Category Archives: Lecture

Goethe’s Birthday/Augustine’s Deathday

28 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Sunrise-6:15am, Sunset-7:30pm.

cassiopea dipper

You can tell that summer’s days are numbered: When darkness falls, Cassiopeia has risen about as high in the northeast as the Big Dipper has dropped in the northwest.

Also, with August nearing its end, you can say hello to the Double Cluster in Perseus without having to stay up late. After dark, find the tilted W of Cassiopeia partway up the northeastern sky. Note the two stars of its lower-left segment (the faint end of the W). With a dark enough sky you can even make them out with the unaided eye Look for two little irregular cotton puffs, touching each other & tilted diagonally, as a distinct enhancement of the background Milky Way.

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Historia Nikolaos Gyzis Nikolaos Gyzis

What is to be the starting force and impulse for events in social and ethical life must come out of the spiritual world.” Rudolf Steiner, New Spiritual Impulses in History” Dornach 16 December, 1917

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Saint_Augustine_by_Philippe_de_ChampaignePhilippe de Champaigne

430 – Deathday of Saint Augustine an early Christian theologian & philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western philosophy.  Among his most important works are The City of God & Confessions.

In his early years, he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism & afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. He “established anew the ancient Faith.” After his conversion to Christianity in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy & theology, believing that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom.

He is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, the alleviation of sore eyes.

632 – Deathday of Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad

1189 – The Third or Kings’ Crusade, was an attempt to reconquer the Holy Land. The campaign was largely successful, regaining the important cities of Acre & Jaffa, but it failed to capture Jerusalem, the emotional & spiritual motivation of the Crusade.

After the Crusaders had driven the Muslims from Acre, Richard the Lionheart finalized a treaty granting Muslim control over Jerusalem, but allowing unarmed Christian pilgrims & merchants to visit the city.

Goethe-NetzMichael Mathias Precht

1749 – Birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German author, poet, playwright, & diplomat. In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe’s works, Rudolf Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. As well as the introductions & commentaries to 4 volumes of Goethe’s scientific writings, Steiner wrote 2 books about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886), which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation & justification for his later work, & Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897). Steiner writes about Goethe in many of his lectures, including commentaries on his play Faust.

1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act through most of the British Empire

1850 – Wagner’s Lohengrin premieres at the German National Theatre, Weimar

1859 – The Carrington event, Solar Storm disrupts electrical telegraph services & causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly all over the earth’s middle latitudes.

1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run

1943 – World War II: In Denmark, a general strike against the Nazi occupation

1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, an ardent segregationist, begins a filibuster to prevent the Senate from voting on Civil Rights Act

martin_luther_king_jr i have a dream

1963 – March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom: The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech

1968 – Riots in Chicago, during the Democratic National Convention

1988 – Ramstein air show disaster: Seventy-five are killed & 346 injured

1990 – Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province

1990 – An F5 tornado strikes the Illinois cities of Plainfield & Joliet, killing 29

1993 – The Galileo spacecraft discovers a moon, later named Dactyl, the first known asteroid moon

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castleNeil Hague

Calendar of the Soul Twenty-third Week [August 28, 2016 – September 03, 2016]

There dims in damp autumnal air

The senses’ luring magic;

The light’s revealing radiance

Is dulled by hazy veils of mist.

In distances around me I can see

The autumn’s winter sleep;

The summer’s life has yielded

Itself into my keeping.      ~Rudolf Steiner

***

goethe-s-way-of-knowing-works-4-of-16

Goethe and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, August 19th, 1921

“…As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the world and about life.

But at the same time there is something else in Goethe — a kind of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his life at Weimar.

Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his contemporaries around him. He himself relates — and I have often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe’s early life — how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his father’s collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order, as he says later — for at seven years he would not, of course, have spoken in this way — to bring an offering to the great God of Nature.

We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a most remarkable way.

We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.” — At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of Nature flashes up within him.

It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time, both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.

Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre, after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor is it possible to understand Goethe’s whole attitude to Faust until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had taken place.

After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns away from the

“… heavenly forces rising and descending, Their golden urns reciprocally lending,” where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: “Thou, Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me.”

