April - Devotion becomes power of sacrifice

March 21 to April 21

The love that in the responsibility for every individuality feels itself to be a member of a free community is devotion.

In devotion, the nature of living thinking is experienced, of the spirit that lives in us as individuality. In living thinking we do not develop our subjective thoughts, rather the spirit thinks through us the thoughts that indwell within creatures. However, the spirit does not do this by overwhelming us, but such that we unite with it in a free deed, which is at the same time a beholding. In reverence for the spirit in us and in all beings, we raise ourselves to ethical individualism. The content of this reverence, however, differs according to whether it refers to creatures of nature or human beings. Natural creatures we comprehend through our own thoughts, human beings through theirs. By not thinking our subjective thoughts about other human beings, but by devoting our thoughts to theirs, our own individuality becomes the bearer of another individuality. Since externality is wholly overcome in thinking, we lose ourselves in this other individuality, only to find ourselves in it again. In this way, freedom becomes community for devotion.

Thus it becomes power of sacrifice.

A meditation of such devotion is the contemplation of the loss-and-found scenes in the lives of the leaders of humanity. (Buddha is found again under the tree with the singers, the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple with the teachers.) 

December - Control of the tongue becomes feeling for truth.

November 21 to December 21

This insightful patience controls the tongue.

For whoever speaks and judges hastily, harms or hinders the maturing process that harvests the truth of world phenomena in his judgment and lets his own actions emerge as ripened fruit from his interaction with world phenomena. Whoever speaks without waiting for this ripening merely voices subjective opinions concerning a world that, in essence, remains foreign to him. Such utterances may draw the applause of the like-minded and, by conforming with common usage, meet with outward success. They are not the truth patiently won and tried in practice with equanimity. Truth is rather the spirit of things opening its eyes in our pursuit of knowledge. Premature words uttered frightens it away. Control of the tongue enables the enchanted spirit, lying dumb and blind in things, to see and speak. Control of one’s tongue loosens the tongue of the creatures sighing for the spell to be broken. The spell is lifted from them when their being in our silence becomes an organ of perception, which interprets itself in the gaze upon its spell-bound state. In this way, the world and the self crossover and interchange, in contrast to the state of our normal consciousness in which they confront each other, disparate and fixed. The essence of things within the human being actively pursuing knowledge becomes an organ of perception; man experiences himself, in so far as he is engaged in creating knowledge, as a being spread out over de totality of the world phenomena. In control of the tongue, it is not the separation of world and self, but their crossing over and interchange that is sensed as the truth. The control of the tongue is the fruitfulness of human knowledge.

Thus this control becomes feeling for truth.

A meditation of such feeling for truth is:

When man gains knowledge of himself,

His self becomes for him the world;

When man gains knowledge of the world,

The world becomes for him his self.