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 30th, 2021 Addition
Keep in mind that the 7th Holy Night is from midnight on Dec. 30th to midnight Dec. 31st.Let us add Pisces into the mix:
31 December - Pisces: This day is the end of the year and a day of destiny; for most people think of both past and future and feel the weight of destiny, their own destiny as well as that of the world and humanity. This is the Day of St. Sylvestrus, an early Pope of Constantine the Great, who was actively involved in making Christianity a state of religion of the Roman Empire. This time was the time of darkness for Christianity, because it then lost much of its esoteric nature and became exoteric and externalized, making it an instrument of power. We can be interested in Raphael’s cartoon in the Victoria Albert, which portrays the calling of Peter. Christ called Peter three times and Peter felt it as a reproach, you may remember, and when he enquired about John’s destiny, he was told that it would come to the fore later, which it did in Revelations.
-Willi Sucher
AND MAY THIS BECOME THE YARROW OF THE OUTFLOWING WISDOM AVAILABLE TO OUR SOULS:
“The Seventh Holy Night - SPIRITS OF WISDOM - KYRIOTETES, DIVINE SOPHIA - NIGHT OF DESTINY.
Dearest friends, tonight at midnight we don't merely unite one Holy Day with another but one Year with another! It is a time for looking back, but also for looking ahead in perfect balance. For standing in the moment, for being mindful, that is conscious in our etheric bodies! Hence our journey has led us now to the perfect number - 7.
On this night the 7th of the 12, we are faced with an important mystery, the mystery of the twelve Regions of the Senses and the Seven Life Processes. The astral body and its connection with the senses in the physical body and the etheric body with its connection to the blood in the human being.
During the old Temple initiation, a human being was put into a trance so that his etheric astral body and ego were lifted up by the priests, this way the acolyte could journey through the cosmos signified by the number 12 while the priests took the place of the ego to keep the physical body from death. Hence Lazarus when initiated by Christ is said to have 'died' and is placed in a grave for three days until he is awakened by Christ. This was the old mystical initiation enacted before the eyes of laymen and punishable by death. For this reason the Sanhedrin could not tolerate Christ Jesus to live - He was a revelation of the old mysteries which he came to renew.
In our time this is no longer possible, an initiate must lift out the astral and etheric bodies while maintaining full consciousness, that is the ego in the physical body. In most people today this is done unconsciously, we enter into the things we see with the astral body and return to imprint this on the lifted up etheric body and it is only when one notices after images and complementary colours that one realises that one is always doing this imprinting of Astral onto Etheric. When one does this one is on the way to acquiring a consciousness in the soul - or a Consciousness Soul.
In our sleep we lift up the astral body and ego leaving the sleeping physical body and the etheric body behind on the bed. We travel a path to the edge of the cosmos and back again and dreams are a half conscious experience of this journey. Like concepts, which must find a language to express themselves, the etheric body provides the Astral body and ego daily events and memories which they can use to flesh out their nightly experiences. Hence dreams often have an earthly quality to them and can only ever be seen as symbolic of an underlying spiritual truth we can only see in its reality if we develop the soul in such a way that it remains awake in the night so that it can imprint what it experiences passing the through the 7 times 12 stages.
'When a man who possesses the clairvoyant faculties here described goes to sleep, his being flows out into conditions expressed in the secret of the number 12 times 7... As the seven planets group them-selves within the twelve zodiacal constellations and pass in front of them, when a man is ascending in soul into the Cosmos he must pass through 7 times 12, or rather 7 times it stages to reach the Spiritual.' Rudolf Steiner.
The number 7 is connected with Wisdom, for:
'Wisdom has built her house on 7 pillars.' Proverbs 9:1
This also describes the relationship between the Kyriotetes on the Sun and human beings for her influence through the Third and Second Hierarchies extends from Virgo to Fishes representing the boundaries of the workings of the Cosmic Sophia. In our time spiritual forces that are beneficent for human evolution are entering the earth from this region and this explains the above quote from book of Proverbs:
'Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars'.
