Aquarian Age Lecture 4
Apr 1st, 2009 by admin
Microcosm Lecture Series Notes
Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age
Lecture 4 of 25 by [R]
Spiritual Aspiration And The Aquarian Age
This is the first of the work talks. They are to try to understand our consciousness and our duty as spiritual aspirants as we go into the Aquarian Age. We realize that we are co-creators, and the way things are going to be depends on us, so what we do is an important thing. Since this is a work talk, we will not have the big tidal waves of ideas of the earlier talks.
It is assumed that all of us here are spiritual aspirants, although it may not always seem that way to ourselves. To the degree that we are sincere in our aspiration and we are enthused, it radiates from us, even if we are deadpan it radiates from us, and it’s catching for other people. Then what happens is people start asking us questions, and that is when the work really begins. I know from personal experience and the personal experience of others that when you start studying astrology you become enthused about astrology. You usually start talking about it and people start asking you questions and you begin to realize how little you know about astrology. At least that’s the way it worked with me.
We are going to be asking questions—about that subject about which we are enthused.
One of the most common questions that we get when we start talking about the Aquarian Age, which some people call “The New Age,” is: what will the Aquarian age be like? It seems like a reasonable question. People are looking for a prophetic answer and they want to be wowed about what it is going to be.
I have an answer that is a little bit pat, a little bit smug, and almost trite, and that is that I respond with another question. “What would you like it to be like?” And it really isn’t trite because it brings the person who has asked that question to realize that they have a creative responsibility. We have a responsibility for all of our future, including the Aquarian Age, and for what humanity is going to be like. The scope is spiritual which means it is very vast and has more to it than just our little lives, but our little lives are the proving ground for the spiritual part of our being.
Implicit in this question is an understanding. There are propositions about the nature of time; past present, and future. With regard to that, Max Heindel, who was the founder of The Rosicrucian Fellowship, pointed out that people like us are considered dreamers.
Dreaming can be important if it starts to take hold, if we can start to manifest it—but that’s a very big “if, “ because when we’re dreaming there is always a temptation to lay back and dream some more. If we do that we regress. We don’t do anything. If that‘s the case we are almost sick souls. There is a short little book called The White Knights and if you can find a Constance Garnet translation it is very poetic. It’s the story of a man who lives in a basement and in his basement he does nothing all day long but daydream. His friend, Nashtenko comes to visit and they have conversations. It goes, “Alas, Nashtenko, there are some rather curious corners in Saint Petersburg — corners in which the normal light doesn’t enter in. Instead there is another light, another light that is as though it could be in a different planet. It is a world where everything is utterly fantastic, but at the same time it is humdrum and banal.”
He goes on to point out, in a daydream you can make all of these fantastic scenarios, but they’re always the same because they are just what you want them to be. And because it’s such a controlled environment, it isn’t alive. It doesn’t have a quality of reality, and so this man realizes that he has sold his soul to daydreaming. When you think about it, that’s what heroin is. Or any other drug, it takes you to a place in consciousness where you’re just there and you live that dream.
The real world that you live in, Nashtenko, is alive and the reason it is alive is because it fights back.
And so this is a temptation that when we have an imagination, and we understand the joy and the pleasure of it there is a tendency to want to do that, to sell ourselves to fantasy, imagination. Just as that narrator tells it, there is resistance. Anytime we try to manifest any dream there is a resistance. Any time there is a creative assertion there is an equal and opposite reaction, and our actions themselves, our creations themselves produce their own resistance. So if we sit down or write a poem or do a work of art, or form a spiritual study group or something like that, there is always an enormous resistance and it always seems external as though it’s coming from outside of us.
When we do make the creation we find that reality fights back in ways that we never expect, so we can never manifest it in exactly the way that it is in our imagination. And so we do the best that we can and in the process we improve our skills and we become better focused in being able to manifest things, and then we are done and it seems like it’s over. But then a miracle occurs.
And that miracle is, if we call up the image, the dream that we had before, it is now much brighter than it was before, which wouldn’t have happened if we had kept it in a dream state. We did something that — in the process of realizing a dream we enlivened it. We have produced not only the external creation but we produced an awakening in the creative spirit that makes that creation.
So any time we want to do anything, especially something like washing the dishes we have the old question of to be or not to be, in the existential sense, and it is very much like Hamlet. We have to fight against adversarial things. It’s always a very big thing. But if we just keep at it step by step we become, and we get that sense of spirit that flows in the becoming. So, we create and we rest.
It’s like the grand creation when there are periods of creation and periods of dreaming on the experience, and then the manifestation continues forward so this is the kind of thing that we’re working in. The only difference is that with evolution we are small-time participants and we have to go along with the timing of the greater creation. So there are windows of opportunity when certain things are ripe; if you don’t do them then you can’t do them at all. I learned to ice skate a little bit when I was in my 30’s and I realized right away that no matter how much I practiced, I could never do it like a child who learned it when the window of opportunity was open — during that time when the nerves and muscles were developing. There are certain windows that are like that. There are some plants that if they don’t get their pollination at exactly the right time, they become evolutionary cripples. They live out their life, but they don’t come to fruit.
So what we’re dealing with here is windows of opportunity for doing things in time. The purpose of all of these talks is to realize different things that we can do in our time if the window is open for us now so that not only ourselves but everyone, including the creative spirit, the universal spirit – to get the most out of the evolution that we are in.
