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Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

 

Lecture 5 of 25 by [R]

 

Potential, Aspiration And The Aquarian Age

 

 

(Several minutes at the beginning of this lecture failed to record.)

 

            ………………We have to realize that that emptiness is the womb of new future creations.  What happens is people’s quiet time is all-important to the future.  But if we have carried something all the way out to the end, that’s only half of the process, because the creation has to be reborn, it has to be redeemed, it has to be resurrected, and it has to go back to the dream, or the original dream will never have that brilliance that it can have which comes as a result of carrying it out.

            Now the return to the dream or the taking of the totality of the experience of the creative activity is not something automatic.  It seems to happen after we die; our lives automatically un-spin, but in reality if we are living a spiritual life, all the processes that seem to happen on their own in creation are things that we must do voluntarily.  We must carry them out by ourselves, for ourselves, in full waking consciousness; and that resurrection of the dream is what we’re going to be talking about this evening.

            Just a few moments ago when we were talking about the manifestation, we mentioned that there were several problems of resistance.  One of the resistances that we noted was the limitation of matter.  Matter always has limitations as far as its relationship to our creative desire.  When we’re doing something new and when we’re carrying it into the worlds of matter, there is always ignorance.  We don’t know what’s coming, and so there is for us ignorance in creation or in moving out the creation.  Right now in the Age of Pisces, we may be very deep, maybe as deep as we can go in blind ignorance, because blind ignorance is one of the characteristics of the Age of Pisces.

            Now from a spiritual point of view, both the ignorance and the resistance of matter are the same thing.  They are identical.  That is to say, within the Absolute Being there is an assertion of spirit which knows itself, which knows being there is a realization of ignorance of things that could be but yet are not.  What that ignorance is focused on is what becomes matter.  This is what we were talking about last time we’re going to look at it now in terms of dyads or poles.  We’re probably going to take up the entire blackboard with crazy diagrams and things like that.

          First we have The Absolute.  Actually, for The Absolute, we should just leave the blackboard black, because black is one of the symbols of The Absolute.  It is everything that is and everything that isn’t, and we know not that there couldn’t be else beyond what is and what isn’t: being and non-being.  Everything else in manifest-being is a subset of The Absolute.  But, when we try to talk about it – when we know “being” it’s undeniable, spiritual being – existential reality compared to what is non-being that produces a pole, and we said (we’re going to look at this in terms of poles or dyads) and we said that even the potential, what could be, that lies between what is and what isn’t – even that pole of potential is divided so that we have the potential of time and the potential of space.  We use time and space in a much more inclusive way than it is used in physics.

            But, what we’re seeing here is: time is anything in potential in which something can be projected. 

            Space is anything in potential in which anything can be received.

            So, no matter what kind of relationship is projected, it can take place within time.  No matter what kind of relationship, and when we think of spatial relationships in the simplest sense we think of all the space in this room, and then as this room continues and as this room continues, that is called extensive space.  Time is usually intensive and not extensive.

            Now what takes place in potential is spirit and matter; this is all of everything that exists.  We have to remember that this is all one thing.  We live in a modicum and something is either more spiritual or it is more material, and they are two states of the same thing.  It’s not something that is separate and apart from all of the rest of creation.  Then we might say that The Absolute is extended in spirit and matter; it would be states of being.  These are states of what could be – these are states of being of what are.  Except the matter side is the unknown side; it’s not fully understood.

            What is spirit is – we could say there are the Gods, but that sounds awfully theistic, but let’s say they’re ideas, concepts, such as a means of projecting consciousness.

            Whereas in space, we have substance, shapes, forms and things of that nature, so what we’re talking about here – what you can see in a very unconscious way, are various ideas that the consciousness produce in the more-unconscious matter; various kinds of states of being, various kinds of shapes, various states of matter.  It’s more of the form side.

            What transpires in spirit is a matter of knowledge, or it’s a matter of intelligence or power or action.  It’s pro-active.

            What we’re doing here again, is we’re doing something very simplistic.  We could go into these things for many years, and there are books in the world that go into them.  Compared to knowledge and power and intelligence, there are different states of ignorance, of resistance, inertia.  You might say that the spirit that is creating within this congealed ignorance, and there are various states of congealed ignorance, is fighting with itself – or creating with itself, but because there is a potential of reality, and because the struggle is done for keeps, you might say the whole creation is playing make-believe for keeps.  And because the spirit does that, it brings reality out of potential.  It brings light and consciousness out of ignorance and it is an ongoing activity in The Absolute which has no limitations of any kind.  This carries on as long or as far as the spirit can take it.

            There are some unusual things that come out of this.  In terms of time, the spirit is the past, whereas matter is the future.  This does not mean that everything is going to become more material.  It means that since spirit is already known, we know things after the fact, and the spirit re-knows itself perpetually and keeps itself alive.   But what is going to be in terms of spiritual reality is in matter, and that is the future.  Meaning to say, when we take things out of ignorance that is the spiritual future – what is going to be that has never been before.

            There are some unusual conclusions that come out of this.  With the kind of consciousness where there is knowledge, especially from the past, there is objectivity.  Whereas, when it’s within the limits of matter, there is subjectivity.  I have a subjective point of view, because if I look at Millie I can only look at her physical body from this point of view.  It’s very subjective, and because my eyes are what they are, and because my nervous system is what it is, and because my consciousness is what it is, I have a very subjective view of Millie.   That doesn’t mean that I don’t think she isn’t perfect or that she isn’t a great person or anything like that, but it is subjective, and that is what we’re trying to get at.

            Now, obviously, as we take all of these things and we try to bring them closer to everyday life, this is obviously the realm of cause.  This is the realm of effect.  You need to say that this is a vertical kind of causation.  It’s not one pool ball hitting another one, this is a state of higher consciousness causing effects in a state of lower consciousness.  What we’re talking about is all kinds of consciousness.

            Everything in spirit is ideal, because of the very nature of spirit, being perfect.  Everything that is in matter is actual, meaning that it doesn’t subsist in the pure state of spiritual consciousness.  It subsists in a state that has become as a state of acting.  As a result of spiritual causes, things become.  Usually a state of division is two points over a plane.  That’s the division side.  It’s this world and that.  But, in spiritual philosophy, especially in terms of evolution, civilized, and mathematic, it’s better to do it two planes suspended over a dot.  What happens is that in the process of creation, as more and more of the dream is condensed on the spirit side, things lead more and more toward matter, or toward form, or toward bodies, and matter at the other end of being leans more and more toward spirit.  This would be the level of creatures.

            When we get to the human level (this is where we are) the three-fold spirit is focused.  That is the middle of it all.  We as humans are as Saint Paul says, “a very peculiar people” in that we stand right in the middle of the creation.  We’re spiritual and material, we are creatures and creators at the same time, but it’s not clear what we’re going to be yet.  The next stage of evolution is when the stuff of matter, through the spirit working on it in the creative process, (in our case what we do every day, like Millie baking cookies or something like that) we’re working on matter.  We are bringing the potential out of matter.  So, matter is becoming spiritualized in the same way that spirit was becoming materialized.

            The next stage in the activity is where the interplay between matter and spirit self consciously – where each enters into the other.  Spirit enters more and more into matter, and as it does so, it transforms matter so that matter enters more and more into spirit.  When this process has been completed, you have what in spiritual things is called the spiritual diamond.  When matter has been taken all the way up to the spirit and spirit has become completely materialized and you have a level of completion.  In individual evolution this is called the diamond-hard soul body.  It is somebody who has taken experiences and brought them forward.  What happens then is (at the same time) these states of spirit begin collapsing one into another.  The two collapse altogether until you have one point and you have the entire creative cycle symbolized in a mathematical symbol (for you, Duncan, it’s an exercise class).  You see what we’re trying to get at?  

            What we’re talking about is a three-fold process.  The materialization of spirit, the spiritualization of matter, and it all takes place through the compounding of soul.  Soul is that transitional state between matter becoming spiritual.  It’s an ongoing process, sometimes one thing dominates more over the other.

            With instinct of consciousness, the spirit is within; is without.  So we have to remember that within our being there is a center where everything on this side of that center is concrete, whether it’s a thought or an emotion or a burst of energy, it’s concrete; it has a beginning and an end.  Whereas everything on the other side of that center which is the spirit part, is abstract, it’s universal, it’s spiritual.  Now, in the process, in our consciousness, the more that we go into matter, the more we externalize; and the more the consciousness becomes spiritualized, the more it becomes internalized.  What we’re talking about here is “going within.”  Materialization is an externalization, whereas spiritualization is an internalization.

            It’s a curious internalization, because it’s not like when we walk in the door that we are in the interior of the house because even things that seem to stand outside of us we see from within as they are seen from within when we have the within kind of consciousness.  So, the internalization is not just a simple thing like we perceive right now, and if that isn’t complicated enough for you, my presentation will make it even more complicated.

            In terms of spiritual things, the divine Will to be, the divine spirit, is the highest state.  Corresponding to it is physical matter, especially chemical physical matter.  The next state of spirit is the life spirit.  It is the light, the love, the imagination; it is pure truth.  And that spiritual life, when it awakens something out of matter (we’re talking about the evolutionary creation of which we are a part of now) what it brings out of matter is the ethers.  So, what we’re talking about is vitality, life—vitality in that way.

            The next area is called human spirit or abstract thought.  It’s still universal, but it has some limitations.  A = B = C is true anywhere, on any plane.  It’s universal, but it has a limitation within it, a formula of some kind or other.  All of this central area is the region of mind.  Reflecting from that is the nature of desire.  Then, right in the crux, in the middle between spirit and matter is concrete mind.  This is what happens when we have a mind that can bear the truth of the spirit.  The spirit can enter into all of its vehicles and know itself in its thinking process, through its emoting and motivating process, and through its living.  Even somebody who might be in a coma, in a coma for many years, existing in that state, something is being learned.  There’s a whole metabolic process.  The spirit is still doing something and finally we can become conscious of ourselves materially or physically – the train of consciousness that comes from the spirit to matter and from matter back to spirit.

            Now there’s another side to this.  On any level, at any state of being, there is the microcosm and the macrocosm.  The macrocosm is the universal, unconditioned stuff of a state of being.  The microcosm ……….is an individualized way and it offers those things to the evolving beings and they take them and they carry out the creative work; they carry out the details.  It is a spontaneous creation; it is a spontaneous finalization of everything that is participating in the entire process.

            This is why it was always said; there’s the famous myth of Zeus who had a lover who was human, and he would appear to her in various forms, and his wife who was jealous, Hera, got wind of this.  She figured she would have him destroy his own lover.  He’s together with his lover and is enjoying himself so much and he says to her, “You can have whatever you want; I will give it to you.”  Hera has had his ears by this time and she says, “If he ever gives you the opportunity to receive whatever you want, ask him to see him as he actually is.”

            When he said “you can have whatever you want,” he nodded his head, and after he nodded his head, he could not go back on his own word.  She said, “I want to see you as you actually, really are.”

