Astral Light, Shine Forth

subtleties beyond the grasp of mere intellect

Biodynamic Digest #21

With your friends Stewart Lundy and Lloyd Nelson, with an intro of the Liturgy of the Season with Max Leyf

THIRTY-SIXTH WEEK OF THE YEAR

36. In meines Wesens Tiefen spricht
Zur Offenbarung drängend
Geheimnisvoll das Weltenwort:
Erfülle deiner Arbeit Ziele
Mit meinem Geisteslichte,
Zu opfern dich durch mich.

∇∆

IN deepest recesses of me
a power presses towards its revelation,
lo! the cosmic WORD begins to stir today
and in my soul doth raise its voice to say:
’pursue thy strivings’ destination
my light divine will show the way,
to offer up thyself through me.”

A Map of the Universe

“It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”¹ - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Astro Weekly:

For those who took advantage of the recent spectacular series of multiple energetically beneficial planetary trines by using the Biodynamic preparations, good work! The next beneficial planetary trine in the Biodynamic almanac occurs two months from now in mid February 2026. The next planetary trine (120 degree aspect) that is listed as “Special Good” in the BD almanac does not happen for almost three months from now, in the second week of March 2026.

The spectacular Geminid meteor shower rained down incredible shooting stars the last few nights and will continue for the next week. The starry world speaks, but can we slow down and perceive the music of the spheres?

For the third week of the advent season, we now consider the world of soul sensing and perceiving, the starry world, the Astral. In the astral plane of existence we can work in harmonious relationships with the moon, planets and stars. Strictly speaking, the “aster” in “astral” refers to stars, but specifically the wandering stars of which we include the visible planets. The characteristic of willful movement typifies the “astral world.” All weather is the movement of high pressure zones to low pressure zones, and the vast majority of air is so-called inert nitrogen, and yet the dynamics of warmth and light affecting this atmosphere gives us all our weather patterns. “The will as such is never impartial, neutral or indifferent.”²

Accessing the astral plane is like opening a doorway into the starry heavens. This is the realm of the imagination, which, in its healthiest aspects, is freed from lower impulses and can become a mirror of the universe. It is our task to develop flexibility in our thinking by opening up to the potential and possibilities of health, freedom, and even farm fertilization. The cosmos awaits a friendly dialogue, if we can even open to the possibilities.

David Bowie perhaps sang it best-

There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’s told us not to blow it
‘Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
He told me
Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie

Reach farther…

The universe awaits you, O Cosmic Explorer. Its secrets veiled behind a sheath of hardened materialism. This veil of Nature is not to hide her secrets, but is a revealing form of concealment. Imagine an invisible ghost. Without a sheet thrown over it, the ghost would be invisible. These veils of material do not hide spiritual truths but reveal them. Just because revelation is partial does not mean it is false, because we are completely incapable of comprehending the totality of absolute Truth itself. This means not that what we know is incorrect, but that it is always incomplete. The promise of this? There is always ever more to discover!

To put it in more intimate terms, the veil of Nature is the negligee of Divinity. Maya as such is not illusion, except when we fixate on surfaces as the only reality. Maya is meant to seduce us to supernal Truth that sense-perceptible appearances are only barely concealed. This is the romance of existence, and the role of the physical world.

As Goethe says, “When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.”

As a tree produces fruits and can only give to the future, store your riches in heaven, a storehouse of untold potential. Like a grandmother who saves up an educational IRA from which only her grandchild can make withdrawals, the benefits of our actions are not meant for ourselves. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “ Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction.”³ The man of action is entitled to meaningful work but not to the benefits of his actions. “Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward.”⁴

Cosmic thinking offers new freedoms from the hindered mind. The bonds of materialism restricts one to Earthbound thinking. The problem with most of our language is that it refers only to sense-perceptible things, but in biodynamics we’re trying to talk about invisible processes! It makes things particularly difficult. Imagine if you could only talk about a person not in terms of what they do but only in terms of their clothes. If we are limited only to NPK with plants, we’re missing most of what makes a plant a plant.

