Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, Verse 9

Introduced by Michael Vode

Verse 9 brings to fruition the foregrounding, nascent Whitsun experience of verse 8.  In verse 8 “human cognition” “must in humility yield to a dream state” “when life divine seeks union with my soul.”

In verse 9 this gesture of self-effacement recurs three times in ascending registers. The opening line sets the stage in a realized “forgetting of my own will” that “my soul and spirit” “receive the summer-heralding cosmic warmth.”

Then ‘spirit vision bids me to lose myself within the light,” In other words, what must take precedence is a sustained, open, undistracted attentiveness that waits.

Finally, an ultimate paradoxical surrender issues in a conferred universal, whole, individual consciousness: “a powerful presentiment speaks out”: “lose yourself in order to find yourself.”

Whitsun gives birth to a future-oriented community of aware, awakened, active individuals, each in unison, in-formed by the higher life of Holy Spirit.