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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes 

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age 

Lecture 9 of 25 by [R] 

The Aquarian Age and Some Problems of the Mind

[Illustratioons were not part of the lecture]

             Compared to some of the other talks, this will not be really deep, yet it could be because in modern Christian mysticism, the deepest mystery is called the mystery of the mind. We are taught in modern mysticism that one of the purposes of evolution, as far as we humans are concerned, is to develop creative minds. The last step of our participation in the evolutionary creation is to fulfill that completely – to be very creative. That will be in a very distant period when the cosmos will be constituted quite differently than it is now. The idea is that ultimately, at the end of this evolutionary creation in which we are participating, we will have the ability to think minds that can think. In short, we will become creative beings that can help others and instill in them a mind with which they can think independently as we think; that each person can be a focus of the divine.    

            We’re not talking here about what is very generously called ‘artificial intelligence.’ We’re talking about real intelligence where a truth or a spiritual being, can think a new mind for other people to do the same thing eventually.  That’s pretty profound. Of course, this is not an instantaneous process and we have a lot of stages to go through in our general evolution. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Specifically, in the evolution of our mind we have a lot to go through. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, some days I feel lucky if I have any thoughts at all – even very mundane thoughts about things about the world. My thinking, I find, is terribly slow – it’s turgid – and it has errors which is a curiosity because Plato wondered if a person could have mis-thoughts or incorrect thoughts, we’ll come back to that in a little bit.

             Learning how to think and being willing to learn is a very long, slow process, even in this new birth alone, I have spent more than 45years now trying to learn to think deeply and unite that with feeling and the special kind of thinking that we call prayer, and I have made very, very little progress. It’s slow. It’s very hard. We have to be able to completely control every one of our thoughts which seems almost impossible. We do have motivation because someday, when we bring what are now minerals to life, they will live as long as we can hold the thought of life for them.  Even right now, somebody’s health or illness or continued survival on this plane may depend on how accurate and clear and strong our prayers are.

            So there is plenty of motivation especially if we are learning to be unselfish, but to think the whole notion of thinking the thought that can think for itself, because that is what the mind is – it’s a very complex thought – the thought of thinking the thought that can think thoughts is just utterly boggling to me. That’s one of the mysteries about one end of the creation – the far end ahead of us; there are plenty of mysteries about the mind at the other end of creation. For example, we are told in all mystic cosmogonies that the creative dream that is behind the process that we are going through, this evolutionary creation – that dream was there before the creation began. Where? This is before there was even a macrocosmic mind of the god of our solar evolution. Where was it?

            The concrete mind was not made manifest until quite a ways into the evolutionary creation. Does this mean that there is another mind or another means of creating thoughts within the spirit, or is this something that is just remembered from a past manifestation, or is there a cosmic creator formula that is always there that comes to mind when the spirit begins to create? There are all kinds of possibilities. There are all kinds of questions that can be asked, and if we follow all of those questions out some of them would prove to be not very valid questions to ask, but they are genuine questions. They are genuine questions about the nature of mind which is what we are trying to pursue.

            If one reads mysticism, Western mysticism, very carefully, one can conclude that the process of thinking is a process of questioning. We are told that thought forms are produced by evacuating areas or regions within thought stuff. Of course, we can’t think of thought stuff the way we think of matter – but we evacuate thought stuff and those are what thoughts really are. The vacuum, the attitude that creates the vacuum is the attitude of questioning. It is the opening of the mind in thoughts of itself.

            It is analogous to a vacuum in material stuff because if we take a vacuum pump and we take an area that is sealed off and pump everything out of it that we think is there, electromagnetism still passes through that vacuum. So there is something more subtle than the vacuum pump can pump that occupies or that interpenetrates space that allows the electromagnetism to pass through it. In an analogous manner, when we think concrete thoughts and we evacuate a form within thought stuff, there is something more subtle within that vacuum, something that is more pure and uncontaminated and that is ideational thought or what is called in Western mysticism, light spirit which is the light of pure truth not like the light we see with our eyes. 

