Where do we experience moments of “dying and being reborn”? In what situations have we been struck by a sense of resurrection? How does this experience arise in consciousness? Several Section leaders at the Goetheanum share brief reflections on moments, often quite personal, when they have gone through such experiences.
Sonja Zausch, Bart Vanmechelen, Jan Göschel
Self-Efficacy as Resurrection Force
Resurrection is experienced wherever I sense the connection between the physical-sensory world and the spiritual world. Here is an account of our experiences working together in areas of growth and development, and in doing so, experiencing self-efficacy as a force of resurrection.
The first phenomenon: connecting with the world. A small child playing in a crib hears his mother working in the kitchen. After several attempts, he manages to pull himself up and stand upright for the first time. Moving in search of balance, the child feels the Earth’s support beneath his feet, and a whole new perspective on the world opens up. He beams with joy. He experiences himself consciously, fully present, having arrived on Earth. A connection between heaven and Earth is established.
The second phenomenon: connecting with others. A person with a physical disability cannot stand without assistance. The eurythmy therapist makes conscious, enlivened gestures of how to stand upright and open oneself to the world. She encourages this person. He focuses his attention on the therapist and inwardly lives with the gestures, posture, and intentions she expresses. Through closeness and collaboration, trust and courage arise. He can empathize inwardly and feels empowered to imitate her movement. Through the therapist’s encouraging words, he feels seen and accepted just as he is. In full devotion to the shared practice, connection, motivation, and new strength emerge. Fully conscious and joyful, he looks at the therapist with gratitude. Spiritual presence arises in the social space of the therapeutic moment. In the therapist’s imagination, an image forms of a possible next developmental step. Through inspiration, the therapist becomes attentive to the movements that can make the next step possible. And through intuition, she consciously experiences how they can continue practicing together.
The third phenomenon: connecting with our ideals. During our team’s annual peer-reflection (intervision) meeting, we reflect on the experiences of the past year. Through conversation, we build a shared understanding based on the observations and questions raised during our many interactions with colleagues. Team members listen empathetically, ask clarifying questions, and refrain from passing judgment. Together, we seek out what is essential and what insights we have gained. The intervision facilitator serves as an involved outside witness, observing with inner distance while immersing herself in the process. Her feedback shows that she has perceived yet another level. As we describe the process, a space emerges where vulnerabilities can also be shared. Through our shared perception, it becomes clear what we can incorporate into our team development to enhance our collaboration. A new awareness of direction emerges. Our shared goals become more tangible and more unifying. As a result, warmth, courage, and trust can thrive within our agreements and plans, allowing our inner strength—and the joy in shaping and realizing our ideals together—to flow into their implementation.
Eduardo Rincón
Crossing the River
One day in April, when I was nine years old, my school took us on a field trip to a park near a forest. Feeling curious and energetic, I convinced two friends to slip away from the group and explore the forest with me. We followed a path into a deep ravine and passed a group of Boy Scouts climbing out, warning us not to go down to the river. They called it “the Devil’s Ravine.” Thinking they were joking, we kept going. The path narrowed along a steep drop. I was fooling around and slipped toward the edge. I caught myself on some plants, only then realizing how high the drop was. But my grip gave way and I fell nine meters [29.5 ft.] onto the riverbed below.
I briefly lost consciousness and woke up disoriented, lying on my back. I heard my friends calling that the teachers were coming, and a Boy Scout shouted instructions for me to walk along the riverbed to a place where they could pull me out. When I stood, I realized my legs were badly hurt, but I managed to cross the small river and limp along the base of the ravine until I reached a spot where people above lowered belts tied together. They pulled me out and I was taken straight to the hospital.
I had badly injured both of my legs; one of my knees required surgery. For a time afterward, I depended on a wheelchair. It took months before I could walk again. But the deeper change was not physical. From that moment on, life felt different. The world no longer seemed the same, as though something essential had shifted out of place. I began to see life and death differently. I believe that was when I stopped being a small boy.