In the same way that there is something like a sin – to regress and lapse into day dreaming, there is the same thing with not evolving things, or not participating. We’re doing this because we want to. We are filled with the spirit and we want to participate. Some do not want to. Even in some religions there is a desire to keep things the same. That is a very deep and deadly sin.
It is the sin of Faust. Mephistopheles can have the soul of Faust when Faust says let this moment live forever. And that is precisely the attitude of people who want everything to always be the same. They don’t want any changes. They don’t want any progress.
I was put onto this line of thinking when my friend Al Dong , who is a pomologist and develops new fruits, said that the problem with fruits is that they are not allowed to evolve. People want an apple to stay the same. Most people think Delicious, Golden Delicious, or McIntosh. And there are actually 100’s of different apples. So what they do is keep those apples always the same. They always propagate by clone, not seed, and that is counter evolutionary. Their co-evolutionary members have an advantage; they are advancing, but the Golden Delicious apple tree is staying the same. But there are new insects and new diseases. The important principle is that we have to realize that what we have now can be better in the future. We made a weakling that needs more and more protection. You know, more and more poisons and things like that.
Let’s look at this whole business in another way. We will talk a lot about time tonight. Time and history, etc. I know from experience that to make any kind of change is for the better. I have Virgo rising, a sign that likes to make plans. I look at my early young manhood and I was studying various philosophies etc., and I had these plans of what my life was going to be like: allot study time to this, restrict that, figure out how not to have to eat, take pills, so I would have time to master all of these things. It was utter folly, but it wasn’t really bad. None of the plans would have been a monstrosity – a good life. But none would be as good as the unexpected things. The world that fights back is different than you ever thought it would be. It brings the wonder to life.
I must say, I like the unexpected things that happen along the way better. We talk about this as though it’s very easy to do, but the reality is it’s very hard to imagine people you have never seen or places you have never been to – to try to imagine that part. We have to expect that there is newness and with that it is a very wonderful thing because it is a surprise. Time only backfires if we are not ready to accept things. Readiness is the all. I like to call it Robert Frost’s law: If there are no surprises for the poet there are no surprises for the reader. You could say that if there are no new things in life, life is a very dead kind of thing.
Moving into the future is more than just building a railroad track; a railroad track, with all the devices on the track. It’s not like that. It’s important to realize that there is something coming to us in the future just like we are building the past in the present coming into the future.
There are two streams of time and two streams of consciousness. Both are important. If we are trying to study or understand something about the Aquarian Age we have to realize what the trajectory is for what we are doing now and we have to begin to understand and or at least accept that there will be things that will be new and different from the way we see them now.
It’s easy to miss the new things. Because they might be within our field of vision right now, but we just don’t see them. Fortunately there are some things that are symptoms that we are not understanding what is new or what is coming to us from the future. There are obvious things that we see every day. The most obvious is when the old things don’t work; old solutions don’t solve the problems. That’s a matter of us not really looking at something as really new that is different from anything we have ever seen before. I’ve been very heartened about this financial crisis that a lot of people are going through now. A lot of people have said we don’t know what we’re doing; this is something we’ve never experienced before, and that means we’ve a good chance of solving it. I don’t like all of the things they are doing to solve it, but at least they know that this is something unprecedented.
Some people persist even though what they are doing is not working; because they are so convinced of what they’re doing, they are still living in the past, and they won’t admit that they are failing. They are saying, just give it time, it will work out, and it will work out, and you can keep going on into infinity like that. But eventually the stream that is flowing to us from the future demands that we accept it and swim up the stream like trout and get to new things that the stream is bringing down to us to live on, or we allow ourselves to be swept away and eventually end up in some stream of stagnation where we don’t grow.
Let’s look at time and history at some of the things we’ve looked at before, but look at them in a different way. A lot of this series of talks is going to be like that — from the very first talk when we asked, “When is the Aquarian age?” We are in the precessional cycle relative to The Aquarian Age about as far away from it as Augustus Caesar was from the beginning of the Piscean age. In the case of Caesar it’s also parallel to ours, because the society of Rome was already going into decadence and the Age of Aries was going into decadence. And so, in our case the USA is going into decadence and maybe we’ll have a renaissance like in Rome and Italy, but it’s not clear, and we’re facing the Aquarian Age which means something new.
Now what happened with the Romans, they had a hard time accepting what was new. What was to dominate all of culture after the age of Aries was Christianity, which was not the ultimate Christianity but the first beginnings of Christianity. The Romans had the Christians among them and they thought they were bad.
Remember, they had conquered the world in the Age of Aries. They thought that any religion that taught meekness and humility and such was bad. They wanted something that gave them more pride and related them to the Gods. They had already tired out the Roman religion. So they reverted. Anytime you are not willing to accept something new the tendency is to revert. So they went to Mithraism, Mandeanism and things from centuries earlier. Even Stoicism wasn’t enough for them. Similarly, in our times we find even deeper reversions, people going back to nature worship as if this was something new and progressive and it is really something old and does not have the grandeur that it did when it was a viable way to approach the spirit.
Now, this applies to us. Even though we aspire to (let’s call it mysticism, whether Christian or of any other religion) we’re relating it to that which is becoming. The same thing might happen with us. We are likely to take it and expect it’s going to be the way we think now and we’re likely to look at it with Piscean Age attitudes instead of Aquarian Age attitudes.
