RF Friends - (visit our home page)

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

Transitioning Into the Aquarian Age

Lecture 13a of 25 by [R]

Science, Technology and the Aquarian Age

 

            When we left off last time we spoke about regeneration and the Aquarian Age.  We were relating Scorpio to Aquarius and we came into that subject which is The Fall of Humanity.  Every time I come to that subject there are always a lot of problems.  The purpose of the talk was to look at spiritual regeneration—spiritual regeneration from a place where we are way too absorbed with materialism.  

            We talked about materialism and the Aquarian Age with Taurus and then we talked about regeneration of that with Scorpio, but in doing that we reviewed how we got into the fix where we became materialistic.  We went into the Adam and Eve story and the Fall of Humanity and how by directing the creative energy, the spinal force too much downward and outward, we produced materialism, both for ourselves and for the world.  We hardened the world, we hardened ourselves and we got ourselves into a terrible fix. 

            When we talked the last time, we tried to talk about a new humanity, a humanity that was redeemed from materialism and we tried to talk about the things we have to do to redeem ourselves or to be redeemed in the case of grace.  We saw that there were serious difficulties in reaching that new state, whether by works or by grace or by both, there were things that we had to change our attitudes about.  But apparently what happens is that most people don’t focus on the positive new humanity and many people have a lot of problem dealing with the whole idea of the fall, that there is even a fall. 

            Early in life I was quite surprised by all of that, but as time has gone on and I have seen this phenomenon again and again, there’s something fascinating about the concept of sin that people become attracted to it and repulsed by it at the same time and they become very preoccupied with it.   Over the course of years I have participated in a number of study groups in which we have read The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception.  I no longer do that for several reasons, because I find that prayer unified people whereas discussion and difference of opinion or different ways of getting at things tends to divide people.  Usually, with many people the divisiveness of discussion is stronger than the attraction of prayer.  I’m not snobbish about it, because it isn’t a matter of intellectual capacity, because that’s not what you look for in spiritual discussion anyway.  You look for originality from peoples’ own experience of the matter, but I just don’t like to participate in those groups. 

            At one time there was a group here in town, one of the times that they formed, and it was a straight reading-through of the Cosmo-Conception. – a slow, steady progress, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and article by article, but when they got to the part of studying the fall of humanity, once that subject of sin and evil and all of the things we call by that name, it was as if everybody just forgot about what they were doing.  When that happens, it happens with many different people.  You hear all kinds of statements made, “but, Max Heindel can’t be true, because he did not focus or tell us enough about evil.”  I’ve heard this, and heard this on several occasions.  He didn’t tell us enough about the different forms and forces of evil that there are.  Well, this is for spiritual growth and it’s not for the study of evil, but in this little group it was a matter that no progress could be made at all.   Instead of page by page it became word by word and eventually it shut down the whole group altogether.  It’s one of those kinds of things, so the subject that we dealt with last time carries into the talk this time, things of that nature, of that subject, and we hope that we don’t get stuck in that again.

            In astrology there are what is called the greater and the lesser benefic: Jupiter being the greater benefic and Venus being the lesser benefic.  There are also a greater and a lesser malefic.  The greater malefic is Saturn and it is associated with the sins of omission.  Mars is the lesser malefic and it is associated with the sins of commission.  Since probably all of us that are in this study or in these talks are children of fire, and being children of fire, we tend to make errors more toward the direction of commissive sins.  We are the children of the fiery Mars, and we tend to do that.  Even if we’re careful after having made a lot of mistakes, we get like Mars.  We get cocky and when we get over-confident we fall all over again.   

            We think we’re going to make it; we think we’re going climb up that difficult slope of generation, but we count our chickens before they’re hatched – chickens and the eggs, of course, being associated with Mars and Aries.   This, by the way, is the Mars talk, so it will take us a long time to realize that.  So, in our over-confidence, we overstep.        

            As people of the sins of commission, we almost all think we know more than we really do.  The children of fire are not people who are given to humility very easily.  So, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this kind of thing comes up.  I shouldn’t be discouraged, and I no longer am discouraged, because I have realized it in myself; there being so many days when I have said, well, today is going to be the perfect day, and I’m going to put all of my focus and attention on truth, healing, and goodness, and I’m going to be a thoroughly loving person and then something comes along and I don’t do it. 

            There’s always some kind of a fool, or an adversary, or an enemy, or a heretic, or a bad driver or an impertinent clerk or a cop, and someone gets in the way so you can’t see the light.  They stand between us and Christ.  And it’s very difficult to see the face of Christ in their being.  That always comes up and then I fall.  It happens to me quite frequently, usually every day.  But, when I watch friends for a long time who aspire on the spiritual path, none of them is perfect and all of them have had their transgressions and their regressions.  All of them have fallen in little ways and sometimes in big ways, but it’s really good to see that once the spiritual life has taken hold in someone’s consciousness, they don’t give up. 

