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Dear friends,

“And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” John 20:26-29.

Max Heindel tells us clearly that the body is a tool of spirit. In fact he calls it “an irresponsible tool” in his discussion of the Lord’s Prayer at this link: http://www.rosicrucian.com/zineen/magen213.htm

This is Mr. Heindel’s way of telling us that the body is not responsible for being sick. Spirit cannot be sick either, nor can it be a cause of sickness being perfect. Spirit is the source of healing, and that is why healing prayer works. So where is the source of sickness?

What is the role of mind? Christ Jesus demonstrated to Thomas that His body could materialize at any time at the direction of His mind. Shut doors are no barrier for such a body. A few days before He spoke with Thomas and other disciples, Jesus had been crucified. He showed little concern for his impending death knowing that the body was not real and He could not die. His true reality could not be harmed in any way by the crucifixion. He was crucified because He spoke the truth and people in his time were not willing to hear it. He said such things as “the Son of Man has the power to forgive sins.” That means that we have the power to forgive sins. His statements like these provoked an angry response because people felt their beliefs were being threatened.

The Rosicrucian Teachings tell us that we too can use a body similar to the one Jesus appeared in, called the Soul body or etheric body, to serve as invisible helpers to join in healing work while asleep.

Healing is not of the body. It works on what is really sick, and that is the mind. We know that the body as most people think of it does not exist. Mr. Heindel says it changes constantly. He learned clairvoyantly what was learned decades later through physics research. The body is held together by an archetype in the mind.  When something goes wrong with the archetype, it results in sickness. Healing also begins with the archetype. However, we do not work directly with that archetype. That is why we appeal to Christ, and in that appeal He corrects the archetype, and when it is appropriate healing will result.

We have been asked why sometimes healing does not appear to work. Isn’t Christ all powerful and able to work miracles at any time? Yes, He is, and yes, He can. However, He also has a total picture of what is best for everyone. That means that sometimes a person will have to live out “ripe destiny” and experience the illness fully. It may be that one person experiences an illness so that another person can learn a necessary lesson in life. We may never know the reason, but Christ knows it perfectly.

Sickness is experienced when the mind tries to use the body in inappropriate ways. Healing is received when the mind accepts and expresses its true purpose in the service of Christ. Healing prayer then begins with appealing to Christ and accepting the role of our minds as channels for Christ and the Invisible Helpers in the healing work.

Thank you for opening your mind to Christ to join in the healing work.
 
Peace,

John

Tags: archetype, Saint Thomas, The Body

Quick and Easy Breakfast Burrito

 2 servings

 

Eggs are the perfect solution for a casual Easter brunch.  They are seasonally abundant, nourishing, and versatile.  Not just for breakfast or brunch, they can be the main feature of any meal. 

2             flour tortillas (about 8 inches in diameter)

4             large eggs

2             tablespoons milk

2             tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped

2             tablespoons butter

1/3         cup chopped, sweet onions

1/2         ripe avocado, pitted, peeled, and diced

2/3         cup grated Pepper Jack cheese

salt and pepper

cilantro for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350° F and turn it off.  Place the tortillas in a baking pan and warm them in the preheated oven.

In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, salt and pepper, and cilantro.  Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat and sauté the onions briefly.  Add the eggs and cook, stirring, until almost set.  Add the avocado and cook until eggs are firm.

Spoon the eggs down the center of each tortilla and top with the cheese.  Wrap and place each tortilla, seam-side down, in the covered baking pan.   Return them to the warm oven to steam and hold for up to 1/2 hour until time to serve.   

Garnish with cilantro and serve with salsa. 

The steaming interval in the oven improves the texture and flavor.  The Pepper Jack cheese adds a delicate zestiness.  Other optional ingredients: olives, rice, beans, bell peppers.  For less cholesterol, use rice milk, fewer yolks and more whites, olive oil instead of butter.

Tags: breakfast burritos, Easter brunch

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

Transitioning Into the Aquarian Age

Lecture 13a of 25 by [R]

Science, Technology and the Aquarian Age

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]

Tags: aquarius, Aries, Technology

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age 

Lecture 13b of 25 by [R]

 Regeneration and the Aquarian Age

            Because the fundamental understandings have been skewed by the Satanic and Luciferic taint of commission and omission, there is a price to all of this.  The material blindness is Satanic in nature.  We think we can hide things, and the emergency with which we approach everything is Luciferic.   The whole idea that we can just rush forward and dispose – the whole idea of disposability instead of looking at things as cycles or spiral cycles in an integrated whole is a Luciferic idea.  I can just throw this beer can out the window; it doesn’t make any difference.  It’s that kind of attitude because there is not the realization of connectivity of everything in truth, of everyone in spirit—in life spirit. 

            We’ve come up with these kinds of outlooks and these are the things that we have to not allow ourselves to fall into if we want to progress forward.  So, we try to dispose of things, either enemies or insects or things like that.  We poison ourselves and we produce devices and we produce substances with big escapist tendencies.  It’s not only that we’re ashamed of the nudity and we try to cover it up with clothing or whateer other things you try to cover it up with – we try to escape from it with things like drugs and things of that nature.  So, we have the same misdirected illusions that the Lucifers intended for us.  We keep making more and more progress and buy sex and violence.  It’s all a Luciferic progress and the Lucifer spirits like that we don’t see things that clearly.  They like that we are skewed into materialism, because if we could see through all of that and recognize the unified truth to all things, the game would be up for them. 

