Restoring the Balance of Tao through Art

Christmas Day 2011... Reflections from Hong Kong by js

This is an article I have written on request from several US newsletters and as writer of this article take the liberty to post it on this blog

"The Tao expresses – for the greater part of humanity as it has already expressed for millennia – the highest to which humanity could aspire, and of which humanity thought that the world, the whole of humanity, will one day aspire. It is the highest that the human being carries as a seed, which one day will blossom fully out of innermost human nature. Tao signifies both a deep, hidden fundament of the soul and an exalted future." (Rudolf Steiner, November 16, 1905; whole lecture as yet untranslated)

Based now in Hong Kong for a little over three years, one has had countless new and deep experiences teaching and commission-creating in many larger cities on China mainland. There have been eager requests for numerous lazure painting workshops and for murals both interior and exterior. There have also been well received intensive two- or three-day weekend introductions to Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum impulse (Anthroposophy and art) coming from the north to the south... in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, including many very receptive groups of parents and teachers in the various Waldorf communities springing up across China in the past seven years. At most recent count (if anyone is counting) there are nearly 200 kindergarten initiatives in all and nearly 20 primary school initiatives with more each year in both areas.

So one must note that, despite what anyone would have dreamed of just ten years ago regarding Waldorf schooling or its "mother ground," Anthroposophy, small but ongoing changes are occurring as, little-by-little, new and very appreciated Waldorf teachers and mentors cross through the many border crossings into China to contribute their unique gifts and experience from Steiner education. This shows, in my view, that it is an education for each and every child, making contributions toward a New World Culture.

Earlier today here at HeartSource, our home, we enjoyed a time of good company shared with children and their parents in the sun-filled garden and commencing with good food around the kindergarten table. Yes, much to be grateful for, while in the world that all of us have known, as Steiner puts it in the opening words of the Michael Imagination lecture of 1923, “many old forms of civilization to which people mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss and there will be an insistent demand that mankind must find its way to something new.” So what were those things that he himself had been offering humanity? Gifts that many of us have come to know: Anthroposophy as a practical spiritual worldview ripe for our time, biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf and also curative education, and a human-based medicine – actually all of these and more as healing-balancing measures for a world so way out of balance. A painful heart struggles daily at grappling with the fact that around the world there is unprecedented oppression, enslavement, and insane extermination of countless people. Perhaps the second most immediate concern for me is the thought that a great majority of the seven billion of us don't have access to food let alone healthy food and enough, or even any drinkable water. These are basic human physical needs!

But the third concern for me is an acute sense of soul needs that everyone is entitled to have met but only few have access to. This is also a basic requirement on the way to personal and fraternal fulfillment. This is art and the creative process. Friedrich Schiller had it precisely right in exclaiming that, holding the balance between excessive urge to form (meaning brain-bound and even materialistic thinking) and excessive urge to sensuality (meaning all our natural urges, even, I believe, the excesses of materialistic acquisitions), we may become freely creative beings. This is the graceful potential – God-given – to become playfully free, transforming the duality of excess by striving by inner force of heart for balance.

In the realm of creativity most of us will have to lean on a good “brotherly or sisterly” teacher for encouragement, guidance, and skillful training. I certainly did. And there is very good virtue in this endeavor to eventually individually nurture our “child within.” There is also a future-oriented aim we consciously or unconsciously work toward. This is where I look to a great teacher of humanity, the Russian philosopher and writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) from his “What is Art'?” of 1898. For me, he speaks to us today... from the future:
"The task of art to accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor (now attained only by the best members of society) by ordinary feeling and the instinct of all of humanity. By evoking under imaginary conditions the feeling of brotherhood and love, spiritual art will train humankind to experience those same feelings under similar circumstances in actual life; it will lay in the souls of fellow humans the rails along which the actions of those whom art thus educates will naturally pass. And universal art, by uniting the most differing people in one common feeling by destroying separation, will educate people to union and will show them, not by reason but by life itself, the joy of universal union beyond the bounds set by life. ...The destiny of art in our time is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for humanity consists in their being united together, and to set up, in place of the existing reign of force [by false experts and leaders in every domain of modern life] that kingdom of God – that is, of understanding love – which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life."

