WHAT is the winter solstice, and why do so many people around the world bother to celebrate it, as they do every year at this time?
“The word ‘solstice’ derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still),” explains the NY Times Op-Ed Contributor in the article”There Goes the Sun.”
The phenomenon reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter at dawn for two or three days.
At that time the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.
Winter in the northern hemisphere marks the annual return of an ancient solar festival. Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer.
The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” recalls the NY Times Op Ed: “Pleasing, that idea. …
As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”
But the event has deeper, metaphysical implications. Both the Sun and the human heart are the two greatest life-givers we know. Indissolubly interconnected, according to occult teachings, both radiate continuously a powerful aura of biological and regenerative energies.
“The Sun has but one distinct function,” Blavatsky explains to her students (Transactions, 116) — “it gives the impulse of life to all that breathes and lives under its light. The sun is the throbbing heart of the system, each throb being an impulse. … This impulse is not mechanical but a purely spiritual, nervous impulse.”
Theosophy Watch 
I can only add my thanks for the beautifully put together presentations over time. I often forward them to some of my mailing list. Hopefully that germinates the seed.
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This is truly an amazing, generous offering. Thank you so very much for this. I’ll have to read and watch over and over. A great gift to be able to curl up with the ultimate Mystery story. We are so very fortunate to have the Divine Wisdom available to us in these times and in this way. Theosophy Watch is truly an Oasis!
May Everyone Have A Wonderful Holiday Season and New Year…NAMASTE!
Love/Live/Peace
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Beautiful, is the work and care you have put into this piece of the “Heart Doctrine”, Theosophy!
Beautiful! is the word Agnes a dear friend and student of Theosophy wrote underlying a paragraph in her book The Four Sacred Seasons, and I read at her funeral service a few years back.
“The Egg of Brahma is composed of concentric spheres centered in the Sun, and each one of these spheres is a cosmic world. Its heart – the hesrt of each one of them – is the Sun. The world or sphere of our Esrth is one such, and surrounds the Sun as a sphere of dense substance, and the nucleus in this sphere or egg, for such it is, is what we commonly call our Earth….” (paragraph continues on page 11).
¡Feliz Solsticio! , Saludos y Namaste!
Marion
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