RF Friends - (visit our home page)

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes 

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age 

Lecture 9 of 25 by [R] 

The Aquarian Age and Some Problems of the Mind

[Illustratioons were not part of the lecture]

             Compared to some of the other talks, this will not be really deep, yet it could be because in modern Christian mysticism, the deepest mystery is called the mystery of the mind. We are taught in modern mysticism that one of the purposes of evolution, as far as we humans are concerned, is to develop creative minds. The last step of our participation in the evolutionary creation is to fulfill that completely – to be very creative. That will be in a very distant period when the cosmos will be constituted quite differently than it is now. The idea is that ultimately, at the end of this evolutionary creation in which we are participating, we will have the ability to think minds that can think. In short, we will become creative beings that can help others and instill in them a mind with which they can think independently as we think; that each person can be a focus of the divine.    

            We’re not talking here about what is very generously called ‘artificial intelligence.’ We’re talking about real intelligence where a truth or a spiritual being, can think a new mind for other people to do the same thing eventually.  That’s pretty profound. Of course, this is not an instantaneous process and we have a lot of stages to go through in our general evolution. 

Thinker - Rodin

Thought - Rodin

Specifically, in the evolution of our mind we have a lot to go through. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, some days I feel lucky if I have any thoughts at all – even very mundane thoughts about things about the world. My thinking, I find, is terribly slow – it’s turgid – and it has errors which is a curiosity because Plato wondered if a person could have mis-thoughts or incorrect thoughts, we’ll come back to that in a little bit.

             Learning how to think and being willing to learn is a very long, slow process, even in this new birth alone, I have spent more than 45years now trying to learn to think deeply and unite that with feeling and the special kind of thinking that we call prayer, and I have made very, very little progress. It’s slow. It’s very hard. We have to be able to completely control every one of our thoughts which seems almost impossible. We do have motivation because someday, when we bring what are now minerals to life, they will live as long as we can hold the thought of life for them.  Even right now, somebody’s health or illness or continued survival on this plane may depend on how accurate and clear and strong our prayers are.

            So there is plenty of motivation especially if we are learning to be unselfish, but to think the whole notion of thinking the thought that can think for itself, because that is what the mind is – it’s a very complex thought – the thought of thinking the thought that can think thoughts is just utterly boggling to me. That’s one of the mysteries about one end of the creation – the far end ahead of us; there are plenty of mysteries about the mind at the other end of creation. For example, we are told in all mystic cosmogonies that the creative dream that is behind the process that we are going through, this evolutionary creation – that dream was there before the creation began. Where? This is before there was even a macrocosmic mind of the god of our solar evolution. Where was it?

            The concrete mind was not made manifest until quite a ways into the evolutionary creation. Does this mean that there is another mind or another means of creating thoughts within the spirit, or is this something that is just remembered from a past manifestation, or is there a cosmic creator formula that is always there that comes to mind when the spirit begins to create? There are all kinds of possibilities. There are all kinds of questions that can be asked, and if we follow all of those questions out some of them would prove to be not very valid questions to ask, but they are genuine questions. They are genuine questions about the nature of mind which is what we are trying to pursue.

            If one reads mysticism, Western mysticism, very carefully, one can conclude that the process of thinking is a process of questioning. We are told that thought forms are produced by evacuating areas or regions within thought stuff. Of course, we can’t think of thought stuff the way we think of matter – but we evacuate thought stuff and those are what thoughts really are. The vacuum, the attitude that creates the vacuum is the attitude of questioning. It is the opening of the mind in thoughts of itself.

            It is analogous to a vacuum in material stuff because if we take a vacuum pump and we take an area that is sealed off and pump everything out of it that we think is there, electromagnetism still passes through that vacuum. So there is something more subtle than the vacuum pump can pump that occupies or that interpenetrates space that allows the electromagnetism to pass through it. In an analogous manner, when we think concrete thoughts and we evacuate a form within thought stuff, there is something more subtle within that vacuum, something that is more pure and uncontaminated and that is ideational thought or what is called in Western mysticism, light spirit which is the light of pure truth not like the light we see with our eyes. 

            Both of those regions, the region of ideational thought and the region of light spirit, are regions from which we experience intuition. The Neptunian type of intuition is associated with human spirit where things that are in all principles are chaotically connected.  The light spirit is the Uranian type of intuition which is pure truth. It is the odd explanation – you just know something is true and that is enough. It is why the first impulse of Uranian intuition which is the more common of the two is sufficient unto itself.  We just learn to act according to that intuition when we recognize it within our being.

            When we evacuate a thought form, we make space for pure regions of truth to be manifest.  The attitude that evacuates, that pulls the thought stuff out of there is the attitude of questioning. It’s like an artist says, ‘Well will this line do it?’ That’s a question.  Or a scientist asks another type of question. In that questioning, you’re making a space for the truth to be seen pure and simple. Obviously the deepest and the most potent types of questions are the pleas that we ask in our prayers because we’re asking directly for divine stuff to fill our thoughts. (Incidentally, if any of you are interested, we have a prayer group that meets here on Sunday nights, every Sunday night at 6:30.

Click on image to hear 'Ode to Joy'

            By now you’ve gathered that I’m trying to engage you in self-observation. I’m trying to get you to think about what happens when you’re thinking. It’s not done to manipulate but it’s done to do what Beethoven and Schubert called the ode to intellectual joy and it’s what Socrates loved more than anything else in the world – thinking. Most of the time when we are awake, we are in our dense physical bodies. The dense physical body and even the biological ethers that support the dense physical body are different from every other body or vehicle of consciousness that we have. They’re different because they tire out. All of the other vehicles that we have at our disposal of ourselves, of our spiritual being, do not tire. In fact, all of our other vehicles become stronger and better by use. Therefore, one of the things of the mind is the more we think the stronger and clearer and more precise thinkers we become. We’re not talking about the brain. The brain is only the means for the thought of the mind to be brought into the dense physical body. The more we think, the better we get at thinking.

            We hear people say, ‘Oh, I have too much to think about!’ Usually, those are people who are doing the least amount of thinking. It’s the people who are quietly by themselves that are doing a lot of thinking. We noted, in other earlier talks, for people who are new (this is a little bit unfortunate) – we noted that the crux of the mind, the heart of the mind is a very spiritual place both in our spiritual anatomy and in the cosmographical anatomy you might say. The mind is at the heart of the creation. It is at a cosmological center. On one side there are the transcendental realms – ideas in various states of spirit.  At the other side, there are the concrete realms – the phenomenal realms, things that have beginnings and ends, which include thoughts and emotions and actions and stuff like our bodies. In the middle is where the mind is.

             It is both a lens and a mirror, but we will come back to that in a little bit. It is a lens in that through the mind is how the spirit projects its creations into the phenomenal worlds and it is a lens in that, through the mind is where the essence of experience in the phenomenal world is drawn into the spirit as soul matter in a process called re-thinking or thinking back to the origin and taking in the experience and taking in the essence of it by going over it forward and backward. The ‘re’ in re-thinking is like the ‘re’ in reset. It’s a two-faced mirror.  On the phenomenal side of the mirror are all of those thoughts which are automatic. We don’t have to ponder every move that we make. Some moves are made automatically by reflex. It’s an instinctive kind of mind. On the other side, the transcendental side of the mirror, the spirit reflects, and what is universal spirit knows itself through the reflection in the idea of self-hood. So it is reflected back to itself and through that, objective waking self-consciousness is born.

            The mind at the center of being is focused on top of the center of our entire potential as spiritual beings, which in some teachings, is called virgin spirit because it has never before been in this kind of evolution.  It, in itself, is focused through the center of the will to be – the divine spirit.  It’s given different names in different spiritual studies but the effect is the same in mysticism because in almost all mysticism people find the same things. It’s usually called silent watcher and in three-dimensional space it is seen as the thought behind the root of the nose from which the spirit sees outward and sees into itself. So, this center of the mind is the crux of our very existence, the crux of everything that we experience.

            As a crux, it has a predisposition, a predisposition to its centrality, and that crux has a nature of its own. It is the center of things. One of the things about the mind is that it loves paradoxes because the poles, the extremities, especially the basic pole, the spirit-matter pole, the extremities meet and find their opposite in this crux. You might say, it’s the seed from which the spirit-matter pole springs. So, at the heart of our language, which is our best expression of the mind, we find that paradoxes are right there. We find, especially if we go back to languages when languages were more deductive and less inductive, when there was less describing things of the external world but they were talking more about spiritual principles, that a word means a thing and its opposite at the same time. There are a few of those words that are still in existence in the language and they’re delightful. One of the most common is the word cleave. The word cleave means to cut something in two, but the other side of cleave is as cleave in the Bible. It says that a man shall cleave to his wife, which means to come together and be united as one; obviously, talking not only about a physical marriage but about a spiritual marriage. What’s beautiful about this is it’s because that’s the very nature of what the crux of the mind is. It is where things are separated and where things come together. So the word that remains that talks about that kind of state is actually from that kind of state.

            In these talks we’re talking about exercising our minds a little bit, especially in this one; we want to get to a better understanding of the great gift of thinking and what is taking place when we are thinking. We’re doing that in order to understand the Aquarian Age.  In this talk and the talk that follows it, we are going to be talking about the problems of paradox and paradox in the mind. Last time when we talked, we also talked about a paradox. We talked about freedom and we came to understand that in exercising freedom in a wrong way, we imprisoned ourselves.   

Dostoyevsky has interesting things to say about freedom. He understands through two of his characters, Shatov in The Possessed, and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; both of his people have the idea that the only way to be free is to break the law because then you prove that you are beyond the law. They have really a good idea, an excellent idea, but they perverted it in a very material way.

            What we have learned is that by breaking the law (that is by taking creative power into our hands before we knew what to do with it and before we had the capacity to really think out the consequences of our actions), we sold ourselves into bondage. Instead of freedom, we found ourselves more weighed down and locked in with what some people call a burden of sin and, because we did that with regard to material experience, we lost the intuitions that could transcend the laws so that we could know the truth. What happened instead—we sold ourselves out to materialism and blinded ourselves. So, we’re talking about outlaws. Just like outlaws in the movies, …???, or they have to live in the badlands. Strange as it may seem, we’re on our way to trying to understand the converse of this paradox. The converse of this paradox is when we apply freedom within that we actually gain freedom. Because if we work within the law without coercion then we are free to do other things that we must do.  We experience those things with an attitude of freedom rather than with a begrudging attitude of being under the law.

            What we’re trying to get at is that through the mind being able to express spiritual freedom in the realms of manifestation in which we have our creative commitment, we can be suspended. It is one of the best key words for Aquarius: suspension. We are suspended in freedom in what is known only to most people as a very heavy, hard activity. Actually, if we penetrate through the law in this fashion, we actually get beyond thought. We get to the unity that connects cause and consequence and it is exactly as St Paul says in the Bible, ‘The end of the law is love.’ In the unity of this altruistic, this Aquarian type of love, there is not that kind of division. If we look at it this way Christ, not Jesus but the being that worked through Jesus and works through us, Christ is the ultimate outlaw, is the ultimate desperado, because everything is urgent, under the impulsion of love or under the impulsion of truth.  Everything is urgent. We can’t … the truth or we can’t … the love. Meister Eckhart, a Fourteenth Century mystic, had the experience and, I understand on a terribly regular basis, of being in the light spirit. He said with regard to this that when one is in the light spirit (not using those words), it is impossible to sin. Meaning to say, if we are in that truth and in that love, it is impossible for us to break the law because we understand that we’re living in the end of the purpose of the law in the first place; an experience that we were intended to come to.  

