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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

 Lecture 8 of 25 by [R]

 Humility, Hierarchy and The Aquarian Age

                This is the eighth talk of Transitioning into The Aquarian Age and we’ll review. What we’re trying to do is understand Aquarius and the Aquarian Age so that we can work in harmony with the times and we can fulfill more easily the purposes of the evolutionary creation of which we are part.

            It is a very difficult thing to study one thing by itself.  In terms of education, to know the thing by itself alone is usually much easier when you compare it or contrast it with other things. So what we’re doing is taking each sign of the zodiac, and on the basis of that sign relative to Aquarius, we’re getting an understanding of our transition into the Aquarian Age. We do that with each sign; we think of a few simple principles that relate to that sign, and then we relate it to Aquarius.

            We’re using the astrological mandala in order to come to that end. The astrological mandala is the very compound, complex symbol of the entire universe.  It is the symbol of the entire universe in astrological terms which means there are several layers of complexity within actual reality. It’s all helpful and a fun thing to do but I don’t know that it is the best way to go about it. In the astrological mandala all of the elements of astrology are in standard position. The constellations are lined up with the signs and the signs are lined up with the houses and every planet is in its sign of rulership, and implicit in the whole structure is the aspects. When everything is all in the standard position it’s like the tumblers of a safe and we hope they’re lined up so that we can open up and get at the truth of things.   What we’re trying to do is understand the basic divine intents and the underlying relationships of things in the cosmos. If we can understand them more clearly we can live more clearly and this is a much better way of going about it than looking at any horoscopes. We’re looking at the raw materials or the source material directly.

            In our last talk, we noted the relationship of the first cusp in the first house to the cusp and house that came after it and the cusp and house that came before it. We noted that there were very dramatic changes from one sign to the next or from one cusp to the next. The most dramatic changes of all of astrology come about from adjacent signs.

            For example, if you take Cancer, Cancer is an emotional and sentimental sign and it’s plopped right between Gemini which is sort of airy and indifferent about things and is certainly not at all sentimental, and on the other side, Leo, which is not at all sentimental either and demands that things be done one way or another. So what we noted is that an irrepressible driving force that is Aries meets deadlock resistance when it comes to Taurus, and in relation to Pisces, Pisces is more like a resist-push mist that, unlike Taurus which resists energy, Pisces gives into energy so that the relationship between the signs on either side of Aries is that each uses a different philosophy.

            We saw that whether it is the consolidation of responsibility that happens when you pass from the first house to the second house or whether it is being under the weight of a whole cycle of energy as the twelfth house is, either of those two houses represent a basic change of state and that’s what the semi-sextile represents is a change of state. The most basic changes of state are consolidation and what you could call de-consolidation.

            The image that we used when we talked about consolidation or de-consolidation is an image that relates to form and to stuff and to matter. But when we’re studying history or when we’re studying cosmological history we’re thinking in terms of time – not in terms of space. So what we concluded last time is that, corresponding to the semi-sextile is a change of state in time.

            I need to say that from the past there is always a build-up that pushes us into the future and whether we like it or not because, if we try to repress it, it just pushes harder and we noted that the future has a quality about it that pulls us forward. So the fundamental changes of state and time are brought about by push and pull working at the same time upon the present. Call it … or synchronously. I don’t know how to say it. Relative to Aquarius the push comes from Pisces because with precession we’re going backwards through the zodiac. We’re looking at history. The pull from the future comes from Capricorn. In order to understand the pull of the future, we’re going to look at some basic ideas of Capricorn and the ideas we’re going to look at are the ideas of humility and hierarchy and we’re going to do that in a rather miscellaneous manner not in an especially coherent plot. It’s going to be all over the place.

            When we think about terms like humility and hierarchy, it seems almost impossible that they would be associated in the same sign because humility is so willing to take a backseat but when we think of hierarchy we think of social stratification and elitism and all of those kinds of things. But that is one of the things of astrology that the seed of something that seems opposite or you think are opposite are both found in the same sign. It’s very much like the Yin and the Yang, the Tao symbol. Each of them, the Yin or the Yang, has the opposite, the seed of the opposite within it so that there is no such thing as an unbalanced opposition that you can only go so far in one direction without being pulled back in the other direction because the seed of the opposite is within that.

            We want to understand hierarchy and the first way we’re going to begin to understand hierarchy or humility is through the study of simplicity and simplification. Concentration and simplicity have always been associated with Capricorn. It’s like a crystal; the atoms are put together in the simplest way possible. When they are in the simplest arrangement they are the most concentrated and the consequence is that a crystal is highly organized and everything becomes crystal clear because of that organization. It is seeing the simplicity and simplification of the tenth house as much as Capricorn. For example, the tenth house rules professionals and professionals know how to cut corners. They do it with the least amount of effort in order to do that kind of simplification. They get to be top dog by being able to have the smallest margins of error which means they simplify things the most.

