Dear Friends, We can conceive the Divine. We birth them from out of the future, just as they gave us warmth & life in the past. We can live our gifted life as a lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy – an eternal nativity.  We can work with these spiritual beings as allies. They have been approaching since time began. And guess what? They have arrived; & they wait for us to engage them. They are the fruit of the Tree of Life & we are the leaves, ever falling. And yet we are ever in Resurrection – Rising fecund from the compost – Growing wiser with each season.

To be a hardy perennial ready to grapple against all odds, we have to cultivate
resilience, resisting the temptation to swallow the thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted & seductively packaged by the ‘experts’ who act as if they are controlling us for our own good. Can we learn to stay in love, as we overthrow the hardened hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality?

Let’s remind each other about who we really are: We’re immortal freedom fighters in service to Divine Love. When we came down the rainbow bridge we drank from the river of forgetfulness to take on the temporal form of a human being. This caused many of us to suffer amnesia about our true origins, & our grand destiny; which is to liberate all sentient beings from suffering, & re-claim the conscious awareness of our birthright – Recognizing & cultivating the Christic seed planted in the Earth so that we shall become a Sun. We will accept nothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth, & Earth up to heaven.

Yes, friends, I know our task may seem impossible. Ignorance & inertia, partially camouflaged as the letter of the law, seems to surround us. Nihilism is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as insightfulness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Violent stories about treachery & degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as logical, reasonable & smart. Beautiful truths are suspect, & ugly truths are readily believed.

So what can we do to help each other in this work?

First, we can create sacred spaces to shelter everyone who is devoted to the awakening. These sanctuaries might take the form of temporary autonomous zones, like festivals, or art workshops, or makers spaces, where we can ritually potentiate the evolving New Mysteries. Or they might be more enduring safe houses like Anthroposophical Branches, Camphill Communities, or Fair Trade Cafes, or Biodynamic Farms & CSA drop off sites; where we can get regular practice in freeing ourselves from the slavery of hatred in all of its many guises.

What else can we do to help each other? We can take on the solemn duty to hospice what is dying, & midwife what is being born. We need the prompt of focused purpose, to kill off every old reflex pattern within us that marches in goose step with the putrefaction. We need each other’s dauntless fortitude as we goad & foment the blooming life forces within, that thrive on the incandescent questions of being truly human.

Friends, Buoyant cosmic energies are surging within us, waiting to enhance the truth of who we really are: Heart-Thinkers with Michael – Friends of Christ Jesus – Sisters to Sophia – Children of god.

Remember?

~hag

***

17 November 2020 – “Speaking with the Stars”: The Leonids’ radiant lies in the sickle of Leo the Lion, which rises shortly after midnight. Tonight is the peak.

 Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

 ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

According to T.H. Meyer & Johannes Hemleben, in his book “Rudolf Steiner: A documentary biography”: Today in 1901 Marie von Sivers asks THE question of Rudolf Steiner –Marie von Sivers “appeared one day” at one of Rudolf Steiner’s early lectures in 1900. In the autumn of 1901, she posed the question to Steiner, “Would it be possible to create a spiritual movement based on European tradition and the impetus of Christ?” Rudolf Steiner later reported:

With this, I was given the opportunity to act in a way that I had only previously imagined. The question had been put to me, and now, according to spiritual laws, I could begin to answer it.

From Rudolf Steiner’s The Story of My Life, Chapter 30: “The Brockdorffs were leaders of a branch of the Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in connection with Goethe’s fairy-tale led to my being invited by the Brockdorffs to deliver lectures regularly before those members of the Theosophical Society who were associated with them. I explained, however, that I could speak only about that which I vitally experienced within me as spiritual knowledge.

In truth, I could speak of nothing else. For very little of the literature issued by the Theosophical Society was known to me. I had known theosophists while living in Vienna, and I later became acquainted with others. These acquaintance ships led me to write in the Magazine the adverse review dealing with the theosophists in connection with the appearance of a publication of Franz Hartmann. What I knew otherwise of the literature was for the most part entirely uncongenial to me in method and approach; I could not by any possibility have linked my discussions with this literature.

