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A Christmas Address Given December 2001 by Dorit Winter, Director of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training The sun continues to shine even on a cloudy day. At this moment of human history, the clouds are particularly dense and thick and they are gathering. How can we prepare for the storm to come? For such darkness surely portends a powerful tempest. That is the question we are all asking at this season, in this year. Our festival today is the answer. Only by realizing the significance of the holiday we are now celebrating will we be able to strengthen our understanding of the potential for sunlight from within. Inside each of us there is sunlight, no matter how dark the storm-tossed clouds. Our inner light is the light cast by our own thinking. En-lightenment is the capacity to be awake, to be conscious. When vision is focused enough, and there is sufficient strength to see the light itself, we speak of claire-voyance. And yet, we notice all around us that we are in danger of losing our inner light. The dark clouds gathering want to rob us of our light. They want to dumb us down, to blind us to our own light, to darken consciousness. How does this happen? How do we get dumbed down? Through fear, stealth, speed, mechanization, paralysis of will. For instance, consider how many of us find our mail boxes regularly stuffed with catalogues filled with gadgets to lure us into paralysis of will. Here, for example, one catalogue offers gadgets for counting your money, for pressing your ties, for selecting your CDs. These are the more innocuous machines, made to enhance our comforts but intended, ultimately, to rob us of our limbs and the strength that is in them- comforts to make us will-less. How many hours of human intelligence go into the making and selling of these "conveniences"-the automatic timers for your Christmas lights, the videos to entertain the children in the back seat, and on and on. Will misdirected, will misused can result in horrific acts. There is a lot of wasted will in our world today. Think of the incredible will required to fly a plane into a building. Tragically, it is a blind will. Is it too far-fetched to posit the connection between such a blinded will-power and the "click culture" purveyed by these catalogues? We are surrounded by a culture that sees progress in protruding buttons and stunted limbs. This is the dumbing-down culture. And it has become the foundation of the culture of fear that, since September 11, 2001, has become so overwhelming. Recent headlines declared: "Carte blanche to use force anywhere anytime to meet a potential threat." Fear of power has authorized power to be feared. Darkness gathers about us, but light gathers within us. It is this light that we are here to celebrate today. It is a light that shines for any human being, for it shines within every human being, and deeds of individual human beings will foster that light. It is a light that can disperse the black clouds, allowing the sunlight to reach earth in purity, as the child in the manger also did. |
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