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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

 

Lecture 6a of 25 by [R]

 

Some Thoughts On Altruism

 

[Editor’s Note: All portrait thumbnail illustrations are editorial content, not part of the lecture]

 

            This is an old talk, it is actually 25 years old, but it’s gone through many changes.  The first time I gave the talk was when I was in Louisville, and it was the one and only time I was in Louisville.

            We’re going to explore Aquarius primarily through the opposite sign, Leo.  The talk is not really unified.  There is not a common theme except altruism which runs through it.  It’s a collection of various thoughts I’ve had about altruism, put together all in one lump.  It’s also not a very profound talk.  It’s important because it’s about living, but there aren’t any super concepts in it. 

            Some of you who know me, by now know that, irrespective of my behavior, I am a moralist.  I’m sort of a cosmic moralist, and if you look at my face in terms of physiognomy, I have these jowls that usually are the sign of a moralist.  They’re called “Germanic jowls” which the Germans have passed on to the English, so you have these jowly moralists in England.  No doubt a lot of the moralism is a reaction to my inability to live according to a high moral standard.  It’s easier to project morals on other people than it is to live them yourself, but that’s what I have to live with.  In being a moralist, I do get kind of growly about it but I’m not quite at the point where I qualify as a Rosicrucian curmudgeon, but I’m getting there; give me a few years and I’ll be the classic curmudgeon.

            The greater part of the moralistic belief in me is due really to conviction.  I’m one who believes that moral and ethical development is foundational.  They are central to any progress in spiritual development.  You cannot grow safely, and you cannot grow well spiritually unless you first are developing yourself morally and ethically.  If we have moral character it is very easy for us to develop the higher spiritual faculties. 

            Most people cannot be trusted with higher spiritual faculties.  If you think about it, one moment of anger could kill several people, because the same energy that is used for healing could be used for killing.  And that’s what we’re talking about.  I believe that the great spiritual leaders of humanity would love to initiate us and teach us about the spiritual powers that we have and how to use them, but it is because of our lack of moral development that we are not there.  This is a general thing for all of humanity.  And it doesn’t even deal with spiritual powers, because we have atomic bombs that we don’t have the moral……to hold back from using.

            Einstein, who was behind the atomic bomb, became a pacifist in his later life, and he even spoke about working with invisible helpers or beings from the other side.  He said, after many, many years of pondering the unified field theory, that there can be no advances in physics until there are advances in psychology.  I think what he meant was that we have to change psychologically before we can see the world.  We do not have enough unity in the entirety of our character to be able to apperceive the unity that would be behind the universal field theory.   Something like that is parallel to our moral development.  Unless we have that moral development, we cannot unfold the higher spiritual faculties.

            In the 14^th Century there was a German mystic named Meister Eckhart.   There is a quote that I am very fond of and that I use whenever I can.  He says that one does not see God with the same eye with which one sees a cow.  We have to change and we have to change our consciousness quite radically if we want to see and understand the spiritual worlds.  Anyone who has had even a small waking glimpse of the spiritual worlds and sees how much there is there and how chaotic it all is realizes that it really is something that is disorienting and something that is chaotic.  It takes a long time for a person to become useful as a clairvoyant, because for a long time one is very distorted in his consciousness.

            So, this sounds like a lawless talk.  Eventually we’ll get to saying some things.  Lack of ethical and moral character is the primary impediment to spiritual development.  I can’t say it any clearer, any more straightforward than that.  Without it, we are likely to egregious errors, destructive errors, because we must remember we’re always looking through our own psychology. 

            When you have inner vision and your inner psychology is not clear and you do not know yourself well you see in other people what is really in yourself.  The phenomenon that psychologists call projection is more than just a psychological activity; it is actually part of the perceptive activity.  People talk about seeing things in other people’s auras that are really within their own.

