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.
December 28th, 2021 Addition
Keep in mind that the 5th Holy Night is from midnight on Dec. 28th to midnight Dec. 29th.Let us add Capricorn into the mix:
“29 December - Capricorn: This is connected with the Prophet Nathan, who was the son of David and deeply connected with the prophecy of the Christ Events. He was a personality to whom the heavens lay open. The ancient name for Capricorn was the Gate of the Gods. Nathan saw through this gateway, and he took an active part in the preparation of the physical body for the Christ.”
-Willi Sucher
AND MAY THIS BECOME THE STINGING NETTLE OF THE OUTFLOWING WISDOM AVAILABLE TO OUR SOULS:
“The Fifth Holy Night - Spirits of Form - EXUSIAI - EAGLE SCORPION. THE NIGHT OF LOVE.
The Exusiai or Elohim receive their forces from the starry region designated Scorpion/Eagle and this night is connected to the Month of May.
May is the fifth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and is named after the Greek goddess Maia. She was one of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione and the mother of the Olympian Hermes by Zeus. She is associated with spring, fertility and plant growth.
In hindu Maya is associated with the illusion of matter, but in Buddhism, Maya or Maia, is the mother of the Buddha, the incarnation of wisdom.
'Now let us think of this fact — that the Buddha was an emissary of the Christ and had lived on Venus. Then think of the uniqueness of the Buddha-life, of its fundamental character, and proceed as I did myself. First, there came to me the occult knowledge: Buddha goes from Venus to Mars in order there to accomplish a Deed of Redemption for the beings of Mars. And now take the life of Buddha, and observe how strikingly it differs from the lives of all the other founders of religion in that period. The teachings of all the others tend in the direction of concealing the doctrine of reincarnation; Buddha teaches reincarnation and founds a community based essentially upon piety, upon a kind of remoteness from the world. Ask yourselves whether there are beings for whom this quality would be of fundamental significance — beings whose redemption could be wrought by all that the Buddha had lived through and made his own? If it were possible, now, to say more about the constitution of the Mars beings, you would see that the Buddha-life was a kind of preparation for a higher mission; that it occurred in Earth-existence as a kind of culmination and can have no direct continuation. You may compare much in the Buddha-life with the indications given by occultism and then you will be able to form some real judgment of matters with such far-reaching cosmic connections. To discover them — that will still be beyond you; but you will be able to examine and study them with the help of all the material at your disposal, and you will find agreement and conformity among the indications given. That Buddha is connected with Venus was known, also, to H. P. Blavatsky. In her Secret Doctrine, she writes: “Buddha=Mercury” — “Mercury,” because in earlier times the names for Venus and Mercury were confused and reversed. “Buddha = Venus” would be the proper form. A knowledge possessed by occultists today is already hinted at in H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine — but it must be understood correctly.' Rudolf Steiner.
On the future Planetary condition of the Earth, Venus, will be a planet of love, our physical body will be as dense as our etheric body is now and a complete consciousness in the etheric body will develop. But this must be achieved through the conscious 'I'.
The Spirits of Form or Exusiai are the lowest beings of the second hierarchy and they were responsible for bestowing upon human beings the 'I', which has a twofold aspect, the possibility for both good (Eagle) and Evil (Scorpion).
Everything that is “form” on the Earth can be said to have been derived from the Spirits of Form or has received the essential impetus for this form from the “Spirits of Form (both normal - Eagle and abnormal -Scorpion) according to Rudolf Steiner. In this we find family traits and national traits as well as racial traits.
In the past, as we said last time, human beings experienced messages from the gods as after images, those messages came from the Spirits of Form as visions which later became the foundation of ancient religions. Rudolf Steiner tells us:
'These Spirits of Form, whom we call Creators, manifested themselves, to begin with, in imaginations that arose in man involuntarily. That was their initial mode of revelation; then out of the imaginations grew the conceptions of all the ancient religions. You know that imagination is the first stage of supersensible knowledge, then comes inspiration, and then intuition. All those who wanted to reach supersensible knowledge in the ancient sense started from imaginations; they had to find their way to the Spirits of Form.'
