12 | July | 2023 | Cognitive Ritual

~Pablo Picasso

Yesterday in After-Image 1 we explored how in working with complementary colors, the after-image gives us a sense of balance, a unity with everything around us. When we see yellow for instance, we can realize that red & blue are also working to bring us the after-image of violet.

We can take this further into the human realm of relationships – allowing us to sense the life of the community as a living organism. When we see a ‘bad’ trait in a fellow human being, what would it be like to visualize the complementary trait which is also there waiting to be recognized?

This is how we can consciously establish healthy social impulses to balance those anti-social tendencies which are so strong in us these days.

And this is what we need to work with to prepare for our future evolution which wants us to make every human encounter a sacrament.

This also opens us to receive a perception of what Steiner describes in EARTHLY DEATH AND COSMIC LIFE as “the ‘light’ which is thrown out beyond death into our evolution between death and rebirth, which we perceive and from which we build our karma”.

I guess for me the biggest “I” opener is the idea set forth by Steiner that what we take in thru our eyes becomes an objective process in that the after-image impresses itself thru us into the cosmic ethers!

We experience an imprint from our sense impressions which effects not only our personal reality but becomes an imprint on the world.

Our impressions take hold of our etheric body, retaining it as a memory picture. This is transmitted into the outer ether of the cosmos & is inscribed there. “What you remember you inscribe in the cosmic ether, & the cosmic ether summons it forth in you again like the impress of a seal when you call it to mind. Memory is no mere personal affair; through it you relate yourself to the entire universe.” ~Rudolf Steiner, 7 Dec. 1919, The Mission of Michael, the Revelation of the Secrets of Man’s Being

~Rita De Cassia Perez

The manifestation of Christ in the Etheric world is a meeting with humanity waiting to happen. In “From Jesus to Christ” Steiner suggests our empathic process advances the etheric light – that it is our own Christened etheric activity which lights up this realm in which the Christ in a Life-Body is present. Our eyes take in light; when we spiritualize it thru our moral heart-thinking, we shed light back into the etheric realm – revealing the Christ.

So the question & challenge becomes: How are we using our sense impressions? What are we imprinting into our own Life-Body AND into the Life-Body of the Universe we all share? Are we revealing the Christ in us – or are we letting the adversarial forces devour the light thru our unconsciousness..?

The assignment for night school was to take Steiner’s indications about gazing into a candle flame to contemplate the after-image, & applying this at the ‘Close of Day’, using the altar candles during the service, & to report back at our next session…

You can take on this assignment at home with any candle…What do you perceive?

~hag

12 July 2023 – Speaking with the Stars”: Behold the heavens on this my Natal Return! I was born at 4:57…xox

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

100 BC – Birthday of Julius Caesar, Roman politician & general

Feast Day of St. Veronica – According tradition, Veronica was moved with sympathy when she saw Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha & gave him her veil that he might wipe his forehead. Jesus accepted the offering, held it to his face, & then handed it back to her—the image of his face miraculously impressed upon it.

This piece of cloth became known as the Veil of Veronica.The name “Veronica” itself is a Latinisation of Berenice (Greek: Βερενίκη, Berenikē, with a secondary form Beronike), a Macedonian name, meaning “bearer of victory”. The woman who offered her veil to Jesus was known by this name in the Byzantine East, but in the Latin West the name took a life of its own as a designation for a relic venerated in Rome as the true image of Jesus. Since the Latin word for “true” or “authentic” happens to be vera, the theory emerged that the name itself is derived from the Latin phrase “true image”, vera icon (one Latin word for image is icon, derived from Greek: εικόνα, eikona). In the 13th-century text & also in some later sources the term Veronica was used for the veil, not the person, but for centuries it has been better known as the name of the woman.

Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica (vii 18) tells how at Caesarea Philippi lived the woman whom Christ healed of an issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-22). Legend was not long in providing the woman of the Gospel with a name. In the West she was identified with Martha of Bethany; in the East she was called Berenike, or Beronike, the name appearing in as early a work as the “Acta Pilati”, the most ancient form of which goes back to the fourth century. The fanciful derivation of the name Veronica from the words Vera Icon (eikon) “true image” dates back to the “Otia Imperialia” (iii 25) of Gervase of Tilbury (fl. 1211), who says: “Est ergo Veronica pictura Domini vera” (translated: “The Veronica is, therefore, a true picture of the Lord.”)

1804 – Former United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton dies after being shot in a pistol duel by Vice President Aaron Burr

1865- the Theosophical Society General Secretary in Paris A.Sauerwein introdues Mabel Collins to Rudolf Steiner

1895 – Birthday of Buckminster Fuller, American architect & engineer, designed the Montreal Biosphère

1895 – Birthday of Oscar Hammerstein II, American director, producer, & songwriter

1904 – Birthday of Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet & diplomat, Nobel Prize laureate

1948 – Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion orders the expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lod and Ramla.

1967 – The ‘Newark riot’ was one of 159 race riots that swept cities in the United States during the “Long Hot Summer of 1967”. This riot occurred between July 12 & July 17, 1967. Over the four days of rioting, looting, & property destruction, 26 people died & hundreds were injured.

Virtue for July – Selflessness becomes catharsis
(June 21 to July 21)

Such true perseverance is selfless. True selflessness is equally far removed from hardening and dissolution. Adulating dependency is no less self-centered than rigid consistence on one’s own prejudices and interests. True selflessness defends neither the narrowness of the subjective personality nor loses itself in other people and things. It is rather the golden mean between these two deviations and temptations. Not obscured by the selfishness of fear or by that of greed, it is therefore pure. Purification is the path that overcomes fear through the truth that unites all beings and through an inner life that liberates one from the dependency of desire, accepts the twists and turns of fate. This selflessness that through considerateness and renunciation finds itself, is self-assured. With his idea of purification (catharsis) Aristotle denotes initiation into the path of destiny as being the task of the poet. This catharsis is achieved by overcoming and transforming the dangers that threaten the human center.
Selflessness, as the path to the human center, becomes catharsis.
A meditation on such selflessness is the saying: “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.”