Stand Fast-See Far

Yes, Friends, I often look back – to see where I stand now – & to get a clue of how to go forward. Today’s Inspiring quote which touches on themes from the Affect Change post, is from the contents of the Esoteric Lessons, given in Stuttgart, by Rudolf Steiner on this day 17 September in 1917, the anniversary of the Deathday of Hildegard of Bingen, “the Sybil of the Rhine”.

“It’s very important for modern people to get a strong dose of esoteric life. Plagues, epidemics and wars would rage among men in a terrible way if the wise masters hadn’t decided to give mankind a deepening in the spiritual realm….

Unfortunately often this egotistical age can’t make proper use of such high capacities…Even people who have reached a certain stage in esoteric training can’t stand certain truths. And yet these are the very highest truths, and your training will eventually enable to you to receive them….

~ Kinjal Gorakh

We speak of reincarnation and the law of karma. One can tell oneself: I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I can assume that it exists. I’ll act as if my assumption is true and wait to see what comes of it. A person who thinks and acts like this will make amazing discoveries. In everything that happens to them they will think: I caused this in a past life and now bear the consequences of my own deeds. If such a person unconsciously did something foolish and is punished for it, they’ll think: I’ll make myself aware of this foolishness, so that I can see that I was the one who brought on these ugly consequences. This is the real meaning of: Whoever hits you on the right cheek, turn the other one to them also.

Anyone who succeeds in looking for the cause of everything that hits them from outside, sees that it begins within oneself, has accomplished a great deal. One who does this will soon notice that it brings them forward, that they begin to loosen karmic chains and increasingly gets control of their life. Such a person treads their life’s path freely and surely.

One can verify all anthroposophical teachings in the same way. So let’s all try to bring ever more spirituality into life, and make the light and life that the great masters stream into us alive.

You should all realize that the battles anthroposophy and especially esotericism will have to fight with the outer world will get ever bigger. There it’s a matter of standing fast, my sisters and brothers, stand fast, as you look at your goal and at the great masters who stand by us.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Together with you

~hag

17 September 2023 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Look very low in the southwest in early evening twilight for the waxing crescent Moon. Can you see Spica twinkling to her lower right of the waxing curved sickle that is Bella Luna?

Then look for Comet Nishimura at perihelion. You have only a narrow time window between when twilight is still too bright and the comet gets too low and sets.

Art Can Win The War: Employing the Language of Humanity - Impakter
Ken Blancet

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience ~ Zbigniew Herbert

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

hildegard-von-bingen

1179 – Deathday of Hildegard of Bingen, “the Sybil of the Rhine” a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, & polymath.

She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama, the oldest surviving morality play. She wrote theological, botanical, & medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, & poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.  She is also noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.

Hildegard von Bingen - Visual Melt

Hildegard 1st saw “The Shade of the Living Light” at the age of three. Hildegard was hesitant to share her visions, but at the age of 42, Hildegard received instruction from God, to “write down that which you see and hear.” Still hesitant to record her visions, Hildegard became physically ill. The illustrations recorded in the book of Scivias were visions that Hildegard experienced, causing her great suffering: “But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, and by the witness of a certain noble maiden of good conduct [the nun Richardis von Stade] I set my hand to the writing. While I was doing it, I sensed, the deep profundity of scriptural exposition; and, raising myself from illness by the strength I received, I brought this work to a close – though just barely – in ten years. (…) And I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!’

Women Overcoming the Boundaries: Hildegard of Bingen's Mystical  Representation of the Porous Womb

Hildegard’s visions caused her to see humans as “living sparks” of God’s love.

On 17 September 1179, when Hildegard died, her sisters claimed they saw two streams of light appear in the skies & cross over the room where she was dying.

Pin on ART and Crafts

“Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around Him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.” ~Hildegard of Bingen

1787 – The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia

How Emperor Norton rose to power - SFChronicle.com

1859 – Joshua A. Norton declares himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States.” Born in England, Norton spent most of his early life in South Africa, he emigrated to San Francisco with an inheritance, but he lost his fortune investing in Peruvian rice & Norton’s public prominence faded. He reemerged to lay claim to the position of Emperor of the United States, & ‘Protector of Mexico’. He was treated deferentially in San Francisco, &currency issued in his name was honored in the establishments he frequented.