Without realizing it, I had crossed a kind of personal Rubicon, a point of no return. It felt like a fall from grace, abrupt and disorienting. The veil had been lifted too suddenly, leaving me with a sense of separation from the world and from others that I had never known before. The experience was shocking, and it took me years to come to terms with it.
Yet there was something else in that moment, something harder to explain. It felt as though I had glimpsed something beyond the ordinary, as if a door had opened before me. I have a clear sense that I chose not to step through it—I was afraid then. Even now, I find myself returning to that moment, wondering where that path might have led. It has become an integral part of my ongoing inner journey and a fundamental aspect of my research. In the years that followed, I faced other near-death experiences, each one leaving its mark and shaping the course of my life.
Vesna Forštnerič Lesjak
Life Takes Away to Give More
During my first lunar node and for several years afterward, I experienced “death” very intensely. It began with the loss of a friendship with someone very dear to me who played a key role in my life. I also experienced “death” in relation to myself, grappling intensely with the shadow sides of my own personality and consciously trying to transform them so these shadows would not tear me down. And at the same time, I experienced “death” in what had been closest to my heart—in science. The outer Vesna who loved the outer world of science was crumbling, while the inner Vesna was striving to be born—a Vesna who wanted to discover a higher purpose, a deeper meaning, and the light of true knowledge within science. The climax occurred one day during a lecture in pharmacognosy. We were learning about tannins in oak bark and writing down their structural forms. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what an oak looked like—let alone its bark. The feeling of alienation from the real world and the beings within it deepened with each day until it became a dark abyss. So I went to the park to consciously encounter an oak. It was special—“devouring” it with my eyes, observing it, and touching its bark and leaves. I sensed that behind this form of appearance stood and lived a distinct living being. “Goetheanism” was born within me as if of its own accord and, with it, an interest in the world. A slow “resurrection” began and built over the years with great courage and activity; it has continued to this day. It is based on expanding one’s own personality toward an understanding of a larger world that does not exclude the self but does not make it the top priority either. It is also based on the development and use of one’s own strengths and abilities for taking small steps in the world.
The special human beings I have encountered over the years—like angels and guides who appear at just the right moment and who, each in their own way, have introduced me to the waters of anthroposophy and Goethean science—are building this path of resurrection together with me. At home with my family, we are very aware of the blessings that come with a broader and deeper view of the world and of ourselves—the Christ impulse that can be born in each of us and which we can also speak about openly and honestly with one another.
I had not heard from the person who shaped my life and my path during my first lunar node for a good sixteen years. Occasionally, I wanted to get in touch, wrote a letter or an email, but never received a reply. Nevertheless, I believed that life would bring that person back to me in some form, even if it was not in this lifetime—especially if I embraced the whole world and life itself, so that even that special person could not escape my vast embrace. Indeed, shortly before my second lunar node, at the very moment I took on my role within the Natural Science Section, life brought this person back in a very complex way, just when they had nearly lost the meaning of their own life.
Resurrection becomes real when you die to yourself. The more you succeed in doing so, the greater the resurrection can be. For me, this resurrection is relatively small, but I am aware of it, and it shines like a powerful lighthouse, even when the sea is dark and stormy.
Stefan Hasler
Easter Motif
The path from death to life, from Good Friday to the Easter Mystery, is the central theme that Richard Wagner artistically brings to life in his stage-consecrating festival-play Parsifal. Transformation is a fundamental motif in both the story of Parsifal and Richard Wagner’s musical composition. Therefore, transformation is the fundamental motif of our production of Parsifal at the Goetheanum. The task of integrating eurythmy into the staging of this opera has undergone numerous metamorphoses—a true process of transformation.
As eurythmists, we are accustomed to seeking out a work of speech or music that seems suitable for our art, working with it, and presenting it in the best possible way. Singers are accustomed to telling a story and creating dialogue for that purpose. Eurythmists tend toward the imaginative; singers tend toward action.