            Both of those regions, the region of ideational thought and the region of light spirit, are regions from which we experience intuition. The Neptunian type of intuition is associated with human spirit where things that are in all principles are chaotically connected.  The light spirit is the Uranian type of intuition which is pure truth. It is the odd explanation – you just know something is true and that is enough. It is why the first impulse of Uranian intuition which is the more common of the two is sufficient unto itself.  We just learn to act according to that intuition when we recognize it within our being.

            When we evacuate a thought form, we make space for pure regions of truth to be manifest.  The attitude that evacuates, that pulls the thought stuff out of there is the attitude of questioning. It’s like an artist says, ‘Well will this line do it?’ That’s a question.  Or a scientist asks another type of question. In that questioning, you’re making a space for the truth to be seen pure and simple. Obviously the deepest and the most potent types of questions are the pleas that we ask in our prayers because we’re asking directly for divine stuff to fill our thoughts. (Incidentally, if any of you are interested, we have a prayer group that meets here on Sunday nights, every Sunday night at 6:30.

            By now you’ve gathered that I’m trying to engage you in self-observation. I’m trying to get you to think about what happens when you’re thinking. It’s not done to manipulate but it’s done to do what Beethoven and Schubert called the ode to intellectual joy and it’s what Socrates loved more than anything else in the world – thinking. Most of the time when we are awake, we are in our dense physical bodies. The dense physical body and even the biological ethers that support the dense physical body are different from every other body or vehicle of consciousness that we have. They’re different because they tire out. All of the other vehicles that we have at our disposal of ourselves, of our spiritual being, do not tire. In fact, all of our other vehicles become stronger and better by use. Therefore, one of the things of the mind is the more we think the stronger and clearer and more precise thinkers we become. We’re not talking about the brain. The brain is only the means for the thought of the mind to be brought into the dense physical body. The more we think, the better we get at thinking.

            We hear people say, ‘Oh, I have too much to think about!’ Usually, those are people who are doing the least amount of thinking. It’s the people who are quietly by themselves that are doing a lot of thinking. We noted, in other earlier talks, for people who are new (this is a little bit unfortunate) – we noted that the crux of the mind, the heart of the mind is a very spiritual place both in our spiritual anatomy and in the cosmographical anatomy you might say. The mind is at the heart of the creation. It is at a cosmological center. On one side there are the transcendental realms – ideas in various states of spirit.  At the other side, there are the concrete realms – the phenomenal realms, things that have beginnings and ends, which include thoughts and emotions and actions and stuff like our bodies. In the middle is where the mind is.

             It is both a lens and a mirror, but we will come back to that in a little bit. It is a lens in that through the mind is how the spirit projects its creations into the phenomenal worlds and it is a lens in that, through the mind is where the essence of experience in the phenomenal world is drawn into the spirit as soul matter in a process called re-thinking or thinking back to the origin and taking in the experience and taking in the essence of it by going over it forward and backward. The ‘re’ in re-thinking is like the ‘re’ in reset. It’s a two-faced mirror.  On the phenomenal side of the mirror are all of those thoughts which are automatic. We don’t have to ponder every move that we make. Some moves are made automatically by reflex. It’s an instinctive kind of mind. On the other side, the transcendental side of the mirror, the spirit reflects, and what is universal spirit knows itself through the reflection in the idea of self-hood. So it is reflected back to itself and through that, objective waking self-consciousness is born.

            The mind at the center of being is focused on top of the center of our entire potential as spiritual beings, which in some teachings, is called virgin spirit because it has never before been in this kind of evolution.  It, in itself, is focused through the center of the will to be – the divine spirit.  It’s given different names in different spiritual studies but the effect is the same in mysticism because in almost all mysticism people find the same things. It’s usually called silent watcher and in three-dimensional space it is seen as the thought behind the root of the nose from which the spirit sees outward and sees into itself. So, this center of the mind is the crux of our very existence, the crux of everything that we experience.

