Youth Conference at Heartbeet Lifesharing
By Tiemen Woutersen (with major contributions to this report from the speakers).

On October 9-10, 2004 we met at Heartbeet Lifesharing, in Hardwick, Vermont.
Heartbeet is a 160-acre biodynamic farm that provides respite and a permanent residence for developmentally disabled individuals. Hannah Schwartz and Jonathan Gilbert manage this farm. This was the 5thconference that has been organized by this group, which plans bi-annual conferences. Although these gatherings focus on youth, there is no limit set for participation. Anyone who feels drawn to the content of the conference may take part in the weekend.
This time the theme of the conference was An Introduction to Rudolf Steiner’s Spiritual Scientific Research into the Nature of Christianity. Recommended reading was the lecture cycle by Rudolf Steiner on the Gospel of Luke. Four lectures were offered.
Steve Usher gave the first lecture of the conference and presented an overview of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Gospel of Luke. He began with the observation that it is difficult to speak of Christianity in our time because civilization has developed enormous prejudices toward it. The materialistic scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries propounds ideas such as, “there never was an historical Jesus,” or alternatively there was such a “simple man of Nazareth” who has managed, by some amazing sociological formula, to capture people’s fantasy for two thousand years. More recent prejudices run the spectrum from, “Christianity is the religion of closed minded right-wing people” to “Christianity is the tradition that created a disregard for the environment and a will to dominate the world.” It is much easier to speak to a spiritually minded audience about Buddhism than about Christianity.
After a request to put prejudice aside and imagine we were about to hear something completely new, the following thought was presented: a central concept to grasp esoteric Christianity, is that, a solar being, a being from the Sun known as the Christ, united Himself with the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in Jordan. For the next three years, this Solar being lived upon the earth as a man. Those three years are rightly understood as His embryological period. At the Mystery of Golgotha, when Jesus Christ died on the cross, the Christ was born into the earth and since then He has been the Spirit of the Earth Who will remain with men for the rest of earth evolution.
The history of these events consists, on the one hand, of the preparation of Jesus to be a worthy vessel for the Sun Christ and, on the other, of the life of the God-man, Jesus Christ, Who for the three years walked the earth, and Who continues to work as the Spirit of the Earth.
The Gospel of Luke, if investigated by means of spiritual science, reveals deep and moving pictures of both aspects of this history. The lecture considered many details including the roles in the unfolding events of the Gautama Buddha, Zarathustra, the founder of the ancient Persian religion, and the Adam Kadmon soul. It also considered a central aspect of Christianity, namely, that Christ brought the power of love to the ego such that the ego could overflow with love. Love existed before but only at the level of the astral body and soul. Christ made it possible for love to become a possession of the ego and this has the greatest implications for the future.
Els Woutersen then spoke about “Christ and Inner Development”. The Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John were written out of different levels of perception into the supersensible world. Whereas the “eyewitnesses and ministers, or servants, of the Word” wrote the Luke Gospel, the Gospel of John describes the mysteries of Christ as imbued with the Inner Word or Logos.
The old Christian path of initiation was based on the Gospel of John. On this path there would be an intense preparation that would lead to the development of certain feelings to a very high degree and to an experience of the seven different stages of Christian initiation. The events that are described in the Gospel of John then became an inner experience of the soul. This path is now only accessible to those who have developed their feeling life to a high degree.
The Rosicrucian path of schooling is a further development of the Christian path of schooling appropriate for this time. We are able to perform our outer duties and activities and let everything that we develop spiritually flow into the physical plane. By developing a strong and living thinking to a high degree along this path, we can use our thinking when we have perceptions in the spiritual world. Because one does not see luciferic or ahrimanic beings in the sensory world, one is not led astray by them and can develop a healthy strong thinking without being distracted or confused.
When we are prepared to enter the spiritual world we will meet two guardians. The Lesser Guardian of the Threshold is mostly made up of the results of our own past actions, feelings and thoughts. After we have recognized in this being the things from which we need to free ourselves, we meet the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. The Greater Guardian of the Threshold will become the ideal toward which we strive. If we can inwardly feel that the Greater Guardian is the ideal toward which we strive, then we recognize that the Greater Guardian is the Christ. The Christ is the great ideal of humanity on earth and we can only unite with Him when we have offered up our own gifts and talents so that all humanity has reached the same goal.
