A conversation between Jac and his great-great-grandchild

Faizah: In turn, may I ask you something?

Jac: I wouldn't know why not.

Faizah: As you lie on your deathbed and look back on your life, what would you like to have done to be able to say that your life has succeeded?

Jac: That's a good question.

A memory comes to mind, I was 21 years old and living and studying philosophy and psychology in St. Andrews, Scotland. One evening I was sitting in the sauna, yes, I was sitting there in the sauna with one other person, also a man, also white, also working on a university education, also rich and highly educated native parents, white young men among themselves, like ancient Romans in a bathhouse so to speak. I asked him, “What are you studying?” “English literature and history.” he replied. “What do you want with it?”, I asked. He shrugged and said he would probably become a teacher. Then I came up with a whole argument about being a teacher.

And then the conversation stopped flowing.

Anyway. Meanwhile, I am a teacher. I call myself a free traveling and creating teacher. Happy to die in harness. Falling over while I am teaching, that seems like a nice death. At the same time, I am a student. I live with open questions. I observe and investigate. I learn from life, my students and my destiny. 

Faizah: So you are a teacher and a student. As you lie on your deathbed and look back on your life as a teacher and a student, what would you like to have done to be able to say that your life has succeeded?

Jac: Initially, I thought a teacher's job was to impart knowledge. Once I started at a high school and, old-fashionedly, transferred knowledge. Standing in front of a blackboard with a chalk in my hands and chalk marks on my clothes. Even in my early days as a free teacher, I initially transferred knowledge, telling stories and sharing what I knew. I regularly received as a compliment from my listeners that I gave words to what they had always felt. But gradually I discovered that the students, and later the readers too, wanted above all to experience. So I do more and more experiments. Experiential. Observational and thinking exercises. These days I see it as my job as a teacher to make myself and others aware of the wisdom that is within us, that we possess within ourselves. AND that we are all part of one whole reality. It is my job to teach people to trust their own thinking and perception. On our intuition. That is why, as a teacher, I am also a student. How can we let wisdom flow? How can we draw on our own wisdom? So how can we live! And align our actions in the process? How do we root ourselves in our being and develop ourselves into ‘free personalities grounded in ourselves’?

Faizah: When did you succeed as a teacher?

Jac: “A teacher never knows how far his lessons reach,” a teacher once said. But when I lie on my deathbed and look back on my life, I hope to see that I have contributed to the development of people, educating themselves to be co-living artists.

Faizah: Living together artists?

Jac: Those are people who live their in intuitions and in loving attunement make each other possible.

Faizah: What legitimizes your teaching?

Jac: First of all, I legitimize myself as a teacher and as a human being. Just as Americans declared themselves independent on July 4, 1776, I declared myself a sovereign human being and a free teacher on September 21, 2015. At the same time, since then, I invite everyone to do the same. For it is as Rudolf Steiner put it in his Philosophy of freedom formulated, “Nature makes of man only a nature being; society makes of him a lawful acting being; a free being man can only make of himself.” You could also say that man has to free himself first from the means of production nature, then from labor and finally from capital. You free yourself from capital by declaring yourself independent by henceforth living from love of life and the things you do. Just as the struggle for true independence from America began only after the declaration of independence, the catharsis to free man begins only after the ‘I-am-a-free-man’ declaration.

Faizah: And secondly?

Jac: Secondly, I can only fulfill my teaching duties as long as there are people who want to be taught by me. You don't know how grateful I am for the fact that so far new students always sign up.

Faizah: What characterizes a good teacher?

Jac: A good teacher sets his or her own learning goals, creates his or her own teaching materials and makes a path with his or her students.

The main learning objective in all my classes is to make myself and others aware each time of what I call, the loving creative in us, the big, beautiful and fruitful ‘I’ in us, our being. Damaris, my beloved, would say, “In this all men are equal.” And at the same time that this ‘I,’ the loving creative, also works and lives in the nature around us, the loving creative in nature. When I say, “we have to develop into in ourselves grounded free personalities,” I mean, “we have to ground the loving creative in us in the loving creative in the whole of which we are a part.” In order to thus remove the distinction between inner world and outer world, between inner life and outer life, between the knowing and acting subject and the object to be known and acted upon. So as to overcome dualism. Now it is a matter of learning from this ‘I’ to lovingly exchange and assign capital among each other.