            He said, “Ask me anything but that.  There are many wonderful things that I can give you.”

            She said, “I want to see you as you are.”

            “You’ll regret that.”

            In a personal body like this, it would be disintegrated.  Sometimes higher beings enter into bodies like this, but not The Divine itself.  Not the macrocosm, not the universal.  You know, the nth power is the not-being condition and is not being limited, and is in being subtle.  Here we can say that the spirit is impersonal; matter is personal.  These are practical things.  Everything that’s being said here can be looked at in a really simple way.  To the degree that a person is personal and takes things personally; to that degree they are not spiritually unfolded.  A spiritual individual who has awakened that kind of objective consciousness and who can see the causes behind all things does not take things personally.  It’s impossible for the two to live side-by-side.

            We’re saying, then, that there is the macrocosm, and there is the microcosm.  But, in some things – let’s take the Bible, if you’d like, and it said that the face of God moved on the surface of the deep.  That is to say that the divinity, spread out through various Gods, turned inward and focused inward.  And suppose that the focus of that at the center of it – I suppose it’s like this – this is out of the cosmos, the extent of the cosmos, this circle.  It focuses through the center of being, which is the mind, and as it focuses through the center of being at all times it produces a brilliant spot in the center.  Think of the mind like a crystal ball.  It is the lens that is capable of focusing anything ……… spheric, it gets focused through this and it gets focused on a center and then it comes out the other side.  When it comes out the other side, there is a macrocosm which is illumined at the same time that the microcosm is illumined.

            This is the image that we’re trying to get at and this is an image that we spoke of last time.  We said that the yolk of the egg, the creative center, where all of the changes take place and all the control of whether it’s going to be a chicken or a turkey or a goose are in that center.  In that very brilliant center of that creativity is the core de la core.  With human beings, those are the divine human beings who are what we call initiate beings, beings that represent the creative center of it all –because in the whole process of an evolutionary creation, not everybody wants to work that hard.  Now you have some ideas of some of the factors that are involved.

            From our previous talks, we have a little of the knowledge of the relationship of spirit and matter and we know a little bit about the Age of Pisces versus the Age of Aquarius.  We want to take this understanding and bring it into the activity that we are living now in the Age of Pisces and how it works into the Age of Aquarius.  Let’s recapitulate some of the astrological points of view.

            In the cosmic mandala, the first house represents the outward personality.  The seventh house represents opportunities to understand the individuality and they usually come through the partners, most specifically the marriage partner.  On the next higher level, the vernal equinoctial point, at the beginning of Aries is the exoteric, the outer side of human history.  The autumnal equinoctial point represents the esoteric, it represents the more inward, so right now let’s go back and look at some of the things.  Previously we had the Age of Aries where the outward form, the architecture and all, was very Aries-like.  It was very bold and simple.  The esotericism was the studying into the laws.  We read in the Bible, for example, about the laws and the prophets.

            Now we have the Age of Pisces and the outward form, with the equinoctial point having moved into Pisces.  Strangely, we find it both in Asia and in Western society.  It’s too bad those Tibetans had to copy it from the West – all those gargoyles and things like that.  The opposite sign, Virgo, was the sign of the clerics, so this is what we’re trying to get at – the exoteric, the way of the world; the broad path of the many is indicated by the vernal point and the constellation through which it is passing, whereas the esoteric is found by the autumnal point and the constellation through which it is passing.

            Last time, what we looked at, we said that what is esoteric in one age becomes exoteric in the next age.  That is to say that all that is done esoterically, whether in alchemy or in spiritual logic, or anything like that is going to work outwardly into the scientific structure and the logical understanding of the cosmos that will be the general understanding of the Aquarian Age.  That’s as far as we got last time.  And so we discussed some of the things that we could do as esoteric students in our time, and how they would affect the Age of Aquarius in the future. 

            Now what we need to do is look at the converse of this.  We’re going to look at how the esoteric life that we have now in the Age of Pisces, how that by the same token has to do with our esoteric work in the Age of Aquarius.  Let’s try to look at humanity en masse, as one.  Now there are two ways that humanity can be seen in total.  One is indicated again in opposites, but in a very different way.  Astrology, especially cosmological astrology, is a marvelous thing.  If we look on the cosmic mandala, the sixth house represents the state of the physical body.  The 12^th house, or Pisces, represents all of humanity as a jumbled whole, so the physical body of one individual human being is indicated by one sign, whereas the opposite sign indicates that life wave that we call our present humans all together.

            If we take the labors of Heracles, the first labor of Heracles was the slaying of the Nemean Lion.  Spiritual development begins with the development of the vital body, and the vital body is indicated by Leo.  It was begun in the Sun period and it has that very vital quality about it; whereas, on the opposite side the ethers and the angels are indicated by Aquarius.

            If we continue with the same way of thinking, the next labor of Heracles was the slaying of the Laearnean Hydra and that was the control of the desire body; for controlling our emotional nature, which you can’t really do very well unless you have the developed vital body.  The opposite side of the desire body is the macrocosmic desire body and the archangels that lived in it.  Similarly, the concrete mind is the next microcosmic activity.  At this point we see humanity all together as one lump in Pisces.  But in an abstract, intellectual way, humanism and relationship in an altruistic sense is indicated by Aquarius.  When we think of someone being human or knowing the human experience, we’re talking about Aquarius.  Through the Bible, old and new testament, Aquarius is always symbolized by “the son of man” throughout.  This is fascinating how this takes place – how the myths are read out, because if we read the Old Testament of the Bible, it says Reuben defiled his father’s bed, which means he slept with his mother, and Reuben would then be the Uranus kind of figure and if we look at Greek mythology, Uranus slept with his mother Gaia.  That whole incest type of quality is there despite the fact that the societies were very different from each other and they wrote very differently from each other.  Aquarius represents the sign of a general enlightenment; it’s where we’re going.  It is what Paul says.  It’s not sure what we’re going to be like, but if we’re going to be a little bit lower than the angels, we’re heading toward the angelic Age of Aquarius and whatever it is, it’s going to be good.

 

            So, we’re back at that point again where we’re talking about externalizing things or talking about things which have been esoteric secrets – which is this whole talk, because everything we’re going to say rests on it.  This is the crux, the center of being.  You can see that, so to speak, as the eye of God, because it is where the spirit focuses into matter and where the personality reaches toward the spirit.  It has to go through that center, which is why concentration and bringing one’s consciousness to a point to break through to that other side in the highest sense possible is such an important exercise.  It is because the center of the mind is the focus of where The Absolute is centered in that same spot in the center of the mind – the part that no one else can penetrate, the part that only we ourselves can point ourselves into – that Absolute is focused there.

            Now, this eye is both a lens and a mirror.  The spirit can reflect off of it and see itself in reflection, and that’s called immaculate conception;  it’s when the spirit knows itself by reflecting through its own thoughts that it has externalized from its own idea of itself. 

            The bottom surface of the mind, so to speak, is also a reflective surface.  The personality doesn’t have to go all the way back to the spirit to ponder out the meaning of everything.  Instead it can reflect off of the mind which is a sort of automatic, by impulse, kind of quality.  But, it is a lens in that the spirit focuses through that center, and through that center is how it manifests or projects things into the unknown, into the ignorance that brings up the ignorance, and it is through that center—that the experience of external being is realized into the spirit as soul material – a very, very important activity.  So, it is both a center of projection and a center of reflection.

            Now, what we talked about last time, when we talked about what our esoteric is and what it’s going to be in the future we were talking about the spirit.  We have this divine dream that we want to bring forward whether it’s ours, or whether it’s God’s, or whether it’s our take on God’s; we’re talking about the projection from the spirit into matter.  But, when we’re talking now – when we’re talking about the spiritualization of matter by taking it back into the spirit in a state of spiritual consciousness, in this, the Age of Pisces and Virgo, it’s a very important time, because the esoteric work in Virgo is introspective.  But, it is introspective from the viewpoint of the spirit being within the body.

            Previously, all introspective foci in previous cycles in the precessions of the equinox, the introspection was kind of an escapism, of people not wanting to go deeper and deeper into darkness.  Now with the spirit being in and fully awake and fully rational, at this time it is an introspection that can take experiences and draw them inward.  It is a major step forward in gathering soul material.  Because of this ability to consciously digest the world, and feed the spirit, and [come to] understanding, it means we can make new advances in spiritual work – and because of the self-consciousness that we have now that we’ve never had before, which is based on doubt.  That doubt is a disintegrating thing.  It’s a not-believing.  That’s a belief when you create the original conception.  It is in the doubting when you chip away at things and you ask questions that are in ignorance, that you dissolve things.   At this time the esoteric world can do things that have never been done before.   Everything advances much better as a result of this.  This is what we were trying to get at last time when we were talking about the work that is done in Virgo of having a result in a spiritual science that will be applied to all humanity in the future.  It will be like a general enlightenment.  Since Aquarius rules the ethers, everybody will have the light; they will be able to see into the ethers that they,…….,,,,from themselves.

            If it hasn’t been apparent before, there is always balance and compensation in the mandala, the astrological mandala, which is the symbol of the entire cosmos.  When you have a very bold sign like Aries that dashes out and you have it followed by Taurus which slows things down and is more careful and gives you responsibilities, but so that you don’t so bogged down in the matter of things, you have a Gemini that comes along and gives you a more perky, fresh-air kind of – what is represented by Aries and Libra or Taurus and Scorpio and things like that.  The Aquarian consciousness and our move into the ethers represents quite a broad generalization of things.

            The compensation will come from the opposite sign.  It will come from Leo, so one would expect a very different kind of esotericism than the esotericism that we have now.  Leo represents nobility and leadership and aristocracy and centralization, just like in our picture here we have the Sun in the very center with the hierarchies all around focusing through a center of mind and then at the very center, at the core de la core, you have focus.  The Sun represents the stream that flows out – that flows outward into the universe.  In our bodies, Leo represents the heart, whereas the entire circulatory system is ruled by Aquarius.

            So we have the theme of Leo and Aquarius; the exoteric is going to be the broad, general field.  It will be a time of expansion, whereas inwardly the esoteric world will be nuclear.  It will be getting to the heart of the matter.  And that is the crucial…….that we’re getting to right now.  Introversion always balances extroversion.  In fact, they are co-taneous or simultaneous.  A good example of that is any time there is a manifestation of a desire impulse.  That desire impulse issues from the subject to the object of desire, but at the same time the impulse issues outward, automatically in that same stream there is a …….so that if the relationship………  They’re simultaneous.  You can’t have an action without a reaction there at the same time.  In the same way that there is a flowing from the esotericism of the Pisces/Virgo Age, Virgo esotericism flowing outward toward the Age of Aquarius simultaneously there is a taking of the experience of the external world in a universal sense and internalizing it into what is going to be the new esotericism in the Age of Aquarius/Leo.  That esotericism is going to be a Leonine thing.  What we’re saying is that in a very special way, our ………. …[esotericism?]……in the Age of Pisces becomes the source of soul power for doing inner work in the Age of Aquarius.   And the thing of it is that now we can do this consciously.  We can consciously take the experience of our daily life, every little experience that we have and we can consciously through a focus of the mind draw it into the spirit.  It’s very, very important that this is what accelerates not only our individual development, but it accelerates the development of the entire cosmos.