            Whether one becomes a professional or whether pure carbon becomes a diamond, that takes time and time has always been associated with Capricorn. If you read history, especially if you read the Greek historians like Cornelius Tacitus, he points out clearly how people get exactly what they need at exactly the right time. He takes relish in the fact that tyrants get their comeuppance as they should. So it’s gratifying the way things happen in time and they happen with a marvelous punctuality. They happen exactly when they are needed to happen. So, for myself, I’ve found out that the Capricorn principles of concentration and simplification and hierarchy have been revealed to me in various ways and most of them were humiliating.

            I remember the last time I gave these talks, I was sharing a kitchen with a couple of elegant French women, and when we would prepare our meals we would be starting with really simple things that would remain simple all the way to the end – including the eating, whereas the same simple meal with the same simple elements ended up being very sumptuous and that was one example of simplicity. We did a lot of talking while we were cooking and it brought to mind the first time I began to understand simplicity in terms of time in history.

            At one time, I worked at a spiritual center where the basic business of the center was conducted and I was very young. When I gave these talks the last time it was at the same location, which was the headquarters of the Rosicrucian Fellowship. When I was there working as a young man I was filled with the spirit of mysticism and fuelled with enthusiasm and I was irrepressible. All you had to do was push a button and I couldn’t stop talking. At that young age, I realized that I could do anything. I believed that with regard to spirituality I could do everything. I had a certain amount of illusion or delusion and time has rubbed off some of the hard corners, but I still understand that I can do anything, but I also realize that I can’t do everything. Time just does not allow us to do everything because we have to be sequential. Time also produces its own kind of pressure with regard to the spiritual path to becoming and unfolding our divinity; Paul tells us it’s like running a race. As time goes on we become increasingly aware of how precious time is and long it takes to develop things. Just to develop a simple prayer life has taken years and years and years to make just a very little advance in all of that.

            When we’re young we have this feeling of physical immortality, death just isn’t something that we think about. We consider that there is time for everything. But the further we go in life the more we are brought to humility, because we look at the fruits of the things we’ve accomplished and they haven’t proven that much and they haven’t been that great. We realize that we are subject to the same mortality as every one else and the same limitations of the material world and that is a humbling experience. So if we are true to the spiritual path, as time goes on we simplify. We discard the things that are extraneous and the things that are less significant. We realize that some things are more important in life so we understand priority. We know that there is a lot we don’t know as we get older – that’s another part of the humility – but we concentrate and specialize on the things we know and do not try to accomplish everything. So that’s a very simple example of the relationship between humility and hierarchy. Some things are more important than others and we learn to simplify and concentrate on them and if we don’t do that humbly we are humiliated. Life is like that and I’m not going to be one of those old people who wear stretch pants or something like that.

            All right, what we have stated is pretty much personal to me.  I’ve tried to generalize it to the principle, but we want something more than that because we are talking about the Aquarian Age and we’re talking about the mandala, which means the entire cosmos. So we want something bigger and that means a story – a story about gods.

            In most societies in the Western world, especially in what’s called the Indo-European peoples, most of the societies or civilizations have the same gods. They have the same characters to their gods. Indra was the same as Apollo and was the same as Balder. They’re all solar figures but different societies value different things. In India, the sun (that is, Indra) is the chief of the regular gods. When things got to Greece, Jupiter or Zeus was the chief of the gods. Jupiter rules abstraction and the Greeks were very abstract people. By the time things got to northern Europe, Germany and Norway or places like that it was war time and Odin was the chief of the gods. They have a mercurial kind of view. Things were brought down from the spirit of the sun to the abstraction of Jupiter to the concrete thinking of Mercury as the people moved in that direction.

            Now, the myths are controlled by the racial or cultural spirits because a race or a culture is a vehicle that is used to bring people specific evolutionary experiences, because as human beings we can’t do everything; we need to learn specific things. Therefore, the guiding spirits take care of how people dress (customary dress), and the languages and the food that they eat and the music and even things like clothing. The further we have moved from India to the West the tighter our clothing has become and the tighter our clothing, the more we have become materially objective to the point that we become materially obsessed with stuff.

            They control mythology and religion. Different groups have, not only different cultural spirits which are ruled by Archangelic, planetary-flavored spirits, but they had different circumstances in which to live. For example, in Persia it was a rather rigorous climate. In fact, in northern Persia, it stretched right into what is now Afghanistan and so the myths took a different flavor. They had a lot of myths about wolves and things like that. But with the Egyptians, it was a very wealthy society; they had a mild climate and they had all of that fertility, so they lounged a lot. It was not what you would call a hard working society. As a consequence, their gods were pictured as lounging a lot. They would go to the beach and one day a major pout of gods was lounging along the banks of the Nile. In Egypt, if there was a collection of gods – three or more – it was called a pout and every city had its own pout.

