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 4th, 2021 Addition
Keep in mind that the 12th Holy Night is from midnight on Jan. 4th to midnight Jan. 5th.Let us add Leo into the mix:
“5 January - Leo: Here we have Simeon’s Day, when Jesus was brought to the Temple and Simeon cried, “All is fulfilled. Now I can behold the One Who is the Bearer of the Sun.” This brings us a new, rich imagination of the constellation of Lion, as the place of the Spiritual Sun of the universe.”
-Willi Sucher
AND MAY THIS BECOME THE HONEY OF THE OUTFLOWING WISDOM AVAILABLE TO OUR SOULS:
“The Twelfth Night - REGION OF THE LAMB - SECOND LOGOS - THE NIGHT OF 'I AM'
So we have come full circle in a way. We come to that penultimate moment before Christ enters the body of the human Jesus and Jesus opens up his soul to the Second Logos Christ! When the region of Fishes unites with the region of the Lamb.
The Region of the Lamb is the last region before we leave the Zodiac.
What is the difference between the zodiac and the planets?
The Zodiac exists under the sign of “Duration” or eternity and the planets are under the sign of “Time.”
In our own souls too we have the Astral body which is a body of space, hence we need the 12 senses in order to be conscious of ourselves in space, to orient ourselves in space, while the etheric body is a body of time hence it is connected to the heart and lungs our heart beats and our breath have a rhythm.
However in the etheric world, time is spacial!
What happens here in time however is also spacial in a sense because it is usually sequential, that is something happens now while something happened before and something will happen after. We look 'back' in time and look forward to the 'future'. If we take this concept and apply it literally we have the etheric world, where if you look in one direction you will see the French Revolution and in the other you will see the Fall of Rome.
While planets and stars both undergo change these changes occur much faster in planets than they do in the stars.
'As far as human thinking is concerned, we can say that planetary existence belongs to the sphere of the Finite, whereas Zodiacal existence belongs to the sphere of Infinitude. This, as already said, must be taken in the relative sense, but for the present it is sufficiently accurate.' Rudolf Steiner.
There are many planetary systems and each eventually evolves into a sun and depending on the sun's propensity to sacrifice it then turns inside out, that is the Sun becomes a black hole and on the other side it arises as a new Zodiac which then creates from its own substance and influence a new planet and from it a new solar system.
'We can say in effect: what is at first contained in a planetary system evolves to a “sun” existence, then to zodiacal existence and then has the power to be itself creative, to offer itself in sacrifice within a planetary existence.' Rudolf Steiner.
The Region of the Lamb is connected to the Son Logos or the second person of the Trinity. When the Son Logos left the Region of the Lamb to enter into the Sun's spiritual, etheric nature, in order to make His way towards earth, the sun became united with the Son and the Son with the Sun for all times.
He brought Eternity with Him and connected it to the realm of Time or the Sun as a planet. Here He found firstly the Heavenly Sophia or the Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Wisdom, and He united Himself with the Sophia in a divine marriage in the region of the Scales which represent the balance between earthly and heavenly, darkness and light. The forces that descend and ascend and correspond to our lower and higher members.
'When, therefore, you think of the whole Zodiac, you must picture that some of its forces are descending and some are ascending. We think of the forces which are now involved in the ascending line of evolution, collectively, as Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra — because they actually belong to these constellations. These seven constellations comprise the ascending forces. The descending forces are comprised, approximately speaking, in the five constellations of Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. Thus forces rain down from the Zodiac and ascend again: seven constellations of ascending, five of descending forces. The ascending forces also correspond, in man, to the higher members of his being, to his higher, nobler attributes. The forces which are in the descending phase of evolution have first to pass through man and within him to attain to the stage at which they too can become ascending forces.' Rudolf Steiner.
Here the Ego of Christ unites with the soul of the planetary system in the same way that before the ego was able to work within man, the Macrocosmic ego of Christ entered the region of scales:
'...When the, ego actually entered into man the ascending and the descending forces had reached the stage where they were in ‘balance.’ At the entry of the ego, the ascending and the descending forces were in balance and it rests with man to turn the scales in the right direction. That is why the occultists have called the constellation which was entered at the time when the ego itself began to operate, the ‘Balance’ (Libra).' Rudolf Steiner.
We see these ascending and descending forces described by Rudolf Steiner as light and dark aspects of the zodiac meeting as 'colour' in the region of scales.
On earth when Christ's Macrocosmic Ego descended into Jesus, the Sun was at its highest in the day and we must imagine Jesus ascending towards it and the Christ, like a flower opening its chaste petals towards the warm rays of the sun. In Christ Jesus we find a perfect marriage of soul and exhalted ego, of darkness and light, of above and below in which the ascending and descending zodiac took part, it occurred through the agency of the Holy Spirit, for we are told a dove descended over Jesus' head. Rudolf Steiner however tells us that is is also an image of the Zarathustra/Solomon ego ascending out of Jesus! But more than the Holy Spirit was needed for this to occur, for it was the Sophianic forces that helped to open Jesus' soul to the Ego of Christ. For she was his 'mother' from the beginning. Hence in our time we are told we need the Sophia of Christ, or rather the wisdom that can open our souls for the conscious existence of Christ in us.
We must imagine this unification of Jesus soul and Christ ego as bursting forth in rays of colour which stream out life into the surrounding world. Hence Christ Jesus had to go into the wilderness, for the life streaming out of him would have dazzled those who saw it.
For colour comes from a combination of light and darkness. Like that corona of colour we see around the sun in summer at midday, this is what one must imagine around Jesus. This is also what Zarathustra saw around the sun, for he was seeing Christ's entry into the region of Scales.
And so the eternal lamb entered into a time body Fishes connecting human beings directly to the Godhead - to that realm of eternity - THE FATHER.
'I and the Father are one.'
Christ looks up to the Region of Aries/lamb as we look up to the region of Scales. Christ's lowest member on the Sun sphere in the region of Scales was Budhi just as our physical body is ours on earth and Budhi is what we shall achieve when we reach the region of Scales. Then the earth shall have become a sun through the consciousness of the Son of Christ for we shall have achieved a balance between darkness and light in our own souls.
We see here Christ's connection to Budhha the spirit of Mercury/Venus who achieved his Buddhahood by reaching the region of the Scales, where Christ had his then, lowest member. After that Buddha could perform his own sacrifice on Mars.
Now Rudolf Steiner tells us that Christ is a Macrocosmic being that is he is different from other beings who share in the Earth evolution:
'He is a Being of quite another order; He is a Being who remained behind, not only during the Moon evolution, as the Luciferic spirits did, but who, foreseeing the Moon evolution, actually remained behind still earlier, namely, during the old Sun evolution; and it was from a certain assured wisdom far above the human that He remained behind during the old Sun evolution. We cannot regard this Being as microcosmic in the sense which applies to the other beings we have been considering; for we have to regard as microcosmic beings those who were connected with this Earth evolution from its beginning. The Christ was not directly connected with the Earth evolution, but with the Sun evolution.'