            Let’s look in a few simple ways of ways that we can participate consciously in this inward flow.  In all of this we have to remember that what we take from without and bring in – no matter how crass it is or how cruddy it is, it does become spiritualized because spirit is the source of all the interaction with the unknown, but certainly it is important – what we take in if we are selective about what we do with the external world and about what we take from the external world.  What we take from the external world and how we take it within is going to be our inner consciousness.  In this computer age there is one of those statements: junk in, junk out.  What we see and what we do is what we become and if we only take in trashy perceptions of the external world, we’re going to have a trashy consciousness.  You think about that with what you read, or what you look at in movies or in any of the experiences of the external world.  Participating in the external world in an emotional sense, getting the “feel” of it, determines how hardened we are going to be in the future times.

            Unless we do things now, we’re not going to have it in our heart in the future.  All of the future is going to be coming through the heart.  Pisces, especially, represents the emotions of compassion and understanding and upliftment.  They become very, very important, because without them we can’t have the universalized consciousness.  Unless we can feel them in our hearts, we cannot see them in the world.  If we succumb, which (in my estimation) humanity seems to be too much doing to the sort of blasé Aquarian attitude on a low level, what’s going to happen when we come to the Age of Aquarius?  There’s a lot of talk about people wanting to be unisex people.  “I’ve got to develop my inner feminine, or I’ve got to develop my inner masculine.”  The fact of the matter is, you don’t do that by curtailing your basic gender.  You don’t develop the inner feminine by becoming a man that doesn’t have any manly qualities.  I don’t mean the ugly man with sweat and all of that, but unless we can be the man or play the man, the feminine within us cannot respond any more than the feminine outside of us can respond.   There is that kind of a compensatory quality.  Unless we develop the feeling-ful qualities of Pisces, we are not going to develop the heart.

            This is a danger that is happening in the world right now.  The attitude of Pisces is an attitude of reverence, of worship, of devotion.  This is not happening in the world.  There’s too much of a ……..tendency.  Oh, that belongs back in the dark ages when everybody treated everything quite piously.  This is a big mistake, and if we don’t think reverently in life……..the human spirit in Neptune, unless we surrender to that, we will not be able to develop the esotericism of the Age of Aquarius where we are going to control the heart.  Every time we do something devotionally, every time we………we gain control of the heart, we gain control of the blood and where it goes in the body.  From a spiritual point of view, the heart and the blood are one and the same thing.  Unless we have the ability to devotionally surrender to the spirit, we do not have that ability to control the heart which also has to be done with an indirect kind of control.  You don’t drive the heart in the same way that you go like this with your finger.  It’s a different kind of a quality altogether.

            Now let’s try to go a little bit deeper with this.  It’s not just an exercise that we’re doing.  We have to remember to do that.  We need to discover our self within the whole.  We need to discover our self within all of humanity, and we need to discover the self within the whole of the universal spirit so that what we do affects not only us, but the cosmos.  Now the more that we give ourselves to service, and the more that we perform this activity of taking the external world into the spirit the more that we live in our soul bodies which are made of the stuff, (you can say in a way) that the divine spirit is reflected in the chemical stuff and the divine spirit is fed by conscious soul.

            The conscious soul feeds divine spirit.  The intellect……..the intelligible intellect and so this is the soul that feeds the intellect.  The soul that comes out of the desire body is called the emotional soul: the human spirit, the self, the individual.  So, what we have, the window of time that we’re living in, is open a very short time. 

            Our whole basic ability to be conscious at all depends on how much we have been waked up by the physical plane.  We are now as deep in ignorance as we are going to be.  Eventually the physical world is going to dissolve back into the ethers.  It will be reborn in other times in the cycle of things.  It will only be as dense as water or only as dense as air, and eventually only as dense as the chemical ethers – all the denser that the world is going to be.  So, it is a very, very special time that we have right now that we can focus on the stuff of this world and know it.  You know what I mean?  To know the texture of things, to know what it’s capable of and even in our bodies, what certain elements or what certain foods do in our bodies wakes us up to different kinds of consciousness.  All of that goes into our will to be.  So, the work that we’re talking about in the Age of Pisces of taking the external world in the deepest sense – if Pisces represents the dense physical world, and Aquarius represents the ethers, our ability to take that in the Age of Pisces determines what we are going to be able to do in our esoteric work in the next period that is coming ahead.

            Now we’ve said that Jupiter is co-ruler of Pisces along with Neptune and we said that this represents uplifting………This is a literal thing.  At this moment, the focus of the Christ, from the center of our universe, is focused in our earth not only in outer space but inner space and all of the places where it is going, as we do the activity of eating up the physical world and taking the soul material into us we enrich and we change the etheric aura of the earth.  Eventually, we will uplift the earth.  We, with our higher consciousness, will ………the earth through its evolution as we go up through the different changes in the future.  We’re not just talking about personal development here.  We’re saying that if the guidance of the earth comes through the Sun, and if the guidance of us comes from our hearts, we’re saying that the more that we do of getting soul material from the material world and eating it up, the more in the future through the feeling of our heart or through the sense of our heart we will have that kind of total knowledge and we will have the etheric ability to float the earth and carry it through space in sort of ……spiritualized by the rose never smelling as sweet as when it is crushed and we have to be willing to take crushing.  We have to be able to take the essence of a thing out of matter even if that represents a certain amount of personal suffering.

            Now, we’re saying that Pisces, in a cosmological sense, represents all of humanity, and it represents this world in the lowest and deepest sense.  We’re saying that experiencing it and especially taking the essence of that experience of it, we feed the spirit.

            We have this evolution of forms where we are saying that at the same time we’re spiritualizing matter and materializing spirit, the whole business is going to be collapsing back into spiritual worlds.  Each of us, in our own ………the physical world that we can take into us whether we travel or whether we beat rocks or do sculpture or something like that of the nature of stuff, the more we have it at the heart of our being, right in the seed atom.  All of our future …….into form depends on how much we can build into that seed atom. 

            Now, this is going to sound almost like a tent meeting,   but the time is short.  The time is very short to experience the material world and know what it’s like, even if it means aches and pains.  What this all is about is to get you to go out and shovel my walks, but you get what I’m trying to get at: our ability to know the form of things, our ability to know the substance of things, to know what can and cannot be done with things.  You know, we’re waking up to things that are used in the mineral kingdom, whether that is using a can crusher, or whether we do it by some other way, it is important.  Again another variation on the same theme, we have to step back.

            We can’t sit back and dream.  We can’t dream ourselves into heaven.  Our work is creative and we have a duty and a responsibility.  The sooner that we become, in a Pisces way, humbly submissive and allow ourselves to be experiencing the external world as a service to the cosmos, the quicker and better we’re going to be able to progress with evolution.  I think that this is all the farther we’re going to go tonight.  I think you have the whole idea of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the relationship of Pisces to Leo and how it’s going to affect our relation to the exoteric world and how it’s going to affect our esoteric world.  Everything that you do inwardly is eventually going to be externalized and everything that we do externally is going to be internalized and if we do this in the cosmos in harmony with the ages and in harmony with what our lives are, the better we shall be for it.  

http://nethymnal.org/mid/e/a/s/easter_hymn.mid

 

 

            Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!
            Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
            Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
            Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

            Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
            Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
            Jesus died the world to save, Alleluia!
            Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

            Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
            Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
            Death in vain forbids Him rise, Alleluia!
            Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

 

 

Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

 

Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

Woman, behold thy son!  John behold thy mother.

 

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

 

I thirst.

 

It is finished.

Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.    KJV

 

Microcosm Lecture Series Notes

 

Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age

 

Lecture 4 of 25 by [R]

 

Spiritual Aspiration And The Aquarian Age

 

This is the first of the work talks.  They are to try to understand our consciousness and our duty as spiritual aspirants as we go into the Aquarian Age.  We realize that we are co-creators, and the way things are going to be depends on us, so what we do is an important thing.  Since this is a work talk, we will not have the big tidal waves of ideas of the earlier talks.                    

It is assumed that all of us here are spiritual aspirants, although it may not always seem that way to ourselves.  To the degree that we are sincere in our aspiration and we are enthused, it radiates from us, even if we are deadpan it radiates from us, and it’s catching for other people.   Then what happens is people start asking us questions, and that is when the work really begins.  I know from personal experience and the personal experience of others that when you start studying astrology you become enthused about astrology.  You usually start talking about it and people start asking you questions and you begin to realize how little you know about astrology.  At least that’s the way it worked with me.

We are going to be asking questions—about that subject about which we are enthused.

One of the most common questions that we get when we start talking about the Aquarian Age, which some people call “The New Age,” is:   what will the Aquarian age be like?  It seems like a reasonable question.  People are looking for a prophetic answer and they want to be wowed about what it is going to be.

I have an answer that is a little bit pat, a little bit smug, and almost trite, and that is that I respond with another question.   “What would you like it to be like?”  And it really isn’t trite because it brings the person who has asked that question to realize that they have a creative responsibility.  We have a responsibility for all of our future, including the Aquarian Age, and for what humanity is going to be like.  The scope is spiritual which means it is very vast and has more to it than just our little lives, but our little lives are the proving ground for the spiritual part of our being.  

            Implicit in this question is an understanding.  There are propositions about the nature of time; past present, and future.  With regard to that, Max Heindel, who was the founder of The Rosicrucian Fellowship, pointed out that people like us are considered dreamers.

            Dreaming can be important if it starts to take hold, if we can start to manifest it—but that’s a very big “if, “ because when we’re dreaming there is always a temptation to lay back and dream some more.  If we do that we regress.  We don’t do anything.  If that‘s the case we are almost sick souls.  There is a short little book called The White Knights and if you can find a Constance Garnet translation it is very poetic.  It’s the story of a man who lives in a basement and in his basement he does nothing all day long but daydream.  His friend, Nashtenko comes to visit and they have conversations.  It goes, “Alas, Nashtenko, there are some rather curious corners in Saint Petersburg — corners in which the normal light doesn’t enter in.  Instead there is another light, another light that is as though it could be in a different planet.  It is a world where everything is utterly fantastic, but at the same time it is humdrum and banal.” 

            He goes on to point out, in a daydream you can make all of these fantastic scenarios, but they’re always the same because they are just what you want them to be.  And because it’s such a controlled environment, it isn’t alive.  It doesn’t have a quality of reality, and so this man realizes that he has sold his soul to daydreaming.  When you think about it, that’s what heroin is.  Or any other drug, it takes you to a place in consciousness where you’re just there and you live that dream. 