            The city of Kheminis, which is where our word ‘chemistry’ or ‘alchemy’ comes from, had the great pout and that had the twelve gods that were common to the Egyptians, which is one of the only places where we have the story left intact.  At any rate, the major pout of gods were lounging along the Nile River and suddenly Typhon was upon them and Typhon is sort of a giant bad guy. He’s a Titan that is constantly harassing the gods and they didn’t have time to armor themselves.  They probably wouldn’t have done that anyway because if you get used to lounging you become decadent and you don’t like fighting. You consider it to be not a very cultural thing. So they each transformed themselves into an animal and then dealt with things. The Zeus figure changed himself into a ram and went running off. The Apollo figure changed himself into a crow and flew away. The Hera figure, the divine mother, changed herself into a cow and also ran off.  Aries, that is Mars, changed himself into a bear and went lumbering off. Aphrodite, the Venus character, changed herself into a timid little fish and jumped into the river where she was safe. The ruler figure, the Artemis figure, changed herself into a cat and she climbed into a tree. The Mercury figure, being cunning, changed himself into an ibis and he stood in the water feeling protected there because he didn’t think Typhon would go into the water. 

Cronos who is the Capricorn, Saturnine figure turned himself into a seagull and was clever like the Hermes figure.  He knew he would be safe in the water and he could dive underneath if needed, and yet he could have an eye on what was happening on land. That is pretty much the Capricorn idea.  To be Capricornian is to be like a seagull; It is the house of perspective, the principle of perspective. He wanted the view from the safety of the water and the perspective of power on land or in society. If you are on land, probably the best perspective is from the mountain top, because the mountain top is the only place from which you can see a wide vista, a panorama.  I myself like to climb towers, fire towers and things like that and what I try to do when I get to the top is pirouette like a dancer to open my consciousness to the whole 360 degrees.  Not having eyes in the back of my head I’m stuck with just my eyes, but I can still get the effect of 360-degree vision.

            ……………It’s a very strong tenth house and he recognized the importance of perspective and he would actually carry a board around with him that, by looking at the borders of the board that he could tell how perspective would be if he was drawing something or if he was painting something. Cronos, who is Father Time, or who is Saturn, was the god of time. In Rome, it was the god Janus, the two-faced god, and some people think that’s a good description of Capricorn, but there is still that very beautiful temple to Janus in Rome; if you can go in and see it, it is a simply marvelous experience. One face faces one direction; the other faces the other way. In time, it is the New Year when you are looking back on the old and looking forward to the new.

            There are many ways of looking at perspectives in time which is what we’re trying to with history and evolution, and there are statements of time that link the linearity or the simplicity of time together with hierarchy. There is a statement that is made in two places in the Bible that talks about that. In one place, I believe, it’s in the Apocalypse; it says ‘the first shall be last’ which is a statement of precedence and priority. Precedence being “the first” and “the last” is the statement of priority. The other way that it is stated is in St John’s gospel: “he that cometh after me is preferred before me because he was before me.” That’s a very important statement and we’re going to try to get to that. It is a statement also of priority and preference – who is preferred above other people. When we’re talking about hierarchy, we’re talking about priority, precedence, preference and perspective. All of them are parts of hierarchy and all of them are ruled by Capricorn. A lot of this is a result of having spent three years lecturing on hierarchy in mythology and I did get some pretty good understandings from that.

            In large-scale cosmological history, which is even bigger than the precession of the equinox that we’re studying, (people have the consciousness to see things of that magnitude), we are now at the nadir of spirituality. That is, we are furthest away from pure spirit and we are at the maximum of materiality. The nadir really may not be at dead center but within a few thousand or a few million years which, in terms of cosmology, is not very much. It’s a short amount of time. This is a very important time in cosmic history. When we are in this material state, we have a very unique perspective. With that unique perspective, we can begin to understand the reflective symmetry of the cosmological design of things. In order to do this, we are going to go through something that should take years but we’re going to do it in about three minutes. We’re going to look a little bit at the background of cosmogony and cosmology in terms of the mystery schools.

            There is, we’ve talked about it often, a pole – but when you think about a pole, you don’t think it’s a rod or anything like that – you just think about it as two opposing dimensions. In one of those dimensions, the potential is time and that potential is filled with spirit. At the other extreme, the potential is space and that is filled with matter. In the very center is mind which stands between spirit and matter.

            The evolutionary creation in which we exist is an activity that takes place in time and space. You might say the One manifest itself in time-space as matter and it does this in time. Periods of time are very long and large and they’re all given astrological names, not because they have anything to do with these planets, but because they share the same character. The very first period has the character of Saturn; it’s like the ground floor and it takes place in worlds but within those worlds are globes of matter in space.

            Sometimes, the worlds are coincident with the globes and sometimes the globes are within the worlds. The whole thing is turning inward and out, spiraling in a very complex spiral that has about as many dimensions as string theory, but I am certainly not going to justify this by talking about string theory. Within this interplay of globes of matter in space interplaying with periods of spiritual consciousness in time—within this interaction there are revolutions of consciousness. Consciousness spirals through spirit and matter in such a way that it is awakened.

