Do it!

with acting, the big problem is that the word " will" has a double meaning (in Dutch and German), because we usually use "will", the word, for something you wish for. I want this or I want that. But, let's just say, in the triad of thinking, feeling and acting, the will doesn't actually mean so much as the desire - it is a part of it, but the will is much more the movement, the activity, the doing. And when you start delving into that, you enter a totally different world from that of thinking and feeling, and you then discover - if you didn't already know - that in doing, the whole area of thought and image actually falls away. Watch video on YouTube

It has been quite a while since we took the jump to a video again and we plan to do some more work on it now. I have been asked - and this was in response to the corona crisis with all the confusion surrounding it - for two years now to write a booklet on how to arrive at the truth. How to find out what is true and what is false in all the reporting. The first thing to look at then, of course, is thinking, so I have written a booklet titled "Learn to Think!", knowing that thinking is not something you are just given. It is, but that it is also something that needs to be developed. And when I had written that, or actually already while I was writing it, I experienced very clearly: of course, it is really not only thinking that brings you to acknowledge or reject truth. It is also the experience that plays a major role in this, that is, feeling. And with feeling, the big problem is that human beings, because we are all egoists, we feel ourselves the most. And then you can be so convinced that you can perceive the truth with your feelings, but in reality it turns out to be very disappointing, because the prejudice is also in the experience, is also in the feeling, and yes, you first have to find a way to free yourself in your feelings from all that ballast, so that you have the heavens open, so to speak, to become aware in your feelings of what is true and what is not true - and the most important part of that is that you can also say: I don't know. That is very difficult for people I believe, but most of the things in life we don't know, and the knowing is a very limited part anyway. So there had to be that second booklet "Learn to feel!" and then, of course, eventually came the subsequent question; So how do you learn to act? Thinking, feeling, acting. But with acting, the big problem is that the word " will" has a double meaning (in Dutch and German), because we usually use "will", the word, for something you wish for. I want this or I want that. But, let's just say, in the triad of thinking, feeling and acting, the will doesn't actually mean so much as the desire - it is a part of it, but the will is much more the movement, the activity, the doing. And when you start delving into that, you enter a totally different world from that of thinking and feeling, and you then discover - if you didn't already know - that in doing, the whole area of thought and image actually falls away. I also found it very 'funny' actually that when I finished the booklet, I didn't have an image in it, except on the cover. That doesn't really fit with doing, that you have an image associated with it, and you enter a completely different world when you start thinking about what doing, what activity, what movement actually is. What then becomes very clear is that we live in a culture - at least here in the West - where movement, doing, becomes impoverished and it becomes a kind of poor appendage of our humanity. Of course, we are called to move and it says so everywhere. Whenever you look up anything related to health on the internet, for example, one of the advice is definitely always: Move enough! So there is a focus on it, but that exercise then consists of sports or cycling or walking and that exercise does not consist of anything else with the 'doing'. Of course, I am a bit older now and I have memories of the 1950s/60s, when we still sat in the room with the family in the evening, no television, but we did listen to the radio, radio plays and listening programmes, but that was mainly during the day and maybe some music in the evening. But we sat together in the room and I remember - at least that was the case in my family - that there would be handicrafts, embroidery, knitting, but most of all we would continue to work on sewing that had not been finished during the day. That was a very busy event in the evening and while we were doing that or rather, that was then the older people, but as a child you naturally join in, you want that too. We started embroidering and knitting and sewing early on and while that was being done, there was of course talking. I remember that as very cosy and I also remember that when the television came along, my mother really thought that was a kind of murder for social life and for a very long time she also refused to take such a device into the house, because she thought, once that's there, it's on and then you don't see each other anymore, you only see that image, a kind of hypertrophy of the thinking and feeling side of the human being. And so the movement actually came more and more into the background. We experienced that. We experienced that we started sitting with our hands crossed more and more. There is still cooking, of course, and you have to do a lot in a day, that's always