            The real world that you live in, Nashtenko, is alive and the reason it is alive is because it fights back.

            And so this is a temptation that when we have an imagination, and we understand the joy and the pleasure of it there is a tendency to want to do that, to sell ourselves to fantasy, imagination.   Just as that narrator tells it, there is resistance.  Anytime we try to manifest any dream there is a resistance.  Any time there is a creative assertion there is an equal and opposite reaction, and our actions themselves, our creations themselves produce their own resistance.  So if we sit down or write a poem or do a work of art, or form a spiritual study group or something like that, there is always an enormous resistance and it always seems external as though it’s coming from outside of us.

            When we do make the creation we find that reality fights back in ways that we never expect, so we can never manifest it in exactly the way that it is in our imagination. And so we do the best that we can and in the process we improve our skills and we become better focused in being able to manifest things, and then we are done and it seems like it’s over.  But then a miracle occurs.

            And that miracle is, if we call up the image, the dream that we had before, it is now much brighter than it was before, which wouldn’t have happened if we had kept it in a dream state. We did something that — in the process of realizing a dream we enlivened it.  We have produced not only the external creation but we produced an awakening in the creative spirit that makes that creation. 

            So any time we want to do anything, especially something like washing the dishes we have the old question of to be or not to be, in the existential sense, and it is very much like Hamlet.  We have to fight against adversarial things.  It’s always a very big thing.  But if we just keep at it step by step we become, and we get that sense of spirit that flows in the becoming.  So, we create and we rest.

            It’s like the grand creation when there are periods of creation and periods of dreaming on the experience, and then the manifestation continues forward so this is the kind of thing that we’re working in.  The only difference is that with evolution we are small-time participants and we have to go along with the timing of the greater creation.  So there are windows of opportunity when certain things are ripe; if you don’t do them then you can’t do them at all.  I learned to ice skate a little bit when I was in my 30’s and I realized right away that no matter how much I practiced, I could never do it like a child who learned it when the window of opportunity was open — during that time when the nerves and muscles were developing.  There are certain windows that are like that.  There are some plants that if they don’t get their pollination at exactly the right time, they become evolutionary cripples.  They live out their life, but they don’t come to fruit.

            So what we’re dealing with here is windows of opportunity for doing things in time.  The purpose of all of these talks is to realize different things that we can do in our time if the window is open for us now so that not only ourselves but everyone, including the creative spirit, the universal spirit – to  get the most out of the evolution that we are in. 

            In the same way that there is something like a sin – to  regress and lapse into day dreaming, there is the same thing with not evolving things, or not participating.  We’re doing this because we want to.  We are filled with the spirit and we want to participate.  Some do not want to.  Even in some religions there is a desire to keep things the same.  That is a very deep and deadly sin.

            It is the sin of Faust.  Mephistopheles can have the soul of Faust when Faust says let this moment live forever.  And that is precisely the attitude of people who want everything to always be the same.  They don’t want any changes.  They don’t want any progress. 

            I was put onto this line of thinking when my friend Al Dong , who is a pomologist and develops new fruits,  said that the problem with fruits is that they are not allowed to evolve.  People want an apple to stay the same.  Most people think Delicious, Golden Delicious, or McIntosh.  And there are actually 100’s of different apples.  So what they do is keep those apples always the same.  They always propagate by clone, not seed, and that is counter evolutionary.  Their co-evolutionary members have an advantage; they are advancing, but the Golden Delicious apple tree is staying the same.  But there are new insects and new diseases.  The important principle is that we have to realize that what we have now can be better in the future.  We made a weakling that needs more and more protection.  You know, more and more poisons and things like that.

            Let’s look at this whole business in another way.  We will talk a lot about time tonight.  Time and history, etc.  I know from experience that to make any kind of change is for the better.  I have Virgo rising, a sign that likes to make plans.  I look at my early young manhood and I was studying various philosophies etc., and I had these plans of what my life was going to be like: allot study time to this, restrict that, figure out how not to have to eat, take pills, so I would have time to master all of these things.  It was utter folly, but it wasn’t really bad.  None of the plans would have been a monstrosity – a good life.  But none would be as good as the unexpected things.  The world that fights back is different than you ever thought it would be.  It brings the wonder to life. 

            I must say, I like the unexpected things that happen along the way better.  We talk about this as though it’s very easy to do, but the reality is it’s very hard to imagine people you have never seen or places you have never been to – to try to imagine that part.  We have to expect that there is newness and with that it is a very wonderful thing because it is a surprise.  Time only backfires if we are not ready to accept things.  Readiness is the all.  I like to call it Robert Frost’s law:  If there are no surprises for the poet there are no surprises for the reader.  You could say that if there are no new things in life, life is a very dead kind of thing.

            Moving into the future is more than just building a railroad track; a railroad track, with all the devices on the track.  It’s not like that.   It’s important to realize that there is something coming to us in the future just like we are building the past in the present coming into the future.

            There are two streams of time and two streams of consciousness.  Both are important.  If we are trying to study or understand something about the Aquarian Age we have to realize what the trajectory is for what we are doing now and we have to begin to understand and or at least accept that there will be things that will be new and different from the way we see them now.

            It’s easy to miss the new things.  Because they might be within our field of vision right now, but we just don’t see them.  Fortunately there are some things that are symptoms that we are not understanding what is new or what is coming to us from the future.  There are obvious things that we see every day.  The most obvious is when the old things don’t work; old solutions don’t solve the problems.  That’s a matter of us not really looking at something as really new that is different from anything we have ever seen before.  I’ve been very heartened about this financial crisis that a lot of people are going through now.  A lot of people have said we don’t know what we’re doing; this is something we’ve never experienced before, and that means we’ve a good chance of solving it.  I don’t like all of the things they are doing to solve it, but at least they know that this is something unprecedented.

            Some people persist even though what they are doing is not working; because they are so convinced of what they’re doing, they are still living in the past, and they won’t admit that they are failing.  They are saying, just give it time, it will work out, and it will work out, and you can keep going on into infinity like that.  But eventually the stream that is flowing to us from the future demands that we accept it and swim up the stream like trout and get to new things that the stream is bringing down to us to live on, or we allow ourselves to be swept away and eventually end up in some stream of stagnation where we don’t grow.

            Let’s look at time and history at some of the things we’ve looked at before, but look at them in a different way. A lot of this series of talks is going to be like that —   from the very first talk when we asked, “When is the Aquarian age?”  We are in the precessional cycle relative to The Aquarian Age about as far away from it as Augustus Caesar was from the beginning of the Piscean age.  In the case of Caesar it’s also parallel to ours, because the society of Rome was already going into decadence and the Age of Aries was going into decadence.  And so, in our case the USA is going into decadence and maybe we’ll have a renaissance like in Rome and Italy, but it’s not clear, and we’re facing the Aquarian Age which means something new. 

            Now what happened with the Romans, they had a hard time accepting what was new.  What was to dominate all of culture after the age of Aries was Christianity, which was not the ultimate Christianity but the first beginnings of Christianity.  The Romans had the Christians among them and they thought they were bad.

            Remember, they had conquered the world in the Age of Aries.  They thought that any religion that taught meekness and humility and such was bad.  They wanted something that gave them more pride and related them to the Gods.  They had already tired out the Roman religion.  So they reverted.  Anytime you are not willing to accept something new the tendency is to revert.  So they went to Mithraism, Mandeanism and things from centuries earlier.  Even Stoicism wasn’t enough for them. Similarly, in our times we find even deeper reversions, people going back to nature worship as if this was something new and progressive and it is really something old and does not have the grandeur that it did when it was a viable way to approach the spirit.

            Now, this applies to us.  Even though we aspire to (let’s call it mysticism, whether Christian or of any other religion) we’re relating it to that which is becoming.  The same thing might happen with us.  We are likely to take it and expect it’s going to be the way we think now and we’re likely to look at it with Piscean Age attitudes instead of Aquarian Age attitudes.

            What we have to have is a psychological posture that is conducive to moving forward. We dare not presume that it’s going to be a certain way, but on the other hand we have to meet it and we have to meet it with encouragement, with anticipation.  We have to be hopefully intuitive to accept and know what is new and respond to it.

            Let’s take a little look at time because that’s important in understanding history.   And do it in a way that is more mystical than anything else. Going as deep as any being can possibly go.  We will do it in a flattened way, because we don’t have the depth of consciousness to do it in a deeper way. 

            Let’s talk about the relationship of being the absolute.  Between being that is and a complete unknown of the absolute that is everything that is known, and everything that is unknown, and everything that could be known.  So between being and not being, which is a very full not-being, there is potential.  Potential of what could be.  And so being becomes through potential. 

            Spirit knows itself.  It is.  It is the one.  And as it knows itself it realizes in that way like we know anything.  In a very simple way, when we know something and we have just discovered that we know something, it immediately produces a question and that question is: the unknown.  It’s a statement we hear all the time.  How is it normally said?  The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.  This is something that carries all the way to the Supreme Being.  So you can say that in self-knowing, relative to the unknown, there is a potential or there is a dichotomy and that dichotomy is, I know.

            The other side of the dichotomy is, I don’t know but the I-don’t-know is indefinite so between the known and the definite unknown there is a dichotomy or there is a dualism.  It’s different in the spirit than it is in this world because in the spirit everything is internal.  When it comes to the depths of the universal spirit as deep as you can go, which is often called the Supreme Being, everything is internal to the Supreme Being.  Even to what we would consider to be externals; all of the externals are internals.  So this realization of the known and the indefinite unknown is internal to the spirit.  It’s like saying in our consciousness, “I know something but I know I don’t know exactly what.”  It’s sort of like an indefinite knowing within a definite knowing.

            When that is dichotomized and it is projected into potential, because the potential is also within, the potential is dichotomized so there are two poles of potential and the two poles of potential are called time and space.  But time and space mean very different things to a mystic than to a physicist.  I don’t want to insult the physicists and say we’re saying the same thing, because that would be silly.  Potentials are possibilities and those possibilities are something that are not just a shut case of unknown, it’s a case of something that will bear a projection; that will bear the projection of a relationship.  So you can say time is anything that will bear a certain kind of relationship, and space is anything that will bear another kind of relationship.

            In the process of projecting ideas or projecting possibilities into the potential, that is done in a twofold manner also.  That is, let’s try to make it in a couple of dimensions.  On a horizontal, let’s say that when a creation is formed (which is a gigantic asking of a question – “could it be this within the absolute?”) the projected activity is “will,” and within the spirit itself, what receives the projection and informs it is called “imagination.”  We have, relative to a creative activity, the spirit in part of its function projecting a thesis into the potential.  And another part of it within itself (remember with spirit everything is always within), another part of its function receives it and it is through will and imagination that creativity is accomplished. 