These were, as we noted, passive and in our study we saw that in our time we had to come by these experiences ourselves through freedom and love. In our time as we have said these inner 'perceptions' must come through the Archai or Spirits of Personality.
If we have been capable of living these holy days in such a way that at night we are experiencing consciousness to some degree we are developing a consciousness that is not interrupted, a consciousness that is continuous, day and night. Lazarus/John who is the representative of the Eagle aspect of the Zodiac or the light aspect of the realm of the Spirits of Form, was initiated by Christ Himself and after this initiation his consciousness was such that it could experience the events of the night lit up, and transposed to the day, side by side and the day consciousnes in the night, side by side. John the Divine was the first human being to experience it. That is why his Gospel is so different from the other three canonical Gospels.
The task of the Angels, the Archangels and Archai is to help us to develop our thinking feeling and willing so that we might develop higher consciousness. And during the Holy Nights, the heavens open and there can be an acceleration of this experience. For a co-operation of the elements of thought, feeling and will transform the soul through balance, into the substance of love and this is now the new mission of the Spirits of Form - love
Once again we come to the three aims of the angels:
Brotherhood
Perceiving the Divinity of the other
And gaining an unquestionable understanding of the spirit in nature.
But what is needed for these in reality? Selfess Love.
For you see, to enter into another human being and to allow that human being to enter into us spiritually this must be a selfless and objective experience of love, no selfish aims can be attached to it. The Eagle is the selfless ego characterised by St John and the Scorpion is the selfish ego characterised by Judas.
St John was, of the twelve, the only one who could experience the love of Christ. That is why he is called the Beloved. In other words, he had so developed his soul that he was able to take the Christ Impulse into himself during his initiation (in the night) because he had brought equillibrium to his soul. He did not therefore pollute it with desires and passions and it is for this reason that he gained a consciousness of Christ meanning he could always see the Christ in Jesus (in the day) while the others saw Him fleetingly and Judas saw him not at all except for a realisation just prior to his death.
Silver is the metal of the astral body full of passions and desires since silver is connected to the moon where the astral body of human beings was being elaborated. Thirty pieces of silver were the wages Judas took for pointing out Jesus to those who came to seize him, for he did not see Christ - this is a most important point. Hence he is the representative of the modern human being.
Judas had chosen karmic necessity over Destiny and freedom, passions and desires over Love. He did not love Christ for he did not see Him in Jesus. He would have had to have enobled those sentient soul passions, chosen freedom in order to see what lived in Christ Jesus objectively subjectively in his soul in the same way we are asked to see the Christ in the other, in our time through the ennobled faculty of thinking.
Why through thinking? Because it is what ennobles the silver or the Astral body since it is the freest aspect of the soul. Hence we are told to develop an unquestionable knowledge of the essence of nature through thinking, because the plant world has no ego or astral body and it is therefore the least dangerous or destructive.
Spring is a good time for such work, and it is why Christ himself performed his sacrifice in spring. For death brings about new life and Christ by dying saved the human 'I' or ego so that it could one day rise to a higher consciousness capable of love.
When standing before Maia or nature it is far easier to feel no sympathy or antipathy for this colour or that, no selfishness for this tree or that tree. When we are standing before a human being we are standing before a being that like us is not merely possessed of physical, and etheric but also astral and ego. Passions and desires, and selfishness. We must take care that we have an astral body that is ennobled and clean (white garment), when it seeks to unite (Marry) the soul with another in whom lives Christ (the Groom). This is the requirement for seeing the divinity in the other - the ability to love selflessly.
In our time the former work of the Spirits of Form, in forming passive images in our souls, now becomes our conscious task which is really also the very Mission of the Spirits of Form.