What we have to have is a psychological posture that is conducive to moving forward. We dare not presume that it’s going to be a certain way, but on the other hand we have to meet it and we have to meet it with encouragement, with anticipation. We have to be hopefully intuitive to accept and know what is new and respond to it.
Let’s take a little look at time because that’s important in understanding history. And do it in a way that is more mystical than anything else. Going as deep as any being can possibly go. We will do it in a flattened way, because we don’t have the depth of consciousness to do it in a deeper way.
Let’s talk about the relationship of being the absolute. Between being that is and a complete unknown of the absolute that is everything that is known, and everything that is unknown, and everything that could be known. So between being and not being, which is a very full not-being, there is potential. Potential of what could be. And so being becomes through potential.
Spirit knows itself. It is. It is the one. And as it knows itself it realizes in that way like we know anything. In a very simple way, when we know something and we have just discovered that we know something, it immediately produces a question and that question is: the unknown. It’s a statement we hear all the time. How is it normally said? The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. This is something that carries all the way to the Supreme Being. So you can say that in self-knowing, relative to the unknown, there is a potential or there is a dichotomy and that dichotomy is, I know.
The other side of the dichotomy is, I don’t know but the I-don’t-know is indefinite so between the known and the definite unknown there is a dichotomy or there is a dualism. It’s different in the spirit than it is in this world because in the spirit everything is internal. When it comes to the depths of the universal spirit as deep as you can go, which is often called the Supreme Being, everything is internal to the Supreme Being. Even to what we would consider to be externals; all of the externals are internals. So this realization of the known and the indefinite unknown is internal to the spirit. It’s like saying in our consciousness, “I know something but I know I don’t know exactly what.” It’s sort of like an indefinite knowing within a definite knowing.
When that is dichotomized and it is projected into potential, because the potential is also within, the potential is dichotomized so there are two poles of potential and the two poles of potential are called time and space. But time and space mean very different things to a mystic than to a physicist. I don’t want to insult the physicists and say we’re saying the same thing, because that would be silly. Potentials are possibilities and those possibilities are something that are not just a shut case of unknown, it’s a case of something that will bear a projection; that will bear the projection of a relationship. So you can say time is anything that will bear a certain kind of relationship, and space is anything that will bear another kind of relationship.
In the process of projecting ideas or projecting possibilities into the potential, that is done in a twofold manner also. That is, let’s try to make it in a couple of dimensions. On a horizontal, let’s say that when a creation is formed (which is a gigantic asking of a question – “could it be this within the absolute?”) the projected activity is “will,” and within the spirit itself, what receives the projection and informs it is called “imagination.” We have, relative to a creative activity, the spirit in part of its function projecting a thesis into the potential. And another part of it within itself (remember with spirit everything is always within), another part of its function receives it and it is through will and imagination that creativity is accomplished.
Now, in the vertical there is another dichotomy. And that is – when there is a realization of the projection and reception, the part that realizes it and that does it is called “spirit.” And the unknown part that receives the projection and, actually the projection is a projection that results in matter. Again we don’t mean the same thing by the word ‘matter’ that physics means. We mean any grade of ignorance that has been congealed or materialized in the creative process. “Will” asserts itself and it says, “Could it be this?” and then it takes form in the unknown as congealed ignorance into matter.
And so we have this spirit matter pole that is accomplished through will and imagination and we call them the vertical and the horizontal poles. This is common to all forms of mysticism, because everyone has encountered the same reality. [R gives examples] We’re talking in a really simple way, because along the spirit/matter pole there are many different worlds. There are many states of being, many worlds and many different states of consciousness. And they are more unconscious moving into matter but they are multi-dimensional and qualitatively different. Each of those dimensions would give a different kind of quality. All of these issue from and within The One. And these poles are poles of consciousness. They are not a bar magnet pole; that’s outright obvious, but what we’re talking about is something that one experiences within the spirit itself. In the process, it’s tested within the unknown.
We’re trying to get at time and we’re saying that time is a potential in which the active spirit sense and the will are more active. Space is where matter and imagination are more active. We’re not trying to figure out where the Aquarian Age is as much as when the age is. So let’s look at time some more and from another point of view.
This is not the talk; this is just the introduction. The talk is actually about 15 minutes long. Everything before that is introductory. And then, zoom!
The way consciousness was brought to understand matter and spirit was through mathematics. So in ancient Greek mathematicians (they tried to develop other forms of mathematics) but they tried to understand the whole universe with three figures, the point, the line and the circle and to do that they used two devices. But they could have actually used one. The two devices that they used were a straight edge and a compass. A string can be both straight edge and compass at the same time. Each of these basic things was fundamental to creation. Each one relates to a different variety of spiritual consciousness within the potential of time.
The point was called momental time, and usually that is thought of as being more and more punctilious. That is to say, you try to bring consciousness to a point. Remember all the legalese of the Nixon hearings with the Watergate business? They would say, “at this point in time.” It was as if time was a point. This is the type of time that is usually used in mysticism. It is where one brings one’s consciousness to a point and penetrates into that point deeper and deeper and one makes a breakthrough, so that by passing through a point in time one passes through to a place eternal, and that kind of concentration leads to a meditative kind of consciousness. Rather than just try to space out and do a meditational consciousness, you concentrate and pass through time and come to a larger sphere of consciousness. Most people think of time as a sequence of events, but if you have momental time and you go into a moment, the deeper and more pointedly you go into that moment the more it expands.
