Margie on World Peace

I invite Margie to talk about things she remembers, and today she vividly remembered the movement that transformed her life during her adolescence. It was called Biosophy, led by Dr. Frederick Kettner, an Austrian who focused his life on the work of Spinoza and on hope for peace in the world. Biosophy is a subject we have often discussed, and I blipped it in 2019 when Margie talked about how she was drawn into Kettner’s society as a teenager. She went for the dancing, and she stayed for the community and the ideals of peace and the interconnection of all things with nature. She married a man from the community and lived in the community during the first year of her marriage. It was that community that offered her models of independent women who didn’t adopt conventional lifestyles, and I love to hear her talk about it.

“Tell me about Biosophy, Margie. I want to hear more about it.” 

“Oh, Biosophy was wonderful. It saved my life.”

“How?” …and she was off remembering, basking in ideas and memories. One of her most treasured books is Dr. Kettner’s little book of poems, published in 1939 when Margie was fourteen. It’s Back to the Nameless One: Poems for Meditation. She keeps it on the table by her reclining chair, and she reached for it without even looking, her hands know it so well.

She opened to a pair of poems by Dr. Kettner called “Out of Darkness” and “Toward the Light" (see Extra), and she read them aloud. The second one begins, 

Toward the light!
Toward the light!
This song shall guide
My innermost will….

Kettner wanted people to develop peacefulness in themselves by an act of will, so that they could reform society and end war. Margie has spent most of her life moving toward the light of kindness and peacefulness. I suppose Kettner’s ideal failed because of capitalism. 

American “Quakers,” now known as American Friends, posted recently the names of the main companies who are profiting from Israel’s attacks on Palestine. The entire document is worth reading, as it describes where billions of American (and UK and other countries') tax dollars are going and what they are being spent for, and it describes in detail the ways corporations feed violence by creating ever-more efficient and ingenious ways to inflict it. Here are the names of the corporations governments listen to, while ignoring the millions of people filling the streets pleading for a ceasefire.