Monday, April 30, 2018

Buddhism: the hopeless renunciation of all creation / Christianity: its loving salvation



Rudolf Steiner:

"Did this Being really stream out over the Earth at Golgotha? In order to answer this let us examine and compare a time six hundred years before the birth of Christ, let us say, with a time six hundred years after the birth of Christ. What has happened here — wherein does the difference consist?
Six hundred years before Christ, Buddha lived. He lived in a king's palace. Then he went out into the world and learned to know old age, sickness, poverty, death, and the corpse. He saw that the whole life of man is suffering. Old age is suffering; sickness is suffering; poverty is suffering; birth is suffering; death is suffering; to be parted from those whom we love is suffering; in short, the whole of existence is suffering. So he said to himself, and taught the people, that they must lose, must learn to forget, their craving for existence. Here we have the hopeless renunciation of all creation.
But six hundred years later came the Mystery of Golgotha. As a symbol we see a cross erected, and upon the cross a human corpse. And the people look up to the corpse and are filled with a sense that all suffering can be healed. Herein lies a great difference. In death human beings no longer see the token of suffering, but the token of the healing of suffering. They can become victors over all that their life here on Earth brings them. And this means that a fruit will be carried over into the other life.
If man now understands that birth and life are not suffering, but afford the possibility of emerging from it, inasmuch as life gives him the opportunity to develop the spiritual which leads out beyond all suffering — if man understands this, old age is no longer suffering, but a drawing nearer to the fruit of life; death is no longer suffering, but redemption; not to be united with those he loves is no longer suffering, if he has united himself with the Christ-Being, the Being of infinite love, and thus envelops with his love all beings and all worlds.
All this was felt six hundred years after Christ, and since that time it has been possible for man to feel united with the Christ, the Spirit of the Sun, Who is also the Spirit of the Earth — Who, even as He permeates the Earth, permeates also each one of us, and calls forth mildness, warmth, and love within our souls — Who awakens infinite love and transforms the Earth."





The essential characteristic of imagination


Rudolf Steiner: "The essential characteristic of imagination is that it can always yield and give way and so embrace the substance of things that have their being in the process of metamorphosis."





January 7, 1924 [Course for Young Doctors, lecture 6]

A Prayer for the Earth


Rudolf Steiner:

It will depend on human beings how these forces, bestowed upon the world through death-sacrifices, will be embodied in the evolutionary process of the Earth. They serve the evolutionary process of the world through the fact that they can inspire us with what spiritual science has kindled. If materialism were to take hold of every mind, or if nationalism were to spread out exclusively in the form of passion, then Lucifer and Ahriman would be able to use these forces for their own end and in that case these forces would be unable to further the progress of the Earth. If we consider these connections, then the deep significance which spiritual science has for the human development on Earth rises up before us. And only then shall we be able to say: In order that these forces, sacrificed through death, may be rightly used for the progress of human development, it is necessary that the new spirit, which is the outcome of spiritual science, should take hold of those human beings who are capable of grasping it. If we consider spiritual science in  connection with the spiritual process of evolution, which comes to the fore so clearly in these fateful days, then we realize that spiritual science is something tremendously great and sacred. The new spirit which can be acquired through spiritual science thus becomes something that may be compared with the mood of prayer and it may be comprised in the words:

O cosmic spirit, let us be completely filled with the spirit that grows out of spiritual science; so that we may not fail to wrest from Ahriman and Lucifer that which can be of help to the Earth, for its salvation and its progress!






Source: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-etheric-body-as-reflection-of.html

The secret of progress for the future of humankind

The Himalayan Institute, Honesdale, Pa.