At the end of the third act, a dove appears as a symbol of transfiguration, redemption, and union with the divine-spiritual. My inner image of this scene was shaped by the force that comes from heaven behind this dove—a symbol of the Holy Spirit—accompanied by Wagner’s wonderful melodies, which resonate from one key to the next as if from beyond. We wanted to move this eurythmically through the space in such a way that the image arises in the viewer of something actually coming down from above and causing the space to resound. The task was thus to create a kind of etheric stream capable of expressing this experience. This scene is one of the quietist and most still in the entire work. All striving, all tensions, all entanglements are resolved—Parsifal has found the Grail; Amfortas is freed from his suffering; Kundry is redeemed; the Knights of the Grail are reunited under the new king; the work is accomplished.
The staging also needs to radiate this moment of greatest stillness and quiet. Instead of the eurythmy described above, guided by powerful movement, we found a single gesture to express this quiet inwardness: The entire group of eurythmists gathers with folded hands, turned outward and open at the top, so that an imaginary dove is perceived as if hovering above the center. The power emanating from the periphery becomes a kind of center that unites all other centers around itself: the Knights of the Grail, the eurythmists performing the Grail and Spear, etc. The grace-bestowing power descending from heaven is thus given a reception and the spirit is made tangible. The eurythmic movement in space becomes imaginable precisely because it is not performed or moved. Yet the personal, individual connections to this event do come into view, expressed by the choir singers and the soloists.
Richard Wagner sets this event on Good Friday, the day on which the light of Easter falls. I experience this intensification as a process of complete inversion. What was previously valid, even in terms of artistic means of expression, no longer applies. I cannot fall back on the familiar or on what I have already mastered. During the rehearsals, this realization initially came as a shock to us. It brought to mind once again that the task we had set for ourselves—to incorporate eurythmy into an opera and to collaborate with director Jasmin Solfaghari to our mutual satisfaction—required something entirely different and, at the same time, made it possible. Thus, the image of the descending dove became a transformation for me: I had to let go of the familiar, experience powerlessness, and approach the task anew, so that ultimately something new could be created.
Karin Michael
Through the Storm
In March 2001, we spent eight days in the Northern Urals on a ski trek from Vorkuta to Sobj. Five of us undertook my first crossing of the European-Asian border on old Russian skis, each pulling a sled loaded with provisions, sleeping bags, and gear. On the first evening, we stood spellbound before the northern lights at the 67th parallel. After that, the weather turned; on the third day, a heavy storm broke out toward evening. The terrain is flat, and there was no shelter from the wind. To secure the tent, we drove our skis into the snow to serve as tent pegs. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the swelling howl of the storm. Our guide Sascha sat hunched under the tent pole, which could no longer withstand the wind. (From then on, he heroically continued hiking with his back bent like that.)
By morning, it had grown quiet. We crawled out of the tent and assessed the damage. Three skis had snapped, fortunately behind the bindings. Now I understood the advantage of old wooden skis: Sascha sawed off the back of the skis, and we set off again.
After three hours, it grew dark prematurely, and now we learned what a truly severe storm in the tundra means. After a hurried trip outdoors to relieve myself, I took off a glove to zip up properly again. The little finger of my right hand turned white in a matter of seconds. The numbness subsided only gradually after six weeks. Worse still, a colleague ventured too far without gloves, lost her bearings in the storm, and Sascha found her just in time—preventing frostbite by sheer luck, not just on her hands.
We had to interrupt our journey for the day and build a protective wall. Using a sharp metal plate, we cut blocks from the hard snow and built a wall. Just as it was high enough to begin setting up the tent behind it, the wind knocked it to the ground. We started over. After several more hours—night had come—the tent was up, and we were hungry and exhausted. Sasha answered our anxious question of how long this storm might last with a shrug. We became very quiet. Despite our massive down jackets, the cold crept under our skin. It was about fifteen degrees below zero (5°F). No one removed any clothes that night. Only our shoes were placed at the foot of the outer group of sleeping bags (where they remained frozen solid anyway). Our second, personal sleeping bag barely generated any warmth at all.
