Topical Outline of Classes

MBM

Series 1945 – 1946

Advanced Class

Opening Evening Oct. 8, 1945.  MBM with Monday Training Group: Happiness; being right with the highest in yourself; plumb line; well-being and the plumb line; breaking the wheel; sittings.

Oct. 25, 1945:  the three categories of all knowledge; Cosmos; continuity of life; etheric body; karma.

Nov. 1, 1945:  Why people don’t inquire more deeply; other planes of life; God; etheric and psychic bodies; planes knowable to man; correct seeking; orderly procedure, not accident; Helpers; the earth at a point of transition,  cults; the need to develop one’s own faculties; fields of inquiry relating to esoteric teachings – mysticism, occultism, etc.; psychic phenomena; continuance of war until humanity learns how to live together; the progress possible in this season; Theseus and the thread of Ariadne.

Nov. 8, 1945:  Theseus story and involution; bull; Thor’s hammer; Ariadne; overcoming the bull, or the animal nature by the Christ hero or the Buddha.  Powers needed. Daedalus, a lesser figure.  Why is Hephaestus lame?  Demiurge, Vulcan;  will, wisdom, activity; thread of Ariadne.  The Seven;  Atomic bomb; Souls not yet far advanced.  The two elements under the natural law;  Effort to develop the higher nature.  Chariot of the sun.

Nov. 15, 1945  Faith and ethers; and knowledge.  Miracles; grace; Jesus and Christ.  Soteriology.  In Christian scripture.  The Mysteries.  Atonement.  Eternity; Infinity; Immortality.  Subtle bodies,

Nov. 29, 1945  After death states.  Philip Wylie “Night Unto Night”; conditioning; etheric body; motley Logos; two kinds of forgetting; demands on your time; reviewing your life; soul consciousness; conquering pain; the Eight Seedlets; the Four Elements.

Dec. 6, 1945  Soul and the human evolution; death of soul; evolution of animal soul;  Evil.  Eight seedlets continued, and interrelation.  Types on the basis of the development of seedlets.

Dec. 13, 1945  Evil (main discussion) and definition;  purposive; why, if wise Guardianship; volition; the laboratory; “Bewitched”; in the unconscious; race karma; leaders of evil; wars in “heaven”; punishment of criminals; fate vs. destiny; solution of evil; “ignorance the greatest evil”; “lost soul”; therapeutic action of the war; post crisis period; some permanent good; tension between higher and lower; pull of gravity; blind alleys.  What can we do?  plant seeds.  A man “finds himself.”  Knowing if there is a God.  What is “finding yourself?”  Toward soul type?  Re “unselfish action.”  Solution never through the mass or group.

Dec. 20, 1945  Evil, continued.  Souls being disciplined live together effectively. The seven cardinal sins; share in quiet of gov’t responsibility; planting the seed; plumb line; honesty, an unfolding faculty; war and “non-use of the season;” the individual “plus”; atomic energy;,long range and short range view.  Christmas Cycle and the Three Gifts.

 

Jan. 3, 1946: Mystics and mysticism; derivation of the word.  Between the multitude and true esoteric teachings.  Steps in the Mysteries. The number 7 and the number 12. Tabernacle.  Aaron’s rod; manna; mystics and the Mysteries.  Mystic experience and metaphysical phenomena; Ezekiel; progressive mystical development; pressure and emotional states.  Tolstoy.  Augustine.  Cain and Abel.

Jan. 17, 1946  Love. Derivation.  Paul on love.  Drummond.  Piscean Age. I Corinthians, 13.  MBM on love (Aquarian Age); nature of; Venus; levels; a cause; five signs of Venus; chart.  How can we love our enemies?  Finding causes.  Super-personal relationships of the future.  The ultimate model.  “Love thy God, etc…..”.  Concept of God.  The mystic and mind.  The higher degrees of love.  “The greatest sin is ignorance.”  The mystic’s power of love.  Degrees of love; activity, the measure.  Scaling yourself up.

Jan. 24, 1946  Different kinds of love.  Souls in evolution; the schoolhouse.  Plato’s “Symposium.”  Dante’s “Banquet”.  Occult side of life.  God’s love.  Life and love.  Mysticism.  Developing the love of the Larger.  The necessary food.  10% desire;  love an accurate force, to be controlled and directed; the power of sustaining; re “love your enemies”; mores;  earth fights by battles; fighting will continue.  Potentials of the great love in everyone.  Love and wisdom.  Will, wisdom; action.  Love as separator and uniter.  Love vs dismemberment.  The question of frustration; of progressive ideas; of great influences and Teachers.  Yet the influence continues.  Development of the self and work for the development of humanity.  Good fruit.  Wisdom, the outpouring from above.

Jan. 31, 1946  The three categories of knowledge.  Wisdom lore.  Teachers. Divisions of Wisdom.  Way of Ascent.  Incidental behaviors. / Cosmogonies/ Stories of Involving humanity./  Prometheus and the Teachings (Fire); Baldur; Way of Return./ Vicarious salvation.  Bible.  Recording Teachings. Eddas.  Greek “Bible” texts.  Flood.  Great Pyramid.  Epics and sagas.  Osiris.  Isis.  Jesus.  Redemption.  Folklore. / Levels of scripture writing.  Why the teachings are unwritten.  Mystical experience not the Ascent itself.  Mystical experience vs psychic.  Role of symbolism in Scripture texts.  Pojodag motto; expansion of its text and symbolism.

Feb. 7, 1946  Truth vs mores in Scripture.  Trinities.  Re being a provincial.  Triangles and 3,4,5 triangle.  The Son.  Productive trinity on lower levels.  Gender.  Desire, determination, will.  Cosmogony.  Working of Cosmic Mind.  Non-manifestation.  Creation. Titans.  Chronos.  Jupiter.  War of the Titans.  Atlas.  Prometheus.  Hermes.  Hephaestus, or Vulcan.  Athena.  Venus.  Apollo.

Feb. 14, 1946  War, is it instinctive pugnacity?  Repressed energies; a different security.  Dharma; freedom from attachment; desire and war; action of Teachers to help those not yet freed of desire.  Influences that promote war; counter-influences.  Free yourself before you can free others.  Can go forward only individually.  Good from war; destroys the old rapidly.  World as an organization, a result of physical development. But this is not yet of the higher mind.  Workers for the future in every country.  The Cosmic, what it is.  Legends, illustration of.  Jonah and the Whale.  Fish symbolism.  World Tree in the Norse.

 

Feb. 21, 1946  Movement toward Catholicism.  Shifts in the earth; struggle in Palestine.  The three divisions of Wisdom-lore.  Why little is told about involution./ Epics and sagas; heroes; saints; canonization; hero-gods.  Hercules; Jason; Theseus.  Gilgamesh.  Sargon.  Osiris, Isis, Horus.  Evolution vs ignorance.  Good and evil.  Ancestor worship, Japanese.  Hebraic.  Abram, Jacob, Joseph.  Story of Jesus, the great Christian epic. Mutilations.  Mahabharata.  Involution.

 

Mar. 7, 1946  Repentance.  Materialism and the larger questions; numb areas.  Prophecy.  Critical period in which we live.  1953.  Nostradamus; Malachi.  The individual role and the larger picture.  Communism and democracy; theocracy; focus of attention on government.  Challenges to Christian superiority.  Cults from East.  Coming period of brotherhood based on understanding.  The new and the backwash.  The ultimate settlement.  Moving up of multitude.  Plato’s ideal.  Dangers in communism; in democracy; advantages.  Golden Age on Ascent side.  Theocracy and the human soul.  Sugary ideas vs knowing; lessons not learned as yet.  Re earth as the measure of things.  Ultimate alignment with Larger planes.  Re role in coming to earth.  Proving in other planes.  Post-hypnotic suggestion.  Coloration; opinion.  Not here for our comfort.  Extent of the schooling.

 

Thursday Evening Series on Various Subjects

 

1945-1946

Oct. 1945:

The three categories of al1 knowledge

The mistake has been that people have been striving for spiritual values instead of knowledge of that from which those spiritual values are derived. (References to Thomas Vaughn and the mountain.  To Emerald Tablet and the Kingdom of Heaven.  Matthew 13.  Heaven not physical.  Interferes with progress toward the mountain.).

The primary reason for analogies is that the subject is not three dimensional.  People try to reduce them to physical things.  Symbolism is a must in any advanced studies.

Three categories of knowledge.

Man has a mass ego.  Likes to rely exclusively on knowledge from below.

“Naming the animals” in Genesis.  Atomic structure of things; belongs also to the nature.  Does not come to the end of the nature of things and knowing it.  A kind of opposition with man.  Hence…….as the agnostics, scientists, etc.   Hence man misses other knowledge.

Knowledge from above has come down through the ages from the true Teachers.  They were only casually interested in the things of the physical world……  That is not its job.  Its job is to tell what is up above, or in between.  All knowledge not connected with spiritual values.  Spiritual values are what man has built up for himself, but cannot take the thing straight.

The third category man has to go up to get.  The second, man is helped to.  Must believe there is accuracy in other fields of knowledge.  What belongs to advanced study is taking folk ideas into clarity – as re “spiritual values.”

What has this to do with the mountain, the Kingdom of Heaven …… know thyself.  Coming to know the Larger in the small.  Not identity. Make a great difference between correspondence and identity.

What is the Cosmos?  Is in reference to the physical world.  The word Cosmic is used in advanced studies, not now to refer to the physical immensities in the heavens but to those regions which belong to the noumenal world.  They are the permanent world.  Not the phenomenal world.  Errors are not permanent.  Like clay models for children.  This is also true of the psychic world.  The things that are made are not yet worthy of being permanently kept.  They are full of flaws.  Incomplete.  Become identified with what you are, never with what you were – and with the future.  A basic rule in all esoteric studies.  To become “wise as a god.”  You have only eaten about one-half of it, the apple.  It is the fruit of the story of souls in earth.  (The apple) surrounded by threats.  Only those who have guts break threats.

Continuity of life follows from being souls.  Can’t have evolution of souls without it. Experience which transforms you.

Transmigration of souls into animals only a symbol.  See the Judgment Scene on the mural.

Noumenal facts are not spiritual values.  That is important.

Etheric body:  Vegetables and plants have it.  Without it they could not grow or be a living organism.  When it leaves the plant it goes into the forms from which it was derived.  The animal world has an additional body.  Man has still another.

Could develop a consciousness and ability to function in the etheric body while in the flesh.

Many planes of life.

(1) We are souls.  (2) life is continuous.  (3) there are many planes.  (4) souls are responsible for what they are.  Intrinsically.

Karma: cause and effect as concerning the soul, or the individual man.

     Purpose of the evolution: to become wise as a god.  Main tool is mind.

     The momentum of what you have developed is that which you take with you.  Karmic power is the sum total of what it (the soul) has added in the course of its experiences.  Otherwise, no intelligence in life.

We recognize order in the physical world.  Same kind, but of a higher grade, in other planes.

Even bodies can be shaped in the physical.  Cause and effect.  Karmic action re the soul.  That is gradually being added to, through the ages.

Soul is associated with the karmic, or higher etheric body.  It is what a man has become.  Not the measure of what he will be eventually, but it is the big stage in between.  Locally, he is a physical being.  Connected in between with soul.  Ultimately with spirit.

So we talk of the human being and the soul.

 

Nov. 1, 1945

 

Re faith:  Why people don’t inquire more deeply into these subjects.  They are victims of the ideas of preceding ages.  One, that you must have faith if you would proceed to larger matters.  Impossible for modern folk to continue to serve.  Like a false god.  Everywhere else faith gives way to knowledge.  Things of the Larger as real as those of the physical world.  It is man’s fault if they are not known.

Taboos:  were told to listen to the voice of God.  But never a teaching as to how to do that.  An illusion.  The receiving instrument must be prepared.

     The idea of obeying of commandments.  Without inquiring, is to remain a child.  Will never progress until they put aside taboos, which commandments have laid upon us.

     The present humanity is conditioned.  The first step is freeing ourselves from it.

Other planes of life:  The word God receives a severe blow in the study of larger realities.  Those who know have separated the idea of God and Heaven into the realization that there are many divisions.  The knowable God is relatively near.  Our plane admitted to be the lowest in the scheme of things.  Arching (?) up in terms of higher space.  Stages above our plane.  Our thinker (Basilides) of nearly two thousand years ago conceives the planes above ours as divided into 365 planes.  Above them, a God, or Ruler, who is knowable to man.  Then another and another great sphere.  Our plane has its own type of materia, and therefore of bodies.

Sheaths and vestures:  The essence of life survives this body.  Survives another body too.  Sheaths, on the way down.  In the way of evolution bodies are developed, and are then known by their name: vesture.  Vestures are garments.  Bodies always seen as the garment of that which is within.  Taught in the inner tradition of all great races.

     The etheric body.  Can be seen – ghost, spook and other names for this etheric body.  You function in it more easily than in the physical.

     Form and energy: the two aspects of one thing.  The atom is the point where the physical world merges into the next.  Always an overlapping.

Psychic body:  The etheric body, in turn, to a highly evolving being, is the form to the psychic body, or the soul.  The sea, or the water world.  The psychic body is the form for the mind.  Or nous.  When nous is completely dissociated from anything of the lower planes….it becomes akin to the essence of the highest planes.  The radiant body.  The story of the bodies is in every tradition.

     In the Hebraic, the shekinah and merkabah, in the outer tradition.  In the secret tradition of the Hebrews you will find the recognition of three major bodies, each one of which is split up, to cover the ……..of the five (?):  (1) the Ruah (blend of etheric and psychic) the lower vital, or etheric; (2) rechinah, which is the next evolving stage in this tradition; (5) the Nefesh.  See Abelson’s book: Jewish Mysticism.

Christian tradition.  The experience of Paul on the way to Damascus.  Reference to the shining face.  In the Egyptian, the Hinus, etc.  Gross body, water body, etc.

     Lack of knowledge among people because of lack of applied interest and study, and fears and taboos, through which they have been conditioned.  No inquiry of a scientist could go forward if he did not discard taboos.  He wants truth.

Question: Where is the etheric plane?  Answer: It is not a matter of space.  Different wave lengths.  There are etheric battles.  We cannot see them.  We use, literally, the etheric and the physical body until we develop the higher bodies.  You don’t get the fruit of a tree early.

     It makes sense, if you will think apart from taboos or traditions, that if we are souls evolving there must be something corresponding to it.  The development of a fine character makes marks upon a body.  Overlapping.  Through his own faculties (able to) look into the next plane.  That is merely the beginning of that which belongs to higher development.

     No arbitrary division.  365 is rather arbitrary.

     Some of these things directly knowable by the man or woman in earth.  They are not intended to be separate from men.  Beings of other planes trying to help them on.  Want to help evolution.  An advantage, to be conscious of relationships.  Because we are a part of the whole.  Man is only temporarily, incidentally, and intermittently, a creature of earth.  That is not a matter of sentiment, or faith, or virtue, but a scientific fact, capable of demonstration.  Man has made himself a prisoner in this physical world by not knowing these things.  He can get out of it only as he deliberately, and rightly, reaches.

     In anything of the Larger, you have to know.  You can only do the preliminaries on faith.  You can’t go far by just listening “to the voice of God.”

     Nothing is keeping you from knowing, except yourself.  Because you are not “knocking” correctly.  Perhaps lazy, perhaps held by some of the taboos.  But if you are really knocking correctly the door will be opened.  Correct seeking.  The same thing you have learned in the world of physical science; seeking to control is the way they get the effect.