How do we reconcile this fact with what Steiner tells us of Christ and the sphere of the lamb!
Let us consider what he means when he says that Christ remained behind on Old Sun.
Christ entered the Old Sun as a Star carrying with him only Atma Budhi and Spirit Self, to help humanity overcome luciferic temptation in the body - the raying out of his perfected body was what inspired human beings to stand upright. He then sacrificed this perfected body when he entered the Sun as a planet carrying only with Budhi, which he then sacrificed in order to vouchsafe human speech.
To achieve this Christ therefore had to remain behind on Old Sun evolution and not move on to the Moon. This means that at the time He was the highest being on the Sun apart from the Kyriotetes or Divine Sophia. That is why we are told He stayed 'behind'. Where other beings stayed behind because they did not rise to their highest potential, Christ stayed behind because he sacrificed his potential. So on the sun He became the Lord of Lords and that is why on earth he is sometimes called 'Kyrios'. He was not a backward Kyriotetes, but he had an affinity with them.
"He was a macrocosmic Being from the beginning of the Earth evolution on, a being who was exposed to entirely different conditions of evolution from those of the microcosmic beings. And His evolutionary conditions were of a special sort; they were such that this macrocosmic Christ Being evolved the macrocosmic ego outside earthly conditions.' Rudolf Steiner.
What was this special evolution and special affinity with the beings of the Second Hierarchy?
We must look to this evolution and this affinity in a former planetary system.
One must imagine that during the evolution of another planetary system that 'earth' had reached its Venus stage, and Christ was at that time a being who had achieved the highest pinnacle of what could be achieved by an ego in that planetary system, it is also where the present Kyriotetes were developing Budhi. At that time Christ was the highest of them and showed the greatest propensity for self sacrifice in that Planetary System. For this reason he became one of three creator gods when that sun became our zodiac. Hence,
"For this Christ evolution it was normal to bring to ego-perfection, outside the earth, an ego of a macrocosmic sort, and then to descend to earth. And so for the evolution of the Christ Being it was normal, when He descended from the macrocosm to our earth, to bring into it the great impulse of the macrocosmic ego, in order that the microcosmic ego, the human ego, might take up this impulse, and be able to go forward in its evolution. It was normal for the Christ to have the macrocosmic ego-impulse — not the microcosmic ego-impulse — just as much evolved as man upon the earth had developed the microcosmic.
'Thus the Christ Being is a Being Who in a certain sense is like the human being, only that man is microcosmic and has brought his four principles to expression microcosmically, and hence has his ego also microcosmically as earth-ego — but the Christ as Cosmic Ego. His evolution was such that He was great and significant because of the perfect development of this ego, which He brought down to earth. And He had not the fifth macrocosmic principle, and not the sixth, for He will evolve these on Jupiter and on Venus, in order that He may give them to man.' Rudolf Steiner.
Christ will evolve his higher macrocosmic members through the human being evolving their macrocosmic ones.
'The Christ, then, is a four-membered Being, including His macrocosmic ego, just as man himself is microcosmically a four-membered being. And as man during the earth time has as his mission the development of his ego, in order to be able to receive, so the Christ had to develop His Ego, in order to be able to give. When He descended to earth His whole being was employed in bringing His fourth principle to expression in the most perfect possible form. Now each macrocosmic principle has an inner relationship to the corresponding microcosmic principle; the fourth macrocosmic principle in the Christ corresponds to the fourth microcosmic principle in man, and the fifth in the Christ will correspond to the Spirit-Self in man.' Rudolf Steiner.
Christ left behind his Spirit Man in the stars, His Life Spirit on the Sun and his Spirit Self on the Moon, in order to become a human being, but one possessing a Macrocosmic Ego.
'Thus the Christ entered upon His earthly course in that He brought down to man out of the macrocosm what man was to evolve microcosmically — only the Christ brought it as a macrocosmic principle. He entered the earth evolution in such a way that during its course He would not have a fifth, sixth and seventh principle as His personal possession, just as man in his way does not possess them.
'The Christ, then, is a four-membered Being, including His macrocosmic ego, just as man himself is microcosmically a four-membered being. And as man during the earth time has as his mission the development of his ego, in order to be able to receive, so the Christ had to develop His Ego, in order to be able to give. When He descended to earth His whole being was employed in bringing His fourth principle to expression in the most perfect possible form. Now each macrocosmic principle has an inner relationship to the corresponding microcosmic principle; the fourth macrocosmic principle in the Christ corresponds to the fourth microcosmic principle in man, and the fifth in the Christ will correspond to the Spirit-Self in man.' Rudolf Steiner.
And so we see that:
'Just as man receives life into himself, so does this Being radiate life through the whole of our universe. This is the Being Who has the power to make the great sacrifice and Who is inscribed in the Zodiac as the Being Who for the sake of our world offers Himself in sacrifice. Just as man strives upwards into the Zodiac, so does this Being send us His sacrificial gift from Aries — which is related to Him as Libra is related to man. And just as man turns his ego upwards to Libra, so does this Being radiate His very Self over our sphere in sacrifice. This Being is called the “Mystical Lamb,” for Lamb and Aries are the same; therefore the description ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ or ‘Ram’ is given to Christ. Christ belongs to the cosmos as a whole. His I, his Ego, reaches to Aries and thus He becomes Himself the “Great Sacrifice,” is related with the whole of mankind and in a certain sense the beings and forces present on the earth are His creations. The configuration of forces is such that He could become the Creator of these beings in the constellation of Aries, or the Lamb. The designation “Sacrificial Lamb” or “Mystical Lamb” is drawn from the heavens themselves.' Rudolf Steiner.
But Christ has an adversary.
Sorath or the Beast with two Horns is the Demon of the Sun.
Christ tells us that Sorath does not belong to our planetary System and tells us that he has a his disdain for the Earth and for Christ. He is a stow-away.
'Sorath is the name of the Sun-Demon, the adversary of the Lamb.' Rudolf Steiner.
He is the demon of the Sun just as Ahriman is the demon of the Earth.
He, like Christ, evolved in a former planetary sphere and had also been a being on the Venus incarnation of it's principle planet, but his evolution took strange turns, instead of developing the highest love, the highest attainment an ego could possess for self sacrifice, he developed the greatest hate and the most intense egoism. One must imagine a battle between Christ and Sorath occurring on that ancient Venus and in imagining it one can see why Sorath has entered an evolution in which he does not belong. His enmity and competive hatred of Christ has brought him here.
So we find him a stow-away on Old Sun because of his affinity for that sphere!
He is one might say the inversion of Christ, an his true abode is the inversion of the Sun, the Eighth Sphere. He is, also one might say, the other 'side' of Christ, in the sense that our double is the other 'side' of us. For every light casts a shadow! And a great light has to cast off a great shadow!