The Divine Sophia is the foremost being on the sun. Christ entered through her womb on his sacrifices to the Earth, but she is also his bride. She is depicted by St John as the woman with the Sun in her belly the stars over her head and the Sun at her feet, illustrating her relationship to the First hiearchy, (stars) the entirety of the Second Hiearchy (Sun) and the Third Hierarchy (Moon).
Rudolf Steiner tells us it is not the Christ we lack but the Sophia of Christ, but what does this mean? It is the Wisdom light we need in order to enter into the other and into nature in order to find Christ in the soul and in the etheric world! This wisdom was brought to the earth by Anthroposophia whose life is woven into the Science of the Grail, or the science of perfecting the human soul in such a way that it can become the vessel for Christ as exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth.
The more spiritual thoughts feelings and will feelings we have in the day, the better met we are by Angels Archangels Archai Spirits of Form and Spirits of Motion in our sleep, in other words, the more conscious we are of what enters us as spirit in all the things we sense and perceive, the closer we come to finding Christ, and the more love we develop which in turn creates ego consciousness during sleep.
This Sophianic consciousness becomes a moral force in our will in our blood when it unites with the love of Christ in us, moral will uniting with love is Good Will as we saw yesterday, which in turn creates more consciousness so that we can in 'Gradalis' bring down impulses for the coming Holy nights that will have an effect on the coming corresponding Month of the Year.
The 25th of July is St James Day. The Camino was the walk of stars on earth.It was first walked by Charlemagne who was the reincarnated St James. It was a journey hat sought to unite day and night experiences, spiritual sun and physical sun, nature and human nature the soul and the stars. The pilgrim experienced many hardships, trials and vissicitudes in order to obtain a higher relationship, an understanding of the spirit inherent in the world, for instance flowers are merely fallen stars, and also the spirit in their fellow human beings, for Pilgrims were always welcome at the table of a stranger as if a long lost friend - since those along the route were told one never knew if Christ Himself disguised as a Pilgrim would knock at their door. In truth this was the exact fact for Christ lives in every human being!
At the end of the journey the Pilgrim was given a scallop shell as an accreditation for completing their pilgramage. The scallop Shell is associated with Venus the goddess of love. The Scallop shell is a symbol of rebirth and resurrection, overcoming the selfish ego so as to obtain the true ego, the Christ ego. And Venus is just one 'face' of the Divine Sophia who regulates the cosmic intelligence of Christ as he was experienced from the standpoint of the 7 planets.
Venus rose from the sea on a scallop shell in Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus”. This signified the Birth of the Sophianic wisdom in the soul, and it is the first step towards the marriage of the Soul with Christ which we saw in our last study takes place in the region of Scales or the Spirits of Motion. Christian Rosencreutz the reincarnated St John was the first human being to rise to this region and connect with Christ harmonising all 12 zodiacs with the 7 Planets so as to reconcile all religions with Christ.
Hence as we travel into this Holy Day from the Previous Holy Night and reach the midnight hour or the Sun sphere, we must strive to walk the stars consciously.
For living in us is the co-operation of the Spirits of Motion with the Divine Sophia in our very blood, exemplified in the world in the 'Anthroposophical movement'. For Anthroposophia, the daughter of the Divine Sophia who entered briefly into an Earthly incarnation as Mary of the Luke Gospel is a living being who unites the world of stars with our souls with the movement and life in our blood bringing to expression St Johns words in his apocalypse,
'Let the 12 become 7 and the seven stars appear.'
The seven stars are from this standpoint, our seven chakras. The wisdom of the divine Sophia which Anthroposophia has brought to earth is the light of the stars that enters our blood, which came into being on the Old Sun. It now activates our souls which were fashioned on the Old Moon so that we might transform our entire soul into a vessel in which lives the blood possessing the Spirit of Christ.
On this night as we move from one year into the next at the midnight hour may we walk the Camino of stars consciously and bring back the star dust we must elaborate in July so that we can achieve the tasks to which our destiny guides us.