Seasons to do  The things that have happened are not accident.  The war was not an accident.  There is, in events before us, cooperation between earth and heaven, or between those who are the guardians.  This earth and other planes are not accidents.  They are orderly procedures.  Have their laws, helpers, etc. – more advanced organization than in this world.  But man has volition.  Therefore he may not cooperate.  There are seasons when certain things are normally, or logically, to be done.  The farmer knows it, and carries on.  So we have fruits and harvests.

     This is a season of great significance.  It is not exactly spring.  That is not its nature.  But it has its own particular sphere (?) and potentials for the development of the human race rather fast.  If the human race does not utilize them they are not lost.  They may lose their bodies, and the earth be blown up, but the plan still holds, and goes on.  Great beings are prepared for any upset .        atomic bomb will have its reverberation.  Already having some.  Eastman films, an example of the effect of something so small we can ordinarily know nothing of it.  We are at a point as of terrific transition.  If humanity does not plant while the planting season is here they don’t get the harvest.  And there may be a famine as a result.  Don’t think that anything that may happen to the earth, or you, or me, is a matter of irremediable (?) accident.

Ways of knowing of higher planes:  List of different ways of knowing.

(1) study of scripture, esoteric texts; the gathering of information of those who know something about it.

     There we might ask: What role do religions have in this?  No!  Commandment, faith, or the “voice of God” is no answer.  That is why there is so much dissatisfaction.  That is why organized religion has (?) faith.  It has not gone forward in corresponding ratio to man’s progress in science.  I warn you against cults; pseudo teachings.  Go to sources.

(2) by training.  By development of your own faculties, so that you can yourself extend your faculties.  It is more difficult, arduous and lengthy.  It is rare that humans really undertake it, or go far with it. They rationalize, etc.

(3) You can get some degree of knowledge by going to a good medium.  Difficult to find, especially in New York City.

The second is the ideal way, but it is hard.

23rd Psalm.  The writer was an egoist;  Piscean: “Thou anointest my head with oil.”

Mysticism and other approaches.  Fields of inquiry that relate to the broad field we are taking up: Mysticism, magic; occultism; alchemy; mystical astrology.  These and many others are approaches that are made toward the things of higher planes.

Alchemy: changes of man in himself: earth man to nous.

Other studies take up the topography, geology of other worlds.

Occultism and magic have to do with the operation of energies, substances and the beginnings of control over them.

Psychic science has to do with communication.  All belong.  You can’t follow one; you have to know all.

Black magic:  Control of any power can be used for destructive purposes.

In a sense, use of the atomic bomb, or any discovery of energy.  Even

explosion of the first gun.

  Re influence over nature that is undesirable.  There are many kinds of energies and (?) ethers. Thought, feeling, is a force.

Emerson’s Essay on Circles.

Seabrooke, who didn’t develop his being in proportion with his interest in voodoo, etc.  His development is the ideal, but it is strenuous, Man likes to shape everything else except himself.

Builders:  An overall is in charge of the Builders, or Workers.  They are doing the general shaping.  The specific shaping, like the atomic bomb, or what goes on in this particular farm you have purchased, is yours.  That is the factor that goes with volition.

 

Clashing wave lengths  The friction of the two wave lengths: Pisces and Aquarius.  Responsible for the war.  Breaking up of the old habits, the very point of view of humanity.  From putting the dominance on faith, and love and kindness.  To seeing (saying ?) what really is behind it.  We are just in the beginning of it: the transition between the old and the new ideologies.

We will continue to have war until humanity has learned that they can all live together.  They have not learned how yet.  Whether they will learn that lesson as the result of this war, no one knows.  Will they learn that in the Aquarian Age?  It is the opportunity to learn it.  Because humanity has volition.  Also has an awful drag back.  Man is not making the progress yet that is possible in this season.

Vulcan, Demiurge.  Story out of the Greek Bible.  Their myths are their Bible.  As important as the Hebraic.  The story concerns Vulcan, akin to Ptah (Egyptian), the god who shaped things.  Demiurge, the worker in between.  A description of some of this radiation in process of Creation.

     The thread (he) gave to Ariadna, and she, in turn, gives it to someone else, who needed it sorely – Theseus.  Bull, the power and threat of the earth. You are beginning to fight the bull.  The seven best (?) in you, which is again (?) things of earth instead of the things of heaven………  Guides him out of the labyrinth after he had killed the bull.

     What is that threat?  Theseus, a savior god.  Illustrates our

and our proposition in this class, this story from Greece.  Ariadne, a soul symbol.  The soul an intermediate figure between the gods and one who descends and the earth

Nov.8, 1945

Lecture III in series

Theseus story, the seven Titans, Will, Wisdom

Theseus. Europa.  Crete, in the sacred lore, represents a rather high place in the involution.  The queen of Minos drawn with love toward the bull, which represents the earth plane.  As a result of that is born the wild bull – the wild animal nature.  As a result of the light sparks copulating with earth.  Corresponds to the Adam and Eve story.

Labyrinth made somehow a Thor’s Hammer.  Pattern of the labyrinth inherent.  Occasionally Ariadne danced in it.  The second bull is the one that the Christ hero, or the Buddhi (Buddha?) must overcome.

What powers must he have?  Vulcan, the supreme figure of which Daedalus was the lesser figure.  Inventiveness.  Why was Hephaestus lame?  “The whole Creation groaneth and travaileth till the sons of God…..”  The “lame” is that manifestation always puts a limitation on the godlike nature.

Demiurge, the Builder; the supreme Contractor.  Or artificer.  That is one of the great aspects of Vulcan.  Triad.  Must have certain qualities – will, wisdom, Cosmic experience, experience in Building; and third, activity.  The degree of the power which the Father has in one-ness manifests as three: Will, Wisdom, Action.  Jesus, as the Christ, had that same Triad.  Ways of release, – of victory, rather.  On the human level: determination, intelligence, action.  In the ultimate levels, the Will of the Creative Deity.  The Wisdom, tremendous power of experience and of all things action.  Action is the third, the son (Son?)

Will of the elements in action, shaping all things.  Symbol of the action of the Creative God (Thor’s hammer.)  Has been brought by the Teachers to all races.  That is why it is found everywhere.        planted there came to be the beginning of things   (?)   Not simultaneous for all planets …..    what these gods, these Builders, those responsible for its various departments; its hierarchies, its emissaries of all kinds.  That of setting up with (?) the growing business.  The organization is vast, complicated, sustained.

The Seven:  Some of that organization has been represented by a hierarchy of Seven.  Are known in all the great traditions.  Chart of the Seven.  And their correspondence on various planes.  Reflected in many other groups of seven.  As we saw with Daedalus – reflection on a lower level of Hephaestus.  There is an artificer in each one of you.

A key to seven.  Appears often in scriptures of the seven……archetypal…..the primary seven, who are unique to our set-up, our planet. Would not be that way in any other heavenly body.

Battle of the Titans  Genesis, reference to our planet: “In the beginning…”  In the Greek tradition there was the battle of the Titans – great Beings, but also terrific forces over which these Beings are in control.  Some of the intermediate stages.  The Hebrews have an intensity of feeling but see things darkly, gloomily; and our Western world has been conditioned by it.

Cosmogonies All cosmogonies belong to this earth.  Even the Eddic, with the Tree Yggdrasil.  Basilides too, except for what is above the Firmament.  Out of it might descend Workers.  Other projects.

 

Atomic bomb: Souls have not reached a stage where they can maintain their school.  How much he can learn to leave room for others, etc.  Your stature is your stature.  Wisdom again (?). We haven’t much of any of them.  The value of experience.  Only whether we learn from it.  Everything you can do to help people’s understanding will help.

Man is moving from below up.  The two lower elements are under the natural law.  The natural man following it.  He is not much beyond that.  It does not require effort.  His higher nature is only beginning to develop.  Requires effort to develop it.  That is the reason the crowd can be integrated for anything that has violence in it.

In the past humanity has gotten away from its difficulties by forgetting them, – locking them up in the subconscious.  When, therefore, there is a wild spell, like a riot, a hanging, or a war, there is a gratification of the energy in the subconscious of people generally toward that.  It is getting its liberation through that experience.  The future lies in getting away from the present and the past.

Chariot of the sun, question. Ans. The Creator God has to set up what we would call a kind of system, our universe.  The shaper of that has to take account of the sun, the source of life and energy of the earth, for the kind of thing which is going on in the earth.  Different kinds of bodies can live on different planets.  Building of the chariot of the sun, especially the place of the sun in relation to the earth.  Teachers coming into earth bodies come into a group of humans to help them establish that, so that they do not lose the thread of connection with what they came from.  Degenerated into myths, legends, religions, folklore.  Crumbs from the same thing.  Humanity content with pseudo things.

Nov. 15, 1945

Subjects touched on: Nature of faith, salvation, the Mysteries, miracles, grace, Christ and Jesus, eternity, infinity, immortality

Nature of faith.

Paul’s statement about faith.  Faith and grace are important elements in salvation. Soteriology.  Faith important.  Knowledge should supersede faith.  Hope, a large part of faith.  An instinctive drive, even in the multitude to move from faith to evidence.  The craving for evidence a power guiding beliefs (peoples (?).

Faith, love, hate, a condition of the ether.  Doubt congeals and frustrates any action in that territory.  Faith makes it supple and answering (?) the will of the operator.  Faith must accompany all forward movement.  Supplies a condition in the ether that is basic.  The logical thing to which faith leads is knowledge.

Miracles

An event in the physical world contrary to physical law.  Directed by intelligence somewheres.  Operated by intelligence and purpose.  The vision of St. Paul was not a miracle.  It was not on the physical plane.  Voices in the seance room are not a miracle.  Impinging of the etheric on the physical.

Transformations wrought in the physical plane by non-physical forces.  Cancel the physical law.  Independent of the scheme of things.  Magic – the modus operandi for the accomplishment of miracles.

Grace

An impact from other planes.  Works do not count.  Paul is right.  Speeds up the natural law.

Christ and Jesus

There is a lack of discrimination in Christian dogma.  Re, for instance, Jesus Christ.  The Christ state, the Christ Being, and the Christ in us.  (Re the Christ state)  That which is able to be anointed, in the esoteric sense of the word, is a stage, or grade of being, a plane.  All who have attained that plane might be called Christ.  Jesus, when he regained the power, or possession, of that state while in the flesh.

Soteriology in the Christian Tradition

To reach a state or plane line the Christ plane is salvation.  Gautama spoke of Nirvana.  Blots out the hold of the lower worlds.  The soul has gained the essence of its experience.  Christ did not identify himself with human experience, things of the phenomena world.  Effort of learning, but not as holding.  “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy strength, and all thy heart, and all thy mind.”

The idea of soteriology almost exclusively derived from Christianity in the Western world and the old Hebraic texts.  Paul is largely responsible for helping the Christian tradition to see Jesus as the atonement or propitiation, and therefore the salvation of those who believe in Him.

Note: Myers “Human Personality”.  Flammarion, the great French Astronomer, wrote books on the impingement of the etheric plane on this.

Vicarious salvation unique to Christianity.

Every great religion throughout the ages believed in salvation.  Otherwise nothing to be moved toward.  But the Christian attitude? in the Western world is unique.— the emphasis on the idea that one man was sacrificed, and is therefore the propitiation to God for mankind.  In virtually every other religion the emphasis in soteriology has been on understanding.

The Mysteries

Dramatic rituals which portrayed the processes which lead to salvation.  The word itself comes from the Greek and means one who is being initiated, who is being prepared, and is permitted to participate in seeing these dramatic and symbolic portrayals of the nature of life and man’s salvation.  Saved from the struggle and pain, etc. of the lower planes, because they are not identified with it.  It is not at-one-ment.  That is later.  Salvation means also being put on the way to the larger life.  Salvation and atonement are not identical but are like sides of a mountain.  Paul’s faith led to knowing and doing.  Ordinarily, faith alone is not enough.

Eternity, infinity. Immortality.

Eternity: the ceaseless, unending, moundless, etc. — a condition in which those things that are known to time are not there present.  Philosophically, embraced in the word duration.  Not an extension of time.  Reached on fulfillment.  May be far further than atonement, etc.  Dunne’s book on Time on the lower planes.

The noumenal worlds are for those who are perfect workmen.  Do things that are worth salvage.

Infinity not identical with eternity.  Means endless, but rather with the idea of extension in space.  Has led to Pantheism.  Mindless.  The idea that God extends all over.  Infinitude, in esoteric reference, is the influence of the radiation of God activity, or Creator activity, everywhere.

Immortality, a concept that relates to man.  Relates commonly to the soul.  Mortality belongs to the world of change.  Immortality belongs to the noumenal world.  Does not really relate to the soul.  The soul belongs within the phenomenal world.  It is what was spirit, and becomes Nous, that becomes immortal, because it alone is capable of living in the noumenal world.  In the book of Revelation “there shall be no more sea.”  The soul and in-between.  As moon belongs to the earth.

Subtle bodies

Re: proof.  The only thing you can get proof of is the actuality of the etheric world – until you develop higher powers in yourself.  Therefore, take information on what is beyond the etheric world on the basis of inductive reasoning.  And follow a teacher; in all things, that belong to the larger you have to have the aid of a teacher.

November 29, 1945

After death states; something on the eight seedlets and the four elements.

Regarding after death states.  We are all moving toward death.  It is not a terrible thing, we make it terrible by our attitudes.  And because, to some extent, in the coming of death the body is gradually worn down.  Death usually very beneficent, and definitely a release (here MBM quoted from a preface to one of the books of Philip Wylie).  The one inescapable victor.  Look at it more wholesomely.  What is the role of death?  To give the evolving being, the real you, another chance.  A new set of conditions.  To break up a set of conditions in this life which belong to the immediate.  Eternity is usually considered a continuity of time – endlessness in the outer.  Esoterically, it means a state of being that is beyond time.  That is a great relief.  But we do not go into eternity immediately just because we lose this body.  What occurs is not identical for any two beings.  Not the same in condition, nor motivated by the same objectives.

According to the dominant objectives of your being, so you are conditioned. …….Will tend to objectify themselves when you pass over (ed.: this probably means the conditions in which one is interested).  If you have lived an averagely well intentioned life, and not too destructive a life — destructive of the great potentials — then the state immediately upon waking, because it is much like coming out of your sleep, is one of surprise and relief.  Unless you are conditioned to appreciate the continuity of life.  If you are enamored of the things of life, that holds itself upon you and you are surrounded by those impulses, and you won’t find much to gratify them.  Prepare for a journey and do not be without the things you need.

If you are conditioned by a correct knowledge of what takes place, your wellbeing immediately mounts.  Your surroundings may not be much different from earth.  Friends and relatives will be prepared to meet you.  What you think in your heart so are you …….Not necessarily related to you at all.  …… Others may take hundreds of years to work through.  Better not to meet those you don’t like until you are in a state far above likes and dislikes.

You will learn many things.  Go on travels.  It is easier to live because you don’t have the weight of the physical body that gets tired.  You will be in the first, or the lower, etheric body — not the lowest.  You will be moving in quite a different way from here. You will find many things like, and others unlike, this dimension. You will begin a new spell (?) of life, under conditions that are really very, very pleasant.

If you pass over with convinced ideas that there is no life after death, you will hang around earth — you will be earthbound.  You will wonder why people don’t hear you and see you.  One of the first things to discover is that you are out of the physical.

Sooner or later you will discover that there is a motley of folk on the other side, all of whom think they know all about it.  Convinced of an idea, religious or other.  Passing out of the physical not a matter of revelation.  The only revelation you have is that the physical does not close your career.  Where you go from there, and what you do, depends upon you.

