Behold the 12 Holy Nights CONCENTRATION.
A Complimentary Spiritual Exercise & Twelve Day journey into the Heart of the Matter…into the Arms of the Mother, Father, Friend, Beloved God.
This journey is meant to enliven & revivify the blood, to dissolve doubt & fear, to midwife the birth of the Higher-Being through the Womb of Remembrance, to bring clarity regarding the Tasks at Hand & to develop the INNER capacities to PERCEIVE what stands behind the material world.
Each concentration will provide a series of short readings that merge to reveal a Sacred Task given through THE WORD.
The readings will be a marriage of voices from those who are pioneering the Science of Spirit, or HEART-thinking.
“May you come to KNOW the true meaning of Christmas!”
The Over-arching TASK at hand:
“To penetrate to the reality of the world...is the task of this post Atlantean Epoch, and Rudolf Steiner tells us, we can only do this by developing the mood of ‘wonder’ through a reverent devotion to the world of reality, which eventually leads us to...loving ‘surrender’.
We must surrender our lower egos by changing our thinking...
When we develop a feeling of ‘loving surrender’ we are transforming our thinking into a faculty that allows the world itself to teach us something of its nature...
One who has practised surrender rises to an imagination of the flourishing will in all things...
To develop imagination one must learn to think differently, that is one must learn to forget the lower ego for a time, so as to find the higher self...
What helps us to achieve this? Anthroposophia, she opens our hearts and births our Higher egos...”
Through this cascade of readings, you are being asked to read between the stars.
You are pioneering a new way of thinking.
IT MAY NOT BE EASY TO WEAVE THE GOLDEN THREAD, BUT KEEP PUTTING ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER.
Allow the "mood of soul” that births within as you read one passage to merge with the “mood of soul” from the next.
In the end, practice uniting all soul moods that have arisen into ONE. You do not have to understand every word with your mind, but rather bring the questions (perhaps intense questions or confusion) into your heart and let them gently work upon you.
Ponder in your heart.
TAKE THIS WITH YOU INTO DREAMTIME…INTO NIGHT SCHOOL.
Ask your guardian angel to reveal to you what you need to KNOW in the light of your work here.
If all else fails, go outside at night, find two stars side by side & allow your gaze to rest between them. Notice what you see. Notice what you feel.
You will begin to FEEL what I mean when I say “weave the golden thread.”BRING THIS FEELING INTO YOUR READING.
January 3rd, 2021 Addition
Keep in mind that the 11th Holy Night is from midnight on Jan. 3rd to midnight Jan. 4th.Let us add Cancer into the mix:
“4 January - Cancer: This represents Belthazaar, who brought the myrrh, which sign has within itself a certain bitterness of Earth and yet a heavenly sweetness at times. In some connections, it has been associated with the beehive.”
-Willi Sucher
AND MAY THIS BECOME THE MYRRH OF THE OUTFLOWING WISDOM AVAILABLE TO OUR SOULS:
“The 11th Night - BULL/Holy Spirit, THIRD LOGOS - NIGHT OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Dear friends on this night we take one step closer to the realm beyond the stars. This night is related to November which marks the beginning of Advent. We shall see the relevance to the Third logos as we proceed, but first I wanted to explore our journey so far.
Over 10 nights we travelled macrocosmically through the three hiearchies:
Third Hiearchy: Angels, Archangels, Archai
Second Hierarchy: Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes
First Hierarchy: Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim
The Angels answer to the entire 3rd hiearchy which is connected to the Holy Spirit - the 3rd person of the Trinity or the 3rd Logos.
The Archangels answer to the 2nd hierarchy and through it to the Son, the second Logos or the 2nd person of the Trinity.
The Archai answer to the First hierarchy and through it to the Father, the First Logos or First Person of the Trinity.
We have seen how The Angels feel in our thoughts and, how the Archangel's experience in our feelings or speech and how the Archai Perceive in our will actions.
