MysTech Newsletter, October 2022

MysTech held its first conference as an in-person gathering in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2017 at the Rudolf Steiner House. It continued there in 2018 and 2019 but then, with Covid, moved to online for 2020 and 2021. For 2022, we decided to attempt a “hybrid” conference with speakers and participants both in-person and online. Such a conference drove the costs as well as the complications up considerably. As Seattle was where MysTech was founded in 2015, it made sense to have the in-person portion housed there. And we were very fortunate that the Eastside Community School of Issaquah, Washington offered us the use of its new facilities. Their pre-wired auditorium with its built-in cameras and screens fit our needs perfectly, but we could not have done it without Jordi Boig, our conference technician.

Normally, the conference would run from Thursday afternoon until noon on Sunday, but this auditorium had a lease with a local church that used it every Sunday. Thus, we eliminated Sunday from our schedule. With the larger schedule, we could fit in a few more than 20 speakers. Now we shrunk back to 15 and added a forum so that participants could ask more questions and feel a part of a community. 

Community is an apt word for MysTech. We are composed of individuals striving with Spiritual Science to bring about the right orientation to our Technological Age so that our human tasks can be fulfilled. As individuals, we have different perspectives and we often do not agree on certain topics. So, there is not a MysTech dogma. We are a community who work together out of Anthroposophy.

Goals of MysTech come from the work of Rudolf Steiner and include overcoming the fear of the march of technology and helping to bring about the interpenetration of the moral and the mechanical for the future. This conference attempted to move towards those goals. Its theme was “Consciousness, AI, and VR”. We asked what is happening to human consciousness as artificial intelligence and virtual reality become a part of our everyday lives? In the last century, humanity went from horse and buggy to putting men on the moon. How different will humans be in the next century? How do we prepare for this?

Each morning, as those on the west coast were waking up, the conference hosted three sessions online. First was Robert McKay and Grant Davis of Toronto who offered an Introduction to Anthroposophy. Themes here were Steiner’s embrace of Science and his efforts to lead it, beyond its self-imposed boundary of the Lifeless, into the Living. An artistic eye added to the examination of phenomena can lead to understanding quality in addition to quantity. A call to bring about a Renaissance 2.0 was clearly heard. Grant started from the question, ‘where do we come from? Are we cosmic beings who are born into earthly bodies for a purpose?’

The second session was led by Theodor Hundhammer who led us in Eurythmy. His focus was on the vowels and some consonants. Eurythmy has been called “visible speech” and it can be a door through which one can come to experience the etheric realm. It can be seen to be a gift from Steiner as a counterbalance for living in modern times.

The third morning session was Andrew Linnell who offered MysTech Basics. Here Andrew offered some history of MysTech and explained its goals. He gave pictures from Steiner’s works of what is expected in the future and why it falls upon us now to work with various spiritual beings to prepare this future.

For the formal opening of the in-person conference, Frank Dauenhauer honored those whose lives had led to MysTech’s founding, including Dolores Rose Dauenhauer and Paul Emberson.

Ed Conroy followed Frank and from that point on facilitated the conference as our Master of Ceremonies, introducing speakers, taking questions and keeping the program on track.

Gopi Krishna Vijaya gave the Keynote address. He noted that this conference happening now is an act of courage, saying that we have lived through the equivalent of a world war.  During the past two years, we developed a changed relationship to technology and the emotional reactions were tumultuous.  Humanity was faced with technical jargon and a world in which we struggle to gain balance.  In order to do so, he told us, we must be able to use words out of our own capacity rather than using the jargon in a kind of mimicking or parroting way.  This requires, first of all, that we recognize there is a problem – as in the case of any addict, the problem must first be recognized.  It begins, he tells us, with the fact that humans are prematurely exposed to thinking, so we have trouble understanding when we are thinking versus having someone else’s thinking/thoughts circulating in our brain.  We have a tendency to outsource certain things to “others” who we believe know better.  But in order to determine what is real or true, we absolutely must do our own thinking.  Steiner tells us the crucial thing is the capacity to do consistency checks:  the ability to take different viewpoints and “own” them enough to compare them.  That is the way we need to navigate in an area of jargon that we are not completely familiar with.  He called for us to show “covid courage” in our lives and not to succumb to the temptation to place efficiency above humanity. Technology that works wonders in one area leads to the temptation to use it in another but where, instead of good return on investment, it acts as a social poison. Will an economic principle become a social mandate? We know electricity takes the path of least resistance. Have we come to apply that principle in the social realm? Will creativity subside if we only meet online? We face the “trap of the lukewarm” where, for the sake of peace, we become willing to sacrifice truth. Will we outsource our thinking and our memory? There are people hard at work making things that will appeal to and increase your laziness. How shall we deal with the increase of UN-consciousness that will arise from AI and VR? Have infinite pixels of “the screen” replaced the infinite stars of heavens?