With love and Deepest Respect, for you dear ones and for Stephen Lesiuk who walks the Camino of stars again for the first time.
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 7
“I THINK.”
How can I THINK in such a way that i behold?
“Human Soul!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the Grounds of Eternity
Opens to thee the World Thoughts.”
Bring over the fruits of your labor from yesterday as you read the following WORD:
I have dreamed many dreams.
“I have dreamed many dreams; now I am awake. On my soul’s altar I tend the sacred fire of constant remembrance of Thee. With my sleepless eyes of love I ever gaze on Thy face.
Through Thy grace I know that health and sickness, life and death, are but dreams. I have finished all stories of dreams, painted brightly and darkly on the world screen of delusion. Now I behold Thee as the only Reality.”
What is the Essence of Day 7?
“If we have been able to develop our Astral and Etheric Bodies on the previous 6 nights, on this Holy night we step into the first Hieararchy.
Thrones - Spirits of Will
Cherubim - Spirits of Harmony
Seraphim - Spirits of Love
This night belongs to the Thrones who are related to the warmth of Old Saturn and who are therefore related to our physical bodies. In our souls the Thrones are connected to our will.
If we were able to develop our Astral bodies through imagination inspiration and intuition to start the development of Manas (the redeemed Astral Body), if we were able to change our habits, even to a slight degree, to develop a new kind of memory and if we have kindled life in our etheric bodies to lay a seed for Buddhi (the redeemed etheric body), we can now begin to lay down the seed for Atma, or Spirit Man (the redeemed physical body).
What do we mean by Spirit Man?
Spirit Man is the spiritualisation of the entire human being including the physical body.
This will be achieved in its fullness in far flung Vulcan, the last and seventh incarnation of the Earth, but right now we begin...we initiate or rather anticipate this development, for it must start somewhere.
In the Apocalypse of St John we are told to make the Twelve become seven so that the seven stars appear.
The Twelve is related to the physical body, seven is related to the etheric body. We are therefore told that we must make our physical body more etheric. But that does not mean the physical body becomes an etheric body, it simply becomes more and more spiritual.
The physical body was never meant to be as material as it has become, it was intended to be more like the etheric body. However the human being was tempted to descend further into matter than intended through Luciferic Temptation in Lemurian times.
Adam and Eve were the first human beings whose physical bodies became more materialised.
But Rudolf Steiner tells us that there is another being, Adam Kadmon. Adam Kadmon is the human being who remained untainted by the fall and descended from divine-spiritual heights possessing an untainted etheric body.
Rudolf Steiner tells us:
’The Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke — not the Jesus described in the Gospel of St. Matthew — is the Child before whom the shepherds worship. To them the proclamation rang forth: Now is the Divine revealed from the heavenly heights, bringing peace to the souls of men who are of good-will.’
The Jesus of the Luke Gospel is Adam Kadmon, he became the vessel in which Christ lived for three years. During those three years Christ alchemically purified his soul and his etheric body and finally his physical body when he overcame death.
He made the 12 become like the 7. He did not take Jesus’ physical body and return it to its original substance. He transformed it into a spiritualised essence of the physical body.
This implies a full spiritualisation of the entire human being, over three years: Astral, Etheric and Physical.
Now we understand why Christ Jesus tells us that you can’t come to the Father but through Him. For the Father Gods are the First Hieararchy.
Christ resurrected the physical body of Jesus as an archetype for all human beings. Through him we become Atma, the Ideal Human being.
A person who has developed Atma, or Spirit Man, is filled with the Christ Spirit all the way down into the bones, hence ‘not a bone of his could be broken’. And just as the oxygen we breathe enters even into our bones through our blood, so too does the spirit we breathe in through our eyes, when it is united consciously with Christ enter into our very bones, so that good lives even in the bones of those who begin to develop Atma. Every will action is infused with the spirit breath of the warmth and goodness of Christ. This is good will.