We were now four days’ march from Vorkuta, and half the distance to our destination still lay ahead of us. How many days could we last in these conditions? Would we freeze to death here? Our youngest traveling companion was crying. I wrote a few more lines in my travel journal under the light of my flashlight while in my sleeping bag—somehow prepared to die. We fell asleep, knowing that in the cold, one is more likely to freeze to death while sleeping.
The next morning, the sun shone brightly. In the distance, the hills of the Urals had come into view. The white world was incredibly beautiful, and deep within me, a profound gratitude arose for another stretch of life and a survived adventure.
Nathaniel Williams
The New Pegasus
The movie theater was constructed out of sandstone that had been quarried from the mountain on which it stood, as had many of the buildings on the college campus. Although it was primarily for the students, residents in the area could also attend the screenings—that included me. I remember leaving the dark theater after the show, walking out through the two metal doors into the night. There was a streetlight near the exit and some hedges along the walk. I had the impression that there was no air between the leaves of the bushes. The space around me had the quality of a vacuum, an epitome of emptiness. It was 1989, around my tenth year.
In March of 2026, I walked out of a dark theater after participating in a screening of the New Pegasus Project. It was a brisk day. I was met by a spray of small white blossoms on a tree. Beside the path, limestone emerged between moss and brown leaves from the year before. The mottled areas of green-grey and white on one stone stopped me in my tracks with their beauty. Between all the colored surfaces, I felt life. Images and pictures are an essential part of human life.
The impression from around my tenth year—one I came to recognize repeatedly—related to film and cinema: a world of moving pictures conjured on a screen through automatic projection devices. Four decades later, with hyperautomation—or so-called “artificial intelligence”—I can generate an astonishing variety of images and videos on a screen using the simplest commands. Developing The New Pegasus Project has, in a certain sense, involved turning the magic of the automated screen on its head. I have been working on instruments that respond to the smallest movements of the artist while at the same time allowing real-time control over color, movement, form, and brightness. While powerful new technologies allow me to produce highly detailed and complex images in a moment—with little or no effort on my part—the “light horses” offer images that depend on sensitivity, skill, inspiration, and my creativity in the moment. Over the last five months, working artistically with these instruments, my experience of physiological colors has intensified, leading to a kind of thickening of my sense of sight and imagination. This has also affected the visual elements of my dreams and contemplative life. Working with young people, I know that media and screen hygiene is an important topic, and I sense that live screen instruments and corresponding art forms could make up an essential facet of how to balance automated motion pictures with creative, living pictures.
More at youthsection.org.
Peter Selg
I Am for Going Ahead . . .
During my medical studies, I worked on a history of the development of Rudolf Steiner’s statements on human physiology, drawing on all the books in his Collected Works. I sought to discover how he had arrived at his extraordinary perspectives and how they had evolved over the years. It was an intensive study; I borrowed books from libraries, photocopied many of them, and wrote out the excerpts by hand, later using a typewriter. During my “clinical rotation” at Berlin’s Charité, I was able to borrow the Collected Works from the library of the Steiner House on Bernadottestrasse and carry them to the eastern part of the city (Prenzlauer Berg). I read, thought, and wrote. Eventually, after my daily clinical work, I had no energy to grasp the larger picture and details.
I wondered how Steiner’s listeners at the time had absorbed the abundance of these highly complex presentations, clarified them for themselves, and internalized them. What had they been able to make of it? Did the ideas live in them? Did they see their morphological connections? I took a break and began to study the biographies of these listeners; they were fascinating accounts of first encounters with anthroposophy, even though my actual question regarding their understanding of the material—regarding hermeneutics—remained largely unanswered.
