RECORDINGS OF PAST EVENTS HOSTED BY ASNYC
Dec 26, 2024 to Jan 6, 2025
Holy Nights 2024-2025
Dec 13, 2024
Sarah Dennehy: Mindful with Me: Connecting with Your Child through Daily Mindfulness
Mindfulness, or present moment awareness, can be referred to as a space – a space between thoughts, space for observation, the space between stimulus and response. The ability to take this intentional pause is cultivated through a consistent mindfulness practice. And although mindfulness provides numerous mental and physical benefits for both adults and children, slowing down and pausing is rarely promoted or valued.
Dec 6, 2024
Rev. Gisela Wielki: Making America Whole Again
May our feeling penetrate
To the centerpoint of our hearts,
And seek in love to unite itself
With human beings of like goals…
November 6, 2024
A Stunt Gal’s Inner Path: Balancing Timidity and
Foolhardiness, Striving toward Courage
with Lisa Dalton
October 26, 2024
Who Was Rudolf Steiner?
What is Biodynamic Agriculture
Ezra Sullivan moved to South America after high school in California to initiate an inquiry into the life of the human being and nature through meditation and agriculture. There he encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner, and upon returning to the United States after three years, he orientated his spiritual life toward Anthroposophy. The following nine years were focused mainly in the Pacific Northwest on biodynamic agriculture, nonprofit leadership, the intentional communities’ movement, and non-violent activism.
Mary Stewart Adams accepted the role of General Secretary for the Anthroposophical Society in America in 2023, serving both as the US representative to the worldwide anthroposophical community and as lead executive of the general council for the Society in the US. She is also host of NPR’s program, “The Storyteller’s Night Sky.”
October 26, 2024
Who Was Rudolf Steiner?
Rudolf Steiner: Narrator, Philosopher, Researcher
Aaron French, PhD, currently teaches in the religious studies masters’ program at the University of Erfurt in Germany and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. He received his doctorate in the study of religion, with an emphasis on science and technology studies. His writing on Max Weber, Rudolf Steiner and Modern Western Esotericism will be published this fall.
Saul Bellow, M.C. Richards and Rudolf Steiner
Nathaniel Williams, PhD, grew up in the Southeastern United States, studied painting, puppetry and anthroposophy in Switzerland and political theory at the University at Albany. He is the leader of the “Section for the Spiritual Striving of the Youth” at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, an independent college dedicated to contemplative approaches to knowledge.
October 20, 2024
Jesús Amadeo: FEAR
Many of us are aware of the verse, “For the Michaelic Age,” attributed to Rudolf Steiner and beginning as follows:
We must eradicate from the soul
All fear and terror of what comes towards humanity out of the future.
In this Michaelic age and in this Michaelmas season, the theme of fear, amidst an array of real terrors raging around us (warfare, climate-related disasters, political savagery, for starters), hardly needs to plead its relevance. Jesús Amadeo, co-class holder at Anthroposphy NYC, will introduce and lead a conversation on the theme of fear.
October 19, 2024
Kaspar Hauser and the Calendar of the Soul
Lecture by Richard Steel
September 28, 2024
Eugene Schwartz There and Back Again: Life Between Death and Rebirth
The Way There: In this first lecture, we will explore the experience of death and the first steps taken by the human soul after crossing the threshold of the spiritual world. What is the relationship of those on earth to the one who has died, and how does the newly excarnated being find its way into the vastness of the cosmos?
The Way Back: In this lecture we will learn of Steiner’s even more remarkable revelations about the soul’s descent into a new life. This journey will give us more insights concerning the relationship of the heavenly Hierarchies to human destiny.
September 21, 2024
Calendar of the Soul: Three lectures and a guided tour by Richard Steel
September 20, 2024
The Calendar of the Soul, A Deed of Rudolf Steiner for Our Time and Karl Kӧnig’s Illustrations
Lecture by Richard Steel
September 15, 2024
Rosette Sebasoni Making the Impossible Possible
Reconciliation after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
In 30 short years since one of the most devastating mass atrocities in history, Rwanda has made remarkable strides, offering lessons in post-conflict recovery for the rest of the world. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi left the country in shambles and its social fabric shredded.
