Microcosm Lecture Series Notes
Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age
Lecture 12b of 25 by [R]
Regeneration and the Aquarian Age
We do not waste experience. Divinity is parsimonious. Everything has to be regenerated, and that’s why we’re studying Scorpio in relation to Aquarius and the Aquarian Age – things we can do to participate in this process, because there’s always the possibility that with the Aquarian Age it could be the time when we are ripe and ready enough for this material world to be disintegrated, and we would be returned back into the ethers without all of these positive limits of ourselves. That means it’s time for a story or maybe even two.
Moroccan Peddler
The first story is about the Arabian Nights and it’s about a man who is a ne’er do well; he is a visionary in the negative sense of the word. One day he gets a little bit of money, an inheritance or something like that. He finds a spot in the market place and lines up, and he has all of these clay vessels. While he’s waiting for customers to come he’s thinking about how when he sells all of these clay vessels, with the money that he makes, he will buy more things, and eventually he will have silks and he will have caravans, and all of those kinds of fine things, and with that he will build himself a grand palace and he will continue to make money, and then he will buy concubines for himself, and if a concubine is not perfectly pure, or if she does not obey him completely, he will kick her out of the house, and in his daydreaming he kicks, and he knocks the pots over in domino fashion and he has lost everything.
What we are talking about is dreams that are not fulfilled—not carrying things out to their utter end. We’re talking about death and redemption and degeneration and all of those kinds of things. I heard a line from Oliver Wendell Holmes that has been one of my favorite lines of poetry of religious ilk ever since I first heard it. It goes: Weep not for those who bear the cross, but weep for those that bear the cross without the glory.
Destruction, like death, must come. We all have our cross that we have to bear, but we have to redeem everything with death. That’s the spiritual legacy of Socrates. This is why when someone dies we have the procedure that we give him silence for 72 hours, silence and coolness so that the body does not begin to decompose. This is so one can review his life before leaving the physical behind, because nothing must be lost. So that is what regeneration is all about. We want to avoid the wasting of energy, of experience. We don’t want just destruction. The Bible talks about that. Christ said, Destruction must come, but woe be unto the destroyers. That is, people who just destroy but who don’t destroy to redeem – don’t destroy to recycle.
It’s time to look at the other story, and we’re going to look at the background of it. It’s a story we’ve mentioned several times; a story from Adam and Eve. These Scorpios just can’t get beyond that Adam and Eve story. [laughter] We’re locked into that all of the time. This time we’re going to talk about the background in what you might consider a fairy tale, if you like, or you can call it ……….a story with no reality. We want to examine the first and second sins, the sin of Adam and the sin of Cain, the sin of mis-generation and the sin of wanton destruction—very pertinent to our time, the sins of sex and violence.
We look at the creation story from Genesis. Actually it’s three creation stories; if you look at the first creation story, it is the evolution of form. In the evolution of form, humans are the last things that are created in the story. Then, briefly there’s a second miniature creation story. In that, humans are the first created, meaning to say by humans, the spiritual beings that were here before all the other creatures. They were here first, before the animals and the plants and the minerals. The third evolutionary story is an evolution of consciousness story. That’s all of those boring begats in the bible. So and so begat so and so who lived – and they give a little quality about them. All of those begats (all of those names of the begats) actually represent states of consciousness. They talk about the resolution of one kind of consciousness into another kind of consciousness. I understand a little of that, but with most of it I’m in the dark. We want to go further back than that. We want to go back to something that is analogously antecedent and analogously grander than the Garden of Eden story. It takes place in one of the earlier days of creation which in Western mysticism is called a period. The first period is the Saturn period which is what the Bible calls dark and void of form; and it is a time when we went through a mineral-like evolution. We weren’t minerals; our bodies were composed of thought, because the cosmos was formerly as dense as a thought.
The second period was the Sun Period, the period in which there was visible light in the cosmos – not like this kind of Sun, but an internal light that was everywhere. In that period we went through a plant-like existence. The third period which preceded our current earth period in the cosmos as we see it now was called the Moon Period and in the Moon Period we were animal-like. We were suspended in the cosmos as animals and we developed mobility and such. The cosmos was no more dense than ether, or you might say no more dense than a magnetic field. In the Moon Period, the beings that were one step ahead of us are now the beings who are called angels.