            Now, in the vertical there is another dichotomy.  And that is – when there is a realization of the projection and reception, the part that realizes it and that does it is called “spirit.”  And the unknown part that receives the projection and, actually the projection is a projection that results in matter.  Again we don’t mean the same thing by the word ‘matter’ that physics means.  We mean any grade of ignorance that has been congealed or materialized in the creative process.  “Will” asserts itself and it says, “Could it be this?” and then it takes form in the unknown as congealed ignorance into matter.

            And so we have this spirit matter pole that is accomplished through will and imagination and we call them the vertical and the horizontal poles.  This is common to all forms of mysticism, because everyone has encountered the same reality. [R gives examples]   We’re talking in a really simple way, because along the spirit/matter pole there are many different worlds.  There are many states of being, many worlds and many different states of consciousness.  And they are more unconscious moving into matter but they are multi-dimensional and qualitatively different.  Each of those dimensions would give a different kind of quality.  All of these issue from and within The One.  And these poles are poles of consciousness.  They are not a bar magnet pole; that’s outright obvious, but what we’re talking about is something that one experiences within the spirit itself.  In the process, it’s tested within the unknown.

            We’re trying to get at time and we’re saying that time is a potential in which the active spirit sense and the will are more active.  Space is where matter and imagination are more active.  We’re not trying to figure out where the Aquarian Age is as much as when the age is.  So let’s look at time some more and from another point of view.

            This is not the talk; this is just the introduction.  The talk is actually about 15 minutes long.  Everything before that is introductory.  And then, zoom!

            The way consciousness was brought to understand matter and spirit was through mathematics.  So in ancient Greek mathematicians (they tried to develop other forms of mathematics) but they tried to understand the whole universe with three figures, the point, the line and the circle and to do that they used two devices.  But they could have actually used one.  The two devices that they used were a straight edge and a compass.  A string can be both straight edge and compass at the same time.  Each of these basic things was fundamental to creation.  Each one relates to a different variety of spiritual consciousness within the potential of time.

            The point was called momental time, and usually that is thought of as being more and more punctilious.  That is to say, you try to bring consciousness to a point.  Remember all the legalese of the Nixon hearings with the Watergate business?  They would say, “at this point in time.”  It was as if time was a point.  This is the type of time that is usually used in mysticism.  It is where one brings one’s consciousness to a point and penetrates into that point deeper and deeper and one makes a breakthrough, so that by passing through a point in time one passes through to a place eternal, and that kind of concentration  leads to a meditative kind  of consciousness.   Rather than just try to space out and do a meditational consciousness, you concentrate and pass through time and come to a larger sphere of consciousness.   Most people think of time as a sequence of events, but if you have momental time and you go into a moment, the deeper and more pointedly you go into that moment the more it expands.

            Astrologers are familiar with this because the horoscope is based on a moment in time.  In that moment of time the whole life is there.  And they have to figure out techniques to take that moment of time and expand it and delineate it to understand the whole life, and that is what momental time is like. 

            Now for most people the world is linear time.  We watch the clock and the numbers click off and the hands go around.  We see time passing on a line from a distant part of the past through the point of the moment and into the future.  Obviously there is a lot to say for that.  This is the time that is used in the material world; things are accomplished in a sequence of time.  And even that linear time is flavored.  Because if you look at a progression of your life, like I can remember looking at the early stages of my mystical career and everything was Moon and Neptune and then it was Mars and Jupiter and then everything resolved into a flavor that was Venus and Neptune and it was a progress and even though I was going through different kinds of environments in a linear fashion moving forward, each new period depended on what I did in the stage before.   And so most of this evening we have been talking about linear time where what you do has an immediate effect on what the future is going to be.

            Cyclical time is such that everything goes in a circle. It’s the same thing over and over again as though there is a divine archetypal pattern that is the basis of every cycle.  In abstract that is very wonderful.  It doesn’t turn out to be so good in terms of evolution because things don’t exactly repeat themselves, and unless you have some idea of progress, because obviously there is something to linear time when you go through point by point by point in linear time you’re a changed person and you can never be the same again.  You can’t unknow something and you can’t unconscious something once you become conscious of it.  If you learn something, you can’t unlearn it.  That is the value of cyclical time there is recognition of a pattern and that pattern relates to The One, a universal which is the circle and in a way that is an expanded point.  These are different ways of looking at time and each of them gives us an insight. 

            The most advantageous way of looking at time now is to combine linear time with circular time and then you have spiral time, so that everything progresses forward and everything gets better and there is simplicity to it and yet we learn things along the way.  Of course this is exceedingly simplistic.  Some people like things simplistic because then they can figure them out.  At least it seems as if you can, but in the manifestation that we’re in now it’s very, very complex and multidimensional but we can see that with the multidimensional simplicity there are things like that, when they repeat themselves, especially since everything goes from within out, and from without back in.

            There are repeat sequences that are in an orthogonal direction to progress at a right-angle progression so that if something has come into matter, and it becomes more and more external, in order to return back to spirit it has to remove layer after layer.  It’s like when you get up in the morning, you put your clothing on and you put on your underclothing first (if you’re not a weirdo), and you put on layer by layer.  But when you go back to rest at night you take off all the clothes in the opposite order of the way that they’ve gone on.  And so there it’s like when you get up in the morning you put your inner layers of clothing on first and when you go back to rest at night you take the clothes off in the opposite order of how they have gone on.  So in applying time, there are different principles that have to be kept in mind.   

            Suppose you have a swimming pool—perfectly calm and you throw a stone right into the middle of it. The waves start coming out and they go out and out until they meet the walls.  And then they start coming back.  And they meet the same kind of waves coming out as they are going back and that is something like the principle of the last clothes you put on in the morning are the first ones taken off at night.  You can look into the future and see repeated what has happened in the past.  It is similar to the diagram that we have here.  I am afraid that this could get too abstract very quickly, so I have to be careful here.

            So we have something that is expansive and simultaneously contractive at the same time.  Because of the cyclical quality, things are analogous so even if they are happening on different planes things are happening very similarly ……….how to say this….., because there is one unified being into greater and greater concentration into matter and greater and greater passing back into spirit all at the same time.   Because the focus of the spirit is everywhere because at microcosm and macrocosm everything is happening analogously and everything is happening in parallel, so we’re talking about a very complex sense of time that is going on.  I am trying to use a few images to give you an idea of the way time comes back to us according to the way we have put it out, so we have something that replicates itself on many levels – the same kind of replication that we have talked about before – [atom and galaxy and solar system, etc.] 

            If we try to use intuitive analogy to guide us we can focus and can understand the principle on any level from the atomic to the extent of the cosmos.  Let’s take a really simple statement. Let’s take a biblical statement where Christ says, on the third day I will return.  Now, that third day can be understood in many ways.  It could mean the amount of time it is taking. It could actually mean on the 3^rd diurnal day.  We know it was ordinal numbers, not cardinal.  On the third day was the physical resurrection of the etheric body of Jesus which was solidified so that it appeared like the dense physical.  And that was three days.  But we know that the cycle of perpetual return of the life spirit coming from the spiritual sun to the earth after the crucifixion that is after Easter that is after Aries; three signs.   And after Easter, 3 signs; and the Son, the life spirit, returns to the Father at the Summer Solstice.  That is 3 days seen another way. 

            If we look at it in terms of ages, the third day is Aquarius, meaning to say, the third precession moving forward is the Aquarian Age.  On another level analogously, the return to the Father is in 3 days or 3 periods of cosmological time: Jupiter period, Venus period, Vulcan period.  That takes us until the end of the cosmos at least in terms of creation, at least with cosmography.  Some people are not familiar with that but we can see the same thing is analogously true on many levels.  Some are very confused by all of this.  For example there is a book filled with truths and lies, and it is Ages In Chaos by ……………  So there are historical cycles that repeat themselves with even the same names coming up; there are things that repeat every day, every year and there are cycles within cycles and that’s what we’re trying to get at when we’re talking about time.

            We’re talking about time.  All right, from point, line, circle and spiral and a little more confusion we know from the point that we must live right now.  We cannot be thinking about something other than what we are doing right now.  Entering into the moment takes us to higher and higher levels.  We also know that we can live our lives in the now and when we do so with penetration we can live our little lives at the same time we’re living great lives.

            The gospels are considered books of initiation.  They point to this all the time in a way that most people would never realize.  Everything that was taking place in the life of Jesus, especially if you read Matthew’s gospel, points to something in the Old Testament that was said by the prophets, and that’s pointing to a cosmic life.   So, the little life of Jesus was referenced to the cosmic life and if we are becoming Christs-in-the-making it is the same thing we have to do ourselves. 

            This is the reason the horoscope is so beautiful, not just a guide for ourselves and our petty personal lives; it is so we can relate our little lives to the greater cosmos.  So, we have our little lives day by day working and feeding ourselves, but at the same time we are working out our lives in the grand creation.  We see that this can keep us in such a place where we’re ready to accept the future.

            Now, we want to look at time in yet another way.  We have said several times tonight (the things that are repeated are the things that are important) we have said that we must be accepting of the future, even calling it in, in a speculative way, saying, “could this be.”  That means our stance for the future, if we have a stance, is subjective.  We should never be objective about the future.  We can be, but if we are, we make a serious mistake.  If we’re objective about the future we’re building the present and the past into the future.  And you can do that.  You can focus on what you know to be true now and extend that into the future and not appreciate anything that is new.  You become sort of an anachronism.  You become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you miss what is important, because if you are so fixed on something, you can miss a wondrous thing that is going by. 

            I have a friend who conducted psychodramas and did it in a woman’s prison.  They did the psychodrama of Jesus and the taxpayer.  She took the most incorrigible person in the California women’s prison and they had that person play the part of Jesus.  The woman went through the whole experience and learned things about her Self that she had never known before.  She didn’t realize that she could be a divine person.  Then, they enacted the whole thing over again and she played a woman on the street as Jesus was coming by.   She got into such a haggle with another woman over position on who was going to be where on the street that she completely missed the passing of Jesus.  This is indicative of what can happen.  In the first place it means that if you have determined an attitude to be a certain way, that’s the way it’s going to be and you’re going to miss something passing by that’s going to be a very wondrous thing.

            It was like my self earlier in life.   I’m going to be this and this and this and these are the things I’m going to do in life.  That’s being too objective about the future.  To some extent you’ve got to plan what you’re going to have for dinner, but you can’t plan your whole life that way.   An objective attitude about the future is deterministic—subjective is relativistic – it could be this or it could be that. 

            There is the inverse that occurs relative to the past.  For the past we have to be objective because the facts are the facts are the facts.  And if we do not accept what has been, we are not seeing the past clearly, and we are not seeing the present either.  Because we have subjectively made this dream about what the past was when it wasn’t really that.  So, there is a stance with regard to the future and a stance with regard to the past.

            Both are important for moving into the spiritual future.  We have to know what worked and what has transpired in order to build into the future.  We have to be receptive and accepting and anticipating in order to recognize something that new that is coming to us from the future. 