            Let’s go back to the paradox. This is all just window dressing. Let’s look at the first part of the paradox. The only time that we can attempt to step outside of the law is near the middle of the evolutionary creation. Before then and after then, it is exceedingly hard, almost impossible. The further you get from the middle of creation, the harder it is to begin and establish your freedom. Part of the reason is that in the middle of the creation, we have slack. We have cosmic slack and the slack of soul power. There is an illusionary image that can help us to understand this which, in itself, is a paradox. To come to truth through an illusion and make an image, you wonder what you are doing.

       I’m sure we’ve all seen it. Think of a wagon wheel and you start spinning it and pretty soon all of the spokes are a blur. At a certain time, the speed is phased off with the way you perceive things through the eye and even though the wheel is going forward, the spokes appear to be going backward. That’s the illusionary image but it is analogous to the reality of evolutionary creation. In the evolutionary creation, everything always goes forward, even if there is a seeming to go back to hook up to something else, there still is progress because when you go back you go back with the consciousness that you have had in your advancement  or in your progress. At a certain time in the evolutionary creation, right in the middle of it, there is a voluntary conscious backward motion in consciousness.

              It’s like what happens to us in life, we look forward when we’re a child; everything is before us.    Then we start having children and we start looking back and it isn’t necessary for us to look back but we find that when we do look back, we understand things—things about ourselves and things about our children. It is that same kind of backward movement in consciousness that takes place in the cosmos, except the difference is that in the cosmos, it’s not an illusion as it is with the wagon wheel; it is a reality. It is a reality because the looking back changes the consciousness that holds the matter of the cosmos together so that gradually, gradually instead of the cosmos becoming more and more condensed in the materiality, it dissolves more and more back into the spiritual worlds. It is the inbreathing of matter when matter is spiritualized and taken back in.

            This is exactly what happens to us if we practice reviewing our day every day. If we go in reverse order, we take the events of the day and unwind them and we god-essence the meaning, we look from effect to cause rather than from cause to effect and we understand the whole truth. Spirit likes to understand things in wholes. That’s what happens to us. It’s a sacrifice because it’s very hard to look back without going to sleep. When you start looking backwards, it’s using the same principle as when a hypnotist counts backwards to take you out of your body.

        Then there are lots of things that we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we did during the day. I was terribly lazy today. So there was, for me, that resistance of not wanting to face the reality of my life. When we do that, it is an act of sacrifice, and because we give our love to that process, that is what, by looking backward, draws the essence of our light into us. It is a resetting and because it makes things whole, it is a remembering. The remembering goes all the way back to the Orcus.  Orcus was ripped limb from limb and when we remember, we put the members back on and we become whole. This has a lot to do with the triangle in fact, a lot of Orcish mythology and poetry, though beautifully poetic it is mathematical at the same time.

            This is what we were talking about last time when we were talking about superimposing top-down consciousness onto bottom-up consciousness to have a whole experience of things, to have a god’s eye point of view and not just a human point of view or always looking up.  This time when we can look backwards and we can become creative beings marks the end of the period as involutionary beings and instead of creatures, we become evolutionary creators.  That’s what creation is, it’s giving and when we give ourselves to our creations, we take the essence of it into our being. Some of you may have seen this coming. …… This forward spin of progress always continues even when there is a reverse that is superimposed on it and there is always the Luciferic temptation to have more experience, to continue to go forward, to continue to have the bottom-up experience.

            That spinning forward drives us deeper and deeper into matter. If one of these serpents represents backing into matter and the other one represents coming out of matter, there is, at the bottom where the tails meet, there is the gap and there is that possibility that, if we want to, we can keep going into matter and thereby, project ourselves, so to speak, into the abyss. There’s always that temptation. As great as we may think we are, there’s insecurity in our egoism. When we return to …, we say come on, we’re going to show them, we’re going to make our plans about how we’re going to succeed tomorrow. We don’t think about collecting from the past, so that’s a temptation; it’s always there. It’s hard to take the leap of faith. It seems such a silly thing to do and it seems so simple, that to think about looking back at your life, ho hum, been there, done that, is the temptation to pass all that up and think about tomorrow because that’s what counts.

            What happens is, it’s short-sighted. When you start thinking about tomorrow it grinds you deeper into the body and you don’t rest well. When you don’t rest well, you wake up the next day and you’re not so likely to succeed as if you had looked backward and done that and done the other. We are in a paradoxical but unique evolutionary position right now being right in the middle. If we want, we can be real Christian outlaws and we can create and we can run down hill like the pigs of the Bible and drown ourselves in materialism. In all this at this time in evolution, we have some slip. We’re told that when we study astrology that the stars impel but they do not compel. They do not force us to be one way or another. At this time of evolution because we’ve been in it long enough, we’ve developed some soul power. If we want, we can blow up like a kid in a candy shop and give ourselves a cosmic stomach ache. At least we can for a few thousand years. We’re free. We’re not controlled the way the creatures are.

             If we look at the creatures, the mineral kingdom always does the same thing under the same conditions – without exception. Given the same temperature and pressure, water will always boil at the same temperature. If we look at the plants, the plants have a little bit more slip but, for the most part, a species remains a species unless it is deprived of light or water or something like that.  Every member of that species will look the same. Animals have even more slip. They are not completely under the control of the group spirit and they have a little bit of freedom on their own, especially our pets which are inductively drawing from us.  We, as human beings, to a large extent have freedom. If we look in the other direction, the farther we go into the spiritual hierarchies, the more the beings are close to the truth and the more they are unvarying… They are so unvarying, that some beings are laws of nature.  They are so unvarying.

Oedipus and the Sphinx - Gustave Moreau

            If we participate in these activities, if we give our minds to not the ordinary things that would plunge us deeper into materialism, it doesn’t mean that our lives are going to be insipid or we lose all the glory. In fact, the glory is much enhanced. It’s something like a story. In the Greek stories that were told in the dramas, everybody knew where the story was going. If you ever read Oedipus (several of us have read the Oedipus myth together several times), and we knew where the story was going but because the story is so good, it’s great anyway. You get so much more out of it each time you go into it.

             I believe this is the way it is when we start making these sacrifices, when we stop having the opinions that this is the final ultimate thing about this and there is no more room for another interpretation. In that story, we can create, we can activate, we can do all kinds of creative things. The whole reality is in the story of our life. But the whole of reality, the macrocosmic divine scheme or the creative dream is huge and it is so complex that it’s very hard for us with mere human minds to understand it. So, we have to understand it piecemeal and piecemeal is what we’re doing.

            We’re looking at time, at this cycle and the precession of the equinox of the transition of the Piscean age into the Aquarian age and that is piecemeal, what we’re doing. In this, we first introduced the topic and then we looked at the two signs, we looked at the sign that was in-conjunct (quincunx), looking at the relationship of Virgo to Aquarius and we looked at the converse – looking at Aquarius to Pisces and Leo being esotericism. So we began with the quincunx and then we proceeded to the opposition. From the quincunx we saw how things worked from within out and from without in. When we looked at Leo we looked at things from complementation, we looked at the opposition, we saw how a sign and its opposite complement each other and we looked specifically at how altruism is fulfilled through individual love.

             In the last two talks before this one, we looked at the two semi-sextiles – to Pisces and to Capricorn. We looked at the push from the past and we looked at repression and the build up of psychic pressure within us pushing us forward and we looked at the allure of the future from Capricorn that pulls us forward. In this talk and in the next talk, we’re talking about the signs trine to Aquarius. Those signs are Gemini and Libra. This talk is obviously the Gemini talk, Gemini in abstract moving to concrete mind. This is obviously the bi-polar talk. It’s not surprising that bi-polarity would become a fad. It’s almost expected that it would become a fad. So now we’ve got through the first two introductions and we’re ready for the third introduction.

            We all know that in astrology trines have something to do with perfection, but they also have something to do with ease. Yet, trying to understand why the triangle has something to do with something so deep is difficult, very difficult to understand. You can say how a triangle functions. It functions like going up a staircase rather than trying to jump straight up. That’s fairly simple, at least some of it is. In this talk, we don’t have any final answers, any ultimate how’s or whys. The trine works but we’re going to explore it anyway to the little bit of depth that we can. In order to understand or answer these questions, the ultimate why and how of the trine, it’s sometimes easier to do that by asking other questions; questions that bring it more down to a level that we can comprehend.

            Obviously the first question that comes to mind is, why do fairies live so long? Everything in the cosmos is alive; alive ultimately with the light of the universal spirit. There are no dumb or dead horses anywhere in the evolutionary creation. Everything in the cosmos is alive and alive in such a way that if we experience it fully there is no doubt in our mind that we think we’ve been looking in depth all along. Everything that comes into being comes into being because it is a product of something spiritual and the quality of spirit is life.

            Anything that comes into being comes into being through the agency of other beings. We’re all in this together. In everything that happens, none of the experience is wasted. There is no waste. Humans intentionally waste things but in the cosmos there is no waste. Everything that comes into being also has a character and a character is like an agency to which it is suited or by which it is meant to bring things about. Fairies are said by seers to be like cells in the bodies of angels … but when we say cells we don’t mean like with little nuclei and things like that. We’re talking about little beings of life that subsist within the vital life of the angel. This is what seers of all ages have reported, that they exist within a much greater being of consciousness.                          

Johann Heinrich Füssli - Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen

            One might jump to the conclusion that the reason they live so long is because they live within such a divine being. That’s an answer that is partially true and it is even vaguely related to the triangle but it is not completely true because there are other beings that subsist within divine beings that do not live long. It also doesn’t square with folklore. Folklore is very important because it is written by people who saw or see. Folklore writers or tellers of stories were people who were fairy watchers. The answer from folklore to all of this is that fairies live long because of their purity, simplicity and innocence. There are other answers but this is a very good set of answers.

            Gnomes are said to have wrap around eyes, Atlantean wrap around eyes as we often see portrayed in Egyptian art. It is what the Atleateans at the time would have built. Their heads were shaped much differently than ours and, consequently, the positioning of the eyes had that feature that was like wrap-around. That’s neither here nor there.

            The way it works, is that fairies have a great innocence. They don’t have a self consciousness where they can say, I’m going to be this or I’m going to make this of myself. They don’t have that. In their purity, they resonate, mostly to the being in which they live, but they resonate outside of them. Atlanteans lived during the very beginning of our human consciousness when there was waking objective self-consciousness; at the same time there was clairvoyance. So the Atlanteans did in fact, according to the stories anyway, see the fairies. Their waking self-consciousness was inductively radiated to the fairies and the fairies took on the characteristics of the objective consciousness that was projected to them in that two-way perception.

            Since those times, most people have lost the ability to see the fairies, and as a consequence the evolution of fairy form vis-à-vis human consciousness has not progressed a lot. It does happen that cartoonists and people like that who draw fairies have some effect on them, on their shaping and on their experience, but because they are not with waking consciousness and seeing them, the effect is not as strong as when we were Atlantean. 

             This is all fabulous and nice to talk about – fairies and things like that, and I’m glad you indulged that, but the nature of fairies, how do we get to that, is a trine. If we think how to get to the trine and the relationship with Gemini and Aquarius, the answer still is: through purity, simplicity and innocence.

            Fairies of each type live within a given element. Within the chemical ether, the fairies are called gnomes because they deal with the energies passing through the formation of the crystal and solid state. The fairies that work through water are called undines. They can be seen where there is running water, especially where there is the energy of a waterfall released. The aerial fairies are called sylphs. In fact, they sing and when they sing they sing just like Richard Wagner’s Valkyries because Richard Wagner saw fairies and that’s where he got the idea.  Salamanders are the spirits that are in fire or the release of energy. The tail of the salamander is like the shape of the wick of a flame. It’s curious the way that all of these things start. At any rate, because the fairies each live within their element, they have no wear and tear.

