Significant Number 9

Nobody knows precisely what – if anything out of the ordinary – will occur on 21.12.2012, but it may be wise in any case to treat this date as a feasible deadline.

Accepting this premise at face value, for what it is worth – which potentially is either everything or nothing – means there is nothing to lose but everything to gain, but not vice versa, for this reason: The authorities on Mayan culture – the ancestors, as it were – have said that this date is a point of transformation, for better or worse, depending on how the balance tips.

In other words, if the world and all of humanity have not, by this time, made a positive evolutionary step towards a less material, more spiritual, less painful, more peaceful, less hateful, more loving state of reality, natural and supernatural, then the change will be for the worse and might even be catastrophic.

If, however, humanity takes up the ‘Sword of Peace’, ‘Belt of Truth’ and so on, aspiring to and attaining love through truth with hope and faith, then the change will be for the better. The Stairway to Heaven and Gateway to Paradise will manifest and reopen to us. The Tree of Life will be restored and soulmates reunited. It might even be the case that our ability to survive at all will depend on the degree to which our hearts and minds are filled with love and light, the extent to which our soul/spirit is free and in touch with the Divine.

It is therefore proposed that we accept the deadline and begin in earnest a fully conscious, united mission to help save the world by 21.12.2012, else be left to wonder forever what might have been.

So from the present date (September 24 2010) there are 819 days to go until deadline, which is boiling down to a significant number 9 in this book. As to how we might proceed – seeing as 9 might indeed be significant – perhaps now is the time for us all to hang the Hermetic lamps out, so they are brought beyond the mantle more fully. Each to his or her own, thereby, with a mission to shine a light. Upraise sparks.

The Essence of Initiation

It is in we ourselves that there is to be found the ‘Edenic’ layer, of that of Paradise before the Fall, of which an account is to be found in the book of Genesis of Moses. Do you doubt the essential truth of this account? Descend into the depths of your own soul, descend as far as the roots, to the sources of feeling, will and intelligence – and you will know.

It expresses in symbolic language the first layer (first in the sense of the root of all that is human in human nature) of human psychic life, or its ‘beginning’. Knowledge of the beginning, initium in Latin, is the essence of initiation. Initiation is the conscious experience of the initial microcosmic state (this is the Hermetic initiation), and of the initial macrocosmic stage (this is the Pythagorean initiation).

The first is a conscious descent into the depths of the human being, to the initial layer. Its method is enstasy, ie, experience of the depths at the foundation within oneself. Here one becomes more and more profound until one awakens within oneself to the primordial layer – or the ‘image and likeness of ‘God’ – which is the aim of enstasy. It is above all by means of the sense of spiritual touch that this experience is effected. One can compare it to a chemical experiment undergone on the psychic and spiritual plane.

The second experience – that we have designated ‘Pythagorean’ from a historical point of view – is based above all on the auditory sense or sense of spiritual hearing. It is essentially musical, just as the first is substantial or alchemical. It is by ecstasy – or rapture, or going out of oneself – that the macrocosmic layers (spheres or heavens) reveal themselves to consciousness. Pythagoras’ ‘music of the spheres’ was this experience, and it is this which was the source of the Pythagorean doctrine concerning the musical and mathematical structure of the macrocosm.

Christian esotericism unites these two methods of initiation. The Master had two groups of disciples – ‘disciples of the day’ and ‘disciples of the night’ – the first being disciples of the way of enstasy and the latter those of the way of ecstasy. He also had a third group of disciples ‘of day and night’, ie, those who possess the keys to both doors at once, to the door of ecstasy and that of enstasy. Thus, the apostle, John, author of the Gospel of the Word-made-flesh, was at the same time he who listened to the heart of the Master.

He had a twofold experience – macrocosmic and microcosmic – of the Cosmic World and the Sacred Heart, of which the litany says: Cor Jesu, rex et centrum omnium cordium. It is thanks to this twofold experience that the Gospel which he wrote is at one and the same time so cosmic and so humanly intimate – of such heights and depths simultaneously. There, the macrocosmic solar sphere and the microcosmic solar sphere are united, which explains the singular magic of the Gospel.

Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter VI, The Lover