Holy Night 5 applied to May

December 28-29 – Taurus

Consciously purify the body of thought.
Discipline thinking. Concentrating on the positive. Converting the black doves of thought into white doves, because our thinking is, until it is not consciously conducted with discipline, like a dovecote! Keep this dovecote closed against foreign, negative thoughts.

Mystery: The purification of the temple by Jesus Christ.

Rudolf Steiner’s indications for the Holy Nights given to Herbert Hahn
Translation from German by Laura Zanutto 2015 adjusted by Mark Willan 2016

5. Heilige Nacht

28./29. – Stier

Bewusst den Gedankenkörper reinigen. Gedankenzucht. Konzentration auf Positives. Umwandeln der schwarzen Gedankentauben in weiße, denn unser Denken gleicht, solange es nicht bewusst in Zucht genommen wird, einem Taubenschlag! Diesen Taubenschlag auch schließen vor fremden, negativen Gedanken.

Mysterium: Die Tempelreinigung durch Jesus-Christus.

Fifth Contemplation: Kristina Kaine

The thought of disciplining thinking hangs like a heavy weight. The way we think has been developed over our lifetime and we are very comfortable with many of our thoughts. These are the thoughts of our constructed self.

When we read Rudolf Steiner’s indication, “Consciously purify the body of thought” perhaps we can ask what is this body of thought? Is it our collection of thoughts? Or is it that part of us where thinking occurs?

Broadly speaking we can say that the body of thoughts, the place of thought activity, is in three different areas of our being; our etheric body, our Intellectual Soul, and the ultimate “body of thoughts” which is our Spirit, our Higher Self, which works towards expressing itself through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

This gives us a map of our development which began when we first gained the ability to think. The elements of thinking appeared during the last ages of the Atlantean epoch, around 600BC. This gave rise to thinkers like Socrates and Plato. They exemplified the idea that thinking consists of concepts which replaced clairvoyance. In clairvoyance, ideas manifest without effort, they are ‘given’. As we know, thinking requires a great deal of effort which explains why so many people are satisfied with ready-made thoughts.

Sergei Prokofieff, in his book “The Cycle of the Year”, explains the ideas Rudolf Steiner gave in a lecture on November 14, 1909 (see page 406f) about the evolution of human faculties. He says that thinking (as well as feeling and willing) were interconnected in the body underpinning each other. Then they could be experienced independently as three different regions in the soul. When freed from the body they work independently as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

When this begins to happen we can “conduct our thinking consciously” and we begin to use our ability to think purely or as Georg Kuhlewind calls it, ‘living thinking’. In his book, “Stages of Consciousness” he says, “Living thinking is pre-consciousness. Thinking is the appearance of past thoughts, it is already thought.” page 30

Pure thinking does not depend on memories, it thinks in the moment and cannot lay these thoughts down in memory, they must be experienced in real time – again and again. This is an ability we are currently developing. In this way we purify our temple.

Christ and the Money Changers by Anthea Craigmyle