Notes from a study group by Dan Ditzler
This year the definition of Gemüt came to my awareness – life of action permeated with the Michael impulse; or an imbuing of our thoughts with warmth and enthusiasm of feeling. When we bring the image of Michael fighting the Dragon before our souls, how does this make us feel? The influence of the Dragon is supersensible; its form cannot exist in nature; the Dragon can only be found within humans now. Our task is to become conscious of the spiritual relations in us to the things around us.
This lily in a field is awaiting something. Do not just look at it abstractly! Rather, let your heart and Gemüt enter into what lives as soul and spirit in the flower. Human existence should really be a releasing of elemental beings, the spirits of nature that are enchanted into the forms of minerals, plants and animals. We are only sipping what we should be drinking. Unite through your Gemüt with the elemental beings, instead of uniting with the Dragon within and perishing in your lower nature.
The elemental beings need our Gemüt interaction to evolve! They are at a lower stage – destined for a higher one. When you notice cowardice of soul – the Dragon has absorbed your elemental powers. We can only reach the depths of the human being by penetrating and entering into our relationship with the extraterrestrial cosmos and with what this yields for the cycle of the seasons.
Dreams break through the system of laws we live in. They protest the system of natural laws. Dreams are the bridge leading to the spiritual world. The state in which during sleep we penetrate into the spiritual world; greater possibilities are afforded to us for investigating the crab nebula, for instance, that are provided for in labs. In stone circles, there are typically twelve stones. When we see the old cromlechs in Europe, these standing stones were meant to show someone the physical sun’s shadow permeated by the spiritual sun.
Light is by no means phos. It is phosphorus – light bearing. It is endowed with something active and psychic. This light would appear in different colors in the shadows of the cromlechs. Observing this light, the ancients would behold the whole cycle of the seasons in the psychospiritual activity of the sun’s radiance.
The Mithras cult demanded in the neophyte a fine and sensitive development of the capacity for receptive sentience. The human heart is a subconscious sense organ. Raising the heart as a sense organ to a certain degree of consciousness was the subject of the Mithras cult. Head man had to sense very delicately what went on in the chest man and limbs man.
Perceive the course of the seasons within yourself by means of your heart organization. In the Mithras tauroctony, the Bull represents the animal nature; the Scorpion and Snake represent the forces working through the limbs, tamed by the higher self. The Sword of Michael. What must be conquered? How does it manifest differently through the seasons? Experiencing the cosmic spirituality / the spirit of the sun’s journey through the zodiac.
The Moon as a fortress in the cosmos. Saturn tracing the process of sense perception; the population of Saturn is the guardian of our planetary system’s memory. Coexperiencing the cosmos will lead us to a spiritualized instinct for the meaning of the seasons with which our organic and social lives are interwoven.
Sensing spring vs fall… conform with the course of nature. Celebrate festivals with social significance! In respect to our consciousness we are like earthworms- we must come up for the radiant shining of the spiritual sun. The human being must be converted to a citizen of the cosmos. The planets should enter our consciousness as manifestations of spiritual beings. The Spirit of the Earth is a multiplicity of manifold variety (versus the spirit of humans). In Winter – frost – seeds to earth – all germination withdrawn into earth. Elemental beings withdraw into earth and become intimately connected with it. The earth shelters the elemental beings through the winter. In Spring, the earth is more related to the cosmic environment.
The Spring consists of the earth’s sacrificial devotion to the universe in letting its elemental beings flow out. In Spring and Summer the earth loses its spirituality. The elemental beings become under the influence of the cosmic planetary worlds, during the time leading up to St. John’s Day. As our blood circulation is indispensable to us, so is this cycle where the elemental beings pass out of and reimmerse themselves into the earth throughout the year. We should learn to sense the course of the year as we do the expressions of a living soul endowed being. Learn to listen to what the year as a great living being has to tell us…
Distinguishing nature consciousness in Winter versus Spring… I imagine My Ego blooms in the flowers of spring; I blossom and bear fruit with the plant. We have to pass out of ourselves and become one with outer nature. Follow the spirit in its being and expansion. Every breath in the atmosphere in midsummer will proclaim the cosmic principle within the terrestrial.
Dying with nature in Autumn… But humans must not die… nature must be overpowered… the dying experience is a challenge. To oppose it with the creative forces of our inner being. Become the awakener of your own self consciousness. Experience the alternation of nature consciousness and self consciousness. Anthroposophical knowledge should stream into the Gemüt as a force! Enter and feel at home in the consciousness of immortality – in the awareness of prenatal existence. Gather into the Gemüt spiritual forces. Only the living spirit that speaks to us in nature in the same way the human soul speaks to us can enter the Gemüt in a vitalizing and exalting way.