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
'In occultism we differentiate in man firstly his actions, in so far as by actions we understand everything which proceeds from any kind of activity connected with his hands; secondly speech and thirdly thoughts. Everything which in this sense he accomplishes with his hands brings about its karmic results in his next earthly existence. What we speak concerns not only ourselves alone, but also a group of human beings having the same language, and this affects the karma of the group or race. In words lies a greater responsibility than in deeds alone: for with them we are preparing the configuration of a future race. What we think works on even into a new formation of our earth. We therefore distinguish three stages. Firstly: Human action is individual, with the exception of those actions in man that arise from nothingness. Secondly: Man cannot speak for himself alone; words concern a group of human beings. Thirdly: Thoughts are the concern of the whole of humanity.'
Rudolf Steiner goes on to say:
'Let us consider a thought within us. Behind this thought a spiritual being is present. If we imagine ourselves enveloped on all sides by the body of a spiritual being, we can realise that a thought is only the expression of the body of the spiritual being working into us. Every time a thought flashes through our soul it is an impression, a kind of foot-print of a higher spiritual being, just as if we were walking over damp ground, leaving footprints, and were to say: ‘Here a person walked’. This spiritual being is formed of the same substance as that of which thought consists. The thought in us can only become the imprint of a higher spiritual being because this higher being has a body formed of the same substance as our thoughts.'
In truth everything that we perceive through the senses has an intuitive Spirit living behind it.
'Everything physically present has been made by this Spirit. We perceive the outer world and we think about these perceptions. But thought lives in every perception and that is why we can think about them! And what are these thoughts if not the creative Spirit, the Holy Spirit in all we see. Perception stands between the creative thoughts inside us and the creative thoughts outside us.' Rudolf Steiner.
Let us look again at after images and complementary colours which we will bring together under 'counter images'.
When we perceive the world we see the physical and create concepts from what we see, then we combine these concepts to create thought. However there is also a spiritual counter-image that arises in the soul that belongs to the physical perception, this is the pure counter image of the thing seen and one might say it is the substance of the Holy Spirit - the thoughts of the angels carried into us by elemental beings.
Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the Resting head
Which opens to the
The Thoughts of worlds
Rudolf Steiner - Foundation Stone Meditation.
Those creative thought beings enter us and carry the Holy Spirit into us as a counter image and we create abstract thought or a thought that is a mirror image of the physical thing seen discarding the counter image. However this thought we have created of the physical thing has itself a counter-image in the spiritual world! Rudolf Steiner tells us:
''In the higher spiritual world there is a counter-image for every thought. Image and counter-image are as interconnected as seal and sealing wax. The substance is the higher spiritual being which corresponds in our analogy to the sealing wax. Now we call thought, in so far as it corresponds to the sealing wax, intuition, and the impression we call abstract thought. We can say when we think: ‘I feel the traces of what is happening in higher worlds.’ It is with regard to this fact that in religious writings, for instance in the Revelation of St. John, the expression ‘seal’ is used. This corresponds with reality. It is also because a higher being is working with us in our words that every word is the impression of a seal. With the mystics the counter-image is called Imagination. Thus we have three levels of the thought element: the intuitive, the imaginative and the ordinary abstract thinking.'
Say we now stand before a person and we observe them that is with love and make an imprint inside us of their spiritual person, a counter image of their person, they are then 'sealed' in us.
The pushing out of our inner light is, in relation to thought, imagination - we imprint ourselves on the soul of the other, then by bringing the imagination into us in that split second in all its colour and vibrancy we experience inspiration, and the observing inside us of what is imprinted in us as an echo, is intuition - or Intuitive Cognition.
Rudolf Steiner tells us further:
'To be a master means: To work in the substance in which the beings are incarnated who work with us in our thoughts. Imagination gives the picture. This is why the great religious teachers of earlier times spoke pictorially, for imagination gives the picture, not abstract thoughts. In all religions, teachings were expressed in pictures. At first the picture is for man something of lesser importance, but when he understands how to form again for himself a picture out of every thought, then he has reached a higher stage. This is the pre-requisite for a quite new kind of perception. Everything depends on a man developing to the point at which he no longer thinks merely abstractly, but at all times has his thoughts in pictures.
