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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

Lecture 11b of 25 by [R]

Materialism and the Aquarian Age

            In a previous talk, when we talked about perfection and the triangle, we asked the question, why do fairies live so long and we concluded that they live so long because they live in one element and they don’t break down. We could have said that for a lot of things, we could have talked about stones or things like that but it wouldn’t have gotten your attention as much. Now we can see the converse of this same principle. We can see that when we’re working with all four elements and trying to maintain stability within them, it’s hard to keep it all together.

            The elements in the square, if we take it in the basic standard position, are always contrary with each other. Taurus is opposite to Scorpio and both of them are squared against fire and air and there is always conflict between planets that are squared off with each other.

            Classically, the fourth element in a definition of a human being has been rational. The other classical definition is that human beings are mortal – mortal only as far as we can see when we’re being sensible. We want to go deeper than that. We have to go deeper into the elements in order to do that. 

               If you remember, the flagship talk for this series was called, The Holy Grail and the Aquarian Age in Heaven and Earth. In that talk we noted that we were taking several trips around the zodiac between the two cups – the Lethe cup for forgetfulness and the Alethea cup for remembrance.

            In one of the journeys we went forward and we said that was a symbolic representation and not a historical representation as the precession of the equinox indicates changes in history. We talked about that in the trip around the zodiac when we crossed the autumnal equinoctial colure and entered into Libra. This means we entered into more physical worlds and Libra represented the separation of the sexes.

            Following that, we went into Scorpio which represented a fall into desire and magic and all of those things that Luciferic, Scorpionic beings led us into. We were driven out of the Garden of Eden – condemned to suffer death and to work by the sweat of our brows. We no longer named the animals. Naming the animals is symbolic of the fact that we were still a creative force when we were united in Lemuria. We were all single beings. We produced the basic species but maybe not all the species by what is called naming them, but we, how do you say this, this can be easily misunderstood.

Adam Naming the Beasts

Eve Naming the Birds

            At any rate, we were driven out of the Garden of Eden. When we were driven out we could no longer see the spiritual worlds. We had chosen a life of sensible sense-perception rather than a life of balance between the spirit and matter. The Garden of Eden represents a relationship to the inner worlds just as the Kingdom of Heaven in the New Testament represents the inner worlds. In the Garden of Eden there were 4 rivers which represent the flux that flows through each of the 4 ethers and keeps them alive. The tree in the Garden of Eden had its roots in the genitals and the sacrum and had its crown or the part above in the voice-box thru which we name the animals, and the brain. That was the Tree of Life if we knew the answer to it but it was also the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It became that when we turned too much of the energy downward and outward and became materialistic and dependent exclusively on sensory perception rather than on intuition and spiritual vision and seeing through things, seeing things as they are.

            Now, if we put all the things that we just looked at together with the astrological mandala and the fairy tale, we should be able to say something of materialism and the Aquarian age. This talk is almost entirely introduction and very little of it actually ever gets said. The effect of the refocus of our consciousness from inwardness to outwardness is one of the basic lessons.

            In the story of the 2 caskets, the sister that doesn’t follow intuition and doesn’t have the inner sense figures that if she takes the biggest casket she’s going to have the most money. This is the kind of consciousness that we develop if we have materialistic consciousness. For example, animals still have clairvoyance and in that house right next door there used to be a family with a little tiny dog named Pokey, and Pokey who could chase off a German shepherd, because he knew he was in the right and it was his territory, chased off the German shepherd by putting out his desire force that meant danger to the German shepherd. So you can see if you have an inner vision, things are very different than in an outer vision where you take things only by size.

            Again, the mother and the stepmother and the stepsister jumped the gun the way we did in the Garden of Eden. We used the creative energy before we knew when and how to use it…to produce a positive and forward going humanity. They jumped the gun ahead of the warnings and it was their demise. They began to know what death was. They both looked at the illusion of size.

            Earth, of the 4 elements on the mandala, is the most impenetrable element and Taurus is probably the densest of the dense. The box in the story is opaque and the opacity of the material world is a source of great limitation to us again. That square word comes out – limitation; it’s a source of illusion, of materialism, especially materialistic illusion. But limits by themselves are not evil. We know that if we love a child, we give that child limits because without limits it won’t grow right, won’t grow right morally or won’t grow right emotionally.