            This is a very crude drawing of something that can’t be drawn but it is …. Outside of this, it is unlimited, but these are different degrees of spirit being more and more materialized until you get to where we are now – where matter is a very crystallized, materialized and condensed thing.  It’s very concentrated.  In some of these periods of time, (I can’t put a diagram of them up because it would be way too much and I don’t want to go into it that far), the worlds are manifest before the globes and that is the description that we have here. So we’re talking about our periodic revolutions of consciousness but the image that we’re going to have on the board is very inadequate.

            What is a better image is to follow resolution in music. Like you follow something and then a chord resolves into something else and your consciousness is taken into another dimension and then that resolves into something else and then eventually it flows back to where it began. It’s also like a very good prayer or a very good deal of work that you do on your own. You turn inward, inward, inward and you come to some revolution of consciousness and then you come out and then you go back in and you go deeper and by that rhythm you find that if you just try to go linearly you can’t do it but by progressively spiraling you go deeper and deeper and you get a more comprehensive understanding. What’s happening is that these globes where all of the evolving beings, whether they are divine creators or whether they are creatures that are receiving and being brought to wakefulness to become divine beings, they’re all working within these different globes.

            We’re talking about the process of spiraling. You might say that the spirit cycles into matter and it cycles and cycles and eventually cycles another layer deeper and another layer deeper and the whole business is like a spiral that works its way into the degree of materiality. That’s what we’re trying to talk about. We’re trying to say that spirit cannot hold its concentration or does not think it is wise to hold its concentration and have everything happen all at once; mainly because this is quite a variable experience. We have all kinds of vignettes of consciousness, some of which last a hundred million years which is a short time and you go through all these different states and each one awakens a different part of our consciousness or it instills a different potential within us.

            That process continues. It is again a Capricorn principle. It becomes more and more and more concentrated until it gets to this. You might say that with regard to the evolutionary creation in which we live and in which we are partaking this dot is the limit of the concentration of God relative to our evolution. You can’t go any deeper than that. What happens is that as we concentrate, things become more material and consciousness becomes more discrete and more focused in materiality rather than in the general overall spiritual consciousness of things – that understands things. Once nadir materiality has been reached, then someone wakes up and when they wake up it’s almost like death.

            After death, everything unwinds. As long as we live we become more crystal and we become more stone-like and we’re always going forward until we can’t go forward anymore. The will to live has run out and then we let go and everything unwinds. So what we’re talking about here is the physical body, it decomposes, the higher body decomposes – we draw the essence of experience out of them and its all taken into the spirit and then we cycle again hopefully not too much deeper into matter than we are now.

            If we take one loop on this spiral, that’s what this is meant to be. These are different worlds that, during one loop of the spiral, we are passing through. This is a higher state of spirituality. This is a higher degree of materiality. The whole idea is that when we are involving or coming into matter, we become more externalized. When we pass out, we are internalized. We’ll talk more about this as we go on. This is rather sketchy right now, but the whole idea is that we go back the way that we came but we go back with a totally different perspective.  The first things that we learn are the last things that we come to full waking consciousness of, within any loop of the spiral, which is the statement “and the first shall be last.”

            This state of existence is after this state of existence, this realm of existence in time so he that cometh after me is preferred before me because he was before me. It’s talking about different states of consciousness and even though the pictures are not very good we get a little bit of the idea. This is the whole symbol of it. This is supposed to have wings on. This is called a caduceus of Mercury. This is considered the flying spirit and this is the spirit-matter pole. Now the two snakes are supposed to be different colors; this one is meant to be a black snake but a black snake on a black board wouldn’t work very well.  It is the snake of involution into matter and the other snake is the snake of evolution where we come out of matter and return to spirit. So, we’re talking about this whole spiral process. Obviously the caduceus of Mercury is much simpler and it’s only in two dimensions.

            If we look at a mountain from below which is like this perspective, we’re challenged and we’re inspired but there is a lot of illusion. I can remember one time, I was looking on the edge on the Anza-Borrego desert in this valley, the same valley through which the San Andreas Fault runs and everyday I looked at this mountain and the mountain went up and then behind it was the peak and I thought I could make it up to that peak. I walked half a day and I got to that first crest and it was an enormous area before you even started the ascent of the next crest and then another enormous area behind that before you got to the peak. Those are the kinds of illusions that you have when you’re looking from the bottom up. Matter is very limited. There are all those shadows and you can’t see things the way things are at all.

            This is a real problem because most people have a bottom up point of view. This is what makes a lot of science fiction terrible. Most science fiction is not about the future. Most science fiction is an exaggerated extrapolation of the present. If there is something that a science fiction writer has as a peeve, he just takes it and runs it out into the future and makes it feel really extreme. It’s really not of the future at all. There are some people left with future technologies and things like that, but most of it is not. I don’t read science fiction or watch science fiction movies because they are all the same thing, they are all extrapolations of the present into the future.

            What we’re trying to get at is that the bottom up point of view is a human point of view. There are two perspectives. You are looking from the bottom up or you’re looking from the top down. With the top down perspective because you are at the top of the mountain and you can see where every little crevice runs, there are not those illusions. You have the full panorama which adds a totally different quality than when you’re looking up from the bottom. The top down is the god’s eye point of view. It’s a divine perspective and the bottom up is the human point of view.