'Therein consists the whole mission of the earth. In order to produce this force of Love which is to impregnate the earth, the mutual interaction and co-operation was necessary, of all that we have described as the work of the lowest hierarchies.Now what mission have the Spirits of Form? What is the real mission of the Earth? If one connects the Saturn-mission with the imprinting of the element of Will, the Sun-mission principally with the imprinting of the element of Feeling, and the Moon-mission chiefly with the imprinting of the element of Thought, — with that, therefore, which is in the human astral body, — one then has to connect with the Earth-planet the mission of bringing about the perfect equilibrium of these three elements, each of which had the hegemony in an earlier incarnation of our earth: that they should co-operate in perfect equilibrium, — that is the mission of our earth. It is its mission to still the conflict between these elements by bringing them into proper equilibrium.
We must therefore also call the Spirits of Form (because they have this very mission, of bringing the three former conditions into equilibrium), collectively the Spirits of Love. If we consider the earth-existence in this way, we have then in the first place characterized will, feeling and thought, and the working of Love outside our earth-planet; and we have been able to describe as the special task of the Spirits of Form, the imprinting of Love, which results from equilibrium.'
The angels, archangels and archai, help us to prepare our souls so that the mission of the Spirits of Form can be achieved:
'The fabric of Love which is woven as the real mission of the earth, is only visible on earth as a reflection, a maya. The nearest domain above the physical world in which this fabric can be seen, is the astral world. But we can see the working of the hierarchies more and more clearly in the truths underlying our external maya, when we rise from the astral world into the worlds of lower and higher Devachan. Then we see how this web is spun.'
This fabric is being spun in higher worlds from the substance of love in our own souls which is born from our penetration of the maia in the world, the physical appearances of human beings and nature to find the Christ, and to the degree that we develop this substance of Christ love freely in us, do we become a hierarchy of Freedom and Love and our planet prepares itself for its sun incarnation - Venus.
Buddha's teachings were directly connected with the purification of the Astral Body for the descent of Christ on earth, hence his Nirmanakaya (his perfected astral body) was woven into Jesus, and he made his sacrifice on Mars where astral forces led to so much strife on Earth.
When the Earth becomes a Sun, then Venus will once again be Mercury, the planet of healing.
With every thought we are creating future forms. May these forms be such that they can be used by the Spirits of Form for performing his mission on Earth.
With love and deepest Respect for you dear ones and for my dear friend Stephen Lesiuk who, having crossed the threshold will now join others, working at weaving this fabric of love whose threads we provide on earth.
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 5
“I AM.”
How can I be in such a way that I AM?
“In depths of soul,
Where in the Wielding Will
of World Creating
Thine own I
Comes to being in God’s I.”
Bring over the fruits of your labor from yesterday as you read the following WORD:
In the nightly garden of dreams.
“In the nightly garden of my dreams grow many blossoms: the rarest flowers of my fancy. There, warmed by the astral dream-light, unopened buds of earthly hopes audaciously spread petals of fulfillment.
In the dream glow I spy specters of beloved forgotten faces; and sprites of dear, dead feelings, long buried in the soil of subconsciousness. All arise in shining robes. At the trumpet call of dream angels I behold the resurrection of all past experiences.
Lord, Thou hast given us freedom to forget our daily troubles by nightly visits to dreamland. May we escape from mortal sorrows forever by awakening in Thee. ”
Image by @haris_delibasic_photography
What is the Essence of Day 5?
“Your ego lives in the blood in the warmth of the blood. Through the physical body the ego unites with the physical substances of the Earth and transforms these into something utterly different from what is physically present. But we don’t only take into us food from the physical world, but also images, these move into us and we must digest them in the same way we digest food so that we convert this to something utterly different from what we see.
Rudolf Steiner tells us that our etheric body brings into movement all that is fluid us, all that is water. The saps and fluids in the circulation that stand under the influence of the physical body...
If you will recall our earlier explorations you will remember how in developing the astral body we had to become mindful of what we breathed into us not merely through our lungs but through our eyes, what Rudolf Steiner called the ‘New Yoga’ is a breathing in of light consciously...