            So, over the years of watching people with this same struggle, it almost seems that when they’ve fallen they seem to strive harder rather than less.  So, we shouldn’t be discouraged and we shouldn’t let the subject material that we talked about last time get us down.  This doesn’t mean that we are going to stay in the fall; it just means that there is hope, there is promise, that we can come out of it.  We’re going to talk some more about the fall, a little bit.  We hope that it isn’t merely vain repetition, because the spiritual things are such that we can look at them again and again and if we look at them as being new each time, we discover something new in them each time.  It isn’t just a vain, rote, automatic repetition. 

            Since I can talk as an Aries tonight (I try to live within these signs as I give talks), since I’m talking like an Aries tonight and I’m doing the talking, I get to pick the topics.  I get to choose what is relevant, and I get to choose what I like to talk about.  What I’m going to talk about is one item in the third chapter of Genesis, and the other item is in the fourth chapter of Genesis. . They are things that I have never understood well, and even after putting together these thoughts for these talks, I still don’t understand them really well, but I have a better understanding of them, at least in relation to what I’m going to try to talk about tonight.   

            I think that the things that are mentioned in the third and fourth chapters of Genesis are related to each other in that they have to do with the first and second sins—the sins of Adam and the sins of Cain which we know in the modern world as the sins of sex and violence.  The thought form or the thoughts that I’m trying to use tonight are far from mature.  So what we’re going to be doing is a little bit of exploration and we won’t be quite so authoritative about things. 

            In the second chapter of Genesis, Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed; they are naked and unashamed.  That’s in the second chapter.  In chapter three, they eat the fruit, and their eyes are opened and immediately they see their bodies and they sew fig leaves and before long Jehovah is making them skins to cover themselves which is interesting because it involves the death of animals to get the skins, whether you kill them (hopefully you don’t) or whether they die.  If you look in the first chapter of Genesis, we are told to be vegetarians.  We are told to eat only of herbs.  It isn’t until after the fall that meat is incorporated into the diet.  In chapter four, Jehovah shows a preference for the gift of Abel over the gift of Cain, and it seems that Jehovah apparently has respect for the shepherds but not for the croppers.  Gardeners like you and I and Ken; we’re on the “bad” list.  

            Now, this is certainly very curious and it’s certainly very figurative and it must mean something more than just simple things, so we are going to look at these ideas, but as we look at them I must warn you that the way we look at them is going to be somewhat biased.   I am a child of fire; I am one of the children of Cain and I see things from that point of view and it doesn’t have to be a bad way of looking at things; there are many virtues to this way of looking at things, from the viewpoint of fire.  The only thing is that when you look at things from a viewpoint, it is a viewpoint.  Until each of us, myself included, has the Christ-like consciousness, that I can see everything without bias, there is always the likelihood that there will be bias and there will be no distortion.  I’m not going to fault the idea of the firelings or anything like that, but I won’t be shy about it either.  I won’t exaggerate it to distortion. 

            One has to discriminate between bias and ideas and between bias and fact.  The ideas and the facts are like the substance of the soup, whereas the bias or the individual outlook is like the seasoning where we season according to taste.  Max Heindel, when he wrote, wrote from cosmic fact, but when he did so, he said it’s still likely to bias, because. I’m interpreting it.  Because I’m interpreting it, I have an individual point of view.and that automatically indicates a bias.  I’m not even a seer as Max Heindel was a seer, so all I’m working from is thought and intuition.  So, let’s go back to what we’re looking at.  We’re saying that in chapter three, they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened, and immediately they see their bodies and they are ashamed and they sew fig leaves and eventually they make coats of skins for them.  And in the fourth chapter, Jehovah shows a preference for the gift of Abel that is from the sheep rather than the produce from Cain. 

            All right, that’s where we are.  It seems that these passages are two viewpoints and two issues which are each separate issues.  The two viewpoints involved in them are the viewpoints of Jehovah, the divine being, and the viewpoints of the humans, that is, Adam and Eve or Abel and Cain.  The issues are the issue of nakedness and the issue of cropping.  There are a lot of fascinating things about these two passages, but it would get awfully long if we were going to follow all of the fascinations, so we’re going to pass on most of them and reduce it right down to the simplest things, because we are trying to get to the Aquarian Age.  When we do that there is always the danger of eliminating something that is essential and not getting at something which is a necessary view of the truth, but I don’t thing it is that kind of a mission. 