Doug Smith then escorted us through a timeline of the Age of the Consciousness Soul and the spiritual beings at work in its various eras during the years 1413 – 3561. Asking, what are we called upon to do during this period? Doug tells us that we are to acquire freedom of thought, understand one another in social life and attain living knowledge of spiritual worlds through spiritual science. During the years leading us up to this present time, Science and Technology have worked together.  He asks:  what have they given us?  Where are they leading us and what can we learn?   Can we play a role in leading Science into Spiritual Science while Technology takes us into sub-nature? We are entering on both ends, the physically invisible realms. We need spiritual science for both.  We are here for the sake of the universe.  It needs our help.

Elana Freeland, author of Geoengineered Transhumanism spoke about her research on clouds, sky colors, and chemtrails. Are clouds now different? Do they contain an artificial plasma? See this URL which she referenced: NRL Scientists Produce Densest Artificial Ionospheric Plasma Clouds Using HAARP. Might this be obscuring our possible experience of Christ in the etheric (clouds)? Have our bodies absorbed nanobots? Is our air now saturated with nanoparticles that we breathe? What do we make of the use of graphene oxide? Is it the source of Morgellons syndrome? Elana concluded that Geoengineering has already led to weaponization of weather, causing events that are misattributed to climate change.  She also warned that surveillance systems will be ubiquitous for controlling populations, as is already happening in China.  Based on her research, methods of control will include neural manipulation, nanotechnology, digital synthetic biology, transhumanism, smart grid, space fence, and more. 

Next was Florian Sydow. He spoke about building the bridge From Natural Science to Spiritual Science. Foremost in building such a path is an adherence to Truth regardless of monetary rewards or power. For this, clear thinking and strong will are required. One can then approach Isis/Sophia. Rudolf Steiner chose a life as the son of a train station master. He undertook a technical training that allowed him to set the foundation for such a bridge. Florian then spoke of 12 philosophical vantage points and 7 soul moods and 3 occultisms. Next, he spoke of the 3 trials faced during initiation, the 7 levels of Rosicrucian (and other) initiation, the 7 unutterable Mysteries (abyss, number, alchemy, birth & death, evil, logos, and divine bliss). We are today at a point in evolution of moving from individual initiation to include a collective initiation. Cosmic wisdom helps to build the bridge from microcosm to macrocosm.

Unfortunately, due to illness, neither Jennifer Gidley nor Robert Filocco could join us. We will attempt to record what they would have presented and make these recordings available to conference registrants.

That first evening, Daniel Perez presented the first of two talks: The Warmth of Life and the Cold of Computation in Etheric Resonance and Quantum Computing.  He shared with us how his professional work in the area of computers and computation combined with a deep interest in physics led him to the work of Roger Penrose.  He prepared us to consider the new way of thinking about matter based in Quantum theory and how it necessitates a new vocabulary such as Boson, Quark and Qbit, and then led us toward the deeply significant concepts of coherence and entanglement.  In this first of two talks, we were prepared with historical references to figures such as Richard Feynman, who assumed we would not understand but could work around that obstacle, and Einstein who was particularly bothered by entanglement because he knew that the distinction between past, present and future is just “a stubbornly persistent illusion”.  Entanglement, we were told, represents “spooky actions at a distance”.   In mainstream science, the moment of the Big Bang is the highest level of information which then, over time, moves toward more chaos and more entropy.  Daniel contrasted this with spiritual science which sees it differently:  the information in the universe arrives from the spirit realm.  We were directed toward Novalis’ poem “Henry von Offerdingen” in which we might see the marriage of sense and thought in a way that could provide warmth to the cold experience of quantum information.  How cold?  We were told that a Quantum Computer must be maintained in a vacuum at a temperature of 15 millikelvin, significantly colder than dark space.  Referring us to a quote from Steiner (GA199 Lecture XIII) “a person is an idealist if he knows how to spiritualize matter”, Daniel warned that we are in the time of the sounding of the seventh trumpet, when the astral body and the I come under attack and must be strengthened through conscious development.  He warned that entanglement of etheric bodies may be experienced when a loved one dies, and proposed that when we sleep, we enter into the freezing spiritual domain of Old Saturn.  We must become able to take warmth into it.