Though some considered him insane or eccentric, citizens of San Francisco celebrated his regal presence & his proclamations, such as his order that the United States Congress be dissolved by force & his numerous decrees calling for a bridge crossing connecting San Francisco to Oakland, &a corresponding tunnel to be built under San Francisco Bay.

At his funeral two days later, nearly 30,000 people packed the streets of San Francisco to pay homage. Norton has been immortalized as the basis of characters in the literature of writers Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christopher Moore, Maurice De Bevere, Selma Lagerlöf, & Neil Gaiman

Wright Brothers' First Fatal Airplane Crash

1908 – The Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright, with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge as passenger, crashes, killing Selfridge. He becomes the first airplane fatality

1916 –Manfred von Richthofen (“The Red Baron“), a flying ace of the German Luftstreitkräfte, wins his first aerial combat near Cambrai, France, in World War I

1928 – The Okeechobee hurricane strikes southeastern Florida, killing more than 2,500 people. It is the third deadliest natural disaster in United States history, behind the Galveston hurricane of 1900 & the 1906 San Francisco earthquake

1939 –The Soviet Union joins Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in World War II

1939 –German submarine U-29 sinks the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous in World War II

1948 – The Lehi, also known as the Stern gangassassinates Count Folke Bernadotte, who was appointed by the United Nations to mediate between the Arab nations & Israel. Lehi = “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” was a Zionist paramilitary organization founded by Avraham (“Yair”) Stern in Palestine. Its aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by force, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews & the formation of a Jewish state, a ‘new totalitarian Hebrew republic’

U.N. Renews Push to Solve Its Biggest Mystery: Hammarskjold's Death - The  New York Times

1961 – Deathday of Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish diplomat, economist, author & the second secretary-general of the United Nations. Soon after his appointment Hammarskjöld was interviewed on radio by Edward R. Murrow. In this talk he declared: “But the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics [Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroek] for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbours made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it.”

He was en route to negotiate a cease-fire on 18 September when his plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld & fifteen others died in the crash. The circumstances of the incident are still not clear. There is some evidence that suggests the plane was shot down. Göran Björkdahl (a Swedish aid worker) wrote in 2011 that he believed Dag Hammarskjöld’s 1961 death was a murder committed in part to benefit mining companies like Union Minière, after Hammarskjöld had made the UN intervene in the Katanga crisis. Björkdahl based his assertion on interviews with witnesses of the plane crash & on archival documents. Former U.S. President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”

camp-david-accords

1978 – The Camp David Accords brokered by President Jimmy Carter, is signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin

2001 – The New York Stock Exchange reopens for trading after the September 11 attacks, the longest closure since the Great Depression

2006 – Fourpeaked Mountain in Alaska erupts, marking the first eruption for the long-dormant volcano in at least 10,000 years

Occupy Wall Street 2.0: Protesters Go High-Tech - WSJ

2011 – Occupy Wall Street movement begins in Zuccotti Park, New York City

RUDOLF STEINER’S CALENDAR OF THE SOUL
translated (with added titles) by Roy Sadler

AUTUMN PRELUDE IV
The Fruit Of Will
v24
In constant self-creation
the soul grows self-aware;
the spirit of the world strives onward
in new self-knowledge re-enlivened,
creating from the darkness of the soul
the sense of selfhood’s harvest of the will.

MICHAELMAS IV
Michaelic Hope
v29
To have the inner fire
to kindle thinking’s radiance
and draw the meaning of experience
from worldwide spirit’s well of power
is now for me the summer’s heritage,
is autumn’s peace… and winter’s hope.

30 September 2023 –

Our Annual Michaelmas Festival & Zinniker Farm Day

Biodynamic preparation making and Michaelmas 2023 –

Food for Thought

The time for biodynamic preparation making is come up again very soon.
We will be making and burying the chamomile, yarrow and dandelion compost preparations. This offers hands on activity. We will be walking through grass and work in soil. Please dress accordingly and be ready to get dirty.

After the potluck join Hazel Archer-Ginsberg in an experiential activity at the bon-fire called: Food for Thought –

Bounty: What spiritual gifts have you harvested in your life so far this year?
Farewells: What no longer serves? What is over? Say good-bye and thank you.
Preserves: What will you keep as seed for the future?

