Spirit in Action
Biodynamics & Sacred Agriculture: Creating a New Relationship With the Earth
The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association is holding their North American conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on November 14-18, 2012. Executive director, Robert Karp, speaks about the organization, biodynamics, and the conference, while keynoter & workshop leader Dennis Klocek shares about Sacred Agriculture and alchemy.
- Broadcast on:
- 04 Nov 2012
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(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeak. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with two folks associated with the November 14th to 18th, Madison, Wisconsin Conference of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. The theme of the conference is sacred agriculture, creating a new relationship with the earth. I've got a link to the Biodynamic Association and the conference on nordancepiritradio.org. And I hope you'll check it out, but first we'll speak with their Executive Director, Robert Karp, about the conference and the organization. And then we'll get a hold of Dennis Klosek, who will be keynoting and presenting some workshops at the conference. And he'll help us flush out some of the depth of thought and heart behind biodynamics. First, we're headed by phone to East Troy to talk to the Executive Director of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Robert Karp. - Robert, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Nice to be here, Mark. - You're down in East Troy, Wisconsin, and that's where I understand the central headquarters is for the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. That kind of blew my mind because I looked at your board members and there's a whole lot of them that are from the coast, California or Massachusetts or wherever. How is it that the Biodynamic Association is located right there in the heartland of Wisconsin? - You know, it just so happens, Mark, that there's a long history of biodynamic agriculture right here in East Troy, Wisconsin. Our office is actually located on the oldest biodynamic farm in the United States, it's called Zinnaker Farm. About 20, 30 years ago, a number of other people began to move into this area because of Zinnaker Farm. So there's another nonprofit in the area called the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. There are several other biodynamic farms in the region, and it just so happened that this little locale became a hotbed for biodynamic agriculture and we decided to move our headquarters here, just last year. You know, the association has been around since 1938. We've been in a lot of different places during that history, but we've never actually been in the Midwest and the board really liked the idea given how central agriculture is to the culture of the Midwest. The board liked the idea of coming here. - I think we need to explore the entire history of the Biodynamic Farming Garden Association and the origins of biodynamic farming. But first I wanna mention there's a conference that's coming up, it's in mid-November. Tell the folks about that. - Sure, well, we hold what we actually call our North American Conference every other year, and we move it to a different location in the country every time we hold it. We decided because we haven't been in the Midwest for a while and because we just moved our national headquarters here to hold it in Wisconsin, sort of as a way of introducing ourself to the Midwestern community and also supporting the biodynamic movement here in the Midwest. Mind you, we'll have people come from all over the country, actually, all over the continent. So we decided to hold our 2012 conference here in Wisconsin in Madison, which you and your listeners probably know is Wisconsin is already a center for the food movement. There's incredible amount of organic farming happening here and local agriculture, community supported agriculture farms. And yeah, I'm happy to tell you more about the conference. We're very excited about it. Well, please do tell us about it. How long is it? How many people typically show up for something like this? And are there 10,000 options in terms of workshops and presenters, all that? - There's a lot. We like to put out a large smorgasbord when we hold the conference because we have a very diverse membership. We have farmers and gardeners and activists and researchers and educators. And there's also lots of new people interested in about dynamics in our time. It's very much a growing thing. All together, I say we'll get between five and 600 people coming to our conference. And basically we have the main conference, which begins Friday morning and end midday Sunday. And then we also have a series of pre-conference events. So starting on Wednesday already of that week, we'll have a field day out of angelic organics, which is an extraordinary biodynamic CSA farm in Northern Illinois. That's where Farmer John has his farm. Many people know Farmer John because of the movie called The Real Dirt on Farmer John. There's a day-long field day there with Farmer John on Wednesday, as well as a day-long workshop on farm-based education. And there'll even be a play there that evening. And of course, it's really important for us to connect to an actual farm. I mean, ideally we'd hold our whole conference on a farm, but it's just no place that can accommodate 500 people. And then on Thursday, we offer a slate of half-day workshops so that people can go more in depth in specific topics. Everything from managing a community supported agriculture farm to essentials of organic and biodynamic dairy farming, as well as a workshop with Dennis Klochak on working with the cosmic rhythms. We have a workshop on food rights. Basically, we have seven different half-day workshops on Thursday. Thursday evening, we have kind of a celebratory event where we're celebrating some of the graduates in our beginning farmer program and having a food and wine tasting. And then the main conference begins Friday morning. And as I said, last through