“I was riding a packed bus from Cluny Road to my office in the Central Business District, managing somehow to hold on to a bus-strap and read Knowledge of the Higher Worlds  by philosopher-educator Rudolf Steiner. As I read, it hit me — Steiner had the answers to all the ‘Life’ questions: Who am I, really? What am I doing here on Earth? Until then (I was in my 40s), I had only been interested in the material world — what I could touch, smell, see, taste, feel. As a fresh undergrad, I had had my first taste of philosophy: the lecturer said, “See, this chair? Well, it’s not really this solid matter…” My response: “Huh? I don’t want to study something so un-real!” So I chose political science, and eventually became a journalist, then a fashion and lifestyle editor for a major Singapore women’s magazine. Fast forward 30 years, in that bus reading Steiner, I got zapped by his words. They helped me understand how  humans are both matter and spirit, and how we had all but forgotten about spirit in the past 400 years as we allowed materialism to claim us. This forgetting has led us to de-forest the Earth, poison air and water, and tear the land apart for minerals, rocks, and oils. In so doing, we sowed the seeds of ‘dis-ease’ for ourselves.

And where is spirit still to be found? In all of Nature! It is now my personal mission to do whatever I can to help restore forests and biodiversity, to grow food biodynamically (a form of organic farming focused on interrelationships of the soil, plants and animals) as taught by Steiner, and to stop eating animals to develop my compassion. From the understanding that has arisen, came my book, Cancer Cured & Prevented Naturally, in 2007. It’s now an e-book. I am also starting an ecological community called the StarSeed Solar Village in Johor, Malaysia, on ocean-facing high ground. Care to join me?

Betty L Khoo-Kingsley
Author and environmental educator