Beings in Conjunction

Kalley Xentl

My gifts to you ‘I think Speech’ podcast & the collection of Recordings of past presentations

(June 21 to July 21)Selflessness Becomes Catharsis

The fullness of the resplendent Summer with its lush, colorful gardens & flowering meadows, undulating like heat waves in a dream over the earth, embraced in a mantle of warmth. I give myself up to the fullness of the motherly Sun, in order to become, a sun myself. My soul a flaming glow blazing full of yearning for the open stillness of the wide starry sky.

Lose yourself to find yourself

Today too on my natal return, these words sound out to me from those heavenly heights. But how, after the ‘I’ has made its way into us, can we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again in the ‘I’ of the World?

Perhaps it’s by sacrificing our intellectual knowledge to the spirit of the world! This is the secret of the Summer mysteries: the transformation of the intellectual knowledge of the head, into the warmth-bearing substance of the will!

Seen from the aspect of biography, this turning point, is mirrored after the middle of life, where the downward curve of life sets in – understood in July’s glyph of the crab, symbol of the constellation Cancer. (here is an amazing video for the constellation Cancer in Eurythmy)

We are called to give up the armoring of materialism, which is a danger that lucks in the summer feeling. Only when the crab reveals its spiritual secret can it bestow its wisdom to us.

This secret is transformation. The old & worn out reaches its completion, which is expressed in the involving spiral of the shell. – This narrowing passage of the spiral leads to an end, from which there is no escape – And then we see that the new beginning of the evolving spiral is separated from the involving spiral by an abyss.

How can we cross this abyss? Only by a courageous leap over the void! This archetypal motif always appears when what is old & exhausted reaches its end, & the new approaches, which can only be achieved thru new soul forces.

Christopher Clark

Today too this turning point, not only in the wheel of the year, but of world events before us -This stream of the past, that carries the seed of death within it – This stream of materialistic understanding & formation of time, armored within a rigid structure, can only be overcome by a courageous leap. For from that rigid structure no new seeds of the future can emerge. These seeds must be developed by a completely new set of soul forces, into which streams the light of true spiritual knowledge.

The time of summer is especially appropriate for cultivating within us, with warmth, these new concept-seeds of thought, in order to shape new imaginations with which we can approach the metamorphic processes of nature. Thinking in pictures means following intuitively this cosmic transformation processes of nature, for She Herself, the great World Mother, is woven out of cosmic imaginations. Thru this we form in our souls what we see in nature right now: the ripening of fruits, the fruitification of involution, in order to bear the seeds of summer thru the winter.

Catharsis by Melissa Basmayor

This turning point of the year can stand before us a guiding motif:

Take into your soul, in Selfless-Devotion, the rich pictorial language of outer nature, & through it, try to solve the riddle of the world pictures of cosmic happenings. Through this you walk the path of alchemical transformation which leads to catharsis (purification). For catharsis means to be ready to humbly lay aside the proud thinking which has hardened & encrusted itself in modern intellectuality, in order to sacrifice it on the altar of the world spirit, so that it can transform itself into warming forces of will & imaginative world pictures. In doing this, we accomplish the demand of our age, which requires this sacrifice of us. And at the same time we accomplish the inner purification of our souls, which only in breaking through the rigid armour of intellectual thought can experience resurrection in the realm of creative world thoughts!”

We cultivate thinking & make it mature through developing qualities which seem not to be related at all to thinking – through devotion & insight – not so much through logical exercises, but when we observe this & that, & use processes in nature to penetrate into hidden mysteries. It is through devotion to questions of nature & humanity, through the attempt to understand complicated people, through an intensification of attention, that we make our thinking astute.

Little cultivation of insight & devotion makes us grumpy hypochondriacs. What is so very necessary for thinking does not at all depend on thinking. All self-will, all self-seeking, has a destructive effect on thinking…Devotion, willingness for sacrifice with respect to the most insignificant objects & occurrences, has a favorable effect on one’s thinking & one’s mood.” ~Rudolf Steiner GA 130, lecture 2

12 July 2021 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Venus (occult Mercury) and Mars orbit the Sun on either side of Earth. But, in the July evening sky, Venus outshines Mars. Look west after sunset now to see these Beings in conjunction.

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

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.

***

Vicky Neptem

POD (Poem Of the Day)

~My Lips
Red as etherized blood
Speak charms into the mantrams.
Iron words
Hot from the cosmic forge
Speak the intellect of the Sun
Into the green of the earth.
Stars fall into my heart
A pool of fire
Giving light.
Come share my thoughts expanding
In the Summer-tide dream –
Beauty dancing in the thunder Clouds
Meets Love where He waits.
~hag

2 thoughts on “Beings in Conjunction

  1. This really is a great bit on ‘thinking’. Perhaps it might be the most underrated bit concerning Spiritual Science as a whole – or overlooked part. How great it is, devotion and insight, selflessness in the thinking process, to simply understand. The intensification of attention. It should be clear then, why we don’t need to be clairvoyants in this age to realise the Spiritual.

    And, happy birthday, Hazel!

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