            If there are cross-elemental activities, we talked about the wear of the elements breaking the earth down – water wears on earth and wind pushes water and fire pushes the air and there are those struggles. But if you stay within one element, you are simple, you are pure and you are innocent and that’s part of the reason they can live long. They are unassailed by something external. I have a friend who has eight planets in air signs. He has some in each one of the air signs and he is an intellectual nonpareil. When it comes to the manipulation of thoughts and intellectual activities in words, it’s a magnificent thing to just hear him speak. It’s beautiful the way it comes out of him. From Gemini he understands the principle of contrast and he comes up with some rather unique contrasts. From Libra he understands the principle of comparison and from Aquarius he understands the overall, the big picture of intellection. He can simulate it or approximate it by intuition and by erudition.

Tags: Aquarian Age, fairies, Gemini, thought

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

Lecture 9b of 25 by [R]

The Aquarian Age and Some Problems of the Mind

We’re back to the mandala, an astrological symbol of the entire universe as seen from the human point of view. The mandala itself and everything in the mandala is symbolized by three figures – the point, the line and the circle. This was the ancient spiritual geometer, the ability to produce things in the cosmos, everything in the cosmos as a matter of deduction from universal principles was done by using the point, the line and the circle.

These, themselves, are representations of astrological aspects. The conjunction is when two planets are brought together in a point. The opposition is when they are diametrically in a straight line opposed to each other. The circle is produced by a compass. It’s a triangle and we have to go into the higher spiritual dimension as opposed to just the plane. Now using just the point, the line and the circle, you can produce the three fundamental triangles.

right angle triangle

Of the three fundamental triangles the first is the isosceles (right triangle) out of which the square is produced.

30 60 90 Triangle

The second is the 30-60-90 triangle or the 1-2 square root of 3 triangle and out of that an equilateral triangle is produced.

The last triangle of construction is the 1-2 square root of 5 triangle, and it requires an implicit manipulation but from

1 2 5 Triangle

it you produce the pentagon or the pentacle. I have to sit down for an hour or so to figure out how to do it from the triangle but it can be done.

They are tied together by the famous Pythagorean triangle which is the 3-4-5, the 3 being the spirit, the 4 being matter and the 5 being soul nature in between. Everything, even the physical world that we are in, is created out of the ideas behind these three triangles. By uniting them with the fourth, you bring in the dimensionality of everything. For example, these are the five geometric, five Platonic solids. They are the only five that are possible. This is the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the icosohedron, and this is sort of a classic dodecahedron showing the relationship between an icosohedron and a tetrahedron but, by the way, the dodecahedron is bulk and so from these all of the solid state of the world is produced.

tetra

cube

octa

dode

icosa

All of crystallography and close packed structures are based on these, anything that is a solid is a crystal in physics, and is based on these geometric structures. It’s a wonderful thing. This was found and studied in Euclid’s geometry. If you can understand the transcendent spiritual principles that are behind everything you have an understanding inside of yourself of how the universe was created. If you can live those principles in your own being, you automatically become a magician which is a creator in the highest sense of the word.

These are the three figures that you can produce on the plane and they are the only figures, the simple figures that you can inscribe in a circle – the equilateral triangle, the square and the pentacle. This is the famous formula I’m sure you’ve all seen before, it has to do with taking pure spirit, which is the circle, and bringing it down to pure matter which is the square or the cube. It relates to everything we said. This is 3.1415 and this is something that goes back in human history thousands of years. You find this inscribed in caves that they don’t even know the dates they were created. This is the first five digits of pi. Indicating that the ancient people knew very well the relationship between straight lines and points and circles and the squaring of the circle which means being able to materialize the spirit which can’t be done completely which is why it is an insoluble problem.

In the same way, there are five figures that can reproduce almost all of astrology, based on five simple aspects. One of them is the result of a compound figure and the compound figure is two equilateral triangles put together as the Star of David or the symbol of the macrocosm. There are three orders within the five aspects. First, there is the square and the square followed is cross-polarity. Aries is square to Cancer and that’s a battle between fire and water. So there’s always cross-polarity which means that when you’re functioning with the square, when you’re bringing things to this solid material state, you’re always struggling against something that doesn’t want to become manifest. That’s why there must be imperfection in the material world.

The second category of aspects includes the opposition and the sextile. This always is between complementary polarities, fire and air. We saw that when we looked at Aquarius and Leo. The sextile is, again, fire and air between Aries and Gemini or Aries and Aquarius or Taurus and Pisces or Taurus and Cancer. So we see that there is something complementary. The final kind of aspect, the final category of aspect includes the conjunction and the trine. They are single elemental aspects. Obviously, if both planets are in one sign it is a single element. A trine for Aries passes through Leo, that’s all fire. Or, like my friend, with everything in air, it’s all airy intellectual. So, we can see that the conjunction and the trine have something to do with concentration and simplicity and they lead to longevity and innocence because there is nothing outside of it and that is a pure state of being within one element.

With the precession, especially with Aquarius, we are looking at a process of evolution in consciousness taking place in time. In the mandala, just like in the evolutionary creation, everything projects forward. All these astrological influences go forward in the zodiac. So, we can see in the astrological mandala that the trine indicates an implied evolution toward perfection that each part of the trine represents – a different stage of perfection. Now the gardening mandala begins with Aries. This point is the beginning, it is the now, this is forward; going back is Pisces—going backwards in time. The ultimate forward vertex from Aries should indicate the end, the last thing, the capping achievement of the principle so that is the ninth house. The ninth house, if we can come to an understanding of it relative to the initial inception of something, then we will understand the nature of the trine and that will help us to get to where we can understand what is happening in the mind in the Aquarian age and the relationship of Gemini to Aquarius.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It’s much easier just to live a simple life. The first house or Aries represents immediate experience. It is learning by doing, like you have the experience directly, head on like a ram. We said that with a change of state, that it precipitates the conditions of the second house. Whenever you make an action, you bring up the resistance of a heavier responsibility. The third house represents, instead of learning by doing, a general education, getting to know things. So learning by doing is by the sweat of the brow and it results in income and yet in a general education it means that you develop some kind of tool or ability to do things in society, a skill or anability for advancement in work. Finally, the ninth house represents education for its own sake. That you learn for the sake of learning and it is open-ended. It represents high scholarship. It also probably represents graduate school or divinity school, medical school or whatever and what comes out of that is profession. You have esteem in the world. You are honored for what you know. So we can see that there is progression between the fire signs and houses and the earth signs that follow after them.

We also can see from this that the houses relating to the fire signs relate to education, firsthand experience of childhood is overcome by general education and finally, then, by education as a higher way of life. And that higher way of life is open-ended; like the Sagittarian idealism, it shoots for the stars; it’s open-ended and never lets off. That way of life that is open-ended really is a way of life. One understands purpose. It is purposeful and that’s the word we are looking for. The ultimate vertex of the triangle of the simplest triangle on the cosmic mandala is purpose. Since the aspects represent tools or means of action, purpose is the ultimate of action and the purpose is open-ended and it is eternal purpose. So the purity and perfection and simplicity of the trine is to the end of purpose. So you might say the alchemical purging by burning, firing something, is to get rid of everything of the world, the ash of the earth to blow away and you have the purity of the purpose in itself.

The tenth house represents goals, but the ninth house represents purpose, always going towards that. You can see this throughout the whole horoscope or throughout the whole mandala. The second house, for example, is possessions. You can’t have possessions to be an end in itself because if the possessions are an end in themselves then you have something like a miser. Possessions find purpose in use. If you only just use something and you get involved in … you can’t find help in that way. You train for an objective. So you might say that the sixth house finds purpose in the tenth house in order to reach some far-fetched objective. But when you’re there, you don’t just stay there, like Richard Nixon. You’re a lonely person in the White House bugging the pictures or something like that because you haven’t followed purpose for being on the top of things. So the tenth house finds purpose in being productive. It’s like one of those triangles that keeps going around and around and around.

Now that we understand how the process goes, we can start applying it to Gemini. Gemini is the first air sign. The ultimate or the last air sign is Aquarius and so the ultimate purpose of the air signs, though initiated by Gemini, is found in Aquarius. Very briefly, relative to our topic this indicates that the simple knowledge, the gathering of the facts, the getting of the data, has its ultimate fulfillment in universal knowledge. Not necessarily as a cosmic data bank but as a whole. Aquarius thinks in wholes. It is that feeling of totality. Even a little bit of Aquarius… intuition feels like a whole. So this is like saying that condensing thought, like we did in Atlantean times when the atmosphere of the Earth was still vaporous, at that time we were developing the consciousness to condense thoughts. Co-evolutionarily, we condensed the atmosphere of the Earth and this is what caused the great floods of Moses and Noah or, as you know they’re the same in almost all mythologies of the world. So, what we’re talking about here then is taking knowledge to come to an understanding of wholes and when we have the ultimate understanding of wholes then the knowledge, the place or how things fit in, the relationship of one to another is understood from the whole. That’s what we’re trying to get at by the consciousness of Gemini to Aquarius.

After those floods of Noah and Moses as they are told in the Bible, (in Indian philosophy it’s Manu instead of Moses), after that, we could see through the atmosphere. The eye evolved with the ability to have light that we could see through a dense fog. So, we’re talking about something that takes place over millions of years of time. We’re talking about humans not in the shape that we would consider humans to be like now. We’re talking about the progenitors of all the different species that have been blown off by our consciousness as we recapitulated the human state and there were all those previous stages that we went through to become human and to become the seeds for the species that exist now. What we’re talking about was Moses, not the historical Moses of ten thousand years ago. There would be evidence of a general flood ten thousand years ago under … but here we’re going way back.

This is because, you know, people say history repeats itself and what they’re saying is the same thing the mystics have taught – that everything in evolution is spiral and there are spirals within spirals and by going through the various different spirals we are brought through an infinite number of experiences which bring out different and infinite facets within our being.

The rainbow is a sign…the Gemini consciousness. Alternation – waking and sleeping, night and day, life and death consciousness because by then a lot of clairvoyance that was lost in Lemurean times, in the times of the fall of Adam and Eve, was waning. What we’re talking about is alternating consciousness, Gemini consciousness, consciousness that is the result of inbreathing and out-breathing; ….ernated blood vs oxygenated blood; two different kinds of consciousness. Try to sing on the in-breath; you can’t do it; it’s not an easy thing. The rainbow sign introduced all of these alternations at the time when we had developed enough mentality so that we could receive it.

We were given something like a sermon, like the Moses/Manu person, whatever name we want to call the person, we were told that from here on in we could do what we wanted to do but that we would be responsible for the causes we put into effect. Meaning to say that we were to become intellectually conscious through the tree of knowledge—knowing what this kind of action produces in a consequence. This was as it should be. Thinking as human beings, this is when we really began as human beings and thinking is our service. The minerals give us form, the plants give us vital life and through the species shown in the signs of the zodiac, the animals, the animal kingdom is a vessel for emotional consequence.

But humans think and we think concretely. This is our primary service to the cosmos at this evolutionary age. Thinking – it is our service, it is our duty, it is our privilege to think. That’s what the whole talk is about tonight. It’s an occult service. When we are thinking, it may eventually be manifest in the world as actions and changes of forms and things like that but basically, it’s an internal activity. It comes out, we have bad thoughts that result in bad service and we harm others. This is why we recapitulated all these states to bring the nervous system into the body so that we could bring thought into the physical world. That is our service – bringing thoughts all the way down to concrete condition. We have been talking about it in most of these talks. It is through the focus of the lens of the mind that we become aware that the spirit is brought into matter. It brings us all the way through into our bodies. Our lens, our creative mind is one of those objectives.

