Etheric Technology

Blowers v. Rakes

This post may be biting off a lot to chew, but it’s been biting at me for a long time, so let’s see how I can lay it out. Really, this might be background for any number of future posts I could do, if it was wanted.

In previous posts, I’ve written about a study group of friends (all Waldorf teachers) who have inspired me in myriad ways in the past three years.  Due to being Waldorf teachers, we all have Rudolf Steiner in common, a thinker and writer who has influenced my life path tremendously since I was first introduced to his writings at around age 27.  Owen Barfield and George Adams, both of whom were inspired by Steiner, have also been previously mentioned here before.  I really owe at least one post devoted to each one of these humans, as they’ve all given me incredible gifts of their thinking, which has advanced my own. 

However, this blog is not called Brian Does Things in a Logical Order, so I’ll leave that for later.  You tell me, dear readers, if you want an introduction to one or more of those characters sooner rather than later, and I’ll prioritize it. I know of at least one subscriber on this Substack who could do a much better job than I could introducing you, actually.

In the context of reading Steiner, Barfield, and Adams, one is introduced to startlingly fresh concepts.  I owe it to them, and great discussion with my Waldorf colleagues and friends about them, that I now feel truly free of materialism, whereas, prior to the last 20 years, I didn’t even know there was another option (but I recognized dimly even back then that I was chafing at the bit to find one).

When one leaves materialism behind and explores other conceptual frameworks for understanding the world, the phrase “the etheric” keeps cropping up.  The only exposure I had to this word was my undergraduate Physics studies, in which we all dutifully learned about the Michelson & Morley experiment disproving the existence of “the ether,” which was supposed to be the physical substrate for light waves to travel (analogous to how water is the physical substrate for water waves to travel).  But this is not how “etheric” is meant in the writings of the fellows mentioned above.

I’m going to write the following without “checking my facts,” purposely trying my darndest to explain this as I understand it.  If any anthroposophists are harmed in the following explanation I apologize in advance, and I hope they will let me know and I will correct myself as I feel I need to.  As far as I know, it was Rudolf Steiner who coined (or repurposed) the terms “physical”, “etheric” and “astral” as three discernible (but overlapping and intertwined) aspects of each human being.  Actually, he called them all bodies, so physical body, etheric body, and astral body.  And each human being has all of those bodies working within her (and also perhaps around her), all the time, in various states of activity and visibility.  Actually, there was also a fourth body called the I, or ego. Steiner lectured extensively about the attributes of these four bodies.  The etheric body is often also termed the “life body”.  It’s not my purpose here to give a lecture on Steiner’s fourfold human being.  If this all stimulates your curiosity (it has certainly stimulated mine), by all means go down that rabbit hole!  Here is a website about anthroposophical medicine that seems to have a fourfold human being primer to get you started.

The term “body” may be misleading if you think of it physically. Just keep in mind that Steiner was trying to describe four essential aspects of the human being, only one of which was physical.  So “body” was used in the older sense of the term as a collection of observable activities in each human being.  So, our etheric body has access to (or is made up of) all manner of “etheric forces” or “etheric activities”.  These include activities like growth, regeneration, recuperation, maintaining heath, and metabolism.  The activities themselves compose the body, and all of them can be observed even if none of them is physical. If the idea of something totally real that has no physicality makes you queasy, that’s anti-materialism, baby!  The etheric body activities together comprise a potent wellspring of life within each of us.

Have I lost you yet?  Where am I going with this?  Well, here: When I wrote a post reflecting on teaching 8th graders last year and describing Tree Technology vs Industrial Technology, what I was really doing was playing with an idea that has captivated me for a long time: that is something sometimes called in Steiner circles, “etheric technology”.  As a boy, I had an enlarged wallpaper photo of the Space Shuttle covering one entire wall of my bedroom.  I read Popular Mechanics and Popular Science avidly.  I was so swept away by the amazing scientific discoveries that were right around the corner.  I read my science books at school as if they truly contained the secrets to Life the Universe and Everything.  I played with electronics, I learned programming, I built computers, I spent hours programming our VCR so I wouldn’t miss a single episode of  Star Trek and Star Trek: Next Generation. I was, in short, what I now call a techno-messianist.

Techno-messianists have been around a long time but seem to be growing in force and number and are a popular brand of fundamentalism.  These folks believe, as I once did, that scientific advancement and its application in new technologies are, truly, going to save us from ourselves, or bring humanity ever upward to complete technological transcendence of our messy biological inheritance.  So, think of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, a couple particularly grotesque examples.  In 20 years I’ve gone from being a dyed-in-the-wool techno-messianist to, under the heavy influence of Wendell Berry, something more like a pseudo-Luddite.  I hope to write a post to explain that more fully sometime.  Basically, I now see current so-called high technologies as a mirage and a dead end that create many more problems than they solve, and no amount of optimization is going to salvage them.  Popular Science and similar ilk are, as far I know, still churning out the same predictions of the future that they were when I was a kid, and none of it has come true, except in some very limited ways for the very rich.  Charles Eisenstein writes about this brilliantly in many places, pointing out that our scientific-technological fixes themselves become the new problem a few years later.  It is a chimera, never to be reached. See for example his excellent essay about inverting the energy paradigm.  

