“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” ― Victor Hugo

But even ideas whose times have come need midwives and champions who resonate to them first, even before they have fully descended into this world.

George Washington is said to have been killed by physicians treating him for a severe cold. Preeminent in the medical arts toolbox was bloodletting (at times extracting up to 80% of a patient’s blood volume), which they performed four times on the great general and first President. Medical history is replete with instances of treatments worse than the illnesses they are thought to cure. The great success and penetration of homeopathy in the United States prior to the 20th century is often attributed by allopaths to the brutality and misguidedness of what was then conventional medicine’s flailing and failing responses to waves of epidemics that swept through the populace. Cholera’s death toll in the Cincinnati, Ohio 1849 epidemic was 48-60% for conventional care and 3% for homeopathy—attributed by allopaths, of course, to the “fact” that homeopathy’s rarefied dilutions had neither helpful nor harmful effects.

So the question arises, “What common contemporary medical practices or scientific beliefs will be seen, a mere century or two from now, as archaic, laughable, head-scratch-evoking or tragic? Rudolf Steiner’s insight was that all experiences have as necessary components both a percept and a concept—or put another way, a phenomenon that you have no concept for, you cannot fully, truthfully experience. So, what key missing concepts are keeping many individuals, who are otherwise inclined toward a more spiritually inclusive science and medicine, from receiving the riches pouring towards humanity from spiritual sources? Are those chasms, those church/yoga/meditation on Sunday, and then Wall Street or the laboratory on Monday chasms plus the mind/body divide chasm–killing us? If so, they have to be bridged. But how?

With this in mind I have presented two questions to our Mystech presenters: 1) What contemporary ideas or practices will near future generations (the next century or two) find laughable and/or contemptible? And 2) what essential concepts (anthroposophical or otherwise) made more widely available and approachable, may have the power to utterly transform the present toward the good?

A deep feeling for essential breakthrough entry points, especially for the ones we are personally called to, can best direct our efforts and collaborations. We will explore all of this.