Rudolf Steiner:  ""This is the secret of progress for the future of humankind: to work out of communities. . . . As little as an eye is still an eye if it is torn out of one's head, so little is a human soul a human soul if it is separated from community. You will see that we educate our talents best if we live in sisterly and brotherly community, that we live most intensely if we are rooted in the totality. Of course, we have to wait till that which forms roots in the totality ripens to fruit in quiet inwardness. We may not lose ourselves into the outside world nor into ourselves, because it is true in the highest spiritual sense what the poet said: that one has to be quiet in oneself if one's faculties are to appear, but those faculties are rooted in the world. We are only able to strengthen them and to improve ourselves if we live in community, because it is true in the sense of genuine mutual help that working in a sisterly and brotherly way makes us strongest in the fight for survival, and we will find most of our powers in the stillness of our hearts if we develop our total personality, our total individuality, in community with our human sisters and brothers. It is true that a talent is formed in quietude. It is also true that in the stream of the world, character is formed — and with it the whole of one's being and the totality of humanity."










Anthroposophy: The Elixir of Life


Rudolf Steiner:  "Zarathustra, or Jesus of Nazareth, is one of the three Masters of the Rosicrucians. Many copies of his ego — that is, of the ego in which the Christ Spirit Himself had dwelt — can be found in the spiritual world. The copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth are waiting for us in the spiritual world to be utilized for the future evolution of humankind. People who endeavor to strive upward to the heights of spiritual wisdom and love are candidates for these copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth. They become bearers of Christ, true Christophori. On this Earth they shall be heralds of His Second Coming.


We derive strength for our future work from the knowledge of which individualities are behind the missions of important human beings. It is possible to test these facts. Not everyone is able to investigate what goes on behind the curtains of the physical world, but everyone can examine the results of such investigations by looking at the Holy Scriptures written before and after Christ. These facts can illuminate the way to understanding; and if they do, they change within us and become spiritual lifeblood."





Source: http://www.webcitation.org/5x4wQULh8

The First Logos, The Second Logos, The Third Logos

Drawing No. 1

Rudolf Steiner, Paris, June 9, 1906:

