What does it mean to will for the future of Earth as a living being? Chik Ying Chai and Jasmin Peschke share thoughts inspired by working together with the Michael Letter “The Task of Michael in the Sphere of Ahriman.” The third of three such dialogues held during the Agriculture Conference in Dornach, 2025.
Jasmin Peschke Welcome, Chik Ying. You are a gardener and artist, from Malaysia, working with communities there. I’m a nutritionist, responsible for the nutrition department in the Section for Agriculture in Dornach. Let’s start by looking at where we’ve come in this conference. The first step was from without to within, like breathing, where we take the outer world in and warm it to our own temperature, or with nutrition, where the outer world stimulates the inner process of digestion. The second step was to separate the outer from the inner, taking up what we need and discarding what we don’t. This is about judgment, and it requires a guiding principle. Now, in the third step, it’s about strengthening and maintaining our integrity, so going from the inner back to the outer, we can spread seeds and create new projects permeated by our spiritual essence and move into the future together.
Chik Ying Chai Thank you. Yes, this insight began with Rudolf Steiner’s description of human evolution where humankind descended from conscious awareness of spiritual beings to consciousness bound to the physical. Now we are on the threshold of regaining our relationship with spiritual beings, and we need to awaken not just individual will, but communal will.
JP And what does this mean? Awakening the will? When I’m awake, I can use my senses—I can consciously perceive what I observe. Using the properties of the soul in a free way is a question of nutrition. Nutrition today, and 100 years ago in Steiner’s time, no longer has the quality needed to stimulate the will for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge from ideas to action is no longer possible. But now, we can reconnect to the spiritual world out of free decision. This is the path of the will—an evolutionary path to the macrocosmos that makes the Earth’s future possible, through our work on Earth and our individual transformation.
Freedom and love are what we are striving for—that is the eternal in us. In the 1911 lectures in Prague on occult physiology, Rudolf Steiner said that the human’s mission on Earth is to transform inner warmth through our I into living empathy with all beings. So, this is about empathy, interest, mindfulness, and heartfelt affection. This is the right attitude to activate the will for the earth as a living being.
CYC We who work in Biodynamics know that through cultivating food, cooking, and eating, we touch the sun, the clouds, the worms, and the rhythms of Earth and heaven. From the living earth to plants to animals to humans, each step transforms the previous substance into something new. In the flux of tension and polarities, substance becomes increasingly spiritualized, artistic, and sublime. Light and darkness, wet and dry, summer and winter, growing and dying—when we behold potential in polarities, we build a space for Michael and an opportunity to develop independent will forces.
When we look at a work of art, the physical object is not the essence. It guides perception to its inner element. When we enter the Representative of Humanity sculpture qualitatively, a particular inner activity is required from us—a spiritual activity. As we develop a relationship to the form of this complex sculpture, we discover a motive that leads to new insights not just for art but for human life and the Earth.
It is this kind of quality and artistic work we would like to cultivate. In composting, for example, by interspersing layers of dry and green plant materials, cow dung, and soil, we give conscious care to carbon and nitrogen. We tap it with a fork for air penetration; we add preparations to support microbial diversity. Material from the farmscape goes through warming, digestion, secretion, regulation, heat, and moisture maintenance. When the compost is applied to the soil, nutrients are made available that heighten the plant’s sensitivity to rhythms and to balancing life processes. A perceptive living being then grows into the world, becoming healing food for humans and the earth. This beautiful metamorphosis and harmonizing can only occur through farmers or gardeners, in a will of transformation from perceiving to individualizing to maintaining. The timing, landscape, water, and soil structure all nourished and grew the plant. The farmer did it through attention: inwardly perceiving and practicing not through theory but through artistic imagination, bringing life processes to expression.
JP We look around and see so many problems. Much research has been done that can’t address these problems because this is a spiritual issue: the motive for action is not moral insight but egoism due to disconnectedness. Gustave Speth, former Chair of the UN Development Programme, said, “the top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.”1 As global spiritual leader and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh put it, “the way out is in.” Outer development must be complemented with an inner perspective.
CYC In Southeast Asia and Malaysia, like in many places, we face land degradation, loss of biodiversity, and pollution due to unsustainable farming practices. Biodynamic initiatives, such as the Jungle Family Movement, are converting monoculture oil palm plantations to agroforestry and intercropping systems. But we also run cross-disciplinary exchanges where farmers, producers, retailers, cooks, nutritionists, educators, and consumers are in dialogue. We cultivate new community through arts, farming activities, and food. We invite reflection through the calendar of the soul, which requires more will effort for us in the equatorial region because we have very few seasonal differences. We have communal meals and consider what foods enliven human soul life and consciousness. We pause to make a space for observing connection with ourselves and all beings that grace the food. Everyone contributes.
These are edited excerpts from the dialog held at the Agriculture Conference in Dornach, 2025. The entire conversation will be available on Goetheanum TV.
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