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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

Lecture 12a of 25 by [R]

Regeneration and the Aquarian Age

 

            This talk is called Regeneration and the Aquarian Age, and before getting into it we have to review what we’re trying to do.  As sincere spiritual students, we’re trying to do a number of things.  We’re trying to be servants – servants of the spirit and servants of the spirit for the needs of the world.  This means that we have to constantly be rethinking what service is, because very often what we assume service to be is not what our most important service is.  

          From a spiritual point of view, at this time in the evolutionary creation our most important service to the world is thinking.  You might think of all of our deeds, and even the objects of the world—as thought come to fruition.  We cannot help or harm unless we have had a helpful or harmful thought to precipitate the action.  We are becoming, if we practice spiritual exercises (especially concentrated spiritual exercises), analogous to the lethal state of a boxer.   The fists of a boxer are considered lethal weapons because of his training and ability.  Because of our training, and because of our skill and the potency that we learn to put into our prayers, thoughts can be lethal weapons if we are not careful about them. 

            This is especially a problem in dealing with each other, because we are brought together to grow through each other and this sometimes means fighting and battling.  We have to be very careful about our thoughts or we become unconscious black magicians.  Spiritual philosophy tells us that all thought is creative, and that in thinking we are led to new things.  Socrates said, let’s follow the thought and let’s see where it takes us.  It’s not all cut and dried, so we’re looking toward understanding creation. 

            Another thing that we’re trying to do as seekers is review ourselves and regenerate ourselves with the aid of spiritual philosophy.  We’re trying to see what we really are and not just the illusion that we are sweety sweet people when in many regards we are not.  Because if we were, we would be entrusted with many more spiritual powers, but as it is, the spirit cannot put that into our waking consciousness because we are not worthy of that; we would do too much harm. 

            As enthusiastic astrology students what we are also doing is keeping ourselves in the astrological mandala – trying to see the ideals and the ideas that are behind the forms of the cosmos so that we can work better with them.  Another thing that we’re trying to do in all of these talks is tell as many stories as possible, because stories have life.  If we get too pedantic and too analytical in dealing with spiritual ideas it is not too dissimilar from cutting an animal open or dissecting an animal in a laboratory.  On the other hand, stories are full of life.   We study spiritual things because we want life, because we’re tired of the depth of materialism around us.  One final reason we’re doing all of this is to have fun.  Spiritual seeking and spiritual study, to that end, should be enjoyable.  It should be fun and we should always have smiles on our faces. 

            Usually, when I review and do this much talking about what we’re doing, that usually means that I don’t have much to say.  I’m a rather stubborn person, and I persist even though I don’t have  much to say so we’re going to muddle forward anyway.

            Let’s talk about the mandala and astrology in general, because both are always fruitful.  That’s one thing about the mandala and the people who live it out – it’s how many different sides and how many different possible sides there are to people.  When I used to have the book store open there used to be a lot of interesting conversations going on. 

            I remember one time working with a man who had rather serious psychological problems.  He wanted to talk about those problems astrologically, but if you gave him something to do, he would never do it.  He would feel offended if there was something that he could do.  It was a book-store night and I was talking with him, and we had his horoscope and we were ………(this is really a very neurotic person).  I would say to him, “Well, you could try to do this … this would be a way to alleviate this condition in your horoscope which indicates that you have this in your personality.    He wasn’t responsive, and I wasn’t using any astrology [astrological terminology]. 

            Then, another person came in, and this other person thinks he knows everything, and he thinks that my knowledge of astrology and my knowledge of people is deficient compared to his.  He’s watching what’s going on and you could see that he was (so called) chomping at the bit.  He wanted to get in there and take a look at that horoscope, and it was all he could do to keep from reaching over and grabbing the horoscope and looking at it.  But he didn’t know what was afoot, and I could see this, so I excused myself to go to the washroom.  Before I got out of the room, he had that horoscope in hand and he was looking at it.  The neurotic guy said, we’re looking at this combination – do you think it could mean “this” or “this” or “this” or “this” or “this” or “this” and they were things that ……conceived, and he was totally dumbfounded, because the guy had so many potential interpretations, and when I came back, I just sat there and smiled.

