Aquarian Age Lecture 2
Feb 10th, 2009 by admin
Microcosm Lecture Series Notes
Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age
Lecture 2 of 25 by [R]
The Holy Grail and the Aquarian Age—In Heaven and In Earth
The Holy Grail and the Aquarian Age in Heaven and in Earth is the introduction to the whole series of talks. These talks describe changes of consciousness, changes in society, and even physical changes as we pass through the various ages.
When we think of the Holy Grail, we get different kinds of pictures. The Arthurian legends bring to mind swords and knights in shining armor, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, Tristan, and Percival. Lots of adventure, perilous quests and the ever elusive cup.
The British or continental quests centered on either the Cup or the Excalibur sword or spear. Tangled tales and confusions had some fighting against their own friends, not even knowing who they were; visions form heaven; and often a consummation from the grail after which the cup is taken into heaven.
Here, we’re not talking about knights errant, but about humanity, especially those seeking the higher life—on an inner quest to raise their consciousness and about the evolution of consciousness relating to history. The visions that we will look at are indeed visions from heaven and about inward heavens.
One example is the constellations. That is where our visions will come from, and we may talk about inner visions as well. The whole series is not particularly esoteric. Heindel tells us some things from the mystery traditions going back to India; the stories of initiates are stories in the constellations, and we can discern the changes of consciousness necessary to spiritual awakening there.
The cup of receptive consciousness represents where we receive the divine nectar, usually portrayed with a human being with the all-seeing clairvoyant eye and the spinal fire rising up to the voice box and spreading out into something like a tulip – on the other hand there is spirit of the highest type coming into the top of the cranium. Both of these unite at the cranium and at the voice box.
The process of the development of consciousness, the whole idea is a very Aquarian idea in itself.
In the last lecture we started at the beginning of the mysteries and the beginning of the zodiac, somewhere between Aries and Pisces, and the year was about 496a.d. according to H. P. Blavatsky and others.
Therefore, the dawning of the Aquarian Age is somewhere in the middle of the 19th century.
The first cup for us is the cup of experience. In terms of the cup we usually experience material conditions first and from that we begin to need and search for a spiritual meaning, whereas we gain the ability to understand the meaning and from that we gain soul power.
The experience comes first, and later the meaning of it and the psychological reasons. So in the middle of the 19th century we have two individuals bringing to consciousness the idea of process like never before.
Charles Darwin (form) in biology and Karl Marx (idea) in political theory, are examples where process was important.
After the form side of process a readiness for the spiritual impact follows. Blavatsky, Heindel, Steiner and others taught about the process of spiritual evolution.
In the material world we are goal-oriented and purpose-driven and linear. In contrast, process is important in spiritual life, but it’s not like you have an end or goal. In spirit the ends are right within the means. You do not know the ultimate truth; you learn it in the living of it. The process of that is the way enlightenment comes. It is by the way you are living all long that enlightenment comes.
The leaves are falling now and we can think about things autumnal like the Great Pumpkin. What it is varies from biologist to botanist—you can tell by the seeds—no, by the leaves—no, by the flower. So, you have the seed; put it in the ground, it puts out roots, shoots, leaves, and eventually flowers. They get pollinated and eventually the Great Pumpkin grows. Some would say that the Great Pumpkin is only the fruit at the end—even more than the seeds that the fruit contains. Reality is the Pumpkin in all the stages of process from seed to seed. We, in our lives are the whole process. We can’t say that we are what we were when we were 12 years old, for instance. I was stunned a few years ago about what I had become and I was surprised because it was not anything like I predicted so we are talking about the whole process—the whole family of cucurbita. When talking about a process it is very difficult to separate one thing from everything else, so that is the kind of thinking it behooves us to have in our consciousness if we want to grow spiritually. Things may change in coming events; it is that kind of thinking.
In Greek mythology we have the river, Lethe, and it was the river of forgetfulness that ran underground. Anytime you drank from it you forgot all of your life on earth. In fact it is part of the Greek language: lethe, Alethea is the word for truth in the Greek language. If we never forget the source of intuition that is inside of us we never forget the truth. The name, Alice, is from the same source. Also: lethal.
