Forming a Good Life
Incarnation is embodiment is taking on form.
Before we are born, we are in the essence of everywhere.
Even while incarnate, I still breathe the stars. Night and Day, my spirit expands and contracts like my lungs.
To fulfil this journey of embodiment, I need to bring my spirit into form while, also, opening it to the stars. The body offers us the perfect form, a microcosm of the cosmic processes experienced as a space and time retainer. The deeper I can enter into my body the more my spirit becomes the form my freedom can give it.
Each sense impression is a form we take in. We in-form ourselves through our senses. Learning is taking on form. We choose what sort of in-form-ation we want, and we take it in until it forms (adds form to) our vision of the cosmos. The stars are in our world as a picture of cosmic understanding. The reliability of these fixed points of light gives us an image of what knowing is. Something we can return to, daily, to remind us of the steadiness of this world. Once we have a steady vision of all that structures our universe, we say that we stand under this vision like we stand under the stars. We now under-stand more about the world.
We can grow our understanding in three ways. When we take in forms through our thoughts, through our feeling and through our doing. E.G. You can study Peru as much as you like, but your first visit there will still give you a whole new character of understanding. You can holiday in Peru as much as you like, yet taking a job there, even as a volunteer, will give you a whole new depth of understanding. Study gives head understanding, meeting people and landscape, a heart understanding, working there is a will-understanding.
Freedom comes through the thinking. If you work somewhere, you cannot help but gain a knowing. If you meet someone, or holiday in a place, you have some choice over how deeply you are affected. If you choose to study something, that is a free choice that you can completely avoid if you will.
Steiner’s cosmology is structured thought. Reaching into the infinite, he composes the subtle forms he finds into pictures that can form themselves in us as gifts to our understanding. On top of this structure, Steiner weaves a pattern of expression that itself lifts our thinking to a new level. Making a study of Steiner’s work in-forms you on two levels. 1. The ideas themselves. 2 the way in which you have to change to understand them.
In times past, we lived in connection with nature. We had to work to be fed, housed and clothed. Today, the machine-structure of our social context does that for us. We can take up the power of work we needed before and apply it to feeding ourselves inwardly, clothing our eternal being in forms of goodness, truth and beauty, housing each other in structures of aware social relationships. The snake bites hold of its tail when I engage my free will in ordering my inner life.
Each of the activities on the course is designed to contribute to this process of you informing your Self through head, heart and hands, so that we all grow in depth, understanding and integrity. The world around you/me mirrors my inner state of being. This community of seekers will become a micro-world, a carefully held small mirror to reflect, lovingly, to us how we are doing and where we are going.
You are invited to apply.
Blog: Goodness, Truth and Beauty
Blog: Breathing the Stars
Blog: Forming our inner Self
Also: Grounding for Freedom
And: The Shaman’s Code
