Description

Flowforms are stone vessels down which water tumbles. But the form of the vessels guides this ‘tumble’ into a rhythmic swing in a ‘figure of eight’. Very nice but so what?

When I ended up working with water I kept stumbling across Flowforms but it was hard to get someone to sit down long enough to give me their whole story. The bits I could get just raised more questions. So I decided to write down what I could glean and try and fill in the gaps. This publication is the result. Very recently John Wilkes has finally managed to put out his own publication on the subject.

The Introduction from my version explains the slant and history:-

INTRODUCTION

The following pages were written for a book whose working title was ‘Complete Shit’, but which finally emerged from the presses as ‘Sewage Solutions’ ISBN 1-898049-13-0. However, the section was considered by editors, publishers and co-authors to be too long and take the reader far away from the common agenda of that publication. Fragments were left in the text to acknowledge the issues concentrated upon here, but rather than watch all the thoughts die away or be emasculated to fit other’s conceptions about sewage, the universe and everything, I have published this separately.

A gentle irony is that it is now probably too short to cover the ground adequately, wanders from my agenda too much and will still be considered complete shit by many people.

In choosing an approach to this subject I decided to attempt to show that although a surface familiarity with Steiner’s understanding may easily have him bracketed with mystics, dreamers, New-agers, creationists or vague vitalists, his work is distinguished from all of these once one has found the basic threads and experienced the flavour and clarity of his work. Whilst on the one hand I would like to disassociate Anthroposophy from the dogmatism which can and has infected such approaches I would also like to identify the dogmatism within the scientific establishment and disassociate from that.

Note that this is not a challenge to science itself – the scientific discipline is, if disciplined, a treasure of our culture. However, materialistic dogma is not inherent in science even though materialism informs the dominant paradigm of reality in our institutions and press. Although materialistic assumptions have spawned many useful products it should not swamp other equally scientific endeavours which do not acknowledge matter as the only sure and objective foundation from which to push forward the limits of our knowledge.

Please bear in mind that this is one person’s tenuous grasp of a difficult subject. I view it as a working draft which I will continually update and edit as I become clearer on the subjects – albeit a draft which is publicly available in the process. To declare my hand, I work in association with an organisation inspired by the same views which inform the Flowforms so many people have asked me about this controversial anthroposophical input to the questions we are discussing here. (Anthroposophy is the approach to life the universe and everything first and best defined by Dr Rudolf Steiner around the turn of the century. It means human wisdom or wisdom of man.) Towards the many people who have asked and for whom the situation was not then appropriate I feel a kind of duty to make a rough guide to these rarely chartered waters. I will avoid saying ‘it is alleged’, or ‘the hypothetical forces’ so the writing has a chance to flow – I claim no objective truth for this view, but do find it very satisfying for myself. If this brief outline satisfies, interests, infuriates, or just raises further questions then it will have done its job. Particularly if one is stimulated to read the books referred to in the text there is a chance that this thesis will come alive.

Until I have time to rewrite this material in a form not created to fit in with another publication it will have to suffice. In the meantime I would very much appreciate feedback (constructive, or constructively phrased if at all possible) both upon the form and presentation and the ideas themselves. Then the next version will be both better informed and expressed.