Logos. Word.  Carrier of the Creative Power.  The idea, instilled from above, of the meaning of things.  The concept of the Logos is something beyond this plane.  A being who comes into this plane may be one who carries the Logos into earth, but that is not the thing itself.  There are electric bulbs by which we have light, but the real Logos is the powerhouse from which they are derived (the light).  But that source is not the ultimate source either.

(Here someone asks a question re forgetting of the information one had accumulated in earth.) (Ans.) No.  Not as rapidly.  That is a different process.  When you pass out of this flesh you wear for a considerable time a facsimile of this body.  You carry on in terms of what you are called (Mary, Tom, etc,); whereas, when you come down into the flesh, you come into a new set of circumstances.  Therefore the curtain is automatically dropped on what was before, so as to give you a fresh start.  It would be a handicap (if you remembered).  You should be able to get it back only when you have the power to bear it.  You need much development for that.  The information of earth would not be very a propos for that condition.  It would be that much waste. The informative type, who knows so much……..

When you are through with those conditions you are helped to another set.  You are not the only factor in that.  Re.:  demands upon your time.  You have need to steer your course, there too.  You are still starting out with that factor that we call volition.  So there could be inroads made upon you there.  You will be in a position to handle it; and if you don’t handle it you won’t be in that state “by their fruits ye shall know them”. Practice it right here.  Incidentally you help the other fellow.  You can grow or you can dilly dally.  No one will force you to it.  Even circumstances can’t force you to it.  You may not learn or accept.  It depends on what we are.

Some disturbances to the psyche will occur until you are above pleasure and pain.  You must be able to maintain.  To do a thing right once is no measure of permanent achievement.

It takes a lot to review your life.  Takes much to do that.  In that general summary comes its opposite, that you can see detailed things with a precision and a clarity that you cannot see until you have the general.  You must see the details and the pattern, the trend.  When you are ready for that, that is the thing that counts.  Not just the light going up for a few minutes.  You may have some of it here.

Soul consciousness.  Very few people have soul consciousness.  The capacity to suffer deeply is an important thing.  If, through repeated suffering, the thing goes deeper, that is an advantage to the evolving being, but it need not have anything to do with soul consciousness.

There is plenty of pleasure-pain on the other side.  The experience on another plane is valuable too.  Earth experience is unique.  Is not duplicated.

There are other universities beside that of earth.  Other planets are for other sets of opportunities.  What we as humans learn is just a very little of what is to be learned.  We see only facets of life, or the great realities, that we see through the sensitivities and faculties we are developing as humans.  To claim that what we can see in this little earth is the whole measure of knowledge, is something funny.  It is part of the blindness and egocentricity of the human in earth.

If you want to be absorbed in the intellectual pursuits, that is that.  Other universities have other things to teach — things you cannot conceive of because you are here as humans.  Only when your consciousness is able to disassociate with this life. ……. Otherwise it is only theoretical.  I cannot tell you about it through human speech.  The big things to learn are the big things that we carry on with, not the little factual things which pertain locally.  They are good discipline, like the things which sharpen your knife.  But you take on the knife.

Separate your consciousness from the identification with the body.  That is the way to conquer pain.  Shift your focus of consciousness.  Using the physical world, but not identifying.  You can make a gap between the physical and the etheric.  You can shift the polarization.

Man’s equipment.  (Here MBM began a rather brief summary on the eight seedlets.)

The jewels in the casket that Set prepared for Osirus.  The seedlets like peas in a pod.  The embryonic equipment with which we are all endowed.  Their ideal development is from earth up.  But earth, and the power of gravity, tend to hold these faculties down, and man’s attachment to the things of earth.  That force of gravity working.  Some of these (seedlets) are well known to you: sensation, feeling, thinking.

Desire is that which activates man in the conscious.  He has also a motivation which acts from below the threshold of consciousness.  That is urge.  That, springing up, will start the movement all the way through.  That urge is also a peculiar gauge of the stature of an evolving soul.  Why people in a crisis act one way, some in another.  Conditioned reflex, (it is said).  But there is something beyond that, which gives us a look into the soul of that person.  They either, in such a crisis, meet it or they muff it.  That is urge on a higher level.

Urge, therefore is not only on the physical.  It comes from the subconscious.  But describes curiously the stage of the soul’s evolution.  One who is evolved to a considerable extent will have a tremendous urge to do thus and so.

Memory. The power to recall.  The way memory functions in any of us is an index to the status.  What does your memory turn to?  What kind of things can you recall?  Is it your personal life?  Is it the things that wounded you, that you enjoyed, sense pleasure, sex pleasure, drink, sleep?  What do you remember?  A curious gauge, too.

Disorders forgotten by the conscious.  They are remembered by the subconscious.  In a sense, therefore, memories, always, but I am talking about the habit and power to recall.  A tremendous asset, because on our ability to recall is set the build-up of knowledge, of experience, of anticipation.

Imagination.  The ability to make images.  Verbal, color, literal, castles in the air, redistribution of things seen, dramatizing a play.  A marvelous tool.  Man puts it to inferior use.  Because he does not know what it is about.  It is one of the important faculties in developing power for higher realms.  You will have to learn to shape up this imagemaking power of yourself.  You won’t build by bricks or boards.  That faculty goes with you.

Consciousness.  Of all grades and degrees.  Consciousness is very partial.  The concentrated form of it (is not) partial.  Consciousness is like a light.  That is not the thing itself.  Consciousness of God is not the stage of Godhead.  It is like a candle you take into a dark room.  You see what is in the room, but it does not mean you have done anything about it.  It only means that it enables you to do something about it.

Volition.  The power, or the inate right, to have the ability to choose.  The power to select.  That is, in the beginning, also very embryonic.  If you have it in full, there would be no such thing as fate.

Re.: The Seedlets in general.  In the beginning the eight are related to things of earth.  Imagination, feeling, memory, are all snarled up and related to three-dimensional things.  The things of earth are important, belong to the great school, etc., but that is only part of what these faculties are for.  Most people act as if the earth was the end for these faculties.

(Seedlets continued Dec. 6)

The Four Philosophic Elements. – earth, water, fire, air.  The mother principle, the substance out of which all things are made.  The teachers from way back concluded – and they all did – to use certain analogies in common.  Because they all went to school together.  The analogies chosen were of things that are in earth, to describe things that are not in earth.  Earth means all substance; etheric substance, psychic substance, just as well.  Means water and atmosphere.  All degrees of substance, they are earth.

Water, on the other hand has nothing to do with that substance.  It has to do with a peculiarity that runs through all things, in terms of the human evolution and also in terms of Creation, the basis of the static cross, that this water behaves like the water of earth, or the water you and I know.  Water takes the shape according to whatever it is poured into.  That is the analogy of that power, or capacity, in man, that is feeling, emotion, desire.  It is the basis of advertising: the desire of the reader to take shape of what he (the advertiser) has to offer.  Shapes to tragedy, good news – feelings shaping themselves.  And both (earth and water) relate to earth and go down.

Fire.  Is something that goes up, into air. Strives to rise. That thing in you, ambition, in all life, that is seeking to go up, is making its break-away from that which goes down.

Air.  Is that which belongs to mind.  Mind also tends to take form according to that which is around it.  Like the air in this room.  But that shape-taking is enormously different from the shape-taking of water.  We can thrive in the room filled with air but not with water.  We say we could not breathe.  Man is mind.  The essential nature of man is to move up into air.  And the mechanism of earth and water are to establish his rootage and initiate him in his beginnings.

You are not supposed to stay in earth and water.  And fire – questing, searching, yearning, wondering, that is the flame that begins to go up.  It starts the cleavage.  Moves up into mind, which is not intellect, but which is the end product of the human evolution.  It is not reason.  Not even philosophic thinking.  It is far beyond that.  That is the air into which the flame is striving to rise.  The flame does not know it, nor the first searching in you.

The eight are supposed to start down here in earth, move up through water, rise with fire, and move up into air.

Ironically, some of the things that are our advantage are our disadvantage.  One of the trickiest is volition, choice.  It is well told in the Hebraic allegory (the Eve story).  That started desire and the whole process of the development of the eight.

Consciousness.  Ordinarily goes on haphazard.  Under the natural law.  If developed, it can do much at one time.  Many eyes.  Many stages of development of consciousness while we are right here, but we are not doing it.  Much done in industry but we have not found that corresponds in it to ourselves.

—-The End—

December 6, 1945

Subject: Souls, Evil, The Eight Seedlets, cont’d….

Question: Must every soul experience human evolution?

Ans.:    Soul, a name we apply to those forms or life that we know in our planet, and which are part of the Cosmos.  Not the whole by any means.  All those souls must’ go through that evolution.  They are not souls unless they do.

A soul can die…….disintegrate……ceases.  Reference to it in various scriptures.  They carry their perversity a little further……

Question: Do souls of animals also evolve?

Ans.:    Yes. Group souls or group movements, reach a stage where they can have breathed into them the breath of a human soul.  Called the breath of life.

The movement is through the stages — no skipping.

Question re evil:  Will you explain what is meant by the evil in the world?  Why is there evil?

Ans.:      Duality.  The esoteric teaching has no difficulty in approaching the question of evil.  But it does not approach it as religions do.  Esoteric teaching approaches it from the angle of relativity.  Everything has its role in human life.  But look at the suffering and misery and the undoubted terror and anguish of folk who quite patiently are not responsible for the things that they suffer.  Definition of evil.  There is tremendous in the world.  Look up evil.  Admit that there is terrible suffering.  Loss which does not make sense.  Tremendous injustice in the world.  Be clear as to the kinds of evil in the world.  (Ed. MBM goes into the subject of evil more at length in the following lecture, Dec. 13.)

The 8 Seedlets cont’d,

Consciousness.  Can’t go very far without the support of the other seedlets.  Ideal, or completed, development depends upon the symmetrical development of all.

Types will be classified not merely according to sensation, feeling, thinking, but according to these eight.

Imagination

The power to image shows first under the natural law.  It is victim to feelings, interests, attachments.  Presently, as the mind develops, it is put to work in images you build up in regard to setting up a business, setting up a home, writing a book.  It is used gradually to things of the physical world.  Comes into a prominence all its own.  Esoterically, imagination is a tool without which you cannot go very far.  It is your hammer with which to hammer your way into a wall which otherwise closes you from larger realities.  Concepts are imagination, too.

Imagination should gradually be liberated and move up into the fire-air side of things.  Consciousness cannot go until imagination has some preliminary work.

Volition and Desire

Volition is your ability to follow-through where your desire moves you.  Is therefore first the handmaiden of desire.  That is the way life unfolds.  But later volition is liberated from so simple a choice.  Becomes highly complex, as the result of the movement toward differentiation, away from unity, and becomes more complex.  The possibility of 100 choices are before you every week, maybe every day.  You begin to weigh them.  Maybe your preference has won out.  Desire then has your volition in leash.  Volition should eventually become a free agent.  May be in service to your intelligence.  Through the ages volition is gradually freed from the earlier stages and becomes a free agent.

Memory

Your memory in the beginning is related to school days, home days, father, mother; the things you did or did not do.  That is your memory.  You grow up, go to school, etc.  Memory increases, but is still of school, etc.  Then feeling is involved; you like some boy or girl.  You like this study and you hate that study.  Memory and imagination weave when you are in bed.  Another part of you can note what your memories and thoughts are about.  Get on to yourself.  To the level to which these sink.  Memory cannot go further than the experience and development.  It is dependent upon the way you live.  Your imagination you can send ahead. …… is the level you have attained.  Things go down.  Memory and imagination are very revealing.

Consciousness

What about your consciousness at that time?  A wet blanket?  Passive?  Taking on what is being exposed by memory and imagination?  You are going to your own little private theatre.  It just watches what is going on there.  It is not active but passive.

On the basis of these eight seedlets you can conceive innumerable types.  When a certain stage of development has been overcome or you have come over it — the amount that is overcome.  When you have overcome the pull of earth and water, or the physical and emotional worlds, then your normal polarization is higher.  It takes place in the course of evolution.

Few people know what the use of the eight is.  So they are absorbed in earth, water.  (Ref. to a chart)  Moving up against the pull of the physical and emotional world.

 

Accumulated Momentum

The true mystic has urge, fire.  Accumulated momentum.  Now manifesting in this life and driving him on.  If we did not have that accumulated momentum there would be no such thing as progress.  Your bigger drive is indicative.  Out of your heritage.  Points the way.  How much desire, and imagination, is developed.  None of the faculties develop alone.  They are interrelated.

Some memory is dropped way down.  Other memory supports the fire.  Memories of wonderful things.  Maybe a prayer, maybe music.  What belongs to memory, imagination, feeling, are underpinnings of the Quest.  Now no longer turned to earth.

(Here MBM referred to a chart of crescents in different positions).  The fourth picture shows the crescent turned up.  The dominant drive is away from the personal life altogether.  The personal life there is incidental.  The life force now is turned upward.  The seedlets are growing in such a way that they support a higher development.  This is the picture of one who is enlightened, to the larger, Gautama, Jesus, Socrates.  The drive is to air, the feelings incidental.  They support, but are no longer primaries.  Feeling also goes down to the world, but that is the incidental.  Thinking goes up and becomes a support.  Consciousness cannot come to fruition without the support of the other seedlets.  Imagination is doing its real work.  It has been trued by long discipline.  Sensation, a lower container.  The body offered up as an oblation to the gods.  It is there to serve the higher.  In the beginning the body serves only the lower.

Make a drawing of your own eight seedlets.  Where do you think they are?

The original crescent becomes larger.  The moon becomes full.

Memory and imagination can throw the light ahead.  The scientist does that, too.  He may not see accurately but he builds on what he already has.

December 13, 1945

This discourse mainly on the subject of Evil

(Continuing from last week’s discussion so far as it took up evil)

You were trying to come to profound conclusions without coming to grips with it.  The problem of evil has been a profound one throughout the ages.  You can’t go far in esoteric studies without coming to grips with it.

First question:  How could an intelligent God so make a universe that evil, or suffering or sin should be so large a part of it.  Many ways of attempting to answer that.  (Reference to the encyclopedia of religion)  Try to find the answer in this way:  that as long as you can conceive of a theistic Diety you will have the question of evil.  You will question how could such a God permit evil to be in the picture.  You can’t come to profound conclusions without profound struggles.  (Here MBM referred to a motion picture (Bewitched or The Bewitched, in this case a case of possession)

You will find a dozen illustrations of evil at work every day, in the paper. Some are cases of possession.  What makes people vicious?  Evil means doing an injury to others.  If there is a good and wholesome plan in the universe, how is it that these things can occur?  That is your problem.  Until you are permeated with the realization of the enormity of evil, it is, in a sense, idle to go on into any deeper discussion.  We must first admit the depths of it.  Question:  How can there be evil in a thing that has been planned well?  I do not trust the answer of anyone who has not suffered deeply, through no fault of their own.  It is true, there is the natural law, but within it there is tremendous suffering of creatures who are the victims of other creatures, or the winter season, etc.  My thought is more of evil as it pertains to man, and the frank recognition that there are malign gratifications on the parts of humans, in and out of the flesh, in doing injury or evil.  The further you go in esoteric work in that direction the more you will find out about it.  There are those who operate with malign intent.  There is something of that sort in virtually all people’.  In its more insane aspect in what the psychologists call sadistic trends.  You find it more conspicuously in crowd, or mob , psychology.  Recognition of a new kind of force that is generated in a crowd, which is more than the sum of its parts. The demonstration, over and over, of acts done that no group of individuals would do alone, except under the influence of the mob spirit.  Get certain gratification that is unmistakeable in its hour.

