An enquiry into the injunctions from the Foundation Stone Meditation.

The Foundation Stone offers anyone an extraordinarily firm foundation within their own spirit-soul-bodily existence.

Given to the Anthroposophical Society at the Founding Conference over Christmas/New Year 1923/4 it also forms the basis for how this society should function as a lens to magnify the best human endeavour.

Within this meditation there are three injunctions for specific individual practise: “Spirit recollection,” “Spirit Sensing” and “Spirit Beholding.” I have not yet come across an understanding of the potential within these practices that I feel does them justice. This is my attempt to show how much more there remains to be seen there.

Spirit Recollection

“Human Soul! You live in the limbs…  …Practice Spirit recollection”
begins the Foundation Stone meditation.

You could also render this as:
“Hey, You! Notice your embodiment…  …Call yourself back to this reality, to what you really are”

“Re-call your spirit!“ you could also say.
“Ube Geist Erinnern” in the original, could be rendered as:  ‘Practice calling yourself into yourself,.’  “Er-innern”  the act of coming in.

Soo much of the time we are not at home within ourselves, but drifting or flying off this way and that.

Does the act of remembrance truly call us back into ourselves?
What truly is memory, recollection?

And why does Steiner say Spirit recollection? – The facile translation is memory of your own spirit, reminding yourself that you are a spiritual being having an earthly experience. Could he also mean ‘conscious memory’, ‘self-aware memory’ or ‘a remembering motivated from our higher self’? – Is not each a synonym for the other?

Recollection WITH Spirit – bringing your conscious self into your actions:

More often than we might realise, our actions are based on reactivity. While this occasionally causes problems, mostly it simply holds us in an old way-of-being. The act of bringing consciousness into this moment’s choice of response lies in us recalling that we have a choice. Next, we need to examine what our impulse is, before acting. Once paused in this way we can either examine what past-memory underpins our reactivity, or ask ourselves how we might act from our best self in this moment.
Setting times aside now and then, to delve into our past, mole-like, loosens up compacted dirt, bringing in air and light. Choosing any one of the stories we tell ourselves and re-examining what really happened, what might have been driving others in the situation, and how we might re-frame events with truthful, loving forgiveness.  Doing this is a conscious act of our individual spirit to re-form the bank of memories that is our identity. This simplest form of Spirit Recollection engages our individual spirit with the past that drives us.

Recollection BY Spirit – bringing awareness to how we come into being:

True freedom is the capacity in you to notice that the world is formed by how you choose to see it. Our sense organs take in a jumble of signals. As infants we learn to interpret these impressions as objects in the world. Those interpretations are our own. They arise within us. In the act of forming such concepts, our own sense of identity also arises. When a jumble of light, colour and texture transforms into ‘tree bark,’ or ‘door handle’ that creation of the identity of what we are perceiving also creates an identity of who is perceiving it.

Yes, identification goes two ways.  We become the one-who-identifies. Noticing that it is I, myself, that calls them into being is a recalling of our own spirit. ‘The Father Spirit in the heights, begetting a birth in the depths.’

The  call to action in the first section of this meditation is, in part to notice this happening. To notice that, moving through the spatial world takes us into this deep-ocean of spirit-being within which ‘mine own I comes into being.’

To notice our own concept and awareness of ‘self’ arising within the continuous, tumultuous, flow of sense impressions and their transformation into concepts, is to notice how the Father, World, is the circle within which I, as child, am born. My own I comes to being within this “I of the Father,” the world-all spirit-being.

To track this meeting of sense impression with our own concept-forming ability, the movement from the ‘great outside world’ into an arising awareness of self, is to bring our own I to bear on the question of its own coming-into-being, to recollect yourself by the power of your own spirit.

Recollection OF Spirit:

As we look back over our lives we may begin to notice miraculous moments. An accident avoided, a chance meeting that sparked huge change in our lives, or moments of exceptional awareness. In such moments we may have felt ourselves as timeless, or ageless, or as exceptionally lucid (which literally means ‘made of light.’) Deep conversations, ritual, or deep study can also trigger such heightened awareness. The more we recall such moments the more we tap into the spiritual aspect of ourselves. The higher self, that chose this life, that set out the path we are now on.

Another meaning of “Practice Spirit Recollection” is to look back over our memories and remind ourselves of who we truly are. Bit by bit such conscious, spiritually-active recollection penetrates deeper and deeper into our childhood, recalling events from closer and closer to birth. With practice it can become possible to sense something of our former lives, who we and the people close to us were in previous lives. There are three principle ways into this: The first is through chronic pain. When our body continually reminds us of something, looking deeper into what it is we are being reminded of by resting into the pain itself as a meditation, can reveal events that are not of this life. The second is more spontaneous. A clear moment may open up through seeing something that reminds us, on a subtle level of something we can’t quite get a grip on. Later meditation on that feeling can sometimes open doors into where that memory was first formed, maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago during an initiation ritual or repeated spiritual practice. The third way is relationship. When we have an intense relationship with someone, either painful or delightful, if we ask our spirit-guides, angels or whatever to show us where we knew this person before, that can result in images being given to us from ancient times. In all these cases it is most important not to hurry it, nor to push it. If we are not given images easily speculation can create a false foundation for our being. Believing in a history that is not true can really distort our ability to manage the life we are living day by day.