            As a crux, it has a predisposition, a predisposition to its centrality, and that crux has a nature of its own. It is the center of things. One of the things about the mind is that it loves paradoxes because the poles, the extremities, especially the basic pole, the spirit-matter pole, the extremities meet and find their opposite in this crux. You might say, it’s the seed from which the spirit-matter pole springs. So, at the heart of our language, which is our best expression of the mind, we find that paradoxes are right there. We find, especially if we go back to languages when languages were more deductive and less inductive, when there was less describing things of the external world but they were talking more about spiritual principles, that a word means a thing and its opposite at the same time. There are a few of those words that are still in existence in the language and they’re delightful. One of the most common is the word cleave. The word cleave means to cut something in two, but the other side of cleave is as cleave in the Bible. It says that a man shall cleave to his wife, which means to come together and be united as one; obviously, talking not only about a physical marriage but about a spiritual marriage. What’s beautiful about this is it’s because that’s the very nature of what the crux of the mind is. It is where things are separated and where things come together. So the word that remains that talks about that kind of state is actually from that kind of state.

            In these talks we’re talking about exercising our minds a little bit, especially in this one; we want to get to a better understanding of the great gift of thinking and what is taking place when we are thinking. We’re doing that in order to understand the Aquarian Age.  In this talk and the talk that follows it, we are going to be talking about the problems of paradox and paradox in the mind. Last time when we talked, we also talked about a paradox. We talked about freedom and we came to understand that in exercising freedom in a wrong way, we imprisoned ourselves.   

Dostoyevsky has interesting things to say about freedom. He understands through two of his characters, Shatov in The Possessed, and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; both of his people have the idea that the only way to be free is to break the law because then you prove that you are beyond the law. They have really a good idea, an excellent idea, but they perverted it in a very material way.

            What we have learned is that by breaking the law (that is by taking creative power into our hands before we knew what to do with it and before we had the capacity to really think out the consequences of our actions), we sold ourselves into bondage. Instead of freedom, we found ourselves more weighed down and locked in with what some people call a burden of sin and, because we did that with regard to material experience, we lost the intuitions that could transcend the laws so that we could know the truth. What happened instead—we sold ourselves out to materialism and blinded ourselves. So, we’re talking about outlaws. Just like outlaws in the movies, …???, or they have to live in the badlands. Strange as it may seem, we’re on our way to trying to understand the converse of this paradox. The converse of this paradox is when we apply freedom within that we actually gain freedom. Because if we work within the law without coercion then we are free to do other things that we must do.  We experience those things with an attitude of freedom rather than with a begrudging attitude of being under the law.

            What we’re trying to get at is that through the mind being able to express spiritual freedom in the realms of manifestation in which we have our creative commitment, we can be suspended. It is one of the best key words for Aquarius: suspension. We are suspended in freedom in what is known only to most people as a very heavy, hard activity. Actually, if we penetrate through the law in this fashion, we actually get beyond thought. We get to the unity that connects cause and consequence and it is exactly as St Paul says in the Bible, ‘The end of the law is love.’ In the unity of this altruistic, this Aquarian type of love, there is not that kind of division. If we look at it this way Christ, not Jesus but the being that worked through Jesus and works through us, Christ is the ultimate outlaw, is the ultimate desperado, because everything is urgent, under the impulsion of love or under the impulsion of truth.  Everything is urgent. We can’t … the truth or we can’t … the love. Meister Eckhart, a Fourteenth Century mystic, had the experience and, I understand on a terribly regular basis, of being in the light spirit. He said with regard to this that when one is in the light spirit (not using those words), it is impossible to sin. Meaning to say, if we are in that truth and in that love, it is impossible for us to break the law because we understand that we’re living in the end of the purpose of the law in the first place; an experience that we were intended to come to.  

            Let’s go back to the paradox. This is all just window dressing. Let’s look at the first part of the paradox. The only time that we can attempt to step outside of the law is near the middle of the evolutionary creation. Before then and after then, it is exceedingly hard, almost impossible. The further you get from the middle of creation, the harder it is to begin and establish your freedom. Part of the reason is that in the middle of the creation, we have slack. We have cosmic slack and the slack of soul power. There is an illusionary image that can help us to understand this which, in itself, is a paradox. To come to truth through an illusion and make an image, you wonder what you are doing.