            In this whole matter, Christian mysticism agrees with orthodox Chrisitanity in the basic statement that humanity is in a fallen state.  It doesn’t take much of a glance of looking into the world to see that purely human contributions to the environment around us are terribly ugly and they’re terribly destructive and it’s clear that we violate a lot of delicate balances of nature.  These are all indicative of our fallen state.  We’ve fallen out of harmony with the laws and principles that govern our cosmos.  It isn’t a matter of how intelligent we are.  It isn’t a matter of how well educated we are.  It’s a matter that we don’t have the morality and ethics to respect other things in the cosmos.

            Every advanced being that has come to help us has said exactly the same thing.  If we look at the lives of Christ or the life of Buddha they could have taught us science; they could have taught us food production; they had that kind of consciousness, but what they all focused on was loving one another and being more compassionate toward one another and caring about each other.  If great conscious beings like that look at our life in this way, it seems to be a pretty good indication that it is imperative to us to have that kind of consciousness.  We have to take it to heart and we have to strive for moral perfection.  In order to achieve things in that, it’s supplanting egoism with altruism.  Our thoughts and our desire are very self-centered, and they are selfishly self-centered.  In order for us to have a grand macrocosmic understanding of the world around us we have to have a moral consciousness that is altruistic, so as we approach the Aquarian Age, if we want to be able to be the most that we can for the benefit of people and for the whole ongoing evolution and to do the least destruction, it is important that we work toward altruism.  (This is the end of the introduction)

            A lot of what is going to be said in what follows is far-fetched and some of it even seems fantastic.  It isn’t important that you believe in it.  What is important is that you can treat it as a story, as long as you get the moral of the story.  All right, let’s go into the first thought on altruism.

            When I was born the Sun was in the tropical sign, Scorpio and Scorpio represents the creative force that is involved with generation, but because of our fallen state it often has to do with regeneration—regeneration in the midst of destruction and elimination and those are all keywords for Scorpio.  Now, in the mid-1960’s I lived in Southern California, and when I had free time I used to hang out with the folkies, sometimes in Mission Beach and sometimes in Ocean Beach.  I had a dear friend who was a folk comedian from a little town outside of Farmington called Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Those are actually lines from one of his songs.  He was a Scorpio also, and he practiced elimination and creation in a different way.  He used to write most of his songs while he was sitting on the toilet.  At the same time he was eliminating something, he was open to bringing something new in, something creative.

            Myself, I have been a little bit more extremist and a little bit more radical.  During most of my life I have been a rebel to the core of my being.  I rebelled against every authority and I rebelled against everything until I was an atheist.  And I remained an atheist until I had experiences that proved that I couldn’t be an atheist any more.  Now the bad part of this is I didn’t get a very good education because I was always fighting against getting educated.  But, the good part of it was that I didn’t take everything of my education hook, line, and sinker.  All of the people that took it all in and accepted it all and fed it all back as good students basically fell asleep.  If it wasn’t for my rebellion, I probably would have fallen asleep also, but rebelling and rebelling until I came into things that I couldn’t rebel against is where I was able to finally get into the kind of life that I find myself in now.   So, when we approach new things, as we are trying to approach altruism, we have to be careful that we don’t look at them in terms of the old, because the old is authority.  The old is ruled by Capricorn and Saturn, and that is the planet that likes authority.  We have to look at new things all as themselves alone, and not with regard to the old. 

            I had an experience with that on one of the very first times I went across the border into Mexico.  I tasted a mango, and not knowing what a mango was, I didn’t know how to describe it to people.  I made the fatal mistake of trying to describe the mango in terms of things that I already knew.  It was clever enough, but it really wasn’t fair to the mango.  I said that a mango was a peach that had gone to heaven.  But, really a mango is a mango and it should be seen for itself.  So, we must not rely on the past, but look at things new.

            In looking at altruism, we have to be careful and not relate it to other things in the same way that I related a mango to peaches.