            Things had to have begun with the top down before the bottom up. The bottom up exclusively is a notion of linear-time in materialism. That means we are born in the illusion; something lesser than cannot make something greater than itself. It’s a logical contradiction. Like the potentiality of being something greater than itself had to be there before that potentiality could be unfolded. In order for us to become divine creative geniuses we had to have that potential before we could unfold it which means that this was built into us or is described as being built into us from other divine creative beings.

            The top down perspective at the top of the spirit-matter pole is universal. It’s all over at the same time, it’s eternal and it’s inward. Even the outwardness that we would think would be outward is still inward to it. So that is such that because everything is inward, when you’re looking for the outermost spiritual point of view, you can see through everything because it is within you. When you’re looking for matter from the bottom up point of view, matter is okay and the limitations of consciousness (the consciousness is all about limitations) is a much different kind of consciousness. We can only see things outside of ourselves and if we look at the inside of something, we are just looking at the outside of the inside of something – not really the inside as it is experienced inward by itself. We’re talking about two different kinds of consciousness. If we take the material consciousness and apply it to higher spiritual things, we’re still just seeing the outward surfaces or appearances of it. That’s what’s frustrating and that’s what we talked about last time when we were talking about symbolism. So there are two very different varieties of consciousness and ultimately the future consciousness which takes both of them and unites them so we see the within and the without by having universalized the outward objectivity and having externalized everything that is hidden within us, within ourselves.

            The further we have proceeded into matter, the thinner the spiritual consciousness has become. The point right now is that many people don’t even realize that they have spiritual consciousness. Spirit gives itself into matter. It is drawn into it in its giving and that is the point we stand at now in evolution. After the nadir is reached, after we have involved as far as we go, and we take the leap of faith across the gaps of the tails of the two serpents, we unfold.  We are aware of ourselves and we unfold the divine consciousness. We’ll come to that a little bit more. When you have all … together, things align, they collapse and they become re-universalized and there is a retrograde quality to that or there is a looking-back quality to that which continues even though the evolution of consciousness proceeds forward.  There is both a forward and a backward activity that is dissolving matter back into spirit. That’s where we are right now. We’ve just passed the nadir of materiality. Even though it isn’t the same thing as spirit, it’s still pretty wonderful. If we look at it, everything is unique; everything is different. If I look at Bob from here and then walk over a few feet and look at him again, I see him altogether differently and each point of view, each perspective, is a unique thing. It is very helpful for broadening our understanding. Each time we become more inward, we become more awake to unifying those unique points of view that we now have.

            In all of this, this is a very simplified thing that I am presenting here, everything that we are in our whole psychological-spiritual consciousness and our physical nature has been built into us. While we are creatures, the divine beings, the spiritual hierarchies, the gods, whatever you want to call them, the Elohim, they have built things into us. As the physical side of the universe goes into decadence, those things are expelled out of us. As we become creators, we get rid of all of the influence that has been pushed into us or has been developed into us by the divine creative beings. At that time, we will expand.

             If you look at any spiritual path now, they all talk about the expansion of consciousness. It’s like this is what it is, that we’re too limited here, and that we’re too small in our viewpoint. We’re too provincial in our outlook. As we expel things, as we expand, as we become more divine, we become more creative. We are told, freely have you received, now freely give.  Where you’re involutionary, you are a receiver. When you are evolutionary, you are a giver. We’ve been told that it is better to give than it is to receive. We even have throughout Christianity these same principles. St Paul tells us, for example, that there was a religion of Christ before. He says that it is of the order of the Priests of Melchizedek which is talking about an involutionary state of humanity or it is all tied together.

            Let’s return to the top down and bottom up perspective that is already in us and let’s try to understand our waking up in that. Let’s return to something we spoke of the last time we met. We talked about the fall of humanity. Let’s talk about the fall with regard to reflective symmetry and we’re talking now about lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps out of our fallen states. We’re doing that by the pull of the future and the push of the past. The Rosicrucian philosophy was, in modern times, written out by Max Heindel and he twice… very clearly in the story of the prodigal son who left home and eventually ended up in a life filled with the husks of matter. The prodigal son decided to give up this horrid life and return to the father. His urge is received by plenty of pull from above.

            This is our quest, to raise ourselves out of the stupidity that we are in – in matter – and to do that, the pure spiritual way has been given to us by various spiritual teachers. Probably, most pre-eminent of them is Christ. He shows us an attitude—by keeping our eye and merely receiving from Christ, he shows us how we can rise out of matter with ease. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” But there is always that tendency to be pulled back in the opposite direction. We’ve been talking about the pull of the future and the push of the past. There is also a pull from the past and a push from the future and they are perverse states.

