Phoenix Rising : Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus : My University of Chicago years (March 18, 1977 — June 30, 1981)

   

The University of Chicago shield:

Crescat scientia; vita excolatur

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, and so be human life enriched"

After finishing my schooling, I spent four years as a fledgling phoenix working at the University of Chicago, learning a passel of valuable lessons to take with me through life.

The Altar of Humanity
  The Solar Plexus : The Manipura Chakra : The Stronghold of Manu 

Thine Altar

Not my will, but thine, O Lord, be done, 

by me and through me

In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: [Prelude]

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BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

         Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 

         By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove; 

Thine are these orbs of light and shade; 

         Thou madest Life in man and brute; 

         Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot 

Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 

         Thou madest man, he knows not why, 

         He thinks he was not made to die; 

And thou hast made him: thou art just. 

Thou seemest human and divine, 

         The highest, holiest manhood, thou. 

         Our wills are ours, we know not how, 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

Our little systems have their day; 

         They have their day and cease to be: 

         They are but broken lights of thee, 

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

We have but faith: we cannot know; 

         For knowledge is of things we see; 

         And yet we trust it comes from thee, 

A beam in darkness: let it grow. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 

         But more of reverence in us dwell; 

         That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster. We are fools and slight; 

         We mock thee when we do not fear: 

         But help thy foolish ones to bear; 

Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. 

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me, 

         What seem'd my worth since I began; 

         For merit lives from man to man, 

And not from man, O Lord, to thee. 

Forgive my grief for one removed, 

         Thy creature, whom I found so fair. 

         I trust he lives in thee, and there 

I find him worthier to be loved. 

Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 

         Confusions of a wasted youth; 

         Forgive them where they fail in truth, 

And in thy wisdom make me wise.  

Related post:

https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2022/02/touche.html

Courage : Valiant Goodheartedness

  

Rudolf Steiner:  "Air is an illusion; it is courage that is everywhere around us. If we are really to live in the world in which we breathe, we need courage."

Rudolf Steiner:

Another virtue is that which we can call with a word that is hard to form, actually, the courage-like virtue (fortitude). It is of such a disposition that it remains not passive towards life, but is inclined to apply the forces. The courage-like virtue comes, as you may say, from the heart. You can say of somebody who has this virtue in everyday life: he has the heart in the right place.—And this is a good expression for that if we are able to withdraw not cowardly from the matters that life requires from us, but if we are able to take in hand ourselves, knowing to intervene where it is necessary. If we are inclined to put our activity in movement in such way, briefly if we are brave—the term “brave” is also good for this virtue,—then we have this virtue of the brave life. You could also say, this virtue, which is connected with a sound mind life, which generates fortitude at the right moment, whose absence causes the cowardice in life. Of course, one can practice this virtue in the course of physical life only by certain organs. The organs to which the physical and the etheric hearts belong are not as perfect as those are, which serve wisdom. These organs are still on the way to change, and change in future.

There is a great difference between the brain and the heart concerning their cosmic development. Assuming that a human being goes through the gate of death and passes the life between death and a new birth. His brain is generally a product of the gods. Forces that completely disappear when he goes through the gate of death penetrate the brain. In the next life then the brain is anew built up completely, also its internal forces, not only the material. So also, the forces are anew built up. This is not the case with the heart. With the heart the matter so far is that the physical heart does not continue, however, the forces last that are active in the physical heart. These forces go back to the astral and ego and remain between death and a new birth. The same forces knocking in our heart are also knocking next time in our new incarnation. What works in the brain has disappeared; it does not come out in the next incarnation. However, the forces that flash across the heart are there also in the next incarnation again. If we look into a head, we can say, in it, there work the invisible forces that construct the brain. However, when the human being has gone through the gate of death, these forces are handed over to the universe. If we hear, however, the heartbeat of a human being, we hear spiritual forces, which exist not only in this incarnation, but will also live in the next incarnation, passing death and new birth.

The folk soul had a wonderful premonition of such things. Hence, it puts so much value on the feeling of the heartbeat, not because one appreciates the physical heartbeat so much, but because we look at something that last much longer when we consider the heartbeat of a human being. If we have the virtue of courage, we can only use one part of certain forces for this courage-like. We must use the other part for the organs that serve as tools for the courage-like. We must still use a piece of the forces for these organs. If we do not have the courage-like, we do not develop the virtue of fortitude, we lose our self-control, we withdraw cowardly from life, we leave ourselves to the gravity of our being, and then we cannot invigorate those forces, which must help to realise the virtue of fortitude, the courage-like.

While we stand there cowardly in life, the forces also remain inactive which should flash across our heart. They are a sowing for Lucifer. He takes hold of them, and we do not have them in the next life. Cowardice in life means to deliver a quantity of forces to Lucifer that are missing for us when we want to build up our hearts in our next incarnation that are, actually, the organs, the tools of the courage-like. We come into the world with defective, unqualified organs.