the case, but it has become a different kind of doing. It is perhaps mainly the creative doing that has become emaciated, but love work has also become emaciated. People are no longer so inclined to concern themselves with yes, what can you do for each other now. Of course, there are certain organisations for it, that you have volunteers who run errands for the elderly, there are people who really go into a profession in which they want to do that par excellence, take care of others. I could say a lot about it, but everyone will understand what I mean. The TV was the first, but now almost all of us sit at the screen a lot anyway, and if you're not at the screen, then maybe you're on a tractor or something like that, but the use of the limbs - and not as a sport, not as a leisure activity, but as an expression of your humanity - that has fallen very much behind. Just look at yourself when you are sitting at the screen. In fact, what you are doing then is almost all conscious activity and the limbs are doing very little. You might be typing a bit or you are scrolling a bit. or you open and close your laptop, or you get up and you go and have a glass of water, but of course that is not what I mean. Actually, in our time, the artist is still best off, because at least they are still doing something. And I always like to bring up musicians, because these are of course people who, especially when they don't sing, but when they play an instrument, when no words are used, then there are no images either and then what they do is really doing. They also have to do a lot to do what they want to do and so a musician is still really someone who does. In the household, you have a lot to do, although others are often asked to do that for you. But they do it anyway. There are still people who do something. In most families there is also cooking, which is also a creative activity. But on the whole you have to say: doing is something we really have to think about, that it is not lost. I remember an image Rudolf Steiner gives in his autobiography, that he had a friend, when he was young, who said; You will see, in the future man will consist only of a head and have no more limbs and will only be able to move by rolling. This young man saw that image before him, because even then - and this must have been in the late 19th century - he observed how little man still does. If you compare that to now, we have of course become really very idle creatures and we naturally feel very busy. I myself am of course very busy with the text, so you really feel like you are working, but in fact you are doing nothing. So you just sit there and you look and you strain yourself - I'm talking about correcting text now - you strain your perceptiveness, you do that on paper or you do that on the screen. But actually doing something, that is quite different. You also sometimes think back to the art of printing. The very first book I wrote, the pages were still filmed, those films were printed, that was already very modern, of course. But imagine that in the past you had the typesetter, who really had to set each letter by hand, word for word, page for page. I wouldn't want that to be necessary again, of course, but it is very important in reflection to see how our acting life in particular is deteriorating. Now, I became very strongly aware of that, if I wasn't already aware of it, when I started writing the booklet “Doen!” (Act!) So one is the realisation that by willing (the Dutch word for wanting) -and you really can't use that word, because for everyone it means mainly the wish-will, and beyond that, when you talk about doing you enter a whole other area of the human being and you will have to see how you can then write about that in that way. I did that by delving into the different layers of doing, the more physical layer, the more habitual layer, indeed the wish- and desire-layer, the layer of the motive, the layer of realising that you could have done better - that's a kind of higher wish - and then the intention to do better next time, and that's not just about morality, it's also about skill, and then finally the limit you reach, which is set by your body, because as a human being you have a certain skill thanks to your body, which on the one hand is generally human - but of course we know very well that skills are not equally distributed among people, and when you want to do something, you have to be able to do it as far as your body determines. And that limit, that's where you end up, and that has yielded some surprising insights, which I did already have, but which in this context, as I have composed it, emerge with a kind of necessity. The booklet Do! (Shows the booklet). Here, God Himself is doing, and when you have a certain sense of the existence of the divine, then of course you know you are talking about the Creator. We as human beings are, if you want to assume that, created after that image and so there is a very great potential in us too to do. But there is a kind of abyss between what you want to do and what you actually end up doing. And that is perhaps the main theme of this booklet. I would say: buy it and see what doing actually is and how you can develop it. You can't learn it, anyone already can, but you can develop it much further than it comes naturally. And surely that is the best thing in life, that you don't remain who you are, but develop further and further.