We said very early in this talk we are here to develop a creative mind. We don’t even necessarily understand what the purpose of that is but it’s wonderful when we do something creative. Wow! There is no experience that is better than that. So, thinking is one of our primary and overall services, especially since we have fallen into matter and we cannot do things by spiritual perception and cannot do things by intuition as we could earlier. We have forced ourselves into a place where we have to think and we have to think ourselves out of matter. So let’s review a few thoughts about thinking itself, about the circumstances through which our mind came to be, because our mind, the nature of our thoughts, is determined by when and how the mind was developed.

In spiritual history our mind was seeded in the time when we were most blind to the spiritual worlds, when we were most separated and when we were forced into introspection. That makes thinking a very lonely activity. The mind is in its first stage, it’s in its mineral-like stage and it’s very, very young in terms of evolution. Of all the wondrous things we can do with it, we cannot think life into existence, for example.

The mind was seeded or it came into existence at the same time that the thoughts ego was developed as something to protect when we, by our rash actions, separated ourselves from the correct leadership and guidance of the gods. So the mind, the concrete mind is created and coalesced with the lower nature, the self-seeking that does more than protect us has set up shop for itself and it does for its own ends. The mind, we can say, was to grow up at the time of the fall. So it is a mind that, right now, is very much directed and guided toward materialism.

This tells us quite a bit. It tells us that if we want to evolve spiritually, we have to think not only about material things and not only in material ways but we have to think in terms of life; something that is not necessarily indefinite but something that is not as close and cumbersome as dense matter. The mind is bound up at the ground floor. Ab inicio, we’re starting from the bottom with the mind. So it’s part of our tainted and fallen lower nature in general. We can see that this is what we’re doing. This is why it is so important to gain control of the mind because the mind is the closest tool of the spirit and if the mind is attuned to matter, and if the mind is in the hands of the lower nature, it’s going to resist our taking control of it and using it as a divine instrument. So these are real problems.

These are problems that we must work out if we’re going to have that universal kind of consciousness that is the nature of Aquarius and that’s what is right for now. So we can conclude from this our identity – both our higher identity and lower identity – is all wrapped up with thinking. So we have to see what our true identity is and what it is not without taking it automatically as our mind. Again, our minds are bound up with matter and there’s a great danger of materialism. We can go down the abyss. We have a basic idea of what the problems are.

Let’s look at one more paradox (we’re getting down to the end now) and that is that thinking is simultaneously personal, objective and universal. On one hand, we can think a thought about reality and we can test it out in an experiment, a scientific experiment or an artistic experiment and that thought, if it is objective and universal, anyone else can check it out. But the funny thing is that when we think, we think alone. It’s not like emoting. In emotion two people will feel the same thing at the same time, but in the deliberative process of thinking, it’s a very lonely experience. It is part of that introverted experience that brings one to know oneself very, very clearly because it is so alone.

There are interesting things about this because it is about truth; we really can’t own a thought. We are responsible for our own thoughts and they coalesce to make our minds what they become, but we really don’t own them; even less can we own an idea. This is so silly, this whole idea. This is one of the dangers of materialism, the whole idea of intellectual property. Intellectual property is not the property of an individual; it’s the property of a soulless entity. Sony Corporation owns intellectual property of a lot of people. That’s weirdness to me and I can’t understand that at all. If we try to make such as that our property, that’s vanity, and we close our minds rather than opening them to new creation. So, the mind is a crux where universal objectivity and personal subjectivity meet. It’s where the spirit meets the body and it is the turning point. It’s the turning point where our material attachments and personal sins are meek and must return.

Let’s look at the mandala again. A conjunction in the mandala is a synod. It means that two things have come together or fuse together in one point. It is a Saturnine principle in the same way that an entire plant is built into a seed. What is sown in the conjunction is what becomes fruitful in time. It defines its first fruit there. So what is sown in Gemini finds fruit in Libra; it ultimately finds its truth and ultimate purpose in Aquarius.

What we’ve just seen in this little review of the history of our mind is that we have been sowing two kinds of seed. One, extremely materialistic, which isn’t by itself bad but it is personal and the other is universal, objective thought—very impersonal (other oriented). That brings us to …….

Talbot Mundy

I have a great fondness of Talbot Mundy. Talbot Mundy was in the British version of the CIA before the 2^nd world war and he was a theosophist and he wrote some really interesting adventure stories and they all have a spiritual tint to them, not much more than a tint. But he has a quote in one of them. I’ll only give you the partial quote because the partial quote is what is important. ‘Love lives forever. Now and forever. Pain and the past must be something less than love’s chrysalis – its shell – its seed bed, in which necessary nothings rot, to release such real wonders as – as – as…’ beautiful, beautiful lines. We’re talking about the seed bed of thoughts.

The Aquarius wonders that are in the future are a consequence of what we are doing now. We are told, even in orthodox Christianity, how to deal with the problem of the thoughts we are sowing. That is in the story of the tares. I guess the story goes that the wheat was planted and that someone came along and put weed seeds in and when the wheat came up so did the weeds and the people wanted to go out and pull the weeds. In the parable, they are told not to do that but to wait until the harvest. That is really insightful for us solving the problem of the mind. We have two kinds of seed that are being sown in the concrete mind, the Gemini mind if you like, that was ours since the flood and will reach their ultimate fruit in Aquarius.

Now we come to another peculiarity or a paradox about thinking and about the zodiac. All the airy signs and symbols have two parts to them – either the two twins or the part of the Libra sign with the balance and the two lightning bolts or the two waves in Aquarius. They are air signs and thought can be dry and it can be barren and that is the way most people look at it, especially attorneys. They look at it as cut and dried. On the other hand, they can be Aquarian-like as Socrates said. He found the spontaneity of thinking pretty exciting. He said it was almost like following a path through an exotic forest. He said let’s follow this thought and see where it takes us. It’s alive and it’s vital and it’s very spontaneous. It’s Uranian creative. We can already see the tares coming up in our consciousness. You know, all those irrelevant facts and fads and all of those kinds of things. There are people who are involved in amassing them who get immense stores of knowledge and they’re very valuable people. But the wise shall be captured in their folly. We don’t need more thoughts. We need to think more deeply. We need to think more lovingly and we need to think more creatively.

Then, in selfish thought, it’s going to get left by the wayside – that’s the tares – and it’s what we’re sowing. Or if we’re harvesting it’s something like retrospection; that is what counts.

‘The heart is a garden where the thought will always grow and the thoughts that we think are the seeds that we sow. Every kind loving thought bears a kind loving deed while a thought that is selfish is just like a weed. So let us plant our love thoughts so thick in a row, there will not be room for weed thoughts to grow.’

Yeah, forget the rest of the talk. That’s it! We need to use the mind less as a magnifying mirror of shallow responses and more of a lens for planting the seeds that are divine. It doesn’t have to be a profound philosophical thing, but there are wild little good thoughts that we can think every day. When we do reflect, we should reflect on that which is doing the thinking and not seeing how things reflect on us personally. The more we can do of the retrospective thinking, the renegade thinking, the more we will have the strength and the more it will be in the hands of the spirit to plant the right thoughts.

The Gemini Rose

The sun, the self, will ripen all of the seeds, but if we work on control of the mind we can transmute them. Sins don’t have to remain sin. They have seeds somewhere in universal principles and if we can seed that into them, we can transmute them and transform them into very positive things. There is a Bible verse that tells us the same thing very clearly,

‘Be ye perfected by the renewing of your mind.’

Don’t let it stay the same, renew it in the spirit and think new thoughts. This is sort of the opposite. I’m a child of fire rather than a child of water so I’m much more a person involved in the mysteries than religion and so I like ending with Biblical quotes rather than beginning with Biblical quotes. So, let’s end by thinking for just two or three minutes on the idea,

‘Be ye perfected by the renewing of your mind.’

On Healing Prayer

             It may appear that the body is sick, but in actuality there is a shadow over the archetype of a healthy body and sickness results. Therefore all true healing must begin in the mind.  Healing prayer is effective precisely because it begins in the mind, where healing must also begin.  Jesus said, “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me,” at the beginning of a prayer. (John 11:41). 

             Can we be as certain of an answer to our prayers?  Yes, we can. All prayers are answered.
             Why then does it look as if some prayers are not answered?  This can happen under many circumstances. If you pray for what is not good for you, you will not receive it. You will receive instead what you really need, and Christ knows your true need.
             If fear or doubt is involved in your prayer, then your prayer request is distorted and you are not actually praying for what you think you are. That is why it is so important that fear and doubt are set aside, even if temporarily during healing prayer. You will still receive what is best for all involved in the prayer.
             God answers prayers only for eternity. When we pray for something in time that is not in our eternal interest, we will not receive our request in time, but we will receive God’s eternal gifts to us.
             There are many answers to prayer that we have received but not yet heard. As we engage in healing prayer, let us be open to receiving the eternal gifts that God offers us so that we can serve as effective channels to extend God’s healing love to those who most need it.

Peace,
John Hempstead

Matthew 10:29-31

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.
But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.  Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows

Tags: fear, healing prayer

FOR THE NOUVEAU VEGETARIAN

Sausage !

Anyone who decides to change to a vegetarian diet may wonder how he can possibly give up the traditional foods of his friends and family, foods that have long sustained him, and so he asks, “now what will I eat?” The first recipe below for vegetarian breakfast sausage proves that it is possible to create a nutritious “meat” that mimics tradition well enough to please even non-vegetarians.

The sausage patties may be frozen and reheated in an oven, microwave or skillet. They can also be crumbled and used in soups, scrambled eggs or in any brunch recipe that uses sausage.

There is a second recipe, quite different from the first, which got high marks from others, and has simpler ingredients. Let us know which you prefer.

If you miss the meat on your pizza, start with a four-cheese rising-crust frozen version (buy the one with the shortest ingredients list) and follow the third recipe that we think is good enough to compete with the best from any pizzeria. Make the sausage Italian-style by just changing the seasonings. Keep it on hand in the freezer for pizza, lasagna, or any other Italian dishes.

Or be adventurous and invent something new, like German sausage with saurkraut. Swedish meatballs?

VEGETARIAN SAUSAGE PATTIES

Makes 12 two-inch patties

2 eggs
1/2 cup cooked lentils
1/2 cup grated cheese (Monterey jack)
1/2 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup finely ground walnuts
4 – 6 drops liquid smoke
4 – 6 drops onion juice (or 1/4 cup finely minced onion)
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/8 teaspoon ground fennel
1/2 teaspoon dried sage
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Combine all ingredients together until well mixed. Drop by teaspoonfuls on a generously oiled non-stick griddle or skillet. Flatten each patty slightly and sauté undisturbed on medium heat for about 3 minutes or until slightly browned and the patty holds its shape. Then, turn the patties and sauté to brown the other side.

This proportion of spices makes a mild-flavored patty. Use more spice or add cayenne pepper to suit your taste

Substitute these Italian-style seasonings for “Italian sausage”:

1 tsp ground fennel seed
1/2 tsp sugar
2 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp finely minced garlic
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper (optional)

Or for German sausage try substituting: Ginger, nutmeg, coriander and caraway.