'This seductive Being is of quite a different nature from man. It originates from other world periods; it has acquired the tendencies of other world periods and will feel deep satisfaction when it meets with Beings such as those evil ones who have refused to take up inwardly the good which can flow from the Earth. This Being has been unable to receive anything from the Earth; it has seen Earth evolution come but has said: I have not progressed with the Earth in such a way that I can gain anything from Earthly existence. This Being could only have gotten something from the Earth by being able to gain the rulership at a certain moment, namely when the Christ-Principle descended to the Earth. If the Christ-Principle had been strangled in the germ, if Christ had been overcome by the adversary, it would have been possible for the whole Earth to succumb to the Sorat-principle. This, however, did not take place, and so this Being has to be content with the refuse of mankind who have not inclined towards the Christ-Principle, who have remained embedded in matter; they in the future will form his cohorts.'
Rudolf Steiner tells us that when our Earth reaches its Sun stage that is, its Venus incarnation, the Sun will unite once more with the Earth, during the 6th cultural epoch of the 6th great epoch of that 6th evolutionary stage of the Earth. This will express the larger cycle of the number of the Beast 666. Then the battle will wage between Sorath human beings and Christ humanity, Sun Demon against Sun God.
'When the sun will have again united with the earth, then human beings — through the fact that they will have purified their instincts, desires, and passions — will redeem the luciferic beings. The luciferic beings who do not go on to the Sun remain in their original condition. They then appear as expelled into the evil, lower astral world. This is the ancient snake and it emerges as the first dragon. Therefore, when the earth enters the sun, a dragon appears. But there are yet other beings left behind: such human beings who could not prevent themselves from dropping back into animality, who remain slaves to their animal instincts. While the other human beings go to the sun, these will form an evil power over and against the higher. These form the second monster, and the writer of the Apocalypse says in his exact fashion: The luciferic dragon appears in heaven because he comes from higher worlds; the second beast arises from the sea — this consists of the souls of animalistic human beings who have remained behind. (Compare: (Rev. 12:3–13:10)
We have still a third vision, that of the black magicians. They do not remain stuck in animality; they develop spiritual abilities. In full consciousness they have turned away, and provide a bodily incarnation for Sorat. That will be the incarnation in flesh of the demon of the sun.'
But even now dear friends we are seeing a smaller cycle of the above, for not long ago we had the third recapitulation of the number 666 just before the end of the last century and we are living through, in a smaller cycle what will eventually occur in a much larger scale on future Venus:
'And so we see, if the Apocalypticer saw all of that, and he did see it, for he saw that the true unfolding of Christianity is a sun event, and he saw the development of this abominable possession by sun demons. That hovered before him. And the entry of Michael into the spiritual evolution of humanity at the end of the 19th century and the appearance of the etheric Christ in the first half of the 20th century, will be followed by the appearance of the sun demon before the end of this century.' Rudolf Steiner.
We are seeing the effects around us today, human beings have lost their connection to the stars, to higher beings and proclaimed themselves higher animals. Human beings have become so entrenched in matter they can no longer see the spirit of the other or the spirit behind nature, even though we have never been closer to the spirit! Human brotherlines/sisterlines will never be realised unless we learn to truly love one anther spiritually! We see it now among us, the work of Sorath who wishes to divine even Anthroposophists, firstly because of the events after Rudolf Steiner's death, and more and more since then until now when they squabble and unfriend each other and are loveless due to fear, fear of vaccines or covid or both.
But dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, we also have the etheric manifestation of Christ! Christ is waiting to be discovered in the soul of the 'other' and in the soul of nature! Christ is the one who asks us to be His brothers and sisters, His friend. Only by becoming awake to what the angels are asking of us, only by learning to see with the eye of the spirit, can we truly rise to an experience of Christ in the self - the IAM is love.
What we do this day, how we lift our souls to Christ and how we experience his love in us will have a bearing on the month of December and particularly on the 24-25th of December. Christ the Lord of Karma, the Lord of Memory will enable us to use memory as a window through which to cast our gaze from the 24th - to the previous 6th of January and to see how much love we experienced.
This is what we have come to today! Christ is at the end of our studies, Christ is at the foundation of all we have been learning these last 12 Holy days like Jesus himself we have followed the path that leads us to Christ when He journeyed to the baptism. And like Christ we have walked in the night the camino of the stars which have led us to Jesus who stands before John the Baptist.
Tomorrow the two become one.
'I entered in this world of senses,
Bearing with me thinking's legacy,
A godly force led me.
Death stands at the path's end.
I will to feel the being of Christ.
In matter's death he wakens spirit-birth.
Thus in spirit I find the world
And know myself in world-becoming'
Rudolf Steiner Lesson 19 First Class.
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
Christ is a sun-spirit, a fire-spirit. It's his spirit that reveals itself to us in sunlight. It's his breath of life in the air that sweeps around the earth and presses into us with every breath. His body is the earth on which we live. He actually feeds us with his flesh and blood, for all the food we eat is taken from the earth, from his body. We breathe his breath of life that he streams to us through the earth's plant-cover. We see in his light, for the sunlight is his spirit-radiation. We live in his love, even physically, for the sun's warmth that we get is his spiritual force of love, that we perceive as warmth. And our spirit is drawn towards his spirit, as our body is fettered to his body. That's why our body must be consecrated, because we walk on his body. The earth is his holy body that we touch with our feet. And the sun is the manifestation of his holy spirit to which we are allowed to look up. And the air is the manifestation of his holy life that we are allowed to take into us. So that we could become aware of our self, our spirit, so that we could become spirit-beings our self, this high sun-spirit sacrificed himself, left his royal abode, descended from the sun and took on physical raiment in the earth. Thus he is physically crucified in the earth. But he spiritually embraces the earth with his light and his love power, and everything that lives on it belongs to him. He's only waiting for us to want to belong to him. If we give ourselves to him completely then he'll not only give us his physical life, but also his higher spiritual sun-life. Then he streams through us with his divine light-spirit, with his warming waves of love and with his creative God's will. We can only be what he gives us, what he makes out of us. Everything about us that corresponds to the divine plan is his work. What can we do in addition to this? Nothing but to let him work in us. It's only if we resist his love that he can't work in us. But how could we resist this love? Resist him who says: “I have always loved you and have drawn you to me out of pure goodness.” He has loved us since the earth's very beginning. We must let his love become a real being in us. Real life, spirit and bliss are only possible if this life becomes real life for us, becomes Christ's life in us. We can't become pure and holy by ourselves, but only through this Christ-life. All our striving and wrestling is in vain as long as this higher life doesn't fill us. It alone can wash everything out of our nature that's still unpurified, like a clean, pure stream. This is the soul-ground from which this purifying light-life can ascend. There we must seek our dwelling, at his feet and in devotion to him. Then he will transform us himself and stream through us with his divine love-life until we become illumined and pure as he is, become like him. Until he can share his divine consciousness with us. Our soul must become pure and wise through his light — then it can unite with his life. This then is the union of Christ and Sophia, the union of Christ's life with the human soul that has been purified by his light.'
With love and deepest respect for your individual human ego, your karma and your destiny, and for my dear friend who crossed the threshold during advent so he could help me write these Holy Nights - Thank you.
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 12
“I DESIRE.”
How can I DESIRE with balance of Soul the ONE Desire?