That is so, in the flesh and out of the flesh.  It is so in small ways and in collective ways.  Undoubtedly we have seen terrible demonstrations of that in prison camps.  Everyone should see the pictures of what went on.  It belongs to the knowledge of the present age.  Without it we cannot take any intelligent steps forward.  A tremendous amount of active evil, not the casual evil, of being there when the bullet strikes, but perposive evil.  Those who have really thought, in all traditions, those who have followed the work of the Teachers, after the Teachers had come and gone, have still had this problem of evil with them in every race:  how to account for the enormous extent of this malign evil.

The will to evil.  What is it that gives gratification?  (Here MBM made a reference to the Healy book on MENTAL CONFLICT AND MISCONDUCT.  Children’s court in Chicago.  You will find case history after case history of children filled with malign impulses.  Getting gratification at the suffering of others. That is not human nature.  That is evil, potential and active.  The problem is, how did it come, if there is wise guardianship.

It is in that direction that I propose to indicate an answer, which some of you have already touched.  The value I see in this discussion is that it can make you think more deeply, not superficially.  Secondly, that it can help you to see how tremendous, how vast, is the project which is our human evolution.

Volition  When these regions that we call our world, and our immediate solar system, were set into action, the plans were to permit a kind of evolution that would give latitude.  That latitude we have come to call choice, volition.  And certain laws were put into operation, like the laws of cause and effect, which would, comma, in a broad way, control what took place.  In that is karmic action, personal, family, racial, for the whole planet.  That also meant that if the evolving seeds, or monads, should get gratification in ways that we now call evil, they would have the right to do so.  This also was not a project for one or two but for millions of souls.

So we can begin to conceive that these millions of souls are put into a laboratory and left with all the raw material, with laws governing the functioning of that raw material, being given certain clues, and then left to make their way out of the labyrinth, our other analogy.

One of the big factors in this mass project is one that humans are very, very reluctant to learn – perhaps one which is the most conspicuous at the present time, and likewise the most tragic.  We have to learn that this is a community project, and that we solve it as communes; and that we share in the dangers of this communal life.  It is a fact that there are entities watching over and guiding the process, but they cannot guide it against those who are in the laboratory.  We can produce as much malignant energy as we will.  We can get vicious gratification from it.  When you have had moments – we will make them short – of gratification at the suffering of someone who has done you an injury, you illustrate in small what in the Belsen Camp is let out in mass.  It is the same germ.  I am not at all sure that we should be immune from the mass demonstration if the picture were reversed.

In this laboratory – the lower etheric and psychic planes, we make as many mistakes as we want.  We can get gratification over a long time, over ages, quite apart from the stream of evolution.  That can boomerang not only upon us but upon others.

Let me return to the story of the Bewitched.  Accept it now as a genuine story – and there are plenty of such stories in pathological case histories.  Supposing now that there is such an entity getting malign gratification out of evil.  (Jekyll & Hyde)  Our real question goes not to the girl, the heroine, but to the figure behind the girl.  Behind that is someone who has long since gotten off on a wrong track.  Has been indulging the interests and the appetites in blind alleys.  Those things are cumulative.  And we don’t live to ourselves alone.  The call of the vacuum and the sins of omission: and there are plenty of such that affect others, not just ourselves.

And here we are in these lower planes, working out the solution to the problem over ages of time.  We are still very much in the early stages of intelligent living.

The evil that is stored up, and is in the unconscious, and for most people they touch only that which is in the personal unconscious; they do not go into the depths where they meet the accumulation.  They haven’t the guts or determination for it.  Touch only the personal.  And there is evil enough, in which they have gotten their personal gratification.  Multiply that, accumulate that for races, who each have their numerous idiosyncrasies, and you have the story of race karma.

Race Karma  Now in the story of the earth you have race karma pitted against race karma.  Its outer appearance is very different.  Whether it will come far enough so that we begin to solve, or work off, that karma, instead of suffering and not learning the lesson, remains to be seen.  No one can prophecy it.  The gods cannot.  Because there is volition.

Karma  Therefore, as some of you have suggested, evil is karmic.  Evil is personal, too.  But the thing I would have you see is that it is a tremendous problem but that it is a thing inherent with evolution, belongs to the laboratory and the lower planes, and goes on with the human evolution.  It is not a shallow thing.  A terrific thing.

Secret sins.  There are no secret sins that do not touch others.

Leaders in evil.  There are leaders in this making of evil.  Has gone on over ages.  There are “wars in heaven”, in the lower planes.  There are battles in the flesh and out of the flesh.  And the two interlock sometimes.

Benefits from.  Question:  Are the beneficent forces likewise cumulative? MBM:  The time will come when people know more about these things and people will be a little more cautious what they do with criminals.  To electrocute them does not solve anything, but can be operative back on earth.  Most people live as children regarding these things.  In moving into wider boundaries you have to face these questions.

Fate and destiny.  Fate, an intermediate stage of cumulative cause and effect.  Destiny is the far off, divine event.

Solution.  Reached through some other perspective, which contrasts with, or corrects, the original perspective.  That is where the idea of knowledge comes in – why, in the Egyptian tradition ignorance is called the greatest evil.  Unless you understand what it means you take it too easily.

(Answer to question)  You have to convince that entity that they are working up a blind alley.  You have to redirect they energy……  We have not the present means, or enough, to be qualified to a redirecting of the energy.

Lost soul.  Is the one who does not enter into a particular cycle.  Not with your classmates.  The five foolish virgins.  You must find out who the Bridegroom is.

Therapy from war.  In this war there has been a tremendous therapeutic action.  It does not appear that way outwardly.  Tremendous forces that were buried in the  subconscious of peoples has been released.  That is very good.  As every psychologist knows, there is an extremely important post-crisis period to be past.  That is what we are in now.  And in that period, after the crisis, may come a relapse; or there may come the gradual moving forward toward a healing.  The hates and antagonisms that have slumbered, that have been made conscious, are like a gigantic upheaval from the subconscious.

Not psychoanalysis, because no particular intelligence about them.  Psychoanalysis could not do the job because it leads back to the earth.  Whether the leaders in the picture at the present time will be able to supply the medication that is necessary remains to be seen.  You have to have both.  Since we are always endowed with volition, it remains to be seen.  It is easy to regress – go back into the old patterns.

While certain things have been accomplished by the second world war that cannot be erased, the more immediate problems and evils that led to the war may not have been as productive as we hope.  (their solution).  The things that are permanently good are in the direction of the mingling of the races and cultures, so that chemicals from different races get put into outlying countries and people, and will do their work regardless of the Big Five are able to carry on or not.

That is a permanent thing.  But if we are not able to learn together as folk need to work together; if we persist in being suspicious of each other – and they have to be – then we will have more cataclysms, and they will be worse.

How I wish I could help three or four (of the world leaders) to think of big questions in big ways, as leaders must do, in their future lives.

Follow this a little further in some of the ancient cosmogonies.  They include evil.  There is always a protest, or resistance, between those things said to be of heaven and those of earth.  That is why, in the Greek Mythos, the mother goddess protests whenever the father god cohabits with anything of earth.  That is the protest of heaven against earth.  And there is a tension between that which is above and that which is below.  The things which are below fly down.  Gravity.  Illustrates, comma, physically, things of the lower plane upon the human soul.

As long as we are within the sphere of the pull of gravity, the natural tendency is to go down.  Whenever we can get away from the pull of gravity the equal tendency will be to get away from the earth.  That is a metaphysical and mystical fact.  One of the objectives underlying all higher development is to free the individual soul, the being, from the pull of gravity.  Gravity a symbol.  So that the way of gravity is no longer the natural way.  The opposite pull is the natural way.

In all myths there are the imprints of that teaching.  Basic.  It starts with the division of light from darkness.  Not just our earth.  Antithesis.  Battle.  We are left to fight it out, knowing the rules of the game, if we will look for them, but free to go up as many blind alleys as we like, until we do not like them any longer.  Until we outgrow the things we think pleasant now.

In the meantime we are part of a society that does itself, and each other, continual injury.

What can we do?  What can we do to bring further the pull to the higher?  No one answer.  A proof of how little we do.  The moral law is not enough.  It is objective.  We need to watch that we so live “that men shall see your good works and glorify the Father” the Source.  Not so that the attraction goes to you.  But if you do something more or less continuously, so that there is a challenge in it to the Larger, challenge people to the Larger.

Indicate that there is more.  Don’t tell.  They hate to be told.  Strikes their inferiority.  They resent it.  But there are all sorts of ways of stimulating them.  Prodding them.  Plant a little seed.  Jesus did.  He scattered seeds continually.  The idea of things that you know are true, and sound, and relate to the larger.  You should be doing that continually.

Finding himself.  What does it mean when it is said that “a man finds himself”.  We would all agree that finding ourselves is happiness.  It means a finding himself.  Woodrow Wilson on “When a Man Comes to Himself”.  The book is short and readable.  When a man comes to himself, is one thing; when he finds himself is another, though superficially the words might be the same.

(Here MBM referred to a review of the picture “Rugged Path”, with Spencer Tracy.  The man does come to himself.  In the process of coming to himself he leaves all the usual values – job, personal safety, standard of living – because he has discovered that being right with the forward going drive in him is bigger than his personal life.  He (they) made the dramatic discovery that their personal life is of no account whatsoever.  The things they have played up, the idea of family, money, prestige or power – are less than trivia.  It was a blind spot.  That was existence, and only now, when they have been able to put that aside, are they really beginning to live.  The challenge to every human being who is thinking, who lives beyond the ordinary superficial areas.  The thing for which every being craves.  Then you are right with yourself.  Everything begins to fall into its place, though everything you thought so important may go wrong.

It is therefore a discovery, but a personal discovery, that the human life is not of any account; that there is something immeasurably bigger at stake.  And that you so live that the true karmic stream in you leaps forward into fulfillment.  The richest kind of experience.  Only after that is it life.  Before that, only existing and chasing chimeras of all kinds.

Your hearing capacity develops as you do.  You have to obey the law.  It leads step, by step forward.  A process.

Knowing whether there is a God.  You won’t know whether there is a God until you have reached the condition of immortality.  It is the actual stature that permits you to know.  If you are there ? and in a crowd, you can’t see.  Re the quotation on Wisdom is Radiant.  The more you grow in stature to being Doers of the Law, so will you be able to know immortality.  Experientially.  And be able to answer pragmatically whether there is a God.

Finding himself.  Finding himself is not his higher self, or spirit, but the road of his own true development.  He is loyal to the evolving force in himself.  Nothing gives more satisfaction than that.  Then, too, you are being true to yourself.  (The popular idea of being true to themselves is being true to a custom, idea, etc.  (The real thing)  need not be mystical at all.  It comes to be a plumb line of his own development.  “On the beam” of his own life.  His material interpretation of things has not anything to do with it. Not a thing.  It means coming toward the soul type.

Re Unselfishness.  Sociologists say there is no such thing as unselfishness.  Sociologists do not know much.  What they mean is something well-known in psychology, that all behavior broadly speaking, human behavior, which has not gone into advanced training, or finding themselves, is conditioned, and usually by hidden causes.  Like social service work being perhaps a compensation for themselves.  That the care which parents give a child is conditioned by what the parent needs, etc.  Nearly all the things we do that shine so brightly in the social and human crown are really subconsciously determined.  You can discover that for yourselves.

The whole idea of esoteric study and esoteric training, which is something else, is to lead away from that.  When a man comes to himself the behavior is now on a different conditioned reflex – the reflex of having found a wholly new octave of values; not the values of the human self, but values that belong to a higher octave.  Therefore unselfish.  It is not easy to get up to that height.  But of course it is done.  No one can act, or serve, who has been really in the pattern who has not reached past that stage.  That is self evident.  Selfishness is normal and natural to the human being, who is inevitable conditioned by his past.  Refer to Bergson and the influence of the past: “the past leaning over his shoulder.”  This is only true of those who have not gone over the path and reconditioned it.  You will find that in the quirks and behavior pattern, of people generally, and certainly in pathology.  Therefore also selfish.  There is a bigger drive in the self which keeps its attention upon himself.

As evolving souls, we have to watch out that our ignorance or carelessness in no way causes a dilemma to anyone else.  Souls are going through a discipline which is to educate them to the way of living together effectively.  The situation in earth at the present time, and the conflict between races and nations, is a graphic and terrible illustration of that lesson.  Whether you like it or not, you must learn somewheres how to come out of the influence of this gigantic demand upon you.  Not you to give what you want but as a member of a community you enter in and participate in that community.  A very difficult thing for humans to learn.  In stages.  Their independence, ego-feeling, and rugged individualism.  As in the Western World.

Now we turn to something very different.  Back of our experience, individually and as a people, is the gradual shaping of your consciousness and mind, up to the stature where we are ready to live openly and fully with others, still keeping our measure of individuality.  And the same of our neighbor, but fully according to the integrity of the whole.

Question: Re the Seven Cardinal Sins.  A sin causes evil.  Is a fixation in the self at certain stages.  Due to ignorance of the Larger.  But that limitation in the self, together with volition, imagination, and feeling, can be turned toward malign activities toward others.

December 20, 1945

Evil Continued, Stages of Evolution, Plumb Line, Atomic Energy

Evil and what is bad.  Evil is purposive, directed.  Bad, unpleasant, is not so.  Unintended, natural law.  Carelessness may be a sin of omission.

Another question, unawareness and the accumulating of momentum.  As in making for a war.  The question of consciousness comes in.  Might be subconscious, race,  Evil is a community question.  We are all here together.  In a sense, whatever takes place we share.  We share the evil and we share the good.

Evil has malign purpose, will, volition.  But these other examples are non-conscious, or without volition.

The cause of evil may be sloth or there may be an activating agent.

No man is willingly vicious. (Socrates.)  All vice is due to ignorance.  Evil is purposive, conscious, malign, vindictive.  That which is bad, not good, may not be conscious and purposive but may in turn cause consciousness in the one who suffers it.

The question has been whether the captain of the Indianapolis was negligent.  Carelessness with community participation, and that is behind this case.  May cause the loss of the lives, of hundreds.  Therefore that need not be soul karma, it may be karma in terms of the carelessness or disobedience of one man or several.  I do not believe enough can be said on any of our parts of the interrelation of every one of us to the community.  We do not live to ourselves alone. We share in responsibility, in guilt.  And whether that guilt is our individual guilt, or someone else’s in a superior or official tradition.  The same rule holds.  Part of that is what is behind this case of the Indianapolis.  Not only here but also in Japan and Nuremburg.

Drive to fulfill himself.  That drive is from the beginning but man makes misuse of it. Happily, that is to fulfill himself.  At first he is driven blindly by the compulsions in the subconscious, which he thinks are something else, but which are really needs in him to accomplish a balance.  Works automatically.  He may think it unselfish.  But it is actually a drive through his infancy as a human being, as an evolving human, that his nose is kept to himself, even when he does not know it.

Cultivation of the self in reverential carefulness.  What is the sign of the wise man or the woman? – “Cultivation of the self in reverential carefulness.”  That is tending to your own business.  That drive is in you.  In your infancy it caused many behavior patterns which seemed to be altruistic but which instinctively adjusted to the needs of the self, and in that sense  was selfish.  Part of the pattern. (Answer to a question.)  We suffer as many but the solution comes by the individual, never by mass or group.  It is an individual soul, not a mass soul;  and the responsibility is each to himself.  The first stage of that is what is grasped when a man “comes to himself.”  Begins to grasp that his responsibility is to himself.  The western world is mixed up on that. Through certain aspects of Christian teaching.

Question: To what extent do we share in the guilt of evil which results from government failure to make right decisions.