Faizah: What is freedom?

Jac: That man determines himself, that he doesn't have to accept anything from others, others don't have to accept anything from me either. The starting point of my lessons is always man himself and how he thinks and feels during the lesson at that moment. During my classes we practice active and living thinking, by involving our heart in the thinking process. Because by involving our feelings, which arise from our thoughts on ourselves, our thoughts obtain life. My teaching material consists of the thoughts and feelings we have at that moment during that class. And in the process, by getting to know ourselves and each other and living with each other, we develop into free people grounded in ourselves, into coexisting artists.

Faizah: A coexistence artist is something to be?

Jac: Certainly. I too want to live free, equal and together. I long to make myself and others possible. I desire to live together with others on the basis of the common intention to be human. People, who by mutual agreement match abilities to needs, demand to supply, production to consumption. Who attune themselves at all to all life. Who insert themselves meaningfully into the whole of which they are a part. By being honest. By speaking themselves out. By occupying their own space. Who in good concert also arrange their mutual relations. Who lovingly exchange and allocate land, labor and capital among themselves. Beyond market and state, in other words. I live with them in my heart and they live with me in their hearts.

The best compliment I ever received from a student was, “You are a teacher like a friend.”

Faizah: You say that people and their thoughts and feelings are the starting point....

Jac: ... and the end goal.

Faizah: What exactly do you mean by that?

Jac: A human being needs nothing more and also nothing less than himself and his own thoughts and feelings to understand himself in reality, to determine what he wants in that reality in order to then insert himself into that reality in such a way, to act in such a way, to become so active, that that reality becomes true, good and beautiful.

All humans are now part of that one whole reality, their thinking and actions determine how that reality develops, for better or worse. We humans make each other possible or impossible. If you make life impossible for others, you make life impossible for yourself; if you make life possible for yourself, you make life possible for others. Humans are mutually enabling or making impossible beings.

My classes begin by making us aware of ourselves in the space, the whole, in which we are at that moment. We practice undivided attention. We stay with our attention in the here and now with everything we perceive, think and feel in the here and now.

I myself always go with my attention to my heart to perceive and experience ourselves and each other at the heart level in the space we are in, and I ask my students to do the same.

Then sometimes I say, “Everything we need is here and now.” And then I ask a question. Or do an experiment. To search together for possible answers.

Faizah: You now want to write a book about the development of money. What does money have to do with all this?

Jac: By becoming aware each time of the loving creating in us, we also become aware of the principle of creating money out of nothing. Something that the current banks have monopolized, but that every free human being does every moment independent of the current financial system. From the loving creating in us, we can take initiatives and create real values that meet the needs of others. In this way, people make each other possible. By taking an initiative through which you express yourself and create values that meet the needs of others and trusting that others will create values that meet your needs.

Faizah: And that's also why you founded a capital body? To allow people with initiatives to insert themselves into the whole they are part of?

Jac: Yes, at the center of the capital body are people, people who want to make themselves and each other possible.  

Faizah: When you founded that capital body in your time, then a field opened up in which our present society could realize itself.

Jac: Glad to hear you say that. Lovely to hear it. That's how I understand it, too. Indeed, the creation of the capital body feels like the final fulfillment of my teaching ministry. Our School for the Art of Living Together, too, is only just completed with the capital body. People who have become stuck in the society in which the means of production are exchanged in the money system regulated by ever more government-imposed laws and regulations and sign up for the School of the Art of Living Together are, once they have determined who they are and what they have to offer, enabled through the capital body. Beyond market and state. 

Faizah: Meanwhile, we live here in a society where everyone makes real contributions in their own way. Also the children and the elderly. Also the chronically ill. No one here ‘earns’ money through possession. Money in our society is ‘only’ an accounting, a mirror of real production and consumption, a mirror also of the mutual exchange and allocation of the means of production, land, labor and capital.

Jac: How nice to hear that. Your words touch me, move me.

You know, now that you have said this, now that I know this ... that my work makes you possible ... I can die with peace of mind.