The Saturn path: doing good before knowing enough

Walk is the talk that matters

I have lived with this idea for some years now, in kitchens, in organisation development work, and in my personal life. In an earlier piece I wrote of bringing love to the world, ‘free of agenda, but full of intention’, with acquired wisdom submitted to love, and the will to really listen. I keep coming back to it. How do we act on what we recognise as good, while remaining willing to discover what our good intentions have failed to see?

The Moon way and the Saturn way

Bernard Lievegoed describes the Moon way as a path towards spiritual insight that begins with thinking and leads through imagination and inspiration towards intuition. The Saturn way reverses this movement: it begins with intuitive action, then leads through inspiration towards imagination. He calls it a social way, connecting with what people do.

The pursuit of knowledge of the higher worlds is entirely valid. The difficulty arises when spiritual attainment becomes a prerequisite for action: until we have developed those capacities, we cannot trust ourselves to contribute anything spiritually worthwhile. That can leave us perpetually preparing to act, or looking to those understood to possess spiritual insight to tell us what is right.

What interests me in Lievegoed is the change of emphasis: we put whatever knowledge we have into action, with as much intention for it to be good as we can find in ourselves. Our action becomes an offering. We then have to learn to observe its consequences, and remain open to whether what we have done was actually good. The spiritual knowledge is still connected, but we are using it to do, and allowing insight to grow through the doing.

Lievegoed traces this indication to Steiner’s Torquay lectures of August 1924. Steiner’s immediate subject there is spiritual investigation of the human organism, in collaboration with Ita Wegman. He presents a complementary path through the Saturn sphere, while explicitly retaining the need for spiritual insight. The social interpretation is Lievegoed’s development; the wider implications I am exploring here are my own.

Squaring the triangle

Lievegoed connects this with ‘squaring the triangle’ from the Foundation Stone Meditation: bringing threeness, the timeless and archetypal, into fourness, development in time. Enthusiasm, insight, action and result are the four steps. The ideal cannot simply be pushed over existing realities. It has to be realised step by step, by the people who stand in the situation and have the competence to work within it.

This is a useful way of holding the tension between the ideal and the actual. We can be inspired by freedom, equality and fraternity, but how these become real in a kitchen, a school or a cooperative has to be discovered. What worked last year may no longer be what is needed. The search for factual possibilities cannot stop. We must remain in a ‘listening’ mode – vigilant that our wisdom doesn’t go cold, disconnecting from the situation, retreating into ivory towers built upon certainty.

I recognise this in cooking. Knowing ingredients, combinations, techniques and cultural flavours gives us something to work with; cultivating awareness with all our senses lets us begin to play and create – but it also has to taste good, and we are constantly tasting and reassessing the plan in that light. A recipe offers guidance, but the ingredients, the people cooking and the people eating are part of what determines whether the food is good.

Only after the deed

One idea in my Lievegoed notes has stayed with me: Michael comes to help only after the deed is done. We act, then learn to observe the consequences. This is also where leadership development and spiritual development meet: being interested in the behaviour trail we leave behind us, including what other people can see that we cannot.

In my earlier writing I put it quite plainly: ‘Our behaviour record means nothing without others, and is inaccessible without others’ feedback.’ It means more than asking ‘how was I?’ It means actively seeking feedback: reading the room, being interested in whether what we did helped, and allowing the answer to change us.

But who gets to interpret the fruits of a deed? I may see a worthwhile experiment where someone else has carried the exhaustion or the cost. Their experience belongs in the account, especially when they have less influence or find it difficult to speak. Feedback asks me to let their experience change my understanding of what I have done.

Argyris and Schön’s distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use helps here: what we say guides us, and what our behaviour reveals. The higher the ideals an organisation or a person espouses, the bigger the task of living up to them. Calling ourselves true anthroposophists cannot settle the question of whether we are willing to look at what actually is. Our image of ourselves may be precisely what makes that looking difficult.

