Aquarian Age Lecture 3
Feb 12th, 2009 by admin
Microcosm Lecture Series Notes
Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age
Lecture 3 of 25 by [R]
Cultural Vehicles and the Evolution of Consciousness
The last of the introductory talks.
This will be a focusing kind of talk. Years ago I used to go to a lot of movies. They used to show cartoons and one of my favorites was Speedy Gonzalez. It was the usual scene, a starry night, revelry and cantina music. The focus – first the Solar system, and then the camera zoomed to earth, then to North America, then to the Texas border and you keep hearing the music and finally you see a sleepy little village and a cantina. The cantina is closed but if you looked in through a window you could see a mouse hole with swinging doors on it and the mice are all inebriated and wearing sombreros and having a great time when they are set upon by El Gringo Pussy Cat. He wants to sneak up on them and eat them and then Speedy Gonzalez comes to the rescue and the cat goes up in smoke. After a minute the scene is run in slow motion, so you get to see what Speedy Gonzalez has done to the cat. Like the cartoon, we are trying to focus away from the cosmos and zoom in to earth, and it may sound like swinging doors by the time we are done.
Heraclitis says you never step into the same river twice or we can say one never steps the same into the river twice. Either way, the river is altogether different or the individual is altogether different. The concept of perpetual l change in time is a very important concept for spiritual students. Heindel says that adaptability is the key to evolution. We see this in our daily lives.
If a person is living in his rational consciousness he is living in the past because rationality usually comes after the experience. Rationality is dead compared to living spontaneously.
Laws, science, culture, etc. were all developed by people who are now gone so we are sort of trapped in the past. We even cling to our memories whether we know it or not. For example –in the last few days I had a picture come to memory out of my past experience and it was very real like walking into the picture and I began to feel sentimental. Even though I realized those memories were like death I felt the inclination to hang on to that memory. It grabbed at me, but in order to be a free person and live in the now it takes courage. One has to be willing to let go of all of that.
In terms of precession of the equinox we are working toward a new age and a new epoch – an epoch when there will no longer be national and cultural division. All will be defined by the one being. There will no longer a focus of the material part of existence. We have to be ready to accept something new without pre-defining it by the past. Whether we know it or not we usually define things by our experiences of the past.
The first time I tasted a mango I tried to define the taste and thought to myself “this is a peach gone to heaven.” While that may have been clever it was doing nothing for the mango but defining it in terms of the peach. People want to be understood for what they are. That is one of the things about newness. We don’t want to be stuck or stay with things the way they are. We are trying to be awake within the spirit of the times in order to get the most out of it.
We will look at changing consciousness as it is experienced through a vehicle of consciousness–the vehicle of the evolution of astrology. Astrology is in a sense an essential part of people’s lives. We are living a superstructure that is astrological. We are talking about a cycle of becoming and about a clear focus. What we have done or not done in the past and what we are becoming is what we are now. Step into the future—it’s not an easy thing to do.
I met a strange man who was as intractable as a child—four planets in Taurus all opposite something in Scorpio. When he got into the army he refused to get out of bed in the morning. The sergeant first put him together with his bed in the shower, but he still would not get up. Then, the sergeant turned his face into hamburger and he still would not.
Eventually he got a guitar and he played it all the time. He listened with his ear right down on the strings. Finally, when he couldn’t get what he wanted out of the guitar, he threw it down. There was a book near him, and he picked it up and read it. Then, he picked up the guitar again and mysteriously he could play it and he realized that something he had read enabled him to play the guitar. Years later he was very accomplished at playing the guitar.
When I lived with him he was composing music and it was fascinating to hear this because he would play the same bars over and over again—hoping to jump off into the next note or the next few cords. But even after he found just the right note he would still have to try all of the other notes—he was so thorough.
We are going to do this with this talk—take a run through recent history and hope that we can jump off into the future. Not just jump off but see if we can accept the future with what we have lived. (a reference to the Neoplatonists and their mythological idea of time, titanic time—maintaining that the gods got younger instead of older.)
In the age of Taurus most of western culture has to do with Babylon and Egypt. The most important concept of this talk is: The consciousness that we had in Babylon or Greece etc is not the same as the consciousness that we have now. When we are awake now we think that this is it the true consciousness and it is, especially if we can share things, and we are the same being but our consciousness is different quantitatively and also qualitatively different, so we have different kinds of consciousness at different times. As spiritual students it kills our spiritual life if we think of this consciousness as what we have always had.