We will endeavor in contemplation to retrace the stages of man's evolution to the Logos by Whom this world was created.
Modern exoteric science goes back to the Stone Age — an epoch when man lived in caves, using shaped stones as his only instruments. His existence was primitive in the extreme, his horizon narrow, his thought limited to the search for food and means for defending his life.
Occult science leads us back beyond this Stone Age to the epoch of Atlantis. In those times, man's physical appearance was not at all the same as it is today. It is known that the brow of prehistoric man was not developed, for, in effect, the development of the brow and forehead runs parallel with the development of the brain and of thinking. In days of yore, the physical brain was much smaller than the corresponding ether-form which extended beyond it on all sides. In the course of evolution, the etheric and physical brains have become more or less equal in size. A certain center in the etheric brain which is now inside the skull, moved to the interior of the skull in the evolution of Atlantean man. It was a moment of cardinal importance, for as soon as man began to think, to be conscious of his own being and to say ‘I,’ he began to associate ideas and to calculate — which he could not do before. On the other hand, the earliest Atlanteans possessed a far stronger and truer memory. Their knowledge was based not upon the relations between facts but on their memory of these facts. They knew, by their memory, that a certain event would invariably give rise to a series of others; but they did not grasp the causes of these facts, nor could they think about them. In addition to this powerful memory, they possessed another faculty — a mighty power of will. Today, man can no longer work directly with his will upon the life forces. He cannot, for example, hasten the growth of plants by an act of will. The Atlantean had this power and was, moreover, able to draw from the plants ether forces which he knew how to use. He did this instinctively, without the help of intellect and the faculties of logical reasoning which are associated today with what we call the ‘scientific mind.’ To the measure in which intellectuality, the faculty of reflective thought and calculation, unfolded in the men of Atlantis, to that measure their powers of instinctive clairvoyance declined.
If we go still further back in the history of Atlantis, we come to a very remote period when expression through speech, that is to say, expression in articulate sounds, first became possible. This was the age when man began to walk upright, for speech and the expression of articulate sounds can only be a faculty of beings who stand upright.
Before the great Atlantean race, of which all European and Asiatic races were the offshoots, there existed another continent and other peoples, still nearer to the animal nature — the Lemurian race. Science only admits its existence as a hypothesis. Certain islands to the south of Asia and the north of Australia are, nevertheless, evidences of this continent; they are the metamorphosed remains of old Lemuria. The temperature of the Earth in those times was much higher than it is today. The atmosphere was vaporous, full of currents. In Lemuria, we find rudimentary human forms, breathing not through the nasal organs but through organs more like gills.
In the course of human evolution, organs are perpetually being transformed both as to character and appearance. Thus primitive man walked on four feet; he could not utter articulate sounds; he had no ears with which to hear. Movement in the semi-liquid, semi-gaseous element surrounding him was made possible by an organ which enabled him to float and swim. When the elements differentiated and man found himself on solid earth, this organ changed into the lungs, the gills into ears, and the frontal parts of his structure into arms and hands — free instruments for action. Besides this, he began to utter articulate sounds — the words of speech.
This great transformation was of cardinal importance to man. In Genesis (2.7), we read: “And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This passage describes the period when the gills once possessed by man changed into lungs and he began to breathe the outer air. Simultaneously with the power to breathe, he acquired an inner soul, and with this soul, the possibility of inner consciousness, of becoming aware of the self living within the soul.
When man began to breathe air through the lungs, his blood was invigorated and it was then that a soul higher than the group-soul of the animals, a soul individualized by the ego-principle, could incarnate in him to carry evolution forward to its fully human and then divine phases. Before the body breathed air, the soul of man could not descend to incarnation, for air is an element enfilled with soul. At that time, therefore, man actually inbreathed the divine soul which came from the heavens. The words of Genesis, in their evolutionary sense, are to be taken quite literally. To breathe is to be permeated with Spirit. This truth was the basis of the exercises given in ancient systems of yoga. These exercises were founded upon the rhythm of breathing, their purpose being to render the body fit to receive the inpouring Spirit. When we breathe, we commune with the world-soul. The inbreathed air is the bodily vesture of this higher soul, just as the flesh is the vesture of man's lower being.
These changes in the breathing process mark the transition from ancient consciousness, which was merely a play of pictures, to consciousness as it is in our time. Sense perceptions are received from the body; consciousness has a purely objective character. Consciousness in pictures (imaginative) created its own inner content by means of an inherent, plastic force. The further we go into the past, the more we find the soul of man living not within him but around him. We reach a point when the sense-organs existed only in germ and when man merely received from external objects impressions which gave rise to attraction or repulsion, sympathy or antipathy. The movements of this being — whom we cannot really call ‘man’ in our sense of the word — were governed by these feelings of attraction or repulsion. He had no reasoning faculty, and the pineal gland — an organ of cardinal importance in those times — was his only ‘brain’.