            We would follow into those ways like, you know, food that has no nourishment.  You can eat and eat and eat and it may taste good, but there’s no nourishment to it, so it.  If we once see the unity, which is our duty to bring forth to people, that’s the end of that.  We have the misdirected illusions that we were intended to have.  Some of them are pretty subtle, but when you look at them they’re silly.  For example, technology, take television.  At one time people believed that all of the problems of the world would be solved by technology.  They believed, for example, that the dishonesty in politics would be solved by the television, because you could see a candidate on the television screen and you could know when he was lying.  It didn’t work; all it did was produce more sophisticated liars. 

            Now we think that communication is only facilitated by the internet and by cell phones, and we have all these people that are supposedly communicating with each other, but what they really are is they are very, very lonely, and they’re not saying anything significant to each other.  In fact I’ve never heard anyone jabbering over a cell phone that really told them that they love them.  There are all these people jabbering on the internet, and they think this is communication.  Do you tweet?  I don’t.  The whole idea is almost funny to me. 

            This isn’t saying that science or technology are bad or evil or anything like that, because to say that would be wrong.  It would be a sin worse than the first sin, because there would be no new actions.  And there would be no new soul power that would come out of those actions.  It’s not the science and technology per se, but how we go about science and technology.  What are our interactions with each other, and what is the integrity of our deeds?  That has to be within science and technology.  It’s easy to hide behind the computer screen and not be forthcoming about who you are and not be honest about all things.  All of these problems that we’ve just mentioned—pollution and things like that could be solved by technology.  There are ways, even, that we could destroy radioactive nuclear waste, but it always comes down to saying, “It would cost too much.”

            Well, if human life and having a concern for everything that’s living and evolving is dispensable, if it costs too much, where are our values?  If we’re lying to ourselves, if we have these wrong kinds of values and we’re told openly in St. Matthew – (in the Old Testament the sin against the Holy Ghost is implied as abuse of the sexual function), but it’s in Matthew’s Gospel that we’re told literally by the biblical Christ that the sin against the Holy Ghost is lying – at the other end of the spinal fire.  And so what we’re talking about is how the same creative principle, the same creative attitudes are not just merely the sexual things.  They are the lying and the false values that we have applied to spiritual energy too, which is the way the Lucifers gain experience, through our reveling in excitement and emergency.  That is how they grow and how they further their own evolution, at least for awhile.  

            Christ didn’t teach science and technology.  He could have, and he even declined anything in that direction.  In the Lemurian Epoch we jumped the gun with creativity and we got our entire nature out of balance.  We’re morally incapable, it seems, of abstaining.  We can’t abstain from things.  The imbalance is that our moral nature is out of harmony with the advancement of our intellectual and desire nature.  We build bombs that we can’t not use; we have all sorts of things, but we don’t seem to be working as hard on our moral and ethical development as we are in technical development. 

            We’re trying to talk about appropriate technology.  This applies to us as spiritual students, especially, because with our knowledge we’re capable of horrendous abuse.  This is why at the center of all our aspiration we have the exercises that help to purge us from all our moral and ethical deviations and to cleanse us from our desires whether they be commisive or omissive.   If we don’t heed any of these things, and if we don’t respect each other, like The Rosicrucian Fellowship, we can destroy each other over petty church politics rather than just thinking about loving as much as we can and working together however we can.  All right, that’s the end of the ranting and raving part.  There can only be so much of that.

            To repeat, our understandings now are reflective imitations.  However, not all of the reflections of the mandala come through the opposition aspect.  Some come through the principle of the sextile which is what we’re trying to get at.  The adjacent points on the two triangles are sextiles.  Sextiles indicate the reflective consciousness, but without the deadlocking opposition.  They are the reflections into a new element which means a new kind of experience and looking at things in a new way.  It gives you a bigger perspective and that perspective is a perspective that is closer to the perspective of the universal spirit. 

            There is a very broadening versatility in the sextile.  It introduces us to new things and it introduces us to new ways in a complementary manner.  There is a reflection, but a complementary reflection.  Moreover, since the sextile figure represents the macrocosm there is for us a broadening from the dark material perspective into the softer, more-illumined, spiritual perspective.  This is broadening and reflecting and expanding in the greatest sense, as when we talk of a great person or of a big man or a big woman.  We’ll come back to this in a minute, but we have to go on to something else.   

            Let’s return to “our part of the work,”  and that is the earth triangle pointing up.  Even here there is frustration for the speaker, because we haven’t even glanced at the surface of this subject, and we have to now move on to something else.  That’s one of the things with giving talks like this – you discover things.  It’s sort of like if you’re in Carlsbad Caverns or some place like that.  You walk along and suddenly discover that there’s as whole corridor down there of other places that you could go and they’re all wonderful and they have different things for the imagination to feast on.   Before passing on, let’s look at one other point that seems to be important. 

            Saturn is at the top of the earth triangle, and Saturn represents time, Capricorn.  To some extent we didn’t know time until we knew matter.  By matter we mean anything concrete.  Concrete worlds are the worlds of time.  The transcendent worlds, especially the transcendent worlds of pure spirit, are the realms of eternity.  It’s a funny thing that all of our time is measured in terms of space and matter, so there is an inseparable relationship of time with space and matter.  Whereas a potential it is filled with spirit.   The other triangle points downward; it points to Cancer which represents space in a sense of a womb of the spirit.  We see a time/space in the vertical, the spirit/matter pole as the basis of the grand sextile as it appears in the standard position on the mandala.  The vertex, is, as we have seen, connected by an opposition.  There are oppositional paradoxes of both time and space; spirit and matter, intension and extension.