A friend of mine studied both Heindel and Steiner and had a momentary waking experience in the desire world. It was so chaotic, and because there was so much there he was befuddled. He thought, “Wait a minute this is not anything like what Max and Rudy said it would be like.” How could they speak so clearly and so objectively about something that is so chaotic? We have to prepare for anything and cannot assume anything. Also, we have to remember that our whole perception is skewed by our attitude. In the inner worlds that is a very dangerous kind of thing.
Historically, mankind had an atavistic clairvoyance where they could see and they saw spirits and could relate, but they could also sense that they were losing that inwardness. Even though it was involuntary clairvoyance it was still a wondrous experience. They knew it was superior in that it could be a realm that was more causal and not so much the realm of effects, so when they began to lose this faculty they were desperate to have guidance. Much of this was divinatory. If you wanted to know something they would sacrifice a bull and the priest would read the liver. This way they got in touch with the forces coming into the spiritual worlds.
It had some scientific basis—everything is stored in the liver. They looked for certain bulls with certain markings etc and the bull was put in a chamber and people watched every movement and that all meant something.
A lot of the astrology was based on New Moons and they scrutinized and watched the formations on the moon, so they were using things of nature as divinatory to get in touch with what they had lost. Most of the astrology was in the hands of the priests. The age being Taurus, it was characterized by negative polarity. So the church was stronger. In a positive age the scientists would be stronger. Now that we are moving into the Age of Aquarius science dominates. The kings depended on divination and the priests to tell them what to do because they were the only ones capable of doing divining. Chaldean revolutionary astrology is one of the major pagan vestiges of society, and we have the days of the week and each segment of 4 hours has a rulership by one of seven planets. A continuous cycle—every year is ruled by a planet and it goes all the way out to the age of the cosmos itself. But all of the observation was by divination. The lower astrologers were con men and soothsayers and they were there in a different way.
At the end of the period of Taurus things did become more scientific. An astronomer named Saros discovered that New Moon and Full Moon eclipses repeat themselves in cycles and so we have Saros series of eclipses and some deep initiate wisdom.
At the same time that involuntary clairvoyance waned, perception and intellection was increasing. The more one came, the more the other disappeared.
Greece and the Middle East hold a particularly beautiful place for the beginning of western mysticism and the end of eastern mysticism. Whereas Socrates called himself the mayudic philosopher (of a midwife) considering himself the midwife of new ideas. We are talking about out the beginning of evolutionary consciousness and the end of involutionary consciousness in this epoch. The Greeks were pretty extreme. Heraclitis thought everything arose out of fire, another thought everything was created out of air, another out of water. None thought everything was created out of earth. That would be the superstition for the moderns who thought everything came out of matter.
There were many philosophers of that time and they were all extreme—lots of mystery schools: the orphic mystery schools; schools of Apollo; Isis schools etc. Especially in Rome, one philosophy became more accepted and that was the philosophy of stoicism. You might say that there was a higher group of stoics (an intelligentsia), and the others—flatterers and intriguers who were the lower philosophers. It was like John McCain using Joe the Plumber. Like when they paid off an astrologer to say someone had the qualities of an emperor, etc. Tiberius had an astrologer help him and then had all of the astrologers executed.
As the head of the Praetorian guard, Sejanis would just choke to death anyone that he did not like. Goat Island was the Isle of Capri. (Capricorn) In order to get to his palace you had to climb steps and he was interviewing candidates to get an imperial astrologer. He would ask questions, they would do calculations, and if he did not like what they said he would give a signal to his man and the candidate would end up falling off the steps. He found an astrologer who gave all correct answers, so Tiberius asked the candidate to read his own horoscope. The astrologer blanched white and said my horoscope tells me that I am in mortal danger. He got the job.
The intelligentsia stoics were also astrologers themselves. There were emperors who studied astrology, but the consciousness had changed. Involuntary clairvoyance was not such a general property. It was even a good thing – people are now coming into matter. Man’s destiny was that matter must be overcome as it becomes the vehicle for creative expression. You cannot be only a dreamer or become a creative being only in fantasies.