Contrast this with what Charles calls “technologies of reunion”.  Quoting from a quite recent post:

“The key differentiating principle is that Technologies of Reunion are not based on control. What we call technology today is a system for applying force to matter with ever greater precision. . .Technologies of Reunion draw on an understanding that the world is alive, that there are intelligences beyond the human, and that by participating in these intelligences we can co-achieve miraculous results. For example, technologies of control try to perfect agricultural yields by precisely controlling every component of the soil, eliminating weeds and pests, and so forth. Technologies of Reunion seek to support the aliveness of the soil, listening and observing it as a living being, asking what it needs, trusting that its thriving is connected to our own.” 

Charles’ “technologies of reunion” are just about exactly what I mean by “etheric technology”.  It is a technology that makes use of and enhances the etheric bodies of each human being, and of other beings in nature.  Etheric technology is a technology that makes what we are doing with computers, space ships, industry, agriculture, cars, roads, warfare and trash look blunt, ugly, unnecessarily destructive and idiotic.  When I walk the beach and pick up unending bits of single use plastic strewn around, I know we are caught in a technological dead end that needs to be transformed.  So, I get excited looking for such etheric technologies, and this is why I’m writing here.  I’d like to explore further what etheric technologies could be, because they will be technologies of reunion, and technologies of health, and of belonging, and of renewal.   They will be largely beyond the control of the parasitic advertising, entertainment, banking, medical, military and education industries, to name a few.  They will be simple and small, and they will finally bring us humans out of the clouds of our abstract thinking and down to a kind of thinking that incorporates our bodies, our hands and feet, and the bodies and thinking of other non-human beings.

A hallmark of our current technologies is that, by and large, they are making us fatter, stupider and lazier.  The movie Wal-E depicts the ultimate end of the road we are currently traveling along if we don’t find another path:  Riding in hover chairs being bombarded with advertising and above all, consuming voraciously, all the time.  Actually, we are pretty close to this reality now in much of the developed world.  We just haven’t figured out yet how to make the cars hover.  We are dangerously close to making the cars drive themselves however, something I don’t think of as anything other than a huge waste of resources. There’s the pseudo-Luddite in me coming out.

A few technologies that I think point to true etheric breakthroughs:  permaculture, scything, and composting.  (If you don’t know much about any of these, ask me and I’ll write a post about it!) Each one, in its way, puts the living, breathing, thinking, regenerating, fourfold human being at the center.  Rather than making the wonder that is our bodies, souls, and minds obsolete, it makes us stronger, healthier and more connected when we use them.  Rather than creating a new product that can be manufactured on an assembly line factory a million times over and then sold for a profit, they are cheap or essentially free. Rather than creating vast amounts of troublesome waste, they use every part of the landscape.   Rather than requiring brilliant experts and engineers to pull them off, they can be done by just about anybody.  And, they have an incredible number of complementary ancillary benefits that come about simply by using them.

When I was living in Bronxville, NY, a wildly wealthy community, a member of the church I worked for was heading up a fight for a city ordinance to ban all leaf blowers in the entire village.  This was 20 years ago.  I always find it interesting what those with significant means do to make their communities more pleasant.  This morning as I raked up leaves at 7 am (to corral them and keep them for chicken and garden bedding, not to get rid of them), I heard someone’s leaf-blower on the next block already whining.   My neighborhood (like pretty much every other neighborhood, except for those like Bronxville where they can keep such things at bay) is full of neighbors and lawn services standing around holding tubes that are doing much less efficiently something that could be done better (and more etherically) with a good old rake. 

There is no convincing most of the people I come across that their leaf blowers are noisy, annoying and making them stupider.  So I just keep quiet.   But, that’s what I see.  I’m not fundamentalist about it: I have a leaf blower (I inherited it when I bought this house) and I use it from time to time, I admit.  The experience is unsatisfying.  But, the experience of raking leaves, of bending and shuffling, and pulling and lifting, is like I get to dance across my lawn (mixed with some wrestling the leaves a bit).   I also get to have physical contact with every inch of my property, which means I notice things, little plants popping up here and there, little birds and bugs and small changes.  I also get warm from the exercise and get to check in with my own physical health thereby. I get to work in relative quiet and can hear myself think.  I can hear the leaves swish as I rake them together.  I smell their scent, I see their varied colors.  I feel them when I pick them up and put them into my wheelbarrow.  If another neighbor is out raking his leaves, we can hear each other speak when we say hello and shoot the shit.  Do I need to quote some study that the smell of soil and leaves and exercise makes you happier?  No, I do not, I know it from experience. There really is no comparison. When etheric technologies come, we will walk away from the blowers, I know it.  Good riddance!

All of the above may seem pollyannaish. However, unlike my Popular Science magazines, every single one of the technologies I listed above is already in existence, and they work great. Also, I don’t care if any individual person decides to use a leaf blower in any particular instance. What I’m talking about is an aesthetic judgement, not a moral one. Rakes are just more beautiful, period. I can’t force anyone to wake up to the new etheric technology (that would, of course, work against the entire goal, to force people), but I can trust that everyone has an etheric body, an innate sense of their own health, and given the right conditions and a warm invitation such as I’m writing here, the rake will prevail. This is because the old technologies actually rely on keeping us sick, distracted and dependent. And no one, deep down, wants to be sick forever, not really. I do believe this.

As always, I welcome your responses to these ideas. What of the above, if anything, would you like me to write about more? What would you like to challenge me on? Do you love your leaf blower?? :) Tell me!