            Now, finally we’ve worked our way through all of the introductions without getting too much in a muddle, and we’re just about ready tonight to go into the subject matter, but we have one more little segway introduction.  We want to talk about how we know things.  Not to how we understand things, but how we come to specific knowledge.  In this world, how we are right now, it is very difficult to know something alone by itself.  Knowledge is better when it is understood relative to something else.

            We find this all of the time, we can know ourselves by being alone with ourselves, but there are things when we get together with friends, or especially if we get together with adversaries.  Then, we know things about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise know.  The people outside of us represent everything of our being that we don’t know about ourselves.  That’s an exaggerated statement but it works out that way.  Through interaction with others we come to know ourselves.

            We are trying to understanding the Aquarian age.  Aquarius is called an air sign. There are three air signs: Gemini ruled by Mercury; Libra ruled by Venus; and Aquarius co-ruled by Saturn and Uranus so we are talking about intellectual knowledge when we are talking about air signs; each of them points to a different kind of knowledge.  For the most part we do not know the Aquarian way of gaining knowledge which is to know something as a whole so that we know the sum and all of its parts and something more all at the same time.  For the most part most of our knowledge comes from Gemini and Libra. 

            Gemini represents polarized consciousness—something that is divided between extreme poles.  There is how the knowledge of what could be comes through the polarization as we were speaking of earlier.  There is a difference in consciousness and it takes quite a lot of subtlety in order to realize it.  Gemini rules the lungs; what we do on the in-breath is different than what we do exhaling.  On the in-breath everything is oxygenation; on the out-breath everything is carbonization.  In the in-breath we are taking experience into us.  On the out-breath, as when we speak or when we sing — if you watch very carefully (and this is not a breathing exercise, it is a consciousness exercise) if you watch yourself and what you are doing and what kind of thoughts you are thinking, you will understand that there are two distinctly different kinds of consciousness depending on whether you are oxygenating or carbonizing.  Both are necessary and both are complementary to each other.  The principle of Gemini then is knowledge by differentiation.  It is knowledge through contrast. 

            Libra is ruled by Venus, and it rules an accommodating kind of consciousness, always seeking peace, always seeking homeostasis. In order to reach that, it is compensating or complementing, where it accommodates to the other.  As a consequence, the kind of consciousness that is ruled by Libra is comparison.  So, we’re trying to get to the total knowledge of Aquarius; it will take two years and we will know that we are barely scratching the surface.  What we’re going to do is we’re going to use contrast and comparison by taking each of the other signs and relating it to Aquarius.

            This evening we’re trying to understand aspiration in relation to the Aquarian age.  To do that, I will ask you a question.  What sign of the zodiac most relates to our esoteric aspiration that finds its fruition (future) in the Aquarian age? 

 

……………………It’s a trick question.  Surprisingly, the answer is “Virgo.”  That brings up another slight topic.  In the course of these talks, we are going to develop a new understanding of astrological aspects as they relate to the precession of the equinox.  What we will talk about tonight is the first quincunx or the first inconjuct.

            The first inconjunct is the relationship of the ascendant to the sixth house, the second inconjunct is the relationship of the ascendant to the 8^th house.   Together they produce a Y-shaped figure.  A is the ascendant (in this case Aries) and the first house.  B is Virgo and the 6^th.  C is Scorpio and the 8^th.  Now we have to review something on a personal level that we talked about not too clearly on a cosmic level.  Since we are microcosms on the universe, the same things that are functional in the universe are functional in us.

            We said that In the universe we had two streams — one passing from spirit to matter, and one passing from matter back to spirit.  We related it to water coming off of the walls of the swimming pool.  In the RF philosophy a great deal is made about this subject, because there is a whole section dedicated to the cycle of extroversion and introversion.

            One has an experience in the external world which is perceived by touch sound sight and it sight and that is carried back in through the ethers to an impression in the desire nature and it is then carried to a thought and it is carried to the spirit which forms a conclusion about what happens in the external world.  The spirit then initiates an extroversive activity that it thinks “this is what I have to do” and it is clothed in desire.  The desire then takes on energy in the form of an action and a change is precipitated in the outside world.  This is an extremely important cycle.

            If you want to grow spiritually, just watching this cycle in yourself and in the cosmos, there isn’t anything that can be kept from you.

            The cycle proceeds from without in, taking the experience of the external world, the things that we never knew until we tried to do something out there, and the impacts that are the indications of our ignorance, and taking those impacts through the ethers and then to take the energy of them and into our desire nature where we can form an emotional impression of what they were, and then into our thoughts so that we get the thought of what they were, and then we absorb them and assimilate them into our spiritual consciousness, and we (the self, the spirit) decide to take action.  When you’re driving down the street, you see a car coming toward you, passing another car, and you can see that he’s not going to be able to get around, so what do you do?  Well, that information has been taken back to the spirit, and the spirit says, “I’m taking my foot off the gas; I’m putting it on the brake.”

            When it does that, it has the thought, “this is what I have to do,” and it does that and that motivates the desire and the desire gets clothed in energy and then that energy causes you to hit the brake and you stop so that you don’t have a head-on collision.  So, that is introversion and extroversion.

            In another way, you can start with an idea and it may take you 20 years.  You start with an idea for the great American novel.  And then you take that novel and you externalize it.  And then when it’s all over you take the experience back into yourself.  The outward experience is the finalizer.  It is the testing ground where we determine the  accuracy of our creation.  On the introversive stream we digest every phase of that experience and we carry it back in as essence to the creative being.  On the externalizing stream we materialize.  We take a creative impulse, a spiritual, intuitive impulse from deep in our esoteric being and we externalize it.

            Both are fulfillments of the creative urge.  Just like the entire solar cosmos that we are part of takes manifestation, it is the same process that takes place in a creation that takes place in us.  When we are filled with the spirit, we cannot do anything but give.  This happens in us even in our inner being that is secret to us, because we are not completely conscious of everything in ourselves.

            You know, we have desires that are so secret that we don’t know them ourselves and when we discover them, that is a very happy day.  I never knew that this is really what I wanted to do in life and then one day it dawned on me, and it had been there all the while.

            The biblical Jesus says, Secrets that have been from the foundation of the earth will be shouted from the rooftop.  We are people that want to be rooftop shouters.  We want to share everything we have.  Obviously, from the number of the people that we have here, compared to the number of people that will be in the football stadium on Saturday, there are very few esoteric aspirants; very, very few.  But that’s the way it has always been.  That is the way it is in nature. 

            If we take a very simple action, like the action that takes place in an egg, the small nuclear part of the egg that we call the yolk contains the gateway to the memory of nature, so that all of the past experience and all of the past chicken-life experiences that have been, get their entrance through the material that is in the yolk of the egg.  If they’re looking for the memory of DNA and RNA they’re not going to find it.  The DNA and RNA represent a spiral that is a mimic of the cosmic spiral, but that spiral is interpenetrated by the ethers and it is in the ethers that the memory is captured in the spiral.  The yolk is also the center of new creativity where the divine being that guides the chickens work through and bring new changes.  …………..So, the yolk of the egg is esoteric.  It is creative.  It functions.  It is our duty to work and our duty to function.

            In astrology there is a relation between the esoteric and the exoteric.  Ela knew about that relationship in that she knew that the esoteric sign is the opposite of the exoteric sign.  This works throughout astrology, because astrology is analogous just like the entire creation is analogous.  For example, if we look at the first house, the first house is the physical body.  It’s the overt, the very obvious part of our being.  The 7^th house is the house through which we understand the individuality which is the greater part of our being.  It’s everything that isn’t the small personality.  So, in a way, the 7^th house is like the esoteric part of the whole character that is on the horizontal of the individuality and the personality.   

            The small nuclear part of the egg, the yolk

            In astrology there is a difference between the esoteric and exoteric.  This works analogous just like the whole creature is analogous.  The first house is the physical body.  The seventh house is the house through which we understand the individuality which is the greater part of our being, so in a way the seventh house is like the esoteric.

This is understood in folk language.  Pardon the sexist use of words, but the old saying goes, if want to know what a man is really like inside, look at his wife.  That tells us what the inner part is that was hidden, what was secret.  That is brought out.  The sign that is opposite the age represents the esotericism.  We know this from the Bible when Jesus says, be gentle as doves and wise as serpents.  He was referring to the previous age, of which there were still remnants around, the Age of Taurus.  Taurus ruling the doves, and the Ophite Gnostics ruled by the serpents, in fact if you look at the words that is used for serpent in the Bible, it has on the same order, Opheus.  It means “snake.”  

            Now, we’ve got to return and go back to another one of those introductions, another principle of time and space.  The deeper something is in time or space, the longer it takes for it to mature.  I’ll give you a little example: the Greeks.  The warriors shaved their beards, because the fights were then hand-to-hand and if somebody could grab you by the beard, they could slash your throat.  That is primitive warfare.  Think about that compared to now.  Now, we lob ICBM’s and everything is very distant.  It’s very impersonal.  If you have to look a guy in the eye before you kill him, that’s a very personal thing.  But you can say, those bad people are communists or those bad people are fascists or something and you can lob a bomb over their heads quite impersonally.

            For that distance in space there is also a distance in time, meaning to say that things that are extremely deep, not the trivial everyday things, take a longer time to mature.  It said, for example, that the elder brothers of The Rosicrucian Order could see hundreds and thousands of years ahead of time and they have designed a philosophy that it has taken that long for humanity to mature to be ready, so what we are talking about here is about things that take a long time in maturing. 

            Now, if what the most reliable authors on the earth have to say is true, it takes a long time for a person to come to rebirth.  For example some people think it takes for some people, on the average, as much as 1,000 years.  So, when we think about it that way, the fact that the esotericism of Virgo results in the Aquarian Age makes a lot of sense.  Think about it that what the inward consciousness is the planning stage of Virgo, by the time it can be outwardly manifest in the people who have done that work, by then the precession will have gone from Pisces and Virgo, it will have gone to Aquarius and Leo, and so in coming out from Leo it has become manifest externally in Aquarius.  This is a very important thing.  It means this is what governs our spiritual aspiration, our inner esoteric work because it is determining what the future is like.

            Now let’s do some of that real, rough kind of business again that we’ve been doing all along, and let’s just take some simple keywords from various signs and constellations of the zodiac and see how they work.  Let’s go all the way back to the Age of Cancer.  Now one of the combinations or one of the keywords for Cancer, the opposite sign, esoteric work, would be Capricorn, “ambition.”  And Capricorn ambition results in the [coming] Age of Gemini as air-seeking — in the harsh experiences of esoteric times, when people steel themselves against Cain — that becomes the basis for knowledge in the Age of Gemini.  The expedience of Capricorn becomes the utility of Gemini — and the trickiness of Capricorn, just in maneuverability, that becomes the adaptability of Gemini.