            Let’s look at a paradox in time.  That is in all of this because we jumped the gun, that is we committed, we followed the Luciferic marshal quality.  We jumped ahead of time and because of that it takes us longer.  It’s one of those ironies of time and space.  The opposition, as we said earlier, always gives the opposite of what we’d expect.  In this case it is so that when we jumped the gun we focused in a specializing way, in that Saturnine materialistic specializing way and we became ignorant to the greater cosmos and working in harmony with it and having healthy, positive cycles of experience.  Like science and technology, specialized, concentrated, material consciousness is not wrong, but it is the motivation, selfishness.  We were going to buy ourselves eternity, or so we thought with the part that was omitted.  We weren’t told about acting ad-harmoniously with what was going on which was basically an omission. 

            Let’s try to get at this in another way, and that means telling a story.   It’s a story from probably one of the best all-time story-tellers in history—someone who made up allegorical stories almost at the drop of a hat and they were beautifully conceived.  It is from Plato who is one of the best story-tellers, and this happens to be the allegory of the cave, which I’m sure most people are familiar with.  The story was told to people so that by analogy they could see just how blinded and be-rooted they were by materialism.  Now, Plato was oriental in some of his thinking in that he thought that matter was an illusion – not illusory, but he thought it was an illusion.  This was because he had deep spiritual experience and the nature of deep spiritual experience is that it has the character of being more real or feeling more real.  It’s the same way that a materialist believes that because you can stub your toe on a stone, this indicates true reality.  Someone like Plato who could see the universal ideas as they issued from the realm of pure truth which we would call the life spirit—because he had that he recognized that that was reality and comparatively speaking he thought that this world was illusion.  I hope he’s been cured of that by now but that’s…….even great people make great mistakes. 

            This is the story of people who are imprisoned in a cave and is something like this.  There are people that are chained to this wall, and all they could see was this wall.  This is the opening to the cave.  The light shines in and they think that light is only the reflected light on the cave wall.  They see people walking along up here and they take the shadows as the reality.  I don’t remember the story exactly.  I think somebody escapes.  He gets out and he sees the sun and he sees the sunlight and he comes back and tells them, and they don’t believe him. 

            They believe that these are the realities; that the shadows are the realities.  Something like that is what our consciousness has come to be like.  Ironically, materialistic philosopher, even those of great intelligence, don’t get the point when he’[s saying it.  This is a lovely allegory, but they’re taking it as a superstitious mystical view about what truth and reality are.  He was a great storyteller, but as great a storyteller as he was, he was biased by his own insight.  He didn’t like painting, for example.  He didn’t like painting because he thought these bodies of ours are like the shadows on the wall.  They are illusions and the real people can only be seen in spirit.  If someone makes a painting of someone else they’re making an illusion of an illusion.  From his way of thinking that’s true, but there’s so much more to art than that and there’s so much more to insight and seeing all of that, but of course he wasn’t too big on sensory experience, and sensory experience is exceedingly important.  So, as brilliant as he was and with as much insight as he had, he wasn’t perfect.  We all grow and we all get better. 

            I have a friend at the University of Iowa who is a molecular biologist.  He publishes, and publishes successfully, in experiments more than his colleagues do.   He tells them outright, I do this by intuition.  I have this positive attitude about their being an answer to things and the truth of things, and I intuitively know what experiments will work and what will prove to be positive. 

            We’re trying to get into Aquarius.  Saturn is punctilious.  It’s a data collector.  It’s an organizer.  It shares the realm of science with Uranus which is the intuitive insight person.  Saturn in Aquarius is the lower lightening stroke.  It’s the data master.  The higher lightening stroke is Uranus.  So, now we’re finally at Aquarius, however to get more deeply into Aquarius we have to again return to the mandala. 

            There are two ways that the double triangle can be placed on the cusps of the mandala.  In the same way that this is one configuration of the sextile, there is another which is like this.  We have looked at the one with the vertical.  It puts the vertexes of the interlocking triangles between the fire and earth signs.  When we look at the other one we are looking at the horizontal.  The first way we looked at it, it is centered on the solstices.  The second one where everything is centered on the horizontal is focused on the equinoxes and the cusps fall on the fire and air signs.  For Aquarius that means the adjacent points on the sextile or the double trine is on the cusps of Aries and Sagittarius. 

            This, believe it or not is the Aries talk, in that we’ve been focusing on building and deeds instead of faith and we’re talking about a life of action.  This certainly had a lot of bluster in it.  That’s what an Aries talk has to be about; it has to have some bluster and scolding and things like that.  I didn’t take anybody to task, because I don’t think that’s my place, but we talked about the bluster that builds up when the fiery Aries is restrained and held back by the mud of fire and water.  That’s why there had to be all of this scolding.  These talks are meant to be experiential.  They’re meant to put our consciousness into the sign that we’re looking at relative to Aquarius so that we can really feel the spiritual environment that we’re in. 

            We very rarely are aware of the spiritual effects, the astrological effects that surround us.  We know when we’re around somebody who’s angry, and sometimes we can feel that we’re with some really strange person.  Sometimes we can feel something like Christmas or Easter or something like that, but for the most part there are all kinds of changes happening every day, but they are so subtle that we miss them.  Then we wonder why we aren’t clairvoyant; it’s because we haven’t been in touch with the spiritual forces, so in these talks we’re trying to be cognizant of the nature of Aries or of the nature of Sagittarius as we give the talk.   

            The vertical pole is the hierarchical pole.  It is the pole of stratification, of elites, of hierarchy, and that’s just what we expect with water and earth and the watery children of water.  The horizontal orientation likes equality, especially the ultimate vertex. Zodiacally speaking, moving forward in the zodiac is Aquarius where there is parallelism and equality and altruism and everybody is everybody else’s friend.  Aries, like the grasshopper, does leap before it looks.  Aquarius leaps, but it suspends; it stays in heaven.  Aries does have first-hand experience, even if that experience is science, and it’s right at the frontier.  For Aries, everything has to be hands-on.  “I don’t want somebody telling me what the truth is; I want to experience it myself.”  Even if it’s preemptive and energy oriented more than oriented toward facts or things like that, it wants to be part of the cause – not part of the effect.  So, we already feel what it is like with the energetic, positive signs.  We can clearly get the idea of Aries and Aquarius in the idea of sublimation and rapid expansion which is explosion.  That combination of Aries/Aquarius: great fireworks lovers; they like that explosive kind of quality.   