“Human Soul!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the World of Space
Into the Spirit’s Ocean Being.
Practice Spirit Recollection
In depths of soul,
Where in the Wielding Will
of World Creating
Thine own I
Comes to being in God’s I.
And thou wilt truly live
In Human World Being.”
Bring over the fruits of your labor from yesterday as you read the following WORD:
May human love become divine love.
Aum, the heartbeat of creation.
The melody of human brotherhood. “O Cosmic Mother, teach me to use the gift of Thy love in my heart to expand endlessly my sympathies.
May I pass from the boundaries of family affections into a larger realm of friendship and service to all. Let me not tarry, fascinated by rewarding feelings of usefulness, in even those noble regions - the farthest reaches of human solicitude.
Inspire me to enter the infinitudes of divine love. O Universal Spirit, I would invisibly embrace as my own all animate and seemingly inanimate forms in creation.
May I perceive even in stones, built of Thy secret atoms, the pulsing of Thine insuppressible life...
O Cosmic Vibration, manifest Thyself to me as the voice of Infinity. May I intuit the Christ Consciousness in Thee.
O Omnipresent Sound of Aum, Amen! Reverberate through me, expanding my mind from the body to the universe. Teach me to feel in Thee the immortal heartbeat of creation.
Oh Divine Mother, lift us on Thy lap of universal love. Break Thy vow of silence and sing to us the heart-melting melody of human brotherhood. ”
What is the Essence of Day 12?
“Tonight, We shall rise to the Father God. The First Logos.
The Father god is connected to our physical body which is designated the number 12.
The Father is connected to the first hierarchy, the Father Gods, through the Seraphim, the spirits of love, to the Sun Gods to the second hierarchy through the Kyriotetes, the spirits of Wisdom, and to the Moon Gods, the third angelic hierarchy through the Archai.
We are conscious beings on earth because we have a physical body with its 12 physical senses, it’s 7 physical organs, and its four limbs, these enable our ego to experience the world of three dimensions. Our physical body was created on Old Saturn through the auspices of the First hierarchy, the Father Gods, working on behalf of the First logos the Father.
Our physical body is connected to our will and so the Father Logos is therefore connected to our limbs which do the bidding of our Will.
Rudolf Steiner tells us that it is by transforming our will into an organ of perception, that we can come to an understanding of the life that preceded this one. Our Will becomes a faculty of seeing former lives.
This is Intuition.
But what truly is the will?
The will is even more difficult for us to grasp than our feelings for it is not merely sleepy, dreamy as our feelings are, it lives in that part of us that is deeply asleep.
This was needed so that we could develop consciousness, otherwise our consciousness would be taken up with walking or digesting our food. This was taken from our consciousness so that we could be free.
This inner life which was taken from our consciousness is Life Ether.
One might say that to awaken to our thinking is to awaken to earthly our senses and perceptions, to awaken to our feelings is to enter a world of pain and joy. To awaken to our will is to awaken to a world of dying and becoming. Hence we must make a decision to enter here consciously, for it is where lives all our human potential for both good and evil, for all that is good is connected to life, and all that is evil is connected to death. If we are not conscious in this world, we fall in love with evil.
Our journey over the last 11 nights has been to get to know ourselves, to know our thinking, feeling and will, to know our astral body our etheric body and now to truly know our physical body right down to our bones for Atma requires this consciousness.
If we have been more or less successful in experiencing the last 11 nights with consciousness, then it has been uncomfortable even painful and never more so than tonight when we face our past lives, we enter into who we have been which is the ‘cause’ of who we are.
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
’What do we know about what goes on inside us when the thought ‘I want that’ turns into he reaching out of our hand? The actual processes of the will are asleep in the human being. With regard to feelings and emotions we can at least state that in these we dream in ourselves. It is because the will is asleep with regard to ordinary consciousness that the question of freedom is so very fraught.’
Free will, dear friends, what does it really mean?
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
’The way we carry our will within us means that what works into it is not only what we have experienced in the spiritual world or what works into our feelings and emotions between death and a new birth. It is our experiences in our former lives on earth that work in our will.’
Where we go, what we do on earth, in the present, this is connected with our previous lives but not merely that, they are connected to our next life too - karma and destiny.
We must imagine that we have not merely lives on earth, but also a much longer lives between physical births in the spiritual world. Our human lives are composed of many lives on earth and many lives in the spiritual world.
What we bring from our past, has to take these in mind and these form our present karma, karma is the ‘plan’ we elaborated with higher beings that would best balance our mistakes in previous lives, it brings us to the people and experiences we need. Our karma works in our limbs and carries us to these people and experiences. These are, one mights say, necessities. Karma is ‘iron’ necessity. This involves suffering, pain, hardship, etc, for only by experiencing these things do we balance what was imbalanced in a previous life - our human consciousness. We make this vow, before we are born to follow our karma, because we know the necessity. But we soon forget!
What is freedom?
Rudolf Steiner uses the analogy of a house quite often. Say we want to build a house, we consult the experts, design the house and have it built. But what we do in, how we live in it, that is entirely up to us - we are free to live in that house or to sell it and buy a new one, this is destiny.
Karma necessary will.
Destiny free will.
So not everything that we choose to do is karmic, sometimes we choose our hardships, even though our karma dictated a life of ease. Sometimes we choose ease, even though our karma dictated that we have a life of suffering, but, now here is the clincher, if we choose ease, even if karmically it is ours, we do not progress. If we choose ease when we are meant to suffer we must do something else to balance ourselves or face that karma twofold in a next life.
For instance, we can choose to work on our soul life which precludes the necessity of suffering an illness. The former is far better for us, for it is a conscious choice!
In order to make that conscious decision we have to remember our karma, we have to recollect the work of the Father. For how can we fix a problem if we don’t know it exists?
We must practise recollection. We must use intuition to face up not merely to our passions and feelings but to what is essentially evil in us. Like a doctor we must look for the disease. This does not mean that we won’t also see our goodness, but we must not love our goodness because it is ours, we must love it because it is good!
There is a great difference. The difference is consciousness.
You may have heard the term - Love evil well. This makes no sense at all, unless you understand that you are not being told to become a black magician! This actually means that we must enter into the realm where evil lives consciously, we must enter where our angels fear to tread, our will, our physical body, and we must see ourselves for what we are, we must know who we are well. All our faults, all our evil, and we must choose to love. To transform this evil to goodness for the sake of goodness. If we are not conscious in this realm the danger is that we fall in love with evil for the sake of evil.
How do we love? Is it we who loves this evil into good? No. It is Christ in us. Christ alone has the power in us to transform evil, He takes this evil into Himself and redeems it through our consciousness.
Christ is the lord of Karma. He can help us to overcome our karma, which is the gift of the Father, by giving us the freedom to create new destiny.
That is why no man can come to the Father but through Him.
To enter into the physical body without first having a consciousness of the Christ spirit is dangerous. Hypnotism for instance is supremely dangerous for this reason.
