Four words crystallize the spirit in the place of power.
In the sixth month the white snow is suddenly seen to fly.
At the third watch the disk of the sun sends out shining rays.
On the water blows the wind of gentleness.
Wandering in Heaven, one eats the spirit-power of the receptive.
And the deeper secret within the secret :
The land that is nowhere, that is the true home
The Secret of the Golden Flower, Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung
Break the day from night’s long reign.
The world is conceived by One
True in sight.
The stars shall impart their primordial essence,
Shining through darkness.
Let there be light.
You spend vast trouble to aid your foes. You cut from a spirit its bodily life. You punish vengefully the erring. You falsely arrogate to yourselves the right law divine to shed human blood. You err, and know not that the spirits you so hurt shall in their turn avenge themselves upon you. You have yet to learn the earliest principles of that Divine tenderness and pity which labours ever through us to rescue the debased spirit, to raise it from the depths of sin and passion, and to elevate it to purity and goodness.
You know naught of God when you do such deeds. You have framed for yourselves a God whose acts accord with your own instincts. You have fabled that He sits on high, careless of His creatures, and jealous only of His own power and honour. You have fabricated a monster who delights to harm, and kill, and torture: a God who rejoices in inflicting punishment bitter, unending, unmitigable. You have imagined such a God, and have put into His mouth words which He never knew, and laws which His loving heart would disown.
God – our Good Good, Loving, Tender, Pitiful – delighting in punishing with cruel hand His ignorant erring sons! Base fable! Base and foolish fancy, produced of man’s cruel heart, of man’s rude and undeveloped mind. There is no such God! There is none. He has no place with us: none, save in man’s degraded mind.
Great Father! Reveal Thyself to these blind wanderers, and teach them of Thyself. Tell them that they dream bad dreams of Thee, that they know Thee not, nor can know till they unlearn their ignorant conceptions of Thy Nature and Thy Love.
Yes, friend, your jails and your legalised murder, the whole tenor of your dealings with criminals, are based on error and ignorance.
Your wars and your wholesale murderings are even more fearful. You settle your differences with your neighbours, who should be your friends, by arraying against each other masses of spirits – we see not the body; we care only for the spirit temporarily clothed with those human atoms – and those spirits you excite to full pitch of rage and fury, and so you launch them, rudely severed from their earth-bodies, into spirit life. You inflame their passions, and give them full vent. Vengeful, debased, cruel, earth-bound spirits throng around your earth-sphere, and incite the debased who are still in the body to deeds of cruelty and lust and sin. And this for the satisfying of ambition, for a passion fancy, for an idle princely whim, for lack of something else to occupy a king.
Ah! friend, you have much, very much to learn: and you will learn it by the sad and bitter experience of undoing here – after that which you have now done. You must learn the golden lesson, that Pity and Love are truer wisdom than vengeance and vindictive punishment; that were the Great God to deal with us as you deal with your fellows, and as you have falsely fabled that He will, you would be justly sent to your own imagined hell. You must know of God, and of us, and of yourselves, ere you can progress and do our work instead of our adversaries’……
…..turn to the progressive souls who will receive the teaching of wisdom: speak to them the message of Divine truth that shall regenerate and elevate the world: and for the blind ones, pray that when their eyes are opened, they may not despair at the sight which they shall see.
William Stainton Moses, Spirit Teachings
‘Nevertheless, neither is the woman without the man, nor man without the woman in the Lord’*
The vision of such a romance has haunted the highest minds for thousands of years. We find it in platonic love, the basis of the singular romance in the myths of the Androgyne man; of Orpheus and Euridice; of Pygmalion and Galatea… This is the aspiration of the human heart, which cries in secrecy because of its great loneliness.
This romance forms the essential aim of esoteric work. Here is that love which will unite man to that being who is unique for him, the Sister-wife, the glory of man, as he will be the glory of God.16 Having entered into the light of Tabor, no longer two, but one drinking at the fount of true Love, the transfigurer: the conqueror of Death.
Love is the Alpha and the Omega of life. All else has only secondary significance.
Man is born with the Alpha. It is the intention of the present work to show the path which leads towards the Omega.
Boris Mouravieff
I Corinthians xi: 11
The true Master is felt; He is not seen.
When He who was unseen is seen, He disappears.
Then the Spiritual Presences are gathered into the
unity; they know not one another, but they are the
One Self.
In that darkness there is but One.
In that silence there is no knowledge, but Being –
which is all – is fulfilled.
This is the path of the true disciple.
Before man can find the true Master, he must lose
Him. That loss is pure gain; to lose Him thus is
to find Him indeed.
This should be known: the disciple who finds
Him on the plane of the senses has objectivised his
Karma; he loses the Master after a higher fashion.
Know that there is only the One Self, the Master,
and lose thyself also to find Him who is never found
until He has been lost.
When He is lost to every sense then the One
Flame arises, pure as before the beginning of worlds.
Thou shalt never know it: thou art It.
D.N. Dunlop, The Path of Initiation
“Of Beauty….I repeat again tha
t we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses: though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of Beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight. Now he who is not newly initiated, or who has been corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other. . . . But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees anyone having a godlike face or form, which is the expression of Divine Beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him. . . .”
