Hearts Learn

Zosia Nowak

Listen: ‘I Think Speech’ podcast

In writing the pageant & preparing for Building the Temple of the Heart’ – our 2021 ASA annual conference & members meeting co-hosted by the Central Regional Council, I came across again this meditation which Rudolf Steiner gave to Ita Wegman on his 63rd birthday, which I used a lot when the CRC was working with the theme of karma:

Hearts interpret Karma
When hearts learn to read
The Word,
Which creates in
Human Life;
When hearts learn to
Speak the Word
Which creates in
The Human Being

It reminds me that when Heart-Thinking has truly been activated, spirit knowledge is gathered thru the rhythmic center, not the nerve sense system of the head, which disregards the subjective as well as the feeling life where the Word resounds.

Starting now, & in the future, in union with the Wisdom of Anthroposophia, human hearts become more & more consciously connected to the same Divine spiritual forces that helped create humanity in the beginnings of time. This prepares US to become creators – builders of a new reality.

It has become possible for souls connected to Sophia/Michael to be engaged in a willed schooling of initiation – opening the portal to enter into closer communion with the etheric Christ. It is our evolutionary aim that our Anthroposophical training will lead to heart-knowledge, & that the etheric-eye-of-the-heart will become an organ of cognition.

This is made clear from the Michael-Letters:

“Hearts begin to have thoughts; that is the new way of thinking with the heart.”

“The newly developed heart-organ slowly transforms into an eye, or better, a sensing-heart-eye-organ.”

“Everyone who strives in the light of spiritual science and connects themselves with the creative World-Logos through heartfelt thoughts, sooner or later will learn to read Karma. By doing so we add to the substance of the etheric-youth or angel-being through which the etheric Christ reveals Himself today.”

 “The Christ-force imprints human imaginations into the cosmic ether.”

 “That which the human being experiences as strength of conscious imagination becomes world content.”

For those that strive to be spiritually active pupils in the Michaelic stream, the heart becomes, not only an eye for self-cognition, allowing us to truly ‘Know Thyself– in the realization of the Higher Self as an eternal being; it also becomes the eye-of-the-Ego-sense, the True ‘I’ – which perceives the ‘other’ in their true being – & an eye of cognition for supersensible beings, & for the etheric Christ.

Protected, cherished & supported in the True Michaelic Mystery-Culture of Will, we join in community with other light workers to ‘Build the Temple of the Heart’ –making it possible to perceive our chain of karma.

From doing the 10:10 Thought-Seed Meditation, I feel more & more that as our heart-sense becomes a cognitive organ; it is as if our heart is being transplanted into the Sun. I feel the Sun is within me, & that we are shining out with it. The Sun becomes an eye, an ear, as well as our organ of warmth. “We stand within the light, we touch spirit-beings with our light-organs.” Then we not only feel part of the Sun, we perceive ourselves “on the other side of the Sun”. * This then allows us to experience the whole universe within our being. And we become the center point for the joining of the Earth with the Sun.

Dear friends, there is a powerful esoteric call for us to support the creation of a New Sun-Earth. This is how the secret of the Grail can be revealed – as Christian Morgenstern says:  “I lift my heart to you as a true vessel of the Grail …”* It is an experience of being totally imbued with the Spirit of eternity which fills the receiving soul of the Grail at the Sun-altar. Here Spirit, & the Soul Forces of Thinking, Feeling & Willing, unite. This is the Sophianic / Michaelic reality that we can build – a Temple in the New Jerusalem of the Heart.

See you there

Until soon

Blessings and Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

*GA 212

The position of Mercury and the Moon on July 8, 2021
astronomy.org

8 July 2021 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Eve of the New Moon. Bella Luna passes north of Mercury at midnight. Both are level with each other above the horizon as they rise in Taurus, an hour before sunrise.