The angels had their own particular lesson, and they had to make their own particular leap of faith. They had things that they needed to learn, and one of them was variety. It’s a very important evolutionary lesson; the more variety, the more facets of the spirit you can bring out of your character. In fact, with diet, the more variety you have in your diet, the more likely you are to be healthy. Your body needs different things and needs them in different forms. The solar system at that time was not like a solar system; it was just a big sphere of energy, and toward the center there was a hot luminous ball. It wasn’t like one of those nuclear reactions; it had to do with consciousness more than it had to do with chemical interaction. Circulating throughout the sphere was something that is called (and it’s a great stretch of the word) water, an etheric water.
For evolutionary experience we were cycled through that sphere from the creative hot center out to the cool perimeter where things were objectified and brought to fruition. Some of the beings that were human then resisted. They loved the heat and the light and the thrill of creativity, and they were the brightest of the angels. In the human-like condition you first get free will, and they used their free will to remain at the heart of what was becoming the solar system.
They missed essential lessons; they missed the ability to be receptive and to go along with the plan. It’s the way it always is – we think we know better than the plan; we don’t read the directions. They became known as the fallen angels. When they developed their human-like consciousness they were very, very brilliant. But when the Moon Period was over, and after the great cosmic rest, they were in a fix because they couldn’t become angels. In order to become angels, they had to be receptive – to receive and bring through or allow cosmic wisdom to flow through. They were defiant. On the other hand they couldn’t become humans like us because they had no evolutionary experience of building a body like this. Angelic bodies are made of energy, so they were in a fix, and they were left to fend for themselves.
Now this is quite a bit about the cosmic creation. Beings can be defiant and not go along with the plan, and they are not destroyed. Many would say there is a divine compassion, and so they were left to fend for themselves, and therefore they began to act independently. Independence is very different from self reliance. In independence you separate yourself and you act as when independent. If you’re self reliant, you can do things all by yourself, but you intentionally cooperate and work together with others. Cancer is independent. It produces a body or a tumor within us that takes away from the rest of the system and offers nothing to the rest of the system. It’s independent, an independent growth. There’s no sharing or interaction with anything else.
That is the condition that they found themselves in. So, when the cosmic night was over, they were clever and they bided their time. They desperately needed experience for knowledge and so they had to get it somewhere. Being very, very bright they hit upon an idea. They waited until things were just right. (Now this gets very complex; the cosmic creation is so complex and so much based on analogy that it’s almost, for our kinds of minds, impossible to understand.)
But in each of these periods or seven days of creation if you want to call them that, there are seven states of matter which are called globes, and they usually take place in four different grades of matter. There are seven revolutions of consciousness through these seven globes. In each revolution on each globe there are epochs of time. We’re coming down now to our current time. We are in the Earth Period, and we are in the fourth revolution of the Earth Period on Globe D which is the deepest state of matter in the Earth Period. We are now in what is called the post-Atlantean or Aryan Epoch.
The first epoch was called Polarian, the second Hyperborean, the third Lemurian, the fourth Atlantean, and now our own. In the Lemurian Epoch in this revolution on this globe in the Earth Period the Solar System as we know it was being formed. Things were condensing out of a state of energy into a state of matter. Planets were being separated. Adam means “man of red earth” and the earth was still red hot. I know this sounds utterly fantastic and you can consider it another fantasy if you like. In all the water was in a vaporous state or most of the water was in a vaporous state, like the Moon Period. We had internal picture-consciousness; we were not really aware of the external world as we are now. In fact our bodies didn’t look anything like they look now. Someone might say, oh, I remember I was really good looking in the Lemurian epoch. Well if you like to look like a dog or like a lemur or something like that, maybe if you consider that good-looking, it’s worth listening to.
