~The Lady of Shalott by William Holman Hunt
One of my ongoing Life Questions has to do with understanding Karmic Relationships. So I was excited to jump into this Steiner lecture given on this day in 1906. It is full of the mystery wisdom seen in the Evolution of Human Consciousness – the awareness of our progressive internal & external existence, & is worth the read.
AT THE GATES OF SPIRITUAL SCIENCE, GA 95, lecture 8. Good and Evil. Individual Karmic Questions. 29 August 1906, Stuttgart
“…What does occult science have to say about the origin of conscience? How did such an inner voice come into being?..
Conscience is the outcome of experiences spread over a number of incarnations…it has come into being as a result of trial and error…
A motive such as conscience binds itself to the etheric body, becoming in time a permanent characteristic of it because the astral body has been so often convinced that this or that would not do.
Another interesting karmic relationship is between an habitually selfish attitude and a loving sympathy with others. Some people are hardened egoists — not only in their acquisitiveness — and others are unselfish and sympathetic. Both attitudes depend on the etheric body and may even find expression in the physical body. People who in one life have been habitually selfish will age quickly in their next life; they seem to shrivel up. On the other hand, if in one life you have been ready to make sacrifices and have loved others, you will remain young and hale. In this way you can prepare even the physical body for the next life.
Fabre d’Olivet, who has investigated the origins of the Book of Genesis, once used a beautiful simile, comparing destiny with a natural process. The valuable pearl, he says, derives from an illness: it is a secretion of the oyster, so that in this case life has to fall sick in order to produce something precious. In the same way, physical illnesses in one life reappear in the next life as physical beauty. Either the physical body becomes more beautiful as a result of the illness it endured; or it may be that an illness a man has caught from infection in his environment is compensated by the beauty of his new environment.
Beauty thus develops, karmically, out of pain, suffering, privation and illness. This may seem a startling connection, but it is a fact. Even the appreciation of beauty develops in this way: there can be no beauty in the world without pain and suffering and illness. The same general law holds for the history of man’s evolution. You will see from this how wonderful karmic relationships really are, and how questions about evil, illness and pain cannot be answered without knowledge of the important inner relationships within the evolution of humanity.
What is inward has to become outward, and man will rise still higher when his karma has worked itself out. With all this something of extraordinary interest is connected. Centuries ago, with the future development of humanity in view, secret Orders which set themselves the highest conceivable tasks were established. One such Order was the Manichean…
The power to effect this change will bring about a condition of moral holiness on Earth. But this can be achieved only if the evil has first come into existence; then the power needed to overcome the evil will yield a power that can reach the heights of holiness.
A field has to be treated with manure and the manure has to ferment in the soil; similarly, humanity needs the manure of evil in order to attain to the highest holiness. And herein lies the mission of evil.
A man’s muscles get strong by use; and equally, if good is to rise to the heights of holiness, it must first overcome the evil which opposes it. The task of evil is to promote the ascent of man. Things such as this give us a glimpse into the secret of life.
Later on, when man has overcome evil, he can go on to redeem the creatures he has thrust down, and at whose cost he has ascended. That is the purpose of evolution…
If you do not look beyond the physical world of the senses, you will never understand illness, or the mission of evil. In all such relationships there is a deep meaning. Evolution had to take its course in this way, through a process of splitting off, because man was to become an inward being; he had to put all this out of himself in order that he might be able to see his own self.
So we can come to understand the mission of illness, of evil, and even of the external world. We are led to these great interconnections by studying the law of karma…” ~Rudolf Steiner
29 August 2023 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Tonight is the Eve of the Full Blue (2nd full moon this month) Sturgeon Moon. Both Saturn & Bella Luna are at opposition, so they shine together
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
“History, historical life, will only be seen in the right light when a true consciousness of the connection between the so-called living with the so-called dead can be developed” – The Living and the Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 5th February, 1918
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
33 – Beheading of John the Baptist
“If we pass on to the sixth chapter of Mark we hear fully described how King Herod had John the Baptist beheaded. The tortured conscience of Herod arouses a strange foreboding in him. When he hears all that has occurred through Christ Jesus he says, “John, whom I beheaded, has been restored to life!” Herod feels that, though the physical personality of John had gone away, he is now all the more present! He feels that his atmosphere, his spirituality — which was none other than the spirituality of Elijah, is still there. His tormented conscience causes him to be aware that John the Baptist, that is, Elijah, is still there.