'As a rule man forms merely thoughts. The more highly developed man must think in pictures, in images; that means ‘to imagine’. In this expression there already lies what is meant: ‘By means of a certain power to make an imprint in something, (to imagine).’ In creative fantasy, in the case of poet and artist, we find only a weak reflection of imagination. When a man who is seeking higher development speaks, he will try in certain cases, while speaking, to have before him the counter-image, the Imago. This is the source of the mighty pictures in religious writings. Whoever develops himself so far that he can create such pictures has attained the stage of the spiritual beings who are involved in the creation of races. One who develops in himself not only pictures, but intuitions, is not only involved in the creation of races, but in the creation of the next planetary existence. From the pictures there will resound what later will be manifested on the earth, but whoever works out of intuition creates something which is not yet existent, which is nowhere manifested, that is to say he creates out of Nirvana. This concept is inherent in every apocalypse: What will be manifested in the future can only be created out of intuition.'
When we see the 'imago' or counter image of a person standing before us, as I have said we come to Christ, when we stand before nature in all its living qualities and make a living picture inside us of it we come to the Christ or the Son Logos, who lives in that person.
'Behind everything living stands the Spirit of Imagination. It is the same Spirit who is also working in our speech; this is why the Christian religion calls Him the Word. Here something quite exact and actual is meant. This spirit who stands behind everything living is still working today in our speech, in each of our words, and is therefore rightly called ‘the Word’, another designation is: The Son or Christ. He is the Spirit who lives as imagination in everything that has life.' Rudolf Steiner.
The thoughts we have about perceptions only make an impact on the whole World of Thoughts outside us in our present incarnation. But our imaginations which are rooted in feelings (don't forget the angels feel in our thoughts) create our future world and destiny.
'What we perceive around us will no longer be there when we appear again on Earth. Everything therefore which we think in connection with the world of perception will have no effect whatever on the future incarnation; only in this incarnation will it have a Karma-building force. Thought works upon our present character.
What comes forth from feeling, that is essentially connected with our surroundings; what enters into the world of Imagination, comes back to us in the following incarnation, in such a way that it appears within us as inborn tendencies and outside us as opportunities. Through our inborn tendencies we call towards us opportunities offered by the world, which form our destiny, through tendencies which have their source in Karma. Thoughts form the character: the tendencies or disposition lead karmically to the opportunities. Actions bring about the external destiny, all the bodily circumstances into which man is born. What we carry out through Rupa, our bodily nature, that is our actual destiny, that comes back to us karmically.' Rudolf Steiner.
So it is very important what imaginations we are creating in our souls! Hence the urgency of the angels who wish to create waking imaginations in our souls to help us to overcome the effects of the unification of tendencies which we have brought with us from imaginations in previous lives and their unification with the materialistic images of the present day:
'Today tendencies are coming to the surface which were implanted in mankind in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is important that the materialistic images of the present day do not take root in human hearts, for in future times they would fill human beings with the most brutal instincts which are only directed to the world of the senses, if they were not opposed by spiritual ideas. Those desires and wishes live in man which are produced out of imagination.' Rudolf Steiner.
These instincts are those we spoke about over the last 10 nights, they other karmically rise up from the will or from the dead spiritual beings we 'digest' by way of our senses. What was once imagination, now lives in the realm of sexual instincts and hatred, the realm of the antisocial and of destruction. The realm of death and new life.
'There below, in the unconsciousness within us, moral coldness and hatred are entrenched, and it is easy for man to bring into his soul what is present in his body, so that his soul can, as it were, be infected with the lack of human understanding. This is, however, the result of moral coldness and human hatred. Because this is so, man must gradually cultivate in himself moral warmth, that is to say human understanding and love, for these must vanquish what comes from the bodily nature.' Rudolf Steiner.
So if the imaginations we create on this day are materialistic then we take death into us which we will not only carry into this night but into the coming month of November. If we don't notice what enters into our souls with every sense perception it dies away into our will and we carry this death with us for the next year in our blood, but if we take into this realm awakened imaginations of all the things we see then what is born in us is the shinning in of Spiritual Light in our souls. This spiritual light enlightens our entire soul from inside out, so that it becomes a Spiritual Soul ready for the downpouring of Manas.