Sunday, midday. - One of the things you mentioned early on is I think that the conference includes all kinds of workshops you mentioned amongst them, gardeners and there's activists and all of that. Is there a tension or is this just part of the richness of the biodiversity of a conference? Do activists get in the face of gardeners and gardeners just say, I just want to go out and grow things? - Not at all, we find the conferences really enhanced by having participation from very diverse people. I mean, creating a new food system, as it's come to be called, it's gonna take all of us. It's gonna take a lot of different kinds of people. And having farmers and gardeners interacting with consumer activists, with educators and researchers, we have found it just creates a great mix at the conference. And we have a diversity of workshops to address these different interests. We also have some interesting workshops on economics because we recognize how important the economic aspect is of agriculture. You do have to make a living and the question is, how can you make a living that's in harmony with these core underlying values? One of our keynoters, for example, is a man named Charles Eisenstein, who's really become a pioneer of new ways of thinking about the economy. And I think it's very important when we look at renewing agriculture, that we look at it holistically. Yes, it's about farming practices. Yes, it's about nutrition. But it's also about how we manage these farms economically, how we own them. We have a workshop on alternative ownership structures for farms and food businesses. We also have a whole artistic evening at the conference. And this something unique about biodynamic conferences is we really honor the arts. We really try to create a space for the arts in these conferences because the arts offer such inspiration for all of us, whatever we do. So it is a real rich mixture of workshops, of people, of approaches. I'm sure there's a lot of people on the coast who until last year when the demonstrations broke out in Madison, were barely aware of our state. You say that there's a special number of especially large number of organic farms in Wisconsin. How does it really compare to the rest of the map? Oh my, I haven't double checked these statistics recently. But I know that at one point, Wisconsin had the second highest number of community supported agriculture farms in the country and the second highest number of organic farms in the country. I mean, Wisconsin is a real hotbed for local and organic agriculture. It's just an environment that's very friendly to new thinking in agriculture. Do you have some sense of why that may be? I mean, I've lived here almost all of my life, sometime in Africa and five months down in Texas. But otherwise, I've been in Wisconsin all of my life. I take it for granted. Do you notice some differences between thought and practice here as opposed to other areas of the country? You know, I tend to relate a lot of it to topography. Wisconsin has a very diverse geography. There's a lot of different ecosystems around the state, the woodland region, the prairie region, the driftless region. Some of these places like the driftless region, particularly aren't well suited to industrialized agriculture. When you have a place like Iowa that's very flat, even though Iowa was once all prairie and wetlands, Iowa was a very easy place to come in and drain those wetlands and begin to develop large row crop farm. A place like the driftless region in Wisconsin, for example, and other parts of the north, it's just not so suitable for that. There's a lot more woodland. There's a lot more hills and bluffs and streams. It's an environment that's actually suitable for small and mid-sized farms, more suitable for small and mid-sized farms than it is for large 1,000, 2,000 acre farms. Now, having said that, there's a lot of large-scale agriculture in Wisconsin, but there's also a lot of small-scale agriculture, and I think that's a really positive thing for the state. - How does this shoehorn together with organizations like Organic Valley? Organic Valley is one of those places where I think they do a superb job of bringing us the best of organic without going to the big farm model. - Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, Organic Valley started here. I think it drew a lot of its initial farmers from the driftless region in Wisconsin. Of course, it now has farmers all over the United States, but I think that, again, the topography played a role. I also think Wisconsin has a progressive political history. It's been a state friendly and supportive to the formation of co-ops, and of course, Organic Valley is organized as a co-op. It's one of the largest most successful farm co-ops in the United States. I think those traditions, the progressive tradition, the co-op tradition have also contributed toward Wisconsin being a kind of incubator for the food movement. - Of course, the biodynamic farming and garden association, it's rooted in biodynamics, Rudolph Steiner. Would you explain for our listeners a bit of that history what the origins of that is when and how it came to be what it is now? - Well, Rudolph Steiner, for listeners who aren't familiar with him, was a leading thinker in the late 19th, early 20th century. Rudolph Steiner was one of the first individuals to really recognize that Western civilization and the kind of materialist conception of the world that had become the basis of Western civilization was quickly reaching a kind of dead end that unless we developed a more holistic way of looking at the world, of understanding the non-material aspects of reality, the inner dimension of reality, together with the outer dimension of reality, that unless we began to do that and organize our practical activities around this more holistic way of looking at the world, that our civilization would basically go into decline. Steiner was deeply concerned about the kind of technology that would begin to be developed out of purely materialistic science, the kind of legal and economic forms, the kind of educational processes. So