            The first thought on altruism, is that altruism is not universal brotherhood, and universal brotherhood is not altruism.  In the astrological mandala which is the horoscope for all of society, brotherhood and altruism are ruled by two different signs and houses.  Brotherhood is ruled by Gemini and the third house.  Altruism is ruled by Aquarius and the eleventh house.  Though there are parallels between the two of them and similarities between the two, they are two very different things.  Both are lofty ideals and both of them help people to live harmoniously with each other.  But the function of how they operate and why they operate as they operate is very different.   Each of them uses a different idea.

            We don’t have time to be exhaustive about comparing Gemini to Aquarius, but we can look at a few little things.  Gemini is utilitarian.  Gemini does practical things.  Usually it is a reciprocal utilitarianism.  The function of brotherhoods is to help each other.  The principle is usually mercantile in most brotherhoods.  It is based on a principle that we have in folk knowledge where we say, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”  There is always a personal benefit and there’s a mutual interdependence when you have brotherhood, and that is an internal necessity.

            The best internal necessity of reciprocity ruled by Gemini is the lungs.  We have to breathe out in order to breathe in and that reciprocity of in-breathing and out-breathing is absolutely necessary in keeping us alive.   Now, in the human microcosm and in the divine macrocosm it is also a necessary principle.  But, it is more a principle that applies to this world than applies to the other world.  When we’re speaking about the other world, Christ says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”  Neither is the kingdom of altruism which is associated with Aquarius.

            The whole feeling of Aquarius is other-worldly.  In horoscopes where there is a lot of Aquarian influence, there is often a desire to go flying off into the spiritual worlds and not come back, if possible, and there’s always some kind of a drive to altruism.  There is a quest for freedom.  Each of the succedent houses has to do with a different kind of freedom.   The second house has to do with financial freedom.  If you have money you can travel or buy things you want, and you’re free in a financial way.

            The fifth house represents freedom of expression.  A person who can’t pour out his thoughts or his feelings is a person who is in prison in his own being.  And so in the fifth house we have the whole quality of freedom of expression.

            The eighth house is a Scorpionic kind of freedom.  It is a freedom from things.  You get rid of things.  You get rid of them, especially if you’re a Mafioso kind of eighth house person.  You can be free of that person who is your enemy, because you have eliminated him.  So, when you talk to a Scorpio person who doesn’t have the whole horoscope in their being, they say, I want to be rid of that or I want to be free from that.  I want to be my own person away from all that.

            The last succedent house is the eleventh house which is associated with Aquarius, and that is pure freedom.  It doesn’t make any difference whether you own things or don’t own things.  A person who has true freedom is like Aquarius which is an airy sign; it is suspended within the possessions that it has.  It doesn’t have to be me that is expressing; it is someone who is free to express, and not only to express in a personal way, but to express in a universal way.    One doesn’t have to eliminate something.  If you have infinite love with altruism you don’t have to eliminate something to be free from it.  You’re free in yourself.  Yes, you can go flying off into those inner worlds, but you’re basically free inside of yourself.

            Friendship, which is another name for altruism, is offended by pragmatism.  We help our friends, and we call on our friends for help, but the relationship is not based on pragmatism.  If it’s based on pragmatism, it isn’t friendship.  Altruistic love is given freely.  If it isn’t given freely it isn’t altruistic love.  In this regard, altruism is almost impossibly other-worldly.

            The eleventh house is the house of utopianism.  Utopianism is a word that was coined by Plato that means “nowhere,” and Plato was one of those Aquarians that was other-worldly.    By utopianism we mean something that is done for its own sake.  Art for art’s sake or doing good for the sake of doing good.  All of the do-good organizations like the temperance union and all of those are Aquarian organizations.  I had a very good friend named Daisy Lamberti and she belonged to so many of those organizations it was unbelievable.  So, we can see that there is something in the principle of Aquarius and altruism that lifts us up above pragmatism.  This is not to say that pragmatism is bad.  This world is important and functioning well in this world is necessary before we can move into the inner worlds.  But the simple fact is that there’s something about Aquarius and altruism that is other-worldly.