Wisdom gone cold

I have experienced the phenomenon of gifts coming to an organisation with open arms: the initiative of the bold and willing, technology, academics engaged with theory - being turned away because they are theories built on a modern perspective. An abstracted Anthroposophical view determined that these were to be turned away, as they were ‘coming from a worldview that did not acknowledge spirit.’ In my master’s thesis I realised that these phenomena were actually examples of an inverted materialism – a worldview (the spiritual) made king of all the others – which is exactly the biggest error of materialism: extrapolating its truth-claims to speak for domains of reality that it cannot see.

What interests me is the form of thinking behind this. We can reject materialism while thinking in the same abstract, separated way: deciding in advance what deserves to be heard. Spiritual content does not make that thinking living. The notion of ‘pure Anthroposophy’ can itself become an abstraction, held above the situation it is meant to illuminate.

Steiner speaks directly to this in his 1923 lecture on community. He describes a spiritual experience arising through people awakening to one another, without first having to behold spiritual beings. He also criticises the belief-test for being a real anthroposophist, and distinguishes the inward activity of understanding from simply absorbing spiritual concepts. The reversed cultus belongs to this community discussion; reading it alongside the Saturn way is a connection I am making.

In the same lecture, he goes on to describe an approach in which everyday questions lead into Anthroposophy, and labels such as anthroposophical and un-anthroposophical become less prominent. This feels important. Can we communicate in concepts shared by the other? Can academic inquiry, Indigenous authors and people with very different worldviews teach us something we would otherwise miss?

I have found Steiner in the world, rather than fitting the world to Steiner. His twelve worldviews have helped me practise looking through other lenses; they also remind me that my preferred spiritual perspective cannot speak for the whole. An integrative map can become another ring of certainty too. We still have to listen.

Invitation and freedom

In my recent freelance employment, I have experienced being worked very hard, but in the best possible way: through invitation rather than command. Often the invitation was not even spoken, but inferred through connection to, and embodiment of, the collective vision. The trust is in the integrity of those involved – their ‘behaviour trail’ doesn’t leave feelings of discomfort. The invitation is made through integrity, shared values and a common vision that is lived rather than espoused.

This is a distinction I have explored for years. If the foundational idea is that I can see a better path for someone than they can, even my wish to help can become coercive. I have seen myself do it, including with my own children. Invitation begins with relationship: getting to know people, finding what enthuses them, and being prepared to learn their language.

Yet a shared vision can also make it hard to say no. Can we receive someone’s boundary, hesitation or refusal with the same openness that we receive their enthusiasm? If belonging depends on always giving more, invitation begins to carry an unspoken command.

Clear responsibilities, good contracting and boundaries matter here. They give people the security to be generous without becoming endlessly available. In the past, action burnt me out; at Hofgut LEO, it is the reality I keep coming back to. It can go either way. How we work together, and where our motivation comes from, make a difference.

Clarity, humility and integrity

My biggest insight in my master’s study was ‘integrity is where I get my power from’. Congruence between what I know, what I profess and what I do brings confidence. Coming to know myself as a behaving personality also means looking at where my ideals and obligations have come from.

Often there is too much focus on discipline and carrying out our promises, and too little on examining where the goal really comes from. If the ideals are not examined, we whip ourselves, and others, with ideals that are not truly our own. This is where Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom becomes practical: the source of an action matters, as well as whether we can carry it out.

The day I stopped working hard for others, or for their ‘shoulds’, and instead did it for my own sense of self-worth, bringing love into every task as much as possible, was the day I started striding towards my freedom. Interestingly, this is also when work started to become play.

Steiner’s distinction between deeds of love and deeds of self-perfection belongs here too. I do not take it to mean that the wish to develop is wrong. What matters is whether I am meeting the life before me, or quietly making that life serve my development. Through doing the work with love, something may grow in us that we could not have acquired by preparing for it alone.

Thinking that stays alive

For me, this also opens onto the thinking path: getting to know one’s thinking and living it into everything one does. I have come to describe living thinking as a felt-thought: one apprehension that arrives simultaneously through cognition and through the body, with the sense that it could be explained from many angles without being any one of them. You can ‘relax’ in terms of having to retain information, and experience knowledge more as returning to a landscape that can be explored further. Living thinking can be turned, and each turn shows the same thing again from a different side. The thing itself stays whole through the turning. What always has a lot of room for improvement is the expression of this insight in terms that others can relate to.

