Jul 11, 2024
JPI Book Announcement!
We are releasing a new title with SteinerBooks, Biodynamics for Beginners: Principles and Practice, in which the “best of” Applied Biodynamics have been collected and edited. Much of Applied Biodynamics has reached an intimate audience, but it is time for the contents to reach the wider world. As a celebration of Applied Biodynamics shifting to the digital realm, we offer a book printed on paper for your library! Below is a preview of the introduction written by Stewart Lundy. 300+ pages of biodynamics!
Many thanks go to John-Scott Legg and the Steinerbooks team for their patience and diligence. Also, we thank Mary Maruca for her ongoing hard work. This wouldn’t have happened without them.
An excerpt from Stewart Lundy's introduction to Biodynamics for Beginners: Principles and Practice by Hugh J. Courtney (and others).
– James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Describing the invisible world in terms of the visible requires a delicate touch. Since we can only see what’s in front of our eyes, to begin to speak of the invisible world, we must be fluent in analogies based on what we can see and be confident that the universe is a unified whole, not a mere amalgam of unrelated pieces. As the philosopher Aristotle says, we must begin with what we know. Without a unifying world conception, there is no impetus for scientific inquiry and no basis for knowledge. Life would be unlivable if everything did not always already possess an inner kinship. Just as we cannot see the wind itself but we can see what it does, we may not be able to perceive the tones of subtle “forces” but any of us can witness their effects if we put them to use. Similarly, we cannot see for ourselves the inner workings of the soil, but we can see the effects of the secrets of the soil in how the emerging plants express themselves above ground.
To journey into the realm of the invisible – which, if we’re honest, is most of the world – we must keep in mind the entire time that any analogy based on the sense-perceptible world will invariably be incomplete. Our senses are not designed to perceive most of the cosmos but, rather, are tuned to a narrow bandwidth of a mere fraction of a percent of all possible information available. As such, any analogy based on that tiny fraction of a percent will be incomplete at best. But if we approach the world with a “soft” gaze, we can allow disparate viewpoints to become a composite image of a living whole.
There is a story of blind monks grasping at different parts of an elephant: one thinks the leg is the trunk of a tree, one imagines the tail is a rope, one thinks the ear is a large leaf, and so forth. Each similarity, by itself, is incomplete, but that does not mean they are each individually false. The individual ideas of “tree” and “rope” and “leaf” are all, by themselves, correct concepts but they are all misapplied to the elephant. If each blind monk were to trade places with the others successively and try to reconcile these various perspectives, a clearer image of the whole – the elephant itself – would emerge. Each limited view is a legitimate vantage point as far as it goes – after all, there is a likeness between the elephant’s tail and a rope – but when these experiences of separate concepts are reconciled, an even greater concept of the whole emerges.
Some particularly bright stars, such as Rudolf Steiner, seem to have reached far beyond the limits of what is sense-perceptible (and therefore beyond what is externally empirical) into realms inaccessible to ordinary everyday consciousness. But if we need specialized sense organs to perceive light, there are analogous inner “organs” we require to perceive the dark light of the invisible world. If we want to glimpse the subsensible world, we might use a microscope. But if we wish to understand the meaning of the kaleidoscopic panoply of our ever-changing sense perceptions, we need to be able to intuit macrocosmic interconnections which no external technology can do for us. If we are like blind monks grasping at pieces, Steiner is like someone who could grasp the encompassing idea "elephant" while the rest of us are busy arguing from our smaller one-sided perspectives. How Steiner reached his clear-sightedness is somewhat beside the point for our current discussion of biodynamic agriculture. If I lack eyes, I cannot perceive light myself, but my blindness does not negate the empirical existence of colors for anyone else with eyesight. I may have no experiential point of reference to evaluate whether “red” or “blue” exist – or even what those terms mean – but that does not mean that colors as such have no reality merely because I personally cannot experience them. Nevertheless, Steiner did not expect blind faith in what he observed. Anything Steiner disclosed he consistently said should be tested and empirically validated...