So I then gave the lectures in which I established a connection with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. By means of the ideas of the mystics from Master Eckhard to Jakob Böhme, I found expression for the spiritual conceptions which in reality I had determined beforehand to set forth. I published the series of lectures in the book Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens(2). At these lectures there appeared one day in the audience Marie von Sievers, who was chosen by destiny at that time to take into strong hands the German section of the Theosophical Society, founded soon after the beginning of my lecturing. Within this section I was then able to develop my anthroposophic activity before a constantly increasing audience.

No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception…

My object was to set forth the evolution from the ancient mysteries to the mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this evolution there should be seen to be active, not merely earthly historic forces, but spiritual supramundane influences. And I wished to show that in the ancient mysteries cult-pictures were given of cosmic events, which were then fulfilled in the mystery of Golgotha as facts transferred from the cosmos to the earth of the historic plane.

This was by no means taught in the Theosophical Society. In this view I was in direct opposition to the theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was invited to work in the Theosophical Society. For this invitation followed immediately after the cycle of lectures on Christ here described.

Between the two cycles of lectures that I gave before the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers was in Italy, at Bologna, working on behalf of the Theosophical Society in the branch established there.

Thus the thing evolved up to the time of my first attendance at a theosophical congress, in London, in the year 1902. At this congress, in which Marie von Sievers also took part, it was already a foregone conclusion that a German section of the Society would be founded with myself – shortly before invited to become a member – as the general secretary.

The visit to London was of great interest to me. I there became acquainted with important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I had the privilege of staying at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. We became great friends. I became acquainted with Mr. Mead, the very diligent secretary of the Theosophical Movement. The most interesting conversations imaginable took place at the home of Mr. Keightley in regard to the forms of spiritual knowledge alive within the Theosophical Society.

Especially intimate were these conversations with Bertram Keightley himself. H. P. Blavatsky seemed to live again in these conversations. Her whole personality, with its wealth of spiritual content, was described with the utmost vividness before me and Marie von Sievers by my dear host, who had been so long associated with her.

I became slightly acquainted with Annie Besant and also Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism. Mr. Leadbeater I did not meet, but only heard him speak from the platform. He made no special impression on me.

All that was interesting in what I heard stirred me deeply, but it had no influence upon the content of my own views.“

1624 – Birthday of Jakob Böhme, a shoemaker in Görlitz, Silesia, is regarded to be one of the most profound mystics in Germany.

“Jakob Böhme’s thoroughly healthy way of knowledge — his original deeper heart’s knowledge, so in accordance with the feeling of the people — beheld freedom as weaving and working through everything necessitated, working even through natural necessity. And Schelling, ascending from a view of nature in accordance with the spirit to a beholding of the spirit, felt himself in harmony with Jakob Böhme…

Hegel‘s world view has its place in the course of mankind’s spiritual evolution through the fact that in it the radiant power of thoughts lifts itself up out of the mystical depths of the soul, and through the fact that in Hegel’s seeking, mystical power wants to reveal itself with the power of the light of thought. And this is also how he sees his place in the course of this evolution. Therefore he looked back upon Jakob Böhme in the way expressed in these words (to be found in his History of Philosophy): “This Jakob Böhme, long forgotten and decried as a pietistic visionary, has regained his rightful esteem only in recent times; Leibniz revered him. His public has been greatly reduced by the Age of Enlightenment; in recent times his profundity has been recognized again. … To declare him a visionary means nothing. For if one wants to, one can call every philosopher so, even Epicurus and Bacon. … But as to the high esteem to which Böhme has been raised, he owes this particularly to the form of his contemplation and feeling; for, contemplation and inner feeling … and the pictorial nature of one’s thoughts the allegories and so on — are partly considered to be the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the concept, thinking, in which philosophy can have its truth, in which the absolute can be expressed and also is as it is in and for itself.” And Hegel finds these further words for Böhme: “Jakob Böhme is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing is truly German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable is … that he set the intellectual world into his own inner life (Gemüt), and within his own consciousness of himself he beheld, knew, and felt everything that used to be in the beyond. This general idea of Böhme proves on the one hand to be profound and basic; on the other hand, however, he does not achieve clarity and order in all his need and struggle for definition and discrimination in developing his divine views about the universe.”

Such words are spoken by Hegel, after all, only from the feeling: In the simple heart of Jakob Böhme there lived the deepest impulse of the human soul to sink itself with its own experience into world experience — the true mystical impulse — but the pictorial view, the parable, the symbol must lift themselves to the light of clear ideas in order to attain what they want. In Hegel’s world view Jakob Böhme’s world pictures are meant to arise again as ideas of human reason. Thus the enthusiast of thoughts, Hegel, stands beside the deep mystic, Jakob Böhme, within the evolution of German idealism”. ~Rudolf Steiner, The Riddle of Man

1907 – Birthday of Israel Regardie, English occultist & author

***

The Soul Calendar verses given to us by Rudolf Steiner form a lemniscate pattern whose centre point is Easter and Michaelmas, from which the verses rise from Easter
into a summer loop and descend into a winter one from Michaemas.
The verse quartet’s small rectangles near the centre point enlarge
to form a square this week – in verses that are the only ones with words
of threatening and death – before they thin and lengthen up and down
to the solstices. When do the seasons change in the Soul Calendar?

In his wonderful book, ‘The Rhythm of the Christian Year’ Emil Bock wrote
“for the time when the sun descends during the year, from St John’s Tide,
summer’s beginning, through Michaelmas, autumn’s beginning, until Christmas,
corresponding Christian contents for the year do not exist. Is it therefore
surprising that humanity only likes to acknowledge all that moves upward
but is afraid of what moves downward? But we cannot swing along in the
cosmic rhythm if we experience fear of the descent, for example, fear
of ageing. The whole of human life today has therefore become arhythmical
… If we do not live in the rhythm of day and night and love both parts,
the ascending and descending one, we will soon no longer receive benefits
from sleep. Night will leave us empty. It will therefore refuse us its secrets
and gifts.”

Summer is the spiritual sleeptime of the year. Now, in the summer of the soul
from Michaelmas, we are challenged to incarnate our summer of the world’s gifts.
The beginning of the 4 seasons of the year have been linked in the Soul Calendar
to the 4 major festivals, but it seems natural to me for the square quartet’s verses
to be felt as initiatory challenges to make life’s transit into a new stage of the year.
The 4 seasons, correlating then with the meteorological year,
would each have 12 verses in between 4 transitions… this week in v33,
autumn to winter, followed by this week’s complementary verse from winter
to spring in the week before Lent, its opposite verse from spring to summer at
Ascensiontide, and its mirror verse from summer to autumn towards August’s end.

v33,
And so I come to feel the world,
which left without my soul’s communion
would be just frosty, empty life
that powerless to recreate itself in souls
could in itself alone find only death.

v46,
The world is threatening to numb,
my soul’s own inborn force.
Now memory, companion me
and in my sight enhance
the penetration of my glance
vitality of will alone sustains.

v7,
My Self is threatening to flee,
drawn strongly by the world’s inviting light.
Now you, my foresight, dawn in me your star
and my divining, firmly as of right,
replace the power of thought
that in the senses’ glory leaves me.

v20,
And so I come to feel my very being,
who not communing with the world
would perish, and powerless to be
with cosmic being my authentic I,
developing from me alone, would die.

And here are a pair of poems with a relationship
to the seasons and the above quartet.

THE CYCLE OF LEAVES
When daylight’s no longer long enough
for trees to transform it their leaves fall
and feed the soil’s community
who nourishes the roots
that lift Earth’s strength to meet the light
that opens Her New Year’s leaves.

THE CYCLE OF THOUGHT
When in the summer sunshine the mind lets go
and rises to the light conducted thought the world composes
imagination’s flowers open… and form the fruits
that falling into the solar plexus inspire an invisible community
to shine into the heart the springtime intuition
of the resurrected thought the Earth is waiting for.

I invite any dear soul with thoughts or feelings about the seasons,
my translations or my poems, to post them into the comments section.
Roy Sadler

***

Wed. 2 December 2020 – 7:15 pm – 8:30 pm CT The Karma Project

The Karma Project
Manifestations of Karma Study Group
December 2, 2020 – 7:15 pm Central (8:15 pm Eastern)

“… We have now learned that it is possible to seek out accidents or other causes of illness due to karmic effects. In due course we will deal with the details of such processes, such as the way in which the forces in deeper levels of consciousness work within the human being, or to what extent our ordinary consciousness may avoid such accidents. We can understand that someone who goes to a place  where he may succumb to an infection will have been driven there under the influence of a certain level of consciousness; in like manner we must be able to understand how it is that human beings take certain measures to render such infections less and less effective; in other words, that through our ordinary consciousness we are able to avert certain consequences by means of hygiene.“

~Rudolf Steiner, Manifestations of Karma, Chapter 6, “Karma in Relation to Accidents”, Hamburg, 21 May, 1910 … focus of the December 2 meeting.

The lecture can be found online at the RS Archive (eLib) by clicking this link: https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA120/English/RSP1984/19100521p01.html

The Central Regional Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America invites you to join our ongoing  study conversation.  The study has been divided among four volunteers who will summarize their section to rebuild it as a foundation for our conversation. Please familiarize yourself with the lecture if possible so you will feel comfortable sharing your reflections and thoughts with the group.

This collection of lectures has been republished by Rudolf Steiner Press under the title: “Manifestations of Karma.”  This book is a translation from German of Die Offenbarung des Karma (Ga 120), published in English by Rudolf Steiner Press in 1996.

This will be a “Zoom” conference call allowing us an opportunity to see one another while conversing (or audio only if you prefer).  To connect to the audio/video-conference:

Video Conference Details:
Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82715186258
Meeting ID: 827 1518 6258

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kclU2SSTF

If you have questions, please contact Alberto Loya aloyavaca@utexas.edu
Agenda for our Study Call
 
7:15  Welcome and Introductions        
7:18  Verse
7:25  Study led by five volunteers
Note: CRC team will ID volunteers
          Laura – pg. 106 to 110
          Ana – pg. 111 to 115
          Camille – pg. 116 to 120
          Alberto – pg. 121 to end
8:05  Conversation
8:28  Close with verse

***

Holy Nights 2020-21 “A Rose By Any Other Name” The many faces of The Sophia

24 December 2020 – 5 January 2021 (with NYE as the Hidden Holy Night)

Hosted by Laura Scappaticci & Tess Parker, featuring the Sophia Working Group

Everyday 9 am – 9:30 am ET, 10 am – 10:30 am MT, 11 am – 11:30 am CT, 12 pm – 12:30 pm ET

International online gathering on the Theme of the Divine Feminine. 

stay tuned for details

***

Our Annual Conscious NYE gathering 8 pm 1 am

In-Person at Elderberries Bio-dynamic Outpost & Cultural Hub & The Rudolf Steiner Branch Chicago 4249-51 N. Lincoln Ave. 60613

This Years Theme is a Masked Ball –

Live Music, Folk Dancing, Potluck, Mask making with Lucien Dante Lazar, more TBA

$20 per person

Stay tuned for details

***

Epiphany 6 January 2021 What Joan of Arc Calls for Today 7 pm – 9 pm CT

In-person at Elderberries Chicago & online

Today on the Birthday of Joan of Arc we will explore ‘The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations, Lecture 5, The Nature of the Christ Impulse and the Michaelic Sprit Serving It by Rudolf Steiner with Leading Thoughts by Hazel Archer-Ginsberg

Social Sculpture: “The Passage” with Luicen Dante Lazar – Eurythmy

Singing & Eurythmy

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/7052931041

Meeting ID: 705 293 1041
 

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