We can enter the physical body, into our will and create new destiny for the future through Christ, but only by knowing the past. We can redeem the past through consciousness. After all this is what suffering does, suffering illness, or painful experiences bring consciousness, but we can choose to experience this in such a way that we can begin now to create new destiny, not merely wait until our time between death and rebirth.
Our limbs in one life become our heads in another. What we do becomes what we think in one life, what is inside us, and what we think becomes what we do, what is outside us, in the next.
To develop intuition is to prepare our next life, and through it, the physical world in which we shall live!
One might say that intuition is really willed thought, willed consciousness. We will what is inside us out of us, our thoughts and we perceive the world in a new way, this is a creative act, for it creates new life, our consciousness creates what the world will become in the future. In truth what we have around us now, is really the result of what the gods thought aeons ago. What we shall have around us will be the result of what we thinking and will that we have now because we are becoming creator gods!
We must recollect, so that we can create consciously and become one with the consciousness of the Father. This is how we truly live.
For just as ordinary consciousness is life on earth, higher consciousness will be life in a future earth.
The ‘All world being of man’ is that part of the human being that creates worlds.
This is the reason that when Christ came into the world we stopped celebrating Saturn’s Day or the Sabbath and began celebrating Sun Day. For the Father gave his ‘Only Begotten Son’ to us for this: That through the Consciousness He brings we might rise to become like the Father.’
Only this way can we come to some idea of what it means to elaborate Atma in our souls, for Atma is the breath that carries the spirit of Christ into our physical bodies all the way into our bones wherein our karma is written. Now we know better, we feel it in our bones, what on our third night we tried to ‘picture’ and on the sixth night we tried to hear or understand.”
What does Spirit Recollection (Willed Consciousness) LOOK and FEEL like?
SEE into what you FEEL as you read the following:
“Bethesda consisted of five porches, which enclosed a pool made from the waters of an intermittent spring. The bubbling up, or ‘troubling’ of this pool, was said to foreshadow healings attributed to an angel.
Around it, sick people congregated and when the spring began to swirl, the sick and afflicted scrambled to enter its waters to be healed, and for this reason every expectant eye was fixed on the pool.
Judas saw Jesus go to the most wretched man of all, a man who sat without an attendant or friend to help him to the pool. Jesus asked this man if he had the will to stand. The man said that he did. Jesus looked at him, full of love, and told him to take up his coverlet and to go since he was healed. When the man did as he said, all were amazed, not only because the man had been healed but also because this healing infringed upon rabbinic law, which forbade work on a Sabbath.
Judas did not know what to think.
The next day, when they came again to the Temple, the Rabbis and Pharisees were gathered waiting for him. They had heard of the healing.
‘You healed a man on the Sabbath!’ one Pharisee said, pointing a dry bone of a finger at him.
‘It is true,’ said Jesus, tranquilly.
‘Did you tell him to take up his bed and to walk, knowing this to be unlawful?’
His voice was so quiet that the old men who had gathered around had to cup their ears to hear it,
‘I am the Lord of the Sabbath; and if I wish to do good on a Sabbath, then I will do it. You, on the other hand, should be ashamed, for you do not care about the man’s cure or the spirit that enabled it. You think only that he took up his bed on the Sabbath.’ He looked at them and his face did not change but his voice became deeper, ‘Your rigid laws need to be broken! You see God as a God of death, but I tell you He is a God of life! You see him as hateful and disdainful, a God Who longs for revenge, but I have come to show that He is a God of love and warmth and light. He comes to bring salvation and redemption of sin to mankind; to save it from the fear that you cultivate!’
Angered, the rabbis shouted, ‘How can a man bring redemption? You cannot forgive sins! This is only for God to do!’
‘I can forgive sins because what lives in me is above the laws of the Sabbath, the laws of the Sabbath are the laws of necessity, the laws of death. But I can free a man from necessity, I have come to free him from sin, for my power does not come from dark Saturn which names your Sabbath, my power comes from the Sun and my day is Sun-day, the day of light, and life!”
CONCENTRATE upon the following as you practice Spirit Recollection (Willed Consciousness):
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.”
“I have already pointed out in recent lectures how certain functions or activities of the human being, which emerge in early childhood, are in reality a metamorphosis of activities which belong to man between death and a new birth, i.e. in his pre-earthly life. At birth the child is not yet fully adapted to the earthly gravitation, the earthly conditions of equilibrium. We see the child slowly and gradually adapt himself to these earthly conditions as he learns to stand and walk. Thus the adaptation of the body to the position of equilibrium for earthly life is a faculty which man does not bring with him. He must acquire it during his earthly life.
Now we know that the physical body of man in all its form is the result of a mighty spiritual activity — an activity which man performs in unison with Beings of the Higher Worlds between death and a new birth. Yet that which man forms and creates in this activity — we may call it in a sense the spiritual germ of his future physical earthly body — is not so formed as already to contain the faculty of upright gait and posture. This faculty is only incorporated in man’s nature when, after his birth, he gradually finds his way into the conditions of equilibrium, into the forces of earthly existence. For in the pre-earthly life, balance or equilibrium is not the same as it is on earth, where it signifies the power to walk and stand. In the pre-earthly life, balance and equilibrium signify the relation man has to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so forth — to the Beings of the Hierarchies — a relation manifold and differentiated according as one feels oneself drawn more towards one Being or more towards another. This constitutes the state of equilibrium in the spiritual worlds. And this, man loses in a certain sense when he descends on to the earth. In the mother’s womb he is neither in the conditions of equilibrium of his spiritual existence, nor is he yet in the conditions of equilibrium of his earthly life. He has left the former and has not yet entered into the latter.
It is similar in the case of speech. The language which we speak here on earth is, of course, essentially adapted to earthly conditions. In the first place it is an expression of our earthly thoughts. These earthly thoughts contain earthly information and earthly knowledge; and to all this our speech or language is adapted during our life on earth. But in the pre-earthly life as I have already explained, man has a very different language — one which does not go from within outwards, which does not mainly follow the out-breathing process, but the spiritual in-breathing or inspiration (which we observe to correspond to breathing in the pre-earthly life). Thus in pre-earthly existence, man’s language is a living with the cosmic Logos; it is a living within the cosmic Word — the cosmic language from out of which all things of the world are made.
This too we lose when we descend on to the earth. We lose the life within the cosmic language, and acquire here on earth the language which serves us in the first place to express our thoughts — our earthly thoughts. This earthly language serves our mutual understanding — understanding as between human beings, all of whom are living on the earth.
And so it is with our thoughts themselves — our earthly thinking. Here on earth, our thinking is gradually adapted to the earthly conditions. In pre-earthly existence on the other hand, our thought is a living within the creative thoughts of the Cosmos.
Walking, Speaking and Thinking: — let us now consider, of these three, the middle member — human speech. We may indeed say that in speech there lies a most essential element of all earthly culture and civilisation. By speech, human beings come together here on earth, and one man finds the way to another. Bridging the gulf that lies between, soul meets with soul through speech. We feel that we have in speech something essential to our nature here on earth. And indeed our speech is the earthly reflection of our life in the Logos, in the cosmic Word. Thus it is particularly interesting to understand the connection of what man attains by great efforts here on earth, as speech and language, with the metamorphosis of speech and language yonder in the pre-earthly life. Indeed, when we study this relationship, we are led to perceive how the human being is inwardly constructed and organised out of the very element of spoken sound and music...