Steiner was a kind of polymath. He developed this holistic philosophy which he called spiritual science or anthropology, it's also called, and tried to bring it primarily to Central Europe, this new approach to science, new way of looking at the world. And he developed a huge following at that time. Europe was really struggling, World War I came and many people were looking for new approaches. Steiner began to be approached by a lot of different people, by educators, by doctors, by farmers, by researchers, all kinds of people saying, "Well Rudolf Steiner, if this philosophy is true and it sounds true to us, what does it mean for education? How should we shape our schools so that they're more holistic? How should we develop medicine so it's more holistic?" And so out of Steiner's work came a lot of these practical applications which we know today as things like Waldorf education. And biodynamics is one of those movements that developed because a group of farmers came to Ruth Steiner. These farmers were already noticing a decline on their farms as the result of the use of artificial synthetic fertilizers. This was some of the earliest use of artificial fertilizers taking place in Europe at that time. And these farmers were seeing some negative effects of it and they asked Ruth Steiner if he would help them develop a more holistic approach to agriculture. And so he gave a series of lectures that really formed the basis for the biodynamic farming movement at that time. And really it became a foundation also for the organic farming movement. I mean, Ruth Steiner is considered one of the pioneers of organic farming because so many core biodynamic principles are also became part of the organic movement. If I understand correctly, biodynamics is considerably more than just organic, organic in itself. I guess people were always organic 200 years ago, right? But they weren't necessarily biodynamic. What's the difference there? One of the differences that biodynamics is explicitly based on a more holistic way of understanding the natural world. I mean, organic farming in our time has come to be more or less a set of practices rather than a holistic philosophy, a holistic way of understanding nature and the human beings place in nature. And so biodynamics certainly incorporates a number of those organic practices, but also incorporates this holistic way of understanding nature. And out of that, there are several practices that are not necessarily part of the organic palette, if you will. A very key principle in biodynamics is the idea of building up the farm. In itself, the whole farm as an ecosystem or as Steiner called it, the farm organism. Steiner said the whole farm is a living biological entity and it has spiritual qualities. It has biological qualities. Farmer needs to look at their farm as a whole. And ideally, that biological organism includes molds and livestock. So in biodynamics, you're always striving whenever possible to have both crops and livestock on that farm. So for example, biodynamic wineries around the world include animals in their wineries because they realize the incredible health that comes when you're deriving your fertility from your farm, from animals that live right there on the farm. There is no better fertility than animals that are living on the farm rather than having to bring in your fertility from off the farm. And ideally, not all farms can achieve this, but the goal is there in biodynamics that you even raise all the feed for those animals on the farm. So you're trying to create this self-renewing ecosystem on the farm where you're growing the feed for the animal. The animals are providing the fertility for the farm. And this builds up the health and vitality of the farm. It's a very fundamental practice that it can't be achieved on every farm. Every farm isn't going to be able to derive all their fertility on the farm. It has to do with how many acres you have for a particular farm, for example. But that's the goal, the striving. And another major thing is the use of these things called the biodynamic preparations, which are these homeopathic preparations that are used by biodynamic farmers. - What about bugs? They're an animal. How do they fit into the holistic overview? Do you have to be nice? (laughing) - I mean, first of all, in general, in biodynamics, and this is similar, I think, from the perspective of many organic farmers, the key to the health of your farm is in the soil. The healthier the soil that you can build up on that farm, the less pest pressure you're going to have. Pests generally are drawn in when there's some kind of deficiency in the soil that results in a deficiency in the plants. Having said that, obviously there are times where you have pest pressure, and I think biodynamic farmers will try to use some kind of organic way to address that when needed. But there's definitely the view in biodynamics like you have in holistic medicine. I would say that the pests are a symptom. They're not the problem. The problem is some kind of deficiency in the soil, some kind of deficiency at the farm that's making the farm sort of invite those pests in. - A reminder, we're speaking with Robert Karp. He's executive director of the biodynamic farming and gardening association. On November 14th to 18th, they'll be holding a major conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The theme for this conference is sacred agriculture, creating a new relationship with the earth, which is of course why I've invited Robert here today for spirit in action. And one of the things I haven't asked you yet, Robert, which I think is probably pretty important, does this actually make a difference in human health as well as health of the earth? - Absolutely. This was actually one of Rudas Steiner's foremost concerns at the time that he developed biodynamic agriculture was that he felt that the nutrition of the crops that were being raised on the planet were steadily declining. And he said basically that if these industrial methods continued to be used, that our food would become depleted of the vital resources