VEGETARIAN BREAKFAST SAUSAGE

Makes 4 Large Patties

1 cup uncooked oatmeal
3 egg whites or 2 eggs or equivalent
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon ground fennel
1/2 teaspoon ground rosemary
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon dill
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 – 3 cups vegetable stock

This simple recipe was adapted from a WWII recipe for meatless sausage. Mix all ingredients except the vegetable stock and form into four patties. Oil a non-stick skillet or use non-stick cooking spray and brown the patties over medium heat.

Add enough vegetable stock to cover the patties and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes.

Remove patties from the liquid, drain, and re-brown before serving.

The trick to this recipe is to make the patties properly. If you pack them too tightly, the middle becomes glutinous. If they are not packed tightly enough they will fall apart. If you are not going to use the patties right away, do not re-brown them after boiling; save the re-browning until just before serving. They will keep for several days in the refrigerator.

The following was reported by a reader: Wow! I have to say, I’m impressed — and I’m not a vegetarian, but a typical “pork fat rules” kind of gal when it comes to breakfast meats/sides. My husband and I are innkeepers and fairly frequently have guests who are vegetarians. In a quest to find a substitute for bacon or sausage, I discovered this recipe. I just tried it and was very pleasantly surprised. It actually has a very similar texture as regular pork sausage. The seasonings were well balanced — though I think next time I will add some chopped fresh garlic.

I made them using Egg-Beaters Original. And, just for reference, the mixture is still quite runny when mixed together (not possible to “form” into patties), so I used a 1/4-cup measuring cup — packed them semi-tightly and then “dumped” them into my skillet — slightly flattening them with the back of the measuring cup. ….. After the first browning, I simmered them in the veggie broth on one side for 10 minutes, flipped for the remaining 10 minutes and drained on paper towels. For the second browning, I used a cast iron skillet with a little Canola oil. They came out just perfectly!!

From: http://www.bigoven.com/19411-Vegetarian-Breakfast-%22Sausage%22-recipe.html

[Your editor tried the oatmeal version of breakfast sausage using Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats. The flavor and texture were both excellent. It appears that with the steel-cut oats, there is no problem with how the patties are formed. The texture will be good, but for a less chewy sausage, simmer a few extra minutes in the vegetable broth. Using extra-large eggs, one egg plus one egg white added just the right amount of binding liquid.]

SAUSAGE PIZZA

Serves 3 to 4

Quick and easy, this colorful pizza starts with a commercially-available, frozen, 28-oz. Rising-Crust Four-Cheese Pizza. Choose one with the shortest ingredients list.

1 28 oz. frozen cheese pizza (Do not thaw)
1 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/3 cup chopped fresh spinach leaves
1/3 cup diced onion
1/3 cup diced red bell pepper
1/3 cup sliced or halved black olives
1/3 cup crumbled vegetarian sausage

Preheat the oven to 400°. Remove the frozen pizza from the package and sprinkle with the herbs. Add the spinach leaves, onion, bell pepper, black olives and sausage in the order given and place the pizza directly on the rack in the oven. Bake for approximately 15 minutes or until well-browned. Cut in wedges and serve. All measurements are approximate. Other vegetables may be substituted.

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

 Lecture 8 of 25 by [R]

 Humility, Hierarchy and The Aquarian Age

                This is the eighth talk of Transitioning into The Aquarian Age and we’ll review. What we’re trying to do is understand Aquarius and the Aquarian Age so that we can work in harmony with the times and we can fulfill more easily the purposes of the evolutionary creation of which we are part.

            It is a very difficult thing to study one thing by itself.  In terms of education, to know the thing by itself alone is usually much easier when you compare it or contrast it with other things. So what we’re doing is taking each sign of the zodiac, and on the basis of that sign relative to Aquarius, we’re getting an understanding of our transition into the Aquarian Age. We do that with each sign; we think of a few simple principles that relate to that sign, and then we relate it to Aquarius.

            We’re using the astrological mandala in order to come to that end. The astrological mandala is the very compound, complex symbol of the entire universe.  It is the symbol of the entire universe in astrological terms which means there are several layers of complexity within actual reality. It’s all helpful and a fun thing to do but I don’t know that it is the best way to go about it. In the astrological mandala all of the elements of astrology are in standard position. The constellations are lined up with the signs and the signs are lined up with the houses and every planet is in its sign of rulership, and implicit in the whole structure is the aspects. When everything is all in the standard position it’s like the tumblers of a safe and we hope they’re lined up so that we can open up and get at the truth of things.   What we’re trying to do is understand the basic divine intents and the underlying relationships of things in the cosmos. If we can understand them more clearly we can live more clearly and this is a much better way of going about it than looking at any horoscopes. We’re looking at the raw materials or the source material directly.

            In our last talk, we noted the relationship of the first cusp in the first house to the cusp and house that came after it and the cusp and house that came before it. We noted that there were very dramatic changes from one sign to the next or from one cusp to the next. The most dramatic changes of all of astrology come about from adjacent signs.

            For example, if you take Cancer, Cancer is an emotional and sentimental sign and it’s plopped right between Gemini which is sort of airy and indifferent about things and is certainly not at all sentimental, and on the other side, Leo, which is not at all sentimental either and demands that things be done one way or another. So what we noted is that an irrepressible driving force that is Aries meets deadlock resistance when it comes to Taurus, and in relation to Pisces, Pisces is more like a resist-push mist that, unlike Taurus which resists energy, Pisces gives into energy so that the relationship between the signs on either side of Aries is that each uses a different philosophy.

            We saw that whether it is the consolidation of responsibility that happens when you pass from the first house to the second house or whether it is being under the weight of a whole cycle of energy as the twelfth house is, either of those two houses represent a basic change of state and that’s what the semi-sextile represents is a change of state. The most basic changes of state are consolidation and what you could call de-consolidation.

            The image that we used when we talked about consolidation or de-consolidation is an image that relates to form and to stuff and to matter. But when we’re studying history or when we’re studying cosmological history we’re thinking in terms of time – not in terms of space. So what we concluded last time is that, corresponding to the semi-sextile is a change of state in time.

            I need to say that from the past there is always a build-up that pushes us into the future and whether we like it or not because, if we try to repress it, it just pushes harder and we noted that the future has a quality about it that pulls us forward. So the fundamental changes of state and time are brought about by push and pull working at the same time upon the present. Call it … or synchronously. I don’t know how to say it. Relative to Aquarius the push comes from Pisces because with precession we’re going backwards through the zodiac. We’re looking at history. The pull from the future comes from Capricorn. In order to understand the pull of the future, we’re going to look at some basic ideas of Capricorn and the ideas we’re going to look at are the ideas of humility and hierarchy and we’re going to do that in a rather miscellaneous manner not in an especially coherent plot. It’s going to be all over the place.

            When we think about terms like humility and hierarchy, it seems almost impossible that they would be associated in the same sign because humility is so willing to take a backseat but when we think of hierarchy we think of social stratification and elitism and all of those kinds of things. But that is one of the things of astrology that the seed of something that seems opposite or you think are opposite are both found in the same sign. It’s very much like the Yin and the Yang, the Tao symbol. Each of them, the Yin or the Yang, has the opposite, the seed of the opposite within it so that there is no such thing as an unbalanced opposition that you can only go so far in one direction without being pulled back in the other direction because the seed of the opposite is within that.

            We want to understand hierarchy and the first way we’re going to begin to understand hierarchy or humility is through the study of simplicity and simplification. Concentration and simplicity have always been associated with Capricorn. It’s like a crystal; the atoms are put together in the simplest way possible. When they are in the simplest arrangement they are the most concentrated and the consequence is that a crystal is highly organized and everything becomes crystal clear because of that organization. It is seeing the simplicity and simplification of the tenth house as much as Capricorn. For example, the tenth house rules professionals and professionals know how to cut corners. They do it with the least amount of effort in order to do that kind of simplification. They get to be top dog by being able to have the smallest margins of error which means they simplify things the most.

            Whether one becomes a professional or whether pure carbon becomes a diamond, that takes time and time has always been associated with Capricorn. If you read history, especially if you read the Greek historians like Cornelius Tacitus, he points out clearly how people get exactly what they need at exactly the right time. He takes relish in the fact that tyrants get their comeuppance as they should. So it’s gratifying the way things happen in time and they happen with a marvelous punctuality. They happen exactly when they are needed to happen. So, for myself, I’ve found out that the Capricorn principles of concentration and simplification and hierarchy have been revealed to me in various ways and most of them were humiliating.

            I remember the last time I gave these talks, I was sharing a kitchen with a couple of elegant French women, and when we would prepare our meals we would be starting with really simple things that would remain simple all the way to the end – including the eating, whereas the same simple meal with the same simple elements ended up being very sumptuous and that was one example of simplicity. We did a lot of talking while we were cooking and it brought to mind the first time I began to understand simplicity in terms of time in history.

            At one time, I worked at a spiritual center where the basic business of the center was conducted and I was very young. When I gave these talks the last time it was at the same location, which was the headquarters of the Rosicrucian Fellowship. When I was there working as a young man I was filled with the spirit of mysticism and fuelled with enthusiasm and I was irrepressible. All you had to do was push a button and I couldn’t stop talking. At that young age, I realized that I could do anything. I believed that with regard to spirituality I could do everything. I had a certain amount of illusion or delusion and time has rubbed off some of the hard corners, but I still understand that I can do anything, but I also realize that I can’t do everything. Time just does not allow us to do everything because we have to be sequential. Time also produces its own kind of pressure with regard to the spiritual path to becoming and unfolding our divinity; Paul tells us it’s like running a race. As time goes on we become increasingly aware of how precious time is and long it takes to develop things. Just to develop a simple prayer life has taken years and years and years to make just a very little advance in all of that.

            When we’re young we have this feeling of physical immortality, death just isn’t something that we think about. We consider that there is time for everything. But the further we go in life the more we are brought to humility, because we look at the fruits of the things we’ve accomplished and they haven’t proven that much and they haven’t been that great. We realize that we are subject to the same mortality as every one else and the same limitations of the material world and that is a humbling experience. So if we are true to the spiritual path, as time goes on we simplify. We discard the things that are extraneous and the things that are less significant. We realize that some things are more important in life so we understand priority. We know that there is a lot we don’t know as we get older – that’s another part of the humility – but we concentrate and specialize on the things we know and do not try to accomplish everything. So that’s a very simple example of the relationship between humility and hierarchy. Some things are more important than others and we learn to simplify and concentrate on them and if we don’t do that humbly we are humiliated. Life is like that and I’m not going to be one of those old people who wear stretch pants or something like that.

            All right, what we have stated is pretty much personal to me.  I’ve tried to generalize it to the principle, but we want something more than that because we are talking about the Aquarian Age and we’re talking about the mandala, which means the entire cosmos. So we want something bigger and that means a story – a story about gods.

            In most societies in the Western world, especially in what’s called the Indo-European peoples, most of the societies or civilizations have the same gods. They have the same characters to their gods. Indra was the same as Apollo and was the same as Balder. They’re all solar figures but different societies value different things. In India, the sun (that is, Indra) is the chief of the regular gods. When things got to Greece, Jupiter or Zeus was the chief of the gods. Jupiter rules abstraction and the Greeks were very abstract people. By the time things got to northern Europe, Germany and Norway or places like that it was war time and Odin was the chief of the gods. They have a mercurial kind of view. Things were brought down from the spirit of the sun to the abstraction of Jupiter to the concrete thinking of Mercury as the people moved in that direction.

            Now, the myths are controlled by the racial or cultural spirits because a race or a culture is a vehicle that is used to bring people specific evolutionary experiences, because as human beings we can’t do everything; we need to learn specific things. Therefore, the guiding spirits take care of how people dress (customary dress), and the languages and the food that they eat and the music and even things like clothing. The further we have moved from India to the West the tighter our clothing has become and the tighter our clothing, the more we have become materially objective to the point that we become materially obsessed with stuff.