If we study the human organism as it stands before us here on earth, we know that it is through and through an image of the spiritual. Everything here — not only what man bears in himself, but also what surrounds him in external nature — is an image of the spiritual. Now when man expresses himself in speech or in song, he is really manifesting his whole nature — body, soul and spirit — not only outwardly but inwardly. In all that he brings forth by way of sound — whether the articulate sounds of speech or the musical notes of song — the full human being is in fact contained. How deeply and fully he is contained, we only begin to see when we understand more in detail what the human being is in that he speaks or sings.
Let us take our start from speech. In the historic evolution of mankind, speech, as we know, proceeded from something which originally was song. The farther we go back into pre-historic ages, the more does speech become recitative and eventually song. In distant ages of human evolution upon earth, the expression of the human being through sound was not really differentiated into song and speech, but these two were one. What is so often referred to as the primeval language of man was such that we might as well speak of it as a primeval song.
But we will now study speech in its present condition, where it has become very far removed from the pure element of song, and is steeped in the prosaic and intellectual quality. If we take speech as we have it to-day, we find in it two essential elements — consonant and vowel, All that we bring forth in speech is composed of a consonantal and of a vowel element. Now, the consonantal element is in reality entirely based upon the finer plastic structure of our body. Whether we pronounce a B or a P, an L or an M, in each case it rests upon the fact that something or other in our body has a certain plastic form. Nor is this confined by any means to the organs of speech and song alone. These organs only represent the highest culmination of what is here meant. For when the human being brings forth a musical note in song or an articulate sound in speech, his whole body really takes part in the process. The process that goes on in the organ of speech or song is but the final culmination of something that is taking place through the whole human being. Our human body therefore, as to its plastic form and structure, may really be conceived as follows. We take all the consonants there are in any language. They are always variations of twelve primary consonants, and indeed in the Finnish language you still find these twelve preserved very nearly in their pure, original nature; eleven are quite distinct, only the twelfth has grown a little indistinct, but it, too, is still present. Now, these twelve original consonants when rightly understood (and each of them can at the same time be conceived as a form), these twelve consonants taken together really represent the entire plastic structure of the human body. We may say therefore, without speaking figuratively in the least: — the human being is plastically expressed by the twelve primeval consonants.
What then is this human body? From the point of view — the musical point of view — we are now taking, the human body is nothing else than a great musical instrument. Even the external musical instruments — the violin or any other instrument of music — even these you can best understand by somehow perceiving in their form and shape a consonant or consonants. You must see them, as it were, built up out of the consonants. When we refer to the consonant element in speech, there must always be something in our feeling reminiscent of musical instruments; and the totality, the harmony of all consonants, represents the plastic sculpture of the human body.
And the vowel element — in this we have the soul which plays upon the instrument. The soul provides the vowel nature. Thus when you embody in speech the consonant and vowel elements, you have in every manifestation of speech or of song a self-expression of the human being. The soul of the human being plays in vowels upon the consonants of the musical instrument — the human body.
Now if, as I said, we are considering the speech that forms a part of present-day civilisation, we find that our soul, whenever it brings forth vowel sounds, makes use to a very great extent of the brain, the system of head and nerves. In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case to the same degree.
Let us consider for a minute the system of head and nerves. The whole structure of the head is permeated by forces which run along the nerve-strands. Now the activity which the nerve-strands here develop is entered and permeated by another activity, namely that which comes about through our breathing-in the air. The air which we breathe in passes through the spinal canal right up into the head, and the impact of the breathing beats in unison with the movements that are executed along the nerve-strands. Pressing upward to the head through the spinal canal, the current of the breath is perpetually meeting with the activity of the nerves in the head. We have not a separate nervous activity, and a separate breathing activity; we have in the head a harmony and mutual resonance of breathing activity and nervous activity. Now the man of to-day, having grown prosaic in his ordinary life, sets more store by the nerve forces than by the breathing impulses. He makes more use of his nervous system when he speaks; he permeates with nerve, if we might put it so, the instrument which through its consonantal nature shapes and forms the vowel currents.
In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case. Man lived not so much in his nervous system; he lived in the breathing system. Hence the primeval language was more like song. Now when the man of to-day sings, he takes what he does in speech — where he permeates it with the nervous activity of the nervous system — and restores it to the current of the breath. He consciously calls into activity this second stream — the breathing. It is the continuation of the breathing into the head which is directly called into activity when, as in song, the uttering of the vowel is added to the bringing forth of the note. But here in song man does not leave the element of breath; he takes back his now prosaic language into the poetic and artistic nature of the rhythmic breathing process. The poet of to-day still strives to maintain the rhythm of the breath itself in the way he shapes and moulds the language of his poems. And he who writes for song takes it all back again into the breathing process (including the breathing process of the head). Thus we may say, the very process which man must undergo here on earth, in that he adapts his language to earthly conditions, is reversed in a certain sense when we pass from speech to song. Song is indeed a. real recollection — though by earthly means — of that which we experienced in the pre-earthly life. For in our rhythmic system we are far nearer to the spiritual world than in our thinking system. And it is of course the thinking system which takes hold of speech when speech becomes prosaic.
When we utter the vowel sounds, we press what is living in our soul down into the body; and the body, by adding the consonantal element, does but provide the musical instrument for our soul to use. You will certainly have the feeling that in every vowel there is something of the soul, immediate and living. The vowel can be taken by itself. The consonant on the other hand is perpetually longing for the vowel, tending towards it. The plastic instrument of the body is in fact a dead thing until the vowel nature — the soul — strikes its chords.
You can see this in detailed examples. Take for instance, in certain dialects of Middle Europe, the word mir as in the phrase Es geht mir gut. When I was a little boy, I simply could not conceive that the word should be written as it is. I always wrote it mia; for in the r the longing towards the a is quite inherent. Thus when we perceive the human organism as the harmony of all consonants, we find in it everywhere the longing for the vowel nature, that is to say for the soul. Now we are driven to ask, what is the origin of all these things?
This human body, in the whole arrangement of its plastic structure here on earth, has to adapt itself to the earthly conditions. It is shaped as it is, because the earthly position of equilibrium and the whole system of the earthly forces would not allow it to be otherwise. And yet all the time it is shaped out of the spiritual world. This matter can be understood only by deeper spiritual-scientific research. The soul-nature, manifesting itself through the vowels, strikes upon the consonantal nature, which is plastically shaped and formed in accordance with earthly conditions.
If we lift ourselves into the spiritual world, in the way I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, we first attain Imagination or Imaginative Cognition, as I have often told you. Now when we reach this point, we find that we have lost the consonants. We still possess the vowels, but the consonants — to begin with at any rate — are lost. In the Imaginative condition, we have in effect lost our physical body — i.e. we have lost the consonants. In the Imaginative world, the consonants no longer appeal to us. To describe what we have in that world adequately in spoken words, our words would have to consist, to begin with, of vowels only.