       I’m sure we’ve all seen it. Think of a wagon wheel and you start spinning it and pretty soon all of the spokes are a blur. At a certain time, the speed is phased off with the way you perceive things through the eye and even though the wheel is going forward, the spokes appear to be going backward. That’s the illusionary image but it is analogous to the reality of evolutionary creation. In the evolutionary creation, everything always goes forward, even if there is a seeming to go back to hook up to something else, there still is progress because when you go back you go back with the consciousness that you have had in your advancement  or in your progress. At a certain time in the evolutionary creation, right in the middle of it, there is a voluntary conscious backward motion in consciousness.

              It’s like what happens to us in life, we look forward when we’re a child; everything is before us.    Then we start having children and we start looking back and it isn’t necessary for us to look back but we find that when we do look back, we understand things—things about ourselves and things about our children. It is that same kind of backward movement in consciousness that takes place in the cosmos, except the difference is that in the cosmos, it’s not an illusion as it is with the wagon wheel; it is a reality. It is a reality because the looking back changes the consciousness that holds the matter of the cosmos together so that gradually, gradually instead of the cosmos becoming more and more condensed in the materiality, it dissolves more and more back into the spiritual worlds. It is the inbreathing of matter when matter is spiritualized and taken back in.

            This is exactly what happens to us if we practice reviewing our day every day. If we go in reverse order, we take the events of the day and unwind them and we god-essence the meaning, we look from effect to cause rather than from cause to effect and we understand the whole truth. Spirit likes to understand things in wholes. That’s what happens to us. It’s a sacrifice because it’s very hard to look back without going to sleep. When you start looking backwards, it’s using the same principle as when a hypnotist counts backwards to take you out of your body.

        Then there are lots of things that we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we did during the day. I was terribly lazy today. So there was, for me, that resistance of not wanting to face the reality of my life. When we do that, it is an act of sacrifice, and because we give our love to that process, that is what, by looking backward, draws the essence of our light into us. It is a resetting and because it makes things whole, it is a remembering. The remembering goes all the way back to the Orcus.  Orcus was ripped limb from limb and when we remember, we put the members back on and we become whole. This has a lot to do with the triangle in fact, a lot of Orcish mythology and poetry, though beautifully poetic it is mathematical at the same time.

            This is what we were talking about last time when we were talking about superimposing top-down consciousness onto bottom-up consciousness to have a whole experience of things, to have a god’s eye point of view and not just a human point of view or always looking up.  This time when we can look backwards and we can become creative beings marks the end of the period as involutionary beings and instead of creatures, we become evolutionary creators.  That’s what creation is, it’s giving and when we give ourselves to our creations, we take the essence of it into our being. Some of you may have seen this coming. …… This forward spin of progress always continues even when there is a reverse that is superimposed on it and there is always the Luciferic temptation to have more experience, to continue to go forward, to continue to have the bottom-up experience.

            That spinning forward drives us deeper and deeper into matter. If one of these serpents represents backing into matter and the other one represents coming out of matter, there is, at the bottom where the tails meet, there is the gap and there is that possibility that, if we want to, we can keep going into matter and thereby, project ourselves, so to speak, into the abyss. There’s always that temptation. As great as we may think we are, there’s insecurity in our egoism. When we return to …, we say come on, we’re going to show them, we’re going to make our plans about how we’re going to succeed tomorrow. We don’t think about collecting from the past, so that’s a temptation; it’s always there. It’s hard to take the leap of faith. It seems such a silly thing to do and it seems so simple, that to think about looking back at your life, ho hum, been there, done that, is the temptation to pass all that up and think about tomorrow because that’s what counts.

            What happens is, it’s short-sighted. When you start thinking about tomorrow it grinds you deeper into the body and you don’t rest well. When you don’t rest well, you wake up the next day and you’re not so likely to succeed as if you had looked backward and done that and done the other. We are in a paradoxical but unique evolutionary position right now being right in the middle. If we want, we can be real Christian outlaws and we can create and we can run down hill like the pigs of the Bible and drown ourselves in materialism. In all this at this time in evolution, we have some slip. We’re told that when we study astrology that the stars impel but they do not compel. They do not force us to be one way or another. At this time of evolution because we’ve been in it long enough, we’ve developed some soul power. If we want, we can blow up like a kid in a candy shop and give ourselves a cosmic stomach ache. At least we can for a few thousand years. We’re free. We’re not controlled the way the creatures are.