            They control mythology and religion. Different groups have, not only different cultural spirits which are ruled by Archangelic, planetary-flavored spirits, but they had different circumstances in which to live. For example, in Persia it was a rather rigorous climate. In fact, in northern Persia, it stretched right into what is now Afghanistan and so the myths took a different flavor. They had a lot of myths about wolves and things like that. But with the Egyptians, it was a very wealthy society; they had a mild climate and they had all of that fertility, so they lounged a lot. It was not what you would call a hard working society. As a consequence, their gods were pictured as lounging a lot. They would go to the beach and one day a major pout of gods was lounging along the banks of the Nile. In Egypt, if there was a collection of gods – three or more – it was called a pout and every city had its own pout.

            The city of Kheminis, which is where our word ‘chemistry’ or ‘alchemy’ comes from, had the great pout and that had the twelve gods that were common to the Egyptians, which is one of the only places where we have the story left intact.  At any rate, the major pout of gods were lounging along the Nile River and suddenly Typhon was upon them and Typhon is sort of a giant bad guy. He’s a Titan that is constantly harassing the gods and they didn’t have time to armor themselves.  They probably wouldn’t have done that anyway because if you get used to lounging you become decadent and you don’t like fighting. You consider it to be not a very cultural thing. So they each transformed themselves into an animal and then dealt with things. The Zeus figure changed himself into a ram and went running off. The Apollo figure changed himself into a crow and flew away. The Hera figure, the divine mother, changed herself into a cow and also ran off.  Aries, that is Mars, changed himself into a bear and went lumbering off. Aphrodite, the Venus character, changed herself into a timid little fish and jumped into the river where she was safe. The ruler figure, the Artemis figure, changed herself into a cat and she climbed into a tree. The Mercury figure, being cunning, changed himself into an ibis and he stood in the water feeling protected there because he didn’t think Typhon would go into the water. 

Cronos who is the Capricorn, Saturnine figure turned himself into a seagull and was clever like the Hermes figure.  He knew he would be safe in the water and he could dive underneath if needed, and yet he could have an eye on what was happening on land. That is pretty much the Capricorn idea.  To be Capricornian is to be like a seagull; It is the house of perspective, the principle of perspective. He wanted the view from the safety of the water and the perspective of power on land or in society. If you are on land, probably the best perspective is from the mountain top, because the mountain top is the only place from which you can see a wide vista, a panorama.  I myself like to climb towers, fire towers and things like that and what I try to do when I get to the top is pirouette like a dancer to open my consciousness to the whole 360 degrees.  Not having eyes in the back of my head I’m stuck with just my eyes, but I can still get the effect of 360-degree vision.

            ……………It’s a very strong tenth house and he recognized the importance of perspective and he would actually carry a board around with him that, by looking at the borders of the board that he could tell how perspective would be if he was drawing something or if he was painting something. Cronos, who is Father Time, or who is Saturn, was the god of time. In Rome, it was the god Janus, the two-faced god, and some people think that’s a good description of Capricorn, but there is still that very beautiful temple to Janus in Rome; if you can go in and see it, it is a simply marvelous experience. One face faces one direction; the other faces the other way. In time, it is the New Year when you are looking back on the old and looking forward to the new.

            There are many ways of looking at perspectives in time which is what we’re trying to with history and evolution, and there are statements of time that link the linearity or the simplicity of time together with hierarchy. There is a statement that is made in two places in the Bible that talks about that. In one place, I believe, it’s in the Apocalypse; it says ‘the first shall be last’ which is a statement of precedence and priority. Precedence being “the first” and “the last” is the statement of priority. The other way that it is stated is in St John’s gospel: “he that cometh after me is preferred before me because he was before me.” That’s a very important statement and we’re going to try to get to that. It is a statement also of priority and preference – who is preferred above other people. When we’re talking about hierarchy, we’re talking about priority, precedence, preference and perspective. All of them are parts of hierarchy and all of them are ruled by Capricorn. A lot of this is a result of having spent three years lecturing on hierarchy in mythology and I did get some pretty good understandings from that.

            In large-scale cosmological history, which is even bigger than the precession of the equinox that we’re studying, (people have the consciousness to see things of that magnitude), we are now at the nadir of spirituality. That is, we are furthest away from pure spirit and we are at the maximum of materiality. The nadir really may not be at dead center but within a few thousand or a few million years which, in terms of cosmology, is not very much. It’s a short amount of time. This is a very important time in cosmic history. When we are in this material state, we have a very unique perspective. With that unique perspective, we can begin to understand the reflective symmetry of the cosmological design of things. In order to do this, we are going to go through something that should take years but we’re going to do it in about three minutes. We’re going to look a little bit at the background of cosmogony and cosmology in terms of the mystery schools.

            There is, we’ve talked about it often, a pole – but when you think about a pole, you don’t think it’s a rod or anything like that – you just think about it as two opposing dimensions. In one of those dimensions, the potential is time and that potential is filled with spirit. At the other extreme, the potential is space and that is filled with matter. In the very center is mind which stands between spirit and matter.

            The evolutionary creation in which we exist is an activity that takes place in time and space. You might say the One manifest itself in time-space as matter and it does this in time. Periods of time are very long and large and they’re all given astrological names, not because they have anything to do with these planets, but because they share the same character. The very first period has the character of Saturn; it’s like the ground floor and it takes place in worlds but within those worlds are globes of matter in space.

            Sometimes, the worlds are coincident with the globes and sometimes the globes are within the worlds. The whole thing is turning inward and out, spiraling in a very complex spiral that has about as many dimensions as string theory, but I am certainly not going to justify this by talking about string theory. Within this interplay of globes of matter in space interplaying with periods of spiritual consciousness in time—within this interaction there are revolutions of consciousness. Consciousness spirals through spirit and matter in such a way that it is awakened.

            This is a very crude drawing of something that can’t be drawn but it is …. Outside of this, it is unlimited, but these are different degrees of spirit being more and more materialized until you get to where we are now – where matter is a very crystallized, materialized and condensed thing.  It’s very concentrated.  In some of these periods of time, (I can’t put a diagram of them up because it would be way too much and I don’t want to go into it that far), the worlds are manifest before the globes and that is the description that we have here. So we’re talking about our periodic revolutions of consciousness but the image that we’re going to have on the board is very inadequate.

            What is a better image is to follow resolution in music. Like you follow something and then a chord resolves into something else and your consciousness is taken into another dimension and then that resolves into something else and then eventually it flows back to where it began. It’s also like a very good prayer or a very good deal of work that you do on your own. You turn inward, inward, inward and you come to some revolution of consciousness and then you come out and then you go back in and you go deeper and by that rhythm you find that if you just try to go linearly you can’t do it but by progressively spiraling you go deeper and deeper and you get a more comprehensive understanding. What’s happening is that these globes where all of the evolving beings, whether they are divine creators or whether they are creatures that are receiving and being brought to wakefulness to become divine beings, they’re all working within these different globes.

            We’re talking about the process of spiraling. You might say that the spirit cycles into matter and it cycles and cycles and eventually cycles another layer deeper and another layer deeper and the whole business is like a spiral that works its way into the degree of materiality. That’s what we’re trying to talk about. We’re trying to say that spirit cannot hold its concentration or does not think it is wise to hold its concentration and have everything happen all at once; mainly because this is quite a variable experience. We have all kinds of vignettes of consciousness, some of which last a hundred million years which is a short time and you go through all these different states and each one awakens a different part of our consciousness or it instills a different potential within us.

            That process continues. It is again a Capricorn principle. It becomes more and more and more concentrated until it gets to this. You might say that with regard to the evolutionary creation in which we live and in which we are partaking this dot is the limit of the concentration of God relative to our evolution. You can’t go any deeper than that. What happens is that as we concentrate, things become more material and consciousness becomes more discrete and more focused in materiality rather than in the general overall spiritual consciousness of things – that understands things. Once nadir materiality has been reached, then someone wakes up and when they wake up it’s almost like death.

            After death, everything unwinds. As long as we live we become more crystal and we become more stone-like and we’re always going forward until we can’t go forward anymore. The will to live has run out and then we let go and everything unwinds. So what we’re talking about here is the physical body, it decomposes, the higher body decomposes – we draw the essence of experience out of them and its all taken into the spirit and then we cycle again hopefully not too much deeper into matter than we are now.

            If we take one loop on this spiral, that’s what this is meant to be. These are different worlds that, during one loop of the spiral, we are passing through. This is a higher state of spirituality. This is a higher degree of materiality. The whole idea is that when we are involving or coming into matter, we become more externalized. When we pass out, we are internalized. We’ll talk more about this as we go on. This is rather sketchy right now, but the whole idea is that we go back the way that we came but we go back with a totally different perspective.  The first things that we learn are the last things that we come to full waking consciousness of, within any loop of the spiral, which is the statement “and the first shall be last.”

            This state of existence is after this state of existence, this realm of existence in time so he that cometh after me is preferred before me because he was before me. It’s talking about different states of consciousness and even though the pictures are not very good we get a little bit of the idea. This is the whole symbol of it. This is supposed to have wings on. This is called a caduceus of Mercury. This is considered the flying spirit and this is the spirit-matter pole. Now the two snakes are supposed to be different colors; this one is meant to be a black snake but a black snake on a black board wouldn’t work very well.  It is the snake of involution into matter and the other snake is the snake of evolution where we come out of matter and return to spirit. So, we’re talking about this whole spiral process. Obviously the caduceus of Mercury is much simpler and it’s only in two dimensions.

            If we look at a mountain from below which is like this perspective, we’re challenged and we’re inspired but there is a lot of illusion. I can remember one time, I was looking on the edge on the Anza-Borrego desert in this valley, the same valley through which the San Andreas Fault runs and everyday I looked at this mountain and the mountain went up and then behind it was the peak and I thought I could make it up to that peak. I walked half a day and I got to that first crest and it was an enormous area before you even started the ascent of the next crest and then another enormous area behind that before you got to the peak. Those are the kinds of illusions that you have when you’re looking from the bottom up. Matter is very limited. There are all those shadows and you can’t see things the way things are at all.

            This is a real problem because most people have a bottom up point of view. This is what makes a lot of science fiction terrible. Most science fiction is not about the future. Most science fiction is an exaggerated extrapolation of the present. If there is something that a science fiction writer has as a peeve, he just takes it and runs it out into the future and makes it feel really extreme. It’s really not of the future at all. There are some people left with future technologies and things like that, but most of it is not. I don’t read science fiction or watch science fiction movies because they are all the same thing, they are all extrapolations of the present into the future.

            What we’re trying to get at is that the bottom up point of view is a human point of view. There are two perspectives. You are looking from the bottom up or you’re looking from the top down. With the top down perspective because you are at the top of the mountain and you can see where every little crevice runs, there are not those illusions. You have the full panorama which adds a totally different quality than when you’re looking up from the bottom. The top down is the god’s eye point of view. It’s a divine perspective and the bottom up is the human point of view.

            Things had to have begun with the top down before the bottom up. The bottom up exclusively is a notion of linear-time in materialism. That means we are born in the illusion; something lesser than cannot make something greater than itself. It’s a logical contradiction. Like the potentiality of being something greater than itself had to be there before that potentiality could be unfolded. In order for us to become divine creative geniuses we had to have that potential before we could unfold it which means that this was built into us or is described as being built into us from other divine creative beings.