Aaron French, in his talk Ghosts in the Machine, pondered the question, what do technology and artificial intelligence have to do with the realm of the dead? Is there a connection between neo-spiritualism and the dead? Arthur Koestler addressed this in his book, The Ghost in the Machine. Information is disembodied and instantiated into matter, in the computer or the machine. With Bioinformatics, we now live in a world in which mind and matter, the digital or informational, and the physical have been joined! It would be Ahriman’s goal for us to import this model into the realm, beyond the physical, into the afterlife, the realm of the dead. This is the state of quantum computing. Authors like Nick Bostrom believe that soon we will construct computers that are smarter and more powerful than we are. And then we will become fully dependent on them. Will future AI computers have consciousness or life or both? Aaron described Google’s AI, LaMDA, and Blake Lemoine’s claim that it had become sentient. Are we aware of dangers here? What can be done? Aaron discussed the work of Mike Elgan who expects soon to have an AI product with ultra-high-resolution interactive 3D versions of the dead that could bring on a new age of spiritualism. What might this do to our concept of immortality? Might this lead to a rebirth of Astrology? Aaron described Rudolf Steiner’s indications of using the forces from Virgo and Pisces at morning and evening to bring about the healthy-for-evolution machines of the future. Aaron cited several passages from Andreas Neider’s book, The Electronic Doppelganger. 

Boyd Collins presented Trapped in the Metaverse – Reality Becomes a Marketable Product where he asked:  what would a human being have to become in order to lead a satisfying life in the Metaverse? Will this be a soulless ‘realm’? Will one define their identity (or have their identity defined for them) in the metaverse by the groups that they belong to? The metaverse  will attack what’s left of our memory of our spiritual origins. It will extinguish our spiritual core. To help us understand the origins of the coming metaverse, Boyd advised us to become familiar with Zuckerberg’s friend Marc Andreeson, one of the initial investors in Facebook and currently on the board of Meta (which was previously Facebook).  Andreeson, who describes himself as “reality privileged”, says he wants to see the metaverse created to help “the reality deprived”.  Andreeson contends that reality itself is a “failed product offering” and the metaverse will provide a hyper-real replacement. The metaverse promises to be a paradise where one enters for work, for love, for life. But, like the Ahrimanic clairvoyance foreseen by Steiner, it will be personalized for each user.  To do so, users will be surveilled completely, turning them into products.  They, along with everything in the metaverse will be monetized to enable on-going profits for the companies involved. Boyd draws our attention to the fact that the World Economic Forum is deeply involved with Defining and Building the Metaverse And he points out that Citi(bank) estimates the metaverse will be worth $13 trillion by 2030.  Metaverse developers believe organisms ARE algorithms to be influenced and manipulated.  There is no real “self” waiting to be liberated.  In the virtual world, addiction is desirable.  Intensifying cravings and appetites makes users more controllable.  The metaverse will be a tool for psychic fragmentation – disintegration of the self.  Will people left without access to the metaverse be considered “useless”? What about lives spent in it?

Tom Pitchard, brought a new approach to thinking about Steiner’s work in his presentation, Introducing the Spiritual Stack and Flow Model: Toward a Transcendental Architecture of Consciousness.  He opened with the idea that we have lost – as a civilization – the knowledge of how to approach the spirit, and we are in danger of becoming scientific automatons with a broken connection to our higher selves.  He sees Steiner, as the modern Aristotle, providing guidance.  But over his many years of working as an information technologist, Tom came to think that Steiner was in need of a marketing plan that could reach a certain modern audience.  Starting from the idea that on the cognitive spectrum, thought is the lowest manifestation of the spirit, he outlined a modern approach to thinking, going from Data at the bottom, followed by Information, Knowledge and Wisdom at the top (DIKW).  Between Information and Knowledge, he came to perceive a barrier, and when he finally grasped that it was the “written word” he was motivated to take his ideas to the next step and outline the relationship between the rather simplistic, modern approach to thinking about thinking (DIKW) to a more anthroposophic approach that culminates with Intuition.  Along the way, we visit the place he calls “the epistemic divide” – the gap between thought and thinking, which he calls “the door to where thinking occurs, where the etheric and astral meet.”