            The book store – in a way I miss it being open – but there have been some really interesting and weird adventures.  There is one man who for years would come by – he’d come and then he’d leave and then he’d come back again.  One time he ordered an ephemeris and came back several years later and I said, “You’re ephemeris is here” and he got all shook up about that, but I knew he didn’t have the money and he didn’t want to pay for it.  He was rather obsessive, and down on Regent Street, (I think it’s called “The Regent Street Retreat” now), it used to be a bar called “Rafters” and he was obsessed with one of the female bartenders there.  He would tell her about how they had been together – had been all these famous couples in history when they had been together, and he must have been very busy—he would have had to have several incarnations simultaneously to be with all of these people.

            And then I didn’t see him for a few years until one night I was in the book store and I got a call from him and he’s in the dangerous ward of the mental institution, the ward where if you go to visit the guard has to go in.  You know, it‘s under lock and key and these are not flimsy doors; these are metal doors.  He was said to be something like a homicidal maniac.  I don’t know – I am told that he did kill one person and he pleaded insanity, which would seem kind of obvious, but he was offended if you told him that, but at any rate, he got out, and the first place he came to was Microcosm Book Shop.  (These are just stories to get us warmed up.)

            He’s on a new thing, and he thinks he’s the reincarnation of King Arthur.  Everybody loves King Arthur, because it’s such an aspirational thing, and he tries to hook me into it.  I missed one of the greatest opportunities for a sharp line in my life, just because I was too slow.  He starts to try to co-opt me into his delusion and he says, “You remember when you were Merlin, don’t you?”  I said, “No, I don’t think I was Merlin, because if I was Merlin I wouldn’t be in a bookstore on a side street, and such.  Everything….. he tried to draw me into Merlin – he took a course at the university, he showed me his term paper and it was a course covering King Arthur, and in his treatise on King Arthur, he quotes all of the sources – The Venerable Bede, The Winchester Manuscript, all of these sources, and then he starts saying things that deviate from these sources and finally he puts in the sentence, which was sort of like the watershed sentence of the whole thing. 

            He said, How can I disagree with all these scholars about King Arthur, because I AM King Arthur, and it all just degenerates into delusion at that point.  When he sees he isn’t going to co-opt me into that, he starts with – he quotes a psalm.  He says, you think a psalm means this, don’t you?  I said, “I don’t know, I’m not familiar with it.” 

            He says, well it means this, doesn’t it?  I said, “I don’t know, I can’t talk about what I don’t know.”

            He said, “Well, you’re supposed to know everything.”

            I said, “No, I can’t talk about it.”   He’s all upset, and he bolts for the door, and he got out before I could say, “You’re not listening to me, and you didn’t listen to me when you were Arthur, either.”        

So, what we’re talking about is bringing out different sides of character.  Basically, there are positive people and there are contrary people.  I plead to being a contrary.  I used to be so bad that anything anyone said, I would say “no” to it, and I would have a good reason why it couldn’t be true.  Contrary’s do everything the opposite of everyone else.  If you ever saw an old movie—a very good old movie—it was called, “Little Big Man.”  There was an Indian that turned into a contrary who would ride his horse facing the rump and he would say goodbye instead of hello and he would be the opposite of everything.  Those are the kind of people, the contrary’s, that bring things out of other people. 

            On the mandala, Scorpio rules the contrary people.  In case you haven’t realized it, this is the Scorpio and Aquarius talk.  With the Sun in Scorpio, it is clear that the speaker has more than a little bit of contrariness in his character, but I’m getting healed, slowly.  Now this will probably be a contrary talk in that it’s going to go against the grain of all the other talks.  I have concluded in the other talks that we have been way too serious, and when you’re way too serious and you take yourself way too seriously, what happens is you become self-important, and that’s a sign of ….. kinds of egoism and all of those kinds of things.  And so, we’ll try to be a little bit wild, even with the ideas, if it isn’t funny.

            Ironically, there are times and there are things and subjects that require a contrary attitude.  That’s what this talk is all about.  This is perfect.  Some of those times are funerals.  Spiritual students are not the ones to invite to funerals.  I have given several eulogies, and I’ve even conducted an entire memorial service.  In each case that I have done so, most of the people left smiling, so I considered the whole process a success.  I’m one of those people who believes that if you really believe in spiritual things, especially if you believe in forgiveness and regeneration, that there should be no fear of death.   Death is one of those subjects that people take too seriously.  They take it with gravity, even people who believe in life everlasting.