            Sometimes, as when we’ve been developing rudimentary objectivity and objective knowledge, it is a matter of making things as simple as possible – keeping the limits to the least amount of limits to describe reality. Einstein said make it as simple as you can but not more simple than that. So with our Mason infant-like self-consciousness, more information and experience tends to be distracting, rather than seeing through to the basic meaning of something. In the second house, the drudgery of simple things like chores or the weight of responsibility of possession, in those we learn very simple discrete objective lessons. When you’re a kid and you get a bicycle you have to learn how to take care of it or it isn’t going to run right. If you get a guitar you have to learn how to tune it; if you don’t take care of it, it isn’t going to work for you – simple rudimentary lessons.

            Eventually, through the fifth house on that square, we learn to create and to play. Further on, when we get to the 8th house, we learn to see through mysteries and understand that there is something behind them. The biggest mystery being the mystery of death, seeing that there’s something beyond death. Now, as we’re approaching the Aquarian age, that last corner of that upright square, we’re ready to drop limitations, to see thru them. We’re ready to have that Aquarian kind of consciousness where everything is transparent.

            But we cling to our materialism and because of this we have a lot of illusions about reality. We even have an illusion about the whole idea of clairvoyance. There is etheric vision with which you can see through things and we’re on the edge of opening that, but that’s only a psychic faculty. It’s a sixth sense, as people call it. In order to get to the real higher consciousness, it has to be spiritual sight. It has to be brought together with intuitive insight so that we both see and know at the same time. Without the component of intuitive insight, the faculty of clairvoyance is confusing.

            I read the story once of a man who was pretty much clairvoyant all of his life. As he developed, he could see a vast array of symbols and objects in the inner worlds and he went to somebody who was really a spiritual teacher and said to him, I have seen this and this and this, isn’t that wonderful, and he was rebuked. He was told he was just seeing forms. Those forms aren’t doing you any good unless you see the meaning. His feelings were terribly hurt and he was resentful for a long time. Here he had this faculty and very few people had this faculty and he expected to receive commendation. He was being told he was a materialist. But after awhile his spite, his indignation, left and he realized it was right.

            For the rest of his life he never pursued taking a vision as an end in itself, instead always looked for the inner meaning of it. That’s the beauty of what we’re getting at with Aquarius; it’s intellectual and it’s intuitive at the same time. It leads to clairvoyant vision but the clairvoyant vision that has meaning behind it and the intellectual ability to test that meaning when we intuitively get it.

            In the common language the word materialism is possessiveness. Most people think that a person is materialistic if they acquire a lot of possessions, and that becomes the end of their life, like the ultimate materialist would be something like the miser. That’s the folk meaning; there is a deeper meaning to it. That deeper meaning is what we’re trying to get at when we’re talking about clairvoyance. We’re trying to get at what is behind things, not just the form.

            To believe in the form without being able to penetrate it and get to the meaning behind it is materialism. The form is very important, in fact in our very limited consciousness things cannot be brought to us unless they are brought to us in a form, because we do not have direct spiritual apperception, but to believe the form is the reality or the limit of the reality is materialism.

            Even people who have been great clairvoyants and seers have come to the conclusion that they would sacrifice the clairvoyance but not the insight, not the intuition, not the divine knowing, not that part that separates human beings from the beings of form. This is something that we can do right now every day. We can develop a material-world clairvoyance. Even with our senses, we can look at things and try to align our intuitions with our perceptions because when we align our intuition with perception, we see thru things and we have a spiritual vision of the material world. It takes practice because we have made this assumption about matter and form being reality and we have to be able to get beyond this assumption.

            Aquarius is also a sign of universalization. If we have our minds in harmony, we can universalize from discrete Taurean experiences and we begin to see something that is universally objective and not subjective, because it’s only seen in this object. This does not absolve us from our work here with forms and with matter. It is still our responsiblity to work with matter and to make something of it but not to think that it is the total of everything.

            Let’s review a little bit…Taurus represents basic needs, fundamental needs and it represents a talent at using stuff, knowing what stuff is. It gives us material freedom. Leo represents creativeness, even procreativeness, in producing children, the talent that is an expressive talent. Out of that expressive talent we have expressive freedom that we are not just in our body taking care of our things but we can express ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings in the better part of our inner life. Scorpio represents shared responsibilities, taxes, insurance, and things like that; and from that it leads to a talent in learning how to let go of things, to not hang on to them. The freedom that comes from Scorpio is the freedom FROM things, not the freedom within things.

