3 June 2017 – Astro-Weather: Look for the morning star Venus west of the Sun today, in Her greatest elongation today. She rises around 2:30 am CDT & appears brilliant in the east before dawn
The goddess serves as a guide pointing to distant Uranus.
The waxing gibbous Moon passes north of Jupiter this evening. The pair dominates the sky from shortly after sunset until well past midnight
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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
“Greek philosophy beautifully compared the human soul with a bee. The world of colour and light offers the soul honey which it brings with it into the higher world. The soul must spiritualize sense experience and carry it up into higher worlds.” ~Rudolf Steiner 1906
545 – Deathday of Saint Clotilde – patron saint of Les Andelys, Normandy. Wife of the Frankish king Clovis I, & princess of the kingdom of Burgundy. In 511, the Queen founded a convent for young girls. The natural spring there is known for healing skin diseases. Queen Clotilde’s cult made her the patron of queens, widows, brides & even those in exile. In Normandy she was venerated as guarding the lame & those who suffered violent death from ill-tempered husbands.
1924 – Deathday of Franz Kafka a German novelist & short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism & the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments & incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, & has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, & absurdity. His best known works include “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”), Der Process (The Trial), & Das Schloss (The Castle). The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing.
Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today part of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer, & after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family & close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained & formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
1943 – The founding of the Nachlassverein by Marie Steiner
1989 – Deathday of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian religious leader & politician
2013 – The trial of United States Army private Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins in Fort Meade, Maryland
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POD (Poem Of the day)
~Look, I have light
In my eyes
& on my skin…
The warmth of a star…
& everything alive is turning
Into something else
Deep in the alchemical Heart
Of some annihilating
Ever creative fire
That is burning unnoticed
Waiting to touch
Me & you…
~hag
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Whitsun thoughts part 2
Whitsun presents us with a remarkable & dramatic picture of spirit-filled individuals, anointed & enkindled with the impulse to speak out of individual freedom regarding the truth & healing power of the Spirit…Speaking the Language of the heart, that all can understand.
The intense rush of spirit planted in the hearts of human beings highlights one of the greatest challenges of being human: placing our individual gifts, our individual ego, in right relationship within the social realm. This challenge is strongly felt during this time of the consciousness soul era.
Our groups striving to know Spiritual Science, working together as a community, have the possibility to create this type of culture, & the opportunity is here for each of us to meet, human to human, where a sacrament is possible in every encounter.
Our individual strength comes from our personal development & is enhanced by weaving our gifts together with others, knitting our social world in conscious community.
During the Christmas Conference the time had come to take up this new evolutionary task, that of transforming or spiritualizing the human social sphere. This mighty impulse was given inspiration by the foundation stone meditation along with the daily rhythms as presented during the conference.
It was Rudolf Steiner’s hope that a “spiritual foundation stone of Love” would be laid in the etheric hearts of all people, providing a bridge between the macro & microcosmic streams in the world & in human beings striving to create a conscious Michaelic community.
This Sophia inspired Michaelic community can be seen as a vessel in which the Christ Being can unite with humanity. Rudolf Steiner created the Anthroposophical Society so that striving individuals can meet to continue this work of evolution. We get a foreshadowing of this through the Whitsun experience of the 1st apostles.
Now let me ask you this, as seekers on the path, have you ever felt utterly alone, overwhelmed, or even a bit lost? Perhaps when you 1st began to know anthroposophy? Steiner speaks of this in ‘How to know higher worlds’ & in the 5th Gospel. You see, we have an opportunity to recognize & acknowledge the isolation that can come from our striving, a mirroring of the experience of the apostles those 10 days between Ascension & Whitsun. That uncomfortable feeling when waiting feels like wrestling.
The Ascension picture tells us that the deed of Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical & etheric body in the universal human sense.
Whitsun tells us that each single human being must make this deed bear fruit by personally receiving the Holy Spirit, a challenge to strive towards spiritual knowledge.
More will be revealed…
Until soon ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg
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