            We don’t want to spend too much tie on these simple kinds of relationships, so let’s try to get something of a more universal understanding via the mandala or else this might become just a practical astrology talk.  The basic pole is the horizontal pole on the mandala.  It runs between Aries and Libra, and it shows the most basic horizontal relationships.  They are the “I” and “Thou” relationship.  It is the two of us together.  Aries in the Ascendant indicates a direct relationship with the world.  “Let me see for myself.”  Libra represents seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.  What kind of comfort; what does the other person need?

             So, it is a basic introduction to two ways of looking at the world, each of which is equally important.  Having my own opinion; having my own action; and seeing through other people.  The air is focused in Libra in the same way that the fire is focused in Aries.  It’s “other” oriented or some times it’s “culturally” oriented.  This otherness takes us outside of ourselves the same way that a friends in trouble can cause us to forget our own situation and lead us to do things of bravery that we would never do.  For the love of another, we do that. 

            Carried to the extreme, it is the ultimate otherness of the life spirit.  It is the selflessness or the definition of self in others—the universal other which is what the altruistic love is made of.  Ultimately, when the Aries doing things is through the airy signs and the reflectiveness of Aquarius is brought to its ultimate in that sextile relationship, it is literally doing something for the Christ’s sake.  This gives us the spirit of expansiveness that we have been looking for all night.    This cramping of the mud of water and earth; now we can see the sextile expansiveness. 

            Now let’s take that spirit of expansiveness and see how Adam’s apron of figs has evolved into expanded technology of our time so we can use them and use them to progress in our spiritual lives and progress the whole of the collective other. 

            Technology is here.  We cannot deny that fact.  There are potential downsides to that—potential negatives and there’s always when dealing with technology, the risk of falling into the hands of Lucifer if we are not aware of them.  We’re going to address only the positives, and we hope we’re not going to address the positives with Luciferic over-confidence.  We only have so much time left, so let’s spend it looking at things more positive than what we have been looking at. 

            Adam and Eve were told that they would have to work by the sweat of their brows.  And we have.  And we’ve worked mightily and we’ve worked persistently.  We can even move mountains.  They do it in China; they cut mountains down with chain saws.  Did you know that and that’s how they pave a lot of their highways?  They do it with motor scooters and chainsaws.  They cut out blocks and they have a continuous run of motor scooters going back and forth, each with a block on the back, and that’s the way they pave a lot of their highways. 

            Fortunately, in doing all of this work we have become wiser.  We even use laziness, which is the reflection of overweening egoism.  We have used that to make our lives better; we have more and more technology and less grunt labor.  Now, some things like processed food isn’t very good, but a lot of things of technology are.  In the process of developing technology we used to learn how to carry something from the very beginning to the end.  That developed self-reliance in us, an artisanship.  But, lest we become too self-oriented, we needed to share technology with everyone. 

            Mass production came along, and some people think that the idea of mass-production is demeaning or impersonal, because one thing specializes in one thing.  There’s a positive side to mass production and that is – if you carry something all the way from beginning to end by yourself, there’s a certain amount of pride in craftsmanship and the ability to do the things, but if you have to rely on someone else to do their job, that’s opening to the Aquarian type of consciousness.  So, even in things like assembly lines, we’re learning to trust other people. 

            It’s a sign of a self-made person, somebody who’s a rugged individualist who has to always be on top of everything and do things only his way and doesn’t trust other people.  Robotics will probably take things a step further and nanotechnology will carry things even further.  But with the technology we have to learn to shift our consciousness according to what we have learned by the technology rather than becoming the prisoner of the technology itself. 

            The television is a wonderful thing, as is the computer.  You can get a very fine education through watching television or by working with the computer.  But, what happens is we can also put ourselves into that again, escaping from the nakedness, escaping into the fantasy world of television, and we are not going forward when we do something like that.  Probably the person who built the television or who designed or discovered it in the first place is the one who really gets the most out of the television, because that person understands the principle where the actors that put on the shows are getting something from the television. 

            What I’m trying to say here with regard to technology is we learn something from technology, but then we take that information or experience that we gain from technology and we internalize it or spiritualize it.  This is what the spiritualization of matter is all about.  We’re going to have more and more idleness, and right now the tendency is to escape from idleness into indulgence and entertainment.  In terms of salary, entertainment figures are extremely high paid.  Athletes, singers, people who entertain us (And they can’t entertain us for very long because we get bored quickly.)  Ultimately, something outside of ourselves can’t entertain us.  The thing is, if we work with the spiritualization of matter, what we learn from technology and from technological experiences, even cultural experiences, we internalize that, and we live that in our consciousness.

            Ultimately, our work is not going to be grunt work at all.  Our work is going to be in consciousness, because it is consciousness that is going to cause the mineral kingdom that we are now manipulating technologically to become plant-like.  You can’t do that through technology; you can only do that through consciousness.  So, the greater and greater amount of free time that we have will be spent more and more in inner work. 

            We should also apply what we learn from technology to our own consciousness.  What is happening is that we are removed; we have this notion that we are removed from nature and that we can do with it what we want—like poison it and then eventually poison ourselves, but in this removal we enter into empty abstraction..  This is not transcendence from nature; this is an escape from nature which is again one of those things of escaping through illusion. 

