Lodge of the Masters

Now from where do the higher beings obtain this plan? We find an answer to this if we consider that there are still higher stages of evolution where the plans are devised. That is where world evolution is worked out. These higher stages are indicated to us by the Ancients, for instance by Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul, and also by Nicholas Cusanus. His perception was:

Higher than all knowledge and perception is the lack of perception. But this Unknowing is a higher knowing, and this lack of perception is a higher perceiving.

When we stop looking at what we hold in our thinking and concepts of the world, and turn ourselves to what wells up, to our inner powers, then we find something still higher. The Masters can weave the [third] Logos because they have ascended still higher than the nature of thinking. When the higher powers are developed, then, in such beings, thought appears as something different. It then corresponds to our spoken word within us. The thought which constitutes the innermost being for the Masters can itself be the expression of a higher being, just as the word is the expression of thought [with us].

If we ourselves consider thought as the word of a still higher being, then we come near to the concept of a the Logos. Knowledge taken out from thought stands on a still higher level.

When we behold the world we find the atom at the one extreme. It is an image of the plan that proceeded out of the depths of the spirit of the Masters, which is the Logos. If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch, then we are led back again into the world.

If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch, then we are led back again into the world.

Just as man has descended, has plunged down to the physical plane, so is it also with the world as a whole. What contributes to the development of man’s self lies around him in the world.

But then we are led down to the lower planes, which however, themselves contain the higher planes….the Lodge of the Masters.

Rudolf Steiner, Atoms and the Logos

Ursa Major

The clear bead at the center changes everything.

There are no edges to my loving now.

You have heard it said that there is a window

that opens from one mind to another.

But if there is no wall, there is no need

for fitting the window, or the latch.

We take long trips.

We puzzle over the meaning of a painting or a book,

when what we are wanting to see and understand in this world,

we are that.

Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up?

Do you know what a faithful love is like?

You are crying. You say you have burned yourself.

But can you think of anyone who is not hazy with smoke?

Daylight, full of small dancing particles,

and the one great turning,

our souls are dancing with you.

Without feet, they dance.

Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual.

They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of this world, they say,

there is a soul, and you are that.

But we have ways within each other

that will never be said by anyone.

This human shape is a ghost

made of distraction and pain.

Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel,

trying wildly to open,

this image so tightly held within itself.

The Sufi opens his hand to the universe

and gives away each instant, free.

Unlike someone on the street who begs for money to survive,

a dervish begs to give you his life.

Not until someone dissolves,

can he or she know what union is.

That descends only into emptiness.

A lie does not change to truth

with just talking about it.

Soul of this world,

no life, no world remain,

no beautiful men and women longing.

Only this ancient love

circling the holy black stone of nothing,

where the lover is the love,

the horizon and everything within it.

It may be sometimes noisy in the school of love,

but there is never any distinguishing past from present.

No judge decides a precedent here.

In matters of love, judges cannot speak.

Rumi, Ursa Major: The Great Bear, the Big Dipper

The Message of Divine Truth

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

The Cosmic Sabbath

Genesis gives an account of the history of the world’s gradual attainment of independence and inwardness, which culminates in the birth of freedom; and, further, it portrays the misuse of freedom and the consequences thereof.

In fact, what is the essence of the account of the creation according to Genesis? It is essentially nothing other than a description as to how the world in the first instance received its own existence alongside God, then its own movement (‘water’), then its own life (‘plants’), then its own soul life (‘animals’) and lastly – in man, as the ‘image and likeness of God’ – its own self consciousness, ie, freedom.

And what is the seventh day of creation – the cosmic sabbath, God’s day of rest? Is it not the level of freedom attained where God ‘rests’ from his deeds, ie, where he manifests his freedom attained where God ‘rests’ from his deeds, ie, where he manifests his freedom in relation to the world, while the world, the beings of the world, experience themselves as being left to their own freedom, ie, to experience their freedom?

The seventh day of creation is the day of freedom. The blessing of the seventh day is the divine act of creating the highest value of existence, the foundation of all morality: freedom. Here created being attains the highest level of inwardness: freedom. The seventh day of creation is the ‘day’ of the meaning of the world. Here the created world becomes something moral; here the world enters into a free relationship with God and God enters into a free relationship with the world.

However, since it is only in love that freedom is perfect, one may therefore also say that the seventh day is the day of the founding and sealing of the relationship of love between the creator and all created beings. Thus love is the foundation , the meaning, and the purpose of the world.

Valentin Tomberg, The Seven Miracles of John’s Gospel

Miracles of the One Thing

True, without error, certain and most true: that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the miracles of the One Thing.

And as all things were from One, by the meditation of One, so from this One Thing come all things by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon, the wind carried it in its belly, the nurse thereof is the Earth.

It is the father of all perfection and the consummation of the whole world. Its power is integral if it be turned to Earth.

Thou shalt separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the coarse, gently and with much ingenuity. It ascends from Earth to heaven and descends again to Earth, and receives the power of the superiors and the inferiors.

Thus thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitude, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. Thus the world was created. Hence are all wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner.

Therefore am I called Hermes the Thrice Great, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That is finished which I have to say concerning the operation of the Sun.

