An Idea is a Living Seed

ideas photosynthesizing grace

“Only that which is fruitful is true.” - Goethe

“I am the Goal, the Supporter, the Lord, the Witness, the Abode, the Shelter, the Friend, the Origin, the Dissolution, the Foundation, the Treasure-house and the Seed Imperishable.” - The Holy Geeta¹

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Outside our home is a space where a beautiful Japanese maple once grew. Its burnt orange leaves would blaze in autumn. After it died one winter, the only color was flashes of an inconstant cardinal on the tree’s vitiated branches. So I cut it down. Since then, brambles have taken over that area. Rabbits moved into the small thicket, protected by the canopy of vicious thorns. And with those new inhabitants and the debris from blackberry leaves, a new center of fertility emerged. Out of this protective space, a new tree now rises tall and proud. Someday, the tree will shade out those berries — the very plants that provided a safe place for it to emerge. This is the story of spiritual life.

Evil is parasitic, like viruses and aphids; it is a kind of vampiric life that stalks evolution, depending on other organisms for its vitality. “Everything which has the power to act as a bacillus, everything in which bacilli are involved, is the result of crowds of ahrimanic spirits being cast down from heaven to earth at a time when the dragon had been overcome.”² Good may feed on the composted perversity of evil, but benevolent trees provide habitat for many species.³ As Rudolf Steiner writes, “For love to reach its highest goal, the love of all, it must pass through the love of self. In Faust, Goethe rightly causes Mephistopheles to say: ‘I am an aspect of the power that always intends evil, and always creates good.’”⁴ At the center of each incarnation is a germ of egotism. I must pass through the portal of selfishness to attain selfless love.

Pine trees, for example, tend to foster only more pines, even though Maria Thun’s biodynamic research demonstrates that pine needles, aged long enough, become splendid compost. But oak trees, as Ehrenfried Pfeiffer remarks, are one of the only trees that thrive in monoculture but always produce polyculture. The soil around oak trees is so balanced, and they provide so much habitat that you can easily find dozens of species germinating under their canopy. As Joseph tells his malicious brothers: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”⁵

In a sense, “all plant growth is slightly parasitic in character”⁶, which means plants initially take more from the soil than they give. Even “good” trees can grow at the expense of other plants, even ones to which they are indebted. Only after a certain point does a living being begin to become relatively independent, eventually becoming what Alan Chadwick calls a conservatoire: the mature plant can now give more than it takes. But the unfolding life of a plant is in its seminal idea. As Chadwick says, “the seed is utmost idée and least metamorphosis.”⁷ Which is to say, the seed is a pure living potentiality, whereas the formed plant is that potential “dying” into actuality.

Hard work only accomplishes what it does, but no amount of hard work in isolation inspires others to do the same. Moreover, since all work is finite, all results are also finite. When we stop working, the work stops because external work in itself is not alive. Only by taking on apprentices does hard work replicate — and even then, only a few learn the skill well enough to be a master. Why? Because skill itself cannot be taught directly. It must be born within the other person if it is to live there. As Chuang Tzu says,

“Speaking for myself, I see it in terms of my own work. If I chip at a wheel too slowly, the chisel slides and does not grip; if too fast, it jams and catches in the wood. Not too slow, not too fast; I feel it in the hand and respond from the heart, the mouth cannot put it into words, there is a knack in it somewhere which I cannot convey to my son and which my son cannot learn from me. That is how through my seventy years I have grown old chipping at wheels.”⁸

Nothing happens without hard work, but no amount of external effort will compensate for a black thumb. Hard work is necessary: growing ideas must be weeded, but hard work doesn’t make a single living thing grow. As Alan Chadwick says, “If you obey the technique to perfection, that technique will become invisible.”⁹ What should manifest is no longer the activity of tending our inner gardens but the beautiful performance of the ideas in our lives. The technique is an inner experience of the idea itself, not rote memorization or blind repetition of someone else’s work. An idea is a living seed. An idea grows, blooms, and proliferates. After an idea germinates in someone, it eventually grows to spread and germinate in someone else.