We have lost the instrument, and we enter a pure world of sound, where the vowels are indeed coloured and shaded in manifold variety, but all the consonants of earth are in effect dissolved away in the vowels.
You will therefore find that in those languages which were not yet so far removed from the primeval, the things of the super-sensible world were named in words consisting of vowels only. The word Jahve for example did not contain our present form of J or V. It consisted only of vowels, and was half-scanned, half-sung. We enter here into a vowel-language which it is only natural to sing. And when we reach from Imaginative to Inspired Cognition — when therefore we receive the direct manifestations of the spiritual world — then all the consonants we have on earth are changed into something quite different. The consonants, as such, we lose. But in place of it, a new thing comes forth in the spiritual perception which comes to us in Inspiration. And this new thing we find to be none other than the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.
But the spiritual counterparts of the consonants are not there between the vowels; they live in them. In your speech here on earth you have the consonants and vowels side by side. You lose the consonants as you ascend into the spiritual world. You live your way into a vowel world of song. To put it truly one must say, “It sings,” for you yourself no longer sing. The World itself becomes cosmic song. But all this vowel world is variedly coloured or shaded in a spiritual sense. In effect, there is something living in the vowels — namely the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.
Here on earth we have the vowel sound A for example, and — if you will the note C sharp in a certain octave. But when we reach the spiritual world, we do not have one A, or one C sharp in a given octave, but countless ones differing in inner quality. For it is another thing, whether a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi speaks A to one, or a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, or some other Being. Outwardly the manifestation is the same, but it is filled in each case with a different inner soul.
We may say therefore: — Here on earth we have our body. The vowel sound strikes into it. Yonder in the spiritual world we have the vowel sound; and the soul strikes into it, and lives in it, so that the sound becomes the body for the soul. You are immersed in cosmic music, cosmic song; you are within the creative sound — within the creative Word.
Let us now consider sound as it is on earth, including spoken sound. Sound has its earthly life in the element of air. It is, however, but a childish conception of Physics to believe that the peculiar forms in the air are the reality of sound. It is really childish. Imagine, for a moment, you have a piece of ground, and on it stands a man. The ground is most certainly not the man, yet the ground must be there for the man to stand on. Without it, the man himself could not be there. It will not therefore occur to you to seek to understand the man by examining the soil beneath his feet.
In the same way the air must be there for the sound to have a basis of support. Just as man stands on the soil — only in a rather more complicated way the sound has its “soil,” its necessary basis or resistance in the air. For the sound itself, the air signifies no more than does the soil for the man who stands on it. The sound presses forward to the air, and the air gives it the possibility to stand. But the sound itself is spiritual. Just as the man is different from the earthly soil on which he stands, so, is the sound different from the air upon which it stands — in which it finds its support though of course in a more complicated way, in a manifold and varied way.
Through the fact that we on earth can only speak and sing by means of the air, we have in the airy forming of the sound the earthly image of a thing of soul and spirit. The soul-and-spirit of sound belongs to the super-sensible world, and that which dwells here in the air is fundamentally the body of the sound. We need not therefore be surprised if we find the sound again in the spiritual world, though shorn of that which comes from the earthly — the earthly consonant-articulation. The vowel only is carried over there. The sound as such in its spiritual content goes with us when we rise into the spiritual world, only there it becomes filled with soul. Instead of being shaped and moulded outwardly by the nature of the consonants, the sound is inwardly ensouled.
Now all this runs parallel with man’s entry into the spiritual world in the widest sense. Think for a moment, my dear friends, man passes through the gate of death. The consonants he soon leaves behind, but the vowels — and especially the manifold intonations of the vowels — these he experiences all the more strongly, only with this difference. He no longer feels the sound proceeding from his own larynx, but he feels that there is singing all around him, and that in every sound of the song, he himself is living. It is so in the very first days after man passes through the gate of death. He is dwelling in a musical element, which is at the same time an element of speech; and this musical element reveals ever more and more as it becomes filled with living soul from the spiritual world.
Now, as I have told you, man’s going forth into the Universe after he has passed through the gate of death is at the same time a passing from the earthly world into the world of the stars.
When we describe such a thing as this, we seem to be speaking in images, but our images none the less are reality. Imagine here the Earth. Around it are the planets, then the heavens of the fixed stars, conceived from time immemorial — and rightly so — as the Animal Circle or Zodiac. Man standing on the Earth sees the planets and the fixed stars in their shadowed radiance. He sees them from the Earth — or, shall we say, with due respect to earthly man, he sees them “from in front?” (The Old Testament, as you know, expressed it differently.) After death, when man goes farther and farther from the earth, he gradually comes to see the planets as well as the fixed stars “from behind.” But there he does not see these points of light or surfaces of light which are seen from the earth. Rather does he see the spiritual — the corresponding spiritual Beings. On all sides it is a world of spiritual Beings. Wherever he looks back, whether it be towards Saturn, Sun or Moon, or towards Aries, Taurus and the other constellations, he sees from yonder side the spiritual Beings.
But this seeing is at the same time a hearing; and when he says: — Man sees from the other side — or from behind — Moon, Venus, Aries, Taurus and so forth, we might equally well express it thus: — Man hears the Beings, who have their dwelling in these heavenly bodies, resounding forth into the cosmic spaces.
Try to imagine it in its totality. (It really looks as though we were speaking figuratively, but we are not, it is absolutely real.) Imagine yourself out there in the Cosmos — the planetary world farther from you now, the Zodiac with its twelve constellations nearer. From all the heavenly bodies it is singing, speaking as it sings to you, singing as it speaks; and all your perception is a listening to the speaking song, the singing speech of the World. You look out in the direction of Aries, and as you do so, receive the impression of a consonant soul-nature. Behind Aries maybe, is Saturn, a vowel element of soul. And in this vowel element as it radiates out into the cosmic space from Saturn — in it there dwells the soul-and-spirit Consonant: — Aries, or in another instance, Taurus. Thus you have the planetary sphere singing to you in vowels — singing forth into the cosmic spaces; and the fixed stars permeate the song of the planetary sphere with soul from the consonants. Picture it to yourselves as vividly as you can: — the sphere of the fixed stars at rest, and behind it the wandering planets. Whenever a planet in its course passes a constellation of the fixed stars, there bursts forth not a single note, but a whole world of sound. Then as the planet passes on from Aries to Taurus, a different world of sound rings forth. But behind it there follows, let us say, another planet: — Mars. Mars passing through the constellation of Taurus, causes a different world of sounds to ring forth once more. Thus you have in the heavens of the fixed stars, or the Zodiac, a wondrous cosmic instrument of music, while from behind it our planetary Gods are playing upon this instrument.
