On the Winter Solstice
All influence must start from within and work outwardly. Yesterday it was noted that your should maintain your light in a very dark time. How best to do that? Your personal radiance, your greatest asset, comes from within, from your self. Working closely with your inner circle (family), your radiance propogates through its identity into the world at large. Your words and actions thus become powerful.
For this to happen, the family must be strong and balanced. The father figure is strong in its projection, the mother strong in maintaining balance. The other members’ contributions flow from deference, reverence and loyalty. The family keeps your interrelationships in the world real.
The text reads:
“Heat creates energy: this is signified by the wind stirred up by the fire and issuing forth from it. This represents influence working from within outward. The same thing is needed in the regulation of the family. Here too the influence on others must proceed form one’s own person. In order to be capable of producing such an influence, one’s words must have power, and this they can have only if they are based on something real, just as flame depends on its fuel. Words have influence only when they are pertinent and clearly related to definite circumstances. General discourses and admonitions have no effect whatsoever. Furthermore, the words must be supported by one’s entire conduct, just as the wind is made effective by its duration. Only firm and consistent conduct will make such an impression on others that they can adapt and conform to it. If words and conduct are not in accord and not consistent, they will have no effect.
To sustain the light without burning out, you must have a source of renewal and an inner conviction and knowledge of self that keeps giving.
The text reads:
“A luminous thing giving out light must have within itself something that perseveres; otherwise it will in time burn itself out. Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine.
Thus the sun and moon cling to heaven, and grain, grass, and trees cling to the earth. So too the twofold clarity of the dedicated man clings to what is right and thereby can shape the world. Human life on earth is conditioned and unfree, and when man recognises this limitation and makes himself dependent upon the harmonious and beneficent forces of the cosmos, he achieves success. The cow is the symbol of extreme docility. By cultivating in himself an attitude of compliance and voluntary dependence, man acquires clarity without sharpness and finds his place in the world.“
