7 August 2017 – Astro-Weather: The fixed date of the 2nd Harvest known as Lammas is popularly celebrated on August 1st or 2nd – but Today the Cross-Quarter of Lammas is exact –When the Sun reaches 15% of Leo – This day marks the actual midpoint between the Summer Solstice & the Autumnal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Full Moon of August is called The Corn or Sturgeon Moon (exact at 1:11 pm CDT). Bella Luna rises around sunset. Once it’s dark, try to see through the moonlight to find the Moon resting in the northeastern corner of the constellation Capricornus the Sea Goat. That’s where the Corn Moon always resides at this time of year.
When the Sun, Earth, & Moon line up in space, eclipses sometimes come in pairs. So, as everyone in North America readies for The Great American solar eclipse on August 21’st (occurring at new Moon), a partial lunar eclipse sneaks in just two weeks earlier – TODAY – at the preceding full Moon.
This glancing encounter with Earth’s core shadow, the umbra, takes nearly 2 hours from start to finish, visible from the Eastern Hemisphere.
The eclipse belongs to Saros 119 & is # 61 of 82 eclipses in the series. Each series typically lasts 12 to 13 centuries.
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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful flowers, what might not the heart become in the long journey towards the stars?”~ G K Chesterton
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James Christensen
POD (Poem Of the Day)
~Look, how
The charm is everywhere…
How it rests between the breath…
How it comes when called
Forth from chaos into purposeful hands,
Light to my feet
It fills my head with heat…
~hag
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Persian Scholar Al-Biruni (C.E. 973-1048)
Taking into consideration what we talked about from the research of Rudolf Steiner in yesterday’s Blog offering, it is important to be as conscious as possible today during the Lunar eclipse, which is working to attract, & bring to the surface, our lowest, animalistic urges & unconscious impulses.
Today when the Earth comes between the Sun & Moon, we can picture the shadow that moves over the moon as being an assemblage of the human shadow-self, acting as a magnet for the adversarial powers.
Knowing that the spiritual significance of a lunar eclipse exists for this purpose, we can use this opportunity to bring our shadow self to light – to recognize our responsibility to make conscious what is usually in the dark – to bring healing & integration to our souls.
This is an important step toward the work we are called to do during the solar eclipse.
We must recognize that this build-up of shadow-forces, culled from human beings today, will be part of what is released into the spiritual world at the time of the solar eclipse. Could the adversarial beings be using these dark forces to bring about a 3rd crucifixion? The 1st Mystery of Golgotha was on the physical realm, the 2nd occurred in the etheric realm – let me explain:
Steiner tells us, that after the 1st Mystery of Golgotha, The Christ united with the Earth, no longer in an individual physical body, He can be recognized in a being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels. Kind of hard to imagine, but think back to that clue from the Old Testament: ‘And the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses’/ Steiner says: ‘As an angel, Christ could always be found by those who were clairvoyant…In this angel form, He has always been united with evolution’. Steiner doesn’t say so directly, but it makes me think of the connection with the Nathan Soul, the Angel Being he worked with in the Pre-Earthy Deeds – the original Adam Kadmon – that pure, innocent soul part which separated off from Adam, the 1st Human, before the fall.
Through the coming of this new age of Michael, humanity can gradually begin to understand all that the Christ Impulse signifies. It wasn’t possible to really understand it before this. For instance starting in the 16th century thru the beginning of the 19th Century, when influences were coming in from the spiritual world from the Archangel Gabriel to bring modern science, there also entered into humanity a very materialistic world view that was antagonistic to spiritual insights. So more & more, as human beings passed into the spiritual worlds at the gate of death, they brought with them these materialistic ideas, which were polluting these higher realms & which prevented their souls from taking up fortifying spiritual influences for their next lives. Because of this another sacrifice was needed.
So, Steiner tells us, Christ, who had taken on the outer form of this Angelic Being, suffered an ‘extinction of consciousness’, as a result of the opposing forces that had been brought into the spiritual worlds by these materialistic souls who had passed thru the gate of death. These ‘seeds of earthly materialism’ which were increasingly carried into the spiritual world & which caused more & more darkness, built, what Steiner calls, the ‘black sphere of materialism.’ Christ took this black sphere into His Angelic being, for the purpose of transforming it- putting into action the Manichean principle that takes on evil in order to redeem it. This black sphere caused a ‘death by suffocation’ for the Angel Being in which the Christ is manifesting himself since the Mystery of Golgotha.
This sacrifice by Christ in the 19th century is comparable to the sacrifice on the physical plane through the Mystery of Golgotha & can be called the 2nd crucifixion of Christ, on the etheric plane. This spiritual death by suffocation, which brought about the extinction of consciousness in the Angelic Being, is a repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha in the etheric.
It took place to make possible a revival of the Christ consciousness, which wasn’t accessible to human souls on earth at the time of the original Mystery of Golgotha. This revival makes it possible for humanity to gain clairvoyant vision starting in the 20th century. So what was lost in the way of consciousness by humanity in the individuation process brought on by the necessity of modern science, will arise again as a new form of clairvoyant vision.
Steiner names the starting date as 1933. The 2nd World War with its Nazism tried to cover this revelation up.
It was for the sake of humanity that this Being suffered an extinction of consciousness in the etheric world, so that thru this sacrifice humanity could gain a resurrection of consciousness that will lead us to perceive the Etheric Christ.
And so the question I am living with today is: Does this series of eclipses point to another “black sphere of materialism” that could cause an extinction of Christ’s astral body? And what does that mean? Will that sacrifice bring a sea-change in human consciousness as the others have?
In this time of the Consciousness Soul, human beings we are called to actively participate in this cosmic & earthly event, in awakened consciousness.
Holding the light in love
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The Central Regional Council is hosting a Bridging to the ‘Great American Eclipse’ in St. Louis – August 19-22, 2017