            Now one of the key points in this is that with Aquarius and altruism we have the opportunity of being self-forgetting.  That’s what we learn in friendship.  We forget about ourselves for the sake of our friends.  As we said, this is actually the Leo talk, and let’s talk about something that is very Leonine that both Plato and Gurdjieff loved to talk about that was from the opposite sign, Leo and that is: self-remembering.   Plato is very much misunderstood, especially among the academics.  They miss all of the mysticism in Plato and even some of the Platonists miss some of the mysticism in Plato.  There are loads of things in Plato to be harvested in terms of mysticism.

            Plato had the doctrine that all education was remembering, and since he does talk about past rebirths in other times, the scholars believe that he’s saying that all education is remembering something that you learned in a past life.  It’s an outlook that has to be fallacious, because if you only know the things from your past life then you wouldn’t learn anything new in this life.  The idea that education is remembering is misunderstood.  Plato’s theory of education is given in a dialogue called the Meno and in the Meno Socrates takes a young boy, probably a youth, a teenager, and he carries him through a proof of a geometric theorem that the boy never knew.  And the boy gets the theorem right.  He hadn’t studied the geometry, but what happens is, at every step of the proof of the theorem, Plato asks the young man, “What do you feel about this or does this seem true to you?”

            He is asking the young man to remember himself; remember himself, in the sense of the intuitive understanding or the intuitive apperception of truth.  That is the way it works.  If you look at the example very clearly, I don’t know how the scholars can take it the way that they do.  We’re talking about the paradox here of Leo and Aquarius.  We’re talking about being self-forgetting.  Some people would love to be self-forgetting.  They would like to forget all of the lower-self consciousness where they have all of their neuroses and things like that, but we’re talking about a different kind of self forgetting.  We’re talking about even self forgetting of the higher transcendental self.  We’re forgetting our divine Self to something that is beyond Self.  That’s something that we’re going to come back to in a little bit.  We’re going to have to come back to where we are now.  This lecture is choppy, doesn’t flow smoothly.

            Now, let’s come to the strange other-worldly way of Aquarius.  Scripture tells us that the ways of God are strange to the ways of men.  We’ve seen a little bit of that when comparing altruism to brotherhood.  It’s a kind of other-worldliness that is so strange that it can’t really relate to this world.  It’s refreshingly and radically different than the attitudes of this world.  In this world we have another statement that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and dogs don’t even eat each other, but that’s the kind of worldly attitude we have, and we’re talking about trying to get to altruism, because we all want to be altruistic.  We want to be loving, because if we are completely loving, we are completely working in harmony with things.    We have the intuition that comes along with altruism to be completely in harmony with things.

            The point we’re trying to make at this juncture is that we cannot practice altruism with knowledge.  We cannot practice altruism in the same way we practice a piano, and I doubt that there could even be a school for altruism.   We just can’t make ourselves love that way.  What we use to try to practice is the thing that needs to be changed, and the lesser cannot change the greater is what I’m trying to say here, I guess.  It seems that if we want to be altruistic we have to practice something that is necessary for altruism but that isn’t necessarily altruism itself.  We have to make our character amenable to altruism.  We have to practice developing our character so that it is a character through which altruism can and wants to be expressed.

            We’re talking about our character, ……..personality as it runs parallel to the Aquarian ideal of altruism.  Transcendental parallelism is not always a one-for-one thing and it’s not always easy to understand.  When we’re trying to understand altruism, we have to go all the way back to Meister Eckhart and say that we can’t see God with the same eye that we see a cow.  It’s the same idea that comes back to us again and again.  To apperceive or to experience altruism we have to forget a lot more than self and we have to remember something else, just as the boy, Meno, represented something else.