~hag
But then something strange happens. We are shown how, after John the Baptist had met his physical death, Christ Jesus came to the very neighborhood where John had worked. I want you to take particular notice of a remarkable passage and not to skim over it lightly, for the words of the Gospels are not written for rhetorical effect, nor journalistically. Something very significant is said here. Jesus Christ appears among the throng of followers and disciples of John the Baptist, and this fact is expressed in a sentence to which we must give careful attention: “And as Jesus came out He saw a great crowd,” by which could be meant only the disciples of John, “and He had compassion on them …” (Mark 6:34.) Why compassion? Because they had lost their master, they were there without John, whose headless corpse we are told had been carried to his grave. But even more precisely is it said, “for they were like sheep who had lost their shepherd. And He began to teach them many things.” It cannot be indicated any more clearly how He teaches John’s disciples. He teaches them because the spirit of Elijah, which is at the same time the spirit of John the Baptist, is still active among them. Thus it is again indicated with dramatic power in these significant passages of the Mark Gospel how the spirit of Christ Jesus entered into what had been prepared by the spirit of Elijah-John. Even so this is only one of the main points, around which many other significant things are grouped.
I will now call your attention to one thing more. I have several times pointed out how this spirit of Elijah or John continued to act in such a way as to impress its impulses into world history. I have often mentioned that the soul of Elijah-John appeared again in the painter Raphael. This is one of those facts that call attention to the metamorphoses of souls that take place under the impetus given by the Mystery of Golgotha. Because it was also necessary that in the post-Christian era such a soul should work in Raphael through the medium of a single personality; what in ancient times was so comprehensive and world encompassing now appears in such a different personality as that of Raphael. Can we not feel that the aura that hovered round Elijah-John is also present in Raphael? That in Raphael there were such similarities to these two others that we could even say that this element was too great to be able to enter into a single personality but hovered round it, so that the revelations received by this personality seemed like an illumination? Such was indeed the case with Raphael!” ~Rudolf Steiner, Gospel of Mark: Lecture 3
Saturday 23 September 2023
Community Prep-Stir / Potluck / Bon-fire
*Autumnal Equinox
*Yom Kippur
*Michaelmas Festival
6 – 8 pm at the Lucchesi-Archer-Ginsberg domicile
Please Bring Food & Drink to share, & a jar for the prep
30 September 2023 – Michaelmas Festival & Zinniker Farm Day
Greetings,
word eunuchs in the bible!….. the final restricting word.e.g.
But he said to them, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”
—Matthew 19:11–12
Condition of the Moral holiness in the world e.g.
The power to effect this change will bring about a condition of moral holiness on Earth. But this can be achieved only if the evil has first come into existence; then the power needed to overcome the evil will yield a power that can reach the heights of holiness.
A field has to be treated with manure and the manure has to ferment in the soil; similarly, humanity needs the manure of evil in order to attain to the highest holiness. And herein lies the mission of evil.
A man’s muscles get strong by use; and equally, if good is to rise to the heights of holiness, it must first overcome the evil which opposes it. The task of evil is to promote the ascent of man. Things such as this give us a glimpse into the secret of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch
pelvic diaphragm .ascending aorta..most difficult one awakening..Anima..
namaste,mkyogi
We know that quite soon after the beheading of John the Baptist that he began to work from the outside as the Elijah-John stream in support of Christ. The first Act was the feeding of the five thousand, which is the fourth Miracle, and took place at the penultimate Passover event. This was enabled as a recapitulation of Elijah’s first appearance in 1 Kings, chapter 17, when Elijah feeds the widow of Zarephath at the time of a famine. Thus, John continues to live spiritually after the beheading, and becomes the Folk Soul of the Twelve for the awakening of the faculty of clairvoyance while they slept and dreamed.
