Lecture Series
ART AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE – AND WHY WE NEED THIS
What can art do for us? The Arts are well known as a form of pleasurable activity that encourages creativity and supports our health and wellbeing colour, music, plays, inspiring films and beautiful pictures. But practised in a structured, disciplined yet imaginative way, art, any of the Arts, can act as meditation does – as a schooling path of spiritual development. Art approached in this way can ‘configure’ our fourfold being with dynamic, breathing balance, strengthening and ordering our soul forces so that our ‘I’ stands ready to meet the increasingly uncertain challenges of our times.
Indeed, becoming artistic is an inner need of Anthroposophy. Without the artistic element, Steiner tells us, Anthroposophy cannot go into the future, for it will go ‘short of breath’.
This webinar also overviews the new Art as a Path of Schooling for the Soul training.
Where do new ideas come from? What does it mean to be truly creative?
Productive creativity, illustration and self-expression can all become bound by habitual ways of seeing and doing, limiting our capacity for new ideas to emerge. To be truly human means to be truly creative – creative in the generative sense. How do we find that potentiality within?
DATE TBA
Colour, space and evolving consciousness
Our perception of colour has evolved as our perceptive faculties have evolved. Our spiritual history can be studied in light of this understanding.
This webinar is part of a series for Waldorf teachers on the background to Waldorf pedagogy.
DATE TBA
Beyond Steiner – inner indications for our times and future
The threat of AI ‘creativity’ is perhaps the single greatest challenge to the Arts in our current age. We face the falsity of AI-generated images that lack ‘soul’ and increasingly immersive technologies that can conjure virtual realities that are like waking dreams, disconnecting people from the earthly world, and thus hindering humanity’s earthly mission to take hold and transform the material substance of the earth ourselves. These undermine our sense of what is human, what it means to be human, and what does not.
Lecture given on 18 November at Inner Impulses and the State of our Times Conference of the Sektion für Bildende Künste/Visual Arts Section, 17-19 November 2023.
18 NOVEMBER 2023
The Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses in art and in modern cultural life
We are familiar with the figures of Lucifer and Ahriman as portrayed in Rudolf Steiner’s the Representative of Humanity. There, both beings are held in balance by the Christ. Yet in daily life, it is the spectre of Ahriman that shadows us continually, through our engagement with technologies that both ease and complicate everyday tasks. Steiner describes this dual principle as an inescapable tragedy for the modern soul. So how can we grapple with this? In the motifs that filled the ceiling of the first Goetheanum, we find some answers.
Webinar from The Great Luciferic/Ahrimanic Face-off series, September-November2022
24 SEPTEMBER 2022
Painted Space 