Siegfried drinks from the cup of remembrance and remembers everything from the spiritual worlds. It goes both ways. There are two cups: the cup of forgetfulness and the cup of remembrance, because when you die you forget this world, and when you come to birth you forget the spiritual worlds
St John’s gospel’s first miracle of the cup was at the wedding at Cana when Jesus changed water to wine. The last cup was that of the last supper, the cup of communion which clairvoyants claim was water. In the two cups of the reverse zodiac equinoctial and solstitial colures we see the virgin lying on her back with grain in her hand but toward the South Pole is the constellation, crater. The other cup is the cup of Aquarius the pitcher that the water man carries on his shoulder and in some versions on his hip.
Two cups, one with the virgin often pictured as an angel and the second, the cup of Gannymead, the water bearer in Aquarius. They are marking points between where we run our two quests either forward through zodiac and on to Aquarius or backward to Aquarius from the other direction. Being greedy I want to do both directions and double greedy look at both directions twice; following the regular orbital revolution of the earth going forward around the Sun through the seasons we get a mythological view and the stories out of which history is made. If we take apparent backward motion through the constellations we get a directly historical view of things. So we will try to do both of them. When we do all of this we will be like knights on a quest and get very confused. You know, getting into the spiritual worlds you can get lost very easily in them. We will be looking at just a few little snippets here and there.
The way the symbols are interpreted, the signs have many facets to them. There are many interpretations for each myth so if something disagrees with something you have heard before it does not mean a contradiction. It just means we are using myths as receptacles that hold truth—not reading a blue print.
When we look at precessional history we will be using telescoped time – using a constellation that may represent millions of years instead of just an age of 2156 years. I will tell you when something is direct history, but the precessional movement tells us how something will proceed, like the hermetic axiom is a principle of analogy that carries through to all things.
Our first quest will be pseudo precessional—millions and billions of years in time in a few sentences. Our solar system has gone through many different stages in most of its time. The planets we are talking about didn’t exist pre-big-bang. We can trace the material source back to a common time and place but that is only a skin—a skin that has not always been there but there has been a spiritual evolution long before we had the stuff of the galaxies. There was an evolution or a creation that had an evolutionary form. In our solar system there are 4 periods of time that we have gone through and 3 more yet to come.
In the Saturn period, a time potential that was filled with consciousness, there was space that had the potentiality to become matter. So in terms of periods associated with Saturn we were mineral-like. We were capable of being formed. Previous to that we had no form whatsoever and we had the deep unconsciousness of the present minerals—very deeply asleep.
Along came the Sun period when everything had been re-capitulated and the whole cosmos was as dense as desire and illuminated after a very long rest, as dense as energy, but more like a vital living energy. The science concept of energy is only energy that comes from entropy, but this is a different type of energy, not energy going into entropy.
In the 3rd period, the Moon period, we were animal-like.
Next was the 4th or Earth period as humans after cycles within cycles within cycles and many repetitions. God has to hit us with the same thing again and again but from different points of view until we become humans and reach a state of becoming god-like, awakening all the things that have been built into us. This is the current and middle period of seven. (Remaining are the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan periods.)
The periods are broken into epochs; an epoch is a series of recapitulations for greater experience and development on earth. We are talking telescopic time—millions of years.
First was the Polarian epoch.
Second, the Hyperborean epoch was analogous to the sun period—an energetic state.
Third, the Lemurian epoch corresponded to the Moon.
Fourth, the Atlantean epoch represented the first half of the earth period when human beings become erect. In Lemuria the sexes had already been separated for coming into the material world. The capacity to reproduce from only oneself was lost –so here we found it necessary to cooperate with the opposite sex to produce new bodies. Then the mind, through the spirit, can enter into the personality and see its creation outside of itself. A pretty big thing—when you have a divided consciousness, it is like Gemini. You might say that looking at this very telescopic view, we are now in Taurus physically in this world.
Going in the other direction, beginning with the cup at Virgo and taking a symbolic or mythical view going forward, not only in Judeo-Christian mythology, we learn about a war in heaven and the angels struggling with the dragon.
