach Hill and the evil Vorstand to resign and give her the keys to the Goetheanum. She presented a concept of five vowels, which I take as coming from her own spiritual research since I haven’t seen before in Steiner.  I tested it against my heart’s truth along with my knowledge of Steiner’s teachings and other veritable spiritual teachings.  Then I sat silently and contemplated with openness.  For me, I thought, felt, and believed that she was right.  I thanked her and continued to let her words sound in my soul and spirit.  If they connect me to other good spirits that fire my will to deeds of love, then I know that it is truth for me, now.

     Each time you read or study anything, you should be discerning in identifying false prophets and antichrists.  When I see “evil”, I speak up.  This evil is evil to me – it is one of my own doubles.  Again, referring back to my professional experience as a school administrator, what we found with the children and I find with Facebook groups:  Everyone is talking to themselves and most do not know it. 

    I am calling out the evil in me when I see it in the world, otherwise, how would I know it was evil?  I was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, an exorcist.  I know evil quite well – inside me and outside in others and the world.  I worked with 10,000 adjudicated juveniles a year and have lived amongst evil.  I was never hurt, accosted, or disrespected by these children.  They could see that I don’t reject evil; I know it well and only want to help, to love, and to help myself and others evolve.  Only Christ can sort out the karma of an individual over time, so all judgments of a person’s character are temporary. 

    Steiner indicated that Blavatsky was “overlighted” by a master of wisdom when she wrote Isis Unveiled.   But soon thereafter he says, she was in “occult imprisonment” by an Eastern lodge that kept her from seeing Christ – the worst thing that can happen to a person. Facebook is a sort of occult imprisonment of Steiner’s words being given over carelessly to Ahriman.  Ahriman sucks the warmth out of your remarks online because you aren’t speaking to “people”, unless you already know them.

     You are speaking to words. 

     Words speaking to words. 

     Perhaps not even the meaning of those words are shared. 

     The subtle gestures that come with face and body language in real communication are silenced and words are no longer attached to the person’s spiritual presence. 

     Indeed, the very words I type to you now are just an arrangement of the alphabet and your life experience reflects into them, giving them meanings that I may or may not have intended.

    Every idea that does not become your ideal slays you.  Throughout these posts are many Steiner quotes without any personal warmth being added by a personal remark or life experience.  This can cause an intellectual isolationism that places you higher and higher in an ivory tower of your own correctness.