Review in the Journal for Anthroposophy 1990 issue no. 40

The Seer’s Handbook: A Guide to Higher Perception

By Dennis Klocek SteinerBooks, 2005, 270 pgs.
Review by Walter Alexander

When you’re reviewing a cookbook, the genre imposes certain obligations automatically. Although you can get some sense of a cookbook by looking at recipe titles and ingredients, for any kind of authentic judgment, you have to go fire up the stove and cook. Dennis Klocek’s The Seer’s Handbook, subtitled A Guide to Higher Perception, is full of recipes, maybe hundreds of them. But the recipes are exercises in consciousness and attention. And the meals include development of higher faculties, true individuality and conscious awareness, and commerce with the spiritual basis of the world. Finding qualified reviewers for this kind of book is problematic. And when they are found, what language will they speak?

The saving grace here lies in the fact that when anyone, adept or beginner, attempts an exercise, there is only one way to approach it, and that is as an absolute novice each time. Otherwise, you end up in the stale alleyways of habit and custom. There, distraction—that great opportunistic devil—will find you easy prey. The late Georg Kühlewind, in his last year particularly, was fond of pointing out that the ability to begin may be the unique human faculty. So it is noteworthy that in this handbook there is a kind of egalitarianism among the exercises, with equal weight given to the simplest, neutral, attention-strengthening practices and to the ones, even at first glance, of profound consequence. The range of exercises is enormous: health-giving push-ups for concentration, visualization, and attention along with gestures moving into the depths of karma, involving our moral capacities and our ability to sense and unite with the being and beings of nature, and with other human beings, as well.

So with a beginner’s stance in mind, we can point out that with a cookbook, no one troubles over a rationale or raison d’être. We do get hungry regularly without trying, and given the choice between swill, fast food, and delightful morsels lovingly prepared, we know which way we go. The goal is to get fed and fed well, one hopes. But hearing the dinner bell of the work of soul transformation is another matter. Dennis Klocek’s is not a cookbook of tune-ups for the nearly presentable, but one for seekers at least beginning to grasp that only deep, essential change will do. That change, they intuit or have learned through hard experience, will not come through quick fixes, but rather sanely through a path traveled gradually, rhythmically, and faithfully.

This book starts from the viewpoint that human evolution is in process and, at present, far, far from complete. Evolution’s progress is not automatic, and relies on conscious intention for its proper unfolding. As Klocek states in his introduction, “The ability to determine the focus of awareness is the great gift and the great challenge of humanity.” This work of conscious evolution, a work that falls apart if not tended, pushes off from the automaticities of “yesterday’s” development—our instincts, habits, and attitudes, for example, along with impulses toward comfort and lifeless routine. “What we hold onto is what imprisons us,” Klocek writes. Liberation calls for clear self-appraisal. Importantly, Klocek says that in our modern age the struggle is not one principally against desires and temptations, but one of “facing fears of death and self-doubt. This is the work against nature.” So as a counterpoise to a healthy breakfast, the aspiring seer asks the hard questions regularly and rhythmically.

The need to become closer to and more familiar with the particularities of the spiritual world arises, in part, because the honest self-appraisal mentioned above creates its own identity crisis. Klocek writes: “The closer we move to the Divine Light, the more we appear to ourselves in our daily life to be simply apparitions made of shadows.” This experience can lead to our simply giving up or conversely to becoming enamored with a striving for magical power. The true antidote to the shattering experience of the insubstantiality of the temporal self, Klocek suggests, is direct experience of the transcendent paired with “consciously and willingly facing our own dying process.”

For this work against nature toward conscious evolution, we need persistently to deepen and expand our sense of why we are doing what we are doing, who we really are, and what our true place is in the creation. Some relevant samplings from Klocek:

“The purpose of this book is to present a path that can be followed to develop higher seeing and the capacity to perceive and live with the profound silence of the spirit.”

“The fundamental struggle of the human being is to maintain a sense of our own ego presence while simultaneously entering the lives of other beings in acts of surrender.”

“Finding one’s place in the context of the great work is the most serious task for seers.”

“The training of the soul to be flexible yet strong can be called ‘soul breathing.’”

“The soul is being asked to willingly transcend the very foundation of its conscious existence….”

“[We need to] develop forces to overcome the patterned and unfree elements in the soul by tempering them with spiritual impulses.”

“The rule of seership is that if we wish to transform our gifts into capacities, we must transform them ourselves and not just use them as they are given to us.”

At the other pole, in its own way not far from the philosophical challenges, is the seer’s alchemical great work of transforming the mundane into the transcendent. For this Klocek offers a workbench full of practical tools. It is a work toward “exact seership,” the rebinding of the scientific with the moral. His description of an exercise involving visualizing the biography of a flower (in the chapter “The Alchemy of Transformation”) gives a glimpse into the multiple connections woven into many of the exercises in “The Seer’s Handbook”:

We can steady our attention through inwardly picturing the flower’s process of incarnation. The inner picture we form in the meditation connects us to the elemental beings and hierarchical beings that stand behind the patterns of the flower’s becoming. Our attention is gradually made resonant to the lawful patterns in the manifestation of the flower out of the archetypal realm into the sense world…. [This] provides insight into our own biographical pattern of becoming…. Feelings of devotion accompany such insights as our own life forces participate consciously in the transformation of the senses from being simply reactive to being the doors to perception of creative patterns in the cosmos.

This is a book of doing. Toward this end, Klocek’s writing voice and style are generally clear and approachable. He moves easily between the seriousness the topic warrants and a familiar tone signaling a necessary recognition that it is ordinary bumbling human beings like ourselves who are trying to do this stuff. The volume is not an assortment of exercises, but a handbook leading through stages of developing inner capacities to concentrate, visual- ize, meditate, and carry a theme back into silence.

The Seer’s Handbook is a contemporary expansion of the Western alchemical tradition as developed by Rudolf Steiner. It’s absolutely clear, though, that Dennis Klocek speaks with an authenticity borne of his own labors, insights, and hard-won knowledge. For many readers, the challenge and decision will be whether or not to take up the richly-prepared course offered, and if so, when to begin.