that we need as human beings to realize our spiritual ideals. He said, we all have ideals, but we often don't enact them. We often don't have the strength to really carry out our visions. And he said, this is really a problem of nutrition, that the food that's being grown doesn't have the vital forces, the vital life forces that we as human beings need to fulfill our destinies upon the earth. And so he presented biodynamics very much in terms of nutritional needs. Because in his time, there wasn't yet the kind of widespread environmental devastation that we now see so readily. And certainly biodynamics is also a key solution to the wider environmental crisis, but it's also very key to the nutritional crisis that we face as a culture. - Have there been specific studies that you know of that compare in some way nutrition? I mean, I guess using Western science to analyze qualities, it's hard to know if there is more tea or something in a plant. Are there studies that say, yeah, the produce that comes out here actually measures differently? - Yeah, there have been extensive research done in Europe. And the association is right at this time looking at conducting a major research project that would look at some of these very questions. But they have done it. In fact, several of Rudolf Steiner's students and fellow researchers in Europe developed a way to be able to determine the relative vitality of the life forces in different food. And also just through basic measures like keeping quality of food, how long do products keep? How quickly do they rot? Would be the other way to put it, which is an indication of the life forces and the integrity in the food. So there has been research done, but a lot of it was done at an earlier period in Europe and there is a real need now to renew these studies in our time here in North America. So we are really very interested in conducting an ambitious biodynamic research project to really better understand nutrition and equality of food. - You know, you talked about how long something stays good, how long it doesn't rot. And actually that's one of the fears I have. Sometimes when I go to get food from the grocery store, I'm afraid that it's something that's prepared with GMOs or some other such breed, which they've been bred to keep long on the shelf, almost in cryogenic storage, if you will. And so I'm afraid it's not real anymore. Breeding all that kind of thing, I assume those are techniques that people who are doing organic or in this case, biodynamic farming, that they'd be happy to access. I'm assuming GMOs are completely out. - GMOs are completely out, but traditional selective breeding is not out. In fact, this was a deep concern to rid of Steiner that we began to really work with breeding and to develop, for example, new grains that really have vitality to them. He said the health of the older grains are dying out. We have a colleague here in East Troy, Walter Goldstein, who has the Mondaman Institute. And he's been taking the old Native American varieties of corn and crossing them with some of the modern varieties of corn in order to bring nutrition back into the corn plant because corn has been bred to basically no longer have hardly any protein in amino acids, it's just a bundle of starch. But if you go back and you look at these old varieties of corn, they had an incredible nutrition profile that's all been bred out of them. So we really need breeders to begin to work holistically with our different plant species and bring health and vitality back into them the same way we need farmers to be bringing the health and vitality back into our farms. It's really a very important aspect of the biodynamic movement. - Again, Robert, you're Executive Director of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. How big of an organization are we talking about? Are there thousands of employees? How influential do you have branches in all the states? That's what I would actually hope for. I would hope that we'd have something that could provide some counterbalance to giants like Monsanto or Archer Davis or all those organizations that are pushing things in a direction that I think is probably not good for people or the earth. - Right. Joe Mark, I mean, the food movement generally is a very grassroots movement. At this point, there's a lot of smaller non-profits who are doing the good work to try to grow up an alternative agriculture movement. The Biodynamic Association, we're a small non-profit. We have 1,300 members. We have about seven staff people, but we have affiliated groups all around the country. I can't say we have them in every state, but we do have groups that come together. They make what are called the Biodynamic Preparations whether they study biodynamics. So, you know, biodynamics is a growing phenomenon here in the United States and around the world. I think there are about 5,000 certified biodynamic farms around the world. There's probably about 200 certified farms in the United States. There's probably another 200 that aren't certified, by the way. And certainly, we don't have the resources that the Monsanto's of the world have, but we're very pleased by the fact that there's so much interest in our work right now. And, you know, we're pleased that there's really years to hear biodynamics right now, and that's exciting for us. - I was glancing around a bit on your website, which is at biodynamics.com. That's biodynamicsinplural.com. Folks can go there and find out about the conference coming up and much more about your organization. The title for the conference, which will be held November 14th to 18th in Madison, Wisconsin. The title is sacred agriculture, creating a new relationship with the earth. Sacred. That's one of those terms that scientists look at scans at. Some people look at and embrace heartily. I'm assuming you can reassure me that this is just not some religious cult. Is there some kind of religious or spiritual belief which somehow informs or in some ways guides what you do as an organization? Or would you say it's perhaps more philosophical? - Well, I certainly wouldn't