Rosette Sebasoni, a genocide survivor herself, will speak to the challenges of the reconciliation process and its potential. For the past year, she has been collecting stories of reconciliation between ex-perpetrators and the families they harmed that will be published as a book in 2025, co-edited by Karuna’s former director Olivia Stokes Dreier.
Karuna Center for Peacebuilding has led multiple programs in Rwanda over the years. Its most recent collaboration, the USAID-funded Healing Our Communities: Promoting Social Cohesion in Rwanda program, combined joint trauma-healing for genocide survivors and ex-perpetrators, community and inter-generational dialogue, and village-based youth peace committees.
September 8, 2024
Andrew Wolpert Space, Time, and the Here and Now
The enormity of world events challenges our apparent powerlessness in the face of so much inhumanity. As part of our preparation for Michaelmas, awakening to the immense potential in our unfinished human evolution we can affirm our confidence and courage for the future. In his intuitive prescience, Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipated aspects that were central to Rudolf Seiner’s vision of the human being’s capacity for freedom. Rudolf Steiner’s pioneering spiritual research and visionary achievement as an artist serve to awaken us to our tasks to collaborate socially and creatively. Our cosmic origins and potential were manifest in the architecture, sculpture, and painting of the First Goetheanum, the tragic fire was transformative, and Rudolf Steiner’s undeterred resolve to realize his task came to renewed expression in the Foundation Stone Meditation that formed the core of the refounded Anthroposophical Society.
Robert McDermott: Dying and Returning
June 2, 2024
Robert McDermott, a former president of Anthroposophy NYC, is professor emeritus, Baruch College, CUNY, president emeritus and professor emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies, author of Steiner and Kindred Spirits (2021) and editor of The Essential Aurobindo and The New Essential Steiner. Speaking about his book in progress, Dying and Returning, Robert will discuss death and afterlife in world religions, in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner, and in near death experience research. Conversation will follow..
David Anderson: Geology and Mineralogy as World Breathing of Substance
Thursday, May 16, 2024
The COVID shutdowns led to the curtailing of David Anderson’s lecture series in 2020 with about four lectures not delivered. Picking up from that point, David will summarize essentials from the earlier material and continue in February (see below please) and March with examination of the polarity between calcium and silica. He will describe how the layers of rock are deposited from lower primal silica to upper calcium layers, making apparent that the solid earth, once an expanded living being that included all of the planets of our solar system, has now shrunken. The archetypal mineral, plant, animal, and human died and are now observable as the more or less dessicated compressed rocks which we now see. David will discuss specific minerals and their places in the evolutionary ordering of nature, illuminating Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on Mineral-Plant, Plant-Animal, and Animal-Human Beings. Previous Recording (On April 18): The metals were deposited by the seven planets as seeds within the earth (when the planets of the older inclusive Earth left for outer space). Further discussions will encompass the seven Metals and their mother planets: silver, copper, quicksilver, gold, iron and its siblings (nickel and cobalt), tin, and lead. Cyanide, aluminum and clay, antimony and the homunculus in alchemy. Basilius Valentinus. Sulphur and volcanoes. Sulphur and the milky Lemurian protein atmosphere. This Recording (On May 16): Volcanism, granite, porphyry, trachyte, basalt, lavas and meteors. The mineral composition of rocks. Feldspars and micas. The contribution of Metals to the colors of rocks. From the viewpoints of Embryology and Geology, Earth as a seed for the future.