            Nakedness might not even be the central issue at all.  If we think about being naked, it wasn’t an issue before they ate the fruit and got their knowledge of good and evil.  If their being naked wasn’t an issue before that why should it be afterwards?  If Adam hadn’t spilled the beans, Jehovah might not even have known that they were naked.  Jehovah, being the highest initiate of the angels, didn’t have eyes.  So, he couldn’t see the external nakedness the way Adam and Eve could.  What is most likely in all of this is the disobedience – the disobedience at eating the fruit. 

            Now, Jehovah is certainly the chief of the children of water.   He is the highest initiate of the angels and therefore the angels are associated with water and life and all of the things that grow in life that are regulated by the Moon and so he certainly has to have the watery point of view.  Children of water do not like disobedience.  The …..was also an issue and that’s hard to figure out.  Nakedness should not be a big deal.  We see naked animals all the time.  If the statements given by the mysteries that our bodies were more animal-like at that time than they are now in the human form, it would have been no big deal for us to be naked.  The way they’re described in the writings of Max Heindel is they’re described as being something like parisiters or lemurs, like from the island of Madagascar.  That’s the way he describes them both in size and in shape and the nascent development of eyes. 

            Probably what was at issue was the desire for naked bodies, that desire having been acquired through indulgence.  When we’re talking about stories like the Adam and Eve story, it’s not like it all transpires in one diurnal day, like today.  We’re talking about something that transpires over thousands of years.  By the time we’re speaking of here, the self indulgence probably had a pretty good hold on them.  Our innocence had been lost, and we began to see the body as something desirable, something that we would like to possess, because we were insecure and we were incomplete.  What we are insecure about and what we desire is often what we try to possess.  Possessive and materialism and such all go together. 

            When we begin to experience spiritual things and when we see that they have an irresistible value, the basic desires become replaced.  Sexual desire and sexual experience, even though it is a powerful desire and a powerful experience, are greatly overrated.  If we had even one little spiritual experience, we’d know very clearly that what’s the big deal about sex?  I think it is very, very important that we express this fact often, because it is a conspiracy.  This is the satanic side.  Don’t say anything.  Don’t say that you find sex to be not the ‘be all, end’ all that the world makes it out to be. 

            There are  things like conspiracy jokes.  A conspiracy joke is if all of us were to agree that when I said, “dollop mushroom” that everybody would laugh.  And then somebody new comes walking in the room – I’d start telling the story and I’d say “dollop mushroom” and everybody would laugh and then you watch that other person, and that’s what’s called a conspiracy joke.  The person doesn’t know what to do, and it’s interesting to watch all of the expressions that pass across the face.  What finally happens, is the person, to be sociable, laughs along.  Most people, with regard to sexual experience, go along with the idea that it must be something great, even if it isn’t great to them.  You expose the whole conspiracy every time that you put forward, you know, that this is what it is.  It is no more than this. 

            So, it must have something to do with the nakedness.  We’re talking about nakedness and a lack of clothing in relation to a loss of innocence and to desire.  Our outer eyes were opened when we ate the fruit.  That’s saying this happened at the same time in time.  As we came into our body more through sexual activity it had a partially benign effect.  We began to see through our senses more and, literally, our eyes were opened and we could see things outside of us.  But, coetaneous with that was a loss of inner vision so that as we became outwardly more aware, we became inwardly unaware. 

            Where we were opening our eyes, we were missing something.  We felt that we really were missing something important.  What we did was we project it; we projected our insecurity in losing the glory of these spiritual worlds, which is what the Garden of Eden represents.  It represents the type of clairvoyance that we used to have that came naturally to us.  The loss of that, that something was missing, we projected outward onto nakedness, and it must be because of that nakedness outside that we feel incomplete; there must be something wrong with that.  There was a realization that there was something wrong, but it didn’t really sink into our consciousness.  This was a different kind of shame than just a mere shame about how the physical body looks or doesn’t look, whether it’s beautiful or not beautiful.  (This begins to sound more like a cabalistic sermon than it does like a talk on the Aquarian Age.)

            Clothing the body was an outward attempt to cover up shame, because that’s what our life has become.  Our life has become a cover-up.  We try to hide things; we try to hide our selfish desire.  So, that’s what clothing represents.  It turns out that it doesn’t work, because the same desire that made us possessive of other peoples’ bodies instead of taking them naturally – that same desire has been transplanted to clothing.  Clothing has provocative values, and people who want to continue on with that Luciferic consciousness put it into the clothing.  But it was more than that.  It was an attempt to supplement an inadequacy, an incompleteness of which we were becoming self-conscious. 

