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

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning at the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seem asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which draws from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell.
When I embark;
For tho’ from our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

A. L Tennyson, Crossing the Bar

Dark Places of Wisdom

It could be said that this process of awakening is profoundly healing. The only trouble with saying this is that we’ve come to have such a superficial idea of healing. For most of us, healing is what makes us comfortable and eases the pain. It’s what softens, protects us. And yet what we want to be healed of is often what will heal us if we can stand the discomfort and the pain.

We want healing from illness, but it’s through illness that we grow and are healed of our complacency. We’re afraid of loss, and yet it’s through what we lose that we’re able to find what nothing can take away from us. We run from sadness and depression. But if we really face our sadness we find it speaks with the voice of our deepest longing; and if we face it a little longer we find that it teaches us the way to attain what we long for.

And what is it that we long for? That’s what this story is about.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kingsley

This Trembling Heart

I did not wake up one day
and choose to love you
or decide
that my life would now
be focused
in your direction.

this trembling heart
like a magnetized needle
of a compass,
a splayed, obsidian lotus
in a sea of fire
simply returns again
and mysteriously again
to where your soul resides ,
to the breathing star dust
and tender flesh
which temporarily hold
the flowering river
of who you are.

Rashani

The Menorah

At the very end of the New Testament John described the holy of holies that he saw in his vision. There was the throne of God and the Lamb, there was the river of the water of life, and there was the tree of life. The servants of God and the Lamb saw his face and had his name on their foreheads. They stood in a place of perpetual heavenly light, needing neither lamp no sun, and the reigned fore ever (Rev.22.1-5). For the first Christians, this was their vision of heaven.

They were standing in the temple, but not the temple rebuilt by Herod and completed only a few years earlier. They were standing in the temple as it should have been, as it had once been and as they hoped it soon would be, because in their vision they were standing in the true temple. The temple they knew – or had known, since there is no way of dating this vision – had neither the heavenly throne nor the tree of life in the holy of holies. Josephus says that at the end of the second temple period, the holy of holies was empty.

In another part of the vision of the temple, John saw the ark (Rev.11.19) which had been lost for centuries. Later tradition remembered it had disappeared in the time of King Josiah, during the temple purges of 623 BCE. It would be restored in the time of the Messiah, along with the other things that had been in the first temple but not in the second: the fire, the menorah, the Spirit and the cherubim. Since the first temple furnishings symbolised the temple teachings, this was saying that the faith of the second temple was very different from the faith of the original temple.

Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord

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 fire that never dies

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

Armour of God

Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand…..

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.

In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Ephesians 6:10-18

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