say that we're guided by any type of religious belief. Having said that, as I said earlier, the biodynamic movement is an outgrowth of Rudolf Steiner's effort to pioneer what he called spiritual science, which is a way of understanding the spiritual dimension of reality that's at work everywhere in our lives. In us as human beings, in nature, everything we do, if we want to be practical from this perspective, we need to take into account the spiritual as well as the material dimension of what we're doing. And so biodynamics honors the fact that there is a real spiritual dimension to agriculture, both simply the inner lives of farmers. I mean, farmers for centuries have felt a sacred relationship with the land. They felt that it's extraordinary honor to be able to work the land. And part of what we're doing is simply trying to honor this deep sense of the sacred that has been part of agricultural communities for centuries. And it's, we think, also a big part of the growing food movement. People are looking to agriculture to renew themselves, to find a new relationship to the earth, to recreate culture. I think farms are really becoming cultural centers in our time and not just places for food production. And so we are really trying to call attention to this inner dimension of agriculture, not as some new religious dogma, but just honor the reality that agriculture can be a source of spiritual renewal for us as individuals and also for our culture. It's productive of spiritual values. That's the one side of it. And the other side of it is this idea of the spirit at work in nature, that nature is not simply a mechanism, a machine. This is how we get industrialized agriculture, as we think of nature, is simply a machine. But in biodynamics, we look at nature as that's endowed with more than material principles. There's also life principles. There's life forces in nature. There's also the principle of sensation, of feeling, which we see in the animals. Animals embody a whole nother principle. They're sentient beings. And then there's the principle of consciousness, which human beings are the foremost representatives of on the planet, but that are part of all of nature. There's an intelligence in nature. You can see that as an ecosystem, the intelligence of the relationship of the elements in a given ecosystem. And so biodynamics is deeply imbued with a way of looking at the world in which we try to see nature whole. It's not about a dogma. In fact, it's a lot about encouraging farmers and gardeners to develop this intimate relationship with their farms, to develop an intuitive relationship. This is something that farmers, typically, historically have had. They have an incredible intuitive sense of their farms. But this has been declining, this way of working with the farm. So we are really wanting to make it explicit and really look at the spiritual dimension as something that we believe is gonna be necessary to renew agriculture. It's not just about better tasting food or not having chemicals on our food. That's all very important, but it's also about renewing our inner relationship to the earth and our understanding of what is nature. - And all of those are the reasons that I invited you here today, Robert, for spirit and action. I knew that that's what you were about. I just needed to hear you again. I'm really so thankful that maybe, I guess you could say that the Biodynamics Farming Garden Association has come home to roost, at least temporarily, in Wisconsin. And I'm so thankful that you're gonna be putting on November 14th to 18th. The conference, Sacred Agriculture, creating a new relationship with the earth in Madison, Wisconsin. If people wanna find out again, the place they wanna go is website biodynamics.com. And you'll find all about the conference. You'll find about the organization. You'll learn a lot about biodynamics. And even better, come to the conference in mid-November in Madison. And you'll hear all kinds of people. I assume you'll be there, Robert, as will our next guest. All in all, it sounds like a rich amount of resources. Right there in East Troy, Wisconsin, and in November, in Madison. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit and Action. - Thanks for having me, Mark. It's been a pleasure. - That was Robert Karp, Executive Director for the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. And I'm Mark Helpsmate, Host for Spirit and Action, a Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org, with more than seven years of programs available for listening and download, a list of the stations that carry our programs, links to our guests, like the Biodynamics Association, and there's a place for you to share your reactions, thoughts and suggestions as comments, and not least in the least, a place for you to donate. Your contributions make all the difference to us in order to carry out our work. All at nordenspiritradio.org. You might want to delay making that contribution right now until we finish visiting with our second guest connected with the November 14th 18th Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The theme is sacred agriculture, creating a new relationship with the earth. And our next guest, Dennis Klosek, will present as both keynote speaker and in a couple of workshops. He's the author of a number of books and a practitioner of Biodynamics for about three decades. And he joins us today from Sacramento, California. Dennis, I'm delighted to have you here with me today for Spirit in Action. - Yeah, thank you, Mark. - I noticed in your resume that you've got a master in fine arts from Temple University. What was the master's in? Some form of art, obviously. - Yeah, I was painting and drawing, but I don't do so much painting anymore, but I carved wood. I carved Madonna's and kind of sacred figures. - And how do you figure out what is a sacred figure? - Well, you know, my ancestors worked for the church in Poland, carving stone into, you know, Madonna's and things. But for me, I'm a lifelong student of the work of Rudolf Steiner. His work has led me to a long study, you know, 15, 