Hence we see the connection with Advent, and the trials we must face as a result of our lack of love on this night the year before. The trials must be overcome before we can once again enter the Temple of Higher Wisdom, with 'clean feet' so that we can once again walk with the stars and the hierarchies during the 12 Holy Nights and do better for the following year.
On this Holy Night we must strive to connect with the Holy Spirit by creating imaginations that are worthy. Imaginations of the true nature of our fellow human beings and the true essence of nature. For we must prepare ourselves for our journey to the Son Sphere of the Lamb tomorrow night.
May the Holy Spirit be with you on this night, as it is with my dear friend Stephen Lesiuk.
With deepest respect and love
Namaste!”
-Adriana Koulias | Holy Nights 2021
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Here begins the body of work created in 2020.
The 12 Zodiacal Signs by Rudolf Steiner are presented throughout this journey in Sidereal Astrology style & order, beginning with Sagittarius.
PLEASE SEE THE COMMENT SECTION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DAY 1 POST FOR FURTHER EXPLANATION AS TO WHY THIS CONCENTRATION PURPOSEFULLY BEGINS WITH THE ZODIACAL SIGN OF SAGITTARIUS.
Day 11
“I RELATE.”
How can I RELATE directly with the Heart of the Matter?
“The Spirits of the Elements hear it:
In East, West, North, South -
May human beings hear it.”
Bring over the fruits of your labor from yesterday as you read the following WORD:
The star that leads to the Christ Child.
“O Lord, I have long been engrossed in material things. Enthralled by their outward forms, I failed to perceive within them Thy creative Spirit. The starry single eye of my soul insight is now being opened. Through it may I behold creation ashine with Thy glory.
Bless me, that I ever see the Eastern star of wisdom. May it gleam before my human eyes, alike in daylight and in gloom.
Let my wise thoughts follow the wondrous star that leads to the Christ Child of Infinity. ”
What is the Essence of Day 11?
“This is the Night of the Second Logos of the Trinity, The Son or Ram - the Lamb of Christ and His connection to the Sun.
This is the night when, if our feelings have been transformed into a faculty of inspiration on the second night, we are able to experience our time between death and rebirth consciously.
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
’When you use the consciousness of Inspiration to examine what lives in the world of feeling you are looking at the human being not only between birth and death but also in the period lived through between death and a further birth.’
True feeling, or inspiration, is an organ of perception of our time between death and rebirth.
This is, one might say an illumination of the Astral body which is one with the Astral world.
Our last meditation was concerned with using Imagination to experience or light up the etheric body, the body of thought.
This meditation is concerned with using inspiration in order to reveal what lives in the Astral World.
That is the origins of our present life.
Our feelings, emotions and passions are the concern of our Astral body and this is connected to our past life, while our thinking is connected to this life, between birth and death.
When we look at a plant, we know that what it is was once contained in a seed.
Hence when we observe our emotions, feelings and passions, through inspiration, we know that these are connected with something that does not rise up merely from our present life, but belong to something that has emerged from the spiritual world.
A plant may be an etheric being, but what ‘activates’ it and brings it to life, what causes it to arise out of a seed is related to the Astral world. Hence Rudolf Steiner refers to flowers as fallen stars.
In particular we can speak here of the Light of the Sun.
Physical light is the ‘gift’ of Lucifer. Without light our eyes would not have perceived the physical world and our eyes would not have been opened. Hence the name Lucifer means the ‘light bearer.’
When light falls on the physical world it creates shadows and through this interaction of light and shadow we perceive form and depth, colour and tone.
But there is more to sun light than physical light.
The Sun is itself we are told composed of a Light Body, Warmth/love Soul, and Life/Spirit.
The Light body is akin to our Astral bodies, the Warmth to our etheric bodies and the Life to our egos.
It is the warmth and life that are borne by the spiritual light towards the earth that sustains the ‘life’ body or etheric body of plants, the etheric body and astral body of animals and the Etheric, Astral and ego of human beings.
