Being Useful to Each Other

I'd like to start this off with a big hello to Bruce and to all the once and future seedlings who helped make the whole experience such a significant one for myself and for so many of us. And of course a special thanks to Mark for taking the initiative to organize this Living Seed Reunion and for creating this blog as part of the process. I must say, responding to Mark's general invitation to become a contributor here has a totally different feel than starting my own blog to publish my own thoughts and ramblings -- a little less egocentric, and a lot more social. And while there may be mixed feelings about the publicness of it all, we (that's Mark and I, at least) hope this little experiment can spark some lively discussion around themes that lived strongly among the denizens of the original Living Seed and continue to hold our interest thirty-some years later.

I remember clearly, journeying from Oshawa to Toronto to the Living Seed back in '73 or '74 with Bob Bryden (a musician friend who had introduced me to anthroposophy not long before) to consult with Bruce McCausland about the guru Maharaj Ji. That was the great thing about the Living Seed and Bruce's work there. In that little back room bookstore, one could have intelligent discussions not just about anthroposophy but more importantly, about where it stood in the whole context of other contemporary spiritual movements. Bruce had positioned the Living Seed on Toronto's “Salvation Row” near Avenue Road and Davenport, which at the time was a corner of the city where seekers came to find meaning in life. Other movements represented in the neighbourhood included the Hare Krishna, The Process and the Church of Scientology. In that era that was like the afterglow of the 60s, this part of town was the auto mall of spirituality, where the dealers gather together, so customers could kick the tires of brand after brand without having to walk too far up the street.

A couple years later, at Emerson College in England, I listened to other students talk about anthroposophists they'd met before coming there, and how dogmatic and fixed in their ways they were. Based on my own experience encountering anthroposophy through people like Bruce McCausland and Isabel Grieve, I really couldn't relate to what they were talking about. That wasn't my experience at all.