Underneath Virgo is a dragon, a serpentine dragon where there is that kind of struggle and a jewel falls out of the crown and a grail cup is formed. The beast is fighting with the angels and the jewel of conscious being is brought into incarnation and that is the story. This part of Virgo was called the caduceus of Mercury (or Michael) and it goes down to the South Pole which is the bottomless pit. We learn that drinking from that first cup meant drinking wine and we relive the Bacchus frenzy of forgetting our godly home. Other symbols are the lotus eaters—the constant temptations.
In Eden we learn about the word and of purity and the word that issued from the creative hierarchies. Re: Virgil’s Aeneids. The angel was seen as the mentor who had the golden bough and led him into the underworlds where he drank from the waters of lethe. Helen was Virgo — also called Della or Delilah and when the Sun passes through Virgo, Samson gets his hair shorn off. The land of the Philistines, the land of Egypt, meant going down through the lower worlds. Our knights pass out of Virgo into the next sign:
Libra. The winter half of the year equates to the underworld. The sign of love in the symbolic sense of the ancient mysteries was the sign of the separation of the sexes. After that all culture happened through those who were reborn into feminine (more receptive) bodies. Men had the Adam’s apple, the direction toward creative speech. The pomegranate was symbolic of the female organs of creativity.
The shock of fecundation and of opposite-sex forces moved us into individuation, to loss of faithfulness and subsequently to two points of view—and law and justice.
From Libra to Scorpio mythological symbols include angels of discontent; fire breathing angels; Luciferic signs; all kinds of struggles with serpents and dragons; fouling, armored birds; extremes; rebellion; sexuality; sins of Cain; sins of passion and violence; division when we think we can kill somebody. We learn that we can destroy the body but cannot kill the spirit.
Sagittarius in full debauch: prodigal, subhuman and bestial—almost careless and fleshy to the extreme; a time when we need more divine help, so we call on religion and our knights as we pass into depravity and we come to earth.
Capricorn represents the depth of our descent and the lowest place we can go. Everything is now hardened and is a different kind of evil, not Luciferic but naysayer kinds of evil with sins of omission and an extreme materialistic worldly-wise kind of fear; self limitation and darkness. This is where we are: blind to the spiritual worlds with skepticism and solitary confinement—in the dark. When we end the Aquarian period we will be out of darkness.
Now, leaving our knights there, we always leave them in earthy places and take up another precessional point of view with telescoping.
Dealing with history: The symbol of Aquarius is two lightening strokes parallel to each other to represent a conception of or consciousness that sees things in parallel or with the principle of analogy. The mis-principle of synchronicity is a Jungian misunderstanding of parallels. Jung did this because if there would be cross connections to the parallel bars, then there would be magic and we all know there is no magic, his words. We look at parallels on different levels. He would not look at there being any connection between parallels. Any cross connections.
Going forward from Taurus and looking at the evolution of form,
the outer form and seeing how it evolves, we can go all the way back to Lemuria when we were being brought into the physical world at the same time the world itself was crystallizing as it cooled and condensed and as we cooled and condensed. Before the bodies condensed it was much easier to accomplish evolutionary change. Cancer is the sign of imagination and various organs were being developed—being imagined into the body before it was crystallizing from energy. Imagination had its rule over our physical form. Everything lived under a mist and before we could come out into clear air we needed lungs, Gemini. We were building the brain. Through the mind the spirit could work into the brain and into the physical body. We were becoming warm red-blooded human beings. As Nimrod the hunter, we ate a lot of flesh and developed lungs to breath. We developed the ability to produce concrete thoughts with the passing of consciousness into the medulla, and we developed a cunning and material Taurus type of consciousness. All of these attributes developed side by side. The Atlanteans could do remarkable things but there was no rational cognition like now. Passing of basically a material type of consciousness to Aries, the brain developed and we are very clearly seeing the difference between the inner and the material worlds. It is not superstition with the Catholic Church and eating fish, as we began to have a pineal type of consciousness and needed the phosphorous, etc.
We had to undergo evolution. Speculation of [R]: It’s no accident that there are holes in the ozone layer. When you go far south and people are having more skin cancers, remember that the ethers are mainly in the blood – and there are more and more etheric gases in the blood. When you study descriptions of ultra violet light it is similar to the ethers. Neither goes through glass. Aquarius rules the circulatory system. In our evolution the heart and circulation is becoming more under our control. We are directing the blood to the surface to counteract the ultraviolet penetration. As the circulatory system moves more blood toward the skin everyone, irrespective of genetic background, is going to be more blue.