In human beings the highest gift of the Sun is the Ego...However due to the fall, Christ had to descend from the Starry spheres to Earth, from the realm of the Son, in order to bring the True ego to humanity to rescue it from Luciferic and subsequently Ahrimanic temptation.
So what we find, when we transform our feelings into an organ of inspiration is the Higher Ego, which in the spiritual world works with higher beings on our forces for centuries, sending them down to our ancestors, who are ‘activated’ to come together to create the right physical body for us.
It is our higher ego that carries the memory of our time between death and rebirth, and it is our higher ego that we must become conscious of if we are to come to the True Ego, Christ.
We described imagination as a kind of higher painting in our last mediation.
Inspiration is a higher form of music.
Sound in the spiritual world is colour in the physical world.
When we fell due to Luciferic Temptation the Chemical Ether or Sound Ether and the Life Ether were removed from our consciousness. Now we must rise to these again, through a transformation of our feeling life.
In the physical world the interplay of light and shadow creates colour. In our souls, the interplay of spiritual light with our own souls creates sympathies and antipathies, passions and feelings. When these are raised to inspiration we observe our sympathies and antipathies as we would a field of flowers of all different kinds without preference for one or the other. Objectively.
Inspiration is a form of ‘hearing’ into the heart of things and this paradoxically means we do not apply to them anything that belongs to ourselves to the heart of us - to see them clearly we must sacrifice our personal needs and wants, in the same way the eyes sacrifice themselves to observe light to see things clearly.
Then we know why we feel the way we do. We now understand what we began to explore on the second night and on the 5th night: That we need to become conscious of our ‘sympathies and antipathies,’ what ‘moves’ us, for they are elemental beings.
In our time, through the spiritual light that comes from the sun (Vulcan) beings, elemental beings, enter into our souls and in the Foundation Stone Meditation we are told: The elemental spirits hear it!
They hear Christ as he shines his Astral light into the Etheric world, particularly the Sound Ether.
For Christ the Sun logos, the True ego, descended by way of the Sun to the Earth so he could die an earthly death and bring us the potential for True Love, true feeling.
He weaves in our souls and He weaves in the etheric body of the earth, and to use inspiration to hear this resounding, is to Truly feel...
On this night may our objective feeling life become transfigured through our hearing of Christ, for this is the connection of this night with the spirits of Harmony...
May we awaken this night to his resounding words, full of light and colour!”
What does Inspired Relating (Hearing) LOOK and FEEL like?
SEE into what you FEEL as you read the following:
“He looked to his disciples, wrapped in their dreams. When their wills were set free by sleep, he taught them. To one he gave this teaching, and to the other that, but in the waking day their minds fettered them, and they were prevented from remembering. Only three of the twelve had recognised him in the day enough to awaken to his splendour in the night; these were John, Peter and James. And to them he said:
Awaken!
And behold the spirit of creation!
Its beginning, its centre and its end.
I am the cause of east and west,
of north and south,
I am the cause of all that is in the heights above
And in the depths below,
I am truth itself,
I am revelation,
I am knowledge,
Piety and the law.
I am almighty!
Among this brilliance, legions of spirits, a multitude of elemental beings of water, air, fire, and earth, awakened to see him and to answer his call. Moses and Elijah, too, came to stand beside his outspread arms, and thus it was, that between the Way and the Truth, between the stars, and the earth, He shone like a vermilion sun, a splendour that would not be seen again until his resurrection.
This was his gift to the world of the elements, and to his chosen ones. A vision of His true ethereal person, of the light, love and life that would not only renew nature itself, but would also sustain his disciples in the coming difficult months ahead, when his body outwardly aged, and his health inclined towards death. But unlike nature, Peter, John and James did not awaken fully to his call! No! Instead, they trembled in their dreams, and could bear to see his grand and celestial dimensions only darkly, and to hear his call only feebly.”
CONCENTRATE upon the following as you practice Inspired Relating (Hearing):
Lovingly Surrender the lower ego (i.e. judgement, opinion & one-sidedness) for but just a moment…a Divine Breath.
Behold THE WORD with the immaculate Heart.
Invite ANTHROPOSOPHIA to Baptize you in the New Water, the “Draught of Remembrance.”