In practice, this means keeping the thinking alive as we act: allowing what we perceive, feel and do to inform one another, without fixing our understanding before the situation has had its say. As I put it in my dissertation, ‘Let the intuitive guide the science – let the science do the truth-finding.’ What I sense invites inquiry; the encounter, including other people’s experience, can change what I think I know. The deed and the reflection on it become part of how this thinking develops.

The shadow of the good

Lievegoed adds a further challenge: even something good creates a shadow. A form of collaboration that once served a group can become an obstacle to its renewal. We cannot push that shadow aside; we have to take it with us, and meet it with gentleness.

Integrity may ask us to acknowledge harm, make repairs, or let go of a form we helped create. Gentleness makes it possible to stay with that work without having to defend everything we have done.

How do we first recognise and then nurture new life that comes towards us, or even to our aid? How do we avoid quelling the enthusiasm that is being gifted? These questions keep bringing me back to clarity in thought, humility in attitude and integrity in action. To give ourselves fully to what we recognise as good, while remaining willing to discover what our goodness has failed to see.

References

Argyris, C. and Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Jarman, M. (2012). ‘Cookery as art’, 29 October. In Organic Fusion Integrated: Articles.

Jarman, M. (2014). ‘Leadership as Facilitation’, 20 February. In Organic Fusion Integrated: Articles.

Jarman, M. (2015a). ‘Coercion or Invitation’, 17 June. LinkedIn.

Jarman, M. (2015b). ‘Your behaviour record’, 14 May. LinkedIn.

Jarman, M. (2019). A phenomenological inquiry exploring Integrity: as a source of personal power in leadership and design principle in Organisational Development. MSc dissertation, Sheffield Hallam University.

Jarman, M. (n.d.). ‘A thinking path to spiritual perception — exploring living thinking’. Melvin Jarman.

Jarman, M. (2026). ‘Which lenses were you given?’. Part two of What lens are you using? Melvin Jarman.

Lievegoed, B. (1987). Over instituties van het geestesleven. Zeist: Vereniging ter bevordering van de heilpaedagogie, pp. 26–28.

Lievegoed, B. (1993). The Eye of the Needle: Bernard Lievegoed, His Life and Working Encounter with Anthroposophy. An interview with Jelle van der Meulen. Translated by Philip Mees. Stroud: Hawthorn Press.

Steiner, R. (1912). ‘Love and Its Significance in the World’. GA 143, Zurich, 17 December, especially §17. Steiner Online Library translation.

Steiner, R. (1914/1991). Human and Cosmic Thought. GA 151, Lecture Two, 21 January 1914. Translated by Charles Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press.

Steiner, R. (1916). The Philosophy of Freedom. Translated by R. F. A. Hoernlé. London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. See Chapter X, ‘The Idea of Freedom’, and Chapter XIII, ‘Moral Imagination’; chapter numbering follows this edition.

Steiner, R. (1923/1974). Awakening to Community. GA 257, Dornach, 3 March 1923, §§30–35. Translated by Marjorie Spock.

Steiner, R. (1924/1985). True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation. GA 243, Torquay, 21 August 1924, §§36–44. Translated by A. H. Parker.

Appendix 1 Wisdom and the living encounter

Steiner distinguishes our contribution to the world through love from the pursuit of our own perfection:

“We must see our value to the world solely in the deeds of love, not in the deeds of self-perfection.”

Love and Its Significance in the World, GA 143, 17 December 1912, §17.

In his lecture on community, he also criticises the demand:

“If you want to be a real anthroposophist you must believe in reincarnation and the etheric body”

Awakening to Community, GA 257, 3 March 1923, §31.

I read these passages together as an invitation to keep wisdom connected to the people and situation before us. Can we communicate in concepts shared by the other, and remain open to learning from academic inquiry, Indigenous authors and people whose worldviews differ from our own?

Protecting our knowledge as ‘purely anthroposophical’, while dismissing another’s as merely ‘intellectual’, can itself become an abstraction. The question is whether the wisdom we cherish helps us act with love, and whether we remain willing to find out if our action actually helped.

At work in Fusion Café, a social enterprise I founded.

© 2026. Melvin Jarman. All rights reserved.

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