            Now, probably everybody in this room has had some small experience of altruism and everybody in this room has a sense of what altruism is like.  Those who have had a fully conscious waking experience of the source of altruism, no matter what their religion, no matter what their culture; they all claim that it is from the realms of pure spirit.  This means that it is beyond anything phenomenal.  Physical things, vital and energetic things, emotional and feeling things, thoughts, ideas, and even the idea of Self; none of those reach the realms of altruism.  Pure spirit just is.  It is and it is sufficient unto itself.  It subsists within its own being beyond definitive conception.  It can’t be conceptualized.  It is even beyond the idea or the concept that is God.  Spirit is, but God is an idea.  It is a living idea and it is an important idea as a focus for spirit but is not the same thing as spirit.

            God is an idea in the region of ideational or abstract thought.  We can point in the direction of the realms of pure spirit, but we can’t speak of it directly because it’s ineffable.  Anyone who has ever experienced the realms of pure spirit says the same thing.  They are only pointing, because what the experience is, cannot be said in words.

            Proceeding from these limited concrete realms upward into the realms of spirit, the first realm of pure spirit is called “life spirit.”  In street language it’s called Christ consciousness.  In the Orient it is called the “Buddhic plane,” and the Northern Buddhists call it “the void,” because it’s void of any kind of condition or of any kind of relationship or any kind of conceptualization, which is what we just said.  We’re very strict about that.   The Zen Buddhists call it the “not self” using the negative to point to something that is positive that is beyond words or that is beyond concrete manifestation.

            Now, each of these views about life spirit is important to understanding altruism.  We don’t have time to go into all of them, so we will just follow what seems to be right for a short talk like this which may end up being two hours.   I’m laughing because I can laugh.  You have to sit in the chairs for two hours!

            Some Christian mystics call the life spirit the “beyond self.”  It doesn’t matter what we call it provided we can experience it and provided we can live it into existence.  However, this name, “beyond self” points where we want to go with understanding the realm and living altruism, and that is self-watching.  There are different kinds of self-watching.  It’s a difficult thing, because there are different ways it can be accomplished and you can come at it from totally different perspectives.  You can come at it from the perspective of personality, or you can come at it from the perspective of beyond self.  It’s so difficult that Max Heindel, the founder of The Rosicrucian Fellowship, used to talk about and love to quote the Scotch poet, Bobby Burns.  “Oh that God the gift would give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”  That’s one kind of self-watching.  That is an impersonal, external self-watching.  Other people can discern our behavior, because they don’t have anything at stake in it, and they can see what we are which we lie to ourselves and say we aren’t.  Or we are unaware of seeing it in ourselves where we take ourselves for granted. 

             Normally, we come to self consciousness through a process of transcendence.  The process of coming to self consciousness through transcendence is through concentrated thinking.  When the general will of the three-fold spirit that is focused through the self is fully activated in the process of thinking it becomes enlivened.  In the process of thinking it becomes aware of itself as the thinker.  Arriving at self-consciousness, which on the street is known as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, in that way is a matter of concentrating very, very deeply and thinking very deeply and becoming aware of oneself as “the thinker” and then transferring the attention from the thought to the thinker.  That is what is called “meditation.”  It is knowing oneself in a transcendental way.  But it is possible to transcend that.  Instead of coming to know yourself by watching your thinking and then watching you watch your thinking, you can transcend self and you can contemplate Self.  These words are pretty universal through all kinds of religions.

            So, we want to get at contemplation of Self, which means transcending self to that which is beyond self.  It should be mentioned at this point that transcending self into contemplation does not mean destroying or dissolving the Self, which would be a dangerous and blasphemous notion.  After these many millions and millions of years that we have developed the Self, the thought that we should destroy it as soon as we know we have it is utterly blasphemous; it’s like saying that the divine beings that brought us to this in creation were fooling us all along and giving us something to throw away.  So, we want to get to transcending self without destroying it.

            When one transcends self, one transcends to a state of pure spirit which in Christian mysticism is called “life spirit.”  Now this is the realm of pure truth.  The realm of ideas where the self is found is where truths are – where all of the different concepts or laws of nature are, but when we transcend that to pure truth we have the pure light of truth that is unconditioned.  It is the source of the Self which is an idea, so in this regard the realm of life spirit is a realm of selfness.  It is the stuff out of which Self is made.  Now, being so singular and being so unconditioned and unconditional it is unified.  That unity of it all that holds it together as one is Love.  It is Love with a capital “L.”  Hence, this is the realm of altruism.