At the library, having reached the end of the “Pioneers of Anthroposophy” series and the other “disciples’” biographies, I inquired about Ita Wegman, who, as is well known, had written a book with Steiner. But the librarian refused to speak of her at all. Puzzled, I went on, unaware of what lay ahead, but found three brand-new volumes in a Berlin bookstore: Who Was Ita Wegman: A Documentation. Thus, I came into contact with Emanuel Zeylmans van Emmichoven, her biographer. A long and deep friendship began. He kept her entire estate at his home. In the course of our many conversations, he eventually asked me if I wouldn’t like to continue working on it. But during one of my next visits, all the files were gone. He had decided, together with the Ita Wegman estate administration, to transfer all the material to the University Library of Basel (Manuscripts Department), a “safe place,” as he put it. I couldn’t believe it.
Time passed. In early summer 2001, Michaela Glöckler asked me if I would be willing to give three evening lectures on Ita Wegman at the Annual Medical Conference, in the Great Hall of the Goetheanum. My first books had been published, including the extensive work on human physiology. I called Emanuel—what should I do? “Speak!” he said. “But how?” I asked, “I can’t just go on about what you’ve been working on!” “Then go to the university library and keep working!” Easy for him to say, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I took three days off and drove there with my heart pounding. The files were in the basement corridors. I wheeled them into the reading room on a little cart, found important things in the short time I had, but also overheard a conversation between library staff in broad Swiss German about the woman from Arlesheim who had had a hard time with Steiner’s widow. That’s the extent of what they thought they understood; it seemed disgraceful to me.
On the last day, I discovered notebooks by Steiner and Wegman lying in banana boxes on the shelves and felt desperate. By chance, I then learned that Wegman’s estate did not yet definitively belong to the university library; there was still a withdrawal period that was about to expire! I spoke with the estate administrators and the hospital administration in Arlesheim and was given rooms in the wooden house; then everything happened very quickly. September 11, 2001, arrived, and with the attacks in New York, the world stood on the brink of a new war. The medical conference began without our colleagues from the U.S., and fear was everywhere. Four days after the Twin Towers disaster, amid this tension, at a null point, the focus in the Great Hall turned to Ita Wegman and the uplifting courage to heal. Shortly thereafter, her estate returned to Arlesheim, for further work that would lead into the future.
Philipp Reubke
What Is the Upper Hand?
I, too, want to be right all the time. I, too, feel a certain satisfaction when I believe that, by standing up for what is right, I am on the side of good. And when circumstances give me the upper hand, I am glad to stand up for what is right. Decades ago, I thought my rightful claim was to obtain custody of my four children. After all, I believed I had done everything possible to ensure that the partnership with the children’s mother could continue harmoniously. After all, it was clear that she did not want that. After all, as a teacher, I believed I had the full competence and motivation for it and I could prove that I had always taken on a larger share of the household responsibilities.
I had the upper hand because I had a friend, also a father, whose son was in my kindergarten class, and who was a lawyer specializing in family law. One day after lunch at his home, I brought up the subject and asked if he could offer me professional support in this matter. I was absolutely certain: He’s my friend. He’s exactly the right person. He’ll do it. It didn’t take him long to give me his opinion. And what he said shook all my rational and moral certainties, my interpretation of my behavior over the past years, and even my plans for the future. “As a lawyer, I’d tell you: Of course, I’ll take the case, and we have a good chance of winning the trial. But as a friend, I’ll tell you: Don’t go to court over what matters most to you. My experience as a lawyer has shown me that everyone who’s done that has harmed not only their children but also themselves. Right now, it doesn’t bother you to hurt the children’s mother. But even with a little thought, you could see that deep down, you don’t really want that either. My advice as a friend makes my professional advice superfluous: Accept everything the children’s mother wants. Work with a professional mediator who can help you both talk sensibly again about everything concerning the children. I guarantee you, in a few years, you’ll be able to care for the children as much as you want again, and everyone involved will be much better off than they are now. But if you engage in a legal battle, you’ll all suffer setbacks and sustain far more wounds. It will take you much longer to regain control of your lives. The legal battle won’t solve any of your problems. It will prevent you from truly working through your difficulties and growing. A legal battle always leads to the illusion that the root of the problems lies solely with one side. Yet the reasons for differences are always found on both sides.”
