Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere offers us an opportunity to become more conscious about this festival. The sun stands high overhead, really putting the heat on us. Inwardly we can feel the heat also, subjecting ourselves to the judgment that echoes in the murmuring of conscience as we review the year and think about New Year resolutions. That is another tradition, which may or may not be observed today. Yet it isn’t a bad thing to reflect, and maybe it’s quite appropriate at this turning point of the turning of the year…
Rudolf Steiner recommends an activity of reviewing the day backwards. I think it’s also a valuable annual process, to look back over the main events. Among various reasons for picturing events in reverse order, I will consider just one. In the common experience of time, our reactions to any unexpected events obscure the original impulse; the consequences dominate our minds. When conflict occurs, the issues of the hurt caused and who is to blame for it usually becomes an obsessional concern, the only focus of attention. When we look back, we tend to get caught up in the drama; we replay the event in our minds, and years of emotional patterning attach their self-justifying grievances to the issue.
In practising this review, we can learn non-reactiveness, by going from the consequence, back to the event, and then back to our intentions. We learn to stand in the event and ask ourselves: ‘Could I have done otherwise?’ In other words, perhaps we can consider what was needed rather than what we wanted.
Sogyal Rinpoche, in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, suggests that if we make our way back through any conflict to the moment immediately before we reacted, we will know — in the living light of truth — the purpose and meaning of the event. This then can become an enlightened state of being, through which we see the truth:
The Child Luminosity, also called the Path Luminosity, is the nature of our mind, which we can gradually stabilize through meditation, and more and more completely integrate into our action in life.
Sogyal Rinpoche goes on to state that this Child Luminosity is a personalised reflection of the cosmic Mother Luminosity, the very ground of our being as humanity:
The Mother Luminosity is the name we give to the Ground Luminosity. This is the fundamental inherent nature of everything, which underlies our whole experience, and which manifests in its full glory at the moment of death.
We are in the presence here of a deep Mystery. Let’s look at it from another perspective. In a verse for Michaelmas from his Calendar of the Soul, Rudolf Steiner evokes this same mood of self-consciousness that arises in the moment of recognising the Mother Luminosity:
Nature, your maternal existence
I bear within my will’s being;
And my will’s fiery might
Steels my spirit-striving
So that it may bring to birth
A feeling of Self
To bear myself in me.
The ‘mother’ gives birth to the ‘child’… Out of the encounter with world-processes, that ‘fundamental inherent nature of everything,’ a feeling of self is born, making it possible to bear myself — in other words, to say ‘Yes’ to the voice of conscience. Subsequently, in the Christmas verse, Steiner represents this tender feeling of self as the spirit-child; the universal impulse living in my will engenders in my heart the Child Luminosity:
I feel, free of enchantment
The spirit-child in my soul’s womb;
In the heart’s bright radiance
It has engendered the holy cosmic Word,
The heavenly fruit of hope,
That grows rejoicing into world-distances
Out of my being’s divine ground.
Practising the review is intended to lead us back past our characteristic reactions (by which we are ‘enchanted’) to that primal innocence of our original intentions. Then, in sleep there is a mysterious process through which we come to terms with things; an experience of selfhood that is born continually in us. We are in the presence of that witness to our actions, speaking in us as conscience.
These are images from the spiritual sources of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, and I do not want in any way to offend anyone who subscribes to different beliefs. There will be similar archetypes to be found in every faith. There also are existential parallels, for instance in Transactional Analysis, where we find a non-religious approach to the same experience. For in Transactional Analysis we note three principal modes of being human: the parent, the adult, and the child. The parent can manifest in positive or negative (nurturing or controlling) modes; and the child can appear either in positive or negative (free or adapted) modes. The ‘Christmas transaction’ could be understood therefore in terms of the Positive Nurturing Parent enabling the Positive Free Child to be.
So let this be a Christmas invocation: may you give birth to the Free Child, that True Child, within your soul, so there might be peace on earth for all human beings of good will.
~ John Allison, revised and adapted from { parent-theses } and ‘A Teacher’s Book’
