Class Holders
Class Holders

Class Holders

27 November 2019 Hartwig Schiller 85 views

Around 240 School of Spiritual Science class holders met from 1 to 3 November for professional development and a conference on essence and appearance.

When, on 13 November 1908, Rudolf Steiner spoke of Friedrich Hegel’s system of conceptualization (GA 108), he pointed to the connection between concept and reality. The creative activity involved in getting to know the world that Steiner already mentioned in his Philosophy of Freedom is expressed in the merging of essence and appearance as an acquired experience of reality. This motif was worked on at the Class Holders’ Conference, in connection with preparing the Class Lessons, the involvement of the whole human being in the reality of the School of Spiritual Science, the School’s situation and tasks in the world, and the deepening of the sixteenth Class Lesson.

The conference’s central experience was the astonishing openness and diversity of questions that came together from all over the world, focusing mostly on accessibility, openness and the School of Spiritual Science’s forms of working. Four directions determined the overall picture: responsibility towards the inside, openness towards the outside, searching for what is appropriate to the times and searching for appropriate ways of working spiritually. Participants also expressed a need for the continued forming of substance as we approach the completion of three times 33 1/3 years at Christmas 2023/2024.

Ongoing stream of renewal

In this context we looked at the founding of the School of Spiritual Science as an esoteric impulse that is to infuse the Anthroposophical Society with an ongoing stream of renewal. Rudolf Steiner made it his task to establish the School of Spiritual Science but he had to leave it incomplete. He had taken on its leadership but had left open the question of succession.

The extraordinary openness of the meeting may have signalized a departure towards a new understanding of leadership, where members who wish to be active are included in the community of responsibility and of knowledge- and will-based initiative, and an answer can be found to what has been so painfully missed.