As we came into the material world it was necessary, because of the nature of this material world and all of its limitations, that the sexes be separated—that we be gender. Part of the energy would be used for procreation so that there could be the continuance of humans and part of it be used for developing higher organs through which the spirit could express. This was when the Lucifers, which is the name of those fallen angels, which is also the name of these matches, of all things; they are called lucifers. How things all fit together is really interesting.
At any rate, we were animal-like human beings and the angels and the other hierarchies guided us around willy-nilly. But, they couldn’t watch everyone all of the time. Even if you’re a parent, you can’t watch your child one-hundred percent of the time or your child never gets to learn anything. So, the Lucifers found a way to take advantage of those gaps – when we weren’t being watched. They overshadowed our consciousness. They worked through the spine and through the spinal fire, and with our internal consciousness it seemed as if serpents were coming up our spines. This is something we still see with waking consciousness now as we become clairvoyant, however it’s not the Lucifers but it is the path of our own spinal energy from the sacrum to the genitals and up to the voice box and up into the cranium.
Lucifer - Guillaume Geefs - Belgium
They insinuated themselves into our consciousness when we were in female rebirths. This is because in the female rebirth we are much more receptive; we have to be receptive in order to do the imaginative work to build a body. Then, they didn’t lie, but they directed our attention to the fact that we all die, which we had never known before, however they brought to our attention that we could, by our own action become immortal through the procreative process—and that this process could be very pleasantly sensational. What they didn’t tell us was that we had to work harmoniously or else this would all backfire.
What happened was we took the creative powers into our own hands. We began to use the sexual function, first for sexual expression and pleasure, and eventually we began to use it for black magic and disgusting deeds like killing and things like that. This produced ad-harmony and it caused so much of the creative energy to be turned downward and outward that we became materialists and we came to our current state of blindness regarding the spiritual worlds.
If we had maintained a division in the spiritual energy—only so much to go downward and outward and all of the rest to go inward, we would have had more spiritual vision. With greater spiritual vision our progress in the evolutionary creation would have been much faster. We would have learned the lessons more quickly. As it is, because we don’t have the insight to understand our mistakes, we make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. What happened is they recognized the whole trajectory that we have taken. We have taken a trajectory that has taken us deeper into matter than was intended. A trajectory that makes our whole existence [….. ] anyway, that’s the story in brief, but there’s one part of it that’s really important. It was not the using of sex that caused the fall of man. That was not the sin. It was the selfishness that was appealed to and to which we responded. We were led into perdition, and that’s what came of it.
This is all symbolized in the story of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve had three sons, Abel, Cain and Seth. Abel represents the part of humanity that never fell. It was killed off; that means it was lost to us, and these people never descended into physical bodies like us. Sometimes they do—as a good service, but that’s a very long, complicated subject that I don’t want to go into. Cain represents the part of humanity that is very Luciferic in nature. All of us are probably Luciferic; we’re all children of Cain; we’re all children of fire. We want to create; we want to understand why; we want to build things. Seth represents the son of Adam and Eve. It is said that Cain is the son of Eve and of the Lucifer spirit, Samael. Therefore, Seth is the son of water. It represents the people who are accepting of everything and who will go along with—they have a lovely faith—they love a chain of command and all of that, but they don’t have the same kind of gumption that the children of fire have too much of.
We want to look at this in terms of regeneration: what is regenerated in the fire? What is gained from the fire? Now, it’s one of those curious things that spiritually we have to go back from where we came. Since everything comes down from above, we go back up through the same door from which we came. So, we’re talking about the Lucifers, both the bees which are Luciferic and the matches which are lucifers. This is a very, very vague topic that we can’t go into. I’d love to; I’d like to have a whole series of talks—it’s all about beans and garlic and onions and reproduction of sperm and semen and vaginal fluids and all kinds of other things that are really Scorpionic, but we’re just not going to go into it. It’s probably good, because I would probably get too Luciferic about it all. Because we don’t have time to go into it doesn’t mean that these things should be ignored, however. Right now our culture is permeated by Luciferic influence right down to generational maintenance and the stuff of our bodies. Our entire being is still penetrated by Luciferic attitudes.
