The Closing Portal - Epiphany

With this message we cross the closing threshold of the Holy Nights. I think each of us needs to ask what are we carrying with us as we cross from a spiritual intensity to our ordinary time?

It’s Epiphany, the day of sudden awakening.  It is as if we had a twelve night waking sleep and today woke up not really clear what gifts we have received, but none the less we know we carry something that we did not hold before the solstice. Something was born in us in innocence that brings a new and thrilling wisdom.

Blessings and celebrations on the new you!

Now with this new evolved thinking, feeling and willing, gently and gracefully begin your year hoping to find answers to questions of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Remember to wonder as you feel the spiritual forces at your back and supporting your feet. Embrace ambivalence and all difficulties. Find intimacy and forgiveness living in your focused soul. And love the poetic language that glimers in the alignment between spiritual realities and earthly realities.  And what endings do you find in your tall and still soul as you stand true to yourself?

Now Epiphany living in the modern soul has three distinct impacts.  It asks us to name our three gifts, be aware of our destiny and take the first step of manifestion.

On Sunday, January 16th at 4 PM Eastern, I will be giving a complimentary teleseminar on Inner Epiphany.  I will send you the information on the call in a few days.

Meanwhile, bathe in the Inner Dawn of the New Year.

 

Reread the messages of the Holy Nights, experience the comments of others and perhaps add your own.

 

 

The 12th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to

Wear the Three Crowns

 

 

This is the last of the Holy Nights for this Inner Christmas.  (Tomorrow I will write an Epiphany message framing the portal into the ordinary year.)

Never before have I felt a need to attend to what it means to my inner life that the Holy Nights are at an end. Is this because I wrote so personally about the growing capacity for endings?

Twelve is really a number of a full circle of consciousness. We have gone through a full circle of consciousness in the clear presence of the spiritual world and in the clear insight of our "I." Maybe we don't exactly know what that means but all of us sharing Inner Christmas have been active during the Holy Nights - we have moved through a full circle together.

Why would the presence of either the spiritual world or our "I" consciousness fade or blur? Perhaps it is our attention that now dives into ordinary life.

Are the Holy Nights, a yearly spiritual feast, filling us with 12 spiritual dishes that we then digest and make our own? We can then ask which of these dishes did our soul enjoy immediately, which will we savor over the year.  Which dish gave our soul something to chew on? Has it been a good meal? Is tonight's message a sweet or savory ending?

What are the three crowns the soul can grow to wear? The crown of Truth.  The crown of Beauty. The crown of Goodness.

The soul, your soul, can only wear the crowns through much moral striving. It is moral striving to work with the question, "What is Truth/Beauty/Goodness?" This asks you to wonder - growing the last capacity is dependent on growing the first!

Ask 12 questions about Truth.

Then ask twelve questions about Beauty.

And finally, ask twelve questions about Goodness.

Write them down. Do not try to answer them but do reread them and keep them somewhere to read next Christmas before beginning the Holy Nights.

In your whole life, have you ever asked even three questions about Truth, Beauty or Goodness? Isn't it about time?  It is for me.

This is how we begin the year and end the Holy Nights, finding our simple questions about the three crowns of our soul.

Let the questions you have grow in your soul through the year.

If you would like to share your questions and inspire others, please do so at www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

The 11th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Forgiveness

 

 

The Holy Nights and the unfiltered light of the spirit have led us deeply into our soul as an evolving, developing inner moral imagination.  Over and over again, the spiritual hierarchies ask us to reflect on the experience of becoming, the experience of polarities and the experience of freedom.

Do pause for a few sacred moments and consider your personal sense of becoming during these nights. Do you feel different than the way you were before the Holy Nights began?

What about the polarities of human consciousness?  Can you feel a center or see a center between two opposing experiences? Have you sought the awesome and awful point of balanced ambivalence?

And have had any moments where freedom from your numerous identities appeared -  when you realize the spiritual sense of "I" that lives free of all qualifiers, containers and judgments.