…And many other passages can be read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants (Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent indication of the place of Goethe’s soul in the whole sweep of evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the moment he was obliged inwardly to ‘digest’ the result of contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world, and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man…” http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19210819p01.html

THE ST. JOHN IMAGINATION

June 10, 2016

This morning – An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 rocked Southern California, rousing residents out of bed at about 1:05 a.m. PT .

The quake was centered about 13 miles north-northwest near Borrego Springs in the desert east of Los Angeles, the U.S. Geological Service reported.

On the west side of Los Angeles, about 100 miles from the epicenter, the quake produced a long shaking motion lasting about 30 seconds. Near Los Angeles International Airport, window blinds shook & the building structure rolled in steady waves. The quake was also felt in San Diego.

40 AD – Birthday of Apollonius of Tyana, a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher, around the time of Jesus.

671 – Emperor Tenji of Japan introduces a water clock (clepsydra) called Rokoku.

1190 –Frederick I Barbarossa drowns in the river Saleph while leading an army to Jerusalem

1786 – A landslide dam on the Dadu River created by an earthquake ten days earlier collapses, killing 100,000 in the Sichuan province of China

1886 – Mount Tarawera in New Zealand erupts, killing 1,530 people & burying the famous Pink & White Terraces. Eruptions continue for 3 months creating a large, fissure across the mountain peak

1898 – Spanish–American War: U.S. Marines land on the island of Cuba

1915 – Birthday of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American author & playwright, Nobel Prize laureate

1963 – Equal Pay Act of 1963 aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex (see Gender pay gap) was signed into law by John F. Kennedy as part of his New Frontier Program

1964 – United States Senate breaks a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, leading to the bill’s passage.

1967 – The Six-Day War ends: Israel and Syria agree to a cease-fire

1977 – The Apple II, one of the first personal computers, goes on sale

2002 – The first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the United Kingdom

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eye light

~O fickle winds & swirling dust

Mirage of trees in Summer

Let me remember what is real

~hag

~   ~   ~

A Summary of THE ST. JOHN IMAGINATION, by Rudolf Steiner ~from the Four Seasons and the Archangels Lecture 4

In the sense world we see the being of Nature sprouting, budding —from the powers of sleep the forces of vegetative growth, are given form. But in this sleeping Nature, the spiritual which animates & weaves through everything in Nature is revealed.

In summer humanity is bound up with Nature, but, if we have right feeling & perception for it, objective spirituality comes towards us from out of Nature’s interweaving life. And so, to find the essential human being during the St. John’s time, at midsummer, we must turn to the objective spirituality in the outer world, & this is present everywhere in Nature.

If we follow Nature in high summer with deepened spiritual insight & with perceptive eyes, we find our gaze directed to the depths of the Earth itself. We find that the minerals down there send their inner crystal-forming process towards us more vividly than at any other time of the year; shaping itself into lines, angles & surfaces. “If we are to have an impression of it as a whole, we must picture this crystallizing process as an interweaving activity, colored throughout with deep blue”.

St. John's RS GA 229 Plate V

We can feel that as a human form we have grown out of the blue depths of the earth’s crust; permeated with force by the silver-gleaming crystal lines.

Using our imaginative thinking, we could ask: “How is it that these silver-sparkling crystal lines & waves are working within me? What is it that lives & works there, silver-gleaming in the blue of the Earth? — then one knows: That is cosmic Will. And one has the feeling of standing upon cosmic Will”.

Tomorrow we look up to the heights

Until soon

Blessings and Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Current Festival & Program Events

In Truth & Beauty I Stand

May 12, 2016

1820 – Birthday of Florence Nightingale, Italian-English nurse, social reformer, & statistician

Joseph Beuys i like america

1921 – Birthday of Joseph Beuys, German sculptor, performance artist & illustrator

1933 – The Agricultural Adjustment Act is enacted to restrict agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies.

2002 – Former US President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a five-day visit with Fidel Castro becoming the first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since Castro’s 1959 revolution.

2008 – An 8.0 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan, China, kills over 69,000 people

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Pentathlon

Pentathlon Chant:

In Truth & Beauty I Stand – Athena Your Wisdom Lights My way

In Truth & Beauty I stand – Centered In Strength & Purpose

In Truth & Beauty I Stand – To Carry the Torch of Victory!