Answer:  Every one of us has a responsibility in the situation – in any situation to which we are contingent.  Now, however, our ability to act varies.  According to each one, his position, his general abilities, etc. to offer protest or resistance, or to change the trend of the act.  Individual responsibility that each one must act (within the philosophical pattern, that is) according to the measure of his ability in that case.  Not one of us can permit ourselves to be negative on any community situation in which we could take part by saying that the part we take is so small that it is negligible.  Every one of us must take a part.  It may not be in the orthodox pattern, but we must take a part in resistance to the thing we protest against in our hearts and minds.  That is the true moral responsibility.  No one can measure outside of you.  You can only measure it in yourself as you learn to be honest.  No one is honest naturally.

Period of learning. (This is in answer to a question).  There are periods of time when we are in earnest, when we eagerly give ourselves to learning.  Like one who wishes to become adopted.  He forebears against giving aid during the period when he is learning. Why?  Because he’s dedicated to learning how to do better than others – to take the responsibility on a greater level than if he just was working on a superficial level.  Forbear actions under the aegis of our previous tutelage.  Then you have new bearings, new sight.  If we stay in the position that we were, we do not make room for those who should come up to do those things.  The demand of life is ruthless.  Grow and grow and grow.

List your (compensating) behaviors, that is compensating for the things you should be doing if you had guts and courage and adventure.  People are full of double-crossing themselves.

Freeing ourselves from the guilt.  We do share the guilt of evil of our day, and our dilemma, and we free ourselves from that only in the degree, and that is determined by each one by what he is.  And that is karmic, by his individual resistance to the crowd, or to the evil.  He does not need to enter a political party to do that.  He does not need to enter a group which is doing so and so.  Why?  Because the dilemma that the world is in is nothing that you, or I, or a thousand you and I’s could change.

Humanity is at a relatively wide stage of evolution, varies from a lower to a higher degree.  That is, where                                          volition it can make certain choices which throw the whole thing forward into the period to come or can muff them through laziness, evasion, heedlessness, so that the momentum of the accumulated temper of humanity can cause the final debacle.

That is ours to settle.  But not by one or a thousand of us.  We are living all together.  But if you remember that the measure of what we do is not to be seen in terms of the physical world, but in terms of what we become by what we do.  It should not be seen necessarily in this world at all.

That is the measure of what we are moving into.  Therefore, no measure on the physical plane.  But if you and I and a thousand others offer resistance, and do what we can do in counter balancing the ideology of the present day, wherever we are, we are by that helping to shift a weight, even though the crisis may still take place.

There is a contagious influence in carelessness and heedlessness of peoples.  Leaders have only a proportion of power.  It is the momentum in your hearts and minds, and acts, that supports them.  If you do not give that you have a share of the guilt, not merely of the evil.

 

The measure of each.  When you are out of the flesh you are what you have made yourself by your thoughts and action.  Because the physical world is not the measure of you or me.  It is what you have made yourself, in the things you do and don’t do, and evade and accomplish.  In the secret places of the heart, you will find what your guilt really is.

 

Planting the seed.  In spite of all we may do, the debacle may still occur.  But that is no reason for each not contributing to changing the ideology.  Plant a seed here and another there.  All of that is gradually shifting the weight from ignorance to a movement toward what is to be.  What is to be will be, in spite of us or humanity.  It will still be, but it may not be now.  Like the seasons, Spring continues to come.

Do not judge, however, by the things in this world, but by things when you are most honest with yourself. Warps that bind you. You do not know except as you put it into work.  If you do that out here, and evade something in yourselves here, then you have double-crossed yourself because you have given an overt sign of good will and participation, and blunted your own sensitivities to your plumb line.  (MBM used the words We and Ours in this last sentence.) Our own plumb line is extraordinarily important.  Try to find it more and more for what it is.

You would evoke a sensitivity in yourself which would put you right with the laws.  But you must first divest yourself of old ideas.  The movement forward is dual – divesting of the old and moving forward.  It always runs contrary to our personal inclinations.  Until we are really individualized.

The degree of honesty to yourself makes you more helpful to the community. Takes your weight off the burden of Atlas.  The energy comes out from the core of being, and as a punch.  (Ideally, we should be introvert and extrovert on all eight seedlets.  And up the Ladders.)

One of the greatest dangers is to blunt the unfolding faculty which perceives what honesty is.  I see it done over and over.  That faculty which is sometimes in the world called conscience.  That faculty is the thing that keeps you in line with the plumb line.  If you default on that, or blunt it, by preference of the personality, you are doing yourself an immeasurable hurt.  You have to work and work to make that faculty clean again, so it will function.

You share in the guilt unless you have done your share in opposing it.

(Answer to a question about scientists.) If the moral development was not in proportion to his development in physics, it is just too bad.  That is lopsided.  We have been too intent on selfishness, possessiveness, etc., and we pay the price for it.  We have degrees of responsibility.  For just the degree of possessiveness each of us has.  The only way we can exonerate ourselves is not against invention.  If, in ten or twenty years from now, New York and other big cities are bombed, in the last analysis it does not make any difference.  The present war has not done what it was supposed to do.  The gods cannot make humans use the season for it if they do not want to.  The part that you and I have played, understandingly and constructively, is our stature.  We will still be plus what we have done to aid in the dilemma of humanity.

Re. Atomic Energy.  There are certain patterns.  One is, that the time has come — in fact it was underway for a long time (see Oliver Lodge) warning that if this atomic energy was released before men were evolved, it would be dangerous.  It will go on until men, enough men, understand the laws.

It is a question whether they will be sufficiently intimidated by the atomic bomb to hold off on it.  But you will never stop it.  It is a long process.  You and I are living in earth in one of the most dramatic times.  Terrible times.  All the more reason that we, who are not suffering, should do as much hard thinking from the point of view of wisdom patterns; having the time and energy to do it.  It is our job if we will take it on.  But we must think with the processes, not against them.

 

Long range and short range. Keep the long range and the short range point of view.  One as a corrective against the other.   The short-range is that humanity now, united nations, organization, etc., congress, etc.  That our culture should not be lost.  The thing that is more important is our souls.  In other words, doing our part constructively so that this equation is kept, not being disheartened if things go wrong in the physical world.

Humanity does not need to wait until all work upon the self is done.  It is impossible to give the perspective through the conscious mind so that the pattern could be apprehended and it could engage volition so that we could act with it.  We can still do our part.  Get folk interested.  Not everyone can do esoteric training but all can go at esoteric study and come to know something of the patterns, so that with clear thinking they can move forward in that pattern.

The atomic bomb is only a dramatic illustration of the power of the age we are entering.  It is only beginning.  Whether the humanity in earth will get over its greed and competitiveness remains to be seen.  No one knows, not even the gods.

We have this responsibility: that we get people to think.  That we challenge them.  Talk about hidden knowledge.  Things that will make people reach.

It is our obligation to help make others conscious – not by telling but by challenge.  Counteract somewheres crowd behavior by what we say and do.  By a challenge……

January 3, 1946

Mysticism and the Mysteries, Tabernacle

Difference between mysticism and the Mysteries.  Dissociate both mysticism and the Mysteries from the word mysterious.  Mysterious is a degenerate version of the idea behind both these words.  The popular form of things; and the popular approach is usually incorrect.  As we approach the deeper side of our question we must slough those off.  Truth is ruthless.  Has a very sharp sword.  It should have, and none of us should be afraid to use it.

The word comes to us through the Greeks.  The great transmitters.  With the Greek supremacy, and with the plan of Alexander of the great city of Alexandria, which Ptolemy Soter carried on.  Gathering of the sacred lore and other knowledge from the races, wherever the ships and caravans touched.  That was collected and translated into the Greek tongue.  So the Greek peoples were the door through which old traditions passed into our more recent age.  Transmitters of old wisdom, knowledge, skills.  Much of our knowledge is derived from that old transmitting.  The word mystic is one.  The word is derived from the role of the individual applicant for the Mysteries.  The one who was to be initiated in the Mysteries was called a myste, or applicant.

Two ways of looking at the applicant: from the point of view of other people, and that which is better, the myste.  From the people to whom those things were not to be known came the collection of ideas of what we have at the present day as “mysterious.”  Whereas to the candidate for initiation it was the door that was opening to his larger understanding.  To the worldling they remain mysterious.

Myste leads directly to the idea of the Mysteries.  Mystic, Mysteries, mysticism.  The Mysteries, in the large Pattern, as I am trying to give you in our discussion, are on the threshold between esoteric teachings and the multitude.  The multitude do not care for the Larger, or fall within the category of religion.  The Mysteries, on the other hand, is that system of approach to life and the Larger which is in between that multitude and religion, and on the other hand, the profounder hand, the true esoteric teachings.

All peoples, not merely the Greeks, had Mysteries – ceremonials by which candidates were progressively initiated into an understanding of Larger realities.  Primarily the story of the soul – its descent and its ascent.  At any rate, the Lesser Mysteries.  (Were not the Greater Mysteries.)  To the multitude, that is mysterious.  To the initiate, it ceases being mysterious.  It becomes profound and understandable.

Preparation  The Mysteries are guarded by many steps of preparation.  Purgation.  Consisted of preparatory instruction and a cleansing.  That cleansing usually accomplished in two ways – literally, by confessional and mystically, by a ceremonial.  The bath, washing out the mouth, nose, ears….  Symbolic of refusing to speak unkindly;  to listen……This so-called lustration is the first in the process of preparation, together with instruction.

 

Hierophant.  Other words connected with the Mysteries.  Hierophant, the chief priest.  Hier, meaning sacred.  Speaker of sacred things.

The priest who functions in the Mysteries.  Chief priest.  The word hierarchy.  Assemblage of those who are sacred persons, and who are related to the functioning of the Mysteries.  They may be within the earth or in reference to those out of the earth.  Orders, or ranks, of beings who have specific tasks.  Word hierology, the science of sacred records.  Hieratic, adjective, that which is for sacred use.  Hierurgy: urgy (work), the sacred work that is done in the processes of initiation.  This is the language as it has come down to us because we inherited so many Greek roots.

The Mysteries were usually set up in dramatic fashion, so that, through the drama, or mystical procession and equipment of various kinds, steps or gradations of experience could be prepared for the candidate.  , through which he would experience something of what the Mysteries were about.  The Mysteries were to unfold the perception of the candidate in regard to Greater Realities.  Set the key.

7 and 12. He should then follow through on seven steps. With some peoples, in two or three successive years.  With others, had nothing to do with years, but with the progressive development of the candidate.  With these steps, the numbers seven and twelve are usually associated.  Seven relates to a heavenly octave, twelve to an earthly octave.  In esoteric teachings the numbers 7 and 12 repeat.  A common denominator.  Would have some sign of external validity.  The physical manifestation of something larger.

     The number seven is associated with the Seven Lamps around the Throne.  Seven stars around the Pole.  Writing in the heavens.  Twelve, having to do with the constellations and the Zodiac, the labors of Hercules; Gilgamesh.  The seven are related to the Seven Watchers.  Belong to the constellations immediately around the Pole as well as the constellations known as the Great Bear.

Anything that belongs to the Mysteries of the various peoples will tend to be seen within these two (numbers.)  Other octaves are because of these.

The seven steps within the Mysteries are the stages of development and understanding: Baptism; penance; confirmation; Eucharist; marriage; extreme unction; orders.

There is another way of seeing this process of the Mysteries, and obviously, all great teachings are associated with the Mysteries.  That (other way) is the structure of the Tabernacle.  Preparation for it.  Then, three divisions: the outer court; the Holy Place; and the Holy of Holies.  The first belongs to the earth man; the second, to the development of the soul, or the higher consciousness; the third, to spirit, or nous.  Body, soul, spirit.  That is too brief.  If you know the structure of the Tabernacle, and what is in it, you will have a further key to how the steps of the Mysteries are developed.

Outer court:  Altar of burnt sacrifice.  Deliberate, or bold, stripping off of the old.  Determination to radically transform the self.  Laver.  Lustration.  Third, incense burner – the offering up to the higher, God, of the longings and desires in the heart.  That is the work that must be accomplished by the candidate in the first set of requirements.

Holy Place.  Three objects in the Holy Place: table of show bread, seven-branched candlestick, and the altar of incense.  Stabilized what was begun in the first section.  Twelve loaves of show bread: the manifestation of the efforts of the candidate to accomplish the twelve, and the evidence of his work.  The work of mind upon the soul in the seven-branched candlestick.

     The power of mind is nous: mind which has gone through the human evolution and has made the distillation, and has extracted the gold, or the essence of things, and is therefore purified.  The work in the second section of the Tabernacle is upon the soul through mind, to make this distillation.  Mystical alchemy – gold that is being made out of lead.

The third section once more has three objects: Two cherubim; scroll; Aaron’s rod.  Budding staff.  Manna from heaven.  Commandments on stone.  Means the eternal commandments.  Jesus changed those – reduced the ten to two.  That is the Hebraic approach.  The essence of things to be grasped is the finality of commandments on stone.

     Budding of Aaron’s rod.  In the Greek, the Thyrsus rod.  Rod of Aaron in its occult key is the spinal cord.  (Uraeus too).  It represents the essence of the steps of man’s evolution from the coccyx to the forehead, and that is where it flowers.

Manna from heaven has also very profound significance.  Has to do with the realization that without food from above man does not live.  On the physical side, life of the sun.  That is its merest outer dead cell.  This the true initiate comes to grasp.  The Mithraic had grander concepts than the Hebraic, and Christian.  Included responsibility to the world.

Mysticism and mystics   What is mysticism.  Derived from the word myste.  Relatively recent.  From perhaps the twelfth century.  Reference to certain convictions among groups of people who, in reverent earnestness, believed it is possible to contact Deity.  Have set up a vast tradition, and there are such folk within every great race.  They also have teachings re preparations and stages, but individually, not taken by groups as in the Mysteries.

Many leading mystics.  Theresa, a brilliant, active woman, to whom devout religious ceremonials were essential, and in which she believed she had a direct rapport with Deity.

Mysticism makes its greatest call upon the emotions and the heart.  The Mysteries draw upon the emotions also, under (?) the understanding.  Mysticism does too, but the main stress is on the heart and the emotions.  Mysticism also has its progressive steps.  From there on it goes into meditation, which is a thing the individual does alone.  The process goes on into contemplation.   (Here MBM made reference to Milarepa.)

Question: What relation has mystic experience to these?  Answer: Mystic experience is largely accidental, or is caused by abnormal or unusual circumstances, stress, suffering, privation, fear, intense longing, etc.  Therefore outside of the category of a normal progression of steps; whereas in the Mysteries and in mysticism it is seen from the beginning that there are sequential steps, inside of which there will, be mystic experience.  Mystic experience makes its primary appeal, and is only mystic experience, if with it we are profoundly moved.

Some of the experiences of men in the war.    ……their sensitivities may be open.  In mystic experience there is always metaphysical phenomena.  That is the form side of mystical experience.  It always involves a force outside the self.  The mystical experience means a being moved.  The whole object of emotions is to move you; shift you, or make you other.  Otherwise you stay put – turned into a pillar of salt.  The source: varied according to the one who receives it.  A gift to someone would be valid according to the reception of its value by the recipient.  According to their own stature.  What is first in the picture – the stature of the receiver.  Therefore experience that can be progressive.

Ezekiel Ezekiel had a special role to play.  His mystical experience, or his vision, was purposively attuned to him, and that mission.

Levels of experience.  Any communication of that kind is purposive, not accidental.  It may be purposive on a very humble level, from someone in the ethers.  But the more you bring to an experience the more you will get out of it, regardless of what it is.

It always implies operators out of this dimension who, in one way or another are responding to your condition.  If you respond deeply and emotionally it will be a mystical experience.  If it moves you, you will become different.

