Meeting the Guardian of the Threshold
Around 40 people attended the network meeting of the Goetheanum Meditation Initiative Worldwide which was held at the Waldorf School close to Avignon (FR) from 11 to 13 July 2019. The Initiative, which was founded in 2006, presented this year’s meeting in German and English. The theme was the Guardian of the Threshold.
After last year’s meeting in The Hague (NL), the networkers decided in favour of Avignon (FR) for a meeting this year in order to support anthroposophy in France and get to know the situation there better. The Waldorf movement in France keeps being attacked with accusations of sectarianism that have also affected the Anthroposophical Society. The meeting was prepared by Willem Meesters from the Didascali Waldorf Teacher Training and Alain Tessier, who is a council member of the Anthroposophical Society in France, with additional support from René Becker, the general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in France.
The network initiative is undergoing changes because many of the original initiators have left and new members have joined in the past year. Joan Sleigh represents the Executive Council at the Goetheanum within the initiative and Christiane Haid the Goetheanum Leadership.
Guardian and teacher
The initiative was founded in order to create a space for sharing and joint research into the various forms of anthroposophic meditation based on the mantras of the nineteen Class Lessons. After studying the connection between the 19th and the first Class Lessons in 2018, this year’s meeting focused on the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. Ursula Flatters from Järna (SE) gave an outline of how the figure of the Guardian of the Threshold changes in the course of the nineteen Class Lessons. The way he addresses, accompanies and guides the meditant changes noticeably from one lesson to the next. From the beginning, he is not only the Guardian of the Threshold but also the teacher who leads the meditant through the various realms within the spiritual worlds.
Wolfgang Tomaschitz, the general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Austria, referred to the fourth meditation in Rudolf Steiner’s book A Way of Self-Knowledge (GA 16) in order to illustrate how precarious the situation is at the threshold when meditants realize that they have to remelt their entire earthly existence in order to be able to enter the reality of the spiritual world. They need to achieve the ability to live with two contrary attitudes in both the sensory and the supersensible worlds.
In small groups, we shared our experiences of the threshold situation and the various forms in which the Guardian of the Threshold appears. The whole experience was further enriched by a reading from and exercises based on passages from Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas in relation to Johannes Thomasius and others meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. Andreas Neider spoke about the significance of humanity’s unconscious crossing of the threshold.
Enlivening, heart-warming forces
The landscape around the Avignon Waldorf School, through which the Sorgue river flows, has a special warmth and quality of light. This landscape, the warm welcome extended by our French friends, but also the strong Mistral wind conveyed something of the enlivening and heart-warming forces of the Southern French Vaucluse to our meeting.
The network initiative will meet on the weekend after Easter 2020 (on invitation) in order to look ahead to a further major public Living Connections conference in 2021, which will be about meditative experience in relation to self-knowledge.