            So, in the Age of Gemini, the esotericism is Sagittarius.  Sagittarius represents the creation and sustaining of religious forms, and the esotericism of precipitating religious forms becomes the dogmatism of Taurus, esoterically, in the Age of Taurus.  The enlargement of consciousness that is Sagittarius in the esoteric side of the Age of Gemini — when that becomes externalized and brought into the material world it becomes the massive possessiveness of the exoteric Age of Taurus.  The adventure and expansionism of Sagittarius becomes the responsibility, the weight which your adventures result in.  The irrepressibility/ irresponsibility of Sagittarius becomes like the fixity of destiny in Taurus, so in Taurus the esotericism become Scorpio. 

            That’s what the Gnostics were, and the Gnostics were very rebellious.  When that rebelliousness became external, it became the individualism of the Age of Aries.  It works out very nicely.  The inner conviction of Scorpio, such as “I am convicted that this is right.”  When that works out exoterically into the outer worlds it becomes courage.  The Gnostics, inwardly, always respected each other no matter how crazy what another one said. That is what results in the kind of esteem that was developed in the Age of Aries.  The sectism (I don’t know how to say it another way.) the breaking up of the Gnostics.  There were probably about 50 different types of Gnosticism, and they were continuously breaking up into sects and sects.  That is what resulted in the breaking down of the clans of the Taurean Age, as they took place in the Age of Aries.  So, it all fits together very nicely. 

            In the Age of Aries the esotericism is associated with Libra and people studied the laws.  But, studying the laws resulted in the Age of Pisces as the study of principles—abstract principles and the symmetries of the law result in the renaissance kind of balance-view.

            The vicarious otherness of Libra represented the kind of piety that developed esoterically in the Age of Pisces.  The tendency toward more complete freedom among the esoteric people in the Age of Aries resulted in the kind of decadence that we see in the world now.  It’s not really transparent, but if you look at some of the things that Steiner says, it verifies this.  

            This doesn’t work perfectly.  It’s very hard when you work with history to find trends that work but this is a way that you can use astrological keywords and things that you see in everyday astrology and apply it to historical epochs and it seems to work out pretty well.

            Now, we’re coming to our own time which is the Age of Pisces.  In the early Age of Pisces the esotericism was in the hands of clerics in monasteries.  They were the only people who could read, in many cases.  As time progressed the priests became progressively more and more mental so you got to the scholiasts and the logic-chopper and all of those kinds of people.  Virgo is very often a kind of mentalism and the mentalism isn’t always founded on facts as much as it is on the mental conception.  Now this is not all wrong but this is the thing that has developed.   You know………how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, and I believe it was Aquinas who wrote that.

            The involuntary clairvoyance was, as we have noticed, weaving and in its place observation and the mind took hold and with that came a certain amount of skepticism.  With that came a very mental, based on tangibles, kind of esotericism.  The clerics still continued on but after the middle of the Age of Pisces things became cabalistic.  Even more so, they became alchemical.  It was something that was artificial and symbolic and …………..indirect.  So this is what esotericism has been in our time.

            Now, we want to relate this to our lives.  When we say these things, we don’t want to say that there weren’t people that didn’t directly see the spiritual worlds and didn’t work directly with matter, but the ideal that was set at this time was set by an alchemist named, Roger Bacon, and he had the right answer about it all.  He said, we must not be like ants who move things around outside of them.  (that’s obviously matter), nor must we be like spiders who spin out everything from inside of them (which is like spiritually imaginative people that have little to do with reality), but we must be like the bees who take something from without and mix it with something from within and make a …………that is a glory to God.  That’s a rough paraphrase. 

            So, we can see that the science that developed in the Age of Pisces by the Virgo people will, if united with the spirit, will become a true spiritual science.  Now, it is through the skepticism that developed when the inner life was shut off, at least as far as perception is concerned, and that is a very valuable thing.  The new religion, the new science of the Aquarian time must be able to answer all skepticism and go beyond it.

 

            Now, as we aspire to the Aquarian Age, there are several things that we need to be careful of lest we precipitate a tragedy.  We have to be careful of producing a spiritual materialism in which we produce phenomena, all kinds of sensational phenomena or things like that.  Unfortunately, a lot of that is happening in the world.   The world is not esoteric.  That is, exciting things appeal to people.  And spiritual things are seen completely in a material sense.   I think that is what is happening with the UFO phenomena.  I think people are experiencing things from the inner worlds, but they are being led to have their judgments skewed so that they see them as materialistic things.  Rather than vehicles that are passing through space, they are thinking of them as spacecraft.

            Another thing we have to be careful of is over-specialization.  If we’re over specialized, we cannot take our work and integrate it into anything Aquarian.  If you look at it, specialization is a form of elitism.  The Virgo consciousness is going to become the Aquarian esoteric, and if that is to be universal brotherhood where everyone is equal, elitism has no place. 

            We must not have a negative deductivity, that when we do develop our concrete mind, must have our thoughts be the clothing for intuition.  We can produce all kinds of thought-forms, but they are not necessarily meaningful.  They can be quite sophisticated, as we know from artificial intelligence (They do wonderful things with computers with artificial intelligence.) but it’s not a real knowing.  There’s not an intuition there that knows that something is the truth.

            We have to be careful about too much eclecticism, because the Aquarian unity is a unity and it’s not going to be a patchwork of this and that and that.   I’ve got a few more, but I don’t want this to get too long, because we want to get at what we’ve been trying to get at all night.

            Let’s take some things of our aspiration and see how they are pro-evolutionary to the Aquarian Age, starting with one of the simplest Virgo keywords, purity.  Now, we have to be careful with purity.  There are two kinds of purity.  There is the kind of purity that results in refined sugar or in medicines that have been de-naturalized from their natural source.  We want the kind of purity that is free from artifice.  Again, this is like something we spoke of earlier, of bringing something to a point.  If we bring something to a point, if our consciousness is pure, we can see through.  Unless we have that purity of consciousness so that we are crystal-clear in everything we do, we’re not giving our best to the Aquarian Age.  Obviously, in the future, we’re going to have clairvoyance, etheric clairvoyance, and we’re going to be able to see through everything as though it were glass.  That can only come with purity of consciousness.

            We want to be doing everything with an attitude of service.  Not just volunteer work, but everything with an attitude of service.  Service becomes the reality.  We are the creators of the new world, and every time we do something with the attitude of service and not the separative, selfish way – if we do everything for sharing the whole, we actually attract to ourselves the soul material that will become the future world that we all live in.  It has to be a service and it has to be a service that is palpable. It isn’t just doing my duty, it is literally a living kind of service.

            In our spiritual exercises of observation we have to learn the esoteric activity of penetrating form into seeing the life that is behind it.  If we do not penetrate to see the reality that is behind, and if we do not discriminate between life and form we are not making the distinction of consciousness that will be for everyone to live in a realm of pure life and pure energy.  We have to discriminate so we are not distracted by the form.  We have to go through to see what makes something live.  Virgo likes to organize and plan.  We have been wonderfully gifted by those who have preceded us and shown us cosmologically how things are set up analogously, and in parallel.  Therefore, to the degree that we can, we have to make our organizations not just for organization itself, but so that anything we organize in our mind becomes not just a replica, but it becomes based on cosmic formula and parallels so that things line up in truth on almost every level that we manifest.  That kind of conscious is exceedingly important.  I don’t know that Feng Shui does that, but I think anything can be organized in such a way that the cosmos can be brought into it.  A lot of temples have things like that built into them.

            In short, we must take our mental consciousness, because we now have to work through our mind.  It is our duty, it is our responsibility.  We have to take our mental consciousness and creatively attune it to intuition.  That is our single biggest thing.

            There are quite a few things we can do to have a lot of sophistication and they’re not as simple as the things I’ve just said.  These simple principles, these very simple things, if we keep them in mind, even if we don’t perform them, but just keep them in mind, that is a step in itself for our esoteric world’s work, to change the consciousness so that it’s eventually going to work its way out into the world.  We know that we are the transmitters–that we are radiating thoughts into the cosmos.  That’s why we studied to be esoteric.  We can be in our own room and we can be doing esoteric wonders, just by thinking and holding the right kinds of thoughts.  So all we have to do is remember that what we do in our inner work now and how we do it is what the exoteric world is going to be like in the Aquarian Age.  Next time we will look at another sign and constellation, and I think it’s going to be Pisces and Virgo. 

Pleasant Memories Salad

If you’re only a wanna-be mystic, or if you’re like the chef and think it is still okay to savor some of the earthy sensual pleasures, then this is the salad for you.

Memories of smokey maple-cured bacon may be decades old for vegetarians, yet they still tug at the taste buds when certain aromas waft through the air. The olfactory sense strongly connects the past to the future. This salad recipe is adapted from one served at Wisconsin’s White Gull Inn of the Door County peninsula.

The smoked string cheese may be difficult to find in other states, but what better reason to travel to Door County than to enjoy fresh-water great-lakes harbors and pick up a package of Baker’s Smoked String Cheese and some Door County dried cherries from peninsula orchards?

Then, you can take your treasures and memories home with you to extend your vacation. Make this delicious salad, and the recent past will come drifting back into your senses and give you visions of art galleries, Peninsula Players summer theater, cherry orchards, those wonderful harbors, and Wilson’s perpetual soda fountain at Ephraim. Don’t forget the smoked cheese.

And don’t everyone come at once. The best places on earth are easily spoiled.

The Salad

6 cups mixed salad greens
1/3 cup Balsamic vinegar dressing
1/2 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup toasted pecan halves, broken
1/2 cup smoked, string cheese, torn and chopped

Toast the nuts in a skillet or in the oven, watching them closely to prevent scorching. Tear the string cheese into strips and chop the strips into 1-inch lengths.

Toss the mixed greens with dressing. Divide among 4 chilled plates. Top each with 2 tablespoons dried cherries, 2 tablespoons pecan halves and 2 tablespoons of cheese. Makes 4 servings.

The Balsamic Vinegar Dressing

In a jar, combine
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup Balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
1 tablespoon snipped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon ground white or black pepper

Cover and shake until blended. Store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks

An Interview With Allen E

Allen E graciously agreed to break the ice on this site and give RFFriends its first interview.It was only fitting, because this website would not have been established without his expert assistance.

Widely scattered “Friends” who have never met each other except possibly on the internet sometimes wonder if there really is a warm body behind any given e-mail address.We would like to flesh out what is only a name and shake hands – get to know one another and get acquainted.

Allen worked and served as an officer and member of the Executive Council at Mount Ecclesia in the late 90’s until March, 2004.In fact, he lives near Oceanside and makes himself available now as a jack-of-all-trades trouble-shooter to the people who work at the RF headquarters.

Here’s Allen.

ERI don’t really know what you do for an occupation or I have forgotten.  You are connected with a company.  Who?  And what is it that you do?

Allen I am a programmer/consultant doing various software design/implementation work for various companies/organizations and individuals, most of whom do not want me to mention who they are, in locations such as Australia, Europe, the UK, NY, and PA. Mostly I write astrological applications, including financial astrology applications, and manage websites along with their special content. And whatever else comes my way.

