Citizens Oath

Flags by Travis Henry

Here is the spoken version of today‘s post on ‘I Think Speech

Dear friends, as I have mentioned before, coming from a place of striving to live into the social organism as outlined by Rudolf Steiner, I don’t usually pay much heed to what I have seen as the empty pageantry of things like the presidential inauguration.  But this year because of the world situation which feels so untenable, it has come into my consciousness that We as Citizens of Earth are being called to really look at the idea of taking personal & collective responsibility for our world. What do you feel your personal duty is to the collective? What can you give, what gifts can you offer? Are we willing to faithfully execute our unique role in healing, reimagining, & rebuilding our country, to work to the best of our ability, to preserve, protect, & defend dignity, to stand for truth & justice for all, motivated by an unselfish love that promotes peace & truth…Are we willing to take an oath, to solemnly vow? What would that look like for you?

Making a Vow | Ajah Dharma
Dara Dharma

Have you ever taken a made a vow? I love the phrase solemnly swear, it is solemn – a sacred promise. Perhaps when you got married? Did you take vows? What were they? Are you remembering to live into them? Every once in a while people decide to renew their vows. How empowering it is to stand up in the company of friends & family to affirm a wedding, an agreement, a partnership – by taking an oath, to love & to cherish…

Swearing In Paintings | Fine Art America

What would it be like to see this ‘swearing in’ & the symbolic transition of power as an opportunity to get beyond the spectacle, & also in this case the fear of unrest, & imbue it with the power of ‘We the People’ – by participating – by personally & collectively opting in – not for the candidate or party affiliation, but for the divine sovereignty of the office itself. To call in the true Spirit of America, the beneficent folk soul of this sacred land who was once called Columbia, the embodiment of peace, to guide & protect our inalienable rights -To bring healing to this land, stolen from the native peoples, polluted by corporate greed, which engenders poverty & division amongst the people.

Joan of Arc - Maid of Heaven - Charles VII First Meeting

I think of Joan of Arc who fought for the sovereignty of her king, who on a personal level had many failings, but because of her purity of purpose she was able to bring the will of the spiritual world into manifestation, even thru the weak human vessels, to create change on the earth, & further the development of the consciousness soul age.

Ekaterina Abramova — New York Ekaterina Abramova — New York
Ekaterina Abramova

Our time now calls for individuals to join together to create the chalice for the ever present help of the spiritual world to pour into. We are not alone, but we must take a stand in uprightness – we must vow to do our duty as true human beings, or else the cup will not hold, & then thru the crack, or the lack, corruption is allowed to enter in.  

A history on the tradition of gift-giving around the world
Jen Pellington

And so I ask you dear friends on this eve of the presidential inauguration to contemplate what you are willing to vow to do, what actions, what inner workings, what thoughts can you offer, not just to uphold the American Constitution, but to unfold the highest destiny of human evolution?

Please join us as we explore these themes on what is becoming quite a co-creation (still continuing to morph) in bringing Anthroposophia to the world:

Sunday 24 January 2021 – Reclaiming the Wisdom of America –

2 – 4 pm CST An interactive Zoom Presentation with 

Hazel Archer-Ginsberg, Rosemary McMullen, Anne Nicholson, Sally Greenberg, Anne Dale, Stewart Lundy in conjunction with ‘The People’s Inauguration’

Anne Nicholson:  Social Scientist & tech guru is our Host

Sally Greenberg – Opening Verse: Walt Whitman-Leaves of Grass

Hazel Archer will explore the concept of Columbia as the Folk Spirit of America & what that means in this age of the consciousness soul.

Mary Maruca & Stewart Lundy of Perennial Roots Farm brings the connection to Bio-dynamics

Rosemary McMullen sets the scene for the ancestors-Land Acknowledgement, as a way for each participant to look at their current placement in America. The 3 Realms of Culture, Rights, Economy, becomes 4-fold when we bring in the element of Ecology.

Artistic gesture: The Spirit of Place

Sally Greenberg & Anne Dale: a contemplation of the expression of our Civil Responsibility that recommits us to our core values, to one another, & to the Spirit of Place & Time.