Astrologers are familiar with this because the horoscope is based on a moment in time. In that moment of time the whole life is there. And they have to figure out techniques to take that moment of time and expand it and delineate it to understand the whole life, and that is what momental time is like.
Now for most people the world is linear time. We watch the clock and the numbers click off and the hands go around. We see time passing on a line from a distant part of the past through the point of the moment and into the future. Obviously there is a lot to say for that. This is the time that is used in the material world; things are accomplished in a sequence of time. And even that linear time is flavored. Because if you look at a progression of your life, like I can remember looking at the early stages of my mystical career and everything was Moon and Neptune and then it was Mars and Jupiter and then everything resolved into a flavor that was Venus and Neptune and it was a progress and even though I was going through different kinds of environments in a linear fashion moving forward, each new period depended on what I did in the stage before. And so most of this evening we have been talking about linear time where what you do has an immediate effect on what the future is going to be.
Cyclical time is such that everything goes in a circle. It’s the same thing over and over again as though there is a divine archetypal pattern that is the basis of every cycle. In abstract that is very wonderful. It doesn’t turn out to be so good in terms of evolution because things don’t exactly repeat themselves, and unless you have some idea of progress, because obviously there is something to linear time when you go through point by point by point in linear time you’re a changed person and you can never be the same again. You can’t unknow something and you can’t unconscious something once you become conscious of it. If you learn something, you can’t unlearn it. That is the value of cyclical time there is recognition of a pattern and that pattern relates to The One, a universal which is the circle and in a way that is an expanded point. These are different ways of looking at time and each of them gives us an insight.
The most advantageous way of looking at time now is to combine linear time with circular time and then you have spiral time, so that everything progresses forward and everything gets better and there is simplicity to it and yet we learn things along the way. Of course this is exceedingly simplistic. Some people like things simplistic because then they can figure them out. At least it seems as if you can, but in the manifestation that we’re in now it’s very, very complex and multidimensional but we can see that with the multidimensional simplicity there are things like that, when they repeat themselves, especially since everything goes from within out, and from without back in.
There are repeat sequences that are in an orthogonal direction to progress at a right-angle progression so that if something has come into matter, and it becomes more and more external, in order to return back to spirit it has to remove layer after layer. It’s like when you get up in the morning, you put your clothing on and you put on your underclothing first (if you’re not a weirdo), and you put on layer by layer. But when you go back to rest at night you take off all the clothes in the opposite order of the way that they’ve gone on. And so there it’s like when you get up in the morning you put your inner layers of clothing on first and when you go back to rest at night you take the clothes off in the opposite order of how they have gone on. So in applying time, there are different principles that have to be kept in mind.
Suppose you have a swimming pool—perfectly calm and you throw a stone right into the middle of it. The waves start coming out and they go out and out until they meet the walls. And then they start coming back. And they meet the same kind of waves coming out as they are going back and that is something like the principle of the last clothes you put on in the morning are the first ones taken off at night. You can look into the future and see repeated what has happened in the past. It is similar to the diagram that we have here. I am afraid that this could get too abstract very quickly, so I have to be careful here.
So we have something that is expansive and simultaneously contractive at the same time. Because of the cyclical quality, things are analogous so even if they are happening on different planes things are happening very similarly ……….how to say this….., because there is one unified being into greater and greater concentration into matter and greater and greater passing back into spirit all at the same time. Because the focus of the spirit is everywhere because at microcosm and macrocosm everything is happening analogously and everything is happening in parallel, so we’re talking about a very complex sense of time that is going on. I am trying to use a few images to give you an idea of the way time comes back to us according to the way we have put it out, so we have something that replicates itself on many levels – the same kind of replication that we have talked about before – [atom and galaxy and solar system, etc.]
If we try to use intuitive analogy to guide us we can focus and can understand the principle on any level from the atomic to the extent of the cosmos. Let’s take a really simple statement. Let’s take a biblical statement where Christ says, on the third day I will return. Now, that third day can be understood in many ways. It could mean the amount of time it is taking. It could actually mean on the 3rd diurnal day. We know it was ordinal numbers, not cardinal. On the third day was the physical resurrection of the etheric body of Jesus which was solidified so that it appeared like the dense physical. And that was three days. But we know that the cycle of perpetual return of the life spirit coming from the spiritual sun to the earth after the crucifixion that is after Easter that is after Aries; three signs. And after Easter, 3 signs; and the Son, the life spirit, returns to the Father at the Summer Solstice. That is 3 days seen another way.
If we look at it in terms of ages, the third day is Aquarius, meaning to say, the third precession moving forward is the Aquarian Age. On another level analogously, the return to the Father is in 3 days or 3 periods of cosmological time: Jupiter period, Venus period, Vulcan period. That takes us until the end of the cosmos at least in terms of creation, at least with cosmography. Some people are not familiar with that but we can see the same thing is analogously true on many levels. Some are very confused by all of this. For example there is a book filled with truths and lies, and it is Ages In Chaos by …………… So there are historical cycles that repeat themselves with even the same names coming up; there are things that repeat every day, every year and there are cycles within cycles and that’s what we’re trying to get at when we’re talking about time.
We’re talking about time. All right, from point, line, circle and spiral and a little more confusion we know from the point that we must live right now. We cannot be thinking about something other than what we are doing right now. Entering into the moment takes us to higher and higher levels. We also know that we can live our lives in the now and when we do so with penetration we can live our little lives at the same time we’re living great lives.