If you have experienced any of these awarenesses, tonight's message will be, maybe not easy, but less difficult. If you have some awareness, you have forgiven something.

Without forgiveness, can you become an evolved self, can you live between the ever-present polarities and can you be free?

Tonight look at both aspects of forgiveness - to forgive and to be forgiven. Do you seek both equally?  Just imagine yourself in the inner experience of both.  What do they feel like?  If during the Holy Nights you can truly imagine forgiving and being forgiven, the coming year will be blessed.

Don't go into any of your stories or dramas tonight. The specifics of our stories generally keep us from forgiveness, so release any specifics and just focus on feeling forgiveness.  Feel a release, a restoration, a renewal.  Feel wholeness and lightness.

Now think about the five sense that perceive the world - sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  How does each sense forgive? Can you forgive easily through one sense? Is there one sense that cannot bear to forgive something that offends it?

Here is another Holy Nights imagination that calls for poetry.  Begin writing down a list of  feeling words connected to forgiveness. Choose three words from the list and use them in a poem (or a paragraph)  about the coming year and how forgiveness will live in your soul.  Please share your efforts.

The 10th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Intimacy

 

Note: Leave comments and read the previous messages at
http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

"My soul and the world are but one." Rudolf Steiner

Intimacy in the soul is so spiritually and practically essential, but what does that mean?

I've mentioned the three worlds of the soul - the earthly world, the spiritual world, and the individual's inner world. How do we become one which each of these three worlds?

It's not easy but the work of soul intimacy is powerful. It is about discovering your tenderness.  Tender intimacy is the willingness to sweetly hold the object close so that knowledge is revealed with a beautiful proportion. What is the beautiful proportion between the self as subject and matter, spirit and self as object.

Now you must ask yourself how willing are you to hold close with true interest all things material, all things spiritual and all things personal.

Remember we are working with growing capacity in the mood of self-compassion. So no demand and no perfection. No silly sense that if you are not on the mark you are deficient, that if you harbor any self-judgment you are off the path, that if you have any doubt, you lack the fortitude.

If we are to understand the principle of moral development there is no perfection and no failure, just courageous devotion to growing soul capacities.

Back to intimacy and being one with the world. Of the three worlds, pick the world that is most difficult for you.  Is it the world of materialism? the world of spirit? or the world of knowing yourself? Begin with that world tonight.  Notice something small in this difficult world - my guess is the world that is the most difficult is the world of the personal self - and hold it tenderly with your thoughts, your feelings and your will.

What do you think about this little bit of the difficult world? What do you feel about it?  What do you want to do with it or because of it?  These are tough questions.  Please write down your thoughts, feelings and intentions as writing gives you a sense of distance for new intimate observations.

What is the benefit of growing intimacy? Intimacy cultivates love. Nothing more need be said.

Two more nights of the Holy Nights.  Breathe and attend. Love your soul, intimately.

The 9th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to

Stand Tall and Stand Still

 

Note: Please go to the blog to read the comments (and to post your own). The comments really enrich the experience. Thank you. You can also read this message and all the previous ones on the blog.  http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

If in our souls, we stand tall and still what can we observe? Being tall we observe our surroundings. Being still we observe all movement. And we observe the experience of standing. We need to grow taller and more still and we need to stand more often and for longer periods of inner time - timeless time.

There is no word "stiller." Still implies an absolute.  When I still my soul, I need to still my thoughts, my feelings, my will.  Stillness is the absence of movement or the containment of all movement.  What movement do you so identify with that you can neither release it nor contain it? What does that movement protect you from?  If you were still, what would you feel, think, or will?  Is there a part of your being that would speak to you in a voice you could only hear if you stilled all your other voices.  Do you imagine the stillness, the growing stillness, being painful or peaceful? If the stillness grows will it move you through the pain of your emotions to the peace of your inner divinity?