Of course we have a challenge right at the very beginning of this approach of unlocking human potential, as Pfeiffer tells us “here at the outset, we have a large educational task–re-orientation of city dwellers so that they might be equal bodily and spiritually to the task of tilling the soil and feeling kinship with the Earth again. Knowledge of the phenomenon of growth and development in the living Goethean sense will help substantially. Awareness of being responsible for the earth’s fertility–i.e., bearing responsibility for the culture of the future, supported by technical knowledge and love of work is the moral basis for this task.”⁵

the desert meets the mountains in western Colorado

Biodynamic preparations open a pathway to the flow of the universal life force, the primal creative powers that formed the planets in the sky are still at work here on earth. The biodynamic preparations bring the seven planets back into the Earth and into right relationship with the outer cosmos.

One interesting departure from the conventional zodiacal calendar is the “unequal division of the zodiacal constellations.” With the biodynamic almanac, we look towards where the constellations actually begin and end, rather than putting them in 12 carefully constructed 30 degree segments of the starry sky. Maria Thun’s research led her to conclude that the real constellations are not evenly divided. Though independent anthroposophical analysis of her statistical data has not entirely confirmed her boundaries, many swear by her demarcations.

The biodynamic planting calendar is a relatively recent innovation in the long history of agriculture. This BD astronomical calendar is different from what has come before, and represents an advancement in our understanding of the cosmological working of the stars and planets.

Physical to Spiritual

What we encounter first, the sense-perceptible physical world, is the final excretion from life. Consider a tree: we see the bark first, but we know that the bark is an outermost product. Similarly with skin, nails, and hair: these are final products that solidify out of the living fluid realm. What we encounter first is the final product. This turns many things on their heads: plants are not “made up of” the elements – on the contrary, plants build up their bodies out of the elements and even condense new materiality out of the spiritual world.

In the beginning was the Word and Word was with God and the Word was God.

Consider an apple. We see the outside and its luxurious glow tells us whether or not it is ripe inside. We’re not after the skin – but the skin is a clear indicator of inner ripeness. We might want the stimulating taste of the sugar in our mouths, but we need the vitality contained in the apple. So we have the physical body that surrounds an inner viriditas the way that bark surrounds green cambium. In anthroposophical terms, these are the physical body and the organized vitality (“etheric body”) that constantly maintains the outer physical form.

Yet at work in every plant there is clearly a willful impulse to become something else – as a caterpillar transmutes into a butterfly, and the leaf gives way to flower, there is an astral quality mobilizing all life. In animals, this mobility is not merely a driver of growth and reproduction, but actual physical movement. In the human being, the astral world is even more intensely internalized. You could almost say that the human being has swallowed up the entire solar system.

“[T]he astral body is the seat of all earthly senses, in both the human being and the animal. The nervous system is the creation and servant of the astral body, all passions and desire, originate there.”⁶

The pathway to Astral World of the Stars is a place we go every night upon sleeping, where the physical and Etheric body are working on bodily functions, our Astral and Spiritual being soar through cosmic space. The Astral World is home to “demons” and complexes, and is only a medium through which angelic messengers travel. Imagine an iridescent rainbow road – beings that live on that highway are likely to be troublesome!

Where do we go during sleep? When the bonds of the physical world are loosed we can experience newfound freedom. We return daily to Abraham’s bosom, assuming we enter the depths of dreamless sleep. This is why we feel rested in the morning: we were for a moment in paradise. How we prepare for sleep and how we wake up in the morning frame our experience of the world between waking states. The discipline of maintaining consciousness not merely in dreams but in the dreamless space between dreams is preparation for maintaining awareness during the difficult transition between lives.

Freedom from limitations

The narrow-minded will be challenged to open the doors of possibilities. Steiner tells us in the Agriculture Course that what a plant can’t perceive it also can’t utilize. The same could be said about a farmer, a teacher, etc. But elsewhere Steiner also says that we can only perceive that which we can resist. If a feeling just overwhelms us, we are merely drowning in the experience and cannot perceive its shape. Our physical bodies resist the physical world, which is why we can bump into a table and feel pain. But if we aren’t practiced at resisting feelings and thoughts, our inner gardens quickly become overgrown with thistles and brambles. We must interrogate every spirit and check its credentials at the door! We can think any thought we wish to entertain provisionally, but we must not allow ourselves to believe everything we think!

