| A Picture for Michaelmas by Paul Gierlach, Waldorf Teacher Ed. Paul Gierlach, visiting high school teacher at the San Francisco Waldorf School and mentor at the East Bay Waldorf School, teaches anthroposophical and pedagogical studies at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training. Michaelmas is a festival that honors the impulse of the Archangel Michael and is celebrated each year on September 29th. This festival and its symbolism are particularly relevant to the path of the teacher. Let's look inquiringly at the archetypal Michaelic image: the dramatic motif of a figure on a horse in a landscape overcoming a dragon. Let's speak first of the dragon, and let's use its own language: The Information Unit (IU). (An IU is a measurement of our historically recorded advance in information production and/or gathering).
This is the dragon today: its growth and its mass. It shapes our world, yet we human beings are not able or expected to understand or grow emotionally through an interaction with these massive IUs. For the most part, we are not privy to them. Ever so quickly the dragon is not only shaping but becoming our only-known world. Pick up a newspaper, where statistics are the heart of all important articles. Look also to the unseen, in human terms, to the algorithms that are now being written for the computer programs which are self-sustaining and self-referring: with these algorithms, mathematical advances in certain fields are possible only when human input is minimized or absent. The dragon is unavoidable. It tells us, or wants to tell us, who we are and what we may do. Fortunately, we are not born to avoid the dragon. Let's look to the archetypal picture, for it defines our necessary response to our being squeezed out of life. We, on "horseback," subdue the dragon; we send it into the spiritual world. What does this mean? We as teachers each have individual interests or fields of interests that are in the clutches of the dragon; we must immerse ourselves, must enter this field, with an understanding which allows us to know it intimately. We know more than the facts, we struggle with more than the organized or collected data (IUs). We actually, quietly, persistently, meditatively find the thoughts which live beyond the words with which we think. We send this inner experience of the spirit into the spiritual world in all its cognized objectivity, as a thought. There the gods will handle it, and return it to us. But it will be changed: it will be beyond the reach of the dragon. Of course, it will not necessarily replace the dragon immediately, for the world is wide and the thoughts many. But the intellect will have been spiritualized, at least a little, and that is saying a lot. It also is the task presented to us by Michael. That challenge, and not just the exertion of the struggle, is what legitimately warms our hearts. Let us not forget to look at the landscape also; let us always remind ourselves that, in all situations and conceptions, we need to recall the related Michaelic thought: a human being is a spiritual being. Let us, indeed, add something substantial to our IU these two years and, in inverting the phrase, think the thought: we are spiritual beings who are, on the earth, human. Can we not thus see that the archetypal image of Michael and the dragon in the landscape pictures forth for us, in reality, our own biography? |
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