This is why among noble people stoicism was taken up as a fad but it was for a definite purpose. The stoics were famous for suicide. It was not a bad thing to die, everyone had the same kind of experience and the only thing that differentiated the philosopher from an ordinary life was a determination to live through it nobly. What astrology did was help people. They would know that something was coming and they knew that they could not run from it but must live through it and they could be prepared to keep their composure. There was a dinner party, and the stoic said, “toast me, for the Moon is in Aquarius and I am about to be assassinated.” And somebody came in and shot him.
Astrology helped them live through the spirit. The Gnostics were more extreme than the stoics. They believed that the gods had made a mistake and this was the cause of suffering. So they railed against the gods and felt that they had a right to speak out against divine stupidity. They tried to figure out what the gods were up to and then they tried to do the exact opposite. Did you see the movie, Little Big Man? The man was the epitome of contrariness and did everything in reverse. He rode his horse backwards. This is not to say that the Gnostics had no spiritual knowledge or sacred and spiritual things going on.
The movements of evolution are to help everyone.
Toward the end of the age of Aries we had great Aryan martial-type figures, one a Macedonian, Alexander the Great, and the other a Roman, Julius Caesar. Alexander went conquering all the way to India and Julius Caesar did the same all the way to Britain and created an empire. These things don’t happen by accident. They produced a more unified over-all society. The seeds were being planted for a totally different kind of religion. Before this, all religions were separate, cultural, racial, tribal, etc. Ultimately the destiny was to produce individuals and for us to be awake to our own divinity. This we cannot do without the experience of the Holy Spirit or of knowing oneself in a divine sense. Race religions had to give way to a universal religion. The seeds were planted in the age of Aries.
The religion of the future will be all of us in unison being attuned to the universal spirit, but it will not be a humanity being guided by higher beings. It will be a humanity which has come into its own divine powers and capacities and has freedom. We will unite with others in a universal friendship as an act of freedom. This is where we are going and so the seeds of this are what is called the birth of Christianity.
We are not talking about anything that the world has seen so far as Christianity, and probably when it comes into its full it will not even have that name – perhaps the “religion of love” or the religion of this or that. People have believed everything blindly. It had to go into a period of incubation and that incubation is what we call the Dark Ages, roughly between 500 and 1000 ad. This doesn’t mean that all of the culture was lost, because everything that ever happened is recorded in the spiritual worlds. If you can get into the memory of nature you can call back anything that ever was. You can know things and about the intent behind what has been created and know about what has been compromised, like the Bible, etc.
With reference to the culture of the classical times; that went south. It went mostly to Arabia. It is said to this day that it was entirely due to the Arabs that all of the Greek culture was preserved, that Arab chieftains hold documents that had been saved from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Islam was also monotheistic but it was a very stripped-down kind of monotheism. It needed to have more rigor in the control of their lives.
There was sort of an intellectual schizophrenia. The astrologers that were Islamic thought that everything that happened was the will of God and the law. Astrology was used to read the mind of God. It was fatalistic. When astrology came back into Europe it was discriminated against as not believing in free will. Fatalism was another side of Pisces, the belief that things have to happen when one is already so over burdened with past experience that things do happen fatalistically. And this was happening with Arab astrology. After the crusades astrology made its way back into Europe. Now consciousness includes science, includes creativity. It is a mistake for students of astrology to fall back into the old patterns of practice and past modes of consciousness.
People were blind and no longer had the spiritual vision. The Christian attitudes were meeker and more accepting than the stoics. Stoicism and astrology wouldn’t work in these times and astrology became more democratized. So there developed a practical astrology for shop keepers, military men, doctors etc. When they couldn’t see what was going on they used astrology to reckon their consciousness and there was the term “judicial astrology.” Intellectual consciousness was maturing and they could adjudicate. These are extreme statements but they apply generally.
Another kind of astrology developed: polar negative. The church became very strong and was basically like a superstition that one couldn’t go against. Did you know that the pope bathes in a tub that has the signs of the zodiac around it? If he is a Jesuit he probably does know the astrological meaning of it. You dare not think too much because if you think too much you are vulnerable to the devil. Inquiring minds had to do what they did in secret. So there were secret societies, alchemists magicians, cabalists and they spoke with each other. Even though they were becoming rational, they spoke with each other symbolically because they had to be discreet. They were a cult of secrecy — alchemists and other symbolists. Astrology became symbolic, and people translated the symbols.