Pioneer on the Biodynamic method Ehrienfried Pfeiffer says,

“The Goethean attitude of mind–by perceiving the fundamental laws of a higher unity, a higher organism in every part, and by grasping the whole not simply as the sum of its parts, but also by seeing a comprehensive spiritual idea and world order become effective, and, with the “perceptive power of thought,” by surveying both in their cooperative activity—indeed offers a way of knowing that endows people today and in the future with an ability to direct the events of world evolution on an orderly, harmoniously balanced course. Such knowledge requires only study, development, and earnest zeal to bear fruit. It takes courageous decisiveness to recognize and to effect this new and future knowledge without regard for the customary thought habits of the present, whereby we strive for position and respect or, without consideration, for one-sided successes with no general economic and social value.

Yet here, too, natural development acts as an aid to knowledge.

Not only as admonisher, but also as an aid and friend, nature steps up to the side of those who allow her to speak impartially and free of bias to their awakened spiritual organs. Chance observation and systematic search show the way.”⁷

Fertilizer of the Astral World

There is something special in crystals. In Steiner’s work Theosophy, he places crystals between formless chaotic matter and living plant forms. In a spiritual sense, crystals are the precursor to plants. There is no genetic relationship between plants and crystals, but in a much warmer stage of Earth’s development, carbon was not possible as a building block for emerging forms, so silicon was used. An intimation of this is still found in plants today, which benefit significantly from the inclusion of silica. In crystals, as in plants, forces that once rayed into the Earth from the cosmos are dying into visible form and shining back to their Source. In biodynamic agriculture, we use horn silica to create and boost a harmonious interaction with the cosmic light of the Sun and the Life on Earth.

The restoration of the iridescent spectrum of planetary colors into our soil is our task, not merely the replenishment of organic matter.

For instance, red Mars is known as the warrior planet. Stinging Nettle is commonly associated with the planet Mars, and this is evident in its own warrior-like protection, almost like an exterior armor. Stinging Nettle is used biodynamically to protect crops against harmful insects and disease. If we want strong healthy plants resistant to adverse conditions, we can use the protective powers of Mars, through the nettle preparation.

The fifth planet from the Sun is Jupiter, the big planet. Its mass is almost two and a half that of all the other planets in our solar system combined. Size-wise Jupiter is so big it almost became a second sun! Its enormous gravitational pull is responsible for the shift of the Earth’s axis and our periodic ice ages. Not just this, but like the mesentery protecting the inner organs, Jupiter’s vast gravitational field pulls countless meteors to itself, preventing the inner planets from being bombarded. Without Jupiter’s protective presence, life on Earth would be bombarded with meteors and the development of life as we know it would have been impossible.

In astrology Jupiter is known as the planet of abundance, the Grand Benefic. Hugh Courtney actively used the Dandelion preparation, with its strong correlation with Jupiter to increase yields. Jupiter’s energy can be used to create abundance on a farm. Improved produce flavors, size, aromas, and quality are results of using the Biodynamic Dandelion preparation.

It may seem an outrageous claim, but in each biodynamic preparation we have the concentration of the formative powers that created the planets in the sky. When Earth was younger, the “pollen” of these planets was still in our living soils, but the Earth has been progressively dying. According to Steiner, and against modern prejudices, it is only because of the active participation of humanity that the Earth has remained fertile. The last century has been a violent blip in the history of the Earth but we quickly consumed everything of value from most soils. The task now is to restore the celestial pollen back to our soils with remedies made from wild flowers that have retained their medicinal qualities and their connection to the wild cosmos.

The starry heavens provide a powerful physical and spiritual backdrop to all life on the blue planet. The nine Biodynamic preparations are potent tools to bridge the physical to the spiritual and back again. The Biodynamic almanac is a great help for those that seek a new relation with the moon, the planets and the stars. Harnessing the powers of the universal energetic flow through thoughtful action can boost garden and soil health and open the doorways to the star man waiting in the sky. He’d like to come and meet us but thinks he’d blow our minds.

Go Biodynamic

For Life!

1. Emerson, Selected Essays, Nature

2. V. Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 247.

3. The Holy Geeta, Chapter 2, verse 47

4. Matthew 6:2

5. BD Farming and Gardening, pg 203.

6. Burning Bush, pg 415.

7. Pfieffer BD Farming and Gardening, pg 198