We put a tremendous amount of energy into the first and second sins. We have VCR’s that were developed so that people could watch porn at home and they wouldn’t have to go out to a foreign-film theater; they could, in secret, indulgence themselves. I think in all but one or two countries in the world, the largest item in their budget is what is called “defense.” So, it’s a world that is very much prone to sex and violence. We can’t ignore the presence of the Luciferic influence in our lives, because that leads to an even more deadly sin, the sin of Satan where we avoid things, sometimes called “the sin of omission.”
“I’m not going to help that person over there; I’m not going to get involved,” even though the person might be in danger of being harmed greatly. And we have to fret, of course, so that we aren’t too contrarian, because we can’t look too much at evil and we can’t resist evil too strongly, because that’s a way that we get caught into it. We want to look through the conditions that are produced by the ad-harmonious actions and try to understand what is going on. If we look with true spiritual light—if we study the good, we’ll learn about evil anyway, because we have this in our natures. In looking for the good, every virtue that is in us has its opposite pole, because our degenerating actions have produced some kind of vice.
We are free. We are free to decide where to place our attention. Again, remember that we have to leave by the same door through which we came. It means that we have to watch where we’re going. We cannot avoid the use of the sexual energy, but it does not have to be used in sexual indulgence. It is used regeneratively. The big word of regeneration is “creativity.” After all of the old forms have degenerated and dissolved completely there is cosmic recycling, and they are available to us for creation—perhaps creation similar to the lines of the past because our evolution is very, very slow, but we must create. Our new conceptions must always be looking upward. We must always go higher, and therefore we never lose the passion of sexuality.
When we talked about Leo and compared it to Aquarius, we talked about the relationship of individual love to that of altruistic love. Now we can talk about passion relative to altruism. Altruism is not milk [……..]. Altruism has some zing; it has some passion. When we aspire in a regenerative way to love, that is not a meek kind of loving. It has something that is important, and we have to turn the corner. We have to dissolve death; the physical body is called the personality. The physical body has to be destroyed; it has to go down and the personality, the focus on individualism in personality, is very different than spiritual individuation. Spiritual individuation can only take place with regard to the universal truth of the all or of the totality. If we don’t dissolve, and if we don’t regenerate the personality, what happens is we become rugged individualists, and in the rugged individualism we have the same kind of independence as the Lucifers.
This is a very important thing that we are doing. We are becoming new people. We are becoming new in a regenerative way for becoming creative beings and we’re contributing and producing new selves because our life is all we have and if,….. you know, we talked earlier about some problem people that I’ve had to interact with. I do not mean to put them down, because in some ways they are more advanced than others because they do unique individual things and they are creating new personalities.
What we’re looking at here is dissolving our past in full consciousness and recycling it into something new. We remember, and from that we consciously build. It is these things that we should see in our ideal. If we are Christians, in Christ we see the ideal of what we could be. We see the ideal of what we can create; it’s much more important than creating a painting or a house or anything else. We have what Steinbeck called “the glory” and we see what could be and how we could participate in it.
Let’s go back to generation and look at one more central problem about it. In the plant kingdom we see regeneration frequently. Did you know that all of the delicious apples are of the same tree? It’s all one tree that’s been cloned and re-cloned and re-cloned; it has not gone through a reproductive process. It has been kept from having an evolution, and because it is not co-evolving with the insects and the fungi and the other things that will prey on it, we have to use more and more chemicals and things like that, because we want that apple to always stay the same rather than evolve and get better.
In the animal kingdom there is also regeneration. I think most of the amphibians have regeneration. If you cut off the tail of a flatworm it grows a new tail. If you cut it off at just the right place, the head will grow another head. I don’t know if the tail will grow another tail; that doesn’t seem very likely. Flat worms are one of the best examples of regeneration, because if you take a flat worm, and you know how long it’s going to live, generally, and you bring it to just about the time it would die, you cause it to fast. You fast it until just about the time when it would die from starvation, and then you feed it again until just about the time when it would die and then you fast it again.