            There are specific attitudes about the future and the past. If we have the wrong attitudes we produce utter chaos in our consciousness. The attitude for the past is objectivity. If we live subjectively in the past and we have all these sentimental views about the good old days, we have not learned from the objective facts of the past.. The same applies to the future. If we are too objective about the future, we become exactly what we want to be but we miss the greater future. If the attitude towards the future is to be subjective, it is to receive the future into us and that is what pulls us forward.  But if we see only this and this and this, we will be this and this and this but we will be nothing more.

            Similarly, there is a pull from the past. I’m noticing it with age. There’s a tendency to want to look back at things that are done and be attached to them and there really are sentimental things that are inhibitive of progress. Similarly, if we are not looking—we’re just aware of right now, the future comes rushing on us. It doesn’t pull us forward with the intrigue that we want to go into it and explore it; the future comes at us so fast that we can’t handle it. What happens then is that we try to go back to a past that never was and we have fundamentalism and reactionary things. You know, give me that old time religion and remember the good old days and that.

            A lot of people believe the Golden Age was in the past. Truly, for us, we have to look at the Golden Age being in the future.  The beautiful thing about looking at our journey through spirit-matter in this way is the reflective symmetry—if we take that with the continuity of consciousness in cause and consequence, nothing is lost. We don’t have to worry about losing cultural artifacts from the past, because of everything that was here in the past, its essence is going to be rediscovered in the future with a totally different perspective. The ideas of re-creating ancient societies and holding on to old things from past times are well intended but they’re very much misguided. If you have the essence of things and you have the conditions under which things were produced, you don’t have to have all of the things. They come to life as you need them and as you create them or re-create them. The future is going to be creative. It’s not going to be something that happens to us like history or things from the past.

            Now that we have a little bit of the idea of a hierarchical perspective with a cosmic scope, let’s go back and try to look at it again from the personal point of view. Let’s try to narrow in, a little bit, on our lives. Narrowing in is the right set of words. From the top down, from that within—going out, you have the consciousness of the grandstand. You can see better than the players can see, because you are on the outside and you are looking in and there is no subjectivity. It’s all a matter of creation. In the creation that we’re talking about or that we’re trying to describe in these crude diagrams, it is a process of concentration. The spirit, the One, the universal spirit, is projecting its dream of what could be, its cosmic scheme of what could be. That process is a concentrative process much more than it is an additive process.

            In ancient times, the seers and spiritual philosophers said that matter was carved out of space and that space was truly a plenum. I don’t know if they meant by that the same thing as modern physicists when they’re talking about dark matter and dark energy and all the things we can see are only a very small portion of the universe. What we’re trying to say, yes, yes, there is an imaginative projection of a dream, an externalization of the dream to objectify it and to know it but it isn’t all completely like the projection of a movie. It’s much more like sculpting. Sculpting, where you have your block of marble and you realize that the statue that is your dream is within that and you keep chipping things away and you do that in a very negative way. You do that in a Capricornian way.

            You say is this part of my dream – no – and another shard is off of the block and you keep on going that way until you have objectified what you inwardly believed was true or want. There is a realization of the dream in that fashion. Because it is a creative activity and because there is an unknown and because there is something for the divine spirit, the divine creator, just like there is for every other creator, it is a negative process.

            If you’re trying to understand something, like proving a mathematical theorem, you do what Plato did in the Meno; you ask your intuition every step of the way until you come to the universal understanding. In this case it’s negative – no, it’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not this – this is what it is. That is how things are brought into what we call blind matter, dumb matter. Not surprising, is that following the same process, because we have objectified something and we haven’t completely understood it yet, that’s only part of the creation; it’s not surprising that our creations are unsatisfying – they’re never what we wanted them to be in the first place. If we weren’t unsure in the first place, we never would have been drawn into creating the same—what is this in myself that feels unfulfilled; that feminine that draws us on into the future in a very high creative cosmic state. We wouldn’t even have the awareness of the ignorance that is part of that pull.

            At any rate, it is a relief to externalize our insecurity, even from the divine. We’re told that in the beginning was the word and a lot of the people believe that that original word was a laugh because there is a relief at the insecurity of something that could be that has been my dream all the time inside of me even though it is probably never going to be exactly what I want it to be which means it has to be that way if it’s going to be something new.  In the externalization of that is that relief and in that relief there is a spirit of joy and there is a spirit of laughter.

            Anyway, when the dream is made manifest with many, many hierarchical helpers, all of the deepest and the most fixed manifestation of it is unknown. It has to be brought to life. It’s like the statue of Pygmalion and Galatea. Galatea was a statue that had to be brought to life. This is an extremely meaningful myth and story that the statue is an objectification of exactly what we are insecure about in our ignorance; but to really know it, it has to live. It has to become us in spirit because that is what we truly are. That is what goes on in the process of creation.

            Let’s bring us closer to home and let’s look at ourselves with the god’s eye perspective. Suppose we are hewing a delicate statue out of marble and suppose we’re nearly finished and we’re at a crucial point. We make a misdecision and we shatter the piece.