20 years of the alchemical world view. The work of Carl Jung and things like that and psychology, they both sort of come together in a feeling in myself that the dimension of what is known as a luminous experience, luminous is something where you are moved in your soul but you don't quite know why. So maybe you see a huge flock of starlings or something migrating. And there's this wondrous experience of, this is beyond your understanding. That's luminous experience and then sacred would be when you work to try to understand reasons behind that luminous experience. Technically, that's the definition of what is known as the holy or the sacred is when a luminous experience begins to be cognitive and that, you know, in the past, that was a shaman working then the priest or the monk making medicines out of herbs. They didn't quite know why it was happening but they knew that there were healing forces in the natural world and they tried to apply their minds to understanding it and then architecture, dance, song, you know, mastic diets and things like that. They were all holy or sacred because they were attempts at people trying to understand the mysteries of the natural world and then by extension the mysteries of the human soul. - Let me just make a wild guess here. Industrial agriculture probably doesn't strike you as are either luminous or sacred. - Sure, that's why I'm really happy that the BD association has chosen the subject of the sacred in agriculture because I think it's a very timely thing. I think what people are looking for is that and the attempt at trying to bring the luminous back into their work in nature. There's a kind of split so in religious experience you have belief of things where there's, it gives you a meaning if you have a religious experience but there's very little evidence as to what that really is. It's not like in science where everything is about evidence and religion it's much more about my experience of the meaning but in science and the way industrial agriculture has gone, the data gives you evidence but you get it by being a skeptic. You get the evidence by saying, well, gee, I don't know if I should believe that. Somehow that attitude of gee, I don't know I should believe that has crept into the ability of a person who's working in agriculture to have a holy experience. - I think that most people who work in the area of science, they would say that they're scientists because it's effective because it's what works. I think we have lots of evidence that our medical situation is much better than it was hundreds of years ago because instead of chanting a cure that you've given penicillin or whatever, you know what I'm saying like that, how do you view that kind of issue? Is there a place for science as well as the sacred components? - Absolutely, so the sacred means that you bring cognition to the numerals and if it's just a numerals, it goes into mysticism but if it's just cognition, it goes into incursism. That split there needs to be bridged. In medicine, statistics are starting to show that if you want to get sick, you go to the hospital. Not because of surgery, I think great advances in surgery and the technical aspects of things but the actual healing process is something that isn't really present in medicine in a big way. I mean, in the old days, if you were a healer, you didn't get paid until the person knew why they were sick in the first place. That meant that they had to be brought back into an inculturation in the society because it was considered most sickness came from being alienated from your community. The purpose of the healer was to one, get rid of the affliction but two help the person integrate back into the community so it didn't happen again. That doesn't happen when you just take a substance, here's a pill, see me in two weeks. If something in the soul that doesn't get the message, so to speak, the body might get through antibiotics, the body might get some relief but the soul doesn't really understand how to change the life pattern in order to bring wholeness. - Our society is so science-based or at least it thinks it is, that I imagine that sometimes it's a hard sell to talk about the alternatives. Although I imagine people are pretty thirsty for an alternative. What's your experience with that? Are people skeptical most of the time saying, "No, you must be one of those nuts, "you're selling snake oil," or do you have more of, "I need something to bring meaning into my life." - Yeah, you know, there's interesting studies going on homeopathy. In the late 1800s, most hospitals in the United States were based on homeopathy. But right at that time was when the germ theory was developed, and instead of studying homeopathy, was actually considered to be sort of the coming age. The new age, spiritual age, was gonna be that substances would be brought to their archetypes, their power archetypes, and the soul would get it. That was sort of an idea in the late 1890s. With the germ theory, it became vitalism, and vitalism was then seen as snake oil, as you said. But I think it would depend on who you would talk to today, but the studies I've been done with homeopathy where 30% of the people will always get cured with homeopathy, and 30% of the people will never get cured with homeopathy, and the remaining percentage can go either way, depending on plenty of friction. - Of course, what you're gonna be talking about at the Biodynamic Association Conference is sacred agriculture, what it is. So as we bring this consciousness to agriculture, does it also have a practical ramification with respect to how much produce you get? I mean, do you actually produce better if you come with the right sacred spiritual attitude as you do agriculture? - Yeah, so there we get to what does it mean to be sacred? And using that definition and it brings cognition to a new minutes experience, it's where I wanna go with the keynotes and with the workshops I'm doing, is that the way that a contemporary person can best find access. We have to bring cognition to the mystical experience. We can't just be tree huggers and make