News 13-24

Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay

Easter Sunday, 31 March 2024                     

Calendar of Coming Events-- Diary Dates

In the Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
unless stated otherwise.

(** see below for more details.)

• TONIGHT: Sunday 31 March at 7pm.  An Easter Gathering.**
• Saturday 6 April 9:30 to noon. The School of Spiritual Science.  Mantra 13
• Saturday 13 April 2 pm.  Annual General Meeting of the Hawkes Bay Branch of the Anthroposophical Society**
• Friday 19 April. 7 pm. The Libretto of Wagner's Parsifal 
• Friday 3 May.  click for details: 
  

  Hōhepa Hawkes Bay - Biodynamic Centennial Celebration Day - Hastings - Eventfinda eventfinda.co.nz
• Weekend 4-5 May. Annual Conference of Anthroposophical Society in NZ.  To be held in Taikura School as main venue. 
  Guest speaker: Ueli Hurter, Goetheanum, Switzerland. 
  More details now on this new link:
   Conference May 2024 - Anthroposophical Society in New Zealand (anthroposophy.org.nz)  
  Invitation to join: Musical Group **;  Art Display**

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**EASTER GATHERING TONIGHT

For those who would like to gather, share thoughts, insights, poems or songs on the theme of Easter.

We invite you to an informal meeting at the Anthroposophical Centre at 7pm on Sunday 31 March.

Here are some excerpts from a Lecture by Rudolf Steiner: The Festivals and their Meaning II: Easter.  Lect. 6: The Mystery of the Future (CW 102.    13 April 1908, Berlin)

“The grave is empty, and He Who lay within it has risen!” The empty Grave and the Risen Christ — this is the Easter Mystery, the Mystery that is a foreshadowing, a prophecy.   Christ came to establish the great synthesis between the Easter Mystery and the Christmas Mystery.   To the Christmas re-enactment of the ancient Mysteries is added the Mystery of future time, the Mystery of the Risen Christ.

With the Coming of Christ this Impulse was given.   These are the feelings that should inspire us in the days when we have the Easter Mystery in symbols around us.   For the Easter Mystery is not merely a Mystery of Remembrance.   It is also a Mystery of the Future, foreshadowing the destiny of those who free themselves more and more from the shackles, ensnarement and pitfalls of the purely material life.

… we are drawing near the time of our own Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch which denotes something of peculiar significance in the evolution of humanity.  In the Greco-Latin epoch it was still true to speak of an equal possibility, on the one side of remembering the visions arising in the ancient, shadowy clairvoyance, and on the other, of living wholly within the physical body, and of being thereby completely cut off from the spiritual worlds.  Individuals here and there had this experience.  The whole trend of modern life goes to show that the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has descended still more deeply into the physical body — the outer sign being the birth of materialistic concepts.  These made their appearance for the first time in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, with the Atomists of ancient Greece.  Then, having passed from the scene for a time, we find them cropping up again, and during the last four centuries their influence has so greatly increased that man has lost, not only the content of the old memories of the spiritual worlds, but, gradually, all belief in the very existence of those worlds. … In a very large number of people, belief in the existence of a spiritual world has simply vanished.

… in the Atlantean epoch he was an actual witness of them.  His spiritual consciousness by night and his physical consciousness by day did not greatly differ; they were in balance, and it would have been foolish of a man to deny the reality of that which was perceptibly around him — for he actually beheld the gods.  There was no need for religion in our modern sense.

… What is religion, fundamentally speaking?  It is the intermediary between the spiritual worlds and mankind when men are no longer able to experience these spiritual worlds through their own organs of perception.  Religion was the proclamation, the announcement of the existence of spiritual worlds, made for the sake of men who could no longer experience spiritual reality.  Thus was the spiritual life spread over the earth as religious culture in the several epochs of civilisation, in ancient India, ancient Persia and the rest, down to our own time.

… When Jesus of Nazareth had reached the age of 30, the Christ came down into his body.  For the first and last time Christ lived in a physical body.  And His victory over death — when it is rightly understood — reveals to man what the manner of his own life must be if, for all ages of time, he is to be conscious of the reality of the spiritual world.  That is the true union with Christ.”

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**Calling Singers and Orchestral Musicians in H.B.

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