            Part of the statue is broken away and it can’t be put back; at least, it can’t be put back into its original state. Normally, things like this happen when we aren’t concentrating, when we aren’t paying attention. We get distracted and usually the biggest distraction is the wrong kind of self-consciousness. We’re thinking about ourselves in a very egoistic way. How do we feel when we do something like that? Obviously, we feel pain and we feel regretful. We always say, “If only I hadn’t done this,” or, “If only I hadn’t done that.”

            Let’s take another example. Suppose you were playing an accompanied solo with an orchestra; a very beautiful symphonic piece and you decide to show off or to showboat and do something that isn’t in the original score. As a result, you pull the whole orchestra off and everything goes to pieces.

            Even you, without the orchestra to back you up, you go off on a tangent somewhere. Again, we ask ourselves how we feel in this case. We feel probably worse because we have let other people down, we have forsaken them.  We have not been part of the team or the orchestra. Suppose further that we’re doing something of great importance and those who were doing it or those who depend on us – and it is supposed to be done with innocence and purity and sensitivity – we’re supposed to be like a child. How do we feel if we become self-centered and abuse the trust that has been placed in us? Well, sure, remorseful. We feel pain. These people deserve better for all of the trust and everything that they gave to us; they don’t deserve to be treated like that.

            If we take the feeling of these errors or the scenario of these errors and we think about them in terms of our evolutionary creation, it gives us a feeling of what the fall of humanity must have been like for the divine spiritual hierarchies. It hurts others because they love us. I did things in my youth and in my young manhood that hurt both parents, my mother especially.  It hurt them dearly even though they didn’t do anything wrong. Because they love, they feel hurt.

            It hurts oneself. When we realize what we have done, we say, “Oh my God, what have I done!” We’re talking about remorse but we’re talking about remorse of a cosmic scope. Because we indulge ourselves in everything, we indulge ourselves in remorse. Remorse indulged is guilt. As a consequence, consciously or unconsciously, for what we have done in letting down the creation and the creators who have helped us, we carry around a very big burden of cosmic guilt. I don’t mean to imply by these pictures or stories that we, as human beings, are capable of disrupting the entire harmony of the entire creation. That would take more than our unfolded creative capacity.

            All I’m trying to say is that we have brought a very painful element of disharmony into the cosmos and we have made it much more difficult to attain the ends of the evolutionary creation.  And we have made it more difficult for everyone to do so, which is sort of like another image that all of us have had – a puzzle with one piece missing. Here, you have this glorious picture but that one piece is missing and you notice that right away. The capacity for love of divine beings is much greater than we suspect and eventually that love is going to correct our errors, but for right now we are perpetrators of unnecessary pain in the cosmos. The intensity and the extent of our discordancy, of our remorse and guilt, are significant for the being that came and brought the kind of consciousness that allows us the ability to be redeemed. All we actually have to do is receive it but that brings in another level of pain brought on by our level of perversity.

            In my life, I have learned three lessons about love. I’m not sure I’ve learned them completely yet and I’m not sure I know a lot about the subject but these are the some of the dearest things I have learned in life. I had to pay a very high price in order to come to these three principles of love but it was worth everything that I succor. They all have to do with freedom.

            The first principle of love is that we cannot be loved unless the being that loves us does so in freedom. We can’t make anybody love us. We can’t at all do that. In our insecurity if we try to force someone to love us, we have the opposite effect. This is beautiful. This means that when we are loved, we are loved because the person who loved us, loved us in complete freedom. They didn’t have to. There is another kind of compulsion but it is certainly not the kind of compulsion that we think of that has a lot of coercion or anything like that. 

            The second principle of love that applies to this situation is that love must be received in freedom just as it is given in freedom. It isn’t any of our business whether someone accepts our love or not. Our love may be beautiful, it may be pure, it may be true, it may be just the thing to help the person, but if they don’t accept it, it’s painful to us that they don’t accept it because we know how good it is, but they have to have the freedom to receive or not receive.

            The third law of love is the law that it isn’t any of our business if we are loved. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s not ours to worry about. Ours to worry about is if we love. That’s where our responsibility is because if we can’t control other people, it isn’t our business to know that we are being loved. It’s a wonderful thing to be loved and we blossom in it and we are very fruitful in it, but it isn’t any of our business whether we are loved or not. All the time that we spend saying, “Nobody loves me,” or “This special person doesn’t love me.” As long as we think that way, we’re wasting our time; we’re wasting all of our psychic energy.

            In a cosmic context, we are a source of double the pain because we don’t accept the cosmic love that is given to us, because we don’t know how to be loved. We don’t know how to let go of our old selfishness and open ourselves to love so that we can be redeemed. All of the pain and anguish of the fall is redoubled by our perverse unwillingness to receive the thing that could redeem us from the fall. So, here we are blinded in matter, entrenched in materialism, but there are some blessings to that. We have to remember that we are like little children, even though we are divine beings and at the core of our very being we are gods, we are still little children. Our awareness and sensitivity to our misdeeds has also been turned off or muted by our materialism because we probably, if we had full awareness of the things that we had done and the heinous monstrosities that we have put out, we probably couldn’t bear up under that. We’ve become blind and insensitive. We still have the responsibility which is called a cumulative burden of sin, but there is a blessing in not being completely sensitive to it because it would have been too much.