            Through technology we can build photo-multiplier tubes that are so accurate they can sense one photon!  But all of the perception is being externalized.  It’s all being done by the machines, which is good for the machines, but at the same time we should ourselves be extending, not leaving it all to technology.  We should be extending our own observations, out own faculties so that we not only see things by the light reflected off of them, but that we see through them, so what we learn or accomplish through technology is again something that we should find inside of ourselves. 

            There is nothing that we can find in the world outside of us that is not inside of us.  If we are only fulfilling one side of the equation it doesn’t make any sense.  We need to be internal to the degree that we are external.  A lot of things in society, using technology, are forcing us into spiritual awakeness – like is happening right now with the credit card crisis.  You had to have a certain kind of consciousness to barter.  You had to see whether that item looked good and whether your item that you were going to trade was, you know, a worthy deal.  But you can’t do everything by bartering.  That’s, again, trying to do without any technological advance at all. 

            So, we invented currency – coins and paper, and it was something that represented something else.  It was artificial; it was symbolic.  Again, you can make mistakes with that, and you can print all kinds of money and then you run into inflation, but now by technology, value has become something completely invisible.  When you put a credit card down, you can’t see what you’re worth.  Now, it’s true they do all of this data mining.  They know everything of your buying history and they know what you want and what you don’t want, and they have a really good insight into your psychology so that they can sell you more. 

            There’s nothing wrong with that; they’re taking advantage of people with that but, think of it.  By the time the Aquarian Age is over we’re all going to have clairvoyance and none of us is going to have any secrets so that you can see that technology – even many of the things that we don’t like are things that are advancing us toward Aquarian consciousness.  If you don’t have any secrets to protect; if you don’t put your fig-leaf apron on, you’re open for the world to see.  You see, technology is not a bad thing, and it is through technology that we are going to advance.  

            The final point we want to make is that technology has to be in proportion.  It has to be something that is not with that Mars attitude that we can do whatever we want and that we become techno-crazy and not responsible.  We need to be self-forbearant.  We need to develop technology that is good for everyone—that is good for everything and not just something that satisfies self-indulgence.  It would be silly to try and become Luddites and say that technology is going to go away and we can make it go away or something like that; that’s silly.  It’s more a matter of self-discipline. 

            You can have all kinds of temptations around you if you have inner strength, if you have inner values, if you have self-discipline, if you can control yourself and maintain yourself.  And it’s very good to be in an environment with all kids of temptations because you need to learn that.  There is an individual personal thing and that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the cusp of Aries being sextile to the cusp of Aquarius.  We’re talking about individual responsibility.  We’re not talking about inaction; we’re talking about action in which a person is completely self-conscious of what the result of his actions will be with regard to the whole. 

            That’s a very important thing, and this is why I think as far as the Aquarian Age is concerned, the appropriate technology has as its slogan what I think is the perfect kind of slogan.  It says, “Think globally (which is Aquarius), but act locally.” (locally right within your own being, which is Aries, the personality.)   So, we can do wondrous transformations.  We’re even going to have to do (in order to clean up the mess that we’ve made so that things can go on), we’re going to have to do some wondrous things.  So, instead of being Aries-like in having technology be a fad, it can be translated into creative novelty.  Creativity novelty as when in the Book of Revelation, the being that is to represent Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]

Tags: aquarius, Aries, Technology

“TO LOVE AND BE LOVED IS TO FEEL THE SUN FROM BOTH SIDES.”

David Viscott

International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day on the 8th of March every year is a major day of global celebration of women. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women’s economic, political and social achievements. [Wikipedia]

 

On Tuesday, March 9, you may call (712) 451-6025, Access Code: 579887#  

6:30 pm Eastern Time 

to join Ed and Edie for the Rosicrucian Fellowship Healing Service.

(See the article below for Ed and Edie’s story)

Tags: International Women's Day, Love

Dear friends,

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18.

“… and (Jesus) said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

… And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?

She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. ” John 8:7-12.

            Can love contain strife? Perfect love, by definition, cannot contain strife or it would not be perfect. Yet we experience both love and strife in our lives. How do we realize the perfect love to which Jesus bore witness?

            Jesus demonstrated perfect love when he waited after making the statement to those who desired to stone the woman caught in adultery. At that time he did nothing to any of them except extend God’s love through his mind to all of them. These men wanted to kill her because of their own temptations and resulting feelings of guilt. Each of them in turn realized that strife (stoning the woman) would not remove the sin from their own minds. Each dropped his stone and gave up his misdirected attempt to correct his own mind by murdering another.

            Jesus’ message to us is “perfect love casts out fear.” Fear is at the root of anger and strife. If we did not feel threatened in some way, we would have no desire for strife.

            Healing prayer is most effective when strife is absent from our minds, at least temporarily. How do we set aside unpleasant thoughts in our minds? Merely by allowing Christ to enter our minds and remove all thoughts that are incompatible with perfect love. Christ is eagerly waiting for us to open our minds to perfect love. Once we do that we are able to extend that love to those on the healing prayer list that have requested our help.

            When our minds are open to perfect love, we become with Christ Jesus “the light of the world” to those in need of healing. We then cast fear out of our own minds rather than cast stones at others.

            Thank you for your willingness to serve as a channel for perfect love through healing prayer.

 

Peace,

 John

Tags: Perfect Love

You are welcome to join in a live Healing Service by conference call.

The Detroit Study Group Devotional Services Conference Call

Rosicrucian Fellowship Healing Service will be held on the regular healing dates.
To participate, call the following telephone number and access code:

(712) 451-6025, Access Code: 579887#   (see below for more information)

EST: 6:30 PM and EDT: 7:30 PM  

We recommend that you call in 5 – 10 minutes before the Service begins.

Please Note: Since we will start on time we may cut off callers who are late so they will not interrupt the service. Please keep the above phone number and access code and use it with any phone that has long-distance service.

