Epiphany Talk by Carol Kelly January 31st 2015

summarized by Diana Haynes

“The Incarnate Word is with us,

Is still speaking, is present

Always, yet leaves no sign

But everything that is.”

By Wendell Berry

Epiphany is a season of magic, where the ‘Word’ is present; Christ has been born, yet we have to awaken ourselves to ‘see’ it, ‘sense’ it, ‘know’ it. Spirit is hidden in matter and we need all our senses to discover it. Epiphany is the season when the Magi brought their gifts to the child Jesus. They brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and they honored him as the one who was foretold in the stars. But the magi, got lost and went to Herod to get directions to the new King. And Herod lied to the magi. It is the only lie, perhaps, in the whole Bible. Herod said to the magi, ‘go find him that I may also worship him’. Yet, the magi were warned in a dream that Herod’s intentions were evil and they never returned to tell him where they found the baby Jesus.

God spoke to Mary in her vision when she was awake. God spoke to the shepherds through the old earth based clairvoyance. God spoke to the Wise men/kings through their dreams. How does God speak to us today? How is our consciousness evolving, changing?

The magi wore golden crowns, symbolizing their connection to the cosmic wisdom of the heavens. Our heads are a mirror image of the dome of the heavens. Their roundness echoes the vault above us in a perfect microcosm. Our heads contain the warmth of our spirit and the wisdom that we retain from earlier ages. Our physical brain actually floats in the hardened skull that encases it. It has to be free from the weight of gravity to allow the cosmos to ‘think in us’.

The magi bowed their crowned heads before the infant King, for they knew, he was the one who would change human thinking forever. They knew that their kind of seeing was dying out and a new kind of thinking had to be born. They held the vision of what man was to become as a Priest King who stands above the earth and beneath the Hierarchies.

Yet human beings had to descend further into materialistic thinking first. Science has robbed us of our ‘instinctive’ sense experience. We are told the world is built of atoms, yet we can’t see them. We are told the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, as our senses tell us, but that the earth revolves around the sun. Science has come to be respected as the absolute arbiter of reality and has taught us that human beings and even the earth are insignificant in the vastness of the universe.

Materialistic thinking has gone too far, alienating the human being from the world he lives in, causing an extreme sense of separation. It is time to reclaim our senses and perhaps extend them further. The earth is not insignificant and man’s effect on the earth is not insignificant. In fact, man and the earth and the entire cosmos are interwoven in a living relationship. To illustrate:

A human being breathes about 18 times a minute. In one day, this is 25,920 breaths. Just as one day corresponds to 25,920 respirations, so 25,920 days is the equivalent of about 71 years, which is the average duration of a human life. The Platonic year is the time it takes for the sun’s rising point to pass through the entire zodiac and return to its original position, which takes 25,920 years. These 25,920 years are most important for the life of the sun, because during that period, the sun’s life passes through a real unity, a complete whole. If we live one day, we reproduce the platonic world-year with our 25,920 respirations; if we live 71 years, we again reproduce the platonic year with 25,920 great breaths. These correspondences show the intimacy of man’s relationship to the life of the whole cosmos.

Plato stated that our head is rooted in the cosmos. Our head is also where most of our senses are located. Rudolf Steiner extended the definition of our senses to include 12, 7 beyond the typical 5 most of us learned in school. They are:

Touch, Life, Movement, Balance.  Typically these are senses that we don’t doubt. With touch we get to know our bodies and our physical world – our boundaries. Our sense of life includes our sense of being well or not well. Movement corresponds to the awareness in space of our bodies and how we propel ourselves. We know when we are off balance because we fall over. Etc.

Smell, Taste, Sight, Warmth, Hearing.  With smell and taste, we bring the outside world into us. We can discern if something is good or bad. ‘I smell a rat! That stinks! That’s a bitter truth. With sight, we reach out into the world. Sight is a metamorphosed touch because we extend our being into the world through vision. Warmth includes our sense of enthusiasm for something, our affinity towards someone. While hearing is the only sense that we can’t control how sound affects us. We have eye-lids but no ear flaps! We can’t shut out most sounds.

Sense of the Word relates to our ability to recognize language and meaning. Human beings can create music but we can’t create a language. Languages are given to us by the Gods. We have a sense that recognizes it’s hidden laws and features; discerns if someone is speaking gobbledygook or a real language. Each language reflects the soul of a people. German forms words like building blocks and her people are so similarly pragmatic. Whereas English is more like a watercolor where you can intuit what is going to be said early in a sentence. In German, with their verbs at the end of a sentence, you don’t know what is being said until the last moment – and so you have to wait. In English, we don’t wait, we can finish one another’s sentences. Every language reflects the different soul qualities of a different people. And of course, our great challenge is to understand one another precisely because we do understand things so differently. In the beginning was the Word. The word connects us to Divine thought.

Sense of Thought enables us to form meanings and concepts about what our other senses reveal to us. We must sacrifice our own thinking to receive the thought of another. We can transcend our differences and understand the thought of another.

Sense of Self or Higher I. This sense is reflected in the ability to recognize the difference between a corpse and a living being. Something is present in a body that is alive, that is gone when the body dies. This is also a self-reflective awareness that there is an I in another human being that we can encounter, unlike an encounter with nature or an animal where the I is not indwelling in the same way.

We can imagine that these 12 senses are like 12 windows in a castle through which the higher self walks to see out the windows to the 12 constellations beyond. In our higher self, there is only one truth for all of us. If we were always in our higher self, there would be no disagreement. Imagine the woman in Revelations standing on the moon with a crown of 12 stars circled around her head. This is the image of our future thinking capacity. Where we are not anchored in the bias of one limited perspective, but see the whole truth. The whole truth cannot be seen by any one person; which is why many spiritual groups require 12 to be present to make a decision. The 12 disciples represented each of the zodiacal perspectives. This new thinking is given a preview in Goethe who asks “What is this revealing to me?” rather than modern man who asks, “How can I capitalize on this?

Rigid thinking, crystallized, hardened thinking leads to cruelty and separation. And we can see this in the world we live in today. The transmutation of thought is through the fire of self-sacrifice prepares us to accept radically new concepts of the world. Our thinking, which in its materialistic form is divisive, must be transformed to see our unity, our community in Christ. Our attention is the most important thing in this world. When you consider the amount of energy spent in trying to tear our attention away from us! Distractions such as media, computers, cell phones, drugs, alcohol, eating, gambling and endless relationship dramas all clamor for our attention.

It is so hard to take even 5 minutes away from the world to devote yourself to prayer or meditation. You’ll see, the moment you sit down to meditate, the list of things you should be doing will come up in your mind. It takes discipline. This means becoming a disciple of our higher self. Even if we can do just one thing a day, that will strengthen our higher self. And when we do manage to accomplish just that one thing, like saying a prayer every morning and night, then all sorts of other things become possible. When we feel it’s completely impossible and we are at the end of our capacity, Christ will come to us in these death points in our life. This is not the time to be lazy because the attack against the powers of our higher self is on. Now is the time to seek the Christ who is born within us, but remains hidden unless we turn towards him with our attention.

Reference made to Jacque Lusseryan, author of “And there was Light”, “Against the Pollution of the I”. Reference made to Spirit of the Circling Stars by Adam Bittleston