This third aspect of Spirit Recollection, deep-memory, is often taken as Steiner’s true meaning, but it is my opinion that far from insisting we all become clairvoyant, he particularly wanted us to integrate our gifts and capacities with this earthly life. Maximising both what we came to learn and what we came to give, happens best if we strengthen every aspect of ourselves. This practice, of bringing our spirit-attention to our own story in all these various ways, is the ground for all of our becoming.

The Practice of Spirit Awareness, or Sensing

“Human Soul! You live in the beat of heart and lung…  …Practice Spirit Sensing”
begins the second panel of this meditation.

You could also render this as:
“Ah, you! yes, You! Notice how your breath leads you to feel this world within and beyond yourself.
Notice how your heartbeat, that adventuring Prince within you
Is listening to, laughing with, the soul of your breath.”

Awareness WITH Spirit:

A lot of our everyday activity is unconscious. Whether or not we have music, or a podcast, playing while we work, cook or clean we most likely have a script playing in our mind that simply jogs along to the stimuli of this moment rather than choosing conscious awareness. When we bring our spirit focus to whatever we are doing we invite our higher self into our astral body. Such focus strengthens our connection with the world, creating more of who we truly are in the passing moments of our soul.

Awareness BY Spirit:

We can take this to another level by asking ourselves how we actually perform common tasks. What do our fingers actually do when we fasten a lace, or a button, start the car or type out a message. Bring our awareness to skills we take completely for granted shakes up our etheric body, bringing fluidity and growth to the attempts of our spirit self to unite with the greater world. Spirit awareness

Awareness OF Spirit:

Projecting our own fears and hopes onto other people is a normal part of everyday life. Projection is the first stage of realisation that this is an issue we need to address. Recognising where we are doing it happens slowly. Actively looking for and learning to recognise our own patterns in our ideas about other people can grow into a deeper recognition of their own individual spirit working through their patterns into daily life. We notice that in everyone the best attributes and the worst are the same pattern, two sides of a behavioural coin. Our own strengths become our weaknesses when we deploy them without awareness. Seeing deeply into who other people truly are becomes an ongoing awareness of who we truly are. These practices bring our spirit into balance with the world as we grow our focus, our spirit’s, awareness of spirit.

The Practice of Spirit Beholding, or Vision

“Human Soul! You live in the resting of the Head…  …Practice Spirit Beholding”
is the starting of the third panel of this meditation.

You could also render part of that panel as:

Now, you.
Slow down a moment, notice the utter silence of your core-thinking.
Hold your racing thoughts, let them drop-away.
Are You not the very goblet of resting sky?
The silence of the stars, resting where those thoughts did race?
Notice within this silent pool of thought
How all the Cosmic Hope is lodged within this silence.

Vision WITH Spirit:

Consciously asking ourselves what it is we are projecting into the future is the first suggestion within Spirit Vision.
Typically, we imagine a future much like our past. To take up the question of what might be possible is to take our spirit guides into our future-creation process. Human beings are inherently creative, that is the nature of freedom. Bringing this creativity into conscious relationship with the potential of our destiny is the starting point for re-establishing a connection between what we, as humans, have to offer and what the flow of spirit in the world is seeking. It is a movement from ‘I want,’ to ‘I can.’ ~ “Whatever you can imagine, you can do.” said William Blake. “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” said his contemporary, J.W.Goethe. This injunction asks us to bring our conscious creativity into spirit realms where our future lies.

Vision BY Spirit:

The practice of Spirit Beholding bestows freedom upon us, activates our will, suggests Steiner in this third panel of the meditation. Here we get a reminder of the mystery connection whereby active thinking IS will and clear willing IS thinking. If we open up our thinking to the realisation that we are not truly the generators of our thoughts, but the recipients of them, then we understand how choosing which thoughts to attend to steers us like a ship, slowly bringing us around towards whichever source we focus on. By attending to the spirit-source of our imaginal creation of the futures we choose, we form allegiances that give us the will to move forward in life.

Vision OF Spirit:

The more we pay attention to these source-beings of our own thinking the more aware we become of being surrounded by spirit at all times. Meditatively opening our inner-eye to these beings begins a new character of relationship with our spirit guides, angels and so forth. To slow down enough to appreciate the Presence of these beings, individually, ‘looking’ with our inner eye at who is tending to our life and future is one practice of Spirit Beholding that opens our eyes into this other world. Throughout the Foundation Stone meditation we are shown how to become more grounded in this experience of what we truly are, more effective at bringing our efforts into this world that we chose to incarnate into and more aware of the spiritual context of our lives. Consciousness IS spirit. To consciously practice these three, each in their three applicable ways, is to unite the intentions we brought into this life with the intentions we can form as life-long personalities, taking our own destiny and the world’s development small steps or large one, towards the Christ Self that every human being wishes most fully to be a part of.

More: Foundation Stone, intro.