“The seer has a...kind of spiritual experience in regard to speech, What he sees is not in the form of words, nor does it express itself directly in words. Thus it is difficult for the seer to make himself intelligible to the external world, because most people think in words and cannot conceive of living activity that transcends words. A man who has conscious experience in the spiritual world has a feeling of frustration when he has to pour into an already formed speech what he experiences; but because he silences the factors of mental presentations and memory, he is able to quicken within him the creative forces of speech themselves — creative forces that were working at the evolution of man at the stage when speech was born. The seer must put himself into the condition of soul-life prevailing at the birth of speech; he must develop the twofold activity of giving form to the Spiritual inwardly, and of so immersing himself in the spirit of speech-formation that he is able to make the union between the two processes. And so it is important for us to realise that our attitude to the words of a seer must be different from our customary attitude to words. If the seer is to impart information he is obliged to make use of speech, but he does this in such a way that he allows the creative forces of speech to work; he uses the formative forces of speech. He gives form to the spoken word by greater or less emphasis, by speaking of certain matters first and others later, or again by introducing illustrations at some particular point. A man who desires to clothe spiritual truths in speech, must have a particular technique when he wants to express what is living within him. As regards the utterances of a seer, we must pay attention to the “How” — to how he expresses himself, not merely to what he says. It must be remembered that he has first to give form; what is important is how he speaks of things of the spiritual world, not so much what he says. Because this is so seldom realised, and because people think always of the ordinary meaning of words, they find it difficult to understand a seer. He has to unfold (in a relative sense of course) the faculty of speech-creation, so that he expresses the Supersensible through the way in which he speaks. More and more it will be necessary for men to realise that the all-important factor is not the actual content of what is said, but that through the way in which the seer expresses himself, people have the living impressions he is speaking out of the spiritual world. And so speech, even in ordinary life, is an artistic activity. With speech too, the seer has a particular relationship.
I want to speak on this subject from an angle that will seem to savour of science, and will indicate something that must more and more develop in order to build the bridge between the ordinary perception of reality on the one side and artistic imagination and super-sensible knowledge on the other. A question arises: By means of what process does the musician produce from within himself what lives in his music? First of all, it must be understood that what goes by the name of self-knowledge is usually something extremely abstract. Even the ideas about self-knowledge held by ‘Mystics’ and nebulous theosophists are very abstract. Genuine seership regards all such talk about experiencing the Divine in the soul as nebulous, lacking in clarity. A human being has his life of inner experience, his thoughts, feelings, impulses of will; he can sink down into this realm and then speak of mysticism, philosophy, science ... but if once he has contacted living reality, he knows that this is all too empty, too unsubstantial, in spite of efforts to fill it with content. Even in intense mystical experience a man always flutters above the reality, does not penetrate to the true reality, experiences inner pictures only, mere aftermaths of reality; neither does he reach reality through his ordinary perception of the material process of Nature.
Du Bois-Reymond has said, with truth, that contemplation of Nature (the sense world) can never produce knowledge of what lives in space. The scientist speaks of matter, of substance, existing in space, but this evades the faculties with which we try to grasp reality. In ordinary consciousness there is, on the one side, man’s inner life which does not reach to reality and, on the other, the external reality which evades his inner life. An abyss lies between. This abyss, the existence of which must be realised, is an obstacle to man’s power of cognition. The only means for overcoming it, is for the soul to develop super-sensible perception...
When this faculty of seership develops, we enter into a different relationship with our own being and with the material reality that is present as our body. The body becomes something new, ceases to be the object that evades and resists the inner life. The inner life no longer hovers above the reality but impregnates, saturates itself, within its own bodily natures with everything that has material existence in the body. But in all material existence there is spiritual existence, spiritual reality.