When we breathe in the world, even unconsciously there is always spirit which moves into us and enters into our blood. We spoke how beings of soul live in light and how their interaction with our own soul is related to the weaving of inner light and colour and we realised that these are sympathies and antipathies which are what move our feelings unconsciously, and that this is why these are ‘dreamy’ in us.
Just as the air moves into our lungs and takes oxygen into our blood so does Light and warmth weave spirit movement into our souls...
The Spirits of Movement (the Dynamis) provide the balance and they can bring about ‘change’, they help us to convert what is outside us into something completely different.
Metanoia is to change your thinking - we might as well say, change your breathing!
On this night we are asked to take in the world and then to see what it truly is within us...this is changing our thinking.
But we can’t stop at that...we must now change what is in us, we must use what is in us to create something new.
Our ordinary memory is something old. It remembers only the physical things it sees and this informs our thinking, our thinking as we have come to know during these holy nights, when it is based on physical perception brings about death. Death is related to the ego in that, if it were not for this death we could not think independently but it has brought about an imbalance in the human soul which eventually leads to our physical death.
But if we are to reach a higher thinking we must convert this death to new life, what dies must become!
How?
We must take into consideration the spirit in everything we take into us, and when we do this, we can use this spirit to create something new. What is this that we create?
A new faculty of memory in the etheric body.
A memory that ‘re-collects’ the spirit and brings balance.
This is how we change our breathing and this in turn affects our blood.
We can say the highest form of this breathing occurs when we breathe the ‘other’ into our souls and we ‘re-collect’ their spirit with what we see of them physically.
This movement, this weaving of soul to soul, this inner ‘picturing’ of the other is connected with the activity of the Spirits of Motion, the Dynamis, with the Angels, who are desiring to create pictures in our Astral body, pictures related to how we ‘see’ one another, ‘feel one another’ and understand ‘one another’.
This ‘change’ and motion that occurs in the rhythmic system of heart and lungs lives also in the rhythm of Worlds. In this balance we find Christ, in the world and in our hearts because we find Christ through the other, in our own souls.
This day may we see Christ in every person we meet...”
What does Inner Picturing LOOK and FEEL like?
SEE into what you FEEL as you read the following:
“‘Compare me to something, and tell me what I am like.’
His voice was light and in his eye the look spoke of a riddle. John liked riddles and he looked around the circle and the others were all looking at him.
His smile waned and he was full of uncertainty. ‘You are …’ he began. But Phillip, who had been chewing on his cheeks, broke in. ‘Some say you are inspired by what comes from Elijah or what lived in other prophets … they say you are a messenger!’ ‘Would you call Elijah a Son of Man?’ he said to John again.
John felt his face flush. A long time he felt it, and then he harnessed his courage to say, ‘You are …’ But his brother interrupted, ‘We have learnt from you that John the Baptist was a Son of Man, as was Elijah, Jeremiah and the prophets. They were the elect of the Earth, for they had pure souls.’
Jesus nodded, ‘Yes … that is what I have said of them, but what do you say of me?’ He looked at John again.
‘Some say you are a wise philosopher,’ Matthew Levi broke in, looking at the others for support.
Jesus raised a brow, and looked about the circle, ‘Do they? They say that I am a wise philosopher?’
Thomas, seized by enthusiasm, turned his crossed eyes to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher! My mouth is unable to say what you are!’
Jesus let his benevolent regard fall upon him, ‘That is because your mouth is full!’ All of them laughed.
‘Have I not told you, Thomas, I am not a teacher, and yet you continue to call me rabbi? Can your eyes not see more than this body? From whence comes the power in me?’ he said to them, ‘Do any of you know?’
John faltered again under his vigilant eye. He wanted to say that he thought him like a priest, the highest priest of all, but he was uncertain again. His brother too did not speak; only Simon had the courage to say something. He said to him, ‘I have seen that your power comes from the light of the world! The priests call all those souls who are purified, Sons of Man. But in you, lives more than a purified soul. In you, lives the Son of the living God, who has come down from the cosmos! I have seen the light of Christ in you with the eye of my heart!’ He looked to the others, ‘I have seen it!’
