Wellspring: Apocaloptimism

Saturday, October 8, 2022

Apocaloptimism

Woodstock and Me:
An America Tune

I received my draft notice the Saturday of Woodstock.

Here's a salutation to my fellow draftees, all of whom were sacrificed by evil for evil.

from Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly":

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization

"The Lord dwells in the hearts of all creatures

and whirls them round upon the wheel of maya.

Run to him for refuge with all your strength,

and peace profound will be yours through his grace."

— Bhagavad Gita 18:61-62

TURN ON ~ TUNE IN ~ DROP OUT

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." — Matthew 6:34

Rudolf Steiner: "The power needed to overcome the evil will yield a power that can reach the heights of holiness. A field has to be treated with manure and the manure has to ferment in the soil; similarly, humanity needs the manure of evil in order to attain to the highest holiness. And herein lies the mission of evil. A man’s muscles get strong by use; and equally, if good is to rise to the heights of holiness, it must first overcome the evil which opposes it. The task of evil is to promote the ascent of man."

Rudolf Steiner: "When, from out of this consciousness of the universal whole, we say to ourselves that the old civilization is bursting through its partitions, it is doomed — then to try to save it in its present form would be to work against one's age, not with it. We need a new civilization upon the ruins of the old."

Desolation Row

Rudolf Steiner: "The destructiveness lies...firstly in everything we can call Americanism, which increasingly tends to invoke fear of the spirit and make the world into a place where only physical life can unfold. This is actually quite different from the British tendency to try to make the world into a trading company. Americanism seeks to make the world into a physical habitation, furnished as comfortably as possible, where one can live in comfort and prosperity. That is the political element of Americanism. Whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the Earth to its end, destruction dooming it at last to death, because the spirit will be shut out from it."

https://youtu.be/U1mlCPMYtPk

Rudolf Steiner: "But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering."