Conversation with Ezra Sullivan

Speaker: Ezra Sullivan

Spiritual Science and the Initiatory Path of Everyday Life

Ezra Sullivan has dedicated much of his young life to studying, living, experimenting with, and teaching spiritual science in the Rudolf Steiner tradition of Anthroposophy. In his short span of thirty-two years, he has held many roles across three continents – as a spiritual and social entrepreneur, youth educator, and biodynamic farmer for more than a dozen years – as he has sought his own authentic and individual path of worldly service.

Born and raised in urban Los Angeles, Ezra found himself in a directionless state as he graduated high-school. Having not really connected with the studies on offer, he had a firm conviction deep in his heart that current modes of education and the broader way of life around him weren’t communicating with the calling that was trying to locate a home in his being. So, at age eighteen, he decided to move to South America to work on service projects (specifically, as a WWOOFer). Biodynamic farming with local communities became a natural choice – as it involved working with his body, with land, and with more-than-human beings – and offered him a poignant combination of the elemental, the physical, the secular, and the spiritual.

His experiences as a young adult in Latin America were life-shaping. Yet still, clarity of knowing what to do, how to be of service, and relate to the world around didn’t show up immediately in this path. It was a gradual process that opened as he stumbled into an interfaith retreat center to sit his first meditation; as he cycled through the mountainous terrain from Bolivia to Peru; when the kindness of strangers supported him after he lost his wallet and was unable to repair his bicycle; or when he received a spontaneous dinner invite with farmers. He had no plans to return to the United States, but yet another chance-encounter with a distinctly kind Quechua matriarch alchemically cleared the path for him to return Stateside to home.

Following his initial agricultural work in South America, he orientated his spiritual existence completely toward Anthroposophy. The following nine years upon returning to the US were focused mainly in the Pacific Northwest on regenerative biodynamic agriculture, nonprofit leadership, and the intentional community movement. In 2022, Ezra studied at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, where sits the birthing ground of Anthroposophy. He wrote a project titled, ‘The will to change’, the primary question of which was: “How can the will be engaged to create change?” Concentration exercises were his main methodology of exploring the relationship between will, change, and the witness. (Bonus: if you are interested in concentration exercises, read here for one with a ‘spoon’.)

In 2024, Ezra moved to Threefold Community Farm in the lower Hudson Valley of New York where he is starting up a young adult residency program – without the market-oriented trappings of, say, a certificate – but with self-guided processes and creative living through service and community beyond concepts. The intention is to “let ideas have something to land on. Especially for the young adult, there has to be a breathing between the inner and outer work.” His emphasis is on new training modalities that foster access to ancient wisdom for young people so they find “the willingness to be themselves.”

Ezra’s inclinations toward non-violent activism and tenets of right livelihood guide his explorations of relating with current technological and industrialized realities. While nearly off-grid ways were the conscious order of his life in parts of South America, his return to the United States posed subtler, convention-breaking questions, stretching beyond this-vs-that thinking. He describes, “I thought that if I freed myself of digital screens, motorized transport, etc., that I would have more energy for receiving and communing on earth. Ultimately, I found that I couldn't work into spirituality through negating things, but only through willing myself toward it. I don't order material existence so that I can have a spiritual life. A healthy soul knows what it needs intuitively and knows how to use technology responsibly…Everyday life is the initiation path.”

Please join Don Shaffer and Aidyn Laurynz in conversation with this Spiritual-science initiate-experimenter who is exploring how we host future ecologies of embodied consciousness, and the meaning of earnest service.

Five Questions with Ezra Sullivan

What Makes You Come Alive?

What makes me come alive is when I come into my individual capacity for service.

There is a capacity within the human soul which is uniquely mine to awaken. So many folks are facing “burn-out.” How do we get burned-out? By doing what is not ours to do. When I live out of the highest intention of my life purpose, it only gives me energy. So what makes me come alive is doing what is mine to do!

Then, I become free. Freedom is not a given, but it is a possibility if I choose it. It’s a freedom which is not in denial of interconnectedness, not a freedom from, but a freedom for. Freedom is to become eternal. Freedom is the potential for a human to become a vehicle, servant, and steward of spiritual beings. So that my will becomes they will, as so on earth as it is in heaven. So individuality leads to freedom, but central to liveliness is the social space, and community is about unity. Interestingly, the modern path of community is founded in that which differentiates us, and individualizes us. Community must now be formed through us unifying around our uniqueness rather than our similarities. Which is part of the reason why community can be challenging today!

Practically, I find my awakening, my liveliness, in my work. I am old school in the sense that I have no separation between work and life. Before, I farmed for 12 years on three different continents, my work with the land was always centered in intentional community and non-profit educational settings. In farming what made me alive was transformation. Transformation of depleted soil to a thriving body full of life, transformation of the plants to fully vibrant colors with ‘springy’ leaves and flowers and dense and heavy fruits and roots, animals who come to express themselves in the way only they could do, and a community of human people interacting with the farm recreationally, socially, through work, and consumption. Additionally the intimacy which is created by caring for and stewarding an individuated farm organism, a piece of land, fed my soul enormously.

Since 2022 my activities have been devoted to the social and spiritual entrepreneurship spaces. Essentially this field for me is the task of creating new forms, new organs, which are capable of hosting the future. How can we create ecologies of consciousness that open the future? This requires a spiritual science, an idealistic empiricism, so that we know consciously what we’re doing, and don’t only believe it to be true. So I’ve been working in adult education programming, events, and retreats where folks learn spiritual science, as well as interface on their questions, developing communities of practice together. The next step for me is renovating a house in the community in which I live in the lower hudson valley of New York to host a young adult residency program. Here, younger individuals will come to engage in collective study, service work, and develop their own questions into tangible initiatives (threefold.org/youth).

Pivotal turning point in your life?

The rite of passage from adolescence to young adulthood was a pivotal moment in my biography.

As a child, I never devoted much attention to school work because of a deep conviction in my heart that the teachers and conventional institutions which I was surrounded by would not yield the path for which I was seeking. Literature, philosophy, and psychology books I devoured, but I never accepted a curriculum from the outside. This has pretty much continued to today.

After graduating high school I was simply lost. I knew what I did not want, but I couldn’t find my way into the world. Through practicing martial arts in high school I discovered a love of learning and working in my physical body, which grew my interest in doing hands-on work. So at 18 years old I decided to move to South America to volunteer for service projects. Somehow I immediately landed at an interfaith meditation retreat center on a homestead in rural Brazil.

The turning point moment happened on my first morning as I walked out of the temple from my first experience with meditation. Sitting there on the deck of this five sided building with my feet dangling over the grass and the sun rising over the distant hills. In that moment, I committed myself to the pursuit of spirituality through meditation, and to live a life of service to the mission of the earth. I found my feet to walk.

This moment, maybe five or ten minutes, is so precious and vivid to this day. I observed a process in my thinking which brought a clarity of intention that I had not known before. A process, a spiritual being, perhaps my angel, descended into me and witnessed what my consciousness was hosting with me. I was simultaneously both witness and creator. The clarity of thinking's revelation I had known, but this process brought the spiritual activity, thinking, into my will. Suddenly I was able to devote my life towards what I was investigating in my thinking. A conversation, an alignment of the heart. Of course, this devotional conversation falters everyday! But day by day it becomes more effortless to live in accordance with the cognitive activity in my heart.

An Act of Kindness You'll Never Forget?

Towards the end of my time in South America I had an interaction with an elderly Quechua woman which I am eternally grateful for. Her action changed me as if a chemical reaction had taken place, an alchemical process of radical change.

To give the context, it was 2013, and I had embarked on a bicycle trip from La Paz, Bolivia to Cusco, Peru after training for a few weeks up some pretty treacherous mountain paths outside of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Much of this trip was at high elevation (12,000 feet or so) through the Altiplano region, around Lake Titicaca, and then up the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

In a sense at this period in my life I was blissfully directionless. My main aim was to walk the path in front of me as it was being presented. I was following a certain vision I had of melting into the landscape through transcendent experiments in consciousness. I definitely had no intention of returning to the United States, as I felt that governments in developed countries far too limited initiative.

During my trip I made many connections and friends as my wallet had been stolen, so befriending and begging became my only option for food and shelter. Then my bicycle brakes broke and I was only relying on my front brakes, which was also an experience as I navigated the many hills(!). Anyway I am coming towards the end of my ten day trip, just a day or so from Cusco, and my knee just develops this incredible pain. I tried working with it, breathing with it, dissolving it, but no - it persists. Such that I finally stop, without mental participation or any conscious decision making. My body just pulls the bike over to the side of the road.

And there I am, in a rural village in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, standing right by this rock wall which comes up to my waist. On the other side I am looking over a field of recently harvested maize in which a group of folks are working through piles of harvest. I end up spending the day with them as we all sit around together chucking and grading the maize harvest.

I get invited to dinner in a house next to the field and end up sleeping in the field with the patriarch in a little hut for honoring the spirits, and for watching over the harvest to protect it from thieves. The family is very warm and we speak of many things in their thatched roof house with open fire. I am served a warming soup for dinner and breakfast of light chicken broth, yerba buena, fava bean, and quinoa. The whole time I am eating and talking with the father and son, the mother is kind of minding her own business consumed in the running of the house. I had assumed that she didn’t speak Spanish, which is common for that area, as she never addressed me but spoke with the others in Quechua.

The two men leave for work and school leaving me to finish my breakfast alone with the woman. As I get up, and bid her farewell, readying myself to hop on the bicycle again. I had planned to somehow get access to my bank account in Cusco, fix up the bicycle, and continue north up the Andes Mountain Range to Ecuador. As I am raising my hand in greeting toward the woman she approaches me. Slowly she walks across the room with her eyes dead centered on mine, and her hands over her heart, palm to palm, in prayer. She says, “Vaya a tu casa, a tu familia, a tu tierra, regresa a tu casa, a tu familia, a tu tierra…” (go to your home, to your family, to place…) over and over again like a mantram. With tears in her eyes, she reached her hands up onto my shoulders.

I was in shock. It was as if a Sun came in the room, or maybe it was as if she was Mother Mary and I the Son, Jesus. We became elevated to a mythological realm, or maybe even beyond the mythological realm into the superconscious, that wasn’t my life. I can’t recall actually saying anything but, “gracias” over and over again in response. Then I stumble out of the house and onto my bicycle.

Instantly, I knew: homeward bound. I returned to Los Angeles, California later that year and reconstituted my life in North America where my home is, where my family is, and where my place is.