That flat worm will regenerate itself 30 times the length of – you know, like 30 lifetimes of flat worms that have already gone through and that one will still be alive. I don’t know if anybody has tried to produce the immortal flatworm yet (laughter). It seems like somebody could get a grant for that. At any rate, that is physical regeneration. In fact there are cases, all kinds of dark cases of even regeneration of limbs in human beings, but that’s only the physical part of it. In this, material science looks much more at the effects than it does at the causes.
When material scientists want to cause a change in the species, they’re much more likely to …… you know this whole idea gives me feelings of terror. They want to get rid of all the genes that cause disease and likelihood of diseases. They’re hacking away more and more at the DNA. Like for example they find that if they do away with the part of the DNA that does away with malaria, then sickle-cell anemia would be rampant because the same genetic structure that makes a resistance to sickle-cell anemia makes a liability to anemia, and you just – a fallen way is a way to destruction. We can’t learn anything except if we kill it and tear it apart rather than learning something by building and creating. So, what we’re talking about is regeneration in material science, we’re talking about the cloning of pears or regeneration in flat worms or things like that. Provided that the change isn’t too severe and the desire body is reasonably strong, cloning will be successful. It’s accomplished by maintaining the matrix of the etheric body. There has to be the formative ability in the etheric body in order to regenerate something.
But, that’s different from spiritual regeneration or creation. How do we regenerate all of humanity? It is true that there are abstract ideas and archetypal thoughts for everything that is created, everything in our evolution, and we all work with that. They will work with regeneration, for making new humans and a new humanity, and that is the place to begin. The axe is laid to the root.
If we wish to create new human beings, the only way we can do that is by going as deep as we can to the root of where the spirit meets the three-fold personality. When we transcend the concrete nature and exist in the threefold spirit we are at a place where we can create completely new people. This is what being a twice-born means. A person is a twice-born because they are born in the spirit and they are right at the nub of the root or at the crown of the root where something new can be created.
When we do create new humans, even if we use the basic creative ideas of the cosmos or the existing archetypes it’s not like filling in a coloring book; we have to give something of ourselves. True creation and regeneration is a much more demanding process. To do that, let’s go back to the mandala. Last time when we looked at the mandala we began with everything in standard position, and we had a square—the square of the seasons—the square that represents the turning points of summer solstice, autumnal equinox, winter solstice, and vernal equinox.
That was all very fine and helpful to understand—the square as the building process of the four seasons, but we decided that aesthetically, and kind of a spiritual aesthetic, that it didn’t work completely well, because squares just don’t stand on a point. So, we made a standard square as the heart of the fixed signs……like this. When the two are put together we have the double square or the octagon, an eight-sided or eight-cornered or eight-pointed figure.
From the octagon we did the semi-square, which represents something a little bit bad. It’s bad in-the-making, and it’s something that we can change. But, we also get the sesquiquadrate, which is the 135-degree aspect. That is called the Kepler aspect, because Kepler did a lot of work with that, only he looked at just the destructive sides of it. He found out that when there were sesquiquadrates in the heavens between the Sun and the Moon there was a greater likelihood for very destructive thunderstorms. In some parts of central Europe, destructive thunderstorms are called Keplers to this day. There’s another Scorpio word that relates to the eight-sided figure and the sesquiquadrate, and that is degeneration, because if we take the ascendant as the starting point, it ends up in the heart of Scorpio, and Scorpio is the sign of degeneration. Degeneration IS life to hell-fire Scorpio. Like a lot of processes in nature, degeneration is irreversible. This is so because degeneration destroys the underlying form on which something is built. Now, this does not relate perfectly to our archetype of humanity but it helps us to understand it. When we have developed significantly enough by our fall to become aware of the fact that we are not the intended humanity, yet we are not so out of it that we are Luciferic outcasts, we have the impulse to regenerate out of our degenerate conditions.
This is a very hard thing. All of the hard jobs are the jobs of Scorpio. Garbage collectors, morticians, exterminators, butchers – all of those are Scorpio positions and not very pleasant things. Scorpios, as we said earlier, are the contraries. They go against everything, but there is wisdom in that. To the Scorpio, manure is more valuable than gold because it is stuff or matter that has been enriched by experience and from it new growth can take place. That is the relationship between degeneration of the past which is not helpful to us and creative regeneration for the future.