            To me, it’s almost unbelievable how people will shrink from a subject that is one of the most inexorable things in life.  All of our bodies are going to die, and we have to realize that, and we’re proving a materialistic grasping if we have a terrible fear of death.  So, it is a pleasant thing when a contrarian visits the grave with a smile.  There have been contrarians throughout history that have greeted death with more than a smile.   They have greeted it with positivity.

            Don Juan Matos in the Carlos Castaneda stories tells us to always look over our shoulder, because death is right over our shoulder and we must be watching, because in that recognition and with that realization that we could die at any moment, we’re much more likely to live impeccably, and what is important is impeccable living.  That is what we are all about, and so death being over our shoulder was a friendly thing for Don Juan Matos.  Socrates looked forward to death because he felt in death would be the proving of his life.  Moreover, he felt that after he died, among the dead or among the Gods there would be people that he could ask and get answers with so there would be even better discussions than there were here.  And then there is that lovely poem which I didn’t have time to find a copy of; it is called, There is No Death.  A very lovely, uplifting poem, so we can talk positively about death.  Scorpio is said to be the sign of birth and death and rebirth, but we seem to be so preoccupied with death that we rarely think about rebirth and we rarely think about a progressing, ongoing rebirth which is what regeneration is.  I have taken 20 minutes to mention “regeneration” once.

            I had a deathly experience when I was composing these notes.  It was a really interesting thing.  I got to exactly this point in composing the notes and I got stuck.  I couldn’t do anything.  My whole inner process came to a halt.  At first I thought I had hit some kind of inner wall, and maybe I didn’t have anything else to say for the rest of my life.  I was very tired, but I didn’t think I was that tired.  I didn’t know what was going on. 

            Then, I thought well, maybe it’s the subject,, maybe I have some kind of a block about death – or about approaching it, because in order to have a decent talk about something or to share your thoughts and feelings about it, you have to be able to live it.  When the subject is death, that becomes a little bit problematic, because no one wants to really experience death.  However, that didn’t turn out to be the full story either.  These notes were composed during a complete eclipse, an eclipse of the Sun.  In fact outside of where I was preparing the notes, people were watching the eclipse.  I was sort of watching it inwardly, because it was almost exactly conjoined to my Pluto, which is the planet of death, and so what was happening was I had a paralysis where I was stymieing myself and I was incapable of doing anything.  Whether I realized it or not, it was a kind of psychological death.

            That made it even better to be going through this, and no inflection ever did come out right.  When I once realized that this was what was going on, I just took the time and looked at what had been happening in reverse order, which is what happens after death.  You see your life backwards and you try to harvest all of the information from your life so that nothing will be lost – so that all of your experience will be available to you in all of your future.  So, that is what I did, and then the next morning restarted working on the notes and everything went much better.

            Now death, whether it is a physical death, or whether it’s symbolic or a psychological death, it’s a situation which is extremely demanding.  Demanding things require us to make drastic changes.  Suppose you’ve been depending on someone all of your life and they’re not here; they’ve died; you have to make drastic changes.  That’s what regeneration is; there’s no more “business as usual.”  You have to do things differently.

            Death is one of those things which is like an experience of the Phoenix.  The Phoenix was a bird, the two-headed eagle-like bird that burned itself up completely.  It was reduced to ashes and then it rose out of its own ashes, completely renewed.  Because everything is burned in the fires of purgation and of purification, it is even more thorough than metamorphosis, which we discussed in an earlier talk, because at least the butterfly keeps the digestive system, but the Phoenix burns everything down.  Everything must burn up or burn down, and it has to be redeemed. 

            Tonight we have “show and tell” and this is our show and tell.  [Strikes a match.]  That’s it.  Some people see the striking of a match as representative of creation, a creation of light and energy – a spontaneous razing, an invisible inner fire of spiritual creation.  Some people see it as an outward experience of an inner spiritual fire that is seen only with the inner eye – a fire that glows and is beneath the surface.  It sleeps and everything.  It is the subject of the fire sermon by Buddha when he talks about everything being on fire.  There are valid and lofty ideas – the ones we’ve just mentioned about fire, but in this talk we’re going to talk about fire in a little bit different way.  We’re going to talk about a fixed fire, a frozen fire, and that is what Scorpio and Pluto represent – frozen fire.  We’re looking at the fire of redemption and especially the fire of regeneration, but we’re going to try to avoid the kind of fire like Billy Sunday who is a Scorpio, and the fire of Billy Graham who is a Scorpio.  We’re not going to talk about hellfire.  We could, but we’re not going to. 