The gospels are considered books of initiation. They point to this all the time in a way that most people would never realize. Everything that was taking place in the life of Jesus, especially if you read Matthew’s gospel, points to something in the Old Testament that was said by the prophets, and that’s pointing to a cosmic life. So, the little life of Jesus was referenced to the cosmic life and if we are becoming Christs-in-the-making it is the same thing we have to do ourselves.
This is the reason the horoscope is so beautiful, not just a guide for ourselves and our petty personal lives; it is so we can relate our little lives to the greater cosmos. So, we have our little lives day by day working and feeding ourselves, but at the same time we are working out our lives in the grand creation. We see that this can keep us in such a place where we’re ready to accept the future.
Now, we want to look at time in yet another way. We have said several times tonight (the things that are repeated are the things that are important) we have said that we must be accepting of the future, even calling it in, in a speculative way, saying, “could this be.” That means our stance for the future, if we have a stance, is subjective. We should never be objective about the future. We can be, but if we are, we make a serious mistake. If we’re objective about the future we’re building the present and the past into the future. And you can do that. You can focus on what you know to be true now and extend that into the future and not appreciate anything that is new. You become sort of an anachronism. You become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you miss what is important, because if you are so fixed on something, you can miss a wondrous thing that is going by.
I have a friend who conducted psychodramas and did it in a woman’s prison. They did the psychodrama of Jesus and the taxpayer. She took the most incorrigible person in the California women’s prison and they had that person play the part of Jesus. The woman went through the whole experience and learned things about her Self that she had never known before. She didn’t realize that she could be a divine person. Then, they enacted the whole thing over again and she played a woman on the street as Jesus was coming by. She got into such a haggle with another woman over position on who was going to be where on the street that she completely missed the passing of Jesus. This is indicative of what can happen. In the first place it means that if you have determined an attitude to be a certain way, that’s the way it’s going to be and you’re going to miss something passing by that’s going to be a very wondrous thing.
It was like my self earlier in life. I’m going to be this and this and this and these are the things I’m going to do in life. That’s being too objective about the future. To some extent you’ve got to plan what you’re going to have for dinner, but you can’t plan your whole life that way. An objective attitude about the future is deterministic—subjective is relativistic – it could be this or it could be that.
There is the inverse that occurs relative to the past. For the past we have to be objective because the facts are the facts are the facts. And if we do not accept what has been, we are not seeing the past clearly, and we are not seeing the present either. Because we have subjectively made this dream about what the past was when it wasn’t really that. So, there is a stance with regard to the future and a stance with regard to the past.
Both are important for moving into the spiritual future. We have to know what worked and what has transpired in order to build into the future. We have to be receptive and accepting and anticipating in order to recognize something that new that is coming to us from the future.
Now, finally we’ve worked our way through all of the introductions without getting too much in a muddle, and we’re just about ready tonight to go into the subject matter, but we have one more little segway introduction. We want to talk about how we know things. Not to how we understand things, but how we come to specific knowledge. In this world, how we are right now, it is very difficult to know something alone by itself. Knowledge is better when it is understood relative to something else.
We find this all of the time, we can know ourselves by being alone with ourselves, but there are things when we get together with friends, or especially if we get together with adversaries. Then, we know things about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise know. The people outside of us represent everything of our being that we don’t know about ourselves. That’s an exaggerated statement but it works out that way. Through interaction with others we come to know ourselves.
We are trying to understanding the Aquarian age. Aquarius is called an air sign. There are three air signs: Gemini ruled by Mercury; Libra ruled by Venus; and Aquarius co-ruled by Saturn and Uranus so we are talking about intellectual knowledge when we are talking about air signs; each of them points to a different kind of knowledge. For the most part we do not know the Aquarian way of gaining knowledge which is to know something as a whole so that we know the sum and all of its parts and something more all at the same time. For the most part most of our knowledge comes from Gemini and Libra.
Gemini represents polarized consciousness—something that is divided between extreme poles. There is how the knowledge of what could be comes through the polarization as we were speaking of earlier. There is a difference in consciousness and it takes quite a lot of subtlety in order to realize it. Gemini rules the lungs; what we do on the in-breath is different than what we do exhaling. On the in-breath everything is oxygenation; on the out-breath everything is carbonization. In the in-breath we are taking experience into us. On the out-breath, as when we speak or when we sing — if you watch very carefully (and this is not a breathing exercise, it is a consciousness exercise) if you watch yourself and what you are doing and what kind of thoughts you are thinking, you will understand that there are two distinctly different kinds of consciousness depending on whether you are oxygenating or carbonizing. Both are necessary and both are complementary to each other. The principle of Gemini then is knowledge by differentiation. It is knowledge through contrast.
Libra is ruled by Venus, and it rules an accommodating kind of consciousness, always seeking peace, always seeking homeostasis. In order to reach that, it is compensating or complementing, where it accommodates to the other. As a consequence, the kind of consciousness that is ruled by Libra is comparison. So, we’re trying to get to the total knowledge of Aquarius; it will take two years and we will know that we are barely scratching the surface. What we’re going to do is we’re going to use contrast and comparison by taking each of the other signs and relating it to Aquarius.
This evening we’re trying to understand aspiration in relation to the Aquarian age. To do that, I will ask you a question. What sign of the zodiac most relates to our esoteric aspiration that finds its fruition (future) in the Aquarian age?