David Anderson: Geology and Mineralogy as World Breathing of Substance
Thursday, April 18, 2024
The COVID shutdowns led to the curtailing of David Anderson’s lecture series in 2020 with about four lectures not delivered. Picking up from that point, David will summarize essentials from the earlier material and continue in February (see below please) and March with examination of the polarity between calcium and silica. He will describe how the layers of rock are deposited from lower primal silica to upper calcium layers, making apparent that the solid earth, once an expanded living being that included all of the planets of our solar system, has now shrunken. The archetypal mineral, plant, animal, and human died and are now observable as the more or less dessicated compressed rocks which we now see. David will discuss specific minerals and their places in the evolutionary ordering of nature, illuminating Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on Mineral-Plant, Plant-Animal, and Animal-Human Beings. This Recording (On April 18): The metals were deposited by the seven planets as seeds within the earth (when the planets of the older inclusive Earth left for outer space). Further discussions will encompass the seven Metals and their mother planets: silver, copper, quicksilver, gold, iron and its siblings (nickel and cobalt), tin, and lead. Cyanide, aluminum and clay, antimony and the homunculus in alchemy. Basilius Valentinus. Sulphur and volcanoes. Sulphur and the milky Lemurian protein atmosphere. Next Recording (On May 16): Volcanism, granite, porphyry, trachyte, basalt, lavas and meteors. The mineral composition of rocks. Feldspars and micas. The contribution of Metals to the colors of rocks. From the viewpoints of Embryology and Geology, Earth as a seed for the future.
March 25, 2024 to March 29, 2024
Conversations for Holy Week 2024
Resurrection from individual human life to the life of the universe — this is the call that echoes in our hearts from the spiritual bells of Easter. And when we hear these bells, all doubt of the reality of the spiritual world will vanish from us and the certainty will dawn that no material death can harm us at all. For we are caught up again into life in the Spirit when we understand the message of the spiritual bells of Easter. – R. Steiner
10 April 1909, Cologne
David Anderson: Geology and Mineralogy as World Breathing of Substance
Thursday, March 14, 2024
The COVID shutdowns led to the curtailing of David Anderson’s lecture series in 2020 with about four lectures not delivered. Picking up from that point, David will summarize essentials from the earlier material and continue in February (see below please) and March with examination of the polarity between calcium and silica. He will describe how the layers of rock are deposited from lower primal silica to upper calcium layers, making apparent that the solid earth, once an expanded living being that included all of the planets of our solar system, has now shrunken. The archetypal mineral, plant, animal, and human died and are now observable as the more or less dessicated compressed rocks which we now see. David will discuss specific minerals and their places in the evolutionary ordering of nature, illuminating Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on Mineral-Plant, Plant-Animal, and Animal-Human Beings.
David Anderson: Geology and Mineralogy as World Breathing of Substance
Thursday, February 15, 2024
The COVID shutdowns led to the curtailing of David Anderson’s lecture series in 2020 with about four lectures not delivered. Picking up from that point, David will summarize essentials from the earlier material and continue in February (see below please) and March with examination of the polarity between calcium and silica. He will describe how the layers of rock are deposited from lower primal silica to upper calcium layers, making apparent that the solid earth, once an expanded living being that included all of the planets of our solar system, has now shrunken. The archetypal mineral, plant, animal, and human died and are now observable as the more or less dessicated compressed rocks which we now see. David will discuss specific minerals and their places in the evolutionary ordering of nature, illuminating Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on Mineral-Plant, Plant-Animal, and Animal-Human Beings.
March 15, 2023
from Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
Anthroposophical meditation is a path that takes everyday experience as a starting point. Through it we can accelerate this natural developmental process. Rudolf Steiner identifies those aspects of everyday consciousness “hidden” in plain sight that have developmental potential when activated.
Robert McKay introduces us to key elements of this process described by Rudolf Steiner.
February 18, 2023
Earthly and Cosmic Nutrition, Branko Furst, MD
What nourishes us in the foods we eat? Conventional nutrition science analyses the caloric value, mineral and vitamin content. However, food’s vitality and dynamic properties are hardly recognized. Yet it is these qualities which define food’s true nutritional value. Plants are autotrophic or self-feeding in that they assimilate water and minerals from the ground and convert sunlight by means of the green pigment, the chlorophyll, into carbohydrates, proteins, and oils. In contrast, animals and humans derive their sustenance indirectly from plants in the process of digestion. In addition, the peculiar nature of animal and human organs and tissues calls for the presence of cosmic forces that enter through the breath and the senses. Thus, two nutritional streams meet in humans and animals, earthly and cosmic. Branko Furst will discuss the essential nature of these parallel physiological processes as well as their importance for the mutual evolution of the earth and humanity.