            If we watch trees grow, it’s not too difficult to understand that the wood that is burned up is comprised of wood that stored solar energy.  It’s like the sunlight has been captured by the tree, and it has been saved by the tree.  We say to ourselves, what we’re doing when we strike a match – we’re causing, with heat, an interaction between chemicals which starts an oxidation and that oxidation releases energy that has been there for a long time. 

            It’s inspiring to see a recycling process like this – to see the sunlight, years later, in the flame of a match; it’s quite an inspiring thing.  It is never lost; it’s sort of like seeing a light’s life cycle, right before ourselves.  When we see how many things have been done and when we see how much has been experienced through all of these primal energies that are stored in the trees, it causes us to think, and the thinking is very much like the graveyard scene in Hamlet.  We see one thing get metamorphized into another into another into another, and even if we don’t believe in rebirth, we do believe in recycling – how stuff gets passed on and is shared by many, many things. 

            As aspiring as that may be, there are still a lot of questions about it.  There are still a lot of lies that we don’t understand, like the chemicals that are in the head of the match.  Where did they get the energy?   Where did the energy come and the oxidizing ability of the chemicals?  If we answer that question more deeply in terms of astronomy we see how profound the principle of analogy, as above so below; what has gone before in heaven will follow after on earth; we see how profound that is, because it’s involved in all of this.  In effect, an astronomer would say that even these elements, the sulphur, the carbon, the oxygen are themselves frozen sunlight from millions of years ago due to the thermal-nuclear reactions inside the Sun.  The elements are condensations or products of the elements of the Sun. 

            Now, that’s all very interesting and it really does something to our consciousness – but it’s still pretty shallow.  It’s basically from the etheric and chemical regions of the physical world.  It doesn’t go into much deeper things like the alchemization of the spiritual worlds that even condense into the energies that become a Sun and such like that.  Again, it shows us that if we follow this process, if we follow the analogy back we could carry it deeper and deeper into the worlds of spiritual meaning.  This shows how a very simple process is analogously propagated and how it is ramified in many different ways on many different levels.   It’s all a part of reality; experiential, testable reality.   

            The part of time in all of this is really fascinating.  If we look at what we just said, the earth itself is frozen sunshine.  The elements began with the Sun or with a super nova or something like that.  The earth itself is sunshine, so if the consciousness in the Sun, if it could look as though it were perception, and could see itself in reflection on the water, it would be seeing itself through itself from a long time ago – frozen from a long time ago.  In fact a lot of that works into our consciousness…….it’s another subject that I’d like to go into, but it’s way too far afield from here.  If there is a shadow, like from an eclipse or something like that, the Sun is hiding from itself behind its own self. 

            It’s sort of like Superman playing ping pong with himself.  It’s because in time all of those things can happen.  This certainly gives us a much different understanding of time which goes in the direction of eternity that is very, very exciting.  So, our bodies are made of dead sunshine.  That may be because we’re not strong enough to live in the living life yet.  If we did, there would be no reason to hang onto bodies like this anymore.  We’d have outgrown them.  So, it’s the same principle as the match, but on a much deeper level and something that is much more fundamental, having to do with our spiritual character.  By cruising upward through the worlds, we could follow that hermetic axiom right within our own experience.  We could go right back to the source of our own being. 

            Another question that we might ask about all of this: we know the elements hang around, but where does the energy go, the energy that was expressed through sunlight?  Mysticism doesn’t completely disagree with material science, but material science has a view that is about as comforting as a hellfire sermon.  The scientific answer amounts to saying that light and other energy is cast into utter darkness; it doesn’t say anything about weeping and gnashing of teeth.  We’re talking about the second law of the dynamics, in the scientific “repertoire,” (to be generous), it would be saying that energy becomes entropic, that it dissipates into space, and that space is something like a cosmic wastebasket.  It becomes space filler; there must be a lot of it because space is filled with energy.  It makes you wonder, how can…if there’s so much energy in space (this is thinking in terms of physicists) how can our organized energy that goes downhill by the second law of thermodynamics, how can it even make its way into space because there’s so much energy there it might not be accepting of it, so we have to change our views about a lot of things.  I don’t want to go into those things because I’d have to use a certain special kind of language which I’m not inclined to do. 