Purpose The whole idea of the Mysteries and mysticism is progressive development, so as to be aware of the greater things that are out of the earth.  The candidates for the Mysteries are already convinced that the whole answer for things is not three-dimensional.  They are going at it in a sequential, systematic way.

James gives four marks of mysticism.  MBM has added four others.  Both are too arbitrary; not allowing for the scale of things.  Degrees of mystic experience in the war.  Not like the James kind.  All sorts of things that come to people under pressure.  Because pressure changes the organic setup of the individual.  All of you are averagely polarized in reference to the world, or jobs, home, persons.  Only now and then are you polarized any other way.  That is exceptional . The myste and the mystic are deliberately polarizing themselves in other directions . Begin to be supernormal.  Receptivity to other imprints.  A good thing.

The emotions not only joyous.  Tolstoy.  Augustine.  When they become conscious of the larger reality, by virtue of that there is a revaluation of what has preceded, and therefore the opposite emotions.  Causes a new attitude toward the past – humility, shame, repentance, horror, fear, remorse.  Contrast.

You should all do some thinking about hate and love.  (This was in reference to the next session , when MBM would take up the question, of love.)

Cain and Abel, their offerings. Why didn’t God accept the offerings of Cain as he did those of Abel?   Cain, a tiller of the ground, Abel a keeper of sheep.  The category of knowledge built up from earth, – man’s work in earth, .- everything he has done: clothes, streets, houses.  That is done for your convenience by you.  It is not done for God.  It belongs to the earth, whereas the work of Abel, symbolically, means the thing that could not yet be accomplished because it was too early in the stage of involution, – the development of longings to serve God .

When the higher aspect of the self moves      , that which can be moved toward God, it is opposed by the lower tendencies, symbolized by Cain resisting, and attempting to suppress Abel.  It is as though you had planted a seed, and after it had sent down a few roots you stopped it sending out roots.  It would not be a healthy plant . It needs to go out.  “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”  But you can’t do that in a hurry. It is a long process.

So Abel has to withdraw from the picture, because the man of earth has to come first.  Afterwards he will be last.  The things Abel offers are the things that go up, and are capable of being accepted.  Nevertheless, the things of Cain must come first.  You are still in these earlier stages.

 

January 17, 1946

Love

The subject is just as tricky as last week’s (on evil).  What is love?  How can we love our enemies.( Other questions not taken down.)

The very nature of that sort of question indicating the changing times in which we are living.  Even about such forces as love come now many critical questions.  Not merely psychological questions.  The old approach is no longer sufficient.  We need to understand it with our minds even though at first sight it may seem a thing of the heart.

And is love a thing of the heart?  Yes, but not only.  Dictionary definition is a feeling of strong personal attachment to that which delights.

The word love is different in some respects from some of the topics we have studied.  It comes from a lowly root.  Connected with what the psychologist calls the libido.  Comes from below up.  The higher words, which the great tradition of all races had, did not take. The Greeks had three words for the different grades of love:  phanes, eros, cupid.  All three of them on high levels of implication and meaning.  Yet, not one of these took and became part of our speech.  The word love has.  It runs the gamut from what you hear on the street, re a perfume or a play, and so on up.  It is used carelessly.  (Selfless, meaning probably the high levels. ED.)

Paul’s illustration about love, in Cor. I Ch.13.

“The Greatest Thing in the World” by Henry Drummond.  I will discuss those two.  The Drummond book is worth buying and studying.  It belongs to the Piscean Age.  And Paul’s writing belongs to the Piscean Age.  The grandest writing on love in that age.  Drummon’s is a good modern opening up of that l3th chapter.  Paul contrasts, analyzes, and then defends love.  Sometimes called charity, or grace.  Charity is holding something dear.  Grace means about the same thing.

If you are studying ch. 13 carefully you will note that Paul is telling you about.  About the manifestation of love, not what it is.  How it acts.  But at no time does he tell you what it is.  For the Piscean Age, for the many who were looking (?) that was sufficient.

At the end Paul says: now abideth hope, faith & love, the great love.  Put away childish things.  Putting away childish interpretations of love.

I will try to present a little of love from the Aquarian Age.  You will have something that is permanent.  Not now about the manifest behavior but about the inside nature of the thing itself.

More and more, the quest is into the things that are inside of what we have previously seen on the surface.  Matter in regard to the molecules.  In architecture, stresses and strains.  Always now the knowledge which previously not tangible, not obvious, is the thing that is sought.

In esoteric knowledge, the things that are sub rosa, that which is within the outer surface of things, have always been known.  But when we speak of the changing periods I am speaking of the bulk of humanity.  In its bulk, intelligent, forward going men and women everywhere, is moving into the age of understanding, inquiry.  In the previous period this same inquiring group, though inquiring with the heart, was satisfied with statement about.  Now mankind, in a large number, has reached a status where that is no longer sufficient.  Primarily, that has caught on in regard to objective material things.  Here you will see it in regard to profundities.  In that direction I propose we turn our discussion of love.  Instead of seeing it as simple, it must be broken up into parts or segments.  The psychologists and love, sexual and otherwise.

Phanes.  Greek tradition.  That love, in the cosmic sense, is seen as the driving force, Phanes.  That, in a sense, that driving force is that of all manifestation, or Creation.  And that the Creative Force, the Great Creator God and his helpers projected outward through love.  In that sense, then, love would be a rather all embracing force.  But it still does not tell us what that force is.  Quote from Empedocles:  “Behold the sun, warm and bright, on all sides.  Rain clouds……  Perfect flavor of love.  The idea of strife? and love, or love and hate, as in our question, are manifesting after creation has begun.  An underlying these in so many traditions.

The gods, in the various stages, loved this or that.  Jupiter, or Zeus, falling in love, says the outer tradition, with things or folk in earth.  That is the coming of the attractions toward the things of earth, and is causing multiplications of the influences of heaven on the earth.  Or light and dark.  Or the sun and cold.  Strife.  Phanes as an all embracing force.

Piscean writers have emphasized that love is everywhere.  And many folk, with good intention, have continued to say that.  And out of that have grown any number of cults, churches, etc.:  endless amount of literature.  “God is everywhere, etc.”  They have never really inquired.  Belong to the Piscean Age.  In this age we want to know something of what this force is.

How is it that love is everywhere?  Where is love in this room?  Love is a cohesive force that holds together.  That is the first point we want to follow through.

The force called love is esoterically known to the operating on all levels, starting with the most delicate particles of matter in its subdivisions.  It is an attractive force.  And it binds together, not all things, but various things.  It binds those things together to which it is attracted. The needle and the magnet are manifestation of love.  Illustrate that on many levels, many directions.  That is as the thinker begins to understand that otherwise unanalyzed statement that love is everywhere.  As in sciences of all kinds, the scientist peers into the statement of things, seeks to know, so esoteric science always has;  but guard the statements of the great truths that underly life until, from time to time, certain of them are ready to be stated, because the time has come when they may be stated.

(re. the sign of Venus).  We call this the work of Venus.  Follow through in the Greek tradition.  You will have to analyze the little sign which is the glyph of Venus, the circle over the cross; the four elements which are the matter of the cosmos, earth, water, fire, air.  Above them is the circle, ♀ rolling pin.  Smooths out.  changes the nature of that which was in the four elements, irregular, into something which is definitely under the influence of the circle.  Perfect symmetry.  Means gradually winning the irregularity of manifestation back to the symmetry, after the transformation, of the

sphere. The work of Venus is something like that.

How does this occur with the magnets?  Closing the circuit.  The things that Paul said could be found to have their correspondence in our magnet.  Via the principle of correspondence.  The shopper and the article he buys.  Moving up the scale, the love between a man and a woman.  Again a closing of the gap, consummated in the sex act, also in a chemical reaction.  In the valence? (chemical).

Lawrence, T. E.(Seven Pillars of Wisdom) Appros of a love for a cause.  “In this pledge of their endurance…fear broke down because love was aroused.  The cause represents the anode.  Give themselves to the cause.  Whether it was the sacrifice of their lives was incidental.  (Here came a quote from the Marine lieutenant not taken down).  Are we then, as folk who live the ordinary lives, incapable of experiencing love for a cause?  Do we close the gap with anything?

We are seeing that love functions on many planes and that we can now, through our minds, begin to agree that love functions everywhere.  Not this love that people think of in the Piscean Age.  And we would not want it.  It is not healthy.  But this other kind.

So that we have many stages of love.  When we compare these two illustrations of Lawrence and this lieutenant, we discover that there are degrees.  And we have not only to move up on various levels, but also the matter of degrees.

We can only open up the subject tonight.  This power that we have called by the general name, love, is functioning everywhere.  Solar system.  Planets revolving around the sun are held by attraction around the sun and do not go off into space.  Steadiness.

Breaks the question into two parts.  Masculine and feminine.  Sun, masculine.  Earth, feminine.  Toward the moon, the earth has the role of the sun.  The power in the feminine pull, to the earth.  In the masculine pull the moon creates the tides.  And many more subtle things that belong to it.  The subtler things belonging to the feminine pull.  The feminine as well as the masculine works.

Five signs of Venus. Mile posts that indicate main stations that characterize different levels or planes of the work of love.  The lowest refers broadly, to the world of chemistry and body.  The second, bodies and sex.  The third, heart.  Man runs a gamut of many planes.  Chemistry of physical matter.  Subtler chemistry of the etheric body, which commands sex.  Then the chemistry of the affections, or emotions.

Quarrel between love two and three.  The first three are under the natural law.  Bound to lead to trouble and conflict.  Because love is not one lovely thing that would melt away all disorder.  Delusions of the Piscean Age.  Admit the short comings, the tragedies of the world.  Our age will do better than the Piscean.  There is bound to be conflict until mind, or man, begins to understand and control.  Not through reason or intellect, but through something immeasurably stronger and more powerful.

Our question: How can we love our enemies?  A tricky problem.  Sugar water does not stand any test.  Find out first what constitutes enemies.  The active enemy may be on both sides, but it does not need to be.  Find out what is the cause and get at the root of it.  Analyze it or change it.  He. white man and negro.  Attempt to understand the enemy.

An illustration from psychology.  The person who was psychopathic.  Not long ago (hate or fear).  Now no longer any fear or antagonism in the treatment of such situations, because minds have investigated, to find the causes, and worked upon the causes, and have no feeling whatsoever about the person who is suffering this disorder.  There has been a transfer from the person to the disorder.  From the personal reaction to the disorder.  This points the direction of the superpersonal relationships of the future. Understanding and ignorance.

But our understanding has to be taken apart, too, so that we do not take it in some collective sense as love and kindness.  As we did matter.  Took it in the collective sense.  In imaginary, sugary, glossed over nature.  That satisfied most persons in the past two thousand years.  We are just in the mere infancy with racial prejudice.

We have been talking in regard to the natural law.  The mind beginning to inquire, setting up first small blueprints of the new age.  And as the demand comes, love your enemies.  Man cannot do it, if he is honest, unless he knows a great deal.  The old way of loving your enemies is as feeble as the old fashioned home paste of flour and water.  We are going through all degrees of paste and come up to some of these phenomenal new compounds.  Until it is possible to endure betrayal, even as a Jesus did, and still bear no ill will, still continue the active role….But a Jesus is able to do that because he knows so much.

The statements in the Scriptures are peremptory:  “Love they God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, etc.”  That is totality.  I take it you are all honest enough to know that you can’t do it.  That is the ultimate model.  Many statements that are made in Scriptures and sacred texts everywhere are ultimates, and the ones who are without mind believe they can accomplish it and are talking about it as though it were a common place.  The mind refuses to betray them into daily use and the stupid, banal language of the multitude: but they are beckoning lights that point what is before and beyond us.

How can you, if you do not know God, love him?  Must begin to know the outermost fringes.  Break up the concept of what God is.  The idea of loving God and knowing him could only be understood from relativity on levels and degrees.  If you have a little love of God on a humble level, it would have its counterpart of a little knowledge of God.  The mystic would not be satisfied.  (with this appraisal).  He may be sincere but it does not mean that it is.

Broadly speaking, mysticism is a thing of the heart.  What we are discussing is of the mind.  The mystic has a fear of discussion.  Has not mind strength and fears what he does not have.  The unknown intimidates them.  Higher mind is the greatest thing that man has.  If not developed you do not know much about it and you cannot trust it.

Reviewing our points;  (1) many levels; (2) many degrees of qualitative expansion or activity; (3) then gender; (k) building up of the conflicts of humanity, and the interpretation of love under the natural law (this must be point 5)

The higher demands of love, or these ultimates of loving God. whether Greek, or Chinese, or Jesus, – and they all mean the same – that that is not possible except as mind begins to operate.  Not reason or intellect.  The beginning with the higher mind.  That peering behind the veil of objective things comes to know what man basically is, begins to know what the pattern of life is, esoterically.

No outer religion can help you to love God, if you are honest.

Your mind opens up under the greater teachings that belong to the esoteric side of things.  Laying hold of the profundities of that removes from you the limitations of the small personality, the small self, and the conflicts of the small self, so that you are growing in stature, and are able to conceive of the drama of life in a much bigger way.  As you do that, you are gradually able to move toward the love of God.  You will perceive immensities behind that word.  Like the atom, it will fall into its component part.  And the veil that blocks from the higher vision of things will have fallen away.  In the degree that you know, you will be attracted toward.  The old Egyptian lore says that the greatest sin is ignorance.  That is esoterically correct.  Because as ignorance is progressively removed – not merely physical, but psychic, so that the higher mind begins to function, so the capacities in the self respond, and something of that ultimate, of these commands, begins to be your method of response.  The Larger will attract you more powerfully than anything that the smaller has.

The mystics have found the terrific attractive force of their sun.  As they are bound, as the earth, to its orbit around the sun.  They would not turn away from it.  How did they get that way?  Cultivating the fire.  Feeding the fire.

What makes the mystic choose his way?  Degree-ness.  The mystic has a tremendous power of loving.  Because he has specialized in the heart that is developed.  He has great capacity to love.  Piscean love.  And love is an enormously active force.  He has the power to give out of himself.  That is one of his big advantages.  Without great love for what you are doing you will be stalled.  The degree of love on any plane that you have, in the sense of its activity, is the measure of your magnetism.  The magnet is powerful according to its size and kind.  Love is powerful and active according to where it functions.  If you have no activity you have no love.  That is the kind of thing we come to learn when we inquire with our minds.

Scale yourselves up.  Degree-ness.  Ask, where is your activity?  Certain activities are motivated by musts, called duty, and other forces akin to that.  Interest.  It is not love.  And it is therefore useful to put the pragmatic test upon yourselves.  What activity do you undertake that is away from the self, in service, that is a measure of love.  Of your love.  If you haven’t such activity, you haven’t love.

by Henrietta Peterson

January 17, 1946

If you did love the Larger there would be various kinds of activity that would arise out of you.  Men and women in love think of the other, and what they can do to manifest that love.  They are full of initiative, resourceful. Broadly speaking, unless there are crises that challenge us, as Lawrence or the lieutenant said, we manifest very little love.

Remember, love is activity.  We have one extraordinary force that is our activity toward accomplishing what we seek to accomplish.  The more we know the occult anatomy of things – we have only scratched it tonight, re love – the more we are able to control and direct the lesser forces which are within the thing of our scrutiny.  So that our mind can do what we do not do under the natural law.  Mind law compels us to make the change, so that we do with mind, the thing we cannot do naturally.

That is just as true with reference to love.  Love is an extraordinary force.  Very few people really know very much about it.  Haven’t experienced it.  May have experienced the compulsive love of body, sex, maybe a little of the heart.  How much else?  As we move into the new era we must have that fearless honesty.  We are rather a ruthless folk until need drives us forth.  As for the preserving of the country.