Source: January 31, 1915

Related post: Courage, Dear Heart

A Greek Tragedy: The spiritual path as a constant catharsis

  

My guru, Swamiji

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "In the description he gives of tragedy, Aristotle plainly refers us to the ancient Mysteries, for he speaks there of ‘catharsis’. Catharsis, the purification of the human soul, where the transition is made from the kind of feeling that is experienced in the physical to a feeling that belongs in the realm of soul and spirit, was a goal that was set before the Mystery pupils in the olden days. And now look how Aristotle, in characterizing tragedy, sees in its gradual unfoldment a reflection of this process that took place in the Mysteries for the ensouling of man. Note that I say, a reflection; we must not of course confuse the two. Aristotle asks : What should tragedy do; what is its function? Tragedy, he declares, should awaken fear and compassion. In the ancient Mysteries they would have put it differently. They would have said: Tragedy has to pass from the u mood into the i mood — in order then to find its solution in the a or o mood. That is how you would have heard it expressed in very ancient times. Aristotle then goes on to say that this fear and compassion are to be aroused in the spectator in order that he may thereby undergo purification. Catharsis, he tells us, will follow from the experience of these emotions."

  

"I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain."  — Galatians 2:19-21

Wisdom is better than rubies, and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.

The goal of anthroposophy is to become Anthroposophia

Rudolf Steiner: 

But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome.

The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”

Related post: My dharma is penance

Related post: Experience is the best teacher

Source: September 18, 1924 GA 282

Source: February 13, 1923  Living Anthroposophically

All we are saying is STOP THE GENOCIDE

  

   

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "The destructiveness lies...firstly in everything we can call Americanism, which increasingly tends to invoke fear of the spirit and make the world into a place where only physical life can unfold. This is actually quite different from the British tendency to make the world into a trading company. Americanism seeks to make the world into a physical habitation furnished as comfortably as possible, where one lives in comfort and prosperity. That is the political element of Americanism. Whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the Earth to its end, destruction dooming it at last to death, because the spirit will be shut out from it."

     

 

   

Rudolf Steiner:  "I can impart no more esoteric a saying than: Christ is seeing us."

The annihilation of Gaza is staggering.

Israel has dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs on Gaza. That’s 100+ kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was roughly 15 kilotons. That means the small area of Gaza has been punished by bombing that is the equivalent in explosive force to seven Hiroshimas.

More than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza are confirmed dead; the actual number of dead may be twice or three times that number. The number of wounded is likely more than 100,000. (Who can say, exactly, given the level of destruction and disruption in Gaza?)

How is this level of destruction in any way justifiable or defensible?

Gaza is already almost destroyed. The Israeli government’s intent is clear: after rendering Gaza uninhabitable, the Palestinians remaining there will be pushed out, displaced, removed. Or they will die, in place, from more bombing as well as starvation and disease.

The U.S. government has enabled this by supplying Israel all the bombs it needs to pulverize Gaza. The U.S. government has also provided diplomatic cover as well as military protection as Israel implements its final solution to the Gaza question.

Some claim this isn’t genocide because Israel isn’t marching Palestinians to gas chambers. But there are many forms of genocide, many ways to kill massive numbers of people.

In The History and Sociology on Genocide (1990), Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn define genocide as “a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.”

One-sided mass killing: yes.

Intent to destroy a group: yes.

Gaza and its people are being destroyed before our very eyes. A large part of the effort is being funded directly or indirectly by U.S. taxpayers. Yet we are told it is all the fault of Hamas. That Hamas is making the Israeli government kill and wound hundreds of thousands of people.

One thing is certain: The Israeli government couldn’t perpetrate this genocide without massive military support from the United States. Perhaps one day, as Omar El Akkad wrote, “everyone will have always been against this” [the ongoing genocide in Gaza]. The question remains: Why now are so many, especially in the Israeli and U.S. governments, still eagerly perpetrating and defending this?

Source: Bill Astore

If You're Still Supporting Israel In 2025, There's Something Wrong With You As A Person

"The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it’s also a lot more than that.

It’s an experiment — to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It’s a psychological operation — to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It’s a symptom — of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.

It’s a manifestation — of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalized.

It’s a mirror — showing us accurately and impartially who we currently are as a civilization.

It’s a disclosure — showing us what the western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.

It’s a revelation — showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.

It’s a catalyst — a galvanizing force and a rallying cry for all who realize that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.

It’s a test — of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.

It’s a question — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.

It’s an invitation — to become something better than what we are now."

~ Caitlin Johnstone

Continued:

The Problem and the Solution

Colonialism: The Big Picture

Israeli Logic and Morality

Israel is uniquely evil

The Killers

Gaza in Pictures

Israel has no right to exist

US, UK, and Israel