 

In Truth & Beauty I Stand – In-between Heaven & Earth I Am

In Truth & Beauty I Stand – Upright & Reverent I Wear the Crown

In Truth & Beauty I Stand – To Carry The Torch of Victory!

~hag

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silver woman Odilon Redon

Part 4, the last of this series, from the lecture: Vitae Sophia- The New Mysteries of ‘I’ and ‘WE’, a ‘Hero’s Journey’ from head to heart by Hazel Archer Ginsberg

As Anthroposophers we know that when people are united in higher wisdom, when communities arise, not thru necessity or heredity, but through free will, a group-soul descends from the spiritual worlds.

And human hearts, once warmed, can rise up to meet the source of wisdom, like flowers turning toward the sun.

Where separate egos are united by a common truth, “Where the senses can know no more”, the higher group-soul can descend.

If, today, together we Will to turn our hearts towards a higher wisdom, to set fire to the forces of knowledge in our souls, redeeming our intelligence, our Anthroposophical angel, if you will, can anchor & embody itself in the environment we prepare for it.

For this to happen, we need to let go of judgment. When we let go of opinion, we can find truth. And then we can let the ground of our souls become warm.

With focused will we can let the ‘Light Divine

Warm our Hearts

Enlighten our Heads’

That Good May Become’.

So let’s apply some spiritual science eh? Heat rises right? & so it is with our inner being. When we warm our hearts, then the spirit responds. The light-flame from above, answers, to the warmth-flame from below.

And how do we do this? By celebrating the festivals of course.

Schiller once said “Take the divine into your will & it descends from its cosmic throne.”

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flowers Odilon RedonOdilon Redon

This ends the lecture Click to read the entire thing

Come join us for our upcoming Whitsun Festival May 15 featuring Biography Worker Leah Walker

Until soon

Blessings & Peace –

~hag = Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Current Festival & Program Events

 

Bee Pollen in the Chalice

May 11, 2016 On this Day in History:

mudmaid

330 – Byzantium is renamed Nova Roma during a dedication ceremony, but it is more popularly referred to as Constantinople.

868 – A copy of the Diamond Sutra is printed in China, making it the oldest known dated printed book.

912 – Alexander becomes Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.

1310 – In France, fifty-four members of the Knights Templar are burned at the stake as heretics.

1502 – Christopher Columbus departs Cádiz on his fourth & final voyage to the Americas.

1917 – Rudolf Steiner stops giving private consultations & releases his pupils from any obligations to silence previously required.

1930 – Death-day  of Imme von Eckardstein who painted the illustrations for the original Soul Calendar in 1912/13.

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bee painting1 Martin BridgeMartin Bridge

~Today I am

Feeding the uncombed cats & the cross-eyed hens of the world

with BEE POLLEN

~hag

~   ~   ~

chalice Odilon RedonOdilon Redon

Part 3 in a series from the lecture: Vitae Sophia- The New Mysteries of ‘I’ and ‘WE’, a ‘Hero’s Journey’ from head to heart by Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Let’s think about it. The Foundation Stone was formed by Rudolf Steiner at the Christmas conference out of:

  1. The Father-forces rising from the depths -gravity, unconscious will;
  2. The Son-forces working in the periphery – warmth, creative love;
  3. & The Spirit-forces descending from the heights -consciousness, wisdom.

Thru Steiner’s profound mystery deed, an altogether new relationship of the macrocosmic forces working within the human:

3. The thoughts of the Spirit revealed in the human head;

2. Christ working in the heart;

1. & The will of the Father fulfilled in the deeds of the limbs, was made openly manifest.

When Steiner took on the karma of the society he gave the Michaelic impulse the possibility of flowing directly into the earth sphere & into those active in the Anthroposophical society.  

Here we see a direct relationship with the original Pentecost, which was the 3rd & final stage of the ‘moveable feasts’ making it possible for the Sun Being of The Christ to be in union with the stream of Earthly Being, preparing the way for the mission of Anthroposophy, as the Proclamation of World Pentecost.

Yes, we live in a potent time, when divergent karmic streams have the possibility of coming together- ‘That Good May Become,’ a time when, some say, the Platonists of the School of Chartres & the Aristotelian-Dominicans, The Arthur & Grail streams with true Rosicrucianism, meet the new Michaelic Grail imagination arising in the human soul.