The existence of this imaginative consciousness is the answer to endless philosophical discussions on the objective nature and reality of the world, and it is the refutation of all purely subjectivist philosophies, such, for instance, as that of Berkeley. Two poles of being and of life are essential to evolution. The ‘subjective universal’ becomes the objective universe; man proceeds, first, from the subjective to the objective, and he will finally be led from the objective to the subjective by the development of Spirit-Self (Manas), Life-Spirit (Buddhi), Spirit-Man (Atman).
Dream-consciousness is an atavistic survival of the picture consciousness of olden times. One quality of this picture consciousness is that it is creative. It creates forms and colors which do not exist in physical reality.
Objective consciousness is by nature analytic; subjective consciousness is by nature plastic and has magical power. (This is indicated by the etymology of the word ‘image’). The subjective, plastic consciousness of man was thus superseded by objective, analytic consciousness. The procedure by which the soul (which, to begin with, enveloped man like a cloud) subsequently penetrated into the physical body may be compared with that of a snail secreting its own shell and then shrinking back inside it. The soul first gave form to the body and then penetrated within this body, having prepared the organs of perception from outside. The power of sight with which the human eye is endowed today is the same power which once was exercised upon the eye from without, in order that it might take shape.
The change from outer to inner activity of soul is expressed by a hieroglyph. This is the sign of Cancer in the Zodiac, expressing a dual action or movement — one from without inwards, the other from within outwards.
The middle of the third (Lemurian) epoch was the time when the soul passed into its self-created dwelling place and began to ‘animate’ the body from within. Before this point of time we find an astral humanity indwelling a purely astral Earth. Before that again, man and Earth existed merely in a devachanic condition. There was as yet no picture consciousness. Cosmic thoughts poured into and through the being of man. His higher soul was still part and parcel of the whole cosmos, participating in cosmic thought.
The further we retrace the parallel development of man and Earth, the more do we find them existing in a fluid, embryonic condition and the nearer to Spirit. Today, we have reached the lowest point on the curve of descent; man and Earth have reached the greatest degree of solidification and are about to re-ascend, through the action of individual will, toward the Spiritual.
What underlies this great process of evolution? Where was the home of human beings when, at the beginning, they existed merely in germ? Whence has man proceeded? Who created him? It is here that we must try to envisage a life and power of manifestation infinitely more sublime than all human, nay, than all planetary life. This power is the Logos.
In what does human and planetary life differ from the life of the Logos? — This question would seem to demand a flight into the unknown, into a universe of another order. And yet there are analogies which help us to understand or at least to divine something of the creative power of the Logos.
Let us try to envisage an all-embracing mind, a mind to which all earthly and planetary experiences are known. Such a mind could live through all and every form of evolution. But with this power alone, it could not rise beyond the point of the creation of man and of the planetary system. It would remain in the sphere of what can be and has been proved by man. Human intelligence cannot pass beyond this limit.
But we can rise to a consciousness other than that wherein our experiences are merely realized in the mind. There are certain states of creative activity in which the spirit of man can give birth to something new, something never seen before. Such, for instance, is the consciousness of a sculptor at the moment he conceives or sees in a flash the form of a statue before his inner eye. He has never seen a model, he creates his statue. Such too, is the consciousness of a poet who conceives a poem in one flash of inspiration, in creative, spiritual vision.
This creative power is not generated by any intellectual idea but rather by a spiritual sense, — Think of a hen sitting on its eggs. It is wholly given up to this brooding activity and is filled with a kind of warm, almost voluptuous pleasure in which there arises a dreamy pre-vision of the hatching of the little winged chicken. This bliss in the work of creation exists at every stage of cosmic life, and warmth pours from it. In the sphere of Cosmic Intelligence — which may be conceived as the world of thoughts accessible to the higher Self (Manas) — this warmth seems to pervade the whole universe, emanating from the creative life of soul (Buddhi). We can divine the presence of a creative sphere in existence before our Earth and ‘brooding’ over it. This is to ascend from Spirit-Self to Life-Spirit, and from Life-Spirit to Spirit-Man.
The Ego or ‘I’ Principle of man is created by the third Logos.
We should try to conceive the power of the higher Ego as being suffused through the whole universe as a life-begetting warmth and then we reach the conception of the second Logos by Whom macrocosmic life is quickened and Who is reflected in the creative activities of the human soul.
The one primal source and center of manifestation is the first Logos — the unfathomable Godhead.
In every age these three Divine principles have been represented in occultism by these three signs: 