When we look up into the starry heavens, the feeling of our soul’s home awakens in us. The feeling awakens: Before you came down to earth to a new incarnation you yourself were in those stars, and out of the stars, the moral law was imparted to you”. ~Rudolf Steiner

Lilly Zimm

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day (RSarchives) 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY (Rudolf Steiner’s original Calendar of the Soul; The Present Age, Wikipedia)

Feast day of Aquila & Priscilla, Companions of the Apostle Paul. When Paul came to Corinth (probably in the year 50), he met them as tentmakers who had just arrived from Rome, because the Emperor Claudius had recently expelled the Jewish community. They all went together to Ephesus. Aquila & Priscilla are mentioned six times in the New Testament (Acts 18:2,18,26; Romans 16:3; 1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Timothy 4:19), & the reader will note that in the odd-numbered mentions, Aquila’s name comes first, while in the even-numbered mentions, Priscilla’s comes first, as if to emphasize that they are being mentioned on equal terms.

Feast day of Saint Kilian an Irish missionary bishop & the Apostle of Bavaria. He was beheaded with 2 of his companions. Their skulls, inlaid with precious stones, have been preserved to this day. On St Kilian’s day, a glass case containing the three skulls is removed from a crypt, paraded through the streets before large crowds, & put on display in Würzburg Cathedral (dedicated to Kilian).

1099 – Some 15,000 starving Christian soldiers begin the siege of Jerusalem which took place from June 7 to July 15, 1099 during the First Crusade

1579 – Our Lady of Kazan, a holy icon of the Russian Orthodox Church, is discovered underground in the city of Kazan, Tatarstan

1625 – Birthday of Giovanni Domenico Cassini, an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer & engineer. Cassini discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn & noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him.

1730 – A magnitude 8.7 earthquake causes a tsunami that damages more than 1,000 of Chile’s coastline, death toll unknown

1822 – Deathday of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the major English Romantic poets, one of the most influential. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political & social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets & writers that included Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, & his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin.

Shelley’s theories of economics & morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx; his early—perhaps first—writings on nonviolent resistance influenced both Leo Tolstoy & Mahatma Gandhi. Henry David Thoreau‘s Civil Disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley’s writings and theories on non-violence in protest and political action.

Shelley became a lodestone to the subsequent three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian & Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Upton Sinclair & Isadora Duncan. Shelley’s popularity and influence has continued to grow in contemporary poetry circles.

St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is a Gothic horror novella written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1810 was published anonymously as “by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford” while the Shelley was an undergraduate. The main character is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who encounters Ginotti, an alchemist of the Rosicrucian or Rose Cross Order who seeks to impart the secret of immortality.

1831 – Birthday of John Pemberton, chemist & pharmacist, invented Coca-Cola

1838 – Birthday of Eli Lilly, chemist, & businessman, founded Eli Lilly a global pharmaceutical company

1838 – Birthday of Ferdinand von Zeppelin German general & businessman, founded the Zeppelin Airship Company

1839 – Birthday of John D. Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil Company

1876 – White supremacists kill five Black Republicans in Hamburg, South Carolina

1908 – Birthday of Nelson Rockefeller, 41st Vice President of the United States

1926 – Birthday of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross a Swiss-American psychiatrist, pioneer in near-death studies & the author of the groundbreaking book ‘On Death & Dying’ where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief

Today, 89 years ago, on 8 July 1932, Biodynamic champion Hugh Courtney, was born in the Heartland of Chicago, my hometown. He now spiritualizes the Earth from across the Threshold. (15 June 2020)

7 thoughts on “Hearts Learn

  1. Another important dynamic in your formulation for the conference would be the actual activity of the rhythmic center itself; the Feeling Soul. Michael’s new yoga of “Will”, as expressed by Rudolf Steiner here, would have Thinking, Feeling, and Willing arrayed in the three segments of a perfect lemniscate. Upper loop represents Thinking, or the objective self, contained in thought. Lower loop represents Willing, or the subjective self, which ‘wills’ in still unconscious depths. As such, Thinking and Willing are a polarity. They cannot meet each other directly.