Sherry Wildfeuer gave a talk entitled, “How Can I Find the Christ in and for Myself?” She began by acknowledging that the rejection of Christianity so common to spiritually striving young people today is a healthy reaction to the popular versions distorted by sentimentality, dogmatic morality, or academic materialism. She shared her own youthful path to agnosticism, which was intellectually liberating, but lacked substance that could provide nourishment and insight in the face of life’s trials. For her, it was a great relief to meet Anthroposophy, insofar as Rudolf Steiner lays a foundation in his philosophical writings by addressing the question: How can I know anything for sure? He describes how human knowledge is the consonance of experience that comes from two directions: perception and thinking. Two questions we each may ask ourselves are: 1) What are the perceptions to which I must apply my active thinking in order to know the truth of Christ for sure? 2) What thoughts will enable me to perceive Christ in myself? She described the process of initiation in the ancient Mystery Centers, which led the striving pupils to die to the temporal aspects of life and be re-born through the transformative experience of the imagination of the eternal aspect of being. They taught that the Father God had sacrificed Himself into the things of the manifest world; that the Mother dwells in the deep longing of the soul to unite with the divine; and that the Son of God, or Logos, can be born in the human soul through this union. Indeed, this birth is our calling as human beings. In Jesus, the Logos entered not merely as image but as the actual Power of Love, making this available for all human beings and for the life of nature.
Sherry spoke of Christ as the Lord of Karma, Who accompanies us as we die through the painful process of disillusionment and gradually develop, through our inner effort, those capacities of soul and spirit, which have their root in the eternal. She shared some personal and archetypal experiences from her own journey, culminating with the Imagination of the Woman Clothed with the Sun. And she showed that we can each find in our own soul the woman travailing in birth, the child that will shepherd with a rod of iron, the dragon that would devour the child as soon as it would be born, and Michael, who would defend the child. Sherry ended her talk by recognizing the Michaelic deed of Rudolf Steiner, who, through his spiritual scientific investigation, has offered us truthful thoughts about the life and history of the being of Christ.
Beth Usher then talked about “Occult Physiology: Blood and the Awakening Ego”. The evolution of the blood begins with the warmth of Ancient Saturn. Saturn still exists within us today as the warmth of our blood. Blood first became warm during the Lemurian period of Earth evolution. The circulation of the blood appeared when the warmth ether united with the outer warmth of the physical Earth. The Ego, which first entered man when he began to breathe air, works in the circulating blood by way of the warmth organism.
In the new book, Das Herz des Menschen, Dr. H.C. Kummell differentiates the ego’s activity in relation to warmth and uprightness. As warmth leads to the inner experience of the self and its inner identity, so uprightness leads the self in relation to the outer world.
Blood was originally to have become matter “just to the extent of being materially perceptible.” As it shot back to the spiritual, a flashing up of light would have given the human being his only sense perception: the perception of the ego. This experience would have given us a highly refined social sense, because the ego was to have been the sevenfold Jahve, the countenance of Christ, rather than our single individual ego, standing alone as we know it today. The Fall from Paradise changed this. As the human being fell, he left behind the life of his nervous system in the cosmos. The Christ brought this life from the cosmos back to the human being beginning at the Baptism. Life returned, though not to the nerve, but to the blood.
Embryology shows that on the nineteenth day the blood begins to move. This is the first quickening of the incarnating ego. The heart forms from the moving of the blood. Rudolf Steiner has said “it is outrageous to speak of a heart pump.” If the blood moves before the heart, what is the heart for? We can turn to Rudolf Steiner’s picture of the etherization of the blood for this. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer speaks of this etherized substance, this new substance that streams out of the human heart, as that out of which a new cosmos will be created.
Rudolf Steiner speaks of blood as the real issue in the fight for an individual’s soul between good and evil. Thinking the wrong thoughts about the heart materializes culture, even materializes the heart. Moral ideals stimulate the warmth organism, producing in the air organism sources of light. By way of warmth, all this becomes active which we then inwardly experience as the moral. By returning through the moral to warmth, we come full circle to the blood warmth from Saturn. This is a new way to think of the circulation of the blood.
Beth Usher also gave beautiful eurythmy performances of “The Zend Avesta-Hymn to the Sun” and “The Michael Imagination.” She also offered two eurythmy lessons.
There were 47 participants from as far as California, North Carolina and Canada as well as from the mid-Atlantic and New England areas. The foliage around us was beautiful with deep red, orange, and yellow leaves; the food that was prepared with organic produce from Heartbeet was delicious.
Conferences that are truly uplifting are quite rare. What really helped here was that many participants had lived with the content for several months; the lecturers were very knowledgeable, the organization by Rachel and Hannah Schwartz was very good; and the workers at Heartbeet created a special, moral mood. Together, this formed the basis for penetrating the Luke Gospel, the mystery of the blood, as well as the path of inner schooling.
The next conference at Heartbeet Lifesharing will be May 28-29, 2005. For more information contact Rachel Schwartz. For more information on Heartbeet Lifesharing.

Reports: Heartbeet • Youth Conference • Eurythmy