            When we transcend self to the level of contemplation wherein we can contemplate Self, which is probably the best way to do it, because it is sort of an anchor to us, when we transcend to this level of being, we are in the realm of altruism out of which all selves are created.  There is no possible way that you cannot love everything that is in existence.  You just love.  That’s what the nature of it is.  Each of us, if we penetrate deeply enough into our own nature and beyond the conception that we have of ourselves, which is a divine conception (if we get beyond that), we have this Love.  It is Love for everything, and that is the source of altruism.

            Altruism is an experience.   It isn’t a practice.  This is a pretty abstract presentation, so I’ll try to give you a picture.  You have to be careful when you make these kinds of pictures.  They’re very dangerous, because sometimes people think that the metaphor, or the poetic image, or the picture is the reality.  In this case it comes very close to being the reality.  In the Old Testament in the exodus, Jehovah, who is the Holy Spirit, who is sort of the cosmic Self, the central Self, or everything in manifestation, when the people are passing out of Atlantis and into the promised land, Jehovah is pictured at night as a whirlpool pillar of fire and in the daytime as a whirlpool pillar of smoke.

            If we look at another place, Elijah, when he saw God, was carried up in a whirlwind which is a vertical spiral.  The ancient sophists thought at one time that the form of God was the spiral, which caused Aristophenes to make fun of it in a play he attributed to Socrates (which is an incorrect attribution) that God is a spiral.  In a way it’s true and in a way it isn’t true.  The form that spirit takes in manifestation usually is a spiral of some kind.  Whether it is the spiral of a spiral galaxy or the spiral of the DNA molecule, they are all expressions of manifestations within a very fluidic spirit.

            This stuff is not very fluidic and as a consequence we have great misunderstandings of the nature of what things really are.  Now, let’s look at the image.  If we think of an ocean that has no top or bottom, it’s just ocean, and within that ocean there is an eddy, a whirlpool, an empty something or other.  That empty something or other, that vacuum within the almost solid but fluidic continuity of spirit is, Self.  

            Our conception of Self, our outlook, is like looking at the whirlpool.  The process of understanding life spirit and having the contemplative experience and the experience of altruism is a transfer of consciousness from the emptiness of the eddy to the fullness of the ocean.  It’s a very, very beautiful image.

            Different people have different names for it.  In the Orient, for example, where the Hindus call the knowledge of Self the whirlpool (they don’t use “the whirlpool” at least not to my knowledge) they call that “…….”  It is associated with Neptune, the kind of intuition that is knowing, and the other kind of experience, the experience in the life spirit is called “…….” from the same root as “nirvana.”

            Now, how does this apply to our lives?   The biblical Christ tells us to love our neighbor as our self and that’s a very different thing than doing unto others as you would have others do unto you.  Your neighbor is yourself.  That is a representation of the transference of consciousness from thinking about or loving yourself; instead loving your neighbor.  When you see the world through the eyes of the love of your neighbor; it’s like transferring from the whirlpool to the ocean.  One drop of the ocean is like the whole ocean, so once you experience one drop or one experience of the ocean of altruism you know the whole business.

            The beautiful thing about it is, if we can do this we’re completely free of egoism.  And we don’t absolve our self of any responsibilities.  We still have the eddy, we still have the responsibility, the whirlpool, and we still have things to carry out, but now we can carry them out with a full understanding of purpose.  If there is anything about the realm of life spirit, about the altruism of that realm, it’s that it is purposeful.  The people that we admire and the people that we stand in awe of are people who have purpose.  It is because they have an inkling or they have the beginning of that kind of experience of that kind of purpose. 

            We’re talking about an indivisible unity, and any division is only an apparent division just as the eddy is an apparency.  One way of looking at this is a little different than what the famous writer Gertrude Stein said.  Gertrude Stein said,” I am because my cat loves me.”  This is like saying” I am because you are love.”

