Shortcomings of Sculpties

There is an intersting essay on the shortcomings of sculpties by authors including Francis Chung and Neil Protagonist here.

Steiner: the world expresses itself through every human being

When I first tried to research the life and work of Rudolph Steiner, there was very little to be found about him on the web. Nowadays there are a growing number of pages about him and many Steiner Schools.

I see no point in trying to regurgitate an objective assessment of his life and work, which is what you will find at the end of some of the links. The things which appealed to me, were his idea of the four levels of consciousness: he said that stones and rocks had one level of consciousness, plants had two, animals had three and man had four. He believed in the one-ness of all, which is something I have believed in since I had a mystical experience a few months after the birth of my youngest child. For a short time, I experienced the one-ness of all, and understood how it was possible to be uniquely myself, and yet part of a whole. I felt overwhelming love for it all, and immense peace and happiness. Right there, in the middle of an ordinary day in Uxbridge.

That experience has made me look for other people who have had similar experiences, and I was interested by the ideas that Steiner came up with. I love organic architecture, and he felt it was important too.

The educational ideas he came up with seem bonkers in some respects, but I think some of them may become mainstream eventually. His idea that children have a physical phase initially, and ought not to be taught academic subjects until their milk teeth fall out, which seemed nuts to me at first, may turn out to be one of the most insightful things he said: it has been found that children with dyslexia and dyspraxia need to be taught to jump and spin and swing, and these things are now regimented into a regime for trying to recover the skills they have lost.

We may well discover that the most important thing we can do for a child's academic development is to ensure that they do not enter into academic study too early.

As to his ideas on religion and philosophy, I apply the same test to him as I do to everything: does it speak to me? I find with some things I recognise a spiritual trust for myself in things that he says, and with others it takes some time and experience to recognise the truth. I leave you to discover if it speaks to you too.

TED talks

Until this year I hadn't heard of TED (technology, entertainment, design), which is an annual conference of interesting people held in the US. They started to publish ther talks from the conference on the web, and I was hooked, although sometimes I think it is a shame that the talks are so short... often listening to them makes you want more, more, MORE.

I particularly like Sir Ken Robinson's talk on education.

The organisation is growing, and this year held another conference in Africa.

Reincarnation

When I was in my twenties, I was in a pub quiz team. The team and I played home matches in the Three Tuns in Uxbridge, and travelled around the Greater London area playing other pub quiz teams. Sometimes we won.

On this occasion we went to a pub in Harrow that I hadn't been to before. I went into the bar, and almost immediately caught sight of someone who triggered in me a recognition and cascade of memories. The odd thing was that having had that flash of recognition, and a picture show of me, my sister and this person going to clubs in what I guess was the 1950s... I realised that I could not recall his name/I hadn't been to clubs with my sister and a man/there was no substance behind the memories.

I can still remember how it felt sitting there and trying to recall the detail from the pictures which had flashed passed me inside my head. The rooms I remembered were not rooms I have ever lived in. I was groping around for names and dates and something firm to back up the instant slideshow I had seen, but there wasn't anything there.

I was young and embarrassed and so I didn't go up to the guy and tell him that I had the strangest feeling that we had met in another life, and I have regretted that since.

Years later, I went to Rye and bought a book in the Martello bookshop on the High Street, called Destiny, by Martin Heald. As I read the book, I realised that I had dreamed about one chapter in it, and had described the dream almost exactly as it was described in the book. I was so struck by this that I corresponded with the author for a while.

I try to keep an open mind... it seems to me that the lessons of nature, the cycle of the seasons, the circle of birth and rebirth, lean towards the possibility of reincarnation. I have read that the bible once contained much more material about reincarnation, which was cut out of the bible at the behest of Constantine and his wife. Certainly there are still places in the bible which talk about people having returned in another form.

I do not have any facts which a scientist would accept, to prove that reincarnation is a fact, and personally I do not need them. I am happy to keep my mind open to the possibilities and aware of the improbabilities.

One area of research that has fascinated me in this relation, is the idea that people's appearance may be affected by their previous life. Ian Stevenson did some research with children, and various other people have asserted that this is true. There is a huge collection of photographs of possibly reincarnated individuals which are very interesting indeed, if your mind is open to the possibility.

Finding the website with those photographs led me to look for connections myself. So far, I think I have identified three. You will see above Antoni Gaudi, the artist and architect and Hundertwasser have very similar outlook and interests and appearance. The death of Gaudi was in 1926, and the birth of Hundertwasser in 1928. Their appearance was similar both as young men and as older men.

The other link in appearance is between the singer Eva Cassidy, and a little girl who captivated audiences at the recent Britain's Got Talent event: Connie Talbot. There is also the coincidence that not only do they bear a striking resemblance to each other but Connie chose to sing "Over the Rainbow", a song Eva used to sing.

The final couple are Nikola Tesla and Levashov.

Organic architecture

There are links to pages for Gaudi and Hundertwasser, who are the most famous organic architects, but there are many more. Rudolph Steiner believed that people needed organic architecture, and decreed that the schools which bear his name should have organic shaped windows.

I found this link by accident, which shows a very interesting desert house.

Gaudi

Gaudi is the artist and architect who made wonderfully organic and amazingly complex designs using mosaic and bright colours. Barcelona is full of his designs, which I little appreciated when I visited there some years ago.

There are some fantastic pictures of his work available around the internet.

Hundertwasser

Sometimes, you read about an artist, and their life is disappointingly dull, or full of beautiful music and unkind acts. Sometimes, however, an artist rewards one's investigation into their life with rich detail and beliefs consistent with their art. Hundertwasser is a most interesting man, probably more famous for his views and his remedial architecture than for his art.

He believe that people were made sick by uniform environments, and that the secret was to allow people to personalise their windows. His buildings, where every column is different and he used colours and differences to allow people who lived in them to point out their homes, have become tourist attractions in their own right. He called straight lines "the devil's tools".

I thoroughly recommend a study of his life, his thoughts and his creations. I will collect any good links I find for Hundertwasser here.

This is the wikipedia entry for Hundertwasser.