The warmth of old Saturn was connected to the Thrones or spirits of Will, just as the warmth of our physical bodies is connected to the Thrones on Old Saturn. When this warmth is united with the Christ Spirit, the light of the world, the result is, that our warm etherised blood becomes a home for the True Ego.
First Triad of Holy Nights = Lower Ego
Second Triad of Holy Nights = Higher Ego
Third Triad of Holy Nights = True Ego
The Divine ego of Christ his light Divine, his etherised blood unites with our Spirit filled warmth, our etherised blood, just as our ego unites with our blood and that is how good becomes what from our hearts we found and our heads direct to the world.
This is the beginning which we shall elaborate further in the coming nights until we meet Christ who becomes our True Ego on Epiphany or the 6th of January.
John The Baptist was the reincarnation of Adam, he was the forerunner of the True Ego. His task was to prepare the way for the descent of the True Ego into the Luke Jesus his Twin soul, who would bear it from three years.”
What does Thoughtfully Beholding LOOK and FEEL like?
SEE into what you FEEL as you read the following:
“‘... he (John) continued with his work until the sun reached its zenith, and the crowds began, as was their custom, to disperse for the midday meal. Now standing alone in the chilling water, he saw a man step forward and come to the edge of the river. He put a hand up over his eyes to see, for the sun’s rays were shimmering on the surface of the river, blinding him.
He recognised the man’s form and the contours of his face. How bright did the sun shine at that moment! As if its body were leaning over to touch the river! John squinted, and still he could not see, and yet he did see. This was a man he knew, and yet it was not simply that he saw a man he knew, for this man, whom he had met at Qumran, seemed not to be there at all, but in his place was a soul that he recognised in its essential foundations. It was as if he were looking at his own reflection, a part of himself, long lost and forgotten.
Did this soul that came towards him not seem like the youngest and purest soul in the world? And was this not the opposite of his own soul, which felt to him ancient, cracked, and used up, like an old jug emptied of its contents? His heart near burst with the mighty impression this thought created, and his eyes filled with tears. He let go his staff into the water, for he knew that the day he had longed for had arrived, and it had brought to him the reason for his very existence. ’”
CONCENTRATE upon the following as you practice Thoughtful Beholding:
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.”
“There can be no doubt that the unconscious and subconscious play an enormous part in human social life. What is at work in the social life comes ultimately from what people think and feel, and, according to the impulses of their characters, what they will. But in the age of the development of the consciousness soul this becomes increasingly individual. People become more and more different in their thinking, feeling and willing: this is the task of the epoch of the development of the consciousness soul. Therefore much will spring from subconscious sources in human relationships to flow into the social movement which, begun half a century ago, has today reached a culmination and will spread farther and farther afield making enormous demands of the people. What emerges today are primarily chaotic demands. In place of these, clearer and clearer conceptions and better and better will impulses must appear. It was because these clear conceptions and good impulses of will did not exist that mankind fell into the present catastrophe and this catastrophe will become immeasurably greater. For one cannot say that real goodwill exists extensively in regard to this question. What exists is something like a yielding to what seems to be inevitable. One would willingly give them a morsel now and again, for fear that otherwise their mouths might water. But what must appear in a really deep social understanding? That must live in the hearts of men and must become an essential part of our schooling.
Something of this kind can be attained only when at least a certain number of people on earth, really out of knowledge of human nature, out of knowledge of the relation between physical and the superphysical worlds, cultivate a deeper understanding for these problems than most people can develop by reason of our present superficial culture...
Yesterday you saw how matters stand with what plays its part in the whole man’s life as language. Now just think what part, on the other hand, language plays in men’s international operation throughout the world. Consider how manifold are the varied feelings and will impulses depending upon languages. Consider again how infinitely much that is not clear in such things prevails among men. Today let us spend a little time on speech. As I mentioned yesterday we had three periods of evolution to come in the post-Atlantean period of human evolution. We live in the fifth, the sixth will follow, to be followed in turn by the seventh. As we saw yesterday, on turning our attention to the development of language, till now we, as earthly men, have developed a certain inclination to abstract, unimaginative thinking. What must be evolved before the end of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is the imaginative conception, Imagination. It is mankind’s special task in this fifth post-Atlantean period to develop the gift of Imagination.