A few weeks ago we talked about the song of the stomach and we could have retold that in a negative, contrary fashion and we could have called it the song of the anus. In that song the anus could have complained, “you guys get to do all of the things, like play a drum on your heart or blow air or whatever, and I have to deal with all of the crap. In Scorpio the cosmic mandala gives something to [………]. In Scoprio, Uranus, which is the ruler of Aquarius finds its exaltation. In that exaltation a very special quality comes out of Uranus. Uranus rules Aquarius, and that is sort of like the Van Allen belt—the ionosphere where the ions are not connected to nuclei and they’re free to go anywhere and everywhere. That is the basic nature of the freedom that is associated with Uranus and with Aquarius. When Uranus is in Scorpio it is like an ionic solution. The ions in an ionic solution are freed from too strong an attraction to a nucleus, but they are still bound by the solution and they don’t have as complete a freedom as they do when they are out in space in the ionosphere.
What we’re talking about in Scorpio is the motivation—all of the redemption or the regeneration through feeling; and through that feeling, wanting to reach for freedom and to do so through creation. This is the sign of creation and destruction; this is the sign of regeneration through creation. There is no one kind of human being. All of us are different with our idiosyncracies. There is the ideal and there is the broken standard that used to be for all human beings, but we are all in our own individual ways, even in our contrarian ways we are creatively regenerating.
Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise - West 1791
It may seem like we’re lost, but we aren’t; as long as we can create we can continue to live spiritually in the same way that as long as a fish swims it can continue to live physically. This is real Scorpio demand on us (by Scorpio) to live creatively. We don’t have to be outrageous. We don’t have to do exaggerated things, but the more that we creatively do and intentionally, wide-awake, creatively do …no matter who we are in our life….the more we are hastening our regeneration.
We should always be finding new ways to be creative people. Thinking is one of them; we should always think about things in a different way. For me I should probably do another whole section of lectures like this one only from a totally different point of view. If you think about it, we can be very positive. We don’t have to be negative contrarians. All of this is given to us because of the Lucifers, because we had been led astray as far as we had been led astray. Perhaps, even their redemption depends on us, because we’re locked into each other—from them taking their influence and then allowing themselves to become entangled in us, so if we are capable of being redeemed, we help to redeem and heal the discordance in the entire solar cosmos.
We can do this because we have this unique point of view. There is no other being in the cosmos that sees the world even with physical senses the way we do. I used to ride my bicycle to work around Monona Bay every day, and the ducks would be more afraid of me than they would be of the fox. The group spirits that guided the ducks – the car and a mechanical device like that was completely foreign to their consciousness, and they didn’t understand that. But, a human being moving toward them on a bicycle was something they understood—a living being coming at them and a potentially dangerous human being at that.
So, if we are, through humility and receiving a kind of spiritual grace, capable of redeeming ourselves and redeeming ourselves by giving to humanity, we will indeed be a very peculiar people. We might lose some along the way, some that have completely dropped out, but this means that we have the possibility of being something better than what was intended for human beings to be in the first place, because we experience something beyond the intentions of the creation.
That’s the beautiful thing, that ad-harmony was never intended to be part of the creation. When we once gave ourselves the unflattering distinction of being the people who could bring ad-harmony into an otherwise harmonious creation, we also gave ourselves the possibility of regenerating—and regenerating in such a way that we and the cosmos would be the better for it. That’s really quite a wonderful thing. We may be bound together because of complicity with the Lucifers, but that binding does not have to be something negative. It can be something where they can receive experience and experience that is more than they bargained for.
So, we get to strike one more match for the night [strikes match]. When St Paul speaks of our relationships with the angels and with Christ he says that we are a very peculiar people, and it’s not clear what we’re going to be, and that is a very big statement. It’s not clear even to the divine beings, the creators or the creative hierarchies—what we are going to be. But Paul says it in a very beautiful way. He says, we will be a little below the angels, but it’s not clear what we are going to be, but whatever it is, we will be like Him, referring to Christ in the life spirit, in the light of pure truth. We will be like Him.
[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]