Breakout Groups: Social Sharing – What do you see is wanting to come into being in America? How will you contribute to it? Each will share their artistic creation in relation to these questions to see if something new arises.

Anne Nicholson: Plenary- Closing

Sally GreenbergEnding Verse: Alice Walker-America

***

https://skyandtelescope.org/

19 January 2021 – “speaking with the Stars”: In early evening, to the right of waxing Bella Luna is the Great Square of Pegasus, balancing on one corner.

African Women Multicolor Mixed Media Painting 'Duty Line' - Road Scholar  World Bazaar
Negriti Moobu

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Rethinking James Watt: Birmingham... - ERIH - European Route of Industrial  Heritage | Facebook

1736 – Birthday of James Watt, Scottish-English chemist & engineer, inventor of the steam engine.

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes - iPerceptive

1809 – Birthday of Edgar Allan Poe

19 | January | 2019 | Reverse Ritual

1829 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy receives its premiere performance

1853 – Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il trovatore receives its premiere performance in Rome.

Inside Edison's Pearl Street elecric power plant, showing here the large DC  generators.

1883 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey

1938 – Deathday of Rosa Mayreder – an Austrian freethinker, author, painter, musician & feminist -The daughter of a wealthy Viennese innkeeper who was able to work as a painter & writer from her youth. She loved science & turned against the prevailing state of affairs that generally only allowed a higher education to men. She loved  anthropology & physics, but soon came across the special meaning of language . Together with Hugo Wolf, she published the opera “The Corregidor“, she composed the libretto & was one of Wolf’s sponsors.

In 1881 she married her childhood friend, the architect & later rector of the Vienna University of Technology Karl Mayreder . In the women’s movement she worked with activist Marie Lang & Marianne Hainisch in the early 1890s. In 1893 she founded the General Austrian Women’s Association. From 1899 she published together with Marie Lang & Auguste Fickert the magazine “Documents of Women“.

Her books “The Critique of Femininity ” as well as ” Gender and Culture “ & also in conversations that she held in her diaries, she described to the ‘culture-makers’, that it was important  for an equal ratio of the sexes. She gained recognition & approval in literary circles. The opposition was found especially in the field of medicine , which was perceived by her to falsely stress the ‘mental weakness of women’ as a haven of arbitrariness, but also the degradation of women as a sexual object. She turned against the discrimination of their gender & the existing double standards. Her works were widely distributed &translated into English.

Mayreder, who first worked as a painter also founded the “Art School for Women & Girls” in the years before the First World War with Olga Prager & Kurt Federn.

Before & during the war, she was involved with Bertha von Suttner in the peace movement, & in 1919 became the chairman of the “International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom” (IFFF).

Rosa Mayreder met Rudolf Steiner (with whom she entered into a long& extensive correspondence) through women’s rights campaigner Marie Lang. Mayreder wrote many passages in her diaries which describe how enlightening Rudolf Steiner was for her thinking. Steiner spent time with Mayreder & her husband at their villa discussing Goethe & politics over the years & right up until Stiner’s death.

***

Heart of a garden Painting by E Buchanan
E. Bucheaum

POD (Poem Of the day)

~My heart is a furrowed field
That the Sun rolls over
Bating out the fallowness
With never-ending beams
Infusing my will to receive

~hag

8 thoughts on “Citizens Oath

  1. It is very interesting to consider Julian’s declaration that the Sun has three aspects, which Les cites from GA 211. Now, in my somewhat plodding style I often have 10:10 thought experiments that take a day or two to come to a certain kind of realization. So, tonight I was looking over something that seems important. Rudolf Steiner went to England for the first time in nearly nine years in April 1922, when he gave this lecture from GA 211. Then, he returned to England again in August, and gave the next two lectures, and finally, a third trip to England in November 1922, wherein he gives the final three lectures concerning the threefold aspect of the Sun. So, was this by design?