    Now, it is in the middle, where the dot resides, separating the upper loop of objective Thinking, and the lower loop of subjective Willing, that the Feeling Soul works to send its rhythmic forces of heart and lungs, respiration, and circulation of fluids both upwards and downwards in an active dynamic. This is what stands to yoke Thinking and Willing as a united and conscious activity. Yes, the heart-centered rhythmic system in the middle. This leads to etheric regeneration as a necessary step in the goal of astral projection. Of course, by astral projection, I mean concrete chakra development, which spiritual science certainly supports. It is the etheric body that has to be rebuilt today because it has undergone the most radical revision in supporting a mineralized physical body into density. We need to breathe it back into its former robust form, and this is done through the fire element.

    https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/MissMich/19191130p01.html

    1. Thank you I will present this to the eurythmist, i love the idea of doing a lemniscate as part of the movement linking the soul forces.
      Bless you

      1. I have experimented on this practice for many years. I used to walk and run hills with the meditation of the Feeling Soul standing between Thinking and Willing. The constant impulse coming from the heart-centered middle was the incessant beat to link these two polar opposites. The Feeling Soul breathes the Etheric Body in such a way as to achieve a new resurrection. It works! Fire is the cause, effect, and result. My practice of eurythmy was also a kind of yoga of will, with much voluntary suffering. Lucifer has to be extracted from the true Ego. To consciously suffer for it makes it possible.

  2. This mantram, this meditation was and is very important for, very dear to me. Rudolf Steiner gave Ita this mantram, as you write, on his 63rd birthday. He wrote it on a portrait photo of himself and signed it with
    To my Mysa
    27 February 1924
    Rudolf Steiner

    I would like to say something about the German text and the translation. It is so difficult, actually impossible, to translate the tone, the mood in the language. This English translation is absolutely correct and yet I feel a difference.
    If you translate the first line from English back into German: Hearts interpret Karma it is in German Herzen interpretieren das Karma.
    What s the difference between Herzen interpretieren das Karma and Rudolf Steiner s words Es deuten die Herzen das Karma. Grammar and word order is much more flexible in German than in English. Rudolf Steiner often changes the normal sentence order in German so we have to read more slowly, so new emphases, focal points emerge. In this mantram, there is an emphasis on the verbs, on the process being described, not on the nouns. The word “deuten” of course can be tranlslated “interpret”, but there is also something vague in it. When you interpret a horoscope it is not exactly this and not that, “deuten” thus has elements of explain, decipher, elucidate.

    The shape or form, of the poem in German is:

    Hearts interpret Karma
    When hearts learn
    to read The Word,
    Which in Human Life
    Creates;
    When hearts learn to
    Speak the Word
    Which in The Human Being
    Creates”

    There is an inversion in the word order in German which seems important to me:
    learn to read and to speak learn (which is not possible to say in English) so in the first part the focus is on “learn” and in the second on “speak”, begin to learn to speak.

    So when you meditate, ponder this mantra it s good to raise it into a sphere of softness, fluid, etheric, away from plain and easy and fixed.
    I love this mantra so much, it has helped me so much, that I wanted to share these thoughts with you.
    Ottmar

    1. Thank you Ottmar, that is very enlightening. We may use this poem for our speech work in the conference. if so would you recommend changing the 1st line to read: Hearts elucidate Karma…?

      1. Dear Hazel, my mother tongue is German and so I cannot say with certainty what resonates in the words “interpret” or “elucidate”, what connotations are associated with them, what emotional qualities. I think one can certainly leave “interpret”. Just don’t think that “interpret” means a 100 per cent clear, definitive interpretation. To interpret or interpretation does not mean a final interpretation; there is always room for further, complementary interpretations.
        Rudolf Steiner said that in translations, e.g. from the New Testament into a modern language, one should not primarily translate word for word, but that starting from the source language one must first arrive at the spiritual content and then express this spiritual content in the new language. And this is best done by people in their mother tongue and people who are good with the language, e.g. poets. Actually, a translation is a new creation in the other language. Now German and English are not that far apart and Rudolf Steiner’s texts are not that old either.
        This mantra can be found in CW 40 (the German complete edition is available on the internet), but it can also be found in Vol. 4 of Emanuel Zeylmans van Emmichoven’s biography of Ita Wegmann, in the volume Erkraftung des Herzens, Strenthening of the Heart. There is a facsimile of the photo with a small commentary. So something happens in the heart three times, 3 rhythms emanate from the heart, interpret – read – speak.
        I wish you to live with this mantra for a while. The content is very deep and at the same time this mantra is a door opener to understanding karma.
        Ottmar

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