A renewed chalice whose substance is Love, whose form is Imagination & whose light of thought which radiates, is redeemed Michaelic Intelligence.

This transforms the stone of the wise, into the dodecahedral foundation stone of love.

For Michael frees thoughts from the realm of the head, opening a path to the heart, bringing forth that shining, raying-out of the divine chalice, that celestial light of redeemed intelligence, which like the radiance of the spiritual sun, can unite into a single whole the Spiritual substance of love & human love, in the Holy Grail that was set into our souls at the Christmas conference.  Calling ever & again for a renewal of the spiritual quest.

Click to read the entire lecture

Come join us for our upcoming Whitsun Festival May 15

Current Festival & Program Events

~   ~   ~

Tomorrow we look deeper into the mission of The Sophia.

Until soon

Blessings & Peace –

~hag = Hazel ArcherGinsberg

 

Inverted Whitsun

May 10, 2016

hokusai-wave

1849 – Death- Day of Japanese painter, Hokusai

1933 – Beginning of book-burning in Germany

1947 – Birthday – Nicholas of flue, a Swiss hermit & ascetic who is the patron saint of Switzerland. After receiving a mystical vision of a lily eaten by a horse, which he recognized as indicating that the cares of his worldly life (the draft horse pulling a plough) was swallowing up his spiritual life (the lily, a symbol of purity) he decided to devote himself entirely to the contemplative life. According to legend, he survived for nineteen years with no food, except for the Eucharist. Symbolic visions continued to be a feature of his contemplation. He became a spiritual guide whose advice was widely sought & followed. He was known to all as “Brother Klaus.” His counsel prevented a civil war bringing about the permanent national unity of Switzerland.

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rainy_day

~Today I am

a drop of water

Falling

To green the earth

I bring a message from the heights…

I leap

Up from matter

To ride the current of spirit

into truth…

TODAY WHAT ARE YOU?

~hag

~   ~   ~

sophia resurection of

Part 2 in a series from the lecture: Vitae Sophia- The New Mysteries of ‘I’ and ‘WE’, a ‘Hero’s Journey’ from head to heart by Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Now let me ask you this, as seekers on the path, have you ever felt utterly alone, overwhelmed, or even a bit lost? Perhaps when you 1st began to know anthroposophy? Steiner speaks of this in ‘How to know higher worlds’ & in the 5th Gospel. We have an opportunity to recognize & acknowledge the isolation that can come from our striving, a mirroring of the experience of the apostles those 10 days between Ascension & Whitsun. That uncomfortable feeling when waiting feels like wrestling.

The Ascension picture tells us that the deed of Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical & etheric body in the universal human sense. Whitsun tells us that each single human being must make this deed bear fruit by personally receiving the Holy Spirit, a challenge to strive towards spiritual knowledge.  

During our time together on this Whitsun day, we will work with the Whitsun imagination to creatively explore how we may engage in the lifting out of the ‘me’ into the ‘we’, out of opinion into wisdom; warming the I, to open the heart, in support of healthy community. We will endeavor to strengthen our individual soul forces to collectively open the portal into the Spirit worlds. As Steiner’s Whitsun verse states: “This portal’s key the Soul may fashion If she herself grow strong within the strife”

We will create an Ecclesia, a vessel, a chalice, a sheath for the Spirit. Then the spirit flame can spread out to become what Steiner called a “World Whitsun”, which began in earnest at the Christmas conference, where the inverted Whitsun, was born, the idea of taking the spirit that has flowed through the head into the heart, transforming it into wisdom to redeem our intelligence, & then back out as a gift to humanity. Our work is to take our individual Inner Whitsun & expand it, into what Steiner calls the “World Festival of Knowledge” a path leading from ‘Sprit Recollection’, to ‘Sprit Sensing’, to ‘Sprit Beholding’.

In this sense the Christmas Conference, in all its spiritual reality reveals itself as the true Whitsun for anthroposophers. Those who strive to take into their souls the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit concerning the human being- Anthropos-Sophia, which is the knowledge of the grail held aloft by Michael in this present age of the consciousness soul.

Click to read the entire lecture

Come join us for our upcoming Whitsun Festival May 15

Current Festival & Program Events

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Tomorrow we further explore Rudolf Steiner’s deed.

Until soon

Blessings & Peace –

~hag = Hazel ArcherGinsberg