            Mysticism does say that everything eventually returns to cosmic chaos, but not with such casual disposability or with such grim emptiness.  Everything goes back to chaos, but chaos is called something very holy and something very creative.  Speaking like a Taurus, we have too much invested in the experiences of our lives here to let go of them without getting something out of it.  We can’t let our experiences just drift away into ……space. 

            Last time when we met, we talked about Taurus, and we talked about it being the foundation stone in the grand square of the mandala and we talked about it caught in that square that’s resting on its side; we talked about it being the basic cosmic square that begins in Taurus and ends in Aquarius.  We could actually have it begin with any sign or end with any sign because without the spatial limitations that we have here and gravity and things like that, in the spiritual worlds there is much more liberty for understanding things.  So, last time we talked about Taurus and we talked about matter and materialism. 

            Several times we have mentioned in the course of these lectures that all matter is the result of the principle of the square.  That is the right-hand rule – that when there is a projection of energy, a vector of energy at right angles around it, a field of force develops.  In reality, though we cannot see it with our very dull eyes, all of this matter that we hold onto so dearly is really a collection of fields of various different sizes.  That’s not so hard to agree with.  We talked about the square as being part of a cycle – that if we take from lunation to lunation (suppose we start with Aquarius) that is when the Moon goes forward and the Sun is still in Aquarius.  It forms its first square in Taurus, and then it goes forward and forms an opposition in Leo, and then it forms a second square in Scorpio.  This is something we can see every month in the heavens, so each cycle has two squares in it, each lunation cycle. 

            Each of these squares represents a different kind of limit.  We’re talking about limits when we’re talking about squares.   The first square going forward from Aquarius to Taurus, is a positive-limit square.  A positive-limit square is a square where it’s as positive and as far as you can carry something.  The most perfect example that I can think of is a race car on the Bonneville Salt Flats.  It goes as fast as it can go; it can’t go any faster.  There isn’t anything outside of it that is limiting it.  That is all that it is capable of.  In terms of the cosmos, this Taurus square, this is what we are living in–as far as we understand the cosmos to be the positive limit of the divinity of our solar system.  Relative to us in our creation this is as dense as it becomes. 

            A negative-limit square is one where you don’t know that you’ve reached the negative limit until you have tried to exceed it.  And when you have tried to exceed it, it destructs or it shows that things are broken down.  I’ll give you another example from a friendship of mine. 

            I have a friend who I’m convinced in a past life reached for initiation too quickly.  He tried to force the door open, and when he did so, he saw the dweller on the threshold, and he was not psychologically capable of facing up to that.   So, in this life he had that same kind of consciousness of trying to go beyond a limit and it was an egoistic thing, because he wanted to be able to outdo the laws of nature.  This was his way of doing magic.  He would have done anything except the service which would have made him a healthy person. 

            He had the body of an athlete.  If you went to his house it was filled with swimming trophies, because he was an Olympic quality swimmer, but from age 10 until he died in his mid-forties he did not have a single, solitary month when he was not blitzed out on some kind of drug or alcohol, and he eventually died from alcoholism.  But, before he went, he took a number of his mother’s cars with him.  He would study curves and he would calculate how fast you could go around that curve, the negative limit—and then he would try to exceed that, and he never did.  He smashed the cars up and often had all kinds of injuries and things like that, and that’s what a negative limit square is.  It’s when you have gone as far with your cosmic creation as you can go, at least as far as materialization, and then it’s time to break it down and disintegrate it and take the essence out of it, what is important. 

            However, we don’t want a wanton type of destruction.  We don’t want all of our vehicles to end up on the trash heap.  What we’re talking about here is the dissolution of something to redeem the essence that is in it and to regenerate.  Scorpio is the ultimate regenerator.  If you remember a few years ago when Pluto was going through Scorpio, the conservation and recycling movement was much stronger before the public eye than it is now.    So, everything that has gone into the compounding of matter and everything composed of matter has to be redeemed.

[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]

Tags: Eclipse, King Arthur, Phoenix, Pluto, Scorpio