Aether Force
Emberson's research organization, Anthro-Tech pursues two streams: building toward moral technology on one side and documenting the destructive character of existing electrical technology on the other. For example, the Harmogyra, a resonant mechanism conceived by Paul Emberson, rotates simultaneously about each of the three spatial axes, is tunable to impulses arising in the human soul and governed by musical laws, including the production of chords. The winter 2006 issue of Anthro-Tech News reports that the Harmogyra calls forth sympathetic etheric vibrations in the rhythmic system of the observer, creates a field of etheric forces similar to those in the human being, and connects with etheric soul-forces in the observer. Visitors arriving with no prior knowledge reported the same chest sensation independently; some wept. Anthro-Tech reads this as early evidence of the central operating principle of Moral Technology: human feeling and mechanical oscillation beginning to act upon each other.
On the destructive side, Anthro-tech conducted research within s Faraday cage for several hours to over several days produced a marked change in thinking and a different quality of meditation, suggesting the cognitive damage from artificial electromagnetic radiation is reversible when removed.
Emberson describes the Internet as inherently evil because it is built on binary and square wave bursts, making it a vehicle solely for ahrimanic and luciferic impulses, and assumes Ahriman takes possession of Steiner's own work the moment it appears online.
The second research stream involves exposing how computers actually work through historical archive research in France by Hugh Whistler and constructing a large scale physical model of a central processing unit. For context, Steiner himself acknowledged that the printing press was an ahrimanic invention that would affect the nature of intelligence, yet cautioned that students of spiritual science would have to make use of books as aids to memory, "for otherwise the art of printing would be delivered entirely into the hands of the most powerful enemies of the human spirit." Joel Wendt, in his review of Emberson's work extends that same logic directly to the Internet: "My feeling is that Mr. Emberson goes too far here, as following that view would wholly deliver this tool into the hands of the enemy of the spirit. What is needed is an understanding of what the computer and Internet are, and how to use them without being naive to the risks."
Emberson's fears about electrical technology are not baseless but they seem absolute and entrenched in fear rather than Steiner's impulse of working through these things as there is no running away from Ahriman. The Gondhishapur genealogy and Steiner's own warnings about electricity as fallen, condensed light thrust down into subnature are worth entertaining as concepts. The ideas Steiner has laid down for the nature of light, electricity and the atom have been discussed ad nauseum here. Yet it is only considered evil in this view, if the false concept is attributed to the nature of electricity. Without perceptual organs for this force we are lead to studying its effects
What becomes a problem is the absolutism with which those fears are expressed, and the epistemological source of that absolutism is examined by Joel A. Wendt in his review of From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley. Steiner specified in his Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts that Anthroposophy is not a path of knowledge in any passive sense but a path of cognition, Erkenntnis, an active inward act by which the thinker unites percept (experience) and concept (thought) in the soul through their own living activity. The mere reading of a Steiner text cannot produce this union because the reader lacks one of the two required elements: the percept-experience. Where a reader remains passive, the material descends from understanding into belief, and Anthroposophy quietly becomes what Wendt calls "Steinerism," a religious worldview resting on deferred authority rather than living cognitive work.
7 · 391 ·