What I am now considering is the social life of people. The folk genius cultivates imagination. Each one of us must seek his own Imagination for esoteric development: but the folk genius cultivates the Imagination from which must come the common spiritual culture of the future. An imaginative spiritual culture must be developed in the future. Now we have reached, so to speak, the culminating point of abstract spiritual culture, that spiritual culture which everywhere works towards abstraction; from out of that there must be developed a culture with imaginative conceptions. Our culture must be interpenetrated not with thoughts abstractly expressed but with imagery such as we have for example in our group, the Representative of mankind between the luciferic as the one pole and the ahrimanic as the other. And many people will have to tell themselves, more and more people will have to tell themselves, that what really has to do with spiritual life is not to be expressed in abstract thoughts. One should not always be pondering about abstract thoughts, but it is right and living in the right way in the human heart to express oneself through pictures. The life of Imagination in common is what must come. ”
Image: Representative of Mankind by Rudolf Steiner
“The important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are based on the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be testified by external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need to investigate bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover that blood was different then. And they would not even have had the chemical tests to do it. But through spiritual science we can know with certainty that man’s blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point when human blood began to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth century.
What are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we cannot carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have to carry out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously what was simply done unconsciously by man’s blood in the past. For the strength in our blood is in the process of fading away. What would happen if a time were to come when human beings completely lost hold of their youth, and were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there were no means of resorting to doing consciously what was once done unconsciously by the blood?
You must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are connected with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They must be put into practice to the point of making us conscious that man’s whole educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop a strong, conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with the force of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.
Everywhere, people are still working contrary to this requirement. For instance, they are proud of the visual aids used in primary school education, and they attach great importance to getting down to the mental level of the child as far as possible, and not teaching him anything that extends beyond his mental capacity. They actually rig up calculating machines so that they can teach the children to do all kinds of sums by counting balls. Nothing must go beyond the child’s mental capacity. These visual aid lessons get frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to lead to nothing but commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child anything beyond its own mental capacity. People who do this thoroughly overlook an important yet subtle observation of human life.
Suppose a child is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in, not because it is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his teacher’s warmth of enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes the thing in because the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The child takes it in just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the teacher. If the child absorbs something that reaches beyond his understanding, purely because of the infectious quality of his teacher’s enthusiasm, he will not yet understand what he has taken in, as people say in superficial life. Yet what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the age of thirty the grownup will remember what the child took in, perhaps, at the age of ten. He re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he can understand what he is able to release from the depths of his soul; he can understand the thing he was taught purely through the force of enthusiasm, and which he is now able to release from his mature mind. You know, these are the most valuable moments in life, when your mental life does not have to be restricted to what comes to meet you from outside, but you re-experience what you took in your younger days with inadequate understanding, and which you can now release and absorb with your more mature mind. The more care you take that the child does not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly takes in what it understands — for that will disappear with the passing years, and neither joy nor enthusiasm will come from it later — the more you will be doing for the person’s later development; for lessons taken in purely through the teacher’s warmth are life-giving when they are re-experienced.
Nowadays this is of particular importance in teaching. In earlier times it was not so important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by the blood, whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly makes a difference if you understand the kinds of things that are being put to practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them in the right way, you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of making practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if you understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of the fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more importance to the teacher’s capacity for enthusiasm.
