Some Considerations Concerning Anti-Gravity & Related Matters

by Joel Wendt

With an excerpt from Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space & Time
 “Gravitational & Anti-Gravitational Forces”

by Olive Whicher

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This article was sourced from:
The Journal Of Borderland Research Vol. XLVII No. 2 – March-April 1991

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Download the full Journal of Borderland Research Collection HERE

The study of this negative Euclidean type of Space, with the planar movements involved in its forms and transformations, gave… access to a theory of the anti-gravitational forces, of which Rudolf Steiner always spoke… If the physical forces are measured according to the thought-forms of -, areas and volumes, the ethereal forces must be described according to their own nature… In describing the opposite types of force in the two types of space, Rudolf Steiner used the expressions “Schwere” and “Leichte”… We have our English words “weight” and “lightness” or “gravity” and “levity”… It must be understood that “lightness”, in the way we use it here, does not merely mean the absence of weight; it qualifies a force. The shot from a gun may have the quality of lightness in contrast to a heavy cannon-ball; but both are in the same physical space and obey the physical laws – both centrifugally and centripetally.

The ethereal forces also operate in these two directions. but with an entirely different effect; they are linked to phenomena for which the word “plane” gives a truer picture, in contrast to “point”. The ethereal planes hover inward and outward. For want of a better word, Rudolf Steiner often used the word “suction” to describe the activity of the ethereal type of force. The ethereal planar forces have a moulding, formative power, and at the same time they draw or suck the substances which have come under the sphere of their influence away from earth gravity. The levitational force is polar in all respects to the force of gravity.”

Since beginning to read science fiction in my early teens, I have dreamed frequently of actually building some kind of machine which would enable me to overcome my earthbound nature and permit the travel to strange worlds and the meeting of unusual beings. The fascination with this literature seemed to follow the loss ofa peculiar experience, which I had had regularly as I was dropping off to sleep. Just for a moment, before the entry in unconsciousness, there would be this experience of a reorientation in space, such that all the normal relations were reversed. This was not merely a visual experience, as my eyes were closed, but involved all of my senses, including my
feeling of weight.

The Moody Blues, a rock group which came into existence in England in the 1960’s, has clearly had some spiritual experiences of one kind of another. There is no other way to interpret their work. On their album In Search of the Lost Chord the first song is entitled Voices in the Sky, and is followed by The Best Way to Travel, whose opening lyrics are: “And you can fly high as a kite if you want to / faster then light if you want to / speeding through the universe / thinking is the only way to travel…”

”But thought is actually ethereal in origin– it is of the light; and it must awaken in its own primal element…” (Olive Whicher, ibid)

With my dream, and the dream of countless others as evidenced by the popularity of science fiction, the main idea is ·that somehow or another, we utilize the anti-gravity forces, when discovered, to cause spatially extant bodies to move free of the gravity well of the surface of planets. What if this is unnecessary? What if travel to strange and alien places does not require the movement of physical bodies, but is to be found through another doorway. Have The Moody Blues tried to tell us something? Is the ethereal realm truly, as Olive Whicher says it is, the “primal element” of thinking? Is thinking “the only way to travel”?

Consider this possibility. Man is a being of soul and spirit, living in a time when the direct knowledge of this is not only hard to come by, but which is dominated by a way of thinking which denies even the possibility of such realities. Nevertheless Man’s unconsciousness remembers its spiritual origins, and yearns to return to this realm. We dream of flying. We buy books by the millions which take us to far places of the imagination; worlds of magic and sorcery, of alien creatures and faster than light spaceships, of times past, of times future and of times never been or ever to be.

In fact the boundary between science and fiction is increasingly blurred; just consider the works of Carlos Castaneda and Lynn Andrews. Here are works which pass themselves off as a kind of participatory cultural anthropology. The authors not only study modem shtm1anistic practices, they engage in them as well. The public’s appetite for such works seems insatiable.

In the circles of followers of Rudolf Steiner, one will hear the following idea. Mankind, in mass, consciously and unconsciously, is crossing the threshold between the material and the immaterial worlds. Here lies the’ ‘explanation” for the phenomena of UFO’s; which are said, in these circles, to be materialistic interpretations of supra-sensible experiences. This crossing for many, due in part to karma and secondarily to moral choices made in the present, will take a course in which the soul, rather then develop further, will. in fact fall back, into older and now decadent spiritual ways. So will say many anthroposophists, and certainly it was in this way spoken of by Dr. Steiner.

I have taken this approach to the question of “anti-gravity” because I felt it would be helpful to appreciate that the process of understanding such a force would involve certain subtleties, and temptations. We need to recognize that our attempts to appreciate the nature of the ethereal or anti-gravity ‘force’ will be made difficult by several tendencies already existing in the soul. One will be the tendency toward spiritual materialism, the tendency to think and imagine these facts and ideas using the habits ingrained in us by our education and culture.

Another tendency in the soul will involve a kind of spiritual laziness, what Steiner called the phlegmatic nature of soul life today. It is very difficult to move the soul, to bring about real inner transformation of the soul life (not just acquiring new ideas). Yet, the hunger of the soul for contact with its unconsciously remembered spiritual life, leads it to accept intercourse with spirit guides, to serve as a channel, to try to reanimate all kinds and types of spiritual ways out of the past, out of the time when the soul life was essentially different then it is today. This turning away from the difficulties of the present and the future and toward the past of the soul life was called by Steiner, atavism.