             If we look at the creatures, the mineral kingdom always does the same thing under the same conditions – without exception. Given the same temperature and pressure, water will always boil at the same temperature. If we look at the plants, the plants have a little bit more slip but, for the most part, a species remains a species unless it is deprived of light or water or something like that.  Every member of that species will look the same. Animals have even more slip. They are not completely under the control of the group spirit and they have a little bit of freedom on their own, especially our pets which are inductively drawing from us.  We, as human beings, to a large extent have freedom. If we look in the other direction, the farther we go into the spiritual hierarchies, the more the beings are close to the truth and the more they are unvarying… They are so unvarying, that some beings are laws of nature.  They are so unvarying.

            If we participate in these activities, if we give our minds to not the ordinary things that would plunge us deeper into materialism, it doesn’t mean that our lives are going to be insipid or we lose all the glory. In fact, the glory is much enhanced. It’s something like a story. In the Greek stories that were told in the dramas, everybody knew where the story was going. If you ever read Oedipus (several of us have read the Oedipus myth together several times), and we knew where the story was going but because the story is so good, it’s great anyway. You get so much more out of it each time you go into it.

             I believe this is the way it is when we start making these sacrifices, when we stop having the opinions that this is the final ultimate thing about this and there is no more room for another interpretation. In that story, we can create, we can activate, we can do all kinds of creative things. The whole reality is in the story of our life. But the whole of reality, the macrocosmic divine scheme or the creative dream is huge and it is so complex that it’s very hard for us with mere human minds to understand it. So, we have to understand it piecemeal and piecemeal is what we’re doing.

            We’re looking at time, at this cycle and the precession of the equinox of the transition of the Piscean age into the Aquarian age and that is piecemeal, what we’re doing. In this, we first introduced the topic and then we looked at the two signs, we looked at the sign that was in-conjunct (quincunx), looking at the relationship of Virgo to Aquarius and we looked at the converse – looking at Aquarius to Pisces and Leo being esotericism. So we began with the quincunx and then we proceeded to the opposition. From the quincunx we saw how things worked from within out and from without in. When we looked at Leo we looked at things from complementation, we looked at the opposition, we saw how a sign and its opposite complement each other and we looked specifically at how altruism is fulfilled through individual love.

             In the last two talks before this one, we looked at the two semi-sextiles – to Pisces and to Capricorn. We looked at the push from the past and we looked at repression and the build up of psychic pressure within us pushing us forward and we looked at the allure of the future from Capricorn that pulls us forward. In this talk and in the next talk, we’re talking about the signs trine to Aquarius. Those signs are Gemini and Libra. This talk is obviously the Gemini talk, Gemini in abstract moving to concrete mind. This is obviously the bi-polar talk. It’s not surprising that bi-polarity would become a fad. It’s almost expected that it would become a fad. So now we’ve got through the first two introductions and we’re ready for the third introduction.

            We all know that in astrology trines have something to do with perfection, but they also have something to do with ease. Yet, trying to understand why the triangle has something to do with something so deep is difficult, very difficult to understand. You can say how a triangle functions. It functions like going up a staircase rather than trying to jump straight up. That’s fairly simple, at least some of it is. In this talk, we don’t have any final answers, any ultimate how’s or whys. The trine works but we’re going to explore it anyway to the little bit of depth that we can. In order to understand or answer these questions, the ultimate why and how of the trine, it’s sometimes easier to do that by asking other questions; questions that bring it more down to a level that we can comprehend.

            Obviously the first question that comes to mind is, why do fairies live so long? Everything in the cosmos is alive; alive ultimately with the light of the universal spirit. There are no dumb or dead horses anywhere in the evolutionary creation. Everything in the cosmos is alive and alive in such a way that if we experience it fully there is no doubt in our mind that we think we’ve been looking in depth all along. Everything that comes into being comes into being because it is a product of something spiritual and the quality of spirit is life.