Looking at how consciousness is awakened, religious evolution in Lemuria was associated with Cancer a sign of feeling. We had imagination and were sexually singular and could feel organs into existence. We took the creative force into our own hands out of harmony with the cosmos and suffered that great fall and because we had to develop sense perception this happened through feats of violence with people being roasted on spits, etc and with pro-evolutionary fights to the finish and such. In Gemini consciousness was awakened through repetition, remembering things over again and again and again and in Taurus we became awake to things outside of us. With our values outside of us we developed cunning, desiring and wanting things for ourselves. There was cattle worship and persons were judged by the number of cattle they had. Aries became a time of separation and self interest—of the obvious, and then the individual had to be balanced by opposition and by the law so the religion was not just a religion of where the stronger one is but where the better one is.
What had been a memory in Gemini was a focus on object and now in Pisces we have the idea of something and the consciousness of the universal idea because we can’t see it. Religion is that of blind faith and all principle. Now with Aquarius there is an awakening of seeing for ourselves the forces behind the forms. Through etheric vision we can see an inner vision—a re-opening of the inner worlds. We don’t see them directly but on a higher parallel of consciousness of infinites, not just principles but infinites.
The Moral Standard
Now let’s do it in a different repetitive way in terms of what produces the awareness of something good.
Gemini rules Atlantis and whatever is good produces a memory. First we have the experience and then we connect with whatever produces a memory. It takes a long time and many repetitions. It’s the type of thought process for understanding cause and consequence. Telephone lines are ruled by Gemini.
Taurus good is what gets me what I want and developed a moral standard of obedience.
With Aries whatever works with the law and gets results is good: a code of law.
Pisces is being prepared to come out of matter again and the principle of good relates to sacrifice.
Aquarian consciousness adjusts individual actions to the needs of society; altruism and spiritual development are good.
The Sense of Self
n Lemuria it was primarily with the body. If I hurt then I must be. In atlantis the sense of self was associated with growing and becoming; they were like 30 feet tall and they worshipped the body.
In Taurus there is a sense of self in desire; in Aries a sense of self in mind. With the person born on that cusp it’s: I think, therefore I am. Descartes.
Pisces knows himself by the experience of the Holy Spirit. If you have had the experience you know that you are divine.
When we get to the Aquarian age self will not be determined in relation to things that have lesser consciousness than us—not by “we are better than the animals.” As we open clairvoyance we are not at the top of the evolutionary period, but we are somewhere near the bottom. In our higher spiritual consciousness one does not come to the ethers from the physical plane without passing into the mind and the life spirit. Meaning, the selfness out of which self is born, this is what altruism is—a realization that there is a spirit and out of that spirit the self is capable of producing different foci and those foci are the selves and are made up of that spirit, and when we have the consciousness of that spirit our sense of self becomes very different.
If you look in the Old Testament (or the mocking of it) or look in some of the plays like Aristophenes, self is seen as a vortex of fire by night and smoke by day and within an ocean that is selfness. Our individualities are in there. And our consciousness is in little eddies and our individualities are like the little whirlpools in there and in that flotsam and jetsum that collects in all of those eddies–that is our consciousness. When we have the experience of the Christ (or given in other names in other religions, it doesn’t matter what you call it) it is a shifting of consciousness from the vortex of that eddy to the ocean itself.
So, if we are working now toward the Aquarian Age consciousness, that is how this consciousness was developed, was being worked on, when we were coming into consciousness in Lemuria. The willpower to withstand all of that pain and withstand all of that suffering is what the spiritual exercises were all about.
We were bringing consciousness into our physical bodies. As with producing music, there is a big difference in consciousness in the in-breath than in the out-breath. It’s a little dangerous but you can experiment with breathing exercises and see that most important change is accomplished on the out breath.
In early Greek times during the Age of Taurus initiates of the school of Hercules chanted poetry. The mind was coming into development and we could understand more and more beautiful things, which is what the exercises were like in the Age of Aries—more of a rectitude and a singular concentration. Aries always wants to be one all alone and that was an exercise of extreme concentration.
