A screaming comes across the sky

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."   ~ the opening lines of Gravity's Rainbow 

When in the course of my penance I moved from Tulsa to Chicago, I took four books with me: a dictionary, the Chicago Manual of Style, Pound's Cantos, and Gravity's Rainbow.

Psalm 51

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.

Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.

Related post: https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-gate-of-humility.html

Touché!

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."  ~Matthew 25:40

"Touching is separation and connection both at once."  — Novalis

I was once walking in the sub-basement of the Surgery and Brain Research Pavilion of the University of Chicago Medical Center when I turned a corner and there, right in front of me, alone in the hallway, was a rhesus monkey in a torture chamber, totally immobilized, with electrodes on its body everywhere and its head cut open in several places. Our eyes met.

related post: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2018/05/phoenix-rising-per-spiritum-sanctum.html

Beatings will continue until morale improves

The Return of the Prodigal Son

And so, how to maintain the connection to the present and nurture it, whilst work creatively and safely with future ideas and projects?

1. Never become personally invested in your projections for the future; i.e. they are not selfish, but a furtherance for all.

2. Try to limit complaining in general. One can work to better a situation but complaining without the actual work is injurious to the ethers. There are elemental beings who hear and feel this and become upset and agitated. It goes on to spread more agitation generally. Even casual remarks (like about the weather) are potentially bringing everyone and everything down. Conversation does almost expect it, but it is far better to invoke cheerful observations in light conversation.

3. Give thanks daily. It is so important to be thankful for what one has - because to live in a disharmonic wanting brings chaos to the immediate life. Having visions for times to come, and plans for a different future, or even to participate in truly creative and innovative ideas, requires especially that person find the level mean within, which calms those elementals of discontent and disquiet. It requires the ability to be able to soothe oneself at the same time.

Source: http://888-esoteric-christianity.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/why-did-atlantis-fall-27th-february.html

Green and Bear It

Revelation 2:17:  "And I will give him a white stone, and in that stone a name written, which no man knoweth save him that receiveth it."

Not I, but Christ in me

"ES IST ICH"

Nagapushpam ["Serpent Flower"]

"And so all the blood that was contained in this body [of Jesus on the Cross] flowed out of it: around four to five liters of living, foaming blood poured into the basin of rock at the foot of the Cross. We have already said that this rock was green in color. But this was not so beforehand. Before the holy blood touched the stone it was yellowish white in color, like all the other rocks in Jerusalem. When the living blood touched it, however, the rock sank down, forming a vessel-like basin, and changing its color to green." —Judith von Halle, Secrets of the Stations of the Cross and the Grail Blood, pp. 80-81.

"ES IST ICH"

"ES IST ICH"

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

"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

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.  —Psalm 126:5-6

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

Related posts: 
https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-influence-of-spiritual-beings-upon_13.html
http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2018/01/earths-mission-to-transmute-gods-love.html
http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-pituitary-gland-is-to-pineal-gland.html
http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2017/01/namaste-i-salute-blood-of-christ-in-you_11.html

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness

Once when Swamiji, out of the overflowing kindness of his heart, had just given me a mantra, he said "This mantra bestows twelve blessings: peace; intelligence; wisdom; brilliance; prosperity — not material prosperity —" We both laughed.

Matthew 6:19-34

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

"ES IST ICH"

Be Patient

"The good effects that confidence can bring are driven away by impatience; the enlightenment that comes through confidence is darkened by impatience. Nothing is worse than letting impatience conjure up a mist before the soul."  — Rudolf Steiner

Related post: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2016/01/let-us-run-with-patience-race-that-is.html

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

“Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.” — Goethe

Related post: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-gate-of-humility.html

Don't chase butterflies

Do not lose your center fighting the world

M'amour, m'amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world
The Dreams clash
and are shattered-
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.

I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made. 

― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

Great Balls of Fire!

This is what reading Rudolf Steiner is like

"Properly, we should read for power (sustenance). Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."  — Ezra Pound


Rudolf Steiner:  "For those who can have enthusiastic feelings about Anthroposophy and know how to find consolation in it, the higher spiritual sciences are a blessing because they bring consolation and strength under all circumstances. No one leaves these sciences without consolation. The greater our goals, the more our striving will be penetrated by ideals, and human beings will carry them out into the world. We pursue spiritual science and interweave it with our inner human being. It penetrates us and we can carry it out among other people.
   We have to work on these goals as much as we are able. We do not have the right to leave the paths and goals of the spiritual human being unobserved. It is our duty to interweave the soul element with the physical world. Human beings are the entrance gate, the only spiritual gate in the physical and material world through which the heavens can flow in. We can dissolve the lead of materialism by allowing the spiritual truths to penetrate us. Only when human beings work on human development do they contribute to life and not to death. Walking the paths and goals of the spiritual human being means pursuing the task of turning the supersensory into the soul element."

"Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."

Rudolf Steiner, from a lecture given November 27, 1916:

The Christ is He who took upon Himself for the evolution of the Earth all that is bound up with angels, archangels, and archai; that is, all that chains man to the Earth. He bears the sins of the world, those sins that have come into the world through human differentiation. He is a being in whose presence we must say, "I belong to a single human community, but because I belong to a single human community, to something connected with the earthly, I separate myself from the divine. From this I can be redeemed only by a Being who has nothing to do with human differentiation. The Christ in me leads me beyond earthly differentiations, teaches me to feel that what has been produced by earthly differentiation is suffering, that it brings death. Only through such an understanding of the Christ in me do I find my connection with the spiritual world." All that entered humanity through the fact that differentiations have come about has been removed from it through the entrance of Christ into the world. Christ could not, therefore, be a divinity like Mithras, who guides the human being beyond himself. He is the one God who descended to Earth and took away the sins of differentiation and cleansed man of them. Mithras rushes through the world with a sword in his hand that he thrusts into the lower nature to slay it; under him the lower nature dies. Christ offers Himself as the Lamb of God, who takes the lower nature into Himself in order to redeem it.

Much lies in this comparison, immeasurably much! It is for this reason that the idea of Christ is not to be separated from the idea of death and resurrection. Only when we realize that what leads man to the Earth brings him death, that there is more in him than what brings him into the earthly atmosphere, and that something is in him that is the Christ Who leads him away again -- In Christo morimur -- only then do we understand the Christ and know that we are united with Him. Thus, the representations of the ancient gods could set triumphant beings before us, but the Christ could only be presented by the joining of human beings in suffering and death because Christ endured all that enters into the differentiations of man throughout the Earth. It is thus that Christ becomes the One Who leads man through death and back into the spiritual world, but this also makes Him the Divinity Who may be approached here on Earth as we pass beyond maya or illusion. As the Christ is born here from the womb of maya, so must we draw near to Him by advancing beyond maya and appealing to Him in all the higher reality that projects into maya, but isn't maya itself.

If it is to turn to this worship of Christ, mankind will still need a long time on Earth. Nevertheless, we must begin again to take Christianity earnestly. It is taken least of all seriously by the theologians who are frequently in conflict over whether or not Christ performed miracles and, for example, drove out demons through them. Well, it is entirely superfluous to argue over whether or not Christ drove out demons. It is more important that we learn to reproduce His miracles and thereby cast the demons out now where we can. We still have little power to cast out demons in the higher sense as antiquity knew how to do through its atavism. That is the destiny, the karma, of our epoch. But we can begin to drive out those demons of whom I spoke yesterday; they are there and it is negative superstition to suppose that they are not. How do we drive them out? Humanity will be convinced that they are being driven out when what is unholy service today becomes holy; that is, permeated with the Christ consciousness. In other words, this means that we must change to a sacramentalism in which man's deeds are imbued by the consciousness that the Christ stands behind him everywhere. Thus, he ought to do nothing in the world except that in which the Christ can help him. If he does something else, the Christ must also help him but He is thus crucified again and again in human deeds. The crucifixion is not merely a single deed; it is a continuing deed. So long as we do not drive out the demons through what lives in our souls by changing external mechanical actions into holy actions, we will continue to crucify Christ. It is from this point that our education to a true Christianity must begin. What was symbolically practiced in the ancient cults of Christianity and was once performed only on the altar must take hold of the entire world. Humanity must learn to deal with nature as the gods have done; it should learn not to construct machines in an indifferent way but to fulfill a divine service and bring sacramentalism into everything that is produced.

It is already possible to make a beginning in many things. Most of all, human beings can begin to develop sacramentalism in two areas. The first is that of educating and teaching children. We will begin to spiritualize what the religions call "baptism" when we look upon every human being who enters the world through birth as bringing his/her Christ forces with him/herself. Thus we will have the right reverence before the growing human being and can then direct the entire education and especially the teaching of the child in this spirit so that we bring in this teaching a sacramentalism to fruition. We can achieve the same end when we not only look upon educating and teaching the child as a divine service, but also make it such a divine service. Finally, when we endeavor to bring what we call our knowledge into our consciousness in such a way that, as our souls are filled with ideas of the spiritual world, we are aware that the spiritual world is entering into us and that we are being united with the spiritual; when we look upon that as a "communion"; when we can realize true knowledge in a sentence you find expressed before 1887: "Thinking is the true communion of humanity," when the symbolic sacrament of the altar will become the universal sacramental experience of knowledge. It is in this direction that the Christianizing of man must move forward. You will then come to the knowledge that, everywhere in life, reality enters into maya in everything that is related to the Christ, and that to look upon reality after the manner of modern science with its world conception is in the most eminent sense un-Christian.