            Finally, in coming to Aquarius, by comparison and contrast we understand that we have a responsibility that is universal to every other human being. The talent that we have is a general intelligence, an intuition that can be focused on anything in the universe and can create anything in the universe – not just personal expressions. What we have for freedom with Aquarius is unattached freedom. We are suspended; we freely choose to be in the world and not completely controlled by the world. Obviously, from what we’ve been saying all night, if we are attached to stuff we are not free.

            The old statement, how does it go, our things own us rather than we owning our things – attachment. Let’s talk a little bit about attachment. If we recall the topic from two talks ago when we were talking about Gemini and we unite that with the little girl’s fall into another world, into separation and into mentality – into the lower nature; all of these things are from the Bible story or from our two caskets story. At the time of the fall we fell into self-consciousness. The ability to think, the ability to have sense-perception, the ability to be independent all came at the first blush of waking self consciousness. Each of these aspects of that fall has issues and each of them has to be dealt with because combined they produce the limitation that we are experiencing now.

            When we universalize in the Aquarian spirit, we can see that the Taurus substance and forms of things are not the all. In fact they keep us from seeing the all. So universalization begins first with being able to see through things and it ends with being ultimately free human beings – from things. When we are not free from things we are attached. We identify ourselves through things. This is mine and I can remember identifying myself with certain kinds of clothing. We come to know ourselves in that. It’s not all a bad thing, but we selfishly define and make ourselves different from others by our attachments to things that make us distinct from others rather than helping others and being [………….] of them.

            We create in the material world but we don’t create like the Lords of the Flame as we talked of in the Leo talk. We don’t give ourselves wholly to our creations. We are attached and there’s cling and as a result of that we aren’t free. We cling to the matter and even the forms that we have created. We say this is my creation. It’s a very, very selfish way of looking at things. Let’s try to produce one example of all of this and we have to make a correction. Last time when we were talking about Libra, we gave the story of the stomach, which is ruled by Cancer and Libra got short shrift.

            Let’s do a little story for Libra in order to get to the point about Taurus and Aquarius which we’re trying to get at. Ghosts: ghosts usually are seen carrying heavy chains, and they drag and they clank and everything. That’s a symbol. It’s quasi-materialistic. The links of the chain are interlocked and our whole life is a series of interlocking causes and consequences. So the chain represents a solidified destiny and the weight of it that we have produced by our cause and consequence but that’s limited. If we take the chain and we put it not into linear but into a plane, then we have a net, something that goes in two directions.

            The principle of Libra or the principle of cause and consequence being tied together like husband and wife are tied together can be seen through a net. And that’s basically, how the kidneys work. The kidneys are basically a network filter. Blood is thrown against the net and most of the blood makes it through, but some does not. The big molecules do not, and they slide off and go into the urine and bladder. We have an idea here of a network being representative of law and of cause and consequence. The Lords of Individuality are the beings from the sign and constellation of Libra. They are found in the construction of the kidneys which are ruled by Libra.

            Someday, when we no longer have physical bodies like these, we will expel their influence from us and they will be happy to be expelled because we are a burden to them and they want to move on to a different kind of creation and cannot do so. It will be a freedom for them and freedom for us at the same time. But that day is put off, it’s delayed – postponed because we are attached to our bodies and to our forms because we identify with them. Now we’re getting to a much deeper meaning of materialism.

            We are attached and materialistic because we identify our entire beings with our physical bodies. That egoism which is actually a false ego is developed at the same time with the true spiritual ego, but that lower kind of egoism is clearly bound up with materialism. What we’re talking about now as we approach the Aquarian age is the opportunity to be aloof from all this. Detached is probably a better word (aloof has a standoffish kind of quality). It is a quality of being detached from the need to personally identify with anything. As long as we identify with anything we are attached to it, and we are weakened because of the identification.

            If we are in ourselves and stand for ourselves as ourselves, we are not weakened. Of course when we’re at that degree of understanding, we are automatically altruistic because our consciousness is in the shared consciousness that we all have which is the Aquarian consciousness.

            Earlier we talked about the 4 seasons being the square and about the battle of the elements and the compounding process or building process of the square. Compounding is probably a better word. The square compounds because it takes cross-polar elements and turns them into something useful. We know this world because we have all the elements of it in us. Because of that we have an understanding of everything in this world and we can receive and give to this world. The work that we do in compounding to build our bodies or build the things that we make with our bodies is much more radical than just simple compounding of forms.