When the service begins please put your phone on “Mute” (*6) so the service can be read without being interrupted or disturbed with background noises.
If you want to view the text of the service online or download it, it can be found at the following address:
http://aimpurpose.blogspot.com/2008/10/healing-service.html

The healing dates can be found by clicking on Healing Dates under LINKS in the right-hand column of this blog page.

Eliz ? Ever since John H began talking about you doing the Healing Service by Conference call, I have been meaning to ask you, “How did this all come about?”

Ed ? I have been involved with a couple of other businesses using conference calls with a live database of distributors.  On one of our conferences, we were informed that we would be doing a local conference call with www.freeconferencecall.com  I was told to go to the internet and type in freeconferencecall.com and so I went there and set up an account and used it with other individuals that I was affiliated with, and it worked very well.  So, I had the bright idea to do the same thing for my local group for the Healing Service, especially, – and the Sunday Service and also anything else that we might want to come together and do.

We had been, in the past, chain-linking our calls so that we could get a nice-sized group – about six or seven of us together which makes it much easier.

But now, no special equipment or telephone features are needed.  We just set it up with Freeconferencecall.com.  Our number is 1-712 451-6025 and our code number is 579887#.

Edie ? It is a long distance call, so anyone who calls has to use long distance time or if they have a free long distance or…

Eliz ? Could I use Skype?

Ed ? You could use Skype to call into it, and it would be a free call to you.  I’m going to be recommending, in one of the invitations I’ve sent out to people……. something on Skype.

Eliz ? On this call that we’re on now, are you incurring a long-distance charge?

Ed ? Yes, but I have unlimited long distance calling; I pay a flat fee per month, so I don’t need to be limited by that.

Eliz ? This was a great idea.  We are so few and far between—we are scattered so widely that most people just don’t have the luxury at all of having other members who they can physically get together with.

Edie ? Ed called me and told me about this free conference call and explained it, and he said, you know we could do the Healing Service with up to 96 people on this one number.  Years ago, like 16 or 17 years ago, we used to try to get together.  We would get together at Ed’s or at Donald Lynch’s and do the Healing Service every week.  Now, we’ve all gotten older (laughing) we’re on fixed incomes, we don’t move around as much, you know.  And so this is like: this is wonderful.  We don’t have to have a place.  It would be nice to have a place like Richard has where everyone can go.  So, this really excited me because I love the services, and this was something that I could do.

Ed ? Edie has been a blessing.  She is the one that does the reading.  She set up the music in the background.  She’s the anchor person.  We all appreciate her; she’s steady as a rock; she’s there on time.

Edie ? I say thank you to Ed and thank you to God for giving us the idea, the hook-ups, and whatever it took, because he opened an opportunity for me to serve.  And I am so grateful.

Eliz ? Yes, I really understand that.  Somebody sent me an e-mail just yesterday and said he couldn’t find the Moon Dates and Healing Dates in French anywhere, and he was concerned that others could not find them either; I assume this person is from France, although I don’t know.  So, he had typed them out in the traditional format and sent them to me, asking me to pass them on to Mount Ecclesia or to someone who could add them to the official website.  He said, I must say that The Rosicrucian Fellowship is very important in my life, and it is a great joy to help it a little, if I can.

Edie ? We did a little at a time when we first started; we didn’t have music, and then Johnny Perko sent me music, the opening and closing hymns.  I had to learn how to put it on a disc.  I had to put it on my computer and the volume was not very loud.  But I did something wrong.  I can’t play it on what I call my boom box so I could get more volume.  Anyway, for awhile we just didn’t have any music.  Now we do have the opening and closing hymns.

Also, on Wednesday nights we have a little study group going.  We’re going through the Cosmo. That’s also working well, using this conference number and if Ed was able to get this conference number, perhaps other groups can get one and do this also, for hooking up their study group or for lessons.

Eliz ? Yes, what time do you do the Wednesday study group?

Ed ? At 7:00 Eastern Standard Time

Edie ? We’ve downloaded the Cosmo on our computers, so wherever we left off, I just start reading.  If someone wants to stop and ask questions or make comments, we’re not in a big rush.  It doesn’t matter if we only get to one paragraph; we usually do this for about an hour.  And it’s really been wonderful, the discussion and comments – the repetition.

Eliz ? Do you know Alexandre?  Do you know who I mean, the man who has the websites?

Edie ? From Rio de Janeiro?

Eliz ? Yes, have you seen that he has the study guides for the Cosmo?

Edie ? Yes I saw one of them, but I thought, where was the first one?  I’ve missed some of them.

Eliz ? Yes, I missed some too, but I went back and was able to find them.  I can send them to you.  In fact, recently he posted them again, I think it was because somebody else made the request, so I can see that you get them.  You know, they really are good !

Edie ? You can e-mail them to me, is that how?

Eliz ? Right, I will.

Ed ? And to me also.

Edie ? I have been so incredibly grateful for the opportunity of doing these services.  There are times when Ed hasn’t been able to be on, because we do it ON the healing date, and those dates [day of the week] change.  Ed has many things that he does.  I said that I made a dedication to do this; I said I WILL be there.  It’s a wonderful opportunity.  I am so grateful and thank the Elder Brothers for this opportunity because I get so frustrated with myself, because I just feel so limited and helpless by what little I can do to serve, versus going out to Oceanside.   This is like a most wonderful avenue of service – I just love it!

Ed ? We so appreciate her, and I’ll say this.  With the classes we do on Wednesday, we’ve got every kind of person in there.  We’ve got probationers, students AND people who are friends who are not connected to the Rosicrucian Fellowship who enjoy this stuff so much.