Branko Furst, M.D., retired recently from his academic career as a professor of medicine (in anesthesiology) at Albany Medical College, Albany, NY. His lifelong research interest has been the bridging of the conventional and anthroposophical understanding of the human being. He has authored several peer reviewed articles and a monograph The Heart and Circulation – An Integrative Model, currently in its 2nd edition:https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-25062-1.
He has lectured on anthroposophical themes and aspects of circulation to professional and lay audiences in the US and internationally. He resides in Kinderhook, NY and is an active member of the Hawthorne Valley community.
December 11, 2022
The Stars Spoke Once to Man
Christmas will be the 100-year anniversary of when Rudolf Steiner gave Marie Steiner the verse “The Stars Spoke Once to Man.” Mary will speak to how this verse is the precedent to the Foundation Stone Meditation.
About the Presenter
Mary Stewart Adams is a Star Lore Historian and the host of the weekly public radio podcast The Storyteller’s Night Sky. In 2011 she established one of the world’s first International Dark Sky Parks, and in 2021 published the book The Star Tales of Mother Goose. Mary met the work of Rudolf Steiner simultaneous to encountering ancient star wisdom in the 1980s, which was galvanized into a life path through encounter with astrosopher Hazel Straker in 1995.
June 1, 2022
Listening to Plants — Lessons from Violets
presented by Joanna Gabler
Humanity today is standing on the threshold between the visible and invisible with newly acquired consciousness. With an adequate approach and willingness to persevere, there is a possibility to awaken in the soul this ability to communicate with plants in a new way.
Joanna Gabler, philosopher by education, artist and herbalist by vocation and biophiliac by nature, shares her own experiences of connecting with Nature and possible paths/exercises to develop that capacity. She also shares related lessons that she has received from the spirit plant/Deva of violets blossoming abundantly in her yarden (yard/garden).
May 5, 2022
Understanding the Slavic Soul — A Primer for Westerners
Despite the seemingly uniform, homogenous processes of global interdependence and standardization, there exist profound differences in Western Anglo-Saxon and Eastern Slavic perceptions of soul-spiritual and cultural values. The East-Slavic peoples carry a special quality, one characterized by Rudolf Steiner as “oneness of soul,” that is in actuality a seed for humanity’s development in the next epoch.
Serguei Krissiouk sheds light on the underlying currents at play here. He will draw on Rudolf Steiner’s insights presented in his lectures GA 158 “The balance in the world and man, Lucifer and Ahriman” and GA 113 “The East in the light of the West.”
Match 17, 2022
Ahriman On Stage
Eurythmist Brigida Baldszun speaks about how we can learn to recognize Ahriman, and shares her experience representing Ahriman on stage.
Brigida’s inspirations on this theme come from her ten years of study and experience as a eurythmist portraying Ahriman on stage in Rudolf Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas. She draws also from Steiner’s other descriptions of this powerful spiritual being who embodies information, fragmentation, hardening, and materiality.
Apr 15, 2022
The Easter Verse from Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul
Eugene Schwartz, Mary Stewart Adams, Fred Dennehy and Richard Steel share their meditations and pondering on the Easter Verse (Verse #1) from Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, followed by conversation and questions.
March 24, 2022
War in Ukraine – a Ukrainian Anthroposophist’s view
Serguei Krissiouk
War upended the normal, peaceful life in Ukraine on the morning of February 24th, 2022. Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine. The inception of this war shook the world and deeply compromised global peace and security. No one can remain indifferent to the overwhelming human suffering and immense destruction caused by this ongoing war.
While this conflict seems to be completely unprovoked and sudden, there were certain events and processes that had led to the ultimate disaster. This war is not a local conflict anymore, and it can spill into a more serious confrontation between countries and continents.
