News 36: 8 September

Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay

Newsletter 36-24 for Sunday 8 September 2024                   

Calendar of Coming Events-- Diary Dates

In the Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
unless stated otherwise.

• TODAY - Sunday, 8th September at 3.00 p.m.
  When I Die   and   Drawing our Lives to a Close (See below)

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Living on the Pathway towards Death

Today - Sunday, 8th September 3.00 p.m.

When I Die  -   with Kathryn Perks.

AND

Drawing our Lives to a Close - with Jocelyn Freeman.

Today we have two guest speakers so Kathryn Perk’s talk will begin at 3.00p.m. 

Following that, there will be a short break, then Jocelyn Freeman will speak.

Each of these three weekly Living on the Pathway towards Death sessions is independent and one does not have to have attended any previous sessions, so everyone is most welcome to join us today for the third and final session in this series.

Koha will be appreciated.  

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Kathryn Perks, who lives locally, is in touch with organisations and people in NZ who are involved with ideas and activities relating to end-of-life situations.

After we die, there are many important tasks that have to be carried out, usually by family members or friends.  Kathryn has produced a handbook called When I Die of which already 2,000 copies have sold.  By collating and recording personal details now, we can make things easier for those who have to carry out all the necessary tasks that are to be fulfilled after our death. 

Kathryn will share her experiences and give us guidelines on what we can do now that will help others in the future.  Her book, When I Die will be on sale, $20, (kindly at a reduced price for this session). Cash please - no eftpos facilities.

 Jocelyn Freeman writes   “As an Anthroposophical nurse  and a biography counsellor, I have been interested in the meaning of illness and accidents.   I have found that as one moves towards death, biography is a good reflective tool for the process of acceptance and for the preparation for dying.  At this session, there will be an overview regarding the stream of what we brought with us and how we have transformed our meetings of self and world  into stores for the future.”  

The following quote was read last Sunday before Georgina Langdale’s very interesting and informative talk about navigating the transitions between life and death.

“As a child I sometimes dreamt about dying.  After waking, I would tell my mother about them.  She would sit me on her lap and speak very naturally about the fact that, of course, people must go back to heaven.  When another dream announced the death of my great-grandmother, my mother said to me, “She is old and has grown tired of the earth; her soul wants to return with her angel to heaven.  There she will be young again and gain new strength.  You don’t need to be sad about it.”

“I was already sad when my great-grandmother died three days later, but I experienced neither dismay nor fear.  The melancholy that sometimes crept in repeatedly gave way to trust in the rightness of this event and thus I learned to view death as a natural part of life.  I understood, even if not yet consciously, that it was not a sudden break, but a process that has both a meaning and a goal.”

• -- in Bridges Between Life and Death by Iris Paxino.
• Diana Bacchus and Bernie Raichle
• ================================================== 

Quotation: 

The Christ Impulse in Historical Development (part 1)

If now and then we contemplate ourselves as human beings, we are immediately struck by the fact that we experience the world about us through our senses, and then think about the impressions we have received.  We constantly observe these two attributes of man's being.  If, for instance, we have put the light out at night and review the day's impressions before going to sleep, we are conscious that all day long the world has worked upon us.  Now only the memory pictures of the day's impressions surge up and down in our souls.  We know that we are thinking about them, our soul is now within the after-effects of what has taken place in us through the outer impressions.  Apart from trivial matters, we call these memories of the day our own individual impressions.  It is only because we are intelligent, individual human beings, beings with an intellect, that we are capable of receiving impressions of the world in this way.

Now, in our spiritual life this individual aspect is closely connected with external impressions.  During the day, whilst we observe the world, our sense impressions and our thoughts intermingle.  And at bedtime, when we no longer have any fresh sense impressions, but let those we have had pass through our soul, then we know very well that these are our pictures of what is outside.  Our impressions of the outer world merge with what we are as individuals.  They become one.  Now, as we all know, one can make this inner, individual element within us more and more alive, more and more exact, by the means already known to us and described for instance in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.  What you can experience first of all in your inner life, is that you feel you are not absolutely dependent in your thoughts on the external world.  If, for instance, someone can think about what happened on Saturn, Sun and Moon, then he has higher thoughts of this kind.  For of course nobody can have external impressions of what happened on old Saturn, old Sun and old Moon.  We do not even need to go so far.  If we ask ourselves in a quiet moment: ‘How many of my concepts have changed since my youth?’ this in itself is taking an independent individual stand with regard to the world.  When we form views about life, we feel ourselves becoming more independent in our intellect.  Becoming independent in the individual element of the intellect is of great importance for the human being.  For what does this mean? What does it mean for the human being to grasp general truths about life—not just in theory—but through experience, even of things that are independent of external impressions? It means that he is becoming more independent in his etheric body.  That is the first step of a long process.  At the beginning he does not even notice that to some extent he is lifting out his etheric body; ultimately he can make it completely independent of the physical body.

