Our Time

Understanding Our Time

by Terry Boardman

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Bewilderment is widespread today. It is commonly recognised that modern society is experiencing a major crisis that is economic, ecological, political and cultural. We seem to be facing one of those major nodes of significant shift in history that have occurred in former times such as at the end of the Roman Empire c.300, the end of the Middle Ages c.1500, the emergence of the national and 'natural scientific' state c.1650, the revolutionary epoch c.1800, or the First World War. Confusion is commonplace at such times, and solutions seem hard to find. How can we make sense of what is going on? The question could also be posed as: how can we find our bearings by understanding where we are in our story?

Conventional views of history do not help us much; embedded within a mainstream natural scientific worldview, they condemn us to a random position in both space and time: our Earth is a beautiful but insignificant speck in the Universe and is bound merely for an ultimate 'heat death'. Compared to the astronomical wonders revealed to us by technological marvels like the Hubble telescope, all our cultural achievements and our human relationships have little or no significance. Our lives are equally random happenings that occur only once. After death there is nothing except the return of our ashes or corpses to the material Earth. Philosophically then, all is an absurdity, ultimately quite meaningless; existence is a comedy show, and all we can do is 'have a laugh', as the English might put it. Certainly, there is no sense in our western culture's religion and the calendar based on it. The second millennium that we celebrated just 9 years ago is seen as a convenient fiction, nothing more. 2009 is held to be but a number.

From such a bleak philosophical perspective, which its adherents like to think of as existentially 'heroic', it is indeed hard to make sense of what is going on at present. We move on merely one step at a time into the darkness of the future out of a dimly lit past with only the little candle of our intellect, which was lit by the beginning of natural science just 400 years ago, to illuminate the vast darkness. The position of those who adhere to the conventional, western secular humanist outlook on life as represented by our mainstream media is akin to that of the British soldiers in the Great War who sang: "we're 'ere because we're 'ere because we're 'ere because we're 'ere....", and cosmologists just add "and because there was a Big Bang." There would certainly seem to be more to the present crisis than just: "the bankers were too greedy, the politicians too lax, our industry too exploitative of Nature, and the terrorists too resentful of our freedoms", but in essence, that is all too often what conventional analysis boils down to.

By contrast to this tragi-comic bleakness, which reminds one rather of the dour weltanschauung of the pagan Anglo-saxons, the spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) offered a number of approaches by which we can understand the past in a way that helps us to make sense both of the present and also of intuitions about what may be coming towards us from the future. Some of these approaches Steiner was presenting anew, or recasting, for modern times; they belonged to the esoteric knowledge of previous eras. Other indications were his own contribution. Steiner made innumerable contributions that help us make sense of historical events, but seven major ones can be noted:

cont. @ Terry Boardman's website

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also: Pt.1 Terry Boardman intvw by Henrik Palmgren @ Red Ice Creations -mp3