Bruce turns 84 on New Year's Day!

Just visited Bruce and Bruce in Buffalo...had a great time.  We shared some photos.  Click here to see that album.

Any more photos out there?

Cheers,

Mark

Welcome to the Holoscopy Seed Blog!

The Holoscopy Group meets the first Friday of each month at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, 875 Elmwood Ave. (Use Lafayette Ave. parking lot entrance.)
Our next meeting, Friday, November 7, at 7:30 PM will be

David Wilcock: Has Edgar Cayce Reincarnated?

with Bruce McCausland

David Wilcock is an amazing young man. check out his website at divinecosmos.com
and see what we mean.
Some say he's the reincarnated Edgar Cayce. We'll discuss this questiion, along with some of his profound, new teachings.

Bruce McCausland is founding director of the Holoscopy Group. He was also founding director of the Aurora Waldorf School. Bruce retired some years ago as president of the business-to-business advertising agency, Market Planning Associates Ltd.

Hope to see you there!

More about Peter's friends in China...

before going to Chengdu, the first workshop I gave was in Zhuhai (twin city to Macao, but already in mainland China). The picture shows me with that group. Harry Wong and his wife Li who both functioned as translators are just left of me. They had spent about 10 years in Spring Valley. They hosted two months of my 4 month stay,- the last two months where managed by the lady directly right of me who hailed from Hong Kong. The lady at the very bottom left is from Shanghai and she sent me a return ticket to Shanghai where I was to give another workshop. That group kindly hosted me to a guided tour to nearby Suchow (the "Venice of China"),- a truly wonderful experience ! Back in Hong Kong I gave a talk to the HK University Graduates Association one week before my return to Toronto.
Best to all !

More from Peter...

Dear Seedlings:

This photo shows my workshop in Chengdu at work (2005).

I am slowly recovering from osteoporosis of my lower back, I am finally back at the Internet after several months of having been off line. Since I spent one month at the Chengdu Waldorf school giving workshops there in 2005, since the earthquake I got very concerned about the well-being of the many friends I had made there and Harry Wong sent me a copy of his newsletter. [I don't know how to upload a pdf to the blog, so I sent it as an attachment in an email...Mark]. I thought you might be interested and I hope you can tell all our friends about the work in Chengdu.

All the best to all of you !

Peter von Zezschwitz

David Wilcock on Coast To Coast AM Tonight!

Maybe Mark will give me a little slap for this, but I'd like to suggest a NON-anthroposophical source just this once. He's David Wilcock, probably a reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, who will be appearing with Richard C Hoagland on tonight's program. Sure, it's an ungodly hour (2 AM to 5 AM, EDT) in the middle of the night, but these guys have important things to say.
After all, it was Cayce who kick-started my spooks, so I feel I owe him at least a listen.

Getting Involved

In Richard's post below, if I understand it (Dear Richard, you are a bit long-winded) he seems to be asking about how much involvement in current affairs seems appropriate. At my age I am somewhat limited physically -- but I can still toss words around. Just before the reunion I wrote a short piece which was deliberately provocative. May I suggest that anthroposophists seem to ride their high, hobby horses ad nauseam into the sunset of 'safe' areas of philosophic discourse.
By all means: Get Involved! That's what anthroposophy is all about. Become, as Peter v. Zezschwitz put it so many years ago, anthroposophers. (Do the Eurythmy, you'll see what I mean.)
In my essay I tried to become, how do you Canadians put it? "Dit Shisturbers?"
Here's the link: http://www.mccausland.cc/BHM/pages/Intellectual%20Integrity.htm

Framing and Foundations

I see a question arising in a forum such as this might become, as to how far one might go in addressing cultural and contemporary streams and issues from the perspective of a spiritual framework. To what extent does one allow oneself to engage in the controversies of the day or contrariwise, to what degree does one remain apart from life, as “a watcher” in the tradition of Odin. To what degree is it still necessary to stand in the background while influencing affairs of men? I'm sure this question has been the subject of much debate over the ages and I'm merely re-inventing the wheel. And yet, who could say the question has been answered once and for all?

When I refer to “a perspective from a spiritual framework” in the paragraph above, I do so in the awareness of how “framing” these days has become a much-evolved discipline, originally in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and more recently in American political languaging. To scratch the surface of this subject, take a gander at George Lakoff's little book “Don't Think of an Elephant”. Lakoff argues that the American left is falling into the trap of allowing debate to take place within “framing” that's been cognitively engineered by heavily-financed right-wing think tanks, and that this framing already slants the way arguments will come across to the listening public. Perhaps you've also noticed that academic studies of “game theory” are being used to engineer political strategy. Reminds one of Josuf Stalin's famous reference to the writer as “engineer of the soul”. Which in turn reminds one of last year's most important movie (my rating), “The Lives of Others”, in which that quote appears, a movie that was made with the hope of stemming a growing tide of nostalgia for the old days of east-bloc communism. Reminds me how I wondered, back in the 90s, how things would look if we ever had “glasnost” over here in the west. Aggh but I digress. So how's all that for venturing into the dirty waters of politics? Not too deeply I hope.

Perhaps a distinction is necessary between what might be right for anthroposophy, and what might be right for individuals who themselves are more or less connected with anthroposophy. And when we bring our own anthroposophically-influenced perspectives to bear on our discussions of contemporary issues, to what degree does our responsibility to appropriately represent anthroposophy limit us from delving as deeply as we might like into those issues, because we wouldn't want anthroposophy to become tainted by association? Might that be why some contemporary spiritual teachers choose not to stand in the world as representatives of an existing spiritual stream, but rather as pilgrims on their own paths, drawing from various sources of learning? Yet such an approach has the downside of failing to give credit where credit might be due and of perhaps not making it any easier for new seekers to find their own way to hidden knowledge.

We could mention here people like Richard Tarnas, who I'm currently reading. In his talk at Rudolf Steiner Centre Toronto, he mentioned first learning about anthroposophy from a Waldorf teacher education student some decades back. Who really knows to what degree anthroposophy has informed his world outlook? But his treatment of astrology from what amounts to a phenomenological aspect is, to my mind, highly congruent with what one could expect from a “spiritual science”, both in rigor and in depth. I don't think Tarnas represents himself as an anthroposophist. He's “just” a university professor from California who's explored a lot of different esoteric and cultural streams. Would it have enhance the palatability of his book, which already takes on the unpopular topic of astrology – Tarnas calls it “the gold standard for superstition” -- if he had connected it with anthroposophy in his back-cover blurb. I'm guessing probably not.

Clearly I'm not trying to draw conclusions here, but hoping to stimulate dialog. So what do YOU think about all this? It's really very easy to post a comment. Start by clicking immediately below on the word "comments".