It was a bitter pill to accept. I had imagined this conversation for so long and expected a different outcome. A house where I’d felt at home collapsed. Letting go to make growth possible, and doing so in relation to my children—I certainly wouldn’t have been able to manage that back then without my work at the kindergarten, without the bubbling, joyful life that I got to help shape every day. Then, everything turned out just as my friend had foreseen. We worked with a mediator for about two years; the children lived with me for many years, and today the children’s mother and I can celebrate family gatherings and Christmas together and discuss our concerns about the grandchildren.
I would not be sharing this personal story here if I did not feel that people like my friend from back then are the ones who urgently need to be heard today, so that we can break free from humanity’s terrible spiral of violence.
Ueli Hurter
The Horn Manure Preparation: Death and Resurrection
The beautiful meadow, gone: eaten; the flowers, herbs, grasses—the summer bloom, coaxed from the soil by the sun—completely gone: eaten by the cows. It must have tasted heavenly. There they lie, chewing it again; the beautifully horned skulls swaying rhythmically and lightly with the chewing motions of the sated cows. The cosmically open vegetation has died into inner life, and as a result, after diligent ruminating, the cow dung lies on the pasture. Dead? No! The vegetative life force has risen again in astral-concentrated fertilizing power. A gift from the cow—not the “stupid cow,” as we tend to think, but the sacred, wise cow, as those of ancient India knew so well. Cow dung is a resurrection substance. The Earth, the soil, is refreshed by the power of this fertilizer, and many generations of rural people can find themselves; can have a sense of self-awareness shine within them; can become active, culturally active, culturally creative. What nature has given is elevated to an act of culture.
I take the cow dung and fill the horn of the departed cow with it. What is separated in nature, here comes together. What lies in the pasture, ready to be transformed into a common life through the natural process, is concentrated in the horn through the work of my hands. The cow horn now becomes the horn of the Earth organism. I bury it in the winter earth. And the cow horn concentrates the Earth’s waking winter life within its dung. In winter, the Earth is awake, even as it rests in its life processes. This wakefulness, this power of crystallization, this subterranean light in the depths of winter, permeates the dung within the buried horn.
What has thus died away from the senses rises again in spring when the horns are dug up and emptied. Spiritual manure flows from the horns into our hands—horn manure. Now comes the moment of application. The soil awakens. The seed is ready to be sown. Heavenly seed is sown into Mother Earth. Van Gogh’s Sower strides across the field. Where does the mysterious light that the painter sees in the Earth come from? It is the power of resurrection that has now, after two thousand years, arrived in the Earth; in the earthly realm; in the fields, the farmyards, among the farmers. And they join in the great event. The horn manure is added to the water and stirred for an hour. With my hand, my arm, my physical strength, I create a clockwise vortex. I stop the movement; the water swirls. Then the turning begins counterclockwise until the vortex is complete. Then again the moment of chaos in the water; then clockwise . . . and so on, rhythmically for an hour. Once more, “Die and be reborn!” All the power transfers from the horn manure to the water. Then I spray it onto the Earth, the soil, before and after sowing for the joyful union of the seed of heaven and Mother Earth. It is the final death of the manure from the ancient world of wisdom and the resurrection of the power of growth from the future world of love. What takes place on a grand scale—death and resurrection in the etheric dimension of the Earth—we can witness on a small scale through the work of our hands and make real at every point on Earth.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Miriam Wahl, Place to be 1–7, gouache and acrylic on paper, 30 × 24 cm, 2024
Miriam Wahl lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Instagram _miriamwahl