Edie ? We usually end up talking about their personal experiences – relating to what it is we’re reading and that helps the ones who are not students of the philosophy, they haven’t gone through any of that.  I think it helps them to understand more how it works.

Eliz ? For people who have never been exposed to these teachings it must be one revelation after another.

Edie ? You know, Elizabeth, what we have thought is that they have started with this in past lives, because when you can talk to someone and tell them about experiences that follow from past lives, we can talk about life on other planets, spiritual hierarches, constellations, and they don’t bat an eye.  We know they’re ahead of the game.  (Of waking up.)  The reality of their own spirituality; they already understand that they’re just being reminded; it’s time for them to wake up in this life.  Absolutely, that’s what’s happening!

Eliz ? How long have you been doing this with the services and everything?

Ed ? Uh, when did we start, Edie?

Edie ? Let’s see, I don’t know.  We also do the Equinox and Solstice Services.

Eliz ? It sounds like you do the whole calendar.

Ed ? Laughter

Edie ? Oh, it’s so wonderful, it has to be since last summer?  Last spring?

Ed ? I remember, it was right after conclave, about the middle of September.

Edie ? September of 2008.  I remember, I thought, I haven’t read through the Cosmo since I did it as a student in the late 80’s.  My life took a big turn, and it’s like I went straight back into experience here; my higher self  told me to, “start all over,” and boy did I start all over.  Ed said, let’s do it on the phone.  So, we were just using our regular phones.  So, we decided once a week we’re going to get on the phone, and I’m going to pull all of my student lessons out.  We went through all the student lessons, you know – the ones you have to answer, the beginning ones, and then the ones after you become a student that you don’t have to answer.  We went through all of those.  We were doing one a week.

Ed ? Oh, we enjoyed that, that …..

Edie ? About the time we finished that last lesson – that is when this thing about the conference call came up.

Ed ? Let me give you some idea what happened.  I had a conversation with Edgar during late summer, because I had an illumination of something, and he lit into it.  He told me that the things in the spiritual world have a correspondence to things in the physical world, and I saw that so clearly.  I said, Edie, we need to start studying in the Cosmo, and it’s the third chapter in the Cosmo that spoke about the correspondence between the spiritual world and the physical world.  We started at the very beginning of the third chapter and we invited other people on that call.

Edie ? Yes, we went right on the conference call from our personal – each other – we said we can put this on; we can.  Let’s do a conference and invite others. That’s how we went from us studying together to a conference.  We started with the third chapter.

Ed ? You asked me something awhile back about how I started the conclaves?

Eliz ? Yes.

Ed ? Back in 1977 I became a probationer.  It was the summer of ’77.  One of the first Echoes I read had a calendar date of a conclave in Battle Creek.  I told the group back then, “Hey!  There’s a Rosicrucian Fellowship group having a conclave up in Battle Creek.  I think I want to go.  Do you guys want to go?”  At first they didn’t, but a few days before I was to go, they said, “Yes.”

They got a couple of cars together, and we drove up to Battle Creek early Saturday morning.  We got there just in time to, HA! – interrupt one of the lecturers; Michael Miles was speaking at that time.  Richard was sitting up there in the front row, and as soon as we started walking in, Michael stopped and looked at us.  Richard was sitting on a corner chair; he turned around and almost fell off – got up and came back to greet us in.  It was an experience that I had never had before, because,,,,,,,,,well, they took good care of us.  They looked after us.  There was about a half-a-dozen or more of us black folks, in the middle of a white conclave, so that’s how that went.  Uh, next day.  Virginia S who put this conclave on came over to me and asked me a few questions.  The first question she asked me – she said, do I know of anyone who would be interested in carrying on this conclave, because she could no longer carry it on herself.  I said, I’ll DO it.   That’s how it initially……

I went and talked to Richard.  I said, we want to have a conclave here in Detroit, and we would like for you all to come, next time.

He said, “Well………..that is nice……, but it costs money for lodging and stuff.”

I said, “No, you guys can stay with us.  You don’t have to worry about hotel bills or expenses.  And we’ll take care of your food or whatever we eat.”

He said, “OK.”  It was on.  The next year we had a conclave in Ferndale, Michigan, and we had over 100, pretty close to 150 people.  The year after that we had about 60 to 65 people.  Typically, since then, our conclaves have been in the neighborhood of 35 or 45 people.

Richard invited us to come to his conclave in Madison on Memorial Day weekend.  We had ours right after school was out, usually somewhere around the end of June or July, but later on we started doing it on Labor Day weekend.  That was best for everybody.

Eliz ? It’s kind of like bookends on the summer with Madison and their Memorial Day conclave and then you with your Labor Day one.

Ed ? I’m going to be doing a few more things.  I have a marketing system that I pay for on a regular basis as a tool where you can send an advertisement of what you’re doing around the world to over 2 or 3 million websites worldwide, so I’d just like to have your permission, if I can blast your RFFriends……..

Eliz ? Oh, sure !

Ed ? Okay.  Then, in another month or so, we’re going to have a conference room where you can view a website and that could be used for classes – like in Astrology where I could put a chart right on the screen and talk about the aspects or angles or even how to calculate it.

Eliz ? And so you’ve got audio and video on the computer – and is it interactive or just one-way?

Ed ? It is interactive in this sense.  We have a section on the left side, a column where you can type in a question that you might have, and the speaker will be able to see that instantly.  This is going to be available within the next month or so.

Eliz ? On that marketing system that you pay for on a regular basis; you’ve got memorandums or something that go out to a few “million” E-mail addresses?