Sunday, April 29, 2018

The truth is like poetry



"The truth is like poetry. People hate poetry."  —Mark Twain









Thank you, Juanita!

Put yourself in this picture







"He must increase : I must decrease."  John 3:30



And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.  —Luke 9:23-24


In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.  —John 7:37-38














The Pythagoras Tree




From the website "Futility Closet":
Draw a square and perch two smaller squares above it, forming a right triangle:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PythagorasTree1.png
Now perch still smaller squares upon these, and continue the pattern recursively:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PythagorasTree3.png
Charmingly, if you keep this up you’ll grow a tree:


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pythagoras_tree_1_1_13_Summer.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

It was dubbed the Pythagoras tree by Albert Bosman, the Dutch mathematics teacher who discovered the figure in 1942. (Each trio of squares demonstrates the Pythagorean theorem.)
At first it looks as though the tree must grow without bound, but in fact it’s admirably tidy: Because the squares eventually begin to overlap one another, a tree sprouted from a unit square will confine itself to a rectangle measuring 6 by 4.




Every Sunday morning at 9 o'clock


Rudolf Steiner: "Wherever we are gathered together we are gathered in the name of the search for wisdom and the search for love."




Rudolf Steiner [June 7, 1912]:

Why is it that you're here? From where does your urge for esoteric development come? About 4000 years ago, and so before the Event of Golgotha, the etheric body enlivened the physical body in such a way that not all of the etheric body's forces were used to permeate the physical body, and it was to these forces that an esotericist turned, with these he turned to spiritual worlds. Then about 3000 years ago, all etheric bodies had sunk into the physical bodies, especially in Greece, and those who developed the greatest things in the physical realm felt that the spiritual world was a realm of shades. But now the physical body no longer absorbs all of the etheric body's forces, it rejects them, it is withering, for we are past the middle of Earth evolution, and it's only through these forces, which the physical body can no longer take in, that we can live in the spiritual world. And you who felt this urge for esoteric development, who were not satisfied with mere physical life and knowledge, you sensed these unused forces in you; they drove you to seek an esoteric life.
What's the difference between esoteric and exoteric? In exoteric life we get communications that are taken from esoteric life as food for our souls. In esoteric life we ourselves try to look into the worlds from which esoteric communications are taken.
What's given here is not just communications — it's advice that flows from spiritual inspiration. It's not just words, concepts, ideals — it's words, concepts, and ideals that are permeated with life, life germs that are sunk into our etheric forces and that should blossom there — they're realities. They've been tested repeatedly by those whom we call the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings.
Esotericism is a source of life and of forces that flow through the world and that should also stream through us. And so every Sunday morning at 9 o'clock you should meditate on: In the Spirit of Mankind I feel united with all esotericists. When we begin our exercises it's of great importance that we first create inner quiet. It can be attained through patience. The only thing we have to combat is the thought: I won't attain it. We should reject this as a temptation. And even if it takes ever so long, the time will come when our thought horizon will become clear, if we just push away the sense impressions and thought that distract us with all the willpower that we muster. We should let the formulas and symbols live in us vigorously and energizingly, shouldn't form thoughts about them but should experience them and feel them to be like an inner light. They must take hold of us strongly, for they are drawn from the unspeakable word that has creative power. This is the Indians' mahavach; it's inspirations from words that sound through spiritual worlds; it's supposed to radiate in us like an inner sun.
Then we must create an inner void by erasing and suppressing everything that arises from memory, including theosophical contents, and just wait for what can rise in our soul — either something entirely new that we've never heard or had a inkling of, or a lively vision of occult facts that we received in exoteric life. Much more strength is needed for independent discoveries than for an intelligent understanding of the Pythagorean theorem or some other already found fact. What's communicated to us now we can also find ourselves, but probably only after 25 incarnations. We have the duty to work along with the present state of evolution by shortening the path as much as possible.



Godly Light!

Christ Sun!

Warm our hearts!

enlighten our heads!

that good may come

from what we cradle in our hearts,

what we direct from our heads


with true-to-the-mark, consecrated willing!





Rudolf Steiner:  "The kundalini fire will acquire great influence on what lives in the human heart. The human heart will really have this fire. At first this seems to be mere symbolism, but man will then really be permeated by a force which will live in his heart, so that during the sixth root-race he will no longer make a distinction between his own well-being and the well-being of the whole. So deeply will man be permeated by the kundalini fire! He will follow the principle of love as his own innermost nature. In the seventh sub-race of the fifth root-race the whole of mankind will be in a real chaos, for the root-race will then be near to its collapse. But a small number of the seventh sub-race of the fifth root-race will become the true sons of the kundalini fire. They will be permeated with its full power. They will provide the material, they will pass it on to the leaders of those who will develop man further. Thus is the fifth root-race directed to the heights which kindle the divine fire; thus is kindled out of inmost depths with holy fervor the divine principle which no longer separates man from man, but evokes brotherliness as far as the human understanding reaches. And thus far shall brotherliness be quickened in our own root-race and in the next. This fire will live in single individuals; and in those who are initiated in the course of the fifth root-race there already lives a spark of this divine fire which is the capacity for brotherliness and will put an end to separation."


Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
~
1 Corinthians 12:27




At-one-ment 


Washed in the Blood of the Lamb are We
Awash in a Sonburst Sea
You—Love—and I—Love—and Love Divine:
We are the Trinity

You—Love—and I—We are One-Two-Three
Twining Eternally
Two—Yes—and One—Yes—and also Three:
One Dual Trinity
Radiant Calvary
Ultimate Mystery




What Is Revealed When One Looks Back into Repeated Lives on Earth. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts #144, #145, #146


Rudolf Steiner:

When we are able to look back with spiritual knowledge into the former Earth-lives of a human being, we find that there are a number of such lives in which man was already a ‘person.’ His outward form was similar to what it is today, and he had an inner life of individual stamp and character. Earthly lives emerge, revealing that the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was present in them, but not as yet the Spiritual Soul; others appear, in which only the Sentient Soul was developed — and so forth.
We find it so in the epochs of earthly history, and indeed it was so long before these epochs.
But as we look back still farther, we come into ages of time when it was not yet so — ages in which we find Man interwoven still, both in his inner life and in his outer formation, with the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings. Man is already there as earthly man, but he is not yet detached from Divine Spiritual Being, Thinking, and Willing.
And in yet earlier epochs man as a separate being disappears altogether; there are present only the Divine Spiritual Beings, bearing man within them.
Man has undergone these three stages of evolution during his earthly time. The transition from the first to the second took place in the latest epoch of Lemuria; that from the second to the third in Atlantean times.
Now, just as in his present earthly life man bears his experiences within him in the shape of memory, so does he bear within him as a cosmic memory all that he has undergone in the way above described.
What is the earthly life of the soul? It is the world of our memories, ready at every moment to have fresh perceptions. In this interplay of memory and fresh experience man lives his inner life on Earth.
But this inner life on Earth could not unfold at all if there were not present still in man, as a cosmic memory, what we see when we look back with spiritual vision into the first stage of his becoming Earthly Man — the stage in which he was not yet detached from Divine-Spiritual Being.
Of all that took place in the world at that time there is livingly present on the Earth today that alone which is unfolded within the human system of nerves and senses. In outer Nature, all the forces that were then at work have died and can now only be seen in their dead forms.
Thus in the human world of Thought there lives as a present manifestation something which, in order to have earthly existence, requires as its basis the very thing that was already evolved in man before he attained individual, earthly being.
Every time he passes through the life between death and a new birth, man experiences this stage anew. But into the world of Divine-Spiritual Beings, which receives him again even as it once entirely contained him — into this world he now carries his full individual existence which has taken shape during his lives on Earth. Between death and a new birth, man is indeed in the present, but he is living also in all the time that he has undergone through repeated lives on Earth and lives between death and a new birth.
It is different with that which lives in the Feeling-world of man. This is related to those experiences of the past which came immediately after the ones in which man was yet unmanifest as such. It is related, that is to say, to experiences which man already underwent as man but when he was not yet separated from Divine-Spiritual Being, Thinking, and Willing. Man in the present could not unfold the world of Feeling if it did not arise on the foundation of his rhythmic system. And in his rhythmic system we have the cosmic memory of the above-described second stage of his evolution.
Thus in the world of Feeling the ‘present’ in the human soul is working together with that which works on in him from an ancient time.
In the life between death and a new birth, man experiences the contents of the epoch of which we are here speaking as the boundary of his Cosmos. What the starry heavens are to man in the physical life on Earth, his existence between his full union with the Divine-Spiritual world and his severance from it is to him spiritually in the life between death and a new birth. In that life, there appear to him at the ‘world-boundary’ not the physical heavenly bodies, but in the place of each star the sum-total of Divine-Spiritual Beings who, as we know, are in reality the star.