24 Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” 1 Kings 17
24 And He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a great famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. Luke 4
40 And He went away again beyond the Jordan to the place where John was first baptizing, and He was staying there. 41 Many came to Him and were saying, “While John performed no sign, yet everything John said about this man was true.” 42 Many believed in Him there. John 10
24 This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true. John 21
“The eternity of individual man confronts us as the consciousness of the people. And it seems as though while the body of the people is sinking to its destruction, its soul continues as a soul seed in an entirely new form. Where is this soul to be found?
This Elijah-soul is at the same time the soul of the Old Testament people, as it enters the Baptist and lives in him. When he was imprisoned and then beheaded by Herod, what happened then to his soul? This we have already indicated. His soul left the body and worked on as an aura; and into the domain of this aura Christ Jesus entered. Where then is the soul of Elijah, the soul of John the Baptist? The Mark Gospel indicates this clearly enough. The soul of John the Baptist, of Elijah, becomes the group soul of the Twelve; it lives, and continues to live in the Twelve. We can say that it is artistically and pictorially shown in a remarkable manner how the teaching of Christ Jesus, his way of teaching, differed when he taught the crowd and when he taught his own individual disciples — and this, even before the Mark Gospel has told us of the death of John the Baptist. We have already spoken of this. However, a change takes place when the soul of Elijah is freed from John the Baptist and works on further in the Twelve as a group soul. And this is indicated, for from this time onward — this is quite clear if we read the passage and reread it — Christ makes greater demands on His disciples than before. He calls upon them to understand higher things. And it is very remarkable what He expects them to understand, and what later on He reproaches them for not understanding. Read it in the Gospel just as it is written. I have already referred to one aspect of these events, namely that mention was made of an increase of bread when Elijah went to the widow at Zarephath, and how, when the soul of Elijah was freed from John the Baptist, again an increase of bread is reported. But now Christ Jesus demands of His disciples that they should understand in particular the meaning of this increase of bread. Before that time He had not spoken to them in such terms. Now they ought to understand what was the destiny of John the Baptist after he had been beheaded through Herod, what happened in the case of the feeding of the five thousand when the fragments of bread were collected in twelve baskets, and what happened when the four thousand were fed from seven loaves and the fragments were collected in seven baskets. So He said to them:
“Do you notice and understand nothing? Are your souls still in the darkness? You have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear, and you do not think of what I did. I broke the five loaves for the five thousand. How many baskets of the fragments did you gather?” They answered, “Twelve.”
“And when seven loaves were divided among four thousand, how many basketsful of fragments did you gather?” And they answered, “Seven.”
Then he said to them, “Do you still not understand?” (Mark 8:17-21.)
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA139/English/AP1986/19120920p01.html
Steve – Wow, Thank you for opening this portal.
You ask: Where is this soul to be found?
I think about this & it seems to me the work of the Conscious Soul with its opportunity to individuate, so that we can come together in freedom, turning the social challenges that accompany the path, into an opportunity, to willingly cultivate a new kind of Human Group Soul – Each Higher “I” united with the Higher “I” of the other in Christ.
The Elijah-soul, like John the Baptist, prepared the Way. And now we can add the Holy Spirit Aspect as seen in The Divine Sophia, & her son Michael who holds for us the countenance of Christ. We also have other spiritual allies in the building of this realm – this new Christic Group- Soul, this Divine Egregore, as close as Anthroposophia, & beyond…
But really, it’s up to us to come together or not, in this ‘aura’, as Steiner calls it here.
He also says in your quote: “Christ makes greater demands on His disciples than before. He calls upon them to understand higher things.”
Yep, we are called to take on more responsibility.
To understand the clue Steiner is giving us in this quote we must look back at Elijah:
1st he is fed by the Ravens (a name for a stage of initiation)
We also know the ‘The Widow’ has esoteric connotations to great initiates.