……………………It’s a trick question. Surprisingly, the answer is “Virgo.” That brings up another slight topic. In the course of these talks, we are going to develop a new understanding of astrological aspects as they relate to the precession of the equinox. What we will talk about tonight is the first quincunx or the first inconjuct.
The first inconjunct is the relationship of the ascendant to the sixth house, the second inconjunct is the relationship of the ascendant to the 8th house. Together they produce a Y-shaped figure. A is the ascendant (in this case Aries) and the first house. B is Virgo and the 6th. C is Scorpio and the 8th. Now we have to review something on a personal level that we talked about not too clearly on a cosmic level. Since we are microcosms on the universe, the same things that are functional in the universe are functional in us.
We said that In the universe we had two streams — one passing from spirit to matter, and one passing from matter back to spirit. We related it to water coming off of the walls of the swimming pool. In the RF philosophy a great deal is made about this subject, because there is a whole section dedicated to the cycle of extroversion and introversion.
One has an experience in the external world which is perceived by touch sound sight and it sight and that is carried back in through the ethers to an impression in the desire nature and it is then carried to a thought and it is carried to the spirit which forms a conclusion about what happens in the external world. The spirit then initiates an extroversive activity that it thinks “this is what I have to do” and it is clothed in desire. The desire then takes on energy in the form of an action and a change is precipitated in the outside world. This is an extremely important cycle.
If you want to grow spiritually, just watching this cycle in yourself and in the cosmos, there isn’t anything that can be kept from you.
The cycle proceeds from without in, taking the experience of the external world, the things that we never knew until we tried to do something out there, and the impacts that are the indications of our ignorance, and taking those impacts through the ethers and then to take the energy of them and into our desire nature where we can form an emotional impression of what they were, and then into our thoughts so that we get the thought of what they were, and then we absorb them and assimilate them into our spiritual consciousness, and we (the self, the spirit) decide to take action. When you’re driving down the street, you see a car coming toward you, passing another car, and you can see that he’s not going to be able to get around, so what do you do? Well, that information has been taken back to the spirit, and the spirit says, “I’m taking my foot off the gas; I’m putting it on the brake.”
When it does that, it has the thought, “this is what I have to do,” and it does that and that motivates the desire and the desire gets clothed in energy and then that energy causes you to hit the brake and you stop so that you don’t have a head-on collision. So, that is introversion and extroversion.
In another way, you can start with an idea and it may take you 20 years. You start with an idea for the great American novel. And then you take that novel and you externalize it. And then when it’s all over you take the experience back into yourself. The outward experience is the finalizer. It is the testing ground where we determine the accuracy of our creation. On the introversive stream we digest every phase of that experience and we carry it back in as essence to the creative being. On the externalizing stream we materialize. We take a creative impulse, a spiritual, intuitive impulse from deep in our esoteric being and we externalize it.
Both are fulfillments of the creative urge. Just like the entire solar cosmos that we are part of takes manifestation, it is the same process that takes place in a creation that takes place in us. When we are filled with the spirit, we cannot do anything but give. This happens in us even in our inner being that is secret to us, because we are not completely conscious of everything in ourselves.
You know, we have desires that are so secret that we don’t know them ourselves and when we discover them, that is a very happy day. I never knew that this is really what I wanted to do in life and then one day it dawned on me, and it had been there all the while.
The biblical Jesus says, Secrets that have been from the foundation of the earth will be shouted from the rooftop. We are people that want to be rooftop shouters. We want to share everything we have. Obviously, from the number of the people that we have here, compared to the number of people that will be in the football stadium on Saturday, there are very few esoteric aspirants; very, very few. But that’s the way it has always been. That is the way it is in nature.
If we take a very simple action, like the action that takes place in an egg, the small nuclear part of the egg that we call the yolk contains the gateway to the memory of nature, so that all of the past experience and all of the past chicken-life experiences that have been, get their entrance through the material that is in the yolk of the egg. If they’re looking for the memory of DNA and RNA they’re not going to find it. The DNA and RNA represent a spiral that is a mimic of the cosmic spiral, but that spiral is interpenetrated by the ethers and it is in the ethers that the memory is captured in the spiral. The yolk is also the center of new creativity where the divine being that guides the chickens work through and bring new changes. …………..So, the yolk of the egg is esoteric. It is creative. It functions. It is our duty to work and our duty to function.
In astrology there is a relation between the esoteric and the exoteric. Ela knew about that relationship in that she knew that the esoteric sign is the opposite of the exoteric sign. This works throughout astrology, because astrology is analogous just like the entire creation is analogous. For example, if we look at the first house, the first house is the physical body. It’s the overt, the very obvious part of our being. The 7th house is the house through which we understand the individuality which is the greater part of our being. It’s everything that isn’t the small personality. So, in a way, the 7th house is like the esoteric part of the whole character that is on the horizontal of the individuality and the personality.
The small nuclear part of the egg, the yolk
In astrology there is a difference between the esoteric and exoteric. This works analogous just like the whole creature is analogous. The first house is the physical body. The seventh house is the house through which we understand the individuality which is the greater part of our being, so in a way the seventh house is like the esoteric.