The question can be fairly put: will the soul under the influence of either or both, spiritual materialism and atavism, find its way to the truth? Will we come to a true knowledge and understanding of the ethereal or anti-gravity force(s) by methods which rely on habits of thought trained in the materialistic education of the time, or by methods which accept as valid, encounters with the spiritual world that use faculties of the soul no longer appropriate and occasionally dangerous.

The real question comes down to what do we want, and what price are we willing to pay to achieve that goal.

Now some may think that these atavistic soul capacities are not occasionally dangerous, besides their being inappropriate to the soul’s potential development in our time. Let’s take a closer look at just one of these soul faculties, channeling.

Channeling, what was earlier called mediumship, was not unknown to the spiritual savants of the middle ages. The object of such an act is to open a ‘doorway’ for the entrance into this world of a discarnate being. It was this object, in fact, which was the central purpose of ceremonial magic. We wonder today about this ritual magic, and most of the civilized world disbelieves it entirely. Regardless of that, within the teachings of these disciplines one will come upon the idea that one of the main purposes of the ritual, of instruments and incantations, was to serve to control and set limits on the activity of the sought after discarnate being. In the same literature (c. f. The Practice of 
Ceremonial Evocation, Franz Bardon) one will find that the very worst thing that can happen is if the operator were to lose consciousness and become possessed by the discarnate being.

Yet, just this is considered the height of the channeler’s art, to lose consciousness and allow the being to use the operator’s body.

Rudolf Steiner has pointed to Goethe’s Faust as the archetypal artistic representation of the soul’s path of temptation, fall and redemption, at least in the context of our time. Faust is alone when the tempter, Mephistopheles, comes to him, first as a bodiless voice promising knowledge, power and riches. This is a mirror image of a primal temptation (one of three) offered Christ Jesus during the forty days in the desert, following the Baptism at the Jordan.

If you read the description of many channeler’s first encounter with their ”entity”, you will find just such a dramatic scene. The channeler is alone, and the voice comes and offers the arrangement, including the payoff, the image of wealth and importance.

Not all channeling has this characteristic. Even among channelers there is spoken of degrees of consciousness, not always pure unconsciousness. It is not my intention to denigrate a whole class of spiritual experience. The main problem with these ‘new age’ faculties, these essentially atavistic — old soul — capacities, it their fruit. There is a direct correlation between the method and the ends. The knowledge we gain about the ethereal, anti-gravity forces will be affected by the means we use when we seek it.

”Enter by the narrow gate. The gate is wide that leads to perdition, there is plenty of room on the road, and many go that way; but the gate that leads to life is small and the road is narrow, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7: 13)

“Beginning… (in the present)… definite forces will become prominent in the evolution of humanity… such forces, which will transform life on earth… known in secret centers… British secret societies… by means of certain capacities that are still latent but evolving in man, and with the help of the law of harmonious oscillations, machines and mechanical constructions and other things can be set in motion… Motors can be set in motion, into activity, by an insignificant human influence through a knowledge of the corresponding curve of oscillation. By means of this principle it will be possible to substitute merely mechanical forces for human forces in many things. Mechanical occultism will not only render it possible to do without nine-tenths of the labor still performed at present by human hands, but will give the possibility also of paralyzing every uprising attempted by the then dissatisfied masses of humanity.” (Rudolf Steiner, The Challenge of the Times, lecture III given December 1, 1918)

My own view is to give as much trust as possible toward my fellow human beings; to deny them no knowledge for which they seek (as opposed to ‘secret’ societies whose very lifeblood is to withhold and otherwise control knowledge). The capacities mentioned above by Rudolf Steiner for knowledge of “mechanical occultism” are especially inherent in the soul life of English speaking peoples, particularly Americans. My recent discovery of the work which finds its voice in the Journal of  Borderland Sciences has led me to the conclusion that the Journal is the organ for the birth of these capacities in America, the organ for the coming to consciousness and birth of these capacities in a free way.

The fascination with free energy, radionics, ethereal forces, orgone energy and so forth, coupled with the impulse to experiment, that is the impulse to work directly in the practical element, without much thought given to the theoretical side, this is a very healthy and typically American approach, which I have no doubt can lead to genuine knowledge of these matters. As I expressed in the essay, “There No Free Energy” (Journal of Borderland Science Vol XVLI Sept-Oct 1990 ), the whole thing comes down to a moral problem, both as regards method of investigation, and the goal and/or use of the knowledge thereby gained.

Now this moral dimension has little to do with some kind of authority telling us what is right, and everything to do with us assuming to act in a responsible matter. In this, we as individuals become creators of the future, determiners of the future’s moral characteristics. The responsibility we freely choose in the expression of our search for knowledge and its resultant applications ‘stamps’ the future with it’s character and qualities.

” …an act is not, as young men think like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, then that’s the end of it. When the rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends… [and]… we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility… do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.” (Sparrowhawk, Archmage, to Arren, future King ofEarthsea, from the book The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. LeGuin, Bantam Books, 1973)

In the aid of the desire ofr eaders of the Journal for knowledge of the ethereal mysteries I can offer little in a practical vein as I am no experimenter and have no technical knowledge. What little I do know concerns method, which I have learned in practice and applied to other goals. This concerns the how of knowing, which I have come over time to appreciate as Sacramental Thinking.