Tabula Smaragdina

Abode of the Magi

When you hear the lovers’ words, think them not a mistake
You don’t recognize these words, the error must be your take.
The here and hereafter cannot tame my spirit and soul
Praise God for all the intrigue in my mind that is at stake.
I know not who resides within my heart
Though I am silent, he must shake and quake.
My heart went through the veil, play a song
Hark, my fate, this music I must make.
I paid no heed, worldly affairs I forsake
It is for your beauty, beauty of the world I partake.
My heart is on fire, I am restless and awake
To the tavern to cure my hundred day headache.
My bleeding heart has left its mark in the temple
You have every right to wash my body in a wine lake.
In the abode of the Magi, I am welcome because
The fire that never dies, in my heart is awake.
What was the song the minstrel played?
My life is gone, but breathing, I still fake!
Within me last night, the voice of your love did break
Hafiz’s breast still quivers and shakes for your sake.

Hafiz

The Sixth Arcanum

Love is strong as death, ie, death does not destroy it. Death can neither let one forget nor let one cease to hope. Those of us – we human souls of today – who bear within ourselves the flame of the memory of Eden cannot forget it, nor can we cease to hope for it. And if human souls come into the world with the imprint of this memory, and also with the impression of knowing that the meeting with the other will not take place for them in this life here below, they will then live this life as if widowed, in so far as they remember, and as if engaged, in so far as they hope.

Meditations on the Tarot, Letter VI, The Lover

Atonement

An anguish’d heart whose loss hath been so great?
Where are the hours that fled so swiftly by?

In vain the fairest thou didst gain from fate;
Sad is the soul, confused the enterprise;

The glorious world, how on the sense it dies!

In million tones entwined for evermore,

Music with angel-pinions hovers there,
To pierce man’s being to its inmost core,

Eternal beauty has its fruit to bear;
The eye grows moist, in yearnings blest reveres
The godlike worth of music as of tears.

And so the lighten’d heart soon learns to see

That it still lives, and beats, and ought to beat,
Off’ring itself with joy and willingly,

In grateful payment for a gift so sweet.
And then was felt, oh may it constant prove!
The twofold bliss of music and of love.

Goethe, Atonement

Karmic Clairvoyance

Imagine here, the stream of the spiritual world descending, and the lower ego looking back into the past. The connection between two points can be seen through this image of looking forward to the future in the spirit world and looking back to a point in the past and to what has happened then on Earth.

For example, say a man experiences something in the past through the lower ‘eye’. With both ‘eyes’, he seeks a corresponding ‘distant’ point in the future. Then he discovers what is to happen on Earth as the karmic result of these two factors. Then he discovers what is to happen on Earth as the karmic result of these two factors.

We can say that it is a matter of building a certain figure whereby the future is seen and the temporal and spatial place is discovered where the karmic result of the past can be realised. This faculty will arise not as a kind of trick or acquired dexterity; rather, it will have varied degrees of clarity exactly because it will be a faculty instead of a mere skill.

Through this concept of karmic clairvoyance, we can understand that people will increasingly begin to know what they are doing in the stream of karmic events. They will experience and recognise karma in such a a way that an event of the past will always be experience in conjunction with a future event. This will not be a general theory of karma but real knowledge of concrete, specific karmic configurations. This ability will indicate the etheric return of Jesus Christ for humankind.

Valentin Tomberg, Christ’s Return in the Etheric

The Knowledge of our True Nature

During the period of struggle, questions as to the purpose of life and man’s own being had formulated themselves, but when the answers come they do not answer the questions but rather obliterate them in the experience of the reality itself.

Thus, with regard to the mystery of man’s own being, the answer is not an intellectual exposition of the constitution of man, but rather an awareness of his own inner Self and as a result, the discovery of the world of that Self. When, in that world, we consider the problem of the duality which we all experience in daily life, of a higher Self on the one hand and a lower self on the other, we find a wonderful truth.

Man is essentially divine; as a son of God he partakes of the nature of his Father and shares His Godhead. Man’s own and true home is therefore the world of the Divine; there we live and move and have our own being ‘from eternity to eternity’. In his own world the Ego of man has his own activities and lives a life of joy and splendour beyond all earthly conception. There is, however, one lesson or experience which he cannot learn in his own world, but for which he has to put forth his consciousness into the worlds of outer manifestation where there is manifoldness and the antithesis of “I” and “not I”.

It is there alone that, through the medium of bodies composed of the matter of these outer worlds, the Ego can gain self-consciousness, that is to say, consciousness of himself as a separate individual. The divine world which is the true home of the Ego is a world in which there is not that distinction between Self and not-Self, but in which every part shares of the universal consciousness of the whole. That is why in this world the particular self-realisation which is necessary to the Ego cannot be gained. It is only the three-fold universe of outer manifestation, the physical world, that we find the duality of subject and object necessary for the gaining of self-consciousness.

Thus it is truly for the gaining of knowledge that the Ego puts himself forth into these outer worlds and assumes bodies of the matter of these worlds. It is this going forth of the soul into the worlds of darkness which we find symbolically described in the story of Genesis. Primitive Paradise is not a state which can last, however great its beauty and harmony. The soul must eat of the tree of good and evil, the tree of knowledge, even though at the cost of Paradise.

Having thus become conscious of the desire to know the worlds of matter, the soul is clothed in “coats of skin,” the bodies of matter, and henceforth has to live under the conditions of material existence, “labouring and bringing forth in pain.” The end of this long exile is the redemption or regeneration, which takes place when the soul regains knowledge of her own divinity, and Christ is born in the heart of man. Then Paradise is regained, but now in full self-consciousness, the Ego in his own divine world possessing the fruits yielded by the soul’s descent into the worlds of matter.

J.J van der Leeuw, God’s in Exile