            The top down perspective at the top of the spirit-matter pole is universal. It’s all over at the same time, it’s eternal and it’s inward. Even the outwardness that we would think would be outward is still inward to it. So that is such that because everything is inward, when you’re looking for the outermost spiritual point of view, you can see through everything because it is within you. When you’re looking for matter from the bottom up point of view, matter is okay and the limitations of consciousness (the consciousness is all about limitations) is a much different kind of consciousness. We can only see things outside of ourselves and if we look at the inside of something, we are just looking at the outside of the inside of something – not really the inside as it is experienced inward by itself. We’re talking about two different kinds of consciousness. If we take the material consciousness and apply it to higher spiritual things, we’re still just seeing the outward surfaces or appearances of it. That’s what’s frustrating and that’s what we talked about last time when we were talking about symbolism. So there are two very different varieties of consciousness and ultimately the future consciousness which takes both of them and unites them so we see the within and the without by having universalized the outward objectivity and having externalized everything that is hidden within us, within ourselves.

            The further we have proceeded into matter, the thinner the spiritual consciousness has become. The point right now is that many people don’t even realize that they have spiritual consciousness. Spirit gives itself into matter. It is drawn into it in its giving and that is the point we stand at now in evolution. After the nadir is reached, after we have involved as far as we go, and we take the leap of faith across the gaps of the tails of the two serpents, we unfold.  We are aware of ourselves and we unfold the divine consciousness. We’ll come to that a little bit more. When you have all … together, things align, they collapse and they become re-universalized and there is a retrograde quality to that or there is a looking-back quality to that which continues even though the evolution of consciousness proceeds forward.  There is both a forward and a backward activity that is dissolving matter back into spirit. That’s where we are right now. We’ve just passed the nadir of materiality. Even though it isn’t the same thing as spirit, it’s still pretty wonderful. If we look at it, everything is unique; everything is different. If I look at Bob from here and then walk over a few feet and look at him again, I see him altogether differently and each point of view, each perspective, is a unique thing. It is very helpful for broadening our understanding. Each time we become more inward, we become more awake to unifying those unique points of view that we now have.

            In all of this, this is a very simplified thing that I am presenting here, everything that we are in our whole psychological-spiritual consciousness and our physical nature has been built into us. While we are creatures, the divine beings, the spiritual hierarchies, the gods, whatever you want to call them, the Elohim, they have built things into us. As the physical side of the universe goes into decadence, those things are expelled out of us. As we become creators, we get rid of all of the influence that has been pushed into us or has been developed into us by the divine creative beings. At that time, we will expand.

             If you look at any spiritual path now, they all talk about the expansion of consciousness. It’s like this is what it is, that we’re too limited here, and that we’re too small in our viewpoint. We’re too provincial in our outlook. As we expel things, as we expand, as we become more divine, we become more creative. We are told, freely have you received, now freely give.  Where you’re involutionary, you are a receiver. When you are evolutionary, you are a giver. We’ve been told that it is better to give than it is to receive. We even have throughout Christianity these same principles. St Paul tells us, for example, that there was a religion of Christ before. He says that it is of the order of the Priests of Melchizedek which is talking about an involutionary state of humanity or it is all tied together.

            Let’s return to the top down and bottom up perspective that is already in us and let’s try to understand our waking up in that. Let’s return to something we spoke of the last time we met. We talked about the fall of humanity. Let’s talk about the fall with regard to reflective symmetry and we’re talking now about lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps out of our fallen states. We’re doing that by the pull of the future and the push of the past. The Rosicrucian philosophy was, in modern times, written out by Max Heindel and he twice… very clearly in the story of the prodigal son who left home and eventually ended up in a life filled with the husks of matter. The prodigal son decided to give up this horrid life and return to the father. His urge is received by plenty of pull from above.

            This is our quest, to raise ourselves out of the stupidity that we are in – in matter – and to do that, the pure spiritual way has been given to us by various spiritual teachers. Probably, most pre-eminent of them is Christ. He shows us an attitude—by keeping our eye and merely receiving from Christ, he shows us how we can rise out of matter with ease. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” But there is always that tendency to be pulled back in the opposite direction. We’ve been talking about the pull of the future and the push of the past. There is also a pull from the past and a push from the future and they are perverse states.

            There are specific attitudes about the future and the past. If we have the wrong attitudes we produce utter chaos in our consciousness. The attitude for the past is objectivity. If we live subjectively in the past and we have all these sentimental views about the good old days, we have not learned from the objective facts of the past.. The same applies to the future. If we are too objective about the future, we become exactly what we want to be but we miss the greater future. If the attitude towards the future is to be subjective, it is to receive the future into us and that is what pulls us forward.  But if we see only this and this and this, we will be this and this and this but we will be nothing more.

            Similarly, there is a pull from the past. I’m noticing it with age. There’s a tendency to want to look back at things that are done and be attached to them and there really are sentimental things that are inhibitive of progress. Similarly, if we are not looking—we’re just aware of right now, the future comes rushing on us. It doesn’t pull us forward with the intrigue that we want to go into it and explore it; the future comes at us so fast that we can’t handle it. What happens then is that we try to go back to a past that never was and we have fundamentalism and reactionary things. You know, give me that old time religion and remember the good old days and that.

            A lot of people believe the Golden Age was in the past. Truly, for us, we have to look at the Golden Age being in the future.  The beautiful thing about looking at our journey through spirit-matter in this way is the reflective symmetry—if we take that with the continuity of consciousness in cause and consequence, nothing is lost. We don’t have to worry about losing cultural artifacts from the past, because of everything that was here in the past, its essence is going to be rediscovered in the future with a totally different perspective. The ideas of re-creating ancient societies and holding on to old things from past times are well intended but they’re very much misguided. If you have the essence of things and you have the conditions under which things were produced, you don’t have to have all of the things. They come to life as you need them and as you create them or re-create them. The future is going to be creative. It’s not going to be something that happens to us like history or things from the past.

            Now that we have a little bit of the idea of a hierarchical perspective with a cosmic scope, let’s go back and try to look at it again from the personal point of view. Let’s try to narrow in, a little bit, on our lives. Narrowing in is the right set of words. From the top down, from that within—going out, you have the consciousness of the grandstand. You can see better than the players can see, because you are on the outside and you are looking in and there is no subjectivity. It’s all a matter of creation. In the creation that we’re talking about or that we’re trying to describe in these crude diagrams, it is a process of concentration. The spirit, the One, the universal spirit, is projecting its dream of what could be, its cosmic scheme of what could be. That process is a concentrative process much more than it is an additive process.

            In ancient times, the seers and spiritual philosophers said that matter was carved out of space and that space was truly a plenum. I don’t know if they meant by that the same thing as modern physicists when they’re talking about dark matter and dark energy and all the things we can see are only a very small portion of the universe. What we’re trying to say, yes, yes, there is an imaginative projection of a dream, an externalization of the dream to objectify it and to know it but it isn’t all completely like the projection of a movie. It’s much more like sculpting. Sculpting, where you have your block of marble and you realize that the statue that is your dream is within that and you keep chipping things away and you do that in a very negative way. You do that in a Capricornian way.

            You say is this part of my dream – no – and another shard is off of the block and you keep on going that way until you have objectified what you inwardly believed was true or want. There is a realization of the dream in that fashion. Because it is a creative activity and because there is an unknown and because there is something for the divine spirit, the divine creator, just like there is for every other creator, it is a negative process.

            If you’re trying to understand something, like proving a mathematical theorem, you do what Plato did in the Meno; you ask your intuition every step of the way until you come to the universal understanding. In this case it’s negative – no, it’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not this – this is what it is. That is how things are brought into what we call blind matter, dumb matter. Not surprising, is that following the same process, because we have objectified something and we haven’t completely understood it yet, that’s only part of the creation; it’s not surprising that our creations are unsatisfying – they’re never what we wanted them to be in the first place. If we weren’t unsure in the first place, we never would have been drawn into creating the same—what is this in myself that feels unfulfilled; that feminine that draws us on into the future in a very high creative cosmic state. We wouldn’t even have the awareness of the ignorance that is part of that pull.

            At any rate, it is a relief to externalize our insecurity, even from the divine. We’re told that in the beginning was the word and a lot of the people believe that that original word was a laugh because there is a relief at the insecurity of something that could be that has been my dream all the time inside of me even though it is probably never going to be exactly what I want it to be which means it has to be that way if it’s going to be something new.  In the externalization of that is that relief and in that relief there is a spirit of joy and there is a spirit of laughter.

            Anyway, when the dream is made manifest with many, many hierarchical helpers, all of the deepest and the most fixed manifestation of it is unknown. It has to be brought to life. It’s like the statue of Pygmalion and Galatea. Galatea was a statue that had to be brought to life. This is an extremely meaningful myth and story that the statue is an objectification of exactly what we are insecure about in our ignorance; but to really know it, it has to live. It has to become us in spirit because that is what we truly are. That is what goes on in the process of creation.

            Let’s bring us closer to home and let’s look at ourselves with the god’s eye perspective. Suppose we are hewing a delicate statue out of marble and suppose we’re nearly finished and we’re at a crucial point. We make a misdecision and we shatter the piece.

            Part of the statue is broken away and it can’t be put back; at least, it can’t be put back into its original state. Normally, things like this happen when we aren’t concentrating, when we aren’t paying attention. We get distracted and usually the biggest distraction is the wrong kind of self-consciousness. We’re thinking about ourselves in a very egoistic way. How do we feel when we do something like that? Obviously, we feel pain and we feel regretful. We always say, “If only I hadn’t done this,” or, “If only I hadn’t done that.”

            Let’s take another example. Suppose you were playing an accompanied solo with an orchestra; a very beautiful symphonic piece and you decide to show off or to showboat and do something that isn’t in the original score. As a result, you pull the whole orchestra off and everything goes to pieces.

            Even you, without the orchestra to back you up, you go off on a tangent somewhere. Again, we ask ourselves how we feel in this case. We feel probably worse because we have let other people down, we have forsaken them.  We have not been part of the team or the orchestra. Suppose further that we’re doing something of great importance and those who were doing it or those who depend on us – and it is supposed to be done with innocence and purity and sensitivity – we’re supposed to be like a child. How do we feel if we become self-centered and abuse the trust that has been placed in us? Well, sure, remorseful. We feel pain. These people deserve better for all of the trust and everything that they gave to us; they don’t deserve to be treated like that.

            If we take the feeling of these errors or the scenario of these errors and we think about them in terms of our evolutionary creation, it gives us a feeling of what the fall of humanity must have been like for the divine spiritual hierarchies. It hurts others because they love us. I did things in my youth and in my young manhood that hurt both parents, my mother especially.  It hurt them dearly even though they didn’t do anything wrong. Because they love, they feel hurt.

            It hurts oneself. When we realize what we have done, we say, “Oh my God, what have I done!” We’re talking about remorse but we’re talking about remorse of a cosmic scope. Because we indulge ourselves in everything, we indulge ourselves in remorse. Remorse indulged is guilt. As a consequence, consciously or unconsciously, for what we have done in letting down the creation and the creators who have helped us, we carry around a very big burden of cosmic guilt. I don’t mean to imply by these pictures or stories that we, as human beings, are capable of disrupting the entire harmony of the entire creation. That would take more than our unfolded creative capacity.

            All I’m trying to say is that we have brought a very painful element of disharmony into the cosmos and we have made it much more difficult to attain the ends of the evolutionary creation.  And we have made it more difficult for everyone to do so, which is sort of like another image that all of us have had – a puzzle with one piece missing. Here, you have this glorious picture but that one piece is missing and you notice that right away. The capacity for love of divine beings is much greater than we suspect and eventually that love is going to correct our errors, but for right now we are perpetrators of unnecessary pain in the cosmos. The intensity and the extent of our discordancy, of our remorse and guilt, are significant for the being that came and brought the kind of consciousness that allows us the ability to be redeemed. All we actually have to do is receive it but that brings in another level of pain brought on by our level of perversity.

