The Third Holy Night:

At Home with Images

Once at home with what you value, it is time to enter the home of images. It is images that build our thought life as every thought begins as an image. 

There are the sublime images that inspire sublime thinking like wisdom and innocence, love and freedom, truth, beauty, karma, forgiveness.  There are daily images to think about like like being kind, being focused, being organized that enrich our day to day lives.  There are the images of relationship where we discover how to think about being a friend, a spouse, a grandmother and a myriad of other gestures of connectedness. 

Images ask us to think and become familiar with them without becoming bored.  Boredom must not dwell in the soul's home of images - this is so important to remember. 

Rudolf Steiner offered a brilliant exercise for this home that cultivates thinking and overcomes boredom. He asks us to choose an image of an object, simple, mundane and familiar like a knitting needle or a paper clip and think about it for five minutes a day for thirty days.  How many of us can think about a paper clip for five minutes? What could be more boring?

He said it was important to keep the thoughts new and alive, not remembered.  The thought, "a paper clip is a curved piece of wire," would be the same but it would be thought in the moment, not pulled up from the memory of having thought it on the first day. 

I have done this exercise and was constantly delighted by it. Definitely not easy, but invaluable for those of us who think about mysteries.

If we can keep our thoughts about an image of a paper clip alive for five minutes over a number of days, what would happen to our thoughts about the image of a mathematical theorem, a rose, the care of an elderly individual, or meaning of a poem?

Remembered thoughts and boredom with our images are veils that keep us from seeing the image with new, more awake eyes or like a house where every window has the shades drawn so no new light can come in.

Take your spiritual companion into this home of images and ask this being to lift the veils and let the light in by describing one or two of images as if they were paintings being seen or stories being told for the first time. Share a conversation with your companion on how to think about these images. Be curious and inquisitive not just about the images but about the thoughts they engender.

You may discover an image that will inspire your inner journey of thoughts for the coming year. Let the image be your Star in the East for your thoughts.  Have the wisdom to follow it.

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The Value of the Inner Christmas Messages

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