If you are like me, you tremble, perhaps even with a few tears, in absorbing these words of inspiration. Steiner called Leo Tolstoy a representative of that future time, the Sixth Cultural Epoch. Steiner described that time as the Community of Philadelphia, or that world culture centrally founded in the Slavic peoples when brotherhood or fraternity will reign as a principal characteristic of civilization. As reincarnating individuals, we may be directly part of that geographical region or even elsewhere. For that will be a true world culture unbounded by region and united in the etheric. Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood as expressions of the great ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness will reign for a good portion of humanity, though not for all. Some will ward it off with stubborn egoity. There will be both grace-given joy and also deep compassion and conscience for the continuing suffering of humanity (for further reading I recommend this online article: http://www.adrianakoulias.com/ADRIANAKOULIAS/Lectures_files/Rosicrucianism%20and%20the%20Maitreya%20Buddha.pdf).

So art with it's intrinsic creative processes will help us along this Grail Path – or, if you will, the good way of the Tao – when, as the third principle of the Tao, the disciplined and at the same time creative human being finds and maintains balance. The yin and yang counterforces find equilibrium in the human being between heaven and earth. As we feel by grace a sense of unbounded freedom, we can and should feel, by ethical necessity, more of the responsibility we do have for one another and for the kingdoms of nature of Mother Earth in lifting both to higher moral stages of consciousness.

How do I as a striving artist enact some of the foregoing thoughts in practice during my China journeys? Well, for me the most immediate means is by introducing as instructor, Goethe's Color Teachings (just cannot bring myself to say “Theory”). In his color circle we have a most clear and powerful statement embracing all the principles of the Tao...of Oneness (or wholeness), Duality (or polarity of light-dark, warm-cool, complementaries, etc.), Trinity (or transitional enhancement = metamorphosis) moving between and utilizing the primary and secondary triads), and finally Myriad-ness (or limitless relational combinations), sensing always the grand unifying principle of wholeness.

At each step the human being, in this case the artist as painter, uses the sound scientific/artistic judgment gained in researching the color wisdom in Goethe's circle (being “as old as the world”) to make quiet or bolder steps at creating a unique image never before manifested by anyone, anywhere at anytime in the flow of time and space. Color exercises through both painting, which also explores Rudolf Steiner's twelve-fold color circle, together with eurythmy facilitate an intimacy with our medium. Eurythmy in inner color gesture and movement feels an innate kinship with the visual art of painting. These are my main areas of expertise: eurythmy-aided lazure painting on walls and watercolor painting on canvas or paper, taught in intensive art workshops or accomplished by commission.

There also has been work we were able to create back on the North American continent in Toronto this past autumn at Michaelmas. After being invited by master architect Bert Chase of Vancouver, I participated, together with other active art educators in the field of sculpture, in leading two lazure painting workshops in an art symposium at Hesperus Village. One of the workshops was a mural painting workshop for a few participants who continued on after the first art conference. A unique effort was made of using an all-natural glaze medium from Bioshield in Santa Fe, New Mexico www.bioshieldpaint.com combined with all-natural plant pigments obtained directly from Stockmar in Germany. Along the way, I took the opportunity to visit friends in Chicago and brother Patrick and wife Lynne in Harlemville.

On the home front here in Hong Kong we are about to embark on the physical restoration of a newly acquired school building, which will be transformed into Hong Kong's first primary school. Wife Sinmei, a native Hong Konger, has been teaching a small Waldorf home-schooling kindergarten as well as facilitating a two year part-time Waldorf kindergarten teacher training here in the city. As the designated “president” of the newly formed Rudolf Steiner Education Foundation Hong Kong, I will be called into service more and more to offer adult-level courses and lectures in basic Anthroposophy and, of course, art classes of various sorts. I'm gearing up, because this is what I have been preparing for my whole life. Now it's all or nothing...I prefer the former.