This is understood in folk language. Pardon the sexist use of words, but the old saying goes, if want to know what a man is really like inside, look at his wife. That tells us what the inner part is that was hidden, what was secret. That is brought out. The sign that is opposite the age represents the esotericism. We know this from the Bible when Jesus says, be gentle as doves and wise as serpents. He was referring to the previous age, of which there were still remnants around, the Age of Taurus. Taurus ruling the doves, and the Ophite Gnostics ruled by the serpents, in fact if you look at the words that is used for serpent in the Bible, it has on the same order, Opheus. It means “snake.”
Now, we’ve got to return and go back to another one of those introductions, another principle of time and space. The deeper something is in time or space, the longer it takes for it to mature. I’ll give you a little example: the Greeks. The warriors shaved their beards, because the fights were then hand-to-hand and if somebody could grab you by the beard, they could slash your throat. That is primitive warfare. Think about that compared to now. Now, we lob ICBM’s and everything is very distant. It’s very impersonal. If you have to look a guy in the eye before you kill him, that’s a very personal thing. But you can say, those bad people are communists or those bad people are fascists or something and you can lob a bomb over their heads quite impersonally.
For that distance in space there is also a distance in time, meaning to say that things that are extremely deep, not the trivial everyday things, take a longer time to mature. It said, for example, that the elder brothers of The Rosicrucian Order could see hundreds and thousands of years ahead of time and they have designed a philosophy that it has taken that long for humanity to mature to be ready, so what we are talking about here is about things that take a long time in maturing.
Now, if what the most reliable authors on the earth have to say is true, it takes a long time for a person to come to rebirth. For example some people think it takes for some people, on the average, as much as 1,000 years. So, when we think about it that way, the fact that the esotericism of Virgo results in the Aquarian Age makes a lot of sense. Think about it that what the inward consciousness is the planning stage of Virgo, by the time it can be outwardly manifest in the people who have done that work, by then the precession will have gone from Pisces and Virgo, it will have gone to Aquarius and Leo, and so in coming out from Leo it has become manifest externally in Aquarius. This is a very important thing. It means this is what governs our spiritual aspiration, our inner esoteric work because it is determining what the future is like.
Now let’s do some of that real, rough kind of business again that we’ve been doing all along, and let’s just take some simple keywords from various signs and constellations of the zodiac and see how they work. Let’s go all the way back to the Age of Cancer. Now one of the combinations or one of the keywords for Cancer, the opposite sign, esoteric work, would be Capricorn, “ambition.” And Capricorn ambition results in the [coming] Age of Gemini as air-seeking — in the harsh experiences of esoteric times, when people steel themselves against Cain — that becomes the basis for knowledge in the Age of Gemini. The expedience of Capricorn becomes the utility of Gemini — and the trickiness of Capricorn, just in maneuverability, that becomes the adaptability of Gemini.
So, in the Age of Gemini, the esotericism is Sagittarius. Sagittarius represents the creation and sustaining of religious forms, and the esotericism of precipitating religious forms becomes the dogmatism of Taurus, esoterically, in the Age of Taurus. The enlargement of consciousness that is Sagittarius in the esoteric side of the Age of Gemini — when that becomes externalized and brought into the material world it becomes the massive possessiveness of the exoteric Age of Taurus. The adventure and expansionism of Sagittarius becomes the responsibility, the weight which your adventures result in. The irrepressibility/ irresponsibility of Sagittarius becomes like the fixity of destiny in Taurus, so in Taurus the esotericism become Scorpio.
That’s what the Gnostics were, and the Gnostics were very rebellious. When that rebelliousness became external, it became the individualism of the Age of Aries. It works out very nicely. The inner conviction of Scorpio, such as “I am convicted that this is right.” When that works out exoterically into the outer worlds it becomes courage. The Gnostics, inwardly, always respected each other no matter how crazy what another one said. That is what results in the kind of esteem that was developed in the Age of Aries. The sectism (I don’t know how to say it another way.) the breaking up of the Gnostics. There were probably about 50 different types of Gnosticism, and they were continuously breaking up into sects and sects. That is what resulted in the breaking down of the clans of the Taurean Age, as they took place in the Age of Aries. So, it all fits together very nicely.
In the Age of Aries the esotericism is associated with Libra and people studied the laws. But, studying the laws resulted in the Age of Pisces as the study of principles—abstract principles and the symmetries of the law result in the renaissance kind of balance-view.
The vicarious otherness of Libra represented the kind of piety that developed esoterically in the Age of Pisces. The tendency toward more complete freedom among the esoteric people in the Age of Aries resulted in the kind of decadence that we see in the world now. It’s not really transparent, but if you look at some of the things that Steiner says, it verifies this.
This doesn’t work perfectly. It’s very hard when you work with history to find trends that work but this is a way that you can use astrological keywords and things that you see in everyday astrology and apply it to historical epochs and it seems to work out pretty well.
Now, we’re coming to our own time which is the Age of Pisces. In the early Age of Pisces the esotericism was in the hands of clerics in monasteries. They were the only people who could read, in many cases. As time progressed the priests became progressively more and more mental so you got to the scholiasts and the logic-chopper and all of those kinds of people. Virgo is very often a kind of mentalism and the mentalism isn’t always founded on facts as much as it is on the mental conception. Now this is not all wrong but this is the thing that has developed. You know………how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, and I believe it was Aquinas who wrote that.
The involuntary clairvoyance was, as we have noticed, weaving and in its place observation and the mind took hold and with that came a certain amount of skepticism. With that came a very mental, based on tangibles, kind of esotericism. The clerics still continued on but after the middle of the Age of Pisces things became cabalistic. Even more so, they became alchemical. It was something that was artificial and symbolic and …………..indirect. So this is what esotericism has been in our time.