Date: September 30th, 2023 at the Zinniker Farm
Time: 1:30pm, potluck dinner
Please bring a dish to share
Suggested donation: $15-25 for more info

16 thoughts on “Stand Fast-See Far

  1. I’ve always been drawn to Hildegard von Bingen, mostly because I had a similar experience when in the ER due to severe pain/inflammation in my knee. I passed out and saw (felt, too) what appeared to be very much what Hildegard depicts in her drawings. Probably the most incredible experience I’ve had in this life. It was a stark contrast to the pain I was feeling, and it was too incredible and beautiful to be able to do justice in any explanation or pictorial illustration. Nevertheless, it confirms that she is depicting something that is very Real.

    Something else that I somehow find pertinent, but not sure exactly how, is right there in her name ‘of Bingen’.

    Where is Bingen? It is on an intersection in of the Rhine. Steiner surely has much to say about the Rhine (or Ancient Rhine). There is something that is going on there that goes back to Atlantean times. I don’t know if Hildegard has anything to do with this, but I find it pertinent that the Spiritualisation of the elemental world is particularly potent in key geographical points. Well, Steiner surely points out the Rhine is one of them… and I suppose the Danube is another (ie… Gilgamesh). But even places that Native Americans viewed as sacred places, like the hill in which the museum (I think it is or maybe some other structure) is built in Philadelphia. At any rate, they saw it as whoever has the ‘hill’ has the power. The Lenapi said that, I think.

    At any rate, just an observation. So, the Rhine… these are interesting search results:

    https://rsarchive.org/Search.php?q=Rhine&type=keywords

    1. Hildegard had a vision that she was to build a convent there. She had to face much opposition from all fronts to make it happen. This is beautifully depicted in the movie of her life shared by mkyoni.
      I agree that there are many sacred vortex spots on the earth where the elemental powers are strong & can aid the gifts of those who can work with their energy.

      1. Hi Kyle,

        I remember how you reminded me of your conviction for Christ based on this experience, and even the Etheric Christ. This has been especially important for our efforts to corroborate. Then, we can tell others with greater confidence. The appreciation only increases as the “cup runneth over”.

    2. Thanks for sharing your experience KJ, it is a powerful example of how something like extreme pain can take us out of ourseleves, allowing us to see the spiritual world.

      I haven’t ever shared this before as it is very personal, but once after having an intense orgasm, I sat up & a shaft of sunlight that was coming in from a crack in the curtain hit me straight in the eye. It was as if time stopped – & I was in the Sun Sphere with great Spiritual Beings that lived in the light. I can’t really describe it except to say it was like being in the heart of Christ. It felt eternal. I was holding my breath. When I gasped, it all shifted & I went from being one with the light, to coming into a pin-point, back into my body. I was very dizzy. And my friend said I was extremely pale. I had to have a drink of water & sleep after that…

      1. Jacob Boehme had an experience in 1600 when the Sun coming through his window cast light off a pewter dish right into his eye and for 15 minutes he went into an altered state of consciousness and experienced the descent of the Trinity through its stages. This eventually became the subject of his first book, The Aurora. Also, I have always imagined that it was the light of the Sun, glancing off the Knight’s suit of armor right into his eye, that suddenly caused Parsifal to leave home and become a follower of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He never even turned around and waved goodbye to his mother. Herzeleide.

      2. That sound like an incredible experience Hazel. There’s certainly something very real going on. Then as Steve points out, Boheme… and one can also point to PKD and his experience which lasted a couple months. I guess many people have an experience like this that’s impressionable. But I wonder, Steve, someone can have an experience where they ‘don’t look back’, yet, circumstances may force them anyway.

        I’m still convinced that as much as Good does prevail, streaming from the spiritual world, physical earth is very much a ‘non reality’ or a kind of Dante’s hell. If it wasn’t a hell, there would be no need to spiritualize the elementals world, so to speak. At any rate, a person can experience so much pain and suffering and that seems to be when a shining light may or may not come to steer you on the right direction.

        1. Since the fall we have had to enter’s Dante’s hell. So that puts us in the position to take up the task of re-spiritualizing matter. I also pray for a time when we don’t have to learn thru pain & suffering. How do we cultivate our own inner light. We are the ones we have been waiting for…

          1. “But I wonder, Steve, someone can have an experience where they ‘don’t look back’, yet, circumstances may force them anyway.”

            I also was the son of a widow, and felt compelled to go. This forms an important part of the Parsifal epic. And, the Holy Lance shimmering through the Light Waves.