Trying to become wise, Socrates could stand on one foot all night while he was concentrating on a single subject. With Taurus it was concentration toward an understanding of universals.
Exercises now in the Age of Pisces are more abstract and more for understanding universals.
Aquarius specializes the exercises for understanding pure truth in order to become a creator. The sign is ruled by Uranus which is preeminent among the other planets for invention. What really counts is if you can creatively live them into existence. Take the truth and live it into existence, a pure awareness being brought into existence. It is the end of differentiation religions of the Holy Spirit. Now as we approach the Aquarian Age the religion will be of the second attribute—a religion of a totally different order and a totally different consciousness.
A few of the things that are going on around us as we experience transits of Uranus:
Virgo 1962 – 1968 Computers and data.
Libra 1968 – 1974 Going toward the universal oneness where all of humanity is one together, with the beginning of equality and the modern women’s movement and the whole sexual revolution.
Scorpio 1974 – 1981 A more biological kind of consciousness, tax revolts. Death with dignity, all Scorpionic matters leading toward a future kind of humanity.
Sagittarius 1981 – 1988 Electronics taking a different direction with electronic games and the big battles between science and religion, the debauched centaurs.
Capricorn 1988 – 1995 Earth movements – Ancient Earthworks Society, fads of collecting crystals instead of catching glimmers of truth, neo-paganism of the earth children.
Aquarius 1996 – 2003 The beginning of awakening of etheric consciousness. Realization of something greater than us. Angel mania.
Now in Pisces 2003 – 2011 Vicissitudes. Extreme tsunamis and hurricanes as if saying that the entrance of Uranus into Pisces is doing as much as it can to bring us down to a peaceful dependence on material existence. Water–the man in Japan with devices for showing the structure of water and effect of prayer on crystallization.
It all falls together and is very, very clear. Our fourth and last quest.
In the first quest we realized there is a future epoc of man that goes beyond the separations we have now, Galilean.type of humanity. All of these quests converge on the second cup.
In the top of the mandala, in the upper hemisphere, we are told to go where a man is celebrated in the upper room. At that supper everything becomes The Everything—becomes a time of friendship. This is where we are headed through all of our quests, to a humanity again but not held together involuntarily, but voluntarily by friendship and altruism—not held together by higher spiritual beings but a humanity held together voluntarily by a higher sense of altruism with each of us knowing that we would rather be one than be separate.
In the second quest we made a descent into matter and we saw the closing off of our being, but at the same time that we saw the closing off we saw an increase in the negative appreciation of sensual things probably with the depth of concentration coming in Capricorn.
In the third and major quest a number of things are happening.
We realize that we are passing from a time of ideas to a time of complete enlightenment. We are experiencing the light itself and not the things that are made up of or issue through or from the light.
We are passing from a time of separate experience to one of unified experience
We are finding a unified voluntary clairvoyance with receptivity and projectivity in one for a holistic consciousness.
We are finding a sense of self beyond ourself.
We are looking for a good morality with the good integral to self—an Aquarian quality, allowing a sane, less deranged, state.
We are coming to understand the process that we are in.
In the fourth quest — nothing much. The cup of virgin innocence becomes the second cup of transcendence. With virtue—when we drink of the cup of knowledge we do something right because we know we are doing something right. Instead of the cup of the drunken frenzy, we have Aquarius, the water bearer, who knows what he pours and has control, is cool, calm, and collected and has the kind of peace to proceed in spirituality.
The first cup led to strife; the second led to sacrifice and unity; from a seeking experience to a finding experience; from forgetfulness to remembrance.
When we remember our divine estate, it is our source of intuition,
We remember that the self is the truth that resides in us.
When we erred we have said, “Oh, I forgot myself.”
“Today I will be perfect,” but how soon do we again forget ourselves?
How long do we keep Christ as our ideal?
The perpetual forgetting of self is the forgetting of the Christ ideal.
Perpetual remembrance is not that of images, but is a state of being: “This do in remembrance of me.” We will have made a significant step to the passing of the Cup of Remembrance.