all these wild claims, which I think is a problem sometimes in the new age movements and things where spiritual values are brought forward as they tend to go overboard with fetishes and remedies that people can't really explain why this works. I think that is a problem. So for the past 20 years I've been trying to study science to help by dynamic practitioners understand. We can't just go back just to what Rudolph Steiner said. We have to try to understand how it does tells with science. So for me, a link that could be made to regular science is through the study of rhythm, use of rhythm in healing modalities, use of rhythm in planting modalities and harvest modalities. Most of my work has been involved with studying planetary motion and climate relationships. I just published a book called "Climate Soul of the Earth" Steiner Books in New York published it. There are many, many case studies in there of hurricanes and droughts and all kinds of climate patterns that can be linked up to very broad planetary relationships. And I think for me, putting empirical experiments in agriculture, planting at certain times and things is a doorway where there could be a bridge made to science minds who are open to say, "Jesus is another dimension of the experimental method that could prove to be empirical." The difficult part is that the empiricism usually ends up as a qualitative difference rather than a quantitative one. It's very difficult because the forces that are enhanced when you're working with cosmic rhythms are more of the qualitative side of things. So my work here in California has been mostly with wineries because in the development of wine or in the making of wine, qualities really matter a big deal. If you're selling lettuce and it's really super great, lettuce, well, that's one thing, but you're probably gonna have to argue a lot to get a better price for it. But if you're selling a bottle of wine that's obviously heads and shoulders in terms of qualities above another one, that attracts some attention. So for me, the cutting edge of biodynamics in California is the wine industry. And so I've been working with them for about six years to get them to support biodynamic research with funding so that we could develop measurements of qualitative differences. - So is there any need in the sacred agriculture? Is there a need for a perception of an other being? - If I look at a flock of a couple thousand starlings flying making these remarkable turns or a school of fish or something or what's so salmon going up forever, what is the communication that is happening where these birds instantaneously from the front to the back of a 3000 bird flock are in connection with each other. There must be a beingness, a consciousness, we could say, that is guiding the whole. It's not like everyone's saying, hey, Charlie, turn left, you know? I mean, it just doesn't, it boggles the mind. So if we say that flock behavior has a beingness to it, a wholeness to it, where is that being? Is it a body or is it something else? Is it a super sensible quote being? Is it a, we could say a soul being? If we're talking to a human and suddenly they were to, you know, God forbid pass away right in front of us, we'd become extremely aware that something was present in the corpse just a moment ago that is not present now. And the corpse is not the being. The being is actually invisible. So behind the phenomenon of nature in one context, we could say, what is the being of a school of fish? Today DNA shows that most metal mushrooms actually are acres and acres wide. They are actually the same mushroom with different manifestations. It could be on different sides of a hill or all the way a mile away on a different side of a metal, but it's the same mushroom. So when we start to see things like that that we can prove with DNA, what is that being like? What is, what does that being exist as? What does sudden oak death or Dutch elm disease when a whole species suddenly goes out of existence? What is that? Is that just some mechanical thing? Or does that point to the fact that there was a, a being that all those elm trees had in common? So when I say being, I'm thinking more along those lines, what do we mean when we say being? Do we just mean the corpse? Or do we mean the animating activity? And very often the animating activity is not totally coincident with the physical body. - This goes pretty far afield, I think, into the area of maybe philosophy or actually religious spiritual study. And that's stuff I value, so I'm not discounting it. I'm sure a lot of people want to know the practicalities. Is there some physical manifestation that tells us that sacred agriculture and practicing it actually makes a difference in terms of measurable outcomes? And I include happiness as a measurable outcome. - Well, if you include happiness as a measurable outcome, the answer is absolutely yes. If you include just pounds of fiber, then that's another scale. But if we include happiness, if we include quality of life, sustainability of life, just simply the health aspects of eating organically grown food rather than GMO food. I mean, there's a lot of information coming out now about leaky gut syndrome and GMO because of the protein structure of the genetically modified organisms is not recognized by the body of the people of the consumer. It's considered to be an alien protein and stimulates a huge auto immune responses in the gut. So we could say that the being behind the GMO is not recognized by the spiritual being of the human. This is a, it may be philosophical, but it also is a basis for a new economy and health, and like you say, happiness or wellbeing. To me, those benchmarks of what a system of agriculture yields are very different than just a gross national product or tonnage of soybeans, you know, the market pressures to just create more and more substance. I think especially the mental and social health of people having to do with nutrition is one of the biggest issues by dynamics can contribute to. It's the quality of the foods even based on phenolics and just the activity of the