Ed ? Not e-mail addresses, but websites.  This is one of my missions – is to spread the teachings.  Right now the numbers at the Fellowship are going down.  There’s got to be a way in which the numbers can go up.  We’ve got a new generation of folks that are coming in right now, and one of them that I am excited about is a member in Lebanon whose name is “Carlos.”  He goes by the name “LightRays” when he writes stuff.  He was on the healing list and I was assigned to do his chart, to make some recommendations.  “After that we became real great friends.  He has very expensive audio equipment.  He’s a photographer and does work in doing flash videos and such for radio and TV stations in Beirut.  So, it’s very exciting.  He’s a student member and is about ready to become a probationer.  He wants to use his talent to spread the teachings.  I’m going to be hooking up with him through a creative website to further advance that stuff.  I’m going to do that, and I’m going to further advance your website.  I’m going to make sure that your website’s in all of the major search engines around the world.  You will find in the next couple of weeks or a month an increase of the number of visitors to your site.

Eliz ? That will be really great.  It’s interesting to me, well, you see I was working with Allen, and I don’t know how to do any of this, but there’s something called DADA mail.  Every time a new article is put on my website…….you get the little e-mail, I guess you know, RFFriends.  So, my list is about 442 people.   That’s how many people get that little announcement.  I can watch the statistics and every time something is uploaded, especially if it’s something that people find interesting, it spikes.  Lots more people are coming in and…..

You know, it’s just amazing, to all of us that have one limitation or another, it’s like the world has opened up and now the only constraint that we have is our ability to gain the knowledge to use all of this electronic marvel stuff.  It’s like climbing a mountain every time I have to learn something new.

Ed ? But I love it and I eat it up, so this is how we are all connected.  We all have certain talents.  I don’t have the audio-video talent of Carlos; I don’t even have that kind of professional equipment, but in my own way I do what I love doing.  We all have our talents, and I am using them, because I am driven to spread the teachings to as many people as I possibly can on this planet.  Edie is driven to be the spokesperson for us, and she’s an excellent one.  We all are committed.  And I love your website; I just – I can’t stay on for too long, I just like to maximize my time with getting in and out of stuff as quickly as possible.

Edie ? It’s so wonderful to be able to read and now even listen to Richard.  What was done at the Winter School, like I say, I don’t have the resources to – I have never had the resources to travel.  I would have loved through all the years all the schools at Oceanside.  I’ve never been able to attend any of them; and now to be able to read or listen to these lectures – It is so-o-o wonderful.   Thank you, Elizabeth, for making that available to us.

Eliz ? Yes, I just thought that it should be made available to more people.  We’ve had the privilege – it’s been so long that we’ve had this privilege that we just take it for granted.  We don’t even value it like we should which is just so crazy here.

Edie ? Yes, when he asked if we would want him to come here and hold – like a school, both my hands shot up, and he came, but it’s just so difficult when you don’t have a place.  Like Richard has his place, his store, but we don’t have that.  So, there was this and that going on, and he wasn’t able to come back.  We did it in someone’s home.  It was just an apartment; it was just difficult.   The last time he came here, he said “you should come out to Oceanside.  We’re doing classes there now.”

I said, “I know, but I don’t have the resources to travel.”  So, yes, to have them here now it’s just wonderful.  I mean your site again is just opening up, spreading the teachings, because we’re getting the schools and everything, from Oceanside and from Madison.

Eliz ? Isn’t it wonderful.  It’s something we’ve been waiting for, for a long time – I don’t think we knew we were waiting for it, but that capability came and, boy, we have to take advantage.

Edie ? Since the 100-year anniversary, and some months before that, it’s almost like the Phoenix rising out of the ashes.

Eliz ? Isn’t it?!

Ed ? I like that.

Edie ? It’s like we’ve been given a new impulse; new thoughts; new ideas.  It’s like, okay, now we’re going to go forward.  And as you know, people have made remarks about Oceanside and about how it has gone down, and about how it was when Max Heindel was here, and you know —-[emotionally] —- there’s a Temple in all Jerusalem in the ethers…… (and now here goes the heart) and now that’s where the wars are, and it’s like this struggle is going on between the black and white brotherhoods.  Wherever the white brotherhood is strongest, the black brotherhood will be there.  But light is greater than darkness, and if we add our heart’s love to radiate with the Elder Brothers at midnight, or anytime, the sooner we will have peace on earth.

Eliz ? So many members have got this great sensitivity.  If you’ve got that kind of sensitivity without having a lot of positivity along with it, it’s like you can be led around like a marionette, and the evil forces have a field day with you.

Edie ? That’s where we need to send love and light to our brothers and sisters to reinforce their good, and this is how we’re being strengthened.

Eliz ? And this is what we need to help everyone to understand – what has been happening over a hundred years and is still happening.

Edie ? But it’s going to get better.  It has to get better, because many things are opening up.

Eliz –? Yes.  It’s a whole new world.  Just in the last – YEAR !

Edie ? it’s just happening – at the hundredth year…… and also like the thousandth year.   The service we receive from The Christ’s annual sacifice , the Archangels and Elder Brothers and others are what is giving us this added surge and impulse of energy to spread the teachings and heal the sick

Ed ? I really appreciate the closeness that is coming, almost daily, like in Facebook.  It seems like I have gotten a slew of Rosicrucian members that have signed up to be a friend on Facebook – people in South America – everywhere.  I don’t even know them.  Yet they become a friend on – I do Twitter as well, and I give the Healing and Sunday service – some astrological tips on my Twitter site.  You’ll be getting more and more curious people, each and every week, who are following me on the Twitter site.  It’s a brand new world.

Eliz ? It really is.

In speaking about 32 years of conclaves, Ed said: “Lately, it has been a lot of work on our core group, primarily because we are getting older and have less energy than we did earlier, yet we continue out of LOVE.”

Tags: healing service, Rosicrucian Friends, telephone conference