Source: http://www.webcitation.org/5tlU32M3m
            [The Karma of Vocation, lecture 10]

Christ: the eternally uniting life-spirit

Rudolf Steiner: "There was an initiation in wisdom, in the feeling life, and in the will. Christianity is the combination of all these stages of initiation. In ancient times, initiation was a prophetic proclamation, a preparation. Slowly and gradually, the human being was emancipated from his or her guru or initiate. Initiation first took place in full trance consciousness...in complete secrecy, in total seclusion...Then initiation stepped forward out of the darkness...in a great powerful personality, the bearer of the highest unifying principle, of the Word that expresses the hidden Father, that is, his manifestation, which by taking human form could therefore become the Son of Man and the representative for all humankind. It did so in the unifying bond of all the 'I's': in Christ, in the life-spirit, in the eternally uniting, occurred historically--and at the same time symbolically--the initiation of all humanity at the soul level, at the feeling level."

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

Source of Steiner quote: First Steps in Christian Religious Renewal, p. xxxvii
Source of poem: my angel

The future of human labor

Rudolf Steiner, 10/26/05:

"This will be the healthy social relationship in the future. You can see it already today. Labor will be a free activity out of the insight into the necessity that labor has to take place. Men labor because they look at the human being and recognize that he needs labor. What was labor in the ancient world? It was a tribute; it was done because it had to be done. And what is labor today? It rests upon self-satisfaction, and that kind of enforcement which is exerted upon us by egoism. Because we are where we are, we want to be paid for our labor. We work for our own sakes, for our own wages. In the future we will labor for the sake of our fellow human beings. because they need what we can work for. This will be the reason for our work. We will clothe our fellow human beings, we will make our work available to them for what they are in need of--as a completely free activity. Wages have to be completely separated from this. Labor was a tribute in the past--it will be an offering in the future. Labor has nothing to do with self-satisfaction, nothing to do with payment. If I allow my work to be dictated by the needs of my brothers with a view to what mankind really needs, then I will find myself in a free relationship to it, and my work becomes an offering for mankind. Then I shall work with all my strength, for I love mankind and put my strength at its disposal."



Source: Foreword to Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms

In the beginning was the Logos

Rudolf Steiner:  "The world of Man must be so recognized that in Christ it reveals the original and eternal Logos who works for the unfolding of the Spirit-being of man in the sphere of the Divine-Spiritual Being bound up with man from the beginning."

Our human destinies are, at the same time, the deeds of Gods

Rudolf Steiner, February 22, 1916:

We are fearfully stupid if we believe that here on Earth, when we experience something in the manner described and bear it along in the form of memories, everything is finished; we are fearfully stupid if we think that our experiences are finished when we take them up in this manner as human beings. For while we experience things, while we form concepts and feelings rise up in our experiences, the whole world of the Hierarchies is active within this process through which we acquire our experiences; the Hierarchies live and weave in it.

When we face a human being and look into his eyes, then the Spirits of the Hierarchies, the Hierarchies themselves, the work of the Hierarchies, live in our gaze and in what is sent toward us through the gaze of the other human being. Our experience merely shows us the external aspect of things, for in reality the Gods work within our experiences. We think that we live only for our own sake; yet the Gods work out something through our experiences; they obtain from them something that they can weave into the world. We form ideas, we have feeling experiences; the Gods take them up and communicate them to their world. And when we die, we know that the purpose of our life is to give the Gods the opportunity to spin out of our life this woof coming from our etheric body and to hand it over to the whole universe. The Gods gave us the chance to live in order that they might spin out something for themselves, thus enriching the world.

This is an overwhelming thought. Every one of our strides is the external expression of an event connected with the Gods; it forms part of that woof which the Gods use for their plan of the world and which they leave to us only until we pass through the portal of death. After our death, they take it away from us and incorporate with the universe these, our human, destinies. Our human destinies are, at the same time, the deeds of Gods, and the form in which they appear to us human beings is merely their outward aspect. This is the significant, important, and essential fact which we should bear in mind.

The archangel Michael, speaking through Edgar Cayce, encourages his disciples

"Come ye, my children, in that ye have all been called unto that way which would show forth to thy neighbor, thy brethren, that the Father loveth His children. Who are His children? They that keep His commandments day by day. For unto him that is faithful and true is given the crown of life. The harvest is ripe, the laborers are few. Be not weary because there has been that which has seemed to trouble thee, for the ways are being opened to those that show themselves faithful and true. Faint not, for the day of the Lord is near at hand."
















Source: Study Group Readings, volume 7, p. 192