The perfecting of our faculties hereafter, requires the sacrifice of all here
When our covering of a day is dissolved, when time is rolled away for us like a scroll, then we shall more fully enjoy the spirit of life, and drink, with the Redeemer, the fresh juice of the eternal vine, which will restore our faculties to their perfect fulness, to be employed as it may please Him to ordain.
But, in vain should we promise ourselves such enjoyment hereafter, if we have not faithfully performed all our sacrifices here below, not only those belonging to our personal renovation, but those which concern the voluntary offer of our whole earthly and mortal being, by a daily care, on our part, to become orderly victims, without spot and blameless. For, in that invisible region which we enter on leaving this world, we shall find no more earth to receive those different kinds of blood, which we must necessarily pour out, to recover our liberty;and, if we carry with us the corruption, which these different kinds of blood may contain, there would remain nothing for us but suffering and anguish, since the time and place for voluntary sacrifices would be past.
Man: His true nature and ministry, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin
Everyone must face and deal with the three temptations. However, if one approaches the spiritual world across the ‘threshold’ that is guarded by the ‘Guardian’, then one has the task of recognising the forces of the three temptations in one’s own being and of ridding oneself of them.
This means leaving them on this side of the threshold while one’s consciousness is still on the other side. For this, one must become free of the body in one’s thinking (thinking must become ‘body-free’); feeling must become free of the influence of chance; and willing must be cleansed of the lust for power.
If, for example, one were to carry lusting after power across the threshold into the spiritual world, one could thereby bring about tremendously destructive effects. For the will is strengthened to such a degree in the spiritual world, that it manifests in ways of which a person in the state of consciousness on this side of the threshold has no inkling.
Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold stands on the threshold and shows us our double. That is, the Guardian shows us our subconscious, reveals it to us so that we have before us an unerring and true picture of the extent and inner constitution of all the powers that we carry within us – powers that entangle us in the three temptations of existence.
if we are brave enough to withstand this sight without despairing over our own nature, without losing all courage so that we become, as it were, living ashes – if we have the courage to endure this truth – then we can cross over the threshold. Transformations then occur within our thinking, feeling and willing.
Indeed, one’s thinking becomes something quite different from what it was before. Until then, if we reflected upon something in order to draw logical conclusions, our thinking flowed onward from one thought to the next.
Now it becomes transformed into a stream directed upward. A thought becomes a question that ascends to the hierarchies and with persons who have died – then we return with the answer and recall it upon awakening in ordinary consciousness. Thought becomes an answer. The power of thinking becomes the power of vertial memory.
Feeling, for its part, is transformed. It becomes no longer the expression of what one feels with regard to oneself. Instead, it becomes an ever-widening circle that takes up not only what one has in one’s soul as impressions and sensations from without, but also what lives as missions and tasks within other beings.
Integration: matter assumed a spiritualised human body. It must consequently abandon its autonomy and hence its most sublime manifestations: storm, fire, sea….
Once in a human body, matter becomes wholly “invisible”. And yet, its beauty is here unsurpassable, by the grace of the descending form.
It was God’s boldest plan to predestine individual spirits as matter for the highest kind of molding. Here too, by becoming a member of the Mystical Body, the spirit in a true sense gives up its highest natural manifestations:
It must in some sense decline in order to enter into unity. But at the same time, through grace, it gains an unsuspected supernatural beauty.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat
Here is the circle of science: ascending from the visible to the invisible in theory, and descending from the invisible to the visible in practice. It is the ancient symbol of the serpent which bites its tail.
Because the circle is closed – not in the sense of the circle’s dimension, since it can grow indefinitely, but rather in the sense that it is always will be a circle without opening (in contrast to the spiral, which is an “open circle”).
The forces of warmth, magnetism, electricity and nuclear forces are thus discovered – and a series of other forces, more hidden and still more subtle, can be discovered – but only forces are discovered, ie, the causes of mechanical movement. It is in that this circle is closed that it is why – without intervention from outside of it, such as that of Teilhard de Chardin – it is a prison and captivity for the spirit.
What is true of natural science is also true of personal or arbitrary magic. The latter proceeds exactly as the former – ascending in theory and descending in practice. Modern authors on magic are perfectly right in advancing the thesis that magic is a science and that it has nothing to do with miracles as such:
Magic is the study and practice of the control of Nature’s secert forces. It is a science – pure, or dangerous – like all sciences….(Papus).
We have to add here only that this is true, and also that “Nature’s secret forces” are secret only for a limited time, notably until their discovery by natural science – which simply discovers and renders controllable the “secret forces” of Nature one after the other. It is therefore only a question of time until the pursuit of magic and that of natural science coincide and become identical.
But, on the other hand, it is also true that the closed circle of science, which is a prison and captivity for the spirit, applies also to personal magic. Magic, in so far as it is a science – and it is one – has the same fate as science, ie, captivity in a closed circle. And when Papus says further on in the introduction to his Traite methodique de magie practique that, “Magic, we could say, is the materialism of the future knights of Christ….”
He admits with this statement the fact of the captivity of magic as such – in a closed circle of a single aspect of the world, which he names “materialism”. And he gives expression to his hope that in the future there will be an intervention from beyond this closed circle by future magicians (“knights of Christ”)…in other words, that future Teilhard de Chardins will do for magic what he has done for science: that they will open the closed circle and transform it into a spiral.
Meditations on the Tarot, Unknown Author, Letter XVII, The Star