January 24, 1946

Discussion of Love, continued

Conflicts of loves of different kinds.  Parents to children.  Heart and mind may conflict.  Love to a cause and conflict with personal relations.

The loves, seen esoterically, are scaled up, and the evolution of the self follows the ascent of that scale, so that the development of the self is, to a very large extent, dependent upon following a higher love rather than a lower one.  Or sacrificing a lower love, for a higher.  Gravity, under the natural law.  We are dismembered, and have not acquired control over the “I” principle, and tend to identify with one and then the other.

The more you see the pattern, or picture, the more you can see the ascending scale.  It is greater to follow a cause than a personal love.  A cause has less of self in it….. Causes, good and bad, for which men make the supreme sacrifice.

We are working with a pattern.  We are working above the level of crowd psychology.  We must throw out political causes, national causes.

Come back via the word integrity.  Here we all are souls in various stages of evolution, developing first blindly, circumstances.  Later beginning to see.  Then, more or less slowly or rapidly, according to what we do, we begin to understand what it is about, and put ourselves on the way.  In getting our evolution we are also building up our school house, our earth.  In do that, we are living with the muddle of the other souls, benighted or determined, sincere or sly, full of guile or full of wise purpose.

No one can find the solution.  A few souls, moving up from time to time, complete their schooling.  They may or may not leave the imprints of what they have learned on the earth.  If they do, the earth profits that much.  The mass must still be his schoolhouse, laws and administration of each living with the other.  In that, there are opportunities without number to try, and experiment, set up and destroy, and that is what we are doing.  But that mass movement, by the millions, is not what we are studying in the class.  We are trying to get a little more immediate picture as it may concern you.  In that closer picture we must discard the illustrations that belong to the world.  Another example of conflicts between loves: namely, that strange phenomenon when one person loves another intensely, or so it seems, and the other person does not respond at all.  Another great test on love would help you on that.  One of them is Plato’s Symposium, and the other, Dante’s Banquet.  Some of it is on the occult side of love.

(From Plato) Love is something which seeks completion.  The struggle between plenty and want is the struggle of love.  (Here MBM quoted from Plato’s reference to the god of want and the god of plenty.) That is why sometimes someone loves earnestly and it is not returned.  Has to do with sympathetic magic.  It may be that one person has a need – is like our god of want, and finds without knowing what it is, in the magnetic aura of the other person, something that is a plenty, for which they have a want.  And the attraction toward that is the so-called love.  The other may have no want.  The want is a certain condition within the field of magnetism.

This allegory applies to all the levels.  It scales right on up to the ultimate love.  Want and plenty.  In the earlier case it may be something wanted within the aura of an individual person.  Later it may be something that the soul needs or the mind needs.  That is the reason for the Quest of the Good.

Question: The why can God love man?  It suggests that in the relation to man there is quite something else.  On the other hand, until the pattern is fulfilled, till the completion,”the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth awaiting….”  There is a pull, to pull it back.  But it must be transformed and grown.  The occult 1aws do not work simply.

Love is the force between the two.  Life is just that which consists also in between – in the relationship.  You have the extraordinary parallel between life and love.  Love is that which is in between the two gods (want and plenty.)  A quotation from the Hermetic: “It is just in the relationship that life consists.”  It is across the gap that the spark leaps and manifestation takes place.

Presently they arrive at this:  that the love for the Good is the end towards which life is striving – or love is striving.  All other loves are preliminary.  Dante says much the same.  Love is not a thing quickly obtained.  They do not mean the quickly recognized and sensed, love between the sexes or persons, or even on behalf of a cause; but something else.

This leads up to mysticism.  Because the mystic shows such intense love.  There is vast experience and drive in the evolution of soul.  Predestined by the causes and experiences of the past, over lives.  It is under the natural law.  Given a desired end, the scientist of the spirit can set about to accomplish it as well as the scientists of industrial research.  That is something which the average mystic, or religionist, is loath to accept.

So that, if you desire to develop the love of the Larger, or of God, or any other name, it is possible to you; but it won’t do with a 10% to a 15% desire.  You must be systematic and proposive in what you do.  You can unfold that love of the Larger in yourself.

How is it done?  Food has a great deal to do with it.  The food of the one who would develop such love must be selected and maintained.  The physical, emotional and mental has to be watched.  Sustaining the process.  The end is as assured as anything the scientist can offer.  The rub is, you may have only a 10% desire.  The things that belong to the Larger functioning are more accurate in their functioning.  And love is an accurate force.

In the Piscean Age, love has been seen, and felt, as a kind of all-pervading influence which no one could know much about.  Many today are still Piscean in their approach.  It is a fact that love can be controlled and directed and in truth (?) the symposium, the things which Socrates says, are part of the method of building up that love.  The power of sustaining something that you undertake has to be disciplined and controlled. Accelerated evolution.

“Love your enemies.”  (Why?) Because you begin to understand what people are.  Begin to understand their dilemmas, the heartaches and frustrations they have as well as you have.  The more you know of evolution and the whole Pattern, the more your original kindness or tolerance grows.

If you are in the world you must act according to the morays the world lives by.  It experiences the evil.  You must fight the evil.  It will be many millennia before the earth is through with that fighting.  But through those battles it is profiting.  Moving side to side.  We are still under it.

Has everyone the capacity for great love?  Here we come to a paradox.  Man has the power of that great love in the same sense that the young tree has the fruit.  Every being has the capacity for the great love associated with the questions of mysticism but he may not yet have reached the stature where that fruit can be manifest.  As we understand, we can speed up that development.

From the point of view of mystery love, the concept, is the greatest mystery in the universe.  In the mystic and gnostic literature, especially in some of Mead’s writing on Hellenistic lore, wisdom is equated with love.  Then the Trinity is Will, Wisdom, Action.  That is the name of the Holy Family.  The ideal pattern, in which the force is the active one and has its own place in the trilogy.  It is therefore Father with Mother, Activity and Son, which is the manifestation – as action in earth is necessary.

Love has also been called the separator.  And, by the same token, the uniter. Love must be the separator until love has reached the culmination of the movement up through the octaves.

(The meaning of Gnosis in the higher forms of Hellenistic religion.  See “Quests Old and New”, GRS Mead.)

Love is a great agent in the process of at-one-ing, or ascension, or evolution.  And clearly it is an antidote to the process of dismemberment.  The in-gathering.  For the Goal has begun to draw the scattered groups, or fragments, which, because of that, are drawn up and in, to begin the ascent.  The cultivation of the love of wisdom is the agent for atonement.  Sex and companionship, a humble analogy, of what is done between the self and the Great Self.  Man in time and man in eternity.  In that sense, love is seen in the mystical magic of great writers.

Love as separator:  The lesser loves in the lower octave have, in the planetary scheme of things, the role to be separators.  Because they work for the widening of experience and the scattering of the root system.  And it is the great Love that pulls them out.  But the lesser loves scatter them.  The humbler loves work for dismemberment, which has its place in the scheme of things.

______________

The question of frustration.  What has esoteric science to say about frustration?  (Answer) We must remind ourselves that the earth is full of souls in all degrees of evolution.  That therefore there is enormous irregularity and unevenness in the quality of love.  It is the friction between the loves, incidentally of people, who are at different levels of evolution, which causes a great deal of the turmoil in the world.  We are all in the Red Brick Schoolhouse.  If 100 or 1,000 seek to accomplish something that they consider good, it may not really be good for the rest of humanity.

That brings in the democratic theory of government.  That theory has a place in the working out of the long evolution of this planet, that it gives a choice and a determination, more or less, as to which policy shall obtain.  Those who do not profit so much by that policy are, under the democratic system, supposed to yield their preference therefore in the whole evolution of our planet, this choice is good.  Certain principles and ideas that are good are going to be frustrated, because this planet is working out for millions of souls, not just you and me.  What may be good for us may not be good for others.  Graded schools now replace the red brick school house.  There are many classes instead of one room.

At present the world is like the red brick school house in that all of us are still living together in one room.  We are just discovering that it is one room.  There is not yet the planetary perspective that sees and knows ……  what corresponds with the great (grade) school.  The things that you, or someone else, thinks are good, may not be picked up by the heavenly agency, if it is not in the scheme of things for that particular pattern.  Like the picking up of iron filings.  We are here in earth for the benefit of the school and ourselves.  A complicated question.  Therefore our efforts for good do not invalidate them as being good but they may not be able to be assembled in the whole.  So the frustration is apparent, it is not real.

Folks are frustrated in education, invention, and many other ways.  May not be in step with their environment.  It does not mean that the thing for which they are working won’t come to pass.  All the great influences were frustrated in the beginning.  Philosophy, inventions, discovery, teachers. The individuals were frustrated, but the seed continued.  The crucifixion of Jesus.  The stopping of Pythagoras.  Yet the influence goes on.  Be careful in speaking of frustration.  It should not be in terms of our personal selves, or someone else’s, but of the idea.  If it is a good idea it will go on.  But it may not be that the one who started it, nor the one who carries it on.  Plato carried on for Socrates.

We come to this strange thing, that as we come to the development of the self, we must work for the good of humanity.  And that the thing is reciprocal.  No one is tolerated who does not bring in his season good fruit.  The judge of the fruit is the evolving life, or wisdom lore.

Re Walt Whitman.  His vast outgoing capacity for love.  Illustrates how love growing out,(or going out,) each candle lights another, and the first does not grow less.  So the exercise of love, the expression of love, manifests the endless capacity of love.  As far as man’s power of measuring is concerned it is (or has) no measuring capacity.  It is beyond it.  The richness of his outpouring.

Wisdom is the outpouring from above down.  Not earth wisdom, like Walt Whitman had, but outpouring as given by the great Teachers.  Whitman could love much and lustily everything that came his way.  (Mind gradually leads.)  The intellectual love has not any real integrity.

January 31, 1946

DISCUSSION OF THE THREE CATEGORIES OF WISDOM LORE.

Where, generally speaking, it is to be found.  In what it consists.

Here MBM made a reference to the Three Categories of all knowledge.  See diagram in “Living”.

Ninety-nine percent (of knowledge among men) is that which is collected by man over the ages.  Organized knowledge.  Works from below up. The second category (of all knowledge) is the category of knowledge that comes from above down.  The wisdom teachings are brought to earth by the Messengers, by the Teachers.  Who are the Teachers?  Those who are sent, out of the Larger pattern, to earth to bring down various forms of knowledge, as it is from time to time desirable.

Why given to these people?  Because these Teachers are able to either keep, or recover, their knowledge of other states, so that they become links in the chain between the higher planes and earth.  They are advanced beings who, like all men, lose their knowledge of higher planes, but regain it.  Various circumstances.  When they regain it they become the link between the knowledge which they have, or have had, and the particular message which they are to bring down to earth.

All Teachers have not brought the same message.  Because it is a slow and vastly unfolding process.  Other folk do not recover memories, nor are they trained so that they could do it.  The Teachers are chosen because they can do this thing.  Then there are others, who pass it on.  There are still others who talk about it and repeat.  Others who just make noises and do not know what they are saying, all stages.

The Teachers have brought down, in turn, three kinds of knowledge, or three divisions of Wisdom-Teachings.  Why called Wisdom teachings?  Because it cannot be grasped by most people.  And because the majority do not want it.

The three categories of this wisdom, again, one branch which humanity knows not about, and that which it learns through its so-called religious teachers, but usually through a creed of that particular tradition.  The third part of this wisdom teaching is the story of how man shall be saved, the way of ascension.  Churches do not speak much about that.  If you will look at it critically, the bulk of what is taught is a system of conduct, morals.  How to behave, and what to do, and what not to do.  Those magnificent words of Paul regarding love are primarily in reference to conduct, but nowhere in wisdom lore is it said that kindness and lovingness shall win salvation.  But the things of which Paul seeks when he analyzes love are concomitants on the way of development.

The third part of Wisdom Lore, therefore, talks about the Way of Ascent, but only incidentally, in the terms of behavior.  That belongs to the lower levels.  Then you have assimilated that.

The first category relates to how things were started, manifestation, Creation, cosmogonies, the Creation of Worlds, manifestation. The ordinary person does not know anything about that, and does not want to ask.  The questions which interest you are just before you, what you are reaching to.  According to your size and so will be the kind of knowledge you seek.  Relatively few seek much knowledge about the beginning of things.  All that went into beginnings, the strains and stresses, helpers, the opposition of one form of differentiation to another, the Rulers who were finally put in charge of different sections of Creation – all of this is a part of that first Category.

The second division:  stories that belong to the experience of involving humanity.  This is the briefest of the three divisions.  There are nevertheless in all great Scriptures stories about the descent.  There are only a few that are anyways related to the sternness of the Hebraic.  All race teachings have the story of the descent.  There is not much said about it because descent does not involve as much either as Creation, or as the growth of the seeds which human beings are.  The planting of the seed is brief as compared to the growth.

Stories of the descent are found in the Egyptian tradition, the Greek, the Babylonian and others.  Prometheus steals the fire – the higher teachings.  That makes of him a god.  Until then he is chained to a rock – to earthly conditions.  The liver, eaten by the vulture, is desire.

Norse tradition: Balder who is shot by Hodr, who is persuaded by Loki.  (Hodr is the blind god.)  The blindness in the Garden of Eden.  The penalties they will have to pay for going down.

Babylonian: the story of Ishtar’s descent.  None of these stories are long.  In the Greek, the story of the release of Persephone is longer.  Ceres aids her release.  She symbolizes spirit, mind.  The soul is masculine in some traditions, feminine in others.  It is both.

The third phase is the way of return.  How to get out of this earth into which we descended.  In wisdom lore it is known that this is not done by the death of the physical, but by many things.  That it is more complicated than love, is seen by the twelve labors of Hercules.  Any one of them makes a demand for skill, power, persistence, techniques – everyone of them.  In Egypt, the “twelve hours of the night”.  The period of darkness.  Man has not yet reached the Light, meaning the higher worlds.  Or, there is the story of the twelve Pylons, through which, progressively, the soul must travel.

An illustration of short-sightedness is the treatment of atonement (at-one-ment).  (wisdom teachings).  Upsets the idea of being good and kind as the way of atonement.  Or the Christian doctrine that Jesus did what he did for our vicarious salvation.  Aspiration.  The idea of trance condition of the Hindus.  Also the breaking of the hold of the wheel of life.  Having extended consciousness, and not doing anything about it.  (The implication of this paragraph is that there were illusory ideas about atonement, and the way to it, among many peoples, ed.)  Each division is complex.  On the way up you could not go by a train, or plane, or by auto that would get you there.  You, yourself, have to know what is required on the different stages of your journey.  That is one of the magnificent things about the “Twelve Hours of the Night” of the Egyptians.  You have to know the typography, to measure your strength to go through them.

Where can Wisdom Lore be found?  The great Wisdom Lore, of course, is never written.  It is still given to those who are ready for it by word of mouth.  But there is a vast amount of Wisdom Lore that is written, and the word that is generally used for it is bible.  It comes from the word papyrus.  It means the book.  So the book.

After a Teacher has been in earth, that teaching may not become recorded.  It may be kept by word of mouth till much later.  The Older and the Younger Eddas were not recorded till the tenth and thirteenth century, but go back far, and are connected with a lore that was pre-Flood.  There is a vast amount of unwritten lore.  There is also a vast amount of written lore that has not yet been translated from ancient texts.  Little market for it, or pay for it.

