Once we have celebrated St. Michael's Day, we find ourselves at that point in the year when, having completed the expansion of man's soul in the hot summer days, we return to the depths of man's being, following the fall of the rain from the clouds to the ground, the fall of the leaves from the trees to the ground. Now our inner eyes are fully opened and we can realize what it means to die outwardly in order to rise inwardly.
Once the blade of Michael's sword is formed from the sidereal iron, we descend along the edge of his blade until we reach its tip, where the will is concentrated: from the will of the cosmos we pass to the individual will that is able to place the Dragon in its own sphere, only there its power can be placed at the service of the spiritual world without corrupting the life of man. And as we join Michael in this endeavor that unites the celestial heights with the human depths, we observe how nature around us decays and how everything that until six months before had given us outward delight is now the image of composition.
We find ourselves in the Spirit of the Year Reflection Point, where the hopes that lived in the Resurrection forces of the previous spring, with outward expansion, now find their inner fulfillment. Where six months earlier, in the spring, we saw the seeds of the previous sowing grow, we now see the leaves fall from those same trees that gave themselves so prodigiously then.
It is a time when it is more difficult to be in the presence of others because everyone begins to be taken by the forces of the outer end of things: one feels melancholy for what has been and one must make an effort to see what will not be, still all one in the darkness. It is at this moment that the effort is required to overcome the attachment to external forms that, however beautiful they may have been, are destined to become forms that constrain the life that wants to flow beyond. All forms are vehicles of life: forms are made for man's evolution, not man's evolution for the forms themselves.
Where spring was expansion into space, autumn is combustion, the return to essence. All that outwardly has performed its function dissolves and leaves the inner image of itself, that part which, not being bound to the sensible form, can continue its life as supersensible substance. It is capable of enduring when outward death seizes nature and when it is nourished by means of thoughts, feelings and actions filled with the supersensible, it enables one to arrive at the period of Advent and the 13 Holy Nights with a consciousness that is alive and awake, in turn capable of expanding into new outward forms in the following spring and summer, and so on.
In other words, by joining Michael's living thinking, we are able to see the forms as means and not as the end, so that the flow of thought flows through them, to the point that the decomposition of the old dead forms becomes a joy of liberation for the pure living force of thought can then flow.
Here, then, we can also say that in the Point of Reflection of the Spirit of the Year, it reveals itself to man showing how to live an autumn of forms, generated by the past, which are burned in the purifying fire of Michael and, joining the living thought of Michael himself, we can come to experience an inner spring, the rebirth of the ego within the soul of man, a process that will be fully accomplished in the solemn moment of Epiphany.
It is thus that the Spirit of the Year, a Spirit of the Cyclic Periods descending from the First Hierarchy, enters into the sphere of action of the Archai, who insert it into the texture of time, which on the one hand repeats itself incessantly, reflecting its very being between autumn and spring and, on the other, internalizing that which in the previous seasons was exterior, giving birth inwardly, on a higher arc, to that which of subtlety has freed itself from death in form.