We may truly say, my dear friends, when man down here on earth takes back his speech (which is now formed for his earthly needs, just as his walking is transformed, for earthly needs, from his spiritual power of orientation in the Cosmos) — when therefore man takes speech back again into the element of song, he really inclines himself to that cosmic pre-earthly existence from out of which he is born for earthly life. And indeed, all Art comes before man in this sense. It is as though, whenever he expresses himself in Art, he were to say, “’Tis human destiny — and rightly so that man as he begins his earthly course of life is placed into the midst of earthly conditions and must adapt himself to these. But in Art he goes back again a little step, leaves the earthly life to take its course around him, and retreating for a moment approaches once more the world of Soul and Spirit — the pre-earthly life from which he has come forth.”
We do not understand Art, my dear friends, unless we feel in it the longing to experience the Spiritual — though it be but manifested, to begin with, in a world of beautiful semblance. Our creative fancy, whereby we develop all artistic things, is at bottom nothing else than the power of clairvoyance in an earthly form. We are tempted to say: — As sound dwells on earth in the element of air, so it is with the nature of the soul itself. That which is truly spiritual in the pre-earthly life has its earthly dwelling in the image of the spiritual. For when man speaks, he makes use of his whole body. The consonant nature becomes in him the plastic sculpture of the human frame, and the Soul makes use of the current of the breath which does not enter into solid form, to play upon this plastic instrument of music and now, in a twofold way we can turn once more to the Divine, what we thus are as human beings speaking upon earth.
Take the consonantal human frame. Suppose we loosen it as it were from the solid form wherein the earthly forces — gravity and the like — or the chemical forces in the foodstuffs have enchained it. Suppose we liberate the consonant nature that permeates the human being for so we may now describe it. When we place a lung on the dissection table we find chemical substances in it, which we can investigate by chemical methods. But this is not the lung. What is the lung? It is a consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos, which has taken plastic form. The heart, if we lay it on the dissection table, consists of cells which we can investigate chemically and find the substances composing it. But this is not the heart. The heart again is a consonant — another consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos. And if we conceive the whole twelve consonants, cosmically spoken and resounding forth, we have in all essentials the human bodily frame.
Thus as we look to the consonants, if we have the necessary clairvoyant power of imagination to see them in their real connection, there arises before us the human body in its plastic shape. If then we take the consonants out of the human being, we have the Art of Sculpture. If on the other hand we take the breath, which the soul uses to play upon the bodily instrument in song — if we take the vowel nature out of the human being, there arises the musical art, the Art of Song.
Once more: — Take the Consonant-nature out of the human being, and there arises Form, which you must mould in plastic art. Take the Vowel-nature out of the human being, and there arises Song — Music, which you must sing. Man as he stands before us here on earth proceeds out of the two Cosmic Arts — a Cosmic Art of Sculpture from the one side, and a cosmic Art of Song or Music from the other. Two kinds of spiritual Beings join their activity together. The one provides the instrument, the other plays upon it; the one forms and moulds the instrument, the other plays upon it.
Can we wonder that in olden time, when things like these were felt, it was said of the greatest of all artists, Orpheus, that his command over the soul was such that he was able, not only to use the ready-moulded human body as an instrument, but to cast even amorphous matter into plastic forms — forms which correspond to the notes of his music.
My dear friends! You will understand that when we describe such things as these we must depart a little in our use of words from what is usual in this prosaic age. Nevertheless what I have said is not intended in a figurative or symbolic but in a most real sense. These things are indeed such as I have described them, albeit to describe them we must sometimes bring our language into greater flow and movement than is customary in its use to-day.”
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:
“Now in order to grasp the spiritual reality of the present, the human soul must practise Spirit Awareness...It is the practice of spirit-awareness that enables the soul to become conscious of the LIVING REALITY of the present...
In ordinary consciousness the present is experienced in such a way that the human soul is aware only of one bright point in the everflowing stream of time...the soul practicing spirit awareness must try to extend the bright point to an ever-growing SPHERE.
The human soul must learn to face the COSMIC PRESENT, must learn to say, ‘At this moment I stand within a World-constellation. I belong to it with my whole being. My breathing and my heartbeat have as large a share in the structure of this constellation as the sun and planets. The harmony of the stars, the sun, my heart, my breathing, and my feeling produce the constellation of the moment. The tide of the cosmic hour flows through my breast as well as through the heavenly spaces.’ These and similar thoughts can give solemnity to the moment. We can then experience how our breast expands and our breathing is transformed. We breathe in time with the cosmos and our soul expands in concentric circles of solemn tranquility. But these concentric waves do not beat upon emptiness; they encounter waves of still deeper solemnity flowing from the heart of the universe. And in this encounter the human heart and the cosmic heart unite. Then the human soul may reflect: Every moment receives blessing from the heart of the world, without our being aware of it.
Thus we extend the feeling of our own soul-being, by the practice of spirit-awareness ‘in balance of the soul,’ to realize our union with the ‘I’ of the world in the surging waves of cosmic evolution. Thereby we overcome the loneliness of life on earth. We no longer feel forsaken, for we know that in the widened horizon of the sun-filled meditative life we may even now share in the blessing that flows from the heart of the world. Thus the human soul learns true FEELING from the feeling of the cosmos.
But from the cosmos the human soul also learns true THINKING, and this arises from the experience to which the practice of SPIRIT-BEHOLDING leads. For the practice of spirit-beholding...contains all the instruction the soul needs for learning to think truly, which is what the human soul must do in order to see into the FUTURE...And so it is the faculty by means of which we may expect to attain certainty of vision (FAITH), penetrating into the future.
In order to attain this, as radical a change must be made in the force of thought as in the force of memory by the practice of spirit-recollection, and in that of feeling by the practice of spirit-awareness.
For real knowledge of the truth, PROBLEMS are necessary - that is to say, questions wherein the soul is sincerely ready for EVERY answer. For real discovery of knowledge, the questions must not contain in themselves anything that dictates the answer. As regards the content of the answer, the question must preserve a SILENCE ready to meet whatever comes. Thought...must therefore REFRAIN from answering itself. It must be content with the role of stating the problem in a mature and balanced manner, and then awaiting the answer in silence.
It is precisely this silent waiting of the ACTIVE thinking-faculty for which the practice of spirit-vision or ‘spirit-beholding’ strives...the point is to change the thought-direction from the horizontal of HYPOTHESIS to the vertical of VISION - a change that consists in directing the thinking faculty UPWARD.
It is not directed upward, however, in the sense that one’s own opinions are projected into the heavens, but in the sense of a calm, clear-seeing GAZE. Scattered and restless thought-activity must be collected and converged into a silent FACULTY OF PENETRATING VISION...We no longer cogitate; we behold.
When we transform our own thinking faculty into a calm, seeing eye, we become aware of the thought-power of the universe. And on the cosmic thoughts, seen in this way, we can then model and orient our own. Thus the human soul learns to think truly by learning from the thinking of the gods. ”
May you be held in the womb of 𝒮𝑜𝓅𝒽𝒾𝒶 & filled with the Light of ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱 today & always.
Image by @waldorfchalkboarding
Sign up to receive the 🎁 of the 12 Holy Nights CONCENTRATION medicinal cascade directly to your inbox!
P.S. It’s never too late to partake in this Experience as Christmas is EVERYDAY!