            In the Masonic net, the Aries symbol is seen on its side and is the symbol of Hiram’s hammer. When Hiram built the temple for Solomon, he tried to eclipse the temple with his own creation, the molten sea. The molten sea was made by building or compounding all of the elements of the earth by melting them down and turning them into a limpid crystalline substance, a sea that you could see right through. It’s what we’re trying to get at, where we see THROUGH things and are not subject only to the exteriors, to the materialistic side of things.

            At any rate, he was firing the molten sea and it was heating up and the priest of Solomon poured water into it and it exploded. When it exploded Hiram dove into the molten sea and, according to the story, he lived in the center of the Earth until a much later time, after many different rebirths, when he became St. Germain. Saint Germain was the Mason’s mason, the magician’s magician, the master’s master.

            When he was in the court of Louis XIVth in Versailles, at a dinner conversation he just casually said the words you cannot make the philosopher’s stone by fire alone. You must compound water and fire to make the philosopher’s stone. [He was] talking about the whole history of humanity, the fusing together of mystics and occultists, of Freemasons and Catholics, of thinkers versus feelers. The children of fire, which probably applies to almost all of us, need to become dutiful mystics. In our work with materialism, we have to build the molten sea in our own particular version into the philosopher’s stone.

            Creative thought and intuition have to dissolve everything that is opaque in our lives. We have to be transparent and the world itself has to be transparent to us. We have to render everything clear. A person who has even a rudimentary clairvoyance can see right through the entire world. We see only reflections, and that’s one of our problems. It’s a good beginning; we can’t do without the lessons that we learn in the material world. The limitations that we have here teach us important lessons; this is a proving ground; this is a testing area.

            But we can’t stay with these limitations. We have to take the stuff of our experiences from this world and turn them into soul material. We have to literally transform the Earth itself. This isn’t going to just happen. We have to participate in this and the biggest obstruction at this time in our evolution is that we cling to materialism rather than participate in the spiritual view of things. This clinging to materialism keeps us from going forward in the reality. It’s like building the temple because in building the temple it was done by a master of finesse. It was done without the sound of hammer, but with finesse and know-force. So we have to learn to let go of our attachments.

            Now, despite all of our aspirations, we are all materialists. I have never yet met a totally spiritual person in the world. I have encountered a few of them in reading spiritual philosophy but I have yet to meet a human being–every one of us, materialistic. We conceive of things in terms of this world rather than in terms of the spirit. The three-dimensional world is real. It doesn’t take having to walk into a lamppost to prove that. We can see that it is real. The three-dimensional world is valuable especially in its limitation it is valuable. Because in it that limitation we learn objectivity.

            The higher spiritual worlds have less limitation. More importantly, the higher spiritual worlds are the source of everything in this world, just in the same way that the idea and thought of an inventor are the source of the invention. The invention doesn’t produce the inventor. The dense material world that we see around us is a precipitate. it’s the dregs from the higher spiritual worlds. As such, with all of its limitations, it’s marvelous. Everything works here very well and if we can accomplish something here with all of these limitations, we can prove it.

            However while we’re here, we’re living in exile. Because of our attitude we’re living here in quarantine. This is not our home. It is a quadrate prison and we can free ourselves from it by letting go of attachment. When we let go of attachment, we don’t let go of responsibility. If we take responsibility with attachment it’s almost insane. I have seen people in mental institutions that say you have to let me out of here because I am the only one who can clean the floors right at the cafeteria. I’ve literally seen that. It’s when there is attachment to responsibility that one removes oneself from oneself.

            We don’t have to give out objectivity. The objectivity that we have learned from limitation is to be transplanted into higher consciousness so that we can treat spiritual things with as much objectivity as we do material things. We have to have faith in what is in us. We have to have faith in the spirit so that we can let go—not try to escape, but so that we can let go and be suspended and be free from materialism. We have the capacity; all of us do, of knowing and understanding things beyond what we normally think we can do. We all have intuition and that makes us divine. So we can know the truth of all of these things. It is exactly as Christ says in the Bible, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

[Adam and Eve paintings in tempera by William Blake]

[Illustrations were not part of lecture.]

Tags: Adam and Eve, Aquarian Age, Materialism