Spring and Fall

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Spring and Fall, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Draught of Remembrance

If the candidate is found fit for the foregoing experiences, he is then given what is called symbolically the draught of forgetfulness. This means that he is initiated into the secret knowledge that enables him to act without being continually disturbed by the lower memory. This is necessary for the initiate, for he must have full faith in the immediate present. He must be able to destroy the veil of memory which envelops man every moment of his life. If we judge something that happens to us today according to the experience of yesterday, we are exposed to a multitude of errors.

Of course this does not mean that experience gained in life should be renounced. It should always be kept in mind as clearly as possible. But the initiate must have the ability to judge every new experience wholly according to what is inherent in it, and let it react upon him, unobscurred by the past. We must be prepared at every moment that every object and every being can bring to us some new revelation. If we judge the new by the standard of the old we are liable to error.

The memory of past experiences will be of greatest use for the very reason that it enables us to perceive the new. Had we not gone through a definite experience we should perhaps be blind to the qualities of the object or being that comes before us. Thus experience should serve the purpose of perceiving the new and not of judging it by the standard of the old. In this respect the initiate acquires certain definite qualities, and thereby many things are revealed to him which remain concealed from the uninitiated.

The second draught presented to the initiate is the draught of remembrance. Through its agency he acquires the faculty of retaining the knowledge of the higher truths ever present in his soul. Ordinary memory would be unequal to this task. We must unite ourselves and become as one with the higher truths.

Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

Hear the Voices of Cosmic Consciousness

“The ‘I’ is the member of the human being that continues from incarnation to incarnation. The result of each incarnation continues to live in the ‘I’, …forming what is often called a ‘string of beads’ in Indian symbolism, of which the individual ‘beads’ are the ‘I’ being of various incarnations, while the ‘string’ represents the continuity of consciousness from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the ‘I’ being of former lives lives on and represents the ‘inner’ past that is inseparable from an individual. This miracle of healing indicates a power that affected not only the present but also past ‘I’ being – the ‘I’ that passed through death with the responsibility for the previous life course.

‘I’ consciousness of the past, which preserves its activity from the previous incarnation and in which many human beings live and act, is called consciousness of the ‘dead’ in the Gospels, and those who live under the ‘I’ impulse of the past are simply called ‘the dead’. Thus, healing the paralysed man involved more than merely the present ‘I’; the ‘dead’, in particular, heard the ‘voice of the Son’ and experienced a conversion in his past consciousness. ‘For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will’ (John 5.21).

These words of Jesus Christ have a direct connection with the healing and refer to it. And words that follow express it even more clearly: “Verily, verily I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” (John 5.25). True, only a few of the dead had heard this voice – a fact expressed, for example, in these words: “let the dead bury their dead.” (Luke 9.60).

This is the fundamental challenge to which we must respond if we wish to gain spiritual hearing. It is a summons to conquer ourselves again and again and, shutting out all personal impulses, repeatedly listen in silence to the voice of conscience. The sounds that the spiritual world uses to speak are moral and spiritual voices, not fixed ‘vibrations’ for the purpose of being caught by a sensory organ. Those voices can be heard only after the soul has adapted to the voice of the conscience; those who are prepared to follow dictates of conscience without hesitation are thus prepared to hear the voices of cosmic consciousness.

Valentin Tomberg, Christ and Sophia, The Signs and Miracles in John’s Gospel

Le Maitre Philippe

For my reckoning I have, together with some compaions, done the rounds of esotericisms and explored all the crypts with the most fervent sincerity, with the most vivid hope of success. But none of the certainties that I eventually grasped appeared to me to be the Certainty.

Rabbis have communicated unknown manuscripts to me; alchemists have admitted me to their laboratories; Sufis, Buddhists and Taoists have lead me, during long late-night sessions, to the abodes of their gods; a Brahmin let me copy his tables of mantrams; a yogi gave the secrets of contemplation. But, one evening, after a certain meeting, all that these admirable men had taught me became for me like the soft haze which rises at dusk after an over-warm day.

Dr Philippe Encausse, Le Maitre Philippe de Lyon

Resurrection

The resurrection is the final victory not only over death (as the separation of the soul from the body) but also over sleep (as the separation of the soul from the world of action) and over forgetfulness (as the separation of consciousness from the world of past memories).

This means to say that resurrection signifies not only the re-establishment of the integral unity of the spirit, soul and body of the human being, but also the uninterrupted continuity of his activity and the uninterrupted continuity of his consciousness – the whole of his memory.

Now, the emergence of complete memory of the entire past is equivalent, for consciousness, to the last judgement, where the whole past is reviewed in the light of conscience. It is conscience itself, the soul itself, which will judge itself.

And it will then find that it is guilty under all the headings of accusation of divine law which live in the completely awakened conscience. And there will not be a single soul that will justify itself before its own awakened conscience. It is not authorised to justify itself. Justification lies in the realm of the Divine and it is only the Divine that is authorised to justify.

Thus, there will at first be the realisation of the complete equality of all members of the human community in the consciouness of their errors and their faults. This consciousness will be common to great initiates, high priests, heads of nations, and simple workers in the diverse domains of human effort in the past.