Consider a dandelion. A single seed blown to a parking lot takes root, and from no effort on the parking lot’s part, the seed grows and spreads. As a seed has a love for its source, the Sun, so every idea loves its source, God. Plants condense sunlight, ideas photosynthesize grace. Without living ideas, work is futile. Imagine a farmer plowing, hoeing, and watering a sterile field with not a single blade of green. No amount of extra effort will make that field living. Life begets life. Action and hard work are the deadest aspects of ourselves. “The fruit must perish for the seeds to come out.”¹⁰ Detachment from the fruits (effects) of our labors is necessary, or we will be forever frustrated by our inability to keep what we make. The sweet fruit a plant produces does not belong to the plant — it is for others to eat. Even the farmer cannot claim his produce for himself: most of it goes to benefit others.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”¹¹

If we are focused on external activity, our heart belongs to the world of transience. Out of the fruits of our labors arises a new spiritual idea: the lesson we learn from our mistakes in order to evolve into the future. Someone who refuses to learn from their actions is stuck in a rut. “Abba Evagrius said: ‘The beginning of salvation is, to contradict yourself.’”¹² Or, in a more familiar turn of phrase, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”¹³ A plant that never contradicts itself never grows up, never flowers, and never produces seeds. A field that remains consistent is compacted, dead, and static.

Only the idea that motivates devotion imparts vision and gives hope can be credited. The soul is just the soil in which seeds can grow. With no effort of our own, ideas grow, spread, and turn the soul into a vibrant glow with green capillaries coursing with the liquid light of grace.

A dandelion doesn’t ask what kind of soil it will land in. It accepts any condition and grows there. The best of ideas are like this humble messenger of heaven. They don’t discriminate when they encounter a new soul. The best idea germinates regardless of whether the soil in which it is sown is alive or dead. And the idea brings new life.

Someone who does not study is limited to very few options. The fewer concepts we have, the fewer species we have growing in our souls. The fewer species of seeds a soil has, the poorer its geological diversity.

Undesirable seeds can grow. Undesirable seeds can be “roasted” in the fires of meditation and rendered non-viable. “Just as there is consistency of species in procreation, so also, there is a consistency noticeable in the multiplication of thoughts. Just as frogs breed frogs, and men breed men, or mango seeds germinate and grow to put forth mangoes, so too, good thoughts creating good thought currents can multiply only into a flood of good thoughts.”¹⁴ But harmful thoughts spread too because they also feed off the generous fertility of the soil. Good and bad ideas may contest, but on desolate soil, there is no such struggle — it is simply dead.

In the fires of meditation, undesirable seeds are charred. They still exist, but they can no longer grow — they “will all be totally erased, or at least made ineffective — as roasted seeds.”¹⁵ In biodynamics, the process of charring undesirable seeds is called “peppering,” wherein noxious weed seeds are toasted — not reduced entirely to ash — and then “sown” out. Since the toasted seeds still contain foods but cannot become a plant anymore, they rot spreading disease to their immediate relatives. But this same fire does no harm to a sequoia growing in the same spot.

Pest and Weed 'Peppers' Revisited

Not all seeds are created equal. Some we must uproot, but even those become inconsequential if the right seed of enlightenment is planted. Imagine countless annual herbs competing. Some are beneficial, some are noxious. Our childhood habits are like this: good, bad, and ugly. Brambles grow. Opportunistic trees. But which of these is “me”? “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”¹⁶ At the heart of this wild mess is an unnoticed redwood tree. If the giant sequoia germinates, it doesn’t care about what came before it. Those small bad habits and petty behaviors provided shade, organic matter, and moisture for the unfolding evergreen. One day, this great tree will shade out all those earlier habits. This is how the good in us overcomes puerile habits: one day, the great cedar shades out the underbrush, and they simply stop growing. The fires of life reduce them to ash — but the redwood thrives.

The triumph of our inner tree creates an entirely new ecosystem. The tree grows so large that plants start growing on the upper branches while the lower struggles have ceased. This ascent continues; the previous pioneer species have long vanished, but their effects live on in the tree. The tree that stands grew secretly in their shade until it, in turn, shaded them. And so those weedy adolescent habits count towards good.