Elijah and the Widow at Zarephath
7 Some time later the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land. 8 Then the word of the LORD came to him: 9 “Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.” 10 So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, “Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?” 11 As she was going to get it, he called, “And bring me, please, a piece of bread.”
12 “As surely as the LORD your God lives,” she replied, “I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it—and die.”
13 Elijah said to her, “Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. 14 For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.’”
15 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. 16 For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah…
17 Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. 18 She said to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”
19 “Give me your son,” Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. 20 Then he cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?” 21 Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!”
22 The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. 23 Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, “Look, your son is alive!”
24 Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.”
So we see here this individuality (that Steiner denotes as Elijah, John the Baptist, (the Group-Soul of the Apostles), The painter Raphael, & the poet Novalis…) as the precursor, preparing the way for the Christ to perform these same deeds at a higher octave – the New Sacrament for all, & turning Death into Life…
How can we work with this?
The numbers are important pointers to the mystery.
The 5000
5 loaves (the # of the human Being)
12 baskets (Space – The Divine Hierarchies in the Constellations of the fixed Stars of the Zodiac)
4000
7 (7-fold Human being
7 (Time – The Planetary Beings of the Wandering Stars)
When we can awaken to our Life-Body we can consciously tune into the abundance of the Universe, not just for ourselves as seen in the past with Elijah/JB, but now our formative forces must be able to feed others…
That is a great benefit of being in the New Christic Group-Soul. We can heal each other by adding our good leaven to shape & share in the bread of Life.
It is good for us to be talking about this, and especially the place where Christ appears to be scolding the disciples for not understanding about the meaning of the feeding of the five thousand, and then the four thousand. Your encapsulation is noteworthy. These miracles, as they occurred, demonstrate the power of the Elijah-Elisha stream from the OT now working under the auspices of the beheaded Baptist for the NT at the time of Christ.
In Luke, chapter 4, we have a very peculiar instance in which Jesus takes Christ to his hometown of Nazareth, and introduces Him in the synagogue. Jesus opens the Book of Isaiah to chapter 61, and reads:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”
20 And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. 21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 And all were speaking well of Him, and wondering at the gracious words which were falling from His lips; and they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” 23 And He (Christ) said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me, ‘Physician, heal yourself! Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 And He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a great famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff. 30 But passing through their midst, He went His way. Luke 4
This seems very much like what Christ accomplished with the feeding of the five thousand, with an eye to the widow at the famine, and the feeding of the four thousand, with an eye to the afflicted Syrian. In other words, the Astral Body, and Etheric Body, respectively. Both of these bodies need to become Christophoric.
Today, we have the principles and practices of Anthroposophy, and by extension, Psychosophy and Pneumatosophy. We can feed the five thousand and four thousand as an inner practice of the Etheric Christ experience.
Thrillbumps, Yes, Thank you…
I thought to share this from NOVALIS ‘s SOURCES OF INSPIRATION
~Sergei O Prokofieff ( Part 1 )
…Before we find the spiritual inspirations of the individuality of Novalis, it is necessary that we consider his life’s path and the spiritual foundations of his biography from a particular viewpoint which has been given much weight in our present studies.
This viewpoint, which has served as a key to the understanding of the many secrets associated with his karmic biography, is the Hierarchic one, which has led us to a knowledge of the inspirational sources of the life and work of this individuality in his last and in his previous incarnations.
As a point of departure we may take the aspiration, to which we have frequently referred, of the individuality of Adam for his “heavenly archetype”, for the Nathan Soul, as aspiration which, however, acquired the actual forms for its fulfilment only after this individuality had, as John the Baptist, participated in the events of the Turning-Point of Time. These “actual forms” whereby the Adam individuality gradually approached his heavenly archetype appeared initially in a more outward fashion.
The ancient karma that had connected John the Baptist with Jesus of Nazareth, with the Nathan Soul who now incarnated on Earth for the first time, was renewed through their childhood friendship, and therefore through their many meetings and conversations with one another.