            Corollary to that is another blessing for our situation. We’re in quarantine in this materialistic blindness where we can only see with the senses and we don’t have the spiritual vision. We are allowed to work here at our own pace. Our work is by the sweat of our brow rather than by the ease of that love that is given to us if we want to take it, but if we had been weighed down with guilt and remorse, we wouldn’t have accomplished. We have been forced by necessity to be inventive. Going by that old adage, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ we have developed abilities. We’ve taken all of their esoteric energies and we’ve turned them into science and technology and have done some wonderful things.

            Some of these things we have used to extend and to deepen our perversities; that’s always a temptation that is there.  Sometimes we’ve not been kind to our younger brothers and sisters, the kingdoms that are beneath us; we have poisoned them, we have slaughtered them and we have done all sorts of things like that. Nonetheless, we’ve accomplished some things. We’ve worked very hard on that. As a result of these accomplishments, looking at it from the small point of view, the bottom up point of view, we think we’re pretty good. If a child, say a six or seven year old, had to play baseball with Willie Mays everyday, a horrible inferiority feeling would come up. What I’m trying to say is, if we saw the magnificence of the creative work of the divine beings and looked at that all of the time, we would be cowered in our insecurity because our creative efforts have been feeble. But being locked in materialistic blindness, we have developed some self-esteem. We have developed soul power, we feel good about ourselves and we’ve gotten so far that we even feel cocky.

            From the materialistic point of view, we’re at the top of evolution. We haven’t been very good to the things that are below us in evolution. We’re arrogant in our top down viewpoint that is really from near the bottom and this is dangerous because if we become more and more egoistic and more and more materialistic, we become progressively more and more isolated. We have bad attitudes. We don’t want to cooperate. This morning’s paper had another diatribe against mass transit. No, we don’t want to share with somebody; we want to be shielded in our own little car. I think the epitome in the United States would be to have a drive in … You would be with other people, like in a drive-in theater but you would be shielded and protected in your own little car. We hide behind a television and we don’t communicate with other people, not even by telephone or cell phone.

            Now we have these new tweeters and such.  They are all symptoms of loneliness. When we think you are your body, that’s a very isolated state. Rather than sharing the same spirit and communicating the same spirit with someone else you are very isolated in your one little body. You’re alone. But the loneliness isn’t all bad. When we’re alone, we are forced to turn inward. Eventually, when we are sincere in our inward turnings, we make inner breakthroughs. When we make inner breakthroughs, we are surprised, even with little steps forward inwardly. As we make greater and greater steps forward in inner consciousness, nothing is hidden from us.

            Like we said at the beginning of the last talk, we can see everything but the godhead. Now that, the responsibility for everything that we have done, and the awesome consciousness of all of the divine beings that are above us, will be humiliating. We thought we were the top when we are somewhere down near the bottom. That’s humiliating. Hopefully, it will also be humbling. We’ll see all of the divine glories, things that we have evaded for a long time.

            Hopefully, we will not become humble through humiliation because true humility comes from something other than humiliation. For example, walking out on a starry night and being awed by the extreme majesty of just the visible universe can do more to humble a person than taking a great drumming from somebody. Just think of how much more – a view of the divine beings and of the pure spiritual truth. Humility doesn’t keep us devout. Humility is really the basis of our resurrection. It is the basis of our ascension, our apotheosis. It’s only when we are humble that we can judge ourselves with that acrid Capricorn and Saturnine judgment. Only then can we climb with sure steps because we see exactly where we are and what we are capable of. This gives inspiration to a bottom up perspective by the ability to see something above us to emulate, to look up to. We have then spiritually living role models. We have something to work forward to, something that pulls us toward us.

            That pull is elucidated very clearly in the Divine Comedy by Dante. When Dante goes into hell and

 the lower regions, it is a human being or the ghost of a human being, the ghost of Virgil that takes him down into the underworld. When he passes into the spiritual world, it is by Beatrice that he came there. Each time, he feels a need to look to Beatrice, he looks at her and the beauty of her elevates him so that he rises to a different level. That’s not just poetic fiction. That is spiritual reality. Every time that we look deeply and drink in something deeper and higher than us, it uplifts us. We don’t have to put forth a whole lot of effort. All we have to do—this is again that effort, is to relaxively receive.

            Christian mystical aspirants know that they have a promise that they’ll know the truth and that the truth is part of the divine being. The human life focused on that being, Christ, who said, “I am the truth.” Christ, or at least the biblical Christ, said, “If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men.” That is the pull of the future. It is a pull of love. The way Paul says it, “We love him because he loved us first.” That kind of love being given to us, when we receive it, when we eagerly reach for it, is the pull of the future.

Tags: Aquarian Age, cadeuceus, Capricorn, Christ, Dante, perspective, spiral