One very famous one: Nostradamus. He was a very grave man who lived by patronage, went to the school of the Medici’s that taught astrology and things of that type – at the same time as Jerome Chardin. He would go around visiting people and stay for a fortnight. And he would have to regale them. Once when conversing with a skeptic two pigs ran across his path. The nobleman, being a wise guy, asked what is the fate of the two pigs? He said, “The white pig shall go to the dogs and the black pig shall be for dinner.” So, the skeptic went to the kitchen and said, “Be sure to serve the white pig for dinner.” But later as the servant looked the other way the dog grabbed the pig off the table. The cook had to save the day, so he prepared the black pig and they were having dinner. The man said, “I think this is the white pig.” Nostradamus said, “no this is the black pig.” The skeptic then asked the cook which pig they were eating, and the cook said that the dog had devoured the white pig, so they had to prepare the black pig.
[R] tells another story about Michael the Scot’s prediction of his own death.
Another story — Escalus (?) thought he would die from an object falling on his head. On the day that he thought he would die he went to the countryside and sat there in the open. A sea eagle flew over head with a turtle and was looking for a rock to smash the turtle on. Since Escalus was bald, the sea eagle saw the shiny pate of Escalus, thought it was a rock, and it was like Billy Mitchell the dive bomber and that was the end of Escalus.
Toward the end of the Piscean age, symbolism is carried to its height and we have Elmer Bachman and Carl Jung and people like that – taking the symbols and trying to see universal ideas with them. This is where, for the most part, astrology stands in our times. Not as a simple material adjudication but as a discernment of a higher meaning of things. It’s not to say that what Jung and Bacher said is all true or right but it is in touch with the times. We are talking about the evolution of consciousness.
We are back to a time when there was then pragmatic, then scholastic, then very abstract perceptions. Things have passed from family consciousness and inbred clairvoyance, to a few noble individuals who could get little pictures from their lives, to a time of pseudo imperialism, and to scientific and rational practices with a loss of involuntary clairvoyance.
Now all is old age – I do not try to perpetuate old views of astrology. If astrology didn’t try to become something different it would be very disastrous, like people who practiced ancient religions, very ancient religions. As times changed, instead of having the gods from these old religions, the demons moved in and people like Alistair Crowley and others became possessed by demons. Astrology as practiced in antiquity is not of any value to us.
We are turning back into the spiritual worlds and taking all of the experience that we are garnering here in the physical world. And as we turn back it is a reflection, and in that reflection an evolution of consciousness has to be found.
When we talk about evolution we are not talking about something like an express railroad that just goes from one point to another and is on a track. You see there are branches and all sorts of sub branches. Experiences are too valuable to be wasted
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On a taxonomical tree there are all kinds of side branches and as we enter into the Aquarian Age and are looking for a cultural vehicle for the changing of our consciousness it is there. We will use the psi symbol. This is the direction into the future — at least in linear time. If we take the left branch which is not completely pro-evolutionary but will have value anyway you can see it in statistical studies. That would be a byway for astrology—to find out how statistically likely something is. If there are definite statistical tendencies they are usually a consequence in evolution of trying to move something one way or another. It’s like chaos science which fits very well with astrology. If 96 percent of all people are not going to be in an auto accident you want to know if you are in the 4 percent or the 96 percent.
The right wing is humanism. It is based on knowledge of materialism. Like with the spiritual hierarchies, there is the tendency then to become anthropocentric in the cosmos and believe that we are the end and this is a very big vanity in thinking that man is a highly evolved life form when actually we are not. We are actually somewhat more near to the bottom, but this is a by way and it is important. When you look at two horoscopes you can see that one is radically different from the other—but they’re all right. We can appreciate differences or acquire the ability to appreciate differences in human beings—a very valuable thing.
Then there is straight-ahead astrology which will eventually outdo other forms of astrology. It will not be like the shopkeeper in the middle ages trying to figure out if a person is a crook or not. Astrology is something to guide our consciousness—to guide our intuition or has to do with things of our perception. Our intuitions have to become aligned with our perceptions to see the world with interior/exterior guides to observation and to reveal process. The astrology of future will not be just horoscopes. It will be a study of the progress through time and to see all of the facets that are a part of consciousness-–a more spiritual circular consciousness to produce the forward looking and blending of inner and outer things. Eventually, symbolic astrology must also lead us into the inner consciousness of divine beings. That astrology is after all–eventually, if they do well with it—they will look directly into the beings of other entities and with the ability to judge. It will allow us to penetrate into the inner consciousness in the Aquarian age.