    I say this because it can be shown that when Steiner went to England in 1922 that the occult powers that had been closely watching the progress of Anthroposophy and its movement saw an impending situation in which Steiner was aligning more with the west. Steiner gave lectures on “World Economy”, GA 340, in July-August 1922, and then returned to Oxford to communicate these results. By November, and the third trip to England that year, the occult movement that was watching Steiner closely, had decided it was time to demonstrate their opposition, and that is why the Goetheanum was burned down. They were sending a clear message to Steiner that his time was over, and yet, he continued on through 1923 and well into 1924. The link between Steiner and D.N. Dunlop of England, was seen as the threat of a new power source working for the good of the world, and it just had to be brought down in order to keep things regressive as a preparation for the second world war.

    The sad history of the anthroposophical movement after Steiner’s death proves all the more that resources should have continued to pour forth from the Centre to the West in order to build the World Power Conference envisioned by D. N. Dunlop. Steiner’s three trips to England in 1922 indicates his vision of the Threefold Light of the Sun working in the world on a practical level.

    1. Beautiful work my friend. Interesting that you should mention this connection with England & the West. Our Karma Study Group is just now reading in Vol 8 of Karmic Relationships of Steiner’s Summer School adventure to Tintangel with its relation to the power of King Arthur & the Knights of the Round table there on that wind swept fortress by the sea, & the Grail Castle with the Parsifal quest in the South (Spain). Trying to get the folks to see themselves in the 2 streams which must be merged within us all to bring harmony to our movement.

  2. I know what my vow will be – taken from Dante’s Inferno (XIX vs. 21): “let this be my seal, to undeceive all men.”

    Perhaps as a result of coming out of a period of such darkness as we’ve witnessed in these past four years, I’m hoping that we’ll witness the rising of the “Sun of Righteousness” that Malachi spoke of, just before the Mystery of Golgotha happened.

    Hoping that the time is ripe for the receiving of such “weighty and solemn truths” as Dr. Steiner stated in GA 211, Lecture 1: “Julian the Apostate declared that the Sun has three aspects: first, the aspect of the Earthly ether; secondly, the aspect of the light of heaven that is behind the Earthly ether, — which is the aspect also of the chemical, the warmth of fire, and the life forces; and lastly, the aspect of pure spiritual Being. For this he was put out of the way. And indeed it must be admitted that the moment had not yet come when mankind in general was ripe to receive such weighty and solemn truths.” For advancing this knowledge, Steiner tells us that Julian was removed.

    Paul also witnessed this solemn truth – from the same lecture: “for Paul beheld the Radiance, raying inwards from the clouds, of that force which is the Power of the Sun, the super-corporeal Being, the Christ, Who in the Mystery of Golgotha descended to Earth, — the Cosmic Godhead united with the forces of the Sun.” It is for this reason that Steiner says the Early Church Fathers knew more than is known today. We’ve lost that vision, that understanding, of the Sun – I hope the time has come when that vision is renewed.

    1. Les, this reminder of the 3 aspects of the Sun known to Julian the Apostate, really struck home for me, thank you.
      Interesting to see how timing is everything. what could not be received in Julian’s time was given to Paul who opens the way for us.

      1. Yes, it’s a concept that I’ll be ruminating over for a few days myself. Oh, and in hindsight I may have been a bit overzealous in stating my vow – I should have kept that to myself. Live and learn, I guess.

  3. ~ Did you take vows? What were they? Are you remembering to live into them? ~

    1. Yes!

    2. I know now why I tucked myself away for years. Protection, succor for my soul, for two decades. So that I could heal, and gain strength and understanding. So that I might step into the Ring. Now. At this time.

    What’s my Ring? Not a boxing ring. A Love Ring. A Circle of Love. A marriage vow. That’s my protection. That’s my guide, my teacher, my Love.

    I am never alone. She is with me always; is my constant, my every day, in every moment.

    3. Every day, in every moment, I sure try. 🙂

    1. Yes, the ring, the circle, the bell, the ouroboros, the resonance, the wedding ring on the finger that connects to the heart, the eternal embraced, held & protected…

Leave a Reply to Les Bonham Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.