Here we have, so to speak, the first stage, of their “drawing near to each other” on the physical plane. The next and more spiritual stage of this process was, the permeation of the etheric body of Raphael by the imprint of the etheric body of the Nathan Soul which had been preserved in the higher worlds. Finally, the third stage in this development was the further, and more inward, approach of this individuality, now in the person of the poet Novalis, to its ideal — the Nathan Soul who abides in the spiritual worlds.
In the case of the latter, this new, spiritual stage was expressed in that, as he was preparing for his incarnation on the Earth at the end of the eighteenth century, be received into his astral body, or to be more precise into his intellectual or mind soul, an imprint of the astral body of the Nathan Soul which had been preserved in the higher worlds.
“When we read the “Fragments” of Novalis, and give ourselves up to the life that flows so abundantly in them, we can discover the secret of the deep impression they make on us. Whatever we have before us in immediate sense-reality, whatever the eye can see and recognise as beautiful — all this, through the magic idealism that lives in the soul of Novalis, appears in his poetry with a well-nigh heavenly splendour. The meanest and simplest material thing — with the magic idealism of his poetry he can make it live again in all its spiritual light and glory.
And so we see in Novalis a radiant and splendid forerunner of that Michael stream which is now to lead you all, my dear friends, while you live; and then, after you have gone through the gate of death, you will find in the spiritual super-sensible worlds all those others — among them also the being of whom I have been speaking to you today — all those with whom you are to prepare the work that shall be accomplished at the end of the century, and that shall lead mankind past the great crisis in which it is involved.
This work is: to let the Michael Power and the Michael Will penetrate the whole of life. The Michael Power and the Michael Will are none other than the Christ Will and the Christ Power, going before in order to implant in the right way into the Earth the Power of the Christ. If this Michael Power is able verily to overcome all that is of the demon and the dragon [and you will know what that is], if you all, who have in this way received in the light Michael Thought, have indeed received it with true and faithful heart and with tender love, and will endeavour to go forward from the Michael mood of this year, until not only is the Michael Thought revealed in your soul, but you are able also to make the Michael Thought live in your deeds in all its strength and all its power — if this is so, then will you be true servants of the Michael Thought, worthy helpers of what has now to enter Earth-evolution through Anthroposophy, and take its place there in the meaning of Michael.”
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA238/English/Singles/19240928p01.html
so inspiring
How do we reconcile in any other way that John returns to facilitate the raising of Lazarus as Soul and Spirit? Christ Himself becomes Folk Soul of the Twelve for the time remaining at Ephraim.
“When we look back into olden times, we see rise up before us within the traditions of Judaism the prophetic figure of Elijah. We know what significance the prophet Elijah had for the people of the Old Testament, and therewith for all mankind; we know how he set before them the goal and destiny of their existence. And we have shown how in the course of time the being who was present in Elijah appeared again at the very most important moment of human evolution, appeared again so that Christ Jesus Himself could give him the Initiation he was to receive for the evolution of mankind. For the being of Elijah appeared again in Lazarus-John — who are in truth one and the same figure, as you will have understood from my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact.”
The Last Address, 28 September 1924
The Last Address is an invitation to find the successor to Novalis in The Individualities of Elijah, John, Raphael, Novalis, with an eye to the Emissary of the Cosmic Intelligence Itself. As such, Rudolf Steiner spoke very mysteriously about himself when he revealed at the outset of the 1900’s that a Master stood above him, and was guiding his life. He said that the revealing of the identity of this Master came by way of a series of emissaries going back to his early childhood, who encouraged his progress in cultivating the exact clairvoyant faculty needed to bring forth Anthroposophy.
When Sergei Prokofieff brings forth such revelations in his book, “Eternal Individuality”, about Raphael the painter, and Novalis, the poet, and their relation to the Nathan Jesus, it helps give another clue to identifying Rudolf Steiner’s own perceived “Master”. The Nathan Jesus was someone that Steiner also aspired to understand fully, and especially after 1912.