Ralf Tita, Cymatics – Approaching the lively aspects of the world.  The term cymatics, which comes from the Greek word cyma meaning wave, was coined by Hans Jenny a medical doctor and artist in Dornach.

Cymatics is a new approach in research that combines art and science. Like Gopi, and Steiner before him, Ralf pointed to the importance of changing viewpoints in order to come to a new and livelier understanding of the world but going even further to say that “the only hope we have is to work on ourselves, on our consciousness.”  And how can cymatics help with this?  Ralf took us through a process of understanding that ours is not the only time humanity has had to change perspectives in a major way.  Accompanied by images that beautifully illustrated the night sky using time lapse photography, he showed how different viewpoints can be as simple as perceiving from different locations on the earth.  But to move from sense observation to thinking about the fixed stars and the planets, different viewpoints can be expressed mathematically and through historical models we call earth-centric or helio-centric.  So, while we can see and think about the orbits, what we “know” is really only that the models “work” depending on the point of view taken by the thinker.  He reminds us, we can also ask, “is it true?”  And when we work with the information deeply and artistically, how do we feel? Do different perspectives evoke different responses?  The presentation is best experienced to appreciate the wonderful answers to that question. 

Besides his keynote, Gopi Vijaya also spoke at the conference about Force and Energy: What are They?  Cautioning against our mental habit of “noun-ifying, thing-ifying” we should take care not to project that into our way of thinking about heat and light. He tackled the concepts of Energy, Mass, and Force. Do we expect to grasp a concept in a way similar to how we grasp a ball? Should our expectations change as we move from concepts that apply to the solid, to the liquid, and to the aeriform or gas states? Have we carried the concept of ball into these other states? F=ma. Are any of these real? What is energy? What is potential energy? Concepts from the liquid state, e.g., plumbing, have been applied to electricity. As there are different types of solids, of liquids, of gases, are there different types of heat? What is warmth of heart? Gopi presented a model that links: Matter to Physical; Force to Etheric; Energy to Astral; and Free Energy to Ego. 

Just before our dinner break, we were treated to the trio of Brian Gray, Robert Schiappacasse, and David Tresemer who spoke about ‘How Can our Online Culture Meet the Philosophy of Freedom?’. To illustrate the Philosophy of Freedom, Brian drew a diagram of a lemniscate where one lobe is our percepts and the other is our concepts. Between these, at the crossing point, is our I. The vertical line through the crossing point could be called the line of morality and conscience. The content of our percepts from observation is the given. Arriving at concepts to pair with percepts requires the inner activity of thinking. Uniting percept with concept leads to knowledge. The trio related the steps found in the Philosophy of Freedom to the 7 planetary spheres. 

Daniel Perez closed out our second day with his second presentation: Face-to-Face with Virtual Reality and the Guardian of the Threshold. His talk sought to help us answer questions such as, what is one’s countenance? What does it mean that Michael is the countenance of Christ in our Age? With avatar meeting avatar in VR, how does one exercise judgment? In physical life, how do we judge current events? The importance of self-examination and finding how one judges. Since we learn how to hide emotions, do we also attempt to hide our morality?

Patrick Kennedy was our last speaker. His talk was entitled, A New Genesis. Patrick asked, is God failing? Are we failing? Where’s the Reset Button? What are our next steps in evolution? Can the Eucharist be a new technology? Are you willing to die for the hope of evolution? What will it mean for humans to fulfill the call of evolution? As we have descended as cosmic beings to life on earth, for a purpose, how can we ascend from earth to becoming a cosmic being? Are we longing to be Creators? Are we to become the image of the community of the 7 Elohim?  Patrick sees the illusions being brought by technology as just new layers between the spiritual and material realms and relates them to what Steiner meant when he said that the veils are going to be lifted.  In the past, humanity would have been prepared by spiritual beings.  Now, the veils are going to be lifted whether we are ready or not.  Fortunately, Steiner gives us exercises and indications to help us prepare.  When the Spirit descended on Jesus and stayed, he was then sent out to the desert to be tested by the Adversary.  It is now our turn to be tested.  Micha’el’s battle, foreseen in the Twelfth chapter of Revelations, took place between 1841 – 1879 in the spiritual realm.  The dragon was then cast down and rages here on Earth.  If we were to fight only the physical battle, the war would be lost.