ER What I have seen is that you do a huge amount of work that you give away for free, and it’s available on your website.  How did you first get interested in astrology?  How long ago was this?

AllenOne night in early 1973 I was home alone (my wife at the time went back to Memphis to visit her parents) and I happened to come across the TV program called Kung Fu. I was strangely attracted to it and after it was over I wanted to know more about “metaphysical” things. There was a book store in Houston, very near the RiceUniversity campus, called the Aquarian Age Bookshelf and it was run by two elderly women out of the downstairs part of their house. I went there to look around and found a book by Jess Stearn called “A Time for Astrology”. It was this book that led me to want to know more about astrology, which I knew nothing about at the time. Being a natural sceptic, but being a lover of math, I bought all the books and started calculating my own charts. On another one of my visits to this bookstore I bumped into someone and after some conversation, he asked me if I was familiar with the Rosicrucian Fellowship books, which were in one large bookcase along one of the inner walls. I said, “No,” and thanked him for the tip. I started looking at some of their books and got “hooked”. I soon signed up and started all of the Fellowship courses and away I went.

 

ER What got you started with programming astrology software?  Do you incorporate this into your occupation?

AllenI bought my first computer in 1979 (a Radio Shack TRS-80) and found out I had a love of programming. By this time I was 6 years into astrology and I knew it would be silly to keep doing all my charts by hand when I could write a program that did all the “heavy lifting” for me so I could then concentrate on interpretation. So it was then that my two big loves were combined, astrology and programming. I have been doing it ever since.

ER When and how did you find the Teachings and begin to work with the Fellowship?

AllenI became familiar with the Rosicrucian Fellowship books because of my visits to the Aquarian Age Bookshelf, which stocked Fellowship books. Once found I simply kept following that path and following it until I had accumulated most all the books, having read every one I added to my collection. The vibrations I got from the Western Wisdom Teachings seemed to resonate closely with my own. They always have, once I found them.

ERWhat was it like — coming into the Fellowship and dealing with their state of technology?  How did you expand that or bring it up to date?

AllenIt was a good fit. I knew just enough from my prior experiences to be able to do everything the Fellowship needed at the time. I’m no genius, but I do know how to make things work and that’s what I proceeded to do at the Fellowship — improve the operation of everything I could, in every department. I learned a lot of new things as well because in a small organization, which I have always worked in, you must be able to wear a lot of hats. So I learned databases, networking with routers, and various other things basically one step at a time as the need arose. Marie-Jose Clerc was instrumental in all this because she had lots of ideas and we made a great team because of her ideas, then my implementation. And of course, she was the one, along with Bob Jacobs, who had paved the way for technology to get its foot in the door at the Fellowship.

ER I know that you still help out the employees of the RF headquarters when they need you.  What is the state of their network now at Headquarters?  What do they need to make their work more efficient?

AllenQuite frankly, things are a mess at the Fellowship. All the good that I and others did has basically been eliminated by the various people who came after I left. I had things running efficiently and productively, but new management thought they could do things no matter who left – that there would always be a replacement to take over the work when they got rid of people they did not want at Oceanside. That was certainly short-sighted because things haven’t been the same since. The computers now are not on the network that used to work and the people who are still there are not as computer-literate as they need to be in order to work more efficiently. I am not blaming the workers still there, it is just that there is no longer any foundation or structure to do what is really needed. When you get rid of all the manpower, then who is left to do the work? The Fellowship more than anything needs capable bodies to catch up on all the work they need to do.

ER What is your vision of the future for the RF with regard to membership data, administration, publishing, education, websites, and etc.?

AllenThe Fellowship really needs to tell the non-English membership to take over their own business and leave Oceanside to handle the English-speaking part of the membership. For years while I worked at headquarters we heard it over and over that headquarters shouldn’t be so powerful, that headquarters should let go of some of the work they had and let others help. Well, now’s the time to do it. There are about 5 workers at headquarters these days, not nearly enough to handle every member in every language. When I was President we had 25 to 30 people doing the work that was required of us. With about 5 now, how much work do you really think can be done?

It is comforting to me to know that no matter what happens to the earthly organization called The Rosicrucian Fellowship that the Rosicrucian Teachings will go on and be available to all who seek its knowledge. The Fellowship web domains and websites are now being handled properly, by those who are or were close enough to Fellowship matters that they know what they are doing. One of the great tragedies of the Fellowship is that people came into the administration not knowing anything about the day-to-day business or the needs of the Fellowship. So many bad decisions were made. Well, now, no matter how bad things get, Max Heindel’s materials are preserved so that inexperienced people can’t mess things up (hopefully). The Rosicrucian Teachings have always been built around self-reliance, so if anyone wants to study these Teachings our websites, courses (in pdf format), e-books, etc. enable everyone to get what they may be looking for.

ER How many people contact you after being attracted to your website?  What kinds of issues or needs do they have?

AllenPeople contact me for various reasons. Some need programming help, some would like custom programs, some need their computers serviced, some want to learn more about astrology or cosmodynes, some like the idea of my Match-Making database where they can be matched with astrologically harmonious people using the technique I invented called dual cosmodynes, and some want to add my astrological calculation scripts to their websites so people can get astrological calculations done through those sites. It’s that and more. I like to think that by making myself available and able to be found, that the people who need to find me do. That is how God works in my life.

ER Are you still heavily into research and study of the Kerry Theory of astrology?  What conclusions have you drawn about it?

AllenI wish I were doing more with it, but I am waiting on the inventor of the Theory (Kerry) to get to the point in her research where we can take the next big steps forward, one being making a software program that will help us regular people understand and be able to apply the Theory. To me the Kerry Theory is a great discovery because I have not seen any other methodology in my 35 years of astrology that actually works in a consistent manner in describing when events occur. Everything else in the predictive astrology field is filled with so much inconsistency in the workings of its techniques that it is not only laughable, but mainly useless. Oh, sure, some will throw a few progressions and solar arcs and solar returns and asteroids – blah, blah – at the wall and something is surely bound to stick (always IN HINDSIGHT, of course). But does that mean that whatever sticks has any real predictive value in the future and will be consistent when applied to another case? Not hardly. My study of the Kerry Theory leads me to believe that all this will change when we better understand how predictive astrology really works – using this Theory. We will see in the course of time.

ER re: Chiron and its influence.  What signs do you believe to be most associated with that (planetoid?)  Do you believe that only planets have planetary spirits?  What about the asteroids, etc.?

AllenFor me the jury is still out on Chiron. Yes, the Magi Society says Chiron is great and wonderful and you have the asteroid devotees who swear by it and a 100 other bodies of ice. But I don’t see the definitive proof of its working or the working of any of the other asteroids. My study of my own chart does not need these extra bodies to explain my life and what’s in it. Therefore, why add superfluous material to the mix that can only muddy the waters? Plus, I believe Max Heindel when he says that the planets are the physical bodies of great Hierarchs and that this is truly the reason astrology works. I can’t see how a comet or a meteor or any like such object (old and useless debris) has the spiritual influence behind it as the planets do. Elbert Benjamine, who founded the Brotherhood of Light, felt the same way. Both he and Max Heindel had spiritual sight, so I trust them more than I do people without it. Course it’s true that new things are constantly being made known to us. But being a natural-born troubleshooter and engineer, I am skeptical of something until it can prove itself. I try to keep my mind open, and there a lot of interesting thoughts regarding other things in astrology, but I’m not yet ready to hang my hat on them just yet. I might be wrong, but who knows?

Getting back to Chiron – everyone talks about “wounded healer”. I really have no conception of what that really means in plain English. In my own chart I have Chiron in the 1st house exactly quincunx Uranus in the 8th and exactly square my MC. Have I ever seen any evidence of “wounded healing”? No. So I have to ask, “What’s the big deal?” Just because it works at times in other people’s charts (seemingly) does not mean that it can consistently be used like the usual planets. To me, this is more hit-and-miss astrology. So I have no idea what Chiron truly represents, if anything (I don’t see his influence in my chart), what he might rule, etc. The jury is still out on him and all the others, including Sedna, etc.

ER What kind of astrological counseling do you do?

Allen For better or worse I have never really come to grips with the argument about whether astrologers should charge money or not for their services. On the one hand, I can see why they should be compensated just as doctors and psychologists are because a true astrologer tries to diagnose and help people through their difficulties, just like others do who work in the healing professions. Yet, I have never been able to forget that Max Heindel says that no true spiritual astrologer ever charges money for their services. So because of this personal “cross-to-bear”, I have never practiced astrology for a living. For a time back in the mid-90’s I was selling my astrology CALCULATION programs. It was a learning experience and a trial run. It’s funny, but when I got to the Fellowship back in January, 1998, about the first thing the people there wanted to do was throw me out for offering natal reports on my website for $10 or $15 (to cover mailing, paper, toner, etc.). Van Demick said this was being a professional astrologer and as we all know you cannot be a member of the Fellowship while being a professional astrologer. I was basically given a choice – sell your reports and leave the Fellowship or stop charging money to cover your costs. As it turned out I was experiencing a transit Uranus to natal Mars opposition from the 3rd to 9th houses at that time and on the very day this aspect was exact, I decided then to do everything for free – free programs, free reports, free everything. I thought that was a much better channel for those Uranus-Mars energies than getting whacked in a car accident or something similar. So the Fellowship let me stay and that “witch hunt” at MountEcclesia turned into nothing. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the last of the “witch hunts”. But those are different stories.

ER What have you done with astrology programming that you feel is your biggest contribution?

AllenProbably the free programs and the free natal report interpretations that have enabled anyone with an interest in astrology to start learning it no matter their financial situation. The Teachings came to me basically free and I have tried to make as much of my efforts as possible also freely available to whomever was interested. Secondly, in time, I also believe my dual cosmodyne technique might prove itself worthy in informing people about whom they are really harmonious with. You remember that Max Heindel spoke of a “marriage bureau” in the future that would help the right people get together. Well, maybe one day, dual cosmodynes will help. But that will probably be long after I’m gone. But my source code is out there for someone to further develop as they see fit.

ER Which of these (or any other) activities do you enjoy the most?

Allen Programming and working – far and above away from anything else. The greatest blessing in life is work – at least work you love – and I have always been blessed that I can spend most every day doing what I love. I wish more people would educate themselves and become educated in Noel Tyl’s Midheaven Extension Process, which is used in vocational astrology to zero in on what people SHOULD be doing. It’s a crime to see so many people unhappy in what they do. One of these days . . .

Thank you for allowing me to share.

ERYou have assembled the RF websites, your own website, and my website.  Are you interested in attracting business — or setting up websites for others?

AllenYes, I will listen to people’s needs and if I can help, then okay.

ERAre you interested in IT work of the type you have provided for me?  Like, Your Friendly Help Desk for Little Old Ladies Who Can Follow Directions??

AllenYes, I will listen to all ideas.