            Anything that comes into being comes into being through the agency of other beings. We’re all in this together. In everything that happens, none of the experience is wasted. There is no waste. Humans intentionally waste things but in the cosmos there is no waste. Everything that comes into being also has a character and a character is like an agency to which it is suited or by which it is meant to bring things about. Fairies are said by seers to be like cells in the bodies of angels … but when we say cells we don’t mean like with little nuclei and things like that. We’re talking about little beings of life that subsist within the vital life of the angel. This is what seers of all ages have reported, that they exist within a much greater being of consciousness.                          

            One might jump to the conclusion that the reason they live so long is because they live within such a divine being. That’s an answer that is partially true and it is even vaguely related to the triangle but it is not completely true because there are other beings that subsist within divine beings that do not live long. It also doesn’t square with folklore. Folklore is very important because it is written by people who saw or see. Folklore writers or tellers of stories were people who were fairy watchers. The answer from folklore to all of this is that fairies live long because of their purity, simplicity and innocence. There are other answers but this is a very good set of answers.

            Gnomes are said to have wrap around eyes, Atlantean wrap around eyes as we often see portrayed in Egyptian art. It is what the Atleateans at the time would have built. Their heads were shaped much differently than ours and, consequently, the positioning of the eyes had that feature that was like wrap-around. That’s neither here nor there.

            The way it works, is that fairies have a great innocence. They don’t have a self consciousness where they can say, I’m going to be this or I’m going to make this of myself. They don’t have that. In their purity, they resonate, mostly to the being in which they live, but they resonate outside of them. Atlanteans lived during the very beginning of our human consciousness when there was waking objective self-consciousness; at the same time there was clairvoyance. So the Atlanteans did in fact, according to the stories anyway, see the fairies. Their waking self-consciousness was inductively radiated to the fairies and the fairies took on the characteristics of the objective consciousness that was projected to them in that two-way perception.

            Since those times, most people have lost the ability to see the fairies, and as a consequence the evolution of fairy form vis-à-vis human consciousness has not progressed a lot. It does happen that cartoonists and people like that who draw fairies have some effect on them, on their shaping and on their experience, but because they are not with waking consciousness and seeing them, the effect is not as strong as when we were Atlantean. 

             This is all fabulous and nice to talk about – fairies and things like that, and I’m glad you indulged that, but the nature of fairies, how do we get to that, is a trine. If we think how to get to the trine and the relationship with Gemini and Aquarius, the answer still is: through purity, simplicity and innocence.

            Fairies of each type live within a given element. Within the chemical ether, the fairies are called gnomes because they deal with the energies passing through the formation of the crystal and solid state. The fairies that work through water are called undines. They can be seen where there is running water, especially where there is the energy of a waterfall released. The aerial fairies are called sylphs. In fact, they sing and when they sing they sing just like Richard Wagner’s Valkyries because Richard Wagner saw fairies and that’s where he got the idea.  Salamanders are the spirits that are in fire or the release of energy. The tail of the salamander is like the shape of the wick of a flame. It’s curious the way that all of these things start. At any rate, because the fairies each live within their element, they have no wear and tear.

            If there are cross-elemental activities, we talked about the wear of the elements breaking the earth down – water wears on earth and wind pushes water and fire pushes the air and there are those struggles. But if you stay within one element, you are simple, you are pure and you are innocent and that’s part of the reason they can live long. They are unassailed by something external. I have a friend who has eight planets in air signs. He has some in each one of the air signs and he is an intellectual nonpareil. When it comes to the manipulation of thoughts and intellectual activities in words, it’s a magnificent thing to just hear him speak. It’s beautiful the way it comes out of him. From Gemini he understands the principle of contrast and he comes up with some rather unique contrasts. From Libra he understands the principle of comparison and from Aquarius he understands the overall, the big picture of intellection. He can simulate it or approximate it by intuition and by erudition.

Tags: Aquarian Age, fairies, Gemini, thought