“The Gemara asks: Is that so? Didn’t Reish Lakish himself say: Great is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for him as merits, as it is stated: ‘And when the wicked turns from his wickedness, and does that which is lawful and right, he shall live thereby’ (Ezekiel 33:19), and all his deeds, even his transgressions, will become praiseworthy? The Gemara reconciles: This is not difficult: Here, when one repents out of love, his sins become like merits; there, when one repents out of fear, his sins are counted as unwitting transgressions.”¹⁷

This is how we grow. Our neurotic bad habits protect this sacred tree. We don’t even know it’s happening, but while the false King Herod is slaughtering innocents, trying to prevent any rival king from rightfully claiming the throne, the Holy Family escapes to Egypt, hiding in the shadows of the empire. Having “succeeded” in shading out all other possibilities, his hardened heart provided the ideal space for his own doom. In the midst of these rival weeds, a new tree is germinating. The thorniness and tangled underbrush of our egotism secretly—and unbeknownst to it—protect a precious germinal gift.

Condensing this ecological image into a single plant, the thorny rose is a quintessential image of the same process within a single organism. The thorns express a discharge of martial energy, and the pattern of fives in the rose blossom itself demonstrates its venusian character. The delicate blossom is protected by the very thorns it overcomes. The vicious reactiveness out of which saintliness blossoms is retroactively counted as righteous: because of what is attained, everything before the blossom is now made worthwhile. It is as if the flower’s unfolding love for the sun’s grace justifies the preceding thorns.

“Humanity resembles a field of wheat, in which each individual represents a plant, each attempting to grow higher than the others and to bear more abundant fruit; but there are few who desire to develop into beautiful flowers, that are looked upon by the others as being ‘of no practical use,’ and they forget that it is said that to those who possess the kingdom of God all things will be added.”¹⁸

Whatever your thorns — whatever your sins — the foibles of your youth were a defensive moat for the birth of the inner Christ within you. Remorse has only one use: to motivate you to change your ways. After turning from error, remorse should be left behind like the dead skin of a snake. Wallowing in remorse is a complex feeling because it indicates that we actually want to repeat the earlier transgression, which is why it returns to our minds in the first place. If we were to eradicate the root of the regretful memory, the memory itself would no longer trouble us. Recalling sins — even ostensibly to “regret” them — is indulgence in the same kind of imagination that precipitated the earlier errors.

Douglas Adams captures confused human conscience with great humor: “For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.”¹⁹ We indulge sinful ideation while at the same time feeling bad about it — and then patting ourselves on the back for feeling bad about what we shouldn’t even be thinking about anymore. If our Cedar of Lebanon is growing tall, the former briars stand no chance and will fade out of consciousness altogether.

1. The Holy Geeta, Chapter 19, verse 18, commentary by Swami Chinmayananda

2. R. Steiner, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, Lecture IX, GA177

3. It was Alan Chadwick, I believe, who suggested that the ideal location for a compost pile is under the canopy of an oak tree.

4. R. Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (GA55, 22 November 1906, Berlin)

5. Genesis 50:20

6. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture IV (GA327, 12 June 1924, Koberwitz)

7. Alan Chadwick, “Seed: Utmost Idee and Least Metamorphosis,” Green Gulch Farm, CA 11 Feb 1980,  https://chadwickarchive.org/ca-0302/ 

8. A.C. Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981), 139–140.

9. https://chadwickarchive.org/quotes/

10. The Holy Geeta, pg. 740.

11. Matthew 6:19-21

12. Dixit abbas Evagrius: Principium salutis est, si teipsum redarguas.

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, Essays: First Series, 1841

14. The Holy Geeta, commentary. by Swami Chinmayananda, pg 600.

15. The Holy Geeta, pg. 159.

16. 1 Corinthians 13:11

17. Yoma 86b https://www.sefaria.org/Yoma.86b.3?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en

18. Dr. Franz Hartmann, The Life of Paracelsus, pp 187-188

19. Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish