Every morning the Sun rises a little later, & every evening our Sol sets ever earlier. Darkness takes the light, slowly into its somber realm. As we move from Virgo the Virgin, who helps us with our spiritual harvest, into the sign of the scales, Libra, we can think how it is the only constellation that is not a living creature; it owes its origin to the realm of created things, of mechanics. According to Rudolf Steiner it was only incorporated into the imagery of the Zodiac later in order to delineate the world of light in the upper signs more clearly from the 5 lower “nightly” signs. It is entirely dependent on the outer world, best expressed in its function of “deliberation”.
In ancient Greece the descent of the Sun into the Autumn region of the dark zodiac signs was seen in the image of the abduction of Persephone, stole away from her mother Demeter, by Pluto, lord of the underworld. The Greeks hid their faces in fear from the powers of darkness & waited longingly for the return of Persephone who would awaken to new life in the Spring.
But since the descent of Christ into the shadow realm of death, in order to reconquer it for the realm of light, human beings can look at the descent into the realm of darkness in a different way – thru the image of the mighty Archangel Michael standing next to the Virgin, with her staff of life, & in former times, bearing the balance of the world in his hands – carrying the resurrection into the dark in order to realize our true human potential in the confrontation with the forces of evil.
This individuation process can only be fulfilled in the realm of earth & death – Here the human being of the present time is threatened with the danger of giving in to the lower driving forces which powerfully press in from our unconscious sense perceptions.
Here the scales, must be stepped into, to become the sign of the ‘Representative of Humanity’, appearing before our soul, pointing the way forward, to balance us between levity & gravity.
In the Zodiac it is between the grain-bearing Virgin & the death-dealing Scorpion. There is a separation of the “wheat from the chaff’ – the weighing, in the “Scales of Judgement.”
Will the being of Michael which we must enliven within ourselves, be able to maintain the balance of the world? That is the most earnest question which is spoken by his gaze. In the realm of the spirit his victory is assured, But on earth???
This question touches on our human contribution to the Michael Imagination – it has to do with the crisis of the “I”, which exists for everyone today. Is the average human being awake to this aspect? -Ready & able to work to overcome this crisis of humankind on earth?
If we take this into our soul-life we can take up this challenge, knowing that the outcome depends on our behavior, with even the smallest matters, as well as the great tests of our times. Thru this commitment we can rise to become a spiritual comrade, a co-shaper & co-creator of the divine earthly world. We are called in the Age of Michael to rise from being a ‘servant of God’ to being a ‘friend & brother/sister of Christ’ as promised in the Gospel of St. John 15:15.
In looking up to this world destiny of the human being in the dark time of the year which is now setting in, we must find the inner emphasis that is so easily lost today, because we lose our balance to the swings of the pendulum in our soul-life. The approaching winter can invoke (in some) the hum-bug that is possessed by greed, like an old man seeking to dispel the fear of death thru selfish pleasure or grabby possession. The balance of the soul swings back & forth between melancholy & self-satisfied control, until it can find its center in the true “I”.
The image of the scales can become for us the means to orient our soul & spirit at this turning point in the year.
October: “Satisfaction Becomes Serenity” or Contentment becomes Self-composure. This Virtue suggests a call to balance, not a settling in to mendacity, or a false sense of security. But a serenity in recognizing that we are just where we are meant to be in our striving.
More on this tomorrow
Until soon
~hag
***
15 October 2020 – Bella Luna is in the Underworld – Tomorrow New Moon in the Scales 4:31 pm CT
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
Looking at the past to see the present, co-creating the future: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
70 BC – Birthday of Virgil, an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, & the epic Aeneid, considered the national epic of ancient Rome. Modeled after Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to fulfill his destiny & arrive on the shores of Italy—in Roman mythology the founding act of Rome. Virgil’s work has had wide & deep influence on Western literature, most notably Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through hell & purgatory
Feast Day of Saint Teresa of Ávila, who lived in the 16th century, an age of exploration as well as political, social & religious upheaval. She was a woman; she was a contemplative; she was an active reformer.
As a woman, Teresa stood on her own two feet, even in the man’s world of her time. She was “her own woman,” entering the Carmelites despite strong opposition from her father. She is a person wrapped not so much in silence as in mystery. Beautiful, talented, outgoing, adaptable, affectionate, courageous, enthusiastic, she was totally human. Like Jesus, she was a mystery of paradoxes: wise, yet practical; intelligent, yet much in tune with her experience; a mystic, yet an energetic reformer. A holy woman, a womanly woman.
Teresa was a woman “for Christ,” a woman of prayer, discipline & compassion. Her heart belonged to God. Her ongoing conversion was an arduous lifelong struggle, involving ongoing purification & suffering. She was misunderstood, misjudged, opposed in her efforts at reform. Yet she struggled on, courageous & faithful; she struggled with her own mediocrity, her illness, her opposition. And in the midst of all this she clung to God in life & in prayer. Her writings on prayer & contemplation are drawn from her experience: powerful, practical & graceful. A woman of prayer; a woman for God.
Teresa was a woman “for others.” Though a contemplative, she spent much of her time & energy seeking to reform herself & the Carmelites, to lead them back to the full observance of the primitive Rule. She founded over a half-dozen new monasteries. She traveled, wrote, fought—always to renew, to reform. In her self, in her prayer, in her life, in her efforts to reform, in all the people she touched, she was a woman for others, a woman who inspired & gave life.
Her writings, especially the Way of Perfection & The Interior Castle, have helped generations of believers.
In 1970, the Church gave her the title she had long held in the popular mind: Doctor of the Church. She & St. Catherine of Siena were the first women so honored.
Ours is a time of turmoil, a time of reform & a time of liberation. Modern women have in Teresa a challenging example. Promoters of renewal, promoters of prayer, all have in Teresa a woman to reckon with, one whom they can admire & imitate.
1844 – Birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche, German composer, poet, & philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom written by Rudolf Steiner. Nietzsche was seen by Steiner, but was lying in a coma near death. Rudolf Steiner brought out an edition of some of Nietzsche’s writings. In seeing that Nietzsche’s ideas received a public exposure, Steiner was not identifying himself as one of Nietzsche’s disciples, but rather assuring philosophical readers that this important link in the spiritual development of occidental thought should not be ignored.
WHEN I BECAME acquainted with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche six years ago, ideas had already formed within me which were similar to his. Independently, and from completely different directions, I came to concepts which were in harmony with those Nietzsche expressed in his writings: Zarathustra, Jenseits von Gut and Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogie der Moral, Genealogy of Morals, and Götzendämmerung, Twilight of Idols. In my little book which appeared in 1886, Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, The Theory of Knowledge in Goethe’s World Conception, this same way of implicit thinking is expressed as one finds in the works of Nietzsche mentioned above.
This is why I feel myself impelled to draw a picture of Nietzsche’s life of reflection and feeling. I believe that such a picture will be most like Nietzsche when it is created according to his last writings. This I have done. The earlier writings of Nietzsche show him as a searcher. He presents himself to us as a restless striver toward the heights. In his last writings we see him when he has reached the summit, and at a height commensurate with his very own spiritual quality. In most of the writings which have appeared about Nietzsche up to now, this development is represented as if in the various periods of his writing he had more or less contradictory opinions. I have tried to show that there is no question of a change of opinion in Nietzsche, but rather of a movement upward, of a development of a personality in a manner fitting to it, which had not yet found a form of expression in accord with his innate points of view in those first works.
The final goal of Nietzsche’s creativity is the description of the “superman.” I considered my chief task in this writing to be the characterization of this type. My characterization of the superman is exactly the opposite of the caricature developed in the currently popular book about Nietzsche by Frau Lou Andreas Salomé. One cannot put into the world anything more contrary to Nietzsche’s spirit than the mystical monster she has made out of the superman. My book shows that in Nietzsche’s ideas nowhere is the least trace of mysticism to be found. I did not allow myself to be drawn into the refutation of Frau Salomé’s opinion that Nietzsche’s thoughts in Menschliches, All-zumenschliches, Human, All Too Human, were influenced by the works of Paul Rée, the editor of Psychological Observations, and The Origin of Moral Feelings, etc. Such an average brain as that of Paul Rée could make no important impression on Nietzsche. Even now I would not touch upon these things at all if the book of Frau Salomé had not contributed so much toward the spreading of downright disagreeable judgments about Nietzsche. Fritz Koegel, the excellent publisher of Nietzsche’s works, bestowed upon this bungled piece of work its deserved treatment in the Magazine for Literature.
I cannot conclude this short preface without giving hearty thanks to Nietzsche’s sister, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, for the many friendly deeds I experienced from her during the period in which this book developed. I owe to her the hours spent in the Nietzsche Archives, and the mood out of which the following thoughts were written. ~RUDOLF STEINER, Weimar, April 1895.
