Dornach

So in 1912, he starts the Anthroposophical Society.

In 1913, he moves the headquarters to Dornach, the village in Switzerland.

And he dies in 1925.

And until his death, he continued to develop anthroposophy as a movement and a worldview and the membership roles.

All right.

Okay, quote from Steiner.

December 1922 lecture in Dornach.

Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda.

I was working with heroin addicts in the inner city of Detroit at the time and for an NIMH program.

And I wanted to go, I knew I had a next step, and I had to make a choice between going to Switzerland to study in the Steiner world there in Dornach, or go to California and meet with Stan Grof for my interest in psychedelics and depth psychology.

And of course, I ended up going to California.

Steiner, without going into technicalities that he wasn't in these particular books, but he, in a more general way, opened me up to the recognition that everything in the universe that is physical, material, is the physical expression of spiritual realities.

And at its heart, beneath all the complexity and all the controversy, lay the simple, practical teaching on inner calm that we have been following.

He established a cultural and organizational center for the Anthroposophical movement at the Goetheanum, a remarkable building in Dornach, Switzerland, that Steiner himself designed.

The original Goetheanum was a building unlike anything Europe had seen: a vast double-domed structure built entirely of wood, its forms flowing and organic rather than angular and geometric, its interior carved with intricate motifs meant to embody the living qualities of nature rather than the dead symmetry of conventional architecture.

Steiner designed it down to the smallest detail, including the colored glass windows, the painted ceilings, and the carved wooden columns, each of which was shaped according to a different metamorphic principle drawn from Goethe's studies of plant growth.

The building was a work of art as much as a work of architecture, and hundreds of volunteers from across Europe came to Dornach to help construct it, working alongside professional craftsmen in a spirit of communal devotion that must have been extraordinary to witness.

On New Year's Eve 1922, while a celebration was being held inside, arsonists set fire to the building.

By morning, the Goetheanum was a ruin.

And then he began designing a second Goetheanum, this time in concrete so that fire could not destroy it again.

Where have we heard that before? But anyways, against the backdrop of this total geopolitical collapse, Rudolf Steiner was not speaking from a theoretical distance.

He delivered these series of lectures, uh, Historical Symptomatology in Dornach, Switzerland.

And Dornach-- And Switzerland was also neutral at that time.

So everybody in Switzerland was watching Europe blow up, and it was-- we, we don't understand how traumatic that was because this was when warfare truly became mechanized.

And, uh, you know, tanks and planes and chemical warfare and all-- I mean, it was absolutely de- demoralizing.