Whilst the beginning is just a tiny step towards becoming independent, the end is a total drawing out of the etheric body and a perceiving with it.  We then have perceptions in the environment with this independent etheric body.  We can even perceive in this way when we are not yet very advanced in inner mystical experience.  We can grasp this and to a certain extent understand it if we remember what our perception is like in the physical body.  With our physical body we perceive by means of our senses, which are independent.  Our eyes are independent and so are our ears.  We can perceive the world of colour and the world of sound independently.  We can no longer do this when we perceive with our intelligence.  In the case of intelligence everything is a unity, nothing is divided into separate spheres.  We cannot perceive with etheric eyes and etheric ears as though they were separate sense realms, we perceive the etheric world in general.  And when we begin to say something about it we can describe how etheric experience works as a comprehensive whole.  I will not discuss how much further this experience can lead, but only point out that when the human being perceives how general truths are formed he can perceive something of the etheric elements.

Whoever perceives the etheric world and can gradually realise that a higher world of this kind exists, can have an inner conviction that an etheric body is the basis of the physical body.  As soon as we speak of such a being as an etheric body we must take our lead from significant disclosures and from direct experience.  As soon as we know that the physical body is interpenetrated by an etheric body we will readily understand the occultist describing in his way that paralysis is an abnormal occurrence of what otherwise happens through normal training.  It can happen that a man's etheric body withdraws from his physical body.  Then the physical body becomes independent.  Paralysis could possibly result, for the physical body has been deprived of its enlivening etheric body.  But we do not need to go as far as the appearance of paralysis, for we can understand its appearance in everyday life even better.  For example, what is a lazy person? He is someone who has a weak etheric body from birth or who has let it grow weak through neglect.  We try to correct it by relieving the physical body of its leaden heaviness and by some means making it lighter.  A thorough cure, however, can only arise by way of the astral body, for it can stimulate the etheric body to fresh life.  But you have to realise something else.  The etheric body is actually the bearer of our whole intellect.  When we go to sleep at night all our thought pictures and memories actually remain in the etheric body.  The human being leaves his thoughts behind in the etheric body and does not return to them until morning.  By laying aside the etheric body we lay aside the whole web of our experiences.

This etheric body, however, is constructed so that when we investigate it in a Spiritual Scientific way we can quite clearly perceive that the human being is subjected to a far greater number of changes in the course of time than we would imagine.  We all know, of course, that man has passed through a series of incarnations.  It is not for nothing that we are incarnated again and again.  Man's vision is limited.  It is a general belief that man's Organisation has always been like it is today.  In fact, the human Organisation changes from one century to another, only we cannot perceive this externally.  In the frontal lobe of the brain there is an organ with delicate convolutions, that has only been developed since the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries.  It is an organic form for the purely intellectual life of the present centuries.  We can well imagine that it is impossible for a detail of this kind to alter in the brain without in fact the whole human Organisation altering, even if only slightly.  So that in very truth the human Organisation shows signs of changes as the centuries pass by.  But it is only through reading the Akashic Record that these changes can be confirmed.  And that is where the changes in the etheric body can be best followed up.  We see that the people of ancient Greece or ancient Egypt had etheric bodies that were quite different.  All the movements in them were different.

Now, in order to arrive at a thought that can be fertile for us, I would like to make a short digression and draw your attention to the fact that even in ordinary life you can assume the existence of more than one world.  The human being goes to sleep without knowing that he is in another world.  But the fact that he is asleep and does not know anything about it does not prove that this other world does not exist.  Other worlds do impinge in a certain way.  The human being perceives with his senses when he is in the physical world but not when he withdraws into himself: then he has an intellectual world which borders on the physical.  And he finds within himself, in addition to the already developed intellectual element, two other elements as well that are quite different again.  Can the human being develop these other elements?

From: Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz. GA 130

I. The Christ Impulse in Historical Development I. 17 September 1911, Lugano