Connected with the Will alone and not with Feeling or with Thought, there lives in man that which is manifested by those earthly lives which, when we look back on them, reveal already the personal, individual character. That which from cosmic sources gives to man his outer form is preserved in this outer form as a cosmic memory. This cosmic memory lives in the human form as a totality of forces. But these are not the immediate forces of the Will; they represent that in the human organism which is the foundation of the forces of the Will.
In the life between death and a new birth, this region of the human being lies beyond the ‘world-boundary.’ Man there conceives of it as of something that will belong to him once more in his new life on Earth.
In his system of nerves and senses, man is today still united with the Cosmos in the way he was when he was manifest only germinally within the Divine-Spiritual womb.
In his rhythmic system, man is today still living in the Cosmos in the way he lived when he was already there as man, but not yet detached from the Divine-Spiritual.
In his system of metabolism and limbs — the foundation for the unfolding of his Will — man lives in such a way that all that he has undergone in his personal individual lives on Earth, ever since these began, and in his lives between death and a new birth, works on within this system.
From the forces of the Earth, man receives that alone which gives him consciousness of self. The physical bodily foundation of self-consciousness is due also to what the Earth brings about. But everything else in the human being has a cosmic origin, external to the Earth.
The sentient and thought-bearing astral body with its etheric-physical foundation, all the moving life in the etheric body, and even that which works physico-chemically in the physical body, is of extra-earthly origin. Strange as this may seem, the physico-chemical which is at work within the human being is not derived from the Earth.
The fact that man evolves this extra-earthly, cosmic life within him is due to the working of the planets and other stars. All that he thus unfolds, the Sun with its forces carries to the Earth. By the Sun, the human-cosmic element is transplanted into the earthly realms. By the Sun, man lives as a heavenly being on the Earth. And that alone whereby he transcends his own human formation — namely, his power to bring forth his kind — is a gift of the Moon.
Needless to say these are not the only influences of Sun and Moon. Lofty spiritual influences also proceed from them.
When about Christmastime the Sun increases more and more in power for the Earth, it is the yearly influence — manifesting rhythmically in the physical-earthly realm — which is an expression of the Spirit in Nature. The evolution of mankind is a single member in what we may describe as a gigantic cosmic year, as will be evident from our preceding studies. And in this cosmic year the cosmic Christmas is at the point where the Sun not only works toward the Earth out of the Spirit of Nature, but where the Christ-Spirit, the Soul of the Sun, descends on to the Earth.
As in the single human being what he experiences individually is connected with the cosmic memory, so will the human soul have a right feeling of the yearly Christmas when he conceives the heavenly and cosmic Christ-Event as working on and on, comprehending it as a memory not only human but cosmic. For at Christmastime not only man remembers in celebration the descent of Christ, but the Cosmos does so too.
(about New Year, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with respect to the preceding study: ‘What is revealed when one looks back into repeated lives on Earth’)

144. Looking back into a human being's repeated lives on Earth, we find three distinct stages. In a remote past, man did not exist with individuality of being, but as a germ in the Divine and Spiritual. As we look back into this stage we find not yet a human being but Divine-Spiritual Beings: the Primal Forces, Principalities or Archai.
145. This was followed by an intermediate stage. Man existed already with individuality of being, but he was not yet detached from the Thinking and Willing and Being of the Divine-Spiritual World. At this stage he had not yet his present personality, with which he appears on Earth as a being completely self-possessed, detached from the Divine Spiritual World.
146. The present condition is the third and latest. Here man experiences himself in human form and figure, detached from the Divine-Spiritual World; and he experiences the world as an environment with which he stands face to face, individually and personally. This stage began in Atlantean time.



Saturday, April 28, 2018

I got phoned and I missed it







For those who, for whatever reason, missed the original:
https://youtu.be/l9zcLAUp5E0

For God so loved the world



Rudolf Steiner:  "The Event of Golgotha is the free cosmic deed of love within Earthly History, and it can only be grasped by the love which man develops for its comprehension. . . . The Event of Golgotha is a cosmic deed, and free. Springing from the Universal love, it is intelligible only by the love in Man."