Jesus seemed full with pleasure. ‘You have seen it, Simon. Yes, I know that this is so, and blessed you are for it! One day you will help to carry my cross … you will be the rock that grinds the wheat into bread …the rock upon which my church shall be built, and so from now on I shall give you a new name, Petra – Peter! Peter, you will lead a community, faithful to my teachings, against whose truths even death shall not prevail.’ ”
CONCENTRATE upon the following as you practice Picturing Inwardly:
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.”
“Our entire national economy today lives under false premises. Therefore our theories are mostly false because they proceed from assumptions entirely different from those that arise out of the human being and from humanity. One starts with production, or one believes one can achieve something with the development of compensation. All thinking moves in this direction. To be sure, an improvement will not occur immediately with a change in thinking. But it will occur when the direction is changed. Moreover, our proletariat has no inkling about what is here in question. What it demands is more pay and shorter hours. Take a look at the worker in any particular sector, say the electric sector, which has been unionized in order, through this collective, to get better pay and working conditions. What does he want with these better working conditions? He wants a different relation regarding compensation to take place between him and his employer. That’s all he wants. The conditions of production don’t change. All that happens is that the worker gets higher wages [...]. That’s all that happens. It’s just a shift in capital.
But that doesn’t really change anything much at all, because if one gets more pay today, food will be more expensive tomorrow. It is not at all possible to bring about any kind of improvement for the future in this way. This ongoing endeavor is based on false thinking. There it’s a matter of production and consumption. Here a great comprehensive worldwide law about work applies. One has to know this...But as every thought will draw into us and stimulate every action in us, just so this also should stimulate us. We needn’t think that we can realize it right away...In the course of time work has greatly changed its form.
Take a look at ancient Greece. What was work in those days? The worker stood in an entirely different relation to his master. At that time work was slavery. The worker could be compelled by force to work. What he received from his master was his living. But his master took the proceeds of the work; it had nothing whatever to do with the particular relation of the worker to his master. He had to work; moreover, he was maintained under precarious conditions; he was not compensated for the things he did. There we have labor under duress, without pay.
[A] commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages. Look at today’s situation. Today we have jobs for which the worker is partly compensated—partly. What they bring in flows as profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur. Thus work is partly compensated. What, thereby, has the worker himself become? He invests his labor power into this work. In Greece, when one was confronting a unit of work, it was a product of slavery. Today’s commodity involves something entirely different. Today the luxury that I receive is crystallized labor for which the worker is compensated. If we ponder this we will find that a half freedom has taken over from the old slavery. A contractual relation has taken its place. In that way labor has become a commodity in the figure of the laborer. So we have labor that is half compelled and half voluntary. And the course of evolution is in the direction of completely voluntary work. This path no one will change or reject. Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain. Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.
That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. What was labor in antiquity? It was tribute, it was performed because it had to be performed. And what is the labor of the present time? It is based on self-interest, on the compulsion that egoism exerts on us. Because we want to exist, we want labor to be paid for. We work for our own sake, for the sake of our pay. In the future we will work for our fellow human beings, because they need what we can provide. That’s what we will work for. We will clothe our fellow men, we will give them what they need—in completely free activity. From this, compensation must be completely separated. Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.”
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:
Painting by Eva Bednay
“If the truth of the statement ‘From the Divine humanity if born’ is rightly understood, it sets the will free from the narrowing influences of country, nationality, and race, raising it to the stage of pure humanity, permeated by the cosmos. To be purely and simply human is an expression of the deep consciousness that we are not born FROM blood and soil, but are on the contrary born as strangers INTO the blood and soil, originating from the Father-spirit of the Heights in common with all humankind...
This knowledge will immerse the soul in a spiritual and moral current of universality, so that the narrowing influences of blood and country will gradually lose their significance in face of the greatness and tragedy of that which now comes into consciousness - the destiny of all humankind in the world. ”
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!