Advent Week Three – Third Trial

During the third week of Advent we face challenges in our astral levels. Our astral body is the vehicle for all lower and higher soul qualities, of pleasure and pain, sorrow and joy. Motion and emotion or movement and feeling are also centered in this area of our being. This is the playground of Lucifer and Ahriman who try to provoke our fears and anxieties. In his Book, The Cycle of the Year, Sergei Prokofieff puts it beautifully: “For all lies spring ultimately from a subconscious fear, while the utterance of even the smallest truth demands a significant degree of courage.” We need a presence of mind to be in control of the soul forces of thinking, feeling and will. Conscious awareness is required to keep them in harmony and in balance.

An American author, Ralph Keyes, has written a book called The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, where he argues that deception has become the American way of life. (It has certainly become an Australian way of life as well.) We lie, he says, often with no real reason. According to one study, 28 percent of conversations among friends contained conscious lies; 77 percent among strangers.

“In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie,” Keyes argues. “Enhanced truth, it might be called. Neo-truth. Soft truth. Faux truth. Truth lite.” Taken from Richard Louv’s column, November 7, 2004 San Diego Union-Tribune

Plato’s Virtue courage will assist us to resist this pervasive tendency to lie. During this third week we can scrutinize our conversations and have the courage to remain silent because so much of our idle chatter is founded on a fabric of lies. “Have a nice day” is a prime example. Do we really care if a stranger has a nice day?

From Secrets of the Christian Festivals https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08D6CPL8D/

Art: Angel Standing in the Sun, Turner