Winter frost in the woods

This universal idea is best expressed through planets in

26th degree of Gemini (25° - 26°)

THE ESSENCE FORM OF RHYTHM
Ridding ourselves of all non-essentials in order to know the absolute essential truth in its natural form

Beneath all of our urges and feelings, which arise out of being incarnated physically, there exists the essential self. This is real in a way that all external expressions are not and we can only resonate that purest of vibrations when we are pruned of our dressing and naked of glamour. We can then see the most beautiful truth of who we really are.

Rudhyar:
FROST-COVERED TREES AGAINST WINTER SKIES

Frost-covered trees against winter skies

Splendour

The true perception of beauty is a spiritual experience

Nature’s supreme power and beauty shows us how seemingly banal realities can in fact create the conditions for magical outcomes. For example, by nothing more esoteric than shifts in temperature and pressure to create hoar frost, she can transport even the most cynical materialist into experiencing wonderment.

Magick is a normal demonstration of life that requires particular space and time constraints. Freezing the moment has cosmic significance and is a necessary and sufficient condition of the art. To bring about these magical moments, we have but to put aside our private concerns and become responsive to the great forces responsible for life’s never-ending self-embellishment.

Ordinary habits of home-building and feeding ourselves are for comfortable maintenance of the status quo, whereas the discovery of our full potential demands that we engage with the non-ordinary. We need to accommodate a continual process of self-purification which includes monitoring our own perceptions – only then will we be able to master the ‘here and now’ and create magical beauty as a life style.

It is Nature’s way to freeze to death that which cannot survive winter. Purification through these transformative moments enables old cycles to give way to the new. We have to adopt the same approach to our own situations – to cut away the dross so that we only ever have vitality in all we touch. Whatever is not passionate and full-on, whatever does not demand our complete attention is partly frozen and so life-denying.

Somehow the radical irreversibility of death deepens our sense of beauty, and raises it to spiritual levels. The beauty is incidental, a subjective human sentiment; yet is there anything more splendorous? Pushing involvements to their limit brings intensification; this leads to passion or death. Splendour must be passionate to be splendid.

Reborn after the death of winter, we are primed to see things with new eyes, eyes readied for new cycles and the inherent shift of perspectives. In this way and in accordance with our newly expanded vision, we create our worlds afresh by pruning out what does not have splendour.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This has become a cliché, whereas it hides an important esoteric understanding – that there is nothing absolute except the Absolute; everything which is not transcendental is subjective – and if it is seen as splendour, it is because we have learned how to look for splendour.