***
MY POD (Poem Of the Day)
~I have held the striped pebble of love
Lightly in my palm
Tightly in my heart-whole
I have smelled truth in the autumn rain
& I remember how to go
Beyond the horizon
Where light knows
Where no darkness grows –
Meet me there if you will…
~hag
***
| From Arthur Firstenberg info@cellphonetaskforce.org EMERGENCY IN THE HEAVENS Early on October 6, 2020 at 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time, SpaceX launched another 60 satellites, to join their fellows racing through the ionized layer of air that protects us and gives us life. There are now 738 satellites operating in the Starlink constellation. Everyone pretends that they are not there, that we can continue to punch holes in the air with impunity, burn prodigious amounts of fossil fuels, fill up the stratosphere with black soot, litter the night sky with moving lights, and alter the invisible electric field that connects us with the sun and stars and circulates through our bodies from birth until death. In recent weeks, on the coast of Australia, record numbers of whales committed suicide by beaching themselves. In Botswana, hundreds of elephants suddenly collapsed and died. Here in the southwest, from Nebraska, to Colorado, to Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, to northern Mexico, millions of migrating birds have fallen dead out of the sky, emaciated, starved to death because there are no insects to eat. Our earth is burning down and no firefighters will come. The source of the flames is unacknowledged, unseen. It is there, in the air, speeding from phone to phone, antenna to antenna, satellite to satellite, filling atmosphere, earth, and seas, penetrating bones and disrupting nerves of every animal, bird, insect, and tree. IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T KNOW If Neil Armstrong had brought a cell phone to the moon in 1969, it would have appeared from earth, at night, to be the brightest object in the universe in the microwave spectrum. In the daytime, the sun would have been brighter, but at night, the cell phone would have outshone every star. There is a reason cell phones are outlawed in Green Bank, West Virginia, home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: even a single cell phone, even from miles away, would blind the radio astronomers there and make it impossible for them to see the stars. Astronomers measure radio waves in units called janskys. A typical star shines at 10 to 100 janskys. The Sun shines at about 500,000 janskys. When you hold a cell phone against your head, you are pumping energy at the rate of about 100,000,000,000,000,000 janskys into your brain.[1] If we are going to save this planet, we have to be able to think and reason. And we have known since 1975 that microwave radiation damages the brain. In that year, Allan Frey published his ground-breaking article, “Neural function and behavior: defining the relationship.”[2] In a study on rats, he found that low-level microwaves — one hundred times lower than what people’s brains are exposed to from their cell phones today — damage the blood-brain barrier. This is the anatomical barrier that keeps toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses in your blood from entering your brain. It is also the barrier that maintains the inside of your head at a constant pressure and prevents you from having a stroke. At least two hundred laboratories in many countries confirmed Frey’s work over the years. Finally, in 2003, neurosurgeon Leif Salford, at Lund University in Sweden, proved the obvious: that disrupting the blood-brain barrier causes brain damage. He exposed rats to a cell phone, once for two hours, at very low power, and sacrificed them fifty days later. Two percent of the exposed rats’ brain cells were damaged or destroyed.[3] He later exposed rats to a cell phone, again at very low power, for two hours once a week for a year, and found that they were cognitively impaired.[4] And in 2020, a study has been published showing that the same thing happens in humans. A team of scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany used MRIs to examine the brains of 48 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. They found that the more hours per day their subjects habitually spent on their smartphones, the less gray matter they had in their brains and the less brain activity was detected.[5] UPDATE ON OUR FEDERAL LAWSUIT On December 21, 2018, I organized and funded a lawsuit against the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico; the State of New Mexico; and the United States of America, to restore the constitutional rights of the people of the United States. We are challenging the constitutionality of a City ordinance, a State law, and Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These laws, and laws like them all over the world, effectively mandate the placement of antennas on the streets and sidewalks in front of homes and businesses, while depriving injured people of any means of protest, or any remedy for their injuries. These laws violate: the First Amendment Right of Freedom of Speech; the First Amendment Right to Petition the Government for Redress of Grievances; the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Right not to be deprived of Life, Liberty or Property without Due Process of Law; the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Right not to have property taken without Just Compensation. On May 6, 2020, the District Court dismissed our complaint, and we immediately filed an appeal in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The case is Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety v. City of Santa Fe, Case No. 20-2066. Oral argument has not yet been scheduled. You can read our briefs here: https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/5g-litigation This is the only case of its kind in the United States. Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act prohibits States and local governments from regulating cell towers on the basis of their health or environmental effects. ~ Arthur Firstenberg The last 10 newsletters, including this one, are available for downloading and sharing on the Newsletters page of the Cellular Phone Task Force. Some of the newsletters are also available there in German, Spanish, Italian, and French. [1] 1 jansky = 10-26 W/m2/Hz. The values given are for cell phone frequencies. [2] Frey AH et al. 1975. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 247:433-39. [3] Salford L et al. 2003. “Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones.” Environmental Health Perspectives 111(7):881-83. [4] Nittby H et al. 2008. “Cognitive impairment in rats after long-term exposure to GSM-900 mobile phone radiation. Bioelectromagnetics 29:219-32. [5] Horvath J et al. 2020. Structural and functional correlates of smartphone addiction. Addictive Behaviors 105:106334. |
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