August 14-17, 2025
at The Threefold Community in Chestnut Ridge (Spring Valley) NY
Details For The Gathering
Anyone interested in engaging deeply with Rudolf Steiner’s work and the School for Spiritual Science is warmly invited to join with others seeking to understand and enliven the work of the School in North America.
Space, Time, and the Human Heart emerged out of the need and intention to encourage stronger mutual flow between the School for Spiritual Science in North America, given by Rudolf Steiner and as distilled in the 19 Class Lessons, and the Anthroposophical Society, the various vocational Sections, and, equally important, society at large.
Building on several years of convenings, this gathering continues the initiative of members of the School for Spiritual Science (General Anthroposophical Section). At the core of this co-creation is the notion that individual destiny, in relation to an anthroposophical path and through the practical work, is best cultivated in community. We will come together to cultivate a greater living connection to the work of the School while fostering a vibrant, open, and evolving community of practice: spiritual activity within a social field of engagement, reflection, and research.
The following passage gives a sense of what is being striven for in this gathering:
Does Anthroposophy have a future? This question seems to have been very much alive for Rudolf Steiner in the weeks leading up to the Christmas Foundation Meeting. Was it this question that inspired his decision to inaugurate the esoteric work of the School for Spiritual Science? He knew that it was only through an esoteric deepening that new life could flow into the spiritual work and allow anthroposophical practice to bear fruit in the world. Can we, in our work together, birth impulses capable of bringing new vitality to the School for Spiritual Science in North America? What are the inner and outer gestures of a truly modern esoteric path?
The conference organizing group includes: John Bloom, Catarina Burisch, Bert Chase, Oliver Conradt, Sarah Dunbar, Michael Hughes, Kim Hunter, Rudiger Janisch, Jon McAlice, Rubeena Sandhu, and Leah Walker.
Daily Artistic Attunement
To begin the day we will experience speech work led by Barbara Renold based on themes in Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation.
Social Art Circles
During this late morning session, we will explore a shared learning process formed around the call to the Human Soul to practice recalling, sensing,sensing, beholding, in relation to the morning and evening presentations. We will observe with scientific diligence, we will explore relatedness and bring it into a meditative essence—making space for images to arise, for the word to sound—and meet what is received. Moving toward artmaking, we will share, through four-fold seeing, our artistic experience with a partner. The process itself allows us individually and as a circle of researchers, to keep making discoveries: What is the quality of my seeing? Am I perceiving more deeply? How is our learning, our development mutual?
Listening Constellations
This session will take place each late afternoon during the gathering. The intention for the Listening Constellations is simply to create a space of listening to each other, to what our hearts are speaking to us and through us, that can lift up everyone’s experience of our time together. We will gather late each day in our respective constellations to listen to one another’s experiences and inquiries. No lectures, no agendas, no selling. The following ancient Brazilian adage seems apropos for these groups: “We each have two ears and one mouth; therefore, let us each listen twice as much as we speak.”
Choice Point Presentations
During the gathering there will be opportunities to share your spiritual research. We have two 30 minute blocks for research presentations, these could be divided into smaller blocks (2 – 15 minute blocks or even 3 – ten minute blocks, depending on who steps forward). If you are interested in sharing what you are working with, we offer this space. If you are wanting to present, please be in touch with Kim Hunter ahead of time at lotsofplaytime@gmail.com or in person at the conference.
Creative Collaboratoriums
These afternoon sessions are topically focused co-creative explorations. Unlike workshops or lectures, these collaboratoriums are intended as ongoing spiritual scientific research processes into what it means to generate or build experience together out of interest in the given topic, and in which each participant is both teacher and learner, scientist and artist.
Artistic Creativity and the Future Development of Humanity: A Research Project of the Visual Art Section in North America
“Art must become the lifeblood of the soul.”—Rudolf Steiner
Join us in this important research project on the creative process, an initiative of the Visual Arts Section in North America in conjunction with the International Visual Art Section and the Performing Arts Section at the Goetheanum.
This worldwide research initiative arises out of the significant challenges faced by the arts in our time. This includes the current mythology that artistic activity no longer needs human input, but can be carried out by Artificial Intelligence programs. This threat to one of the most fundamental of human capacities for invention and creativity requires that we understand the significant place of the individual in the act of creation. Understanding and being able to communicate the central place of the human being is the focus of this research work, and we welcome your input in this endeavour.
Conversation in the Spiritual Goetheanum
Rudiger Janisch
This artistic collaboratorium is an invitation to explore conversation in the space of the small cupola of the etheric Goetheanum. What kind of conversation could unfold, if we think of ourselves being before the representative of humanity, before the thrones and under the imaginations in the small cupola?
We will attempt to visualize the space as an inner experience at hand of depictions from the first Goetheanum. Then we turn to the conversation activity, for example at hand of the following questions: How would we prepare ourselves with the appropriate humility, how out of hospitality for the other would we speak, how would we listen to the other person, how would we let resound in us what we heard, how would we respond, how with enthusiasm would we be faithful to the experience of this encounter in our life afterwards?
With this preparation we can begin a practice during our weekend which we can take up and carry forward.
Initiated by members of the School for Spiritual Science in North America
Related Conference
You may be interested in a follow up conference for blue card holders: Turning Points Towards Humanity taking place August 17-19 in the same location. Click here for more information and to register.