Let us try to envisage this by thinking of the art of music. While a man is unfolding musical or other mental images, and while in his ordinary consciousness he is engaged in acts of perception, complicated processes are taking place within the body. He knows nothing of them, but they are taking place nevertheless. Clairvoyant consciousness penetrates to this inner sphere of complicated and very wonderful bodily experience. With every out-breath the cerebral fluid in which the brain is contained pours into the spinal marrow, passes downwards, forces the blood into the veins of the lower part of the body. With every in-taken breath everything is borne upwards again. A wonderful rhythm takes place, accompanying all our activity of mental presentation and perception. Breathing, with its plastic rhythm, passes in and out of the brain. A process takes place which helps to produce an experience within the human being. It is enacted in the subconsciousness and the soul has knowledge of it. Modern physiology and biology are still almost entirely ignorant of these matters, but they will, in time, become the subject of a widespread science...
Those who understand such matters know that it is not right for us, in our epoch, to sink down in this physical sense into the bodily organism; but to endeavour through a meditative, intellectual activity to grasp what streams downwards and, through exercises of the will, what streams upwards. We confront the upward and downward currents with our life of soul, feeling their ebb and flow...
This denotes a definite advance in human evolution. Science and the everyday consciousness know nothing about the process, but the soul, in its depths, is aware of it. And what the soul experiences in this domain can, under special circumstances, be raised up to the level of consciousness, as happens, for instance, when a man has genuine-musical talent. How does this happen? In the normal condition of a human being there is a strong connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body. The soul-and-spirit is closely connected with the processes described above. When the balance is very delicately adjusted, and the soul-and-spirit is loosely connected with the body, this particular constitution (which is the result of inner destiny) produces musical talent or sensitiveness to music. Other special artistic faculties also depend upon this labile connection. Men who are gifted in this way are able to raise to a higher level an activity which, in other circumstances, proceeds only in the depths of the soul (where we are all of us musicians). When the balance is not labile this process cannot be raised to a higher level, and then artistic talent is lacking. A man in whom the balance between soul and body is labile...such a man raises upwards, either clearly or dimly, inner rhythmic forces and gives them form through sound and tone. If we study the stream of the nerve currents, from below upwards to the brain, there we find music. The process by which the optic nerves connected with the blood vessels, spreads out in the eye, remains in the subconscious. Something happens here that is eliminated when the human being confronts external nature; the external sense-impression is eliminated. But between nerve-currents and sensory processes a “poet” is present in every human being. And again, whether or not a man is able to raise this process to a higher level and turn it into poetry, depends upon the kind of balance which exists between soul and body...
Think now of the process of radiation, the current that flows downwards and meets the stream of the blood as it branches out; at this point our own balance or equilibrium is inserted into the balance of the surrounding world. A most intense experience arises in the subconscious when the human being ceases to be a crawling baby and acquires equilibrium in the upright posture...this coincidence is an intense and profound experience; it is an unconscious experience of the architectonic principle. When the nerve current downwards meets the blood-stream, architecture, sculpture are experienced — and again the labile or rigid condition of the balance determines whether the experience can or cannot be raised upwards and given form.
Painting, and what comes to expression there, is experienced inwardly at the point where nerve-currents and blood-currents meet. The artistic process itself is a conscious one but the impulses underlying it are unconscious. In seership there is clear consciousness of the impulses underlying artistic imagination; it is an inner experience, not abstract but so concrete and real that each single phase is discovered again in the form and configuration of the human body. In ancient times it was felt, and with truth, that every form, every proportion in architecture exists also within man’s own being as he stands in the external world. The experience of these proportions which gave rise to the architecture of antiquity was different from the experience which expressed itself in the Gothic style, but both styles originate from a realisation of the connection between a man’s own equilibrium and the equilibrium of the macrocosm. The human being, in his structure, is an image of the macrocosm. Hence the body is called the temple of the soul. Such expressions contain great truth. Thus we can say: The sources out of which a true artist and a seer create, are really the same; the seer raises to the level of consciousness both impulses that are meant to remain such, and also those impulses which the artist shapes into a concrete picture — only in the artist’s case the impulses remain in the subconscious. These regions are quite separate in human experience.
The time has arrived when men must become more and more conscious, freer and freer in their spiritual activity. The artist himself must bring the light of consciousness into the sphere of art, and in this way the bridge will be built between artistic creation and seership...