What are the historical, geopolitical, cultural, social, and even deep spiritual causes of this conflict? If we do not attempt to examine them in depth and in detail, we risk missing important symptoms of the current global situation and perhaps opportunities to prevent it from happening in the future. Ignorance is no longer an option. During discussion of this important and painfully urgent subject, we will draw on insights from Rudolf Steiner’s lecture series “The Karma of Untruthfulness” and “Evil and the Future of Man.”
Bio/ Serguei Krissiouk is an anthroposophically trained physician currently involved in research and therapeutic work with chronically ill children, a clinical homeopathic practitioner, translator, and musician.
Match 3, 2022
Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and the Destiny of America
presented by Karl Fredrickson
Venus, Mars and Pluto come into conjunction in the Archer on March 3rd. (Jonathan Hilton)
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” (Abraham Lincoln, December 10, 1862)
“Again and again we need to be really clear in our minds that the present time is literally challenging us every hour, indeed every minute, to wake up. Anthroposophy as a science of the spirit can only be understood by those who are able to grasp that humanity is being asked to make a clear decision. Either the spirit is understood or the chaos continues.” (Rudolf Steiner, Michaelmas, 1917 in Dornach)
Those Michaelmas words spoken by Rudolf Steiner have as much significance for today as they did for 1917–and for what transpired during the momentous years of 1861-1865 in America. (Karl Fredrickson)
What follows is Karl Frederickson’s re-recording of the presentation he gave at ASNYC on March 3, 2022.
Feb 24, 2022
Resonant Unfolding: The Life Cycle of the Plant and Human Inner Development
Presented by Tom Altgelt
Both the life cycle of a plant and our path of inner development can come alive for us as analogous reflections of each other. Pondering them together, we can experience practical spiritual truths about both the unfolding of our inner life and the outer rhythmical manifestations of etheric formative forces. In this online meeting Tom Altgelt shares how Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul brings this alive for us in the fluidic symbol of the lemniscate, where the inner and outer alternate with each other. He describes how in the cycle of the year, Fall and Winter are related to the phase of soul preparation, Spring to the phase of Illumination and Summer to Initiation.
Tom Altgelt, award-winning landscape architect, is the co-founder and co-host of Front Range Anthroposophical Café (https://frontrangeanthrocafe.org/).
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February 19, 2022
Conversation on Conflict and Dissension
Introduced and moderated by Jesús Amadeo
If we rely on the news to create a world view, it may come across that conflict, dissension, and discord are more visible now than a decade or two ago. Where do conflict and dissension come from? Can we be sure our beliefs and ideas are really our own and not just the result of influences arising from how we grew up, our education, societal expectations, family and friends, or our own limited experiences? Are we able to reach a state of being where for a few moments we suspend these influences, and in so doing, be able to discern which ideas and thoughts are truly ours? How can a heightened awareness of the above change the nature of our conversations and discussions on sensitive topics?
In a Zoom only meeting, Jesús Amadeo explores how ideas, thoughts, thought forms, thinking, spiritual forces and influences affect us, and facilitates a conversation on this theme.
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Anthroposophy NYC: Holy Nights 2021-2022
(December 25-January 6)
At this time of year with the shortest duration of outer light, the new inner light emerges—represented in our remarkably varied Holy Nights line-up of speakers and themes.
Speakers include: include Lucas Dreier, Michael Vode, Fred Dennehy, Paul Lynch, Larry Young, Gisela Wielki, Joyce Reilly, Jonathan Hilton — Olivia Dreier’s was not recorded.
Michaelmas Celebration
Friday, October 1st 2021
A conversation and pondering on the Michaelmas Mood verse (verse #26) from Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul with Mary Stewart Adams, Fred Dennehy, Herbert Hagens and Eugene Schwartz.
“One of the greatest mysteries of the passage of the seasons in the course of the year lies in its character as a living organism,” wrote Sergei Prokofieff in The Cycle of the Seasons and the Seven Liberal Arts. Prokofieff also noted Rudolf Steiner’s characterization of Michael as the guiding spirit of humanity whose “principal function from the earliest beginnings has been to govern the cosmic intelligence.”