But people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For standardized education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of education that works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is learned, how to teach a child is learned, how to arrange the lesson is learned. Comparing this with our present-day consciousness it would be like learning that man consists of carbohydrates, protein and so on — these are our constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside our body, and we cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do not eat in a physiological sense until we understand it. I told you once, and you may even have experienced this yourselves, that you can already come across a thing like this: You visit someone who has a scale standing beside his plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scale to find out how much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite specific weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not everybody does it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to understand that physiology is not part of the eating process but covers other aspects, and that a person can eat without having studied physiology, the physiology of the nutritional process. But we do not take it for granted that we also ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way, without having absorbed standardized education. This standardized education is exactly the same thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of color is to an artist. He can have studied aesthetics of color very well, but he will not be able to paint because of that. The ability to paint comes from an entirely different quarter than the study of the aesthetics of color. The ability to teach comes from an entirely different quarter than the study of education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be teachers a seminar of some sort of standardized education that prescribes dogmas, but to give them the sort of thing that makes them become teachers and educators in the same way as people become artists or botanists. It is that the educator has to be born in a person and not that education has to be learned.
What has to be understood just because of this very change in man’s setup is that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people were at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why they invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing today, however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if they are teachers. You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and work out of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us suppose you are a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are a student of standardized education, the kind that follows the rules, then you will know exactly how you have to teach, because you will have learned the rules. You will teach according to these rules, today, just as you taught according to these rules yesterday and will teach according to them tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But if you are the artist kind of teacher you are not nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow according to the same rules, but have to learn from the child afresh each time, how he has to be taught; it must be man’s own nature every time that determines what you do. And it is ideal if the teacher can teach the way the child tells him to teach, and can keep on forgetting actual education and has not got a clue about the rules. For the moment the child stands in front of him again he will again be electrified by the growing child and will know what he has to do with him.
You must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way things have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these things today in such a way that they can be put into so and so many satisfying principles, but you can only speak about them by pointing to something alive, something that cannot be reduced to abstract principles but which is alive and produces ever more life. That is the crux of the matter. That is why spiritual science is needed in actual life today, because spiritual science is not merely for the head but is for the whole of man and releases will impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms of life, so that impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere of human activity.
I have demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely education, and shown how the education of children under the age of twenty-one can be made to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive an education only up to the age of twenty-one, though, for education carries on throughout the whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy way if people learn from one another.
This too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people met in social life they used to learn things from one another unconsciously, some people learning more and others less, according to the way their blood worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost its power. This activity, too, has to be replaced by more consciousness. People must achieve the art of acquiring relatively more for themselves from other people compared with what they produce from out of themselves. In earlier times it was sufficient to rely on life. The blood did everything. Now it is essential for people really to develop a sense for the other person’s being. This will come about as a matter of course if people steer their thoughts in the direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of thoughts are stimulated with spiritual science than without it.
You will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows that spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without spiritual science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking. The kind of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to working with super-sensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an effect on our organism. And when I told you today that memory is the same force that transforms food into substances man needs for his organism, you will no longer be astonished to find that other forces can be transformed in man, like for instance the force with which we understand super-sensible things being the same one that helps us to know the human being better than we would know him if we had no healthy longing for super-sensible knowledge.
You people study what is in my Occult Science, and to do that you have to develop certain concepts that most people would still call “utter madness.” A few days ago, I got yet another letter from someone studying Occult Science, and he said that nearly every chapter was pure nonsense. You can understand people saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it is quite obvious that they often say it these days. Yet these people who do not put themselves out to accept the kind of concepts that lead to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, and do not get down to developing ideas about a world that is not limited to the senses will also not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see the human being in the other person but notice at the most that one person has a more pointed nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the other has brown. But they notice nothing of man’s inner being that manifests as his soul and organizes his body. The same force which enables us to take an interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have super-sensible occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an interest in super-sensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of man that we need today.
You can set up the most grandiose social programs and develop the finest social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able to bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions unless they establish the possibility that people can be social. But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in one another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only become social if they really meet one another in life, and something passes between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people say of the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged in such and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence. But it is not like that. If things are arranged like that, social people will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social people will be anti-social with any sort of arrangement.
The essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for human beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social impulses is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for instance, with an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some other kind of civil servant, you will not educate them to recognize the human quality in others. For the sort of education that is good for becoming a clerk or an officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in other people. The kind of education that makes human beings of people also enables them to recognize people as human beings. But it is impossible to recognize people as human beings if you do not develop a sense for super-sensible knowledge. And the realm in which super-sensible knowledge is most indispensable is in the art of education. Therefore the natural scientific, materialistic way of thinking has done more damage in the field of education than anywhere else. And here you can experience the most amazing things.
In every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to reform everything, even revolutionize them. But if you talk to these people about these things, something very strange transpires. They will admit quite honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things. Yet one of them who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his existence as a tailor is going to be affected when things change. And another person, who is, let us say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life as a railway clerk is going to suffer when things are changed. These are only given as examples to show you that people are perfectly in agreement that everything should be changed as long as nothing changes and everything remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people today are convinced that everything must stay exactly the same when it changes. Make no mistake about the fact that the sort of social improvement people long for today is of extremely abstract dimensions. People long for a great deal, but nothing must change where their comfort is concerned.
And this is particularly true where it is a matter of people taking an inner step into an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that people open themselves to the possibility of making the transition to thinking in quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost being.
All sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realize is that we have constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down onto a material level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the actual nerve of the social question.
Thus it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that really develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a social impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate. A mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our “Threefold Social Organism” had to happen. We had to show in a radical way that any kind of dependency of thought life on economics or on the life of the state had to stop, and thought life had to be set up on its own basis. Then thought life will be able to give economics and the life of the state what economics and the state cannot give to the life of thought.
That is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings will only arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.”
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:
“When questions are directed towards supersensible facts, where spiritual processes and beings are the concern, ordinary thinking is initially powerless to create this connection. The two currents of thoughts are not oriented for this - and therefore DOUBT arises. That is, the condition of consciousness where TWO opposing thought currents, unconnected and disunited, work against each other.
In order that the “I” become master over doubt, what matters is not its partaking in the left or right current, but the bringing about of a THIRD stream that no longer runs in the horizontal but takes place in the vertical. The effort to create this third kind of thought current is precisely that of MEDITATION. The first and fundamental task of meditative exercises is to create a vertical thought current that streams from above downwards; that is, from the spiritual world into the physical.
If this current is created, then ‘doubt’ is overcome as an obstacle to knowledge of higher worlds. Doubt then remains only as an aid so that, in the realm of the physical world, form and maturity can be granted to what has become known in the vertical. A kind of thinking begins that presents a bridge into the spiritual world, and over this bridge regular communication between the two worlds may be cultivated. The presence of this kind of communication is, further, something that has a deep MORAL significance. For not only are far more intensive questions and answers activated through this discerning consciousness than is the case with ordinary thinking, but also the moral task to remain LOYAL to this relationship with the spiritual world is presented. The spiritual world is to the physical world as the world of becoming is to the world that has become.
The spiritual world is the future, it bears within itself the positive future. Loyalty towards the spiritual world has therefore the moral implication of the duty to REMAIN LOYAL TO THE FUTURE. This duty is something other than what one usually understands by loyalty, that is, loyalty towards the past. One is loyal, for example, if one relates to someone today in just the same way as one did many years ago; if one keeps a past alive and preserves it, one is loyal. But towards the spiritual world loyalty represents something else. Here it is being loyal to the FUTURE that counts. And one can only be loyal to the future by constantly striving to recognize and to realize the future, not by looking back on the past in order to preserve it. Therefore, if one remains stationary in particular forms of knowledge and in a particular type of activity, one becomes in this sense disloyal to the spiritual world. For then one abandons the way of the creative realization of the future; one becomes disloyal to the duty to be in constant change. The most important duty of the future towards the spiritual world consists in being indispensably engaged in change in order to seek and to find the ways from the great to the sublime, the true to the wisdom-filled, the good to the perfected. ”
May you be held in the womb of 𝒮𝑜𝓅𝒽𝒾𝒶 & filled with the Light of ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱 today & always.
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