            In my life, I have learned three lessons about love. I’m not sure I’ve learned them completely yet and I’m not sure I know a lot about the subject but these are the some of the dearest things I have learned in life. I had to pay a very high price in order to come to these three principles of love but it was worth everything that I succor. They all have to do with freedom.

            The first principle of love is that we cannot be loved unless the being that loves us does so in freedom. We can’t make anybody love us. We can’t at all do that. In our insecurity if we try to force someone to love us, we have the opposite effect. This is beautiful. This means that when we are loved, we are loved because the person who loved us, loved us in complete freedom. They didn’t have to. There is another kind of compulsion but it is certainly not the kind of compulsion that we think of that has a lot of coercion or anything like that. 

            The second principle of love that applies to this situation is that love must be received in freedom just as it is given in freedom. It isn’t any of our business whether someone accepts our love or not. Our love may be beautiful, it may be pure, it may be true, it may be just the thing to help the person, but if they don’t accept it, it’s painful to us that they don’t accept it because we know how good it is, but they have to have the freedom to receive or not receive.

            The third law of love is the law that it isn’t any of our business if we are loved. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s not ours to worry about. Ours to worry about is if we love. That’s where our responsibility is because if we can’t control other people, it isn’t our business to know that we are being loved. It’s a wonderful thing to be loved and we blossom in it and we are very fruitful in it, but it isn’t any of our business whether we are loved or not. All the time that we spend saying, “Nobody loves me,” or “This special person doesn’t love me.” As long as we think that way, we’re wasting our time; we’re wasting all of our psychic energy.

            In a cosmic context, we are a source of double the pain because we don’t accept the cosmic love that is given to us, because we don’t know how to be loved. We don’t know how to let go of our old selfishness and open ourselves to love so that we can be redeemed. All of the pain and anguish of the fall is redoubled by our perverse unwillingness to receive the thing that could redeem us from the fall. So, here we are blinded in matter, entrenched in materialism, but there are some blessings to that. We have to remember that we are like little children, even though we are divine beings and at the core of our very being we are gods, we are still little children. Our awareness and sensitivity to our misdeeds has also been turned off or muted by our materialism because we probably, if we had full awareness of the things that we had done and the heinous monstrosities that we have put out, we probably couldn’t bear up under that. We’ve become blind and insensitive. We still have the responsibility which is called a cumulative burden of sin, but there is a blessing in not being completely sensitive to it because it would have been too much.

            Corollary to that is another blessing for our situation. We’re in quarantine in this materialistic blindness where we can only see with the senses and we don’t have the spiritual vision. We are allowed to work here at our own pace. Our work is by the sweat of our brow rather than by the ease of that love that is given to us if we want to take it, but if we had been weighed down with guilt and remorse, we wouldn’t have accomplished. We have been forced by necessity to be inventive. Going by that old adage, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ we have developed abilities. We’ve taken all of their esoteric energies and we’ve turned them into science and technology and have done some wonderful things.

            Some of these things we have used to extend and to deepen our perversities; that’s always a temptation that is there.  Sometimes we’ve not been kind to our younger brothers and sisters, the kingdoms that are beneath us; we have poisoned them, we have slaughtered them and we have done all sorts of things like that. Nonetheless, we’ve accomplished some things. We’ve worked very hard on that. As a result of these accomplishments, looking at it from the small point of view, the bottom up point of view, we think we’re pretty good. If a child, say a six or seven year old, had to play baseball with Willie Mays everyday, a horrible inferiority feeling would come up. What I’m trying to say is, if we saw the magnificence of the creative work of the divine beings and looked at that all of the time, we would be cowered in our insecurity because our creative efforts have been feeble. But being locked in materialistic blindness, we have developed some self-esteem. We have developed soul power, we feel good about ourselves and we’ve gotten so far that we even feel cocky.

            From the materialistic point of view, we’re at the top of evolution. We haven’t been very good to the things that are below us in evolution. We’re arrogant in our top down viewpoint that is really from near the bottom and this is dangerous because if we become more and more egoistic and more and more materialistic, we become progressively more and more isolated. We have bad attitudes. We don’t want to cooperate. This morning’s paper had another diatribe against mass transit. No, we don’t want to share with somebody; we want to be shielded in our own little car. I think the epitome in the United States would be to have a drive in … You would be with other people, like in a drive-in theater but you would be shielded and protected in your own little car. We hide behind a television and we don’t communicate with other people, not even by telephone or cell phone.

            Now we have these new tweeters and such.  They are all symptoms of loneliness. When we think you are your body, that’s a very isolated state. Rather than sharing the same spirit and communicating the same spirit with someone else you are very isolated in your one little body. You’re alone. But the loneliness isn’t all bad. When we’re alone, we are forced to turn inward. Eventually, when we are sincere in our inward turnings, we make inner breakthroughs. When we make inner breakthroughs, we are surprised, even with little steps forward inwardly. As we make greater and greater steps forward in inner consciousness, nothing is hidden from us.

            Like we said at the beginning of the last talk, we can see everything but the godhead. Now that, the responsibility for everything that we have done, and the awesome consciousness of all of the divine beings that are above us, will be humiliating. We thought we were the top when we are somewhere down near the bottom. That’s humiliating. Hopefully, it will also be humbling. We’ll see all of the divine glories, things that we have evaded for a long time.

            Hopefully, we will not become humble through humiliation because true humility comes from something other than humiliation. For example, walking out on a starry night and being awed by the extreme majesty of just the visible universe can do more to humble a person than taking a great drumming from somebody. Just think of how much more – a view of the divine beings and of the pure spiritual truth. Humility doesn’t keep us devout. Humility is really the basis of our resurrection. It is the basis of our ascension, our apotheosis. It’s only when we are humble that we can judge ourselves with that acrid Capricorn and Saturnine judgment. Only then can we climb with sure steps because we see exactly where we are and what we are capable of. This gives inspiration to a bottom up perspective by the ability to see something above us to emulate, to look up to. We have then spiritually living role models. We have something to work forward to, something that pulls us toward us.

            That pull is elucidated very clearly in the Divine Comedy by Dante. When Dante goes into hell and

Dante and Beatrice by Henry Holiday

 the lower regions, it is a human being or the ghost of a human being, the ghost of Virgil that takes him down into the underworld. When he passes into the spiritual world, it is by Beatrice that he came there. Each time, he feels a need to look to Beatrice, he looks at her and the beauty of her elevates him so that he rises to a different level. That’s not just poetic fiction. That is spiritual reality. Every time that we look deeply and drink in something deeper and higher than us, it uplifts us. We don’t have to put forth a whole lot of effort. All we have to do—this is again that effort, is to relaxively receive.

            Christian mystical aspirants know that they have a promise that they’ll know the truth and that the truth is part of the divine being. The human life focused on that being, Christ, who said, “I am the truth.” Christ, or at least the biblical Christ, said, “If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men.” That is the pull of the future. It is a pull of love. The way Paul says it, “We love him because he loved us first.” That kind of love being given to us, when we receive it, when we eagerly reach for it, is the pull of the future.

Tags: Aquarian Age, cadeuceus, Capricorn, Christ, Dante, perspective, spiral

Portuguese-Speaking Friends Commemorate 100 Years of The Rosicrucian Fellowship with Exposition and Book

by Delmar Domingos de Carvalho

 The Rose and Rosicrucians and

100 years Fraternidade Rosacruz Max Heindel and

100 years Conception in Bombarral-Portugal

 2009 October 17 – 31

Palacio Gorjao

Municipal Museum

Bombarral-Portugal

 Although the Exposition does not officially open until October 17, Delmar writes that “at the moment” it is open, and yesterday, October 1, more than 100 persons visited.  He reports that all of our “brothers” like what they have seen of the exhibits.

The book:

The Rose, Queen of Flowers,

A Symbol Mythical, Mystical and Esoteric

And The Rosicrucians

Commemorating the First Centennial of the

Rosicrucian Fellowship of Max Heindel (1909-2009)

By Delmar Domingos de Carvalho

may be downloaded in Portuguese at the URL:

http://www.fraternidaderosacruz.org/expo_centenario_rf.pdf

It is available online in English through the Google translator toolbar.

http://www.fraternidaderosacruz.org/ddc_catalogo_expo_centenario_frcmh.htm

The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception

French – English – German – Polish – Spanish – Czechoslovakian – Russian – Swedish – Italian – Rumanian – Turkish – Portuguese – Dutch – Brazilian Portuguese

Click on Image - Mozart's Magic Flute

It is evident from Carvalho’s exhibition photos that this collection of artifacts showcases the works of musical composers, philosophers, scientists, artists and writers whose creative activities reflect or relate to the Rosicrucian Philosophy.

Wagner

Unique to Portugal, in about the same year as the founding of The Rosicrucian Fellowship, Dr. Amilcar de Souza established The Vegetarian Society of Portugal.  This pioneer, according to Mr. Carvalho, has been given neither due homage nor gratitude.  Furthermore, in the same theme, in 2012 it will be 100 years since the beginning of the Portuguese Society for Naturalogia.   In Portugal, this exposition seizes the opportunity to recognize these proponents of  a healthy vegetarian lifestyle.

More information and photos of the exhibition will be available at the PHOTOS tab as they are collected.

Delmar Domingos de Carvalho early in 2009 published his work, Paracelsus And The COSMOBIOMEDICINA, which he claims is the first biography in English about this Elder Brother.  The book is dedicated to Max Heindel, the herald of the Rosicrucian Order, in observance of the centenary of the founding of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, which considered Paracelsus to be not only a Fellow but one of its Masters.

dmrosa@netvisao.pt

Tags: Amilcar de Souza, Bombarral, Delmar Domingos de Carvalho, Elder Brothers, Paracelsus, Portugal, Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, The Rose

The Mystical White Rose

By Andreas Gstaltner

[Translated from the German]

Imagine a rosebush with a white rosebud not yet open.

The rose is a child of the earth where its roots anchor it;

Of the sun which inflames it;

Of the life-giving water and air, that flow around it.

Carry this white rosebud into the holy chamber of your heart. 

There, let it grow. 

Slowly, slowly, its petals unfold until the white rose blossom is fully-blown.

You smell its gentle fragrance.  You feel white light infuse your whole being. 

Finally, you perceive the glowing golden letters that adorn each petal. 

On the first and outer petals you see:

Honesty – it is the first essential on the spiritual path

Discretion and Silence – only to the discreet will the mysteries be unveiled.

Patience and perseverance – bring you to the gate of the temple

Courage and fortitude – carry you across the dark abyss to reach the light.

On the middle petals you see:

Modesty – on the earth live modestly

Humility – in the presence of God be humble

Tolerance – there are many pathways to God

Kindness – open your heart

Restraint – as a peacemaker be slow to anger

Forgiveness — release those lovingly who have hurt you

Faith – with confidence move mountains.

On the innermost petals of the white rose flower you see:

Charity – serve with Christ to uplift humanity

Mercy – be merciful and obtain mercy

Purity – as with the Holy Virgin Mary, the pure shall see God. 

Devotion – to the Divine Mysteries;

          The Divine Light

          The Divine Love

          The Divine Healing

          The Divine Silence

Gaze tenderly at each petal and meditate on what it means to you.

Let it enter your innermost being.

By the sweet rose the bees give their honey.

Mystical White Rose

Tags: Mystical White Rose