This great experience to come of human equality – in the light of completely awakened conscience – is prefigured in the penitential rite of the Mass, during the prayer at the foot of the altar, where priest and congregation say together: Confiteor Deo omnipotenti et vobis, fratres, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Unknown author, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XX, The Judgement

The Stone Philosophical

Make pure thy sense till thou art dust
That out of dust thy grass may grow:
When thou art hay, then burn thou must,
Thy fire most mightily must glow.
And when at last thy dust is burned,
Thy ash to Wisdom’s Stone is turned.
Then live by the Stone’s grace.
This stone it is of noble race.
The Phoenix by its lightning flashes
Will burn till he is turned to ashes,
Then rises younger from the flame.
This Stone the Grail they name.

The Stone Philosophical, Rosicrucian verse

Dark Light of the Soul

We often experience things that come up in the internal-external dialogue to be divided into opposites such as good and bad, God and the devil, us and them, confusion about moral stance and so forth.

The person may have thought that he or she knew exactly his or her standing in terms of ideologies, morals, the world, and religion. It becomes apparent, during this process, that what we thought we knew has been primarily according to our ego’s stannce. The opposites in dialogue may suddenly pull us into new territory where we experience tremendous indecision.

The now indecisive and floundering ego may become identified with both sides of the opposites, which creates quiet a confusion. Splitting, which entails some psychological part of dissociating from consciousness, may arise as a defense mechanism.

Beneath the splitting, dissociation and repression that can accompany creative depression is frequently a “core of madness” that must be uncovered. We feel “mad” owing to the degree of chaos and the loss of equilibrium that our ego is experiencing as its “known” perspectives are challenged.

In this dual identification, it is as if the ego decombusts. Everything is being canceled by its opposite in the dialogue, creating an indecisiveness that is one of the primary symptoms of the depressed condition. In this state of ambivalence, in wh ich everything is canceled out, one may feel like one has fallen into an abyss.

In this void or abyss, we feel as if we were dying, accompanied by bursts of intense anxiety around conflicting thoughts and values. We may feel we haev regressed back into the interpersonal field of parents and family. In the “black hole” of the abyssal experience, conflict can often take on a rather paranoid form. The clash of forces can feel as if one is in an ideological, spiritual, or cultural collision, not just with our former personal ideals and values, but with the entire collective consciousness.

Because dissociation may be occurring on a collective, cultural level, certain individuals may be depressed, not only because of developmental traumatic and intrapsychic factors, but also because of the sensitive and uncanny nature of some individuals to have a large psyche and soul that is more attuned than some of the rest of us to the collective unconcsious.

Certain persons have access to a depth of unconscious material and, with discernment, may find that their psychic imagery is running parallel to the dissociation or splitting of their culture. Crucially, there is an important cultural factor here. The healing nature of this phenomenon is an ego re-organised in relationship to the Self.

Any individual who evolves into a healthy ego Self relationship inevitably has the potential to contribute a great deal to culture and society. If our society pathologises such episodes only during which a reordering process is occurring within the individual, we miss the impact of the unconscious material not only upon the individual and his or her growth, but also the potential for this individual’s healing to have a positive ripple effect upon the immediate culture and community.

Karen Wood Madden, Dark Light of the Soul

Halcyon Birds

King Ceyx thinks only of Halcyone, no other name is on his lips but hers: and though he longs for her, yet he is glad that she is safe at home. Ah, how he tried to look back to the shore of his loved land, to turn his last gaze towards his wife and home.

But he has lost direction. The tossed sea is raging in a hurricane so vast, and all the sky is hidden by the gloom of thickened storm-clouds, doubled in pitch-black. The mast is shattered by the violence of drenching tempests, and the useless helm is broken.

One undaunted giant wave stands over wreck and spoil, and looks down like a conqueror upon the other waves: then falls as heavily as if some god should hurl Mount Athos or Mount Pindus, torn from rock foundations, into that wide sea: so, with down-rushing weight and violence it struck and plunged the ship to the lowest deeps.

And as the ship sank, many of the crew sank overwhelmed in deep surrounding waves, never to rise from suffocating death: but some in desperation, clung for life to broken timbers and escaped that fate. King Ceyx clung to a fragment of the wreck with that majestic hand which often before had proudly swayed the sceptre.

And in vain, alas, he called upon his father’s name, alas, he begged his father-in-law’s support. But, while he swam, his lips most frequently pronounced that dearest name, “Halcyone!” He longs to have his body carried by waves to her dear gaze and have at last, entombment by the hands of his loved friends.

Swimming, he called Halcyone—far off, as often as the billows would allow his lips to open, and among the waves his darling’s name was murmured, till at last a night-black arch of water swept above the highest waves and buried him beneath engulfing billows. Lucifer was dim past recognition when the dawn appeared and, since he never could depart from heaven, soon hid his grieving countenance in clouds.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI, Ceyx and Halcyone

Fan the Moonbeams

Out of this wood do not desire to go:

Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.

I am a spirit of no common rate;

The summer still doth tend upon my state;

And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;

I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee;

And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,

And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep:

And I will purge thy mortal grossness so,

That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

Peaseblossom! Cobweb! Moth! Mustardseed!

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;

Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;

The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,

And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,

And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,

To haev my love to bed and to arise;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In Hours of Ebbing Tide

In hours of ebbing tide, oh trust not to the Sea!
It will come back to shore with redness of the morrow;
O don’t believe in me when in the trance of sorrow
I swear I am no longer true to thee!

The waves will roll again in dazzling ecstasy,
From far away, with joy, to the beloved shore;
And I with breast aflame, beneath thy charm once more,
Shall haste to bring my liberty to thee!

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, In Hours of Ebbing Tide