            1. “For a time other creative ideas pushed those concerned with Parsifal into the Background. They came to the fore once more near the end of his life, when, clearer than before, they conveyed to him a person’s path of knowledge. Wagner portrayed the path to the Holy Grail to show the cleansing of a human beings’ desire nature. As an ideal this is depicted as a pure holy chalice whose image is the plant calyx’s chaste fructification to new creation by the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. The sunbeam enters matter as Amfortas’ lance enters sinful blood. But there the result is suffering and death. The path to the Holy Grail is portrayed as a cleansing of the sinful blood of lower desires till, on a higher level, it is as pure and chaste as is the plant calyx in relation to the sunbeam. Only he who is pure in heart, unworldly, untouched by temptation, so that he approaches the Holy Grail as an “innocent fool” filled with questions of its secret, can discover the path.”

              https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA055/English/AP1987/19070328p01.html

    1. So wonderful to see her story. It really showed that self flagellation & the Priest as guru are not the way.
      And alos that she was human too. And a woman against all odds

  2. Greetings,
    from link,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen
    Reincarnation of Hildegard has been debated since 1924 when Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner lectured that a nun of her description was the past life of Russian poet-philosopher Vladimir Soloviev,[104] whose visions of Holy Wisdom are often compared to Hildegard’s.[105] Sophiologist Robert Powell writes that hermetic astrology proves the match,[106] while mystical communities in Hildegard’s lineage include that of artist Carl Schroeder[107] as studied by Columbia sociologist Courtney Bender[108] and supported by reincarnation researchers Walter Semkiw and Kevin Ryerson.[109]

    2 kundalini expert Gopikrishan writes,
    https://www.icrcanada.org/research/literaryresearch/hildegard

    from above link,
    Little else is known about Hildegard’s life during these years in the convent; she must have distinguished herself in some way, however, because when the Abbess Jutta died in 1136 Hildegard was unanimously chosen as her successor. After this, Hildegard’s life seems to have unfolded uneventfully enough for about five more years until she had a direct experience of the “living light” itself which was quite different from the “reflection of the living light” that she had envisioned continually since childhood. This profound vision literally transformed her consciousness. In Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life, Sabina Flanagan quotes Hildegard’s description of the experience as it appears in the introduction to Scivias:

    And it came to pass in the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, Son of God, when I was forty-two years and seven months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming….and suddenly I understood the meaning of the expositions of the books, that is to say of the psalter, the evangelists, and other catholic books of the Old and New Testaments.namaste,mkyogi

    1. Thank you – this a treasure! So intriguing.
      Steiner also talks about her in his lectures that he gave that brought the Doctors & the Priests together. He goes into detail about how her etheric body was prepared before birth in a special way. He says that if she would have been born today she would have been deemed mentally ill!

      1. Hi Hazel,

        In studying Soloviev’s former incarnations, which Steiner describes in lecture 8 of GA 238, it would be more precise to say that it was Mechtild of Magdeburg, the successor of Hildegard of Bingen, that was the prior incarnation of Solovieff in the 13th century. Here are described the hallmarks:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechthild_of_Magdeburg

        What is important is what Steiner reveals about Soloviev’s former incarnation in the 4th century around the Council of Nicaea, in which the three members of the Trinity were first formulated. Its failure caused him to withdraw into the desert of his mentor, Pamphili, and reincarnate later as a Nun. We know of Soloviev’s three conversations with the Divine Sophia, and this is an important representation of what had occurred in the past two incarnations.

        https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA238/English/APC1957/19240919p01.html

      2. Greetings,
        Lesser known Hildegard s medical know how acknowledged by NIH,
        from link,
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9196248/

        In describing the origin of the disease, Hildegard of Bingen explained that it is the soul’s job to recognize what we name the non-self or whatever is physiologically and psychologically harmful for the body. With attention to the soul, Hildegard of Bingen gave a broader meaning to the non-self by introducing the role of senses. In describing the contraction of vessels, heart, and liver, after the recognition of the non-self, the abbess refers to adaptation or stress syndrome and to the complex mechanism of emotions. Emotions are associated with feelings, which represent their internalization and are able to cause physiological changes in our internal environment. Hildegard of Bingen described this process as a fog that invades the heart and causes sadness. The heart, she said, is the seat of the soul and is the door from which good and bad thoughts come out. From feelings, therefore, we move on to thoughts and then to action and to behavior, as confirmed by actual affective neuroscience studies (Damasio, 2010).
        amazing unbelievable!but true!namaste,mkyogi

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