            The more we were cut off from the spiritual worlds, the more we felt inadequate and the more we sought something outside of us.  When we supplemented that, at least those of us who are primarily children of fire, it was through works, through Luciferian works.  Some works, if they are done with the exclusion of faith, turn out to be detrimental and they only tend to bring us deeper into matter.  That’s the way our vanity works, and that is what is happening; we become more and more with those works and not with the purpose of those works.  We become more and more materialistic.   Works and deeds are something that have always been present in the struggle between the children of water and fire. 

            It carries right over into the New Testament where the disciples fought over faith and works, faith being a watery principle and works being a fiery principle.  The tilling of the soil that Cain did, which contracts with the picking of the fruit in the garden, that was there, that grew on the tree of life, was a self-reliant deed.  That self reliance is what Jehovah (being with the children of water) who wants authoritarianism – and appeal to power – and obedience, didn’t want, and they didn’t respect and even felt that it was a punishment.  That was the punishment: if you’re cast out of the garden, you’re going to have to learn by the sweat of your brow, and that means works.  But work is how we progress, and that’s what I’m trying to say, is there s an attitude in the bible, a Jehovistic attitude about the question of works.  We’re talking about deeds, and that means to do things—tools and devices – infertile machines if you’re talking about the children of water, but we’re talking about the subject of tonight’s talk which is technology and the science that produces it.  In passing, before we move on, the clothing of Adam and Eve by Jehovah seems to have been a protective act, just as you would expect from the highest of all the children of water. 

            Now, we’ve said almost nothing about the difference of the viewpoint between Jehovah and the humans in the story.  That difference is best elucidated, and very clearly elucidated by the astrological mandala.  This is the first of the two sextile talks, the talks that relate Aries and Sagittarius to Aquarius in the Aquarian Age.   The basis of the sextile aspect in astrology is different than the basis of all other aspect relationships that are implicit in the structure of the mandala.  The conjunction and the opposition are non-geometric figures.  The conjunction is a point, and the opposition is a line.  Those aren’t figures; those are locations.  The trine and the square are simple equilateral, geometric figures.  In fact there are only three equilateral geometric figures that are simple that you can inscribe in the circle.  They are the trine, the square, and the pentagon.  Those are the only three that you can produce, and they can all be produced with just a straight edge and a compass.  The sextile is based on the equilateral hexagon.  It is a compound geometric figure.  If we take the symbol of the sextile, it really is the skeleton or the  bones of components of the equilateral hexagon.   We’re talking here about the compound figure – as the least amount of sides of the compound figure that fits into a circle.  If we remove the lines of construction that are the skeleton, we have the Star of David, the Seal of Solomon, which all schools of mysticism recognize as the symbol of the macrocosm. 

            So, when we’re talking about the sextile, we’re looking at a triangular reflection of macrocosmic or universal scope.  In the triangle, the big process, the evolutionary creation of which we are a part – there are three parts in that.  There is the materialization of spirit, which is called involution.  There is the spiritualization of matter, which is called evolution.  And there is the evolution of consciousness which takes place in the revolutionary experience of involution and evolution where spirit interacts with matter.  The downward-pointing triangle is spirit descending into matter.  The upward-pointing triangle is matter rising up to spirit.  The whole process is focused through an individual center, and that is what produces the center of consciousness in our being through which everything is experienced.  When we place this figure on the mandala, we see that the lines of construction are between the cusps of Cancer and Capricorn and the first cusps of the earthy signs.  So, we see that the triangle pointing upward is earthy in nature, and the triangle pointing downward is watery in nature.  The triangle pointing down is the viewpoint of Jehovah, and the triangle pointing up is the human perspective in relation to the divine ……… 

            So, we’re looking at the two perspectives – the perspective of Jehovah and the perspective of Adam and Eve and Abel and Cain.  In all of this we understand that when we’re looking at the grand sextile we’re looking at the basic crystalline structure of spirit involving in matter and matter being spiritualized into spirit—the most basic structure of that process.  The connecting oppositions represent the inverting connections.  That’s the way the opposition always works.  It’s never what you expect it to be.  It’s always the opposite, and it seems to come at you from nowhere.  The way that these things work in spiritual things is that the higher spiritual things get reflected into the lower material bodies.  The deepest aspect of the spirit is reflectively projected in the deepest aspect of physical matter, that is, the dense physical body.  Whereas the life spirit is reflectively projected into the etheric body, and the human spirit reflected into the desire body. 