chemistry in the foods. It's these phytonutrients that are the source of vitamins and wellbeing and things like that. They're shown to increase in organic foods and in biodynamic foods, sustainability, you know, the ability of a vegetable to stay fresh longer. I mean, I give my lettuce to the people around here to the neighbors and they go, oh my God, that's the best lettuce ever had in my life. And my wife and I just look at one another and go, yeah, because it's living. - Do you say yeah because you don't say duh? - Yeah, my wife and I just look at one another and we smile because it's across the board. I'll give a lettuce to somebody who doesn't even know and they'll like the neighbor the other day. I just gave something to her. She moved in there and she came and said, "Well, why do we switch your lettuce?" You know, I know it's the best. Then the neighbor crossed the street, he came in and looked at my butternuts and he said, "Oh, would you?" I said, "Yeah, look, I'll give you one of these for seed and we're talking seed." He said, "Oh, yeah, man." He said, "Your butternuts." He said, "They are off the chart." So when people taste that food, they recognize that there's something in it that is beyond what they normally get. Even if they go empire organic, something in when you pay attention to the rhythms of the planets, when you use the B.D. preps, when you build a compost in a meaningful way, it's a ritual. In the past, agriculture had to be based in ritual. The emperor went out and plowed the first three pharaohs so that the beings that were standing behind the natural world would smile on them. And I don't know if we want to have the emperor do that now, but I think everybody today has to take that responsibility, so to speak, to say, "Gee, I may be digging my compost and turning it right now, but because I've paid attention to the fact that the cosmos is moving in a particular way, I think I can bring something into this compost that goes beyond the pale." That's right, I think there's something in that. It may be a homeopathic kind of consciousness. And like I said, 30% of the people will always get it. And 30% of the people will say it's hogwash. I used to worry about the people and we're saying it's hogwash, I used to try to take my weather work to science meetings and stuff. And I just realized they're just guys and gals. In my old age, I've come to peace with the science establishment. They do great work, but I think there's things that go beyond simply the physical nature of things and to the spiritual nature of things. These luminous qualities in the natural world are actually pointing at opportunities for research, I think are really pretty cool. Again, you're going to be presenting keynote and a couple of workshops at the Biodynamic Association Conference, which is going to be held in Madison, November 14th to 18th. People can check that out at Biodynamics.com. Dennis, you've got a number of books out there and if people are going to track you down, what's the best online source of information about you? - That's DennisClosac.com, K-L-O-S-E-K, all one word. I do a lot of lecturing on many different subjects and there are lectures for sale and lecture for free, basic principles. There are articles that are right, there's some artwork on there. - And you'd probably carve something out of a block of wood for them if they asked, wouldn't you? - Absolutely, yeah, it's like we were talking before. Yeah, my name means a block of wood and polish. My secret life is carving black Madonna's out of native walnut here as a kind of way of keeping myself in the game so that I can have a meditative practice that includes my artistic work. - One thing I tried to ask all of my guests, Dennis, is any kind of religious spiritual background that they have, what was yours? - I was brought up a Catholic in Philadelphia, then there were some really rough times in our family, suicides and things like that of family members and I was searching for something that was deeper and I spent some time really doing a lot of zaw then meditative sitting and reading. I never actually had a teacher and then did a lot of study of comparative religion 'cause my wife actually was a Quaker from Indiana. So we went to the meeting for a while and just nothing Quaker seemed to do it and then I hit Ralph Spiner's work and Gerta and started working meditatively with some of those ideas and that opened up a whole realm to me of the meditative work. As a Western kind of esoteric adept would try to aspire to that kind of idea that you could actually use the natural world as a meditative tool for opening up your heart to God. So my story card and George Fox, the idea, the lights and all of us, that's, yeah. - Is that another daw? - Yeah, I mean, it's always in the persecution and the negation of the religious experience of that kind of inner experience that the truth comes out into the world in a new way. I used to resent the fact that these kind of alternative things are rejected but now I understand that they have to be rejected in order to gain a certain inner resolve. I feel the same way about blind dynamics. - Again, if you want to track down Dennis Closek, you can come via his website if you can spell properly. If you can't, northernspiritradio.org is the place. I'll have a link up there to him. Of course, I also have a link to the conference coming up on November 14th, 18th in Madison. - I want listeners to know that because we've run over time, you can listen to another few minutes of bonus interview with Dennis talking about winemakers and alchemy and other topics by going to northernspiritradio.org and looking for the bonus excerpt with this interview. - Dennis, it's great to hear your ideas, all the work you've done. And I particularly love both the head and the heart that you're bringing to this work. I think bringing them together. They've been so divorced in so many practices. This feels like a really valuable step for our society. And thanks for joining me for spirit in action. - Team Mark, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ I'm feeling ♪