  It’s a realization that the love of the other is the only way that the definition of Self can be found.   We have it in another sense.  Again, in the Platonistic sense said much better by the biblical Christ, “This do in remembrance of me.”  It is remembering that intuition of truth, and it is remembering that we can Love and we can often Love just by taking memory of the capability of loving.  It’s completely spontaneous.  There is no practice.  One Loves and the Love is unconditioned and it is unconditional.  There isn’t the strain that there is when there is self, or even worse, personal ego.  All kinds of strain is why Christ, speaking of this state says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”   So, we can see that if we can penetrate to the experience of altruistic Love, we can be altruistic.  But, we can’t practice altruism.

            Obviously, some of these things are exceedingly difficult to understand with our mundane consciousness.  We’re only at the beginning of waking up objective self consciousness.  Things of the spirit exist in themselves.  The Old Testament says, I am that I am.  It sounds awfully arbitrary, but it’s really a statement of reality.  Transcendent spiritual experience may seem overwhelming, but it’s whole, and that kind of consciousness is very different than our consciousness here which is always in part.  Even our most abstract consciousness and the most abstract symbolical logic is in part.  It’s not in whole.  It’s so much that the spiritual philosophies of ancient times who were thinking of wholes thought that the spirit did not grow.   This is very different from modern Western spiritual philosophy.  All spiritual philosophies talk about awakening to spirit.  And all of them speak about unfolding potentials within spirit.  But modern spiritual philosophies find that there is soul growth and through soul growth there is spiritual growth.  When we’re talking about growth in this regard, we’re talking not about extensive growth the way a tree grows.  We’re talking about intensive growth of something that grows more within itself and through itself, and if you want to say it in that paradoxical way, it becomes more of itself.

            There are no limits to internal intensive growth.  All of the attributes of the spirit always remain whole in the entire process of it.  This has turned out to be a much more difficult talk than I thought it would.  We’re not even halfway yet, so….we have to relate to mundane analogies,   We have to reverse the natural law of analogy which goes as above, so below.  We’ll have to go from so below to as above.  If we create something, we create on the basis of intuition and intuition is a divine creative experience.  In that divine creative experience, the realization of creativity comes from what is called Uranian intuition.  Uranus rules Aquarius and points to life spirit.

            Robert Frost says, with regard to creation, (another one of my very favorite statements, because it applies to so many things) “If there are no surprises for the poet, there will be no surprises for the reader.”

             What we are participating in is a creation.  A creation is the manifestation of a creative dream, or a creative scheme that some people call an evolutionary scheme.  It’s not just an evolution; it’s a creation.  There is new experience, completely new experience – a new experience within the infinite potential of the absolute.  It’s not rote, it’s not repetitive, and it’s not the same old—same old for the creative spirit.  It has to be new and creative for the creator for it to be new and creative for those who are experiencing it.  Looking at it another way, even though the world of spirit is very different than the material world, and the laws of logic and the ways of understanding are very different,  it’s completely impossible that there could be new experiences and new creations without there being the same for the creator.               

          There is a danger in this that happens to a lot of artists.  They make more of their creations than they merit and as a result they close off the creative fountain.  Now, this is a very enormous topic, and we’re only going to speak about a minute fraction of it as it applies to altruism only.  We are trying to understand how the creative dream or the scheme of evolution is made real and why it isn’t just a dream – and to understand our part in it, because we are a very important part in it.  It is through us in microcosm, that the matter, which is the seeming unreality, which is the dream and the stuff of the dream, has to be spiritualized.  It has to be made real in the spirit, because reality is in the spirit.  There is what is called, or could be called, the law of service.  Each of us is a miniature, a microcosm, of the grand creation and each of us, in our own way, fills out the entire creation.  But, because the greater macrocosmic dream was shared with us, it gets the feedback from all of these milliards and milliards of dreams from the different participants