Those who use the microscope know how to adjust it in order that they may closely scrutinize the object under observation. But just as the faculty of real ‘microscopic’ perception from within has yet to be developed (and when this happens inner activity does not hinder, but quickens external vision) so a time will come when genuine seership will impregnate and pervade the elementary faculty of production and creation in the artist...
Men who understand this realise that the healing of mankind in the present and future lies in the quest for spiritual knowledge. The light of seership must shine out in art, in order that the warmth and splendour of art may work in and through the wide horizons of seership. This is necessary for all art which seeks to penetrate into that form of true existence which is needed by man if he is to be capable of mastering the great tasks approaching him from unfathomed depths.
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Think with your HEART all the way through to the other side of the above wedded WORDS.
Weave the Golden Thread.
Take the fruits of your labor into dreamtime with you tonight.
Allow your Higher Being to begin to inform your inner most movement.May you come to hold the FAITH in the following:
“The Foundation Stone consists of thoughts concerning the ways and means of growth in the human soul, and the ways and means of help afforded to it by the spiritual world. Thus the first part of each of the three verses contains the instruction most essential to the human soul in order that it regain the past, find light in the future, and have its share in fundamental Being even in the fleeting glory of the present. The practice of spirit-recollection, spirit-awareness, and spirit beholding form the content of the first half of each of the three verses. They contain that which the human soul must of necessity do FROM WITHIN in order to advance in the right direction.
The first of these three practices or exercises is concerned with an inward effort to alter the direction of the force of memory. For the direction in which memory commonly runs is horizontal. If we want to remember the past, we generally start from the present and think farther and farther back until we find the point we are seeking. This is the method of consciousness in the usual process of memory. And it is characteristic of this process that memory loses its strength when it has to go far into the past.
The call to practice spirit-recollection is not concerned however with lengthening the horizontal line of recollection but with a change of direction in the force of memory. The first step in meditation must indeed be the exclusion of all ordinary remembering. The activity of ordinary remembering must be brought to a standstill - this is the very first thing to be done. The horizontal line of memory must be contracted to a point; and all that is needed is that we recollect our own existence. When this stage of CONCENTRATION is reached and the forces of consciousness are mustered, the next step is to give to the forces of memory a VERTICAL direction. This means that we must no longer be remembering this, that, or the other, but must make our own higher nature, our own true Being, the object of our recollection. The light-stream of consciousness is now directed on the highest and deepest principle of our own humanity.
Then it may happen that the essential characteristics of a new nature gradually dawn on the consciousness of those practising this exercise, who cannot help recognizing this nature as their own, though it is utterly different from all that their ordinary experience has shown them of themselves.
For hitherto the conception of our physical form and the idiosyncrasies of our soul-life have SET US APART from the cosmic whole, DISTINGUISHING us from other beings within it, we now experience an active though tranquil nature, which instead of severing us from the cosmic whole UNITES us with it. It is a cosmic nature which, penetrating deeply and forcefully into our body, participates in the formation of that body, and by penetrating into the bodily limbs unites them with cosmic morality. The limb-system, which in the body merely consists of the members that carry the human soul through the world of space, becomes in this higher nature a cosmic will current, uniting the human soul with the surround Spirit-sea - the ‘Spirit’s Ocean Being.’
This experience of spirit-recollection produces a change in the whole life-feeling of the human soul...We learn, for instance, to say the words ‘I AM’ with new meaning. Instead of saying ‘I am’ in such a way that the utterance carries with it a CONTRAST to an unexpressed ‘Not I,’ it now becomes possible to say the ‘I AM’ so that a world behind and above the ‘I’ may be divined. Then the ‘I AM’ springs forth like a tongue of fire from the ocean of cosmic flame. For it is then no longer spoken HORIZONTALLY, as a separate point upon an alien surface, but VERTICALLY - the coming into being of the ‘I’ within the ‘I’ of God. ”
May you be held in the womb of 𝒮𝑜𝓅𝒽𝒾𝒶 & filled with the Light of ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱 today & always.
Image by @waldorfchalkboarding
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P.S. It’s never too late to partake in this Experience as Christmas is EVERYDAY!