            The opposition shows the demand of matter.  It isn’t a demand like a boss has a demand, says, “You’ve got to do this.”  That would be from the other end.  It’s a demand like your computer is a demand.  If you are programming for a computer, your computer is utterly stupid, and if you don’t tell it every little thing to do, it just stops dead.  It demands our attention continuously.  If we let our attention drop, everything is lost, and that is the demand of matter that I’m trying to get at here.  Saturn, in the Saturn period, in the dense physical experience and the resistance of holding together forms, that kind of stubbornness that we learned in the Saturn period, projected into the opposite, being the will, the power of will that can withstand any kind of resistance to it.  I can command anything that happens.  You can see in a similar way that there is a correspondence between each of our vehicles and an active ….of the spirit, but we won’t go into that because that because everybody has spent some time thinking about that.

            We find the deepest aspect of the spirit focusing into the deepest part of the mandala.  The divine triangle is on the cusps of the watery signs, so from the viewpoint of spirit, including the viewpoint of Jehovah, the process is a subjectifying process, drawing it into the universal subjective – not in a pejorative sense.  The nadir point of the mandala, the cusp of Cancer, is the most subjective place in the entire mandala.  On the mandala is also the point of the Summer Solstice when the material work is the strongest.  So, the spirit is there for us to work against the greatest materialization at that time.  Now, there’s a whole lot of this that we could go into, but there just isn’t time, and if I did that it would rob you of the joy of making discoveries about the same thing. 

            The divine triangle, the down-pointing triangle, which is not so much our business, but in this case, the business of Jehovah, the third of the three-fold spirit. The other triangle, the earth triangle pointing up is our business.   In this figure, human aspiration reaches up to the spirit.  It’s aspiration that reaches as high as it can go; it’s breathless.  It’s like the feeling at Winter Solstice when you’re filled with the spirit of giving and giving and giving and you give as much as you can, and that’s as high as you can go.  But the mandala as we know it now shows clearly that that aspiration is blinded in matter.  It’s blinded in earth. 

            We see that happen.  That’s when the stores sell everything, and for some people, Christmas is all about presents and material things.  It is grounded in matter which is opaque, which is dense, and which we can’t see through.  Our understandings are now only reflections; they’re only intimations because of our material darkness.  When we’re charged from the Luciferic fiery signs, and we reach the earthy signs which follow, we have all of our aspirations, all of our drive to accomplish things ……..in materialism.  We become so focused in materialism because of this habit.  We might say that it wasn’t the original act which probably took many tens of thousands of years to become preoccupied with the sexual creative force, both in magic and in other ways that we had used it for personal pleasure—that habit of doing our evaluation in matter as a replacement for the spiritual understanding that we lost in the fall.  It’s our first way of looking at things. 

            Material science forms the basis of our technology.  It forms the basis of our deeds and works, which is why you have statements in the bible like, the poor you have with you always, meaning to say, not that we shouldn’t take care of the poor, but that we shouldn’t so much think about poverty as the attitudes that produced poverty and the lack of spirit behind those kinds of attitudes. 

            All of our progress in science and technology is in large part driven by selfishness.  Our outlook about the nature of reality for material science is that there are blind laws of nature and that there is a blind evolution with no purpose and no internal guidance and no creativity.  Of that, we’re supposed to believe that intelligence, self-conscious awareness, comes out of something that is completely blind, completely meaningless.  It’s a very stark framework.  There is no apperception of truth in the determined loss. 

            If we reduce it even further, we would see that some kind of chance occurrence would completely change the truth.  I read science magazines, and there are magazines that have articles like that.  They say, “Wow, it’s just a fantastic, lucky thing of chance that things combined to produce the world as we know it now.  If one constant would change by one little point, it wouldn’t be there.”  And they think that this is all chance.  That this isn’t something true, not realizing that when they say that, that their knowledge is equally meaningless, and their knowledge is equally chancy.  If a cosmic ray event occurred, and they wouldn’t use their brain for a moment, they might think that something was true because of that experience and not necessarily that there is an objective truth, but that we are truth-knowers that are tuned into the same universal truth.  For that matter, having a different breakfast or having a different set of parents would have resulted in a totally different science.  It’s not like there is objective – like there is a reality – that there is a universal truth that connects it all together. 

            You don’t get truth out of blind ignorance.  There have to be truth-knowers; the truth has to have existed there before.  The people who are truth-knowers, which we are from time to time when we’re very lucky, we could only become truth-knowers if we had that potential for truth in ourselves in the first place.   It isn’t an accident that someone turns out to be a great scientist or logician or philosopher.   It’s really strange the way it works because a lot of these people are really proud of their intelligence and of their accomplishments, and if they realize that it’s just a product of blind chance and laws of nature, what do they have to be so proud of?  They really haven’t developed anything.

[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]

Tags: aquarius, Aries, Technology