Now, we want to relate this to our lives. When we say these things, we don’t want to say that there weren’t people that didn’t directly see the spiritual worlds and didn’t work directly with matter, but the ideal that was set at this time was set by an alchemist named, Roger Bacon, and he had the right answer about it all. He said, we must not be like ants who move things around outside of them. (that’s obviously matter), nor must we be like spiders who spin out everything from inside of them (which is like spiritually imaginative people that have little to do with reality), but we must be like the bees who take something from without and mix it with something from within and make a …………that is a glory to God. That’s a rough paraphrase.
So, we can see that the science that developed in the Age of Pisces by the Virgo people will, if united with the spirit, will become a true spiritual science. Now, it is through the skepticism that developed when the inner life was shut off, at least as far as perception is concerned, and that is a very valuable thing. The new religion, the new science of the Aquarian time must be able to answer all skepticism and go beyond it.
Now, as we aspire to the Aquarian Age, there are several things that we need to be careful of lest we precipitate a tragedy. We have to be careful of producing a spiritual materialism in which we produce phenomena, all kinds of sensational phenomena or things like that. Unfortunately, a lot of that is happening in the world. The world is not esoteric. That is, exciting things appeal to people. And spiritual things are seen completely in a material sense. I think that is what is happening with the UFO phenomena. I think people are experiencing things from the inner worlds, but they are being led to have their judgments skewed so that they see them as materialistic things. Rather than vehicles that are passing through space, they are thinking of them as spacecraft.
Another thing we have to be careful of is over-specialization. If we’re over specialized, we cannot take our work and integrate it into anything Aquarian. If you look at it, specialization is a form of elitism. The Virgo consciousness is going to become the Aquarian esoteric, and if that is to be universal brotherhood where everyone is equal, elitism has no place.
We must not have a negative deductivity, that when we do develop our concrete mind, must have our thoughts be the clothing for intuition. We can produce all kinds of thought-forms, but they are not necessarily meaningful. They can be quite sophisticated, as we know from artificial intelligence (They do wonderful things with computers with artificial intelligence.) but it’s not a real knowing. There’s not an intuition there that knows that something is the truth.
We have to be careful about too much eclecticism, because the Aquarian unity is a unity and it’s not going to be a patchwork of this and that and that. I’ve got a few more, but I don’t want this to get too long, because we want to get at what we’ve been trying to get at all night.
Let’s take some things of our aspiration and see how they are pro-evolutionary to the Aquarian Age, starting with one of the simplest Virgo keywords, purity. Now, we have to be careful with purity. There are two kinds of purity. There is the kind of purity that results in refined sugar or in medicines that have been de-naturalized from their natural source. We want the kind of purity that is free from artifice. Again, this is like something we spoke of earlier, of bringing something to a point. If we bring something to a point, if our consciousness is pure, we can see through. Unless we have that purity of consciousness so that we are crystal-clear in everything we do, we’re not giving our best to the Aquarian Age. Obviously, in the future, we’re going to have clairvoyance, etheric clairvoyance, and we’re going to be able to see through everything as though it were glass. That can only come with purity of consciousness.
We want to be doing everything with an attitude of service. Not just volunteer work, but everything with an attitude of service. Service becomes the reality. We are the creators of the new world, and every time we do something with the attitude of service and not the separative, selfish way – if we do everything for sharing the whole, we actually attract to ourselves the soul material that will become the future world that we all live in. It has to be a service and it has to be a service that is palpable. It isn’t just doing my duty, it is literally a living kind of service.
In our spiritual exercises of observation we have to learn the esoteric activity of penetrating form into seeing the life that is behind it. If we do not penetrate to see the reality that is behind, and if we do not discriminate between life and form we are not making the distinction of consciousness that will be for everyone to live in a realm of pure life and pure energy. We have to discriminate so we are not distracted by the form. We have to go through to see what makes something live. Virgo likes to organize and plan. We have been wonderfully gifted by those who have preceded us and shown us cosmologically how things are set up analogously, and in parallel. Therefore, to the degree that we can, we have to make our organizations not just for organization itself, but so that anything we organize in our mind becomes not just a replica, but it becomes based on cosmic formula and parallels so that things line up in truth on almost every level that we manifest. That kind of conscious is exceedingly important. I don’t know that Feng Shui does that, but I think anything can be organized in such a way that the cosmos can be brought into it. A lot of temples have things like that built into them.
In short, we must take our mental consciousness, because we now have to work through our mind. It is our duty, it is our responsibility. We have to take our mental consciousness and creatively attune it to intuition. That is our single biggest thing.
There are quite a few things we can do to have a lot of sophistication and they’re not as simple as the things I’ve just said. These simple principles, these very simple things, if we keep them in mind, even if we don’t perform them, but just keep them in mind, that is a step in itself for our esoteric world’s work, to change the consciousness so that it’s eventually going to work its way out into the world. We know that we are the transmitters–that we are radiating thoughts into the cosmos. That’s why we studied to be esoteric. We can be in our own room and we can be doing esoteric wonders, just by thinking and holding the right kinds of thoughts. So all we have to do is remember that what we do in our inner work now and how we do it is what the exoteric world is going to be like in the Aquarian Age. Next time we will look at another sign and constellation, and I think it’s going to be Pisces and Virgo.