Tall always allows for growth in our language because we witness the growing tallness of our children and the growing tallness of trees.  Imagine the sunflower.  Imagine Jack's beanstalk.

Now give thought to the verb, to stand.  Will the real you please stand up?  When do you take a stand? a practical stand, a spiritual stand, a moral stand? How does your soul stand out? or for? or behind?

Imagine standing on the strong shoulders of a giant. What could you see?

What if the shoulders belong to the giant whose name is "I."

From those shoulders, what surroundings can you observe? All the magnificent complexities and simplicities of your three worlds - the earthly world of time and space, the spiritual world of the absolute and the ephemeral and the world of self with its complex relationships.

 

Imagine...and if no answers to these questions appear, ask again and make up an answer. Have fun.

Tonight stand in your soul? What are you standing on?

Tonight experience growing stillness. What begins to vibrate your still self?

Tonight experience growing taller.  What new vistas appear in each of your worlds?

Is this a time for wondering, focusing, naming poetically? Is it difficult?  Feel the forces at your back and the ground reaching your feet.  Align with your unknown truth.  Embrace your feelings of ambivalence and note your emerging desires. 

The 8th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Endings

 

Note: Please go to the blog to read the comments (and to post your own). The comments really enrich the experience. Thank you. You can also read this message and all the previous ones on the blog.  http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 563 - 483 BC

At the beginning of the year, which so appropriately falls in the mid-Holy Nights, let's notice our  unpeaceful feelings about endings.  Endings are death.  Living attention is no longer paid to what had been evolving through time.  Interest is over.  Meaning is complete or can go no further. Or something has reached the point of enough, of satisfaction, of desire met and of destiny fulfilled.

How do you feel about endings, death, enough, over and other states of finality? Do you feel the withering hidng in germinating?

I will be personal here.

I avoid and resist endings. I ignore endings. I rage at endings. I feel the same thing about completions and fulfillments.   I live in a mood of constant development and process. For me even happy endings are lacking.

So this capacity for endings needs so much growth in my soul.  As I seek this growth, I quake a bit.  Where does this lack of peace with death in life come from? Or with satisfaction?  How does it keep me from meaningful beginnings, from true vitality? What thresholds push me back not letting me cross? Am I afraid of the tears or afraid of the joys?

These are my emotional feelings.

Now I contradict myself.

If I didn't love endings, I would not be writing a Holy Nights Message about them.  I am at the age where I consider completions and "last times." I recognize endings sooner and bless them. Finality seems like an opportunity. I am at the threshold of the end of this life.

I love death as much as I love birth.  I celebrate thresholds, transitions and metamorphoses. And witness them with peace, seeing glory.  I also feel them as a continum, a never-ending full of endings! Every death is a birth.

Slowly, I am learning to attend to feelings of satisfaction and good enough. I've stopped always wanting or needing more. I can let go.

And all this changes my relationship to the eternal, the infinite, the cosmic and the universal.  I imagine being at peace with endings means knowing the peace of now and enough and never again.

Tonight write down your thoughts and feelings about endings.  Go to that place of ending hiding in the beginning of the year and ask yourself what you want to end over the next 364 days. And I don't mean "get rid of" or vanquish from your life as in a New Year's resolution to stop smoking or a wish to end poverty and hunger in the world.  What will simply or complexly end this year? I am asking you to live into your relationship to death.

Here is a poem with many beautiful expressions but the one I find the most freeing is "Accustom yourselves to death gently."  Embrace the little deaths, the endings of the year.

Chorus of the Clouds
Nelly Sachs

We are full of sighs, full of glances
We are full of laughter
And at times we bear your faces.
We are not far from you.
Who knows how many tears you have shed through our weeping?
How much longing forms us?
We are players at dying
Accustom yourselves to death gently
You, the unpracticed ones, who learn nothing in the night.
Many angels are given to you
But you do not see them.

Learn something from the Holy Nights, listen to the Buddha and see the angels.