Most races have bibles.  What about the Greek?  (Why don’t we start off from 6,000 years ago.  For many reasons.  One of the most interesting is that the further humanity is developed with its equipment of technical machinery, communications, etc., the more likely any teaching getting out will be garbled.  In the past, those texts were relatively protected.  Only a few could read them.  Also, they were more venerated.  Also, broadly speaking, we have the bibles of only two great eras.  We haven’t many texts that go back more than five or six thousand years.  Therefore, the Teachers of these last years are the ones most available to the present time.  They throw a light, not only backward, but forward.  The Flood marks the difference between the old era and ours).

The Great Flood wiped out a great part of the Civilization of the earth.  There is available to outer knowledge very little of that which preceded it.  The sinking of a great continent.  It threw the weight of the earth out of its old plumb.  Shifted the pole, so that the lands that were previously under the temperate climate became increasingly chilly and are now the polar regions.  That is why there is oil up north. Forests just adjacent to the South Pole.  Fresh water lakes, etc.  What the teachings of that period are is not outwardly available.  But it is available to those who know how to develop and go for it.

The teachings out of the bibles of the world are not too old.  They come from virtually all the great races we have known in the last six thousand years.  Not much written in Greece except through the later philosopher and earlier writers like Hesiod and Homer.  The myths were as genuinely the bible of the Greeks as the Old Testament and the New Testament for the Jew and Christian.

In popular language, mythology does not mean much.  But the Greek myths are as genuinely facts as any in the Old Testament.

One other kind of bible preceded the myths and the written bibles – the Great Pyramid of Egypt at Gizeh.  Because it contains, for those who can decipher it, not only cosmogony but also the way of ascent.  Much about Creation as it relates to the earth and evolution, or ascent.  It is often called the great scripture in stone.  It cannot be changed much.  It is there.  Written scriptures can be, and are, changed, as any scholar of old texts can tell you.

Another division of wisdom lore:  Epics, and sagas of all races.  A saying, usually, of strong heroic figures, together with the story of the peoples among whom the heroes lived.  The role of the heroes.  Contribution of those who are learning, or who demonstrate, something of the nature of the return.  Hence, the labors of Hercules are an epic or a saga.  The Odyssey, the Gilgamesh saga, the story of Jason, the story of Osiris – stories based partially on the lives of some hero who was in the flesh, and embellished with the ideas of those who told them.   Here is something we need to watch.  If those who told the stories do not know their value from the wisdom side of things, they will build up much extraneous material.  The life of the Teacher has been used as an example of what takes place, how to go the way back.  In the wisdom tradition, there are heroes and hero-gods – ways of achieving victory.

The story of Osiris is built upon a fact.  Osiris, like some others, was slain, and torn apart, in the flesh.  His story lends itself to the description of what occurs to the soul.  The soul, because down into the earth is dismembered.  In the story of Osiris, it was not a physical fact that was meant.  In the story, parts of his body are carried to different nomes in ancient Egypt.  All claimed a part.  The whole land was set up on some of the cosmic pattern.  Isis, who was a queen in the flesh, began to search for these pieces.  She assembles them.

The casket of Osiris grows up in the inside of a tree.  Could not have taken place literally.  But typical of the way wisdom is wrapped around basic stories.  Basically right.  The same thing has occurred in the life of Jesus.  We are in the time of seeing the mythesizing of that life.  Certain facts are there, but ideas are added, the idea of people project on the central idea.  Some are right, some wrong.

The example of the epic of Ramayama in India.  His story becomes the story of mind and soul.  Sita.  Ramayama was 14 yrs. in the jungle.  Number symbolism.  Redemption of the soul by the hero.  It is only the one who is advanced who does that, and writes it in a dramatic way.

There are many epics and sagas among all people.  They are written by those who are drawn to them.  These are not the real bible.  Below that another strata, which also contains particles, crumbs from the banquet table of wisdom – records like some of the great fairy stories, some folk lore, which speak in the vernacular of the multitude: Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Three Golden Hairs, the Seven Ruffians, the Twelve Brothers.  Universally known.  Because the Teachers taught the same idea, crystallized that way, like the snow-flake, but in the language of the people.  The stories appeal.  Will end right.  Comforting.  Carry the idea of some of the things necessary to accomplish in order to make the return.  Telling of the complications that are necessary.  Also, some remnant of things mixed up with a frightful amount of superstition and fears.  Nevertheless, some gold and nuggets in folk lore.

Levels, or ways, in which any text can be read.  Factual, allegorical, moral, mystical.  Egyptian: hieroglyphic means sacred or hidden writing.  Allegorical, requires a knowledge of symbolism.  You must know the particular code in which it is written.  First, the outer form, then you work into it from there.

Why higher teachings are unwritten.  They call for developed faculties.  Teachings beyond the allegorical.  These faculties must be evoked, developed.  No text can do that.  More life in it that way, too.  “Like is known to like alone.”  The higher you go, the higher the subtlties required.  “Spiritual things are spiritually known.”  (In answer to a question about mystical experience)  Mystical experience may come along in very early stages of the evolution or ascent of the self.  A kind of prodding, or stimulus to the unfolding.  But it is not the ascent itself.  All degrees of mystical experience, all shades, all variations.  Implies a human stage, in which the heart is still very important.

The difference between psychic and mystical experience.  Contact with the metaphysical, an entity in some other plane, does not necessarily involve a stirring of the depths of ones own being with the perception of a new meaning.  They are really quite far apart (psychic and mystical).  One is operative, the other need not be, any more than a telephone conversation.

What role does symbolism have in reference to the sacred scriptures?  You must understand symbolism to understand scriptures.  Because they speak of things beyond the physical, that cannot be described in factual ways.  They undertake to tell you something about what is larger than this world.  So cannot be described by anything in this world, but can be indicated by certain likenesses.  So symbolism is inevitably the language of wisdom lore.  It is inductive.  Works by comparison, intimations, suggestions.  It takes a certain conditioning of the mind to lay hold of it.  Then you can begin to know things outside this plane as well as in it.  Unless you have developed your own stature so you can function outside this plane.

………

The balance of this talk of MBM relates to the various symbols intertwined with the capital letters in the motto or text of Pojodag on the wall of the school which reads as follows:

     Seekest thou for God, then seekest thou the Good.

     One is the Path to It – the Joining of Devotion and Gnosis.

There are few statements as inclusive, in simple words.  The capital S has the caduceus.  The S indicates the beginning, the caduceus represents descent and ascent.  The serpent being the symbol of the path of descending energy, moves in curves, and stays (?) that way unless wrapped around a basic idea, the spinal column, budding in the head.  The rod of Aaron.  That with which the seeker starts.  The spine, the essence of being.  It is erect.

Symbols in the G of God.  The wheel.  In it, the center from which radiation goes out.  The symbol of the Creative God.  Lays hold of the spine allotted to him for creation.  Many gods as well as one God.  The Creator God.  Symbol as Will, radiating out to the periphery, enclosure in which to manifest the Good.  The serpent rests on the solar disk.  Three outpourings of life.  The archetypal disks in the first capital G.  For the one radiation.  But now it is in manifestation.  The solar serpent, which means so much in esoteric lore, resting upon that solar disk.  The ellipse, the path of the sun, power of the sun.  Manifest through three outpourings.

 

One is the Path:  As ankh cross.  T with the letter 0.  The symbol of the eternal syzygy.  Masc. and feminine, one, and yet two;  in continuous operation; balanced operation.  There has to be the double activity, masculine and feminine, reproductive and manifest, producing and father (?) making way – that is requisite for the beginning of the Path.  The second alone is talking about it.

Path:  The Tat.  Egyptian symbol of the four sections of the vertebrae.  Back to the symbol of the serpent, and the path of that serpent force, ever upward, but now compacted for man in the symbol of the four: earth, water, fire, air; set up in their proper relationship.  Horus on top (of Tat)  Represents power.  To put those four, well developed, in that position means power.  And you have to have power to go on the Path.  Exceeds (?) the travel on the Path.

It: Refers to the Good and God.  The winged disk represents the powers of the higher life – all that is implied in the word     , or Mind.  Also represents immortality and eternity.  Egypt would call it Duration.

 

Devotion:  The bull with three flames.  Symbol of the will, offering the bull (or over the bull).  Known to all places in earth, wherever a great sacred ritual was practiced.  The three flames have certain likenesses to the Three Gifts of the Magi, which belong to body, heart and mind.  The devotion of the three.  You can’t be devoted with your heart alone, and go on the Path.  You can’t be searching with your mind, and go on the Path. In this path you have to go with the three.  Devotion of body, of heart and of mind.  The upper part of the three Ladders, or a reaching toward it.  Also of the eight seedlets.  Devotion in this is not seen as a yearning of the heart or desire, but you must keep in mind the previous things: masculine-feminine, – the determined outgoing and the feminine, which is the bearer of the fruit; the maturing of it.  Make a sum in arithmetic.

Gnosis:  The Two Eyes (these appear also above the Tat.)  If you have assembled the three parts of Wisdom-lore you have changed your being – see into heaven and earth.  Masterhood.  The Two Eyes of Horus.  In the beginning Horus is made blind.  The pig makes him blind.  Ra determines it.  He is to look at the pig.  He feels the pain in his eye.  Becomes blind to the higher planes.  He travels.  The epic and myths of Horus.  He wins the Two Eyes – the one that can look into heaven and (the one) into earth.  Gnosis.

 

Scarab:  Not the same as the sun disk.  The sun disk: the power of pure mind, or Gnosis.  Scarab: the being who is going through the process of regeneration, re-birth.  There refers usually, but not always, to some stage of man’s development.  Also the symbol of Kiepura, of the Creator God.  Symbol of rebirth.

Feb. 7, 1946

Trinities, Cosmogonies, Norse tradition, Hindu, etc.

Question: Are there scriptures that do not contain great truths?  Yes.  The Canon that has been established, the accepted texts, include texts which do not contain truths.  Same for the Hindu, Buddhist, Persian and others.  Those texts which do not contain truths are much as Numbers and Deuteronomy in the old Scriptures – things that were local, belonged to mores and customs – disciplines of that particular people.  They have no true value, permanent value.  Have local value; and then should be in the wastebasket.  Also (the case) in the Vedas, the Zend Avestas.  In fact, if you were going to go through the books – either the sacred texts of the East or the mythology of all races, you would find an enormous amount that even you who are not very skilled could detect as questionable.  Sometimes mere superstition, added to customs.

Truths vs facts   What do we mean by truths?  In philosophic study, words are allocated to various departments.  Facts belong to this plane.  Those realities which belong to the world of nous……..truths.  Whereas the things that belong to the phenomenal world, or the lower world, – physical and psychic, – are phenomena,  They are meant to be changeable.  Truths are those presentations of eternal realities.

Trinities   What is meant by Trinity?  What does Trinity mean?  Dictionary definition: the concept of Deity of three Persons in One Godhead.  That is primarily Christian.  It would be useful to look into other trinities.

Another question, related to this one: Would you be willing to say that it is so important to know these things that belong to the three parts of Wisdom-lore?  Ans by MBM:  It helps the longer career.  Humanity is too absorbed in three-dimensional things.  Attention is too much on the short range.  Think of those who do not know anything beyond the material world as living on an island, or in a province – and becoming provincials, – of the country: connotation of ignorant, limited.  In the same sense, it is important that we are no longer cut off from the larger vision of things.  The larger vision provides an exercise in stretching the mind to concepts beyond those of the immediate.  As a gymnasium, it is wonderful.  As a force that gradually opens up your own higher mind, it is powerful.  There is nothing quite like it.  The work of the mind has a power that nothing else has.  So the value of knowing anything that belongs to those three divisions of Wisdom-Lore is like ceasing to be a provincial, to become cosmopolitan.

Trinities, continued Q: Out of what does the basis of the Trinity arise?  Ans: Out of the study of cosmogony.  The Trinity, first of all, is seen in two ways: in what we call the equilateral triangle, where the three aspects are alike.  The Christian teachings have tried to make three persons alike in their Trinity, which won’t work – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or Father, Mother and Son.  Won’t be reduced to a triangle, (equilateral?)

A little later, – or earlier, from one point of view, because it came in the Greek tradition, Plotinus also tried to work with that concept of the Trinity, and he struggled with the Good, the True and the Beautiful, as the three equilateral sides of the Trinity.

No thing in the Beginning.  The state before manifestation is the Unknown, but the Will that appears, to operate on that Unknown is the Will that is masculine, and is very often called the First Father.  That upon which it works, with the knowledge and experience of the past on Cosmic levels, usually called Wisdom, is seen as the Mother; and the result, the Son.

The Trinity, the true Trinity, is what, in occult language, is called the Holy Family, or the Whole-Making Family: Father, Mother, Son.  That Trinity had appeared in all cosmogonies.  The Father, as in the picture in earth, recedes.  The work of the Father is done in determining the issue.  Then comes the long, germinating, productive work of the mother; and then the manifestation of the son.  This is not a triangle.  In a trinity, that is the same (equilateral?)  It is associated with the famous 3,4,5 triangle, associated with Pythagoras.  And, seeing the numerical secret hidden (he) called it the mystical symbol of Creation.

That Trinity is the productive trinity.  From another point of view, there is no trinity that is equilateral.  But men projected.  The Good, the True, the Beautiful, are not an equilateral triangle.  They are the nature of the qualities that go to make the Ultimate.  But because they are the supreme things that man sees, he is building a trinity on them.

In the data of trinities you will see on the sheet on the curtain a number of illustrations of various traditions.  Stories of the time (s?) before the beginning.  Three texts on the bulletin board.  Considerable space given to what they were not (or there were not).  The “not-ness” or “no thing” is then followed by three Beings, three gods.  And those three gods reappear on different levels within different octaves of manifestation.    ….Vele, Ve and Odin in the Norse tradition.  Note that it is Odin of whom you hear in the lore.  The other two gods fade out.

Note that there were three gods in the Greek tradition.  One you hear much about, and two very little.  Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto.  In the Mesopotamian schemology: Abub (?)*, Tiamat, Mumu – the Great Deep, the Primordial Substance and the Great Darkness.  Anu, Enlil, Ea.  In the Egyptian: Nut, Shu, Seb.  In India, three or four triads.  You probably know most about Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.

In the Buddhist scriptures this three-ness is given a peculiar variation.  Buddha, the Teacher.  Dharma is word, or law; Sanga is order….. The Father, to Gautama (?); that the word, or law, he has written is his mother; and the activity that follows is the order of monks.

Son  Invariably the emphasis is on the son that is closest to humanity.  Wherever there is productivity there must be something that corresponds to the Will, or Determination; something to the experience, or knowledge; and something to the result.  That is father, mother, son.  There is not a thing that you do that is productive that does not involve that trinity.  An underlying, invisible principle.  But there are many, many derivatives from that primary teaching, that made Pythagoras say Eureka!      that began to unfold in his concept.  All derived from father, mother, son.

That is the Trinity.  It is implied whenever you do anything productive, no matter what it is.  If the wish is powerful and becomes determination it links up with the sets of circumstances, or experience, or knowledge – all that you can bring to bear upon it, and you mate with that.  We “mate” all the while.  Sometimes not effectively.  Sometimes unworthily.  But if it is something worth while, and your determination is strong, and your substance (?) experience supports it, something emerges.

That is the child.  It is the child for which the two precede.  Hence, the emphasis is always on the physical.  Not physical offspring.  That is simply the outermost illustration of this great trinity.  A great concept like this is never limited to anything like bodies.

Son is five.  Then you understand why the son, in the famous Pythagorean triangle, is five.  The activity for which the other two are there.  Having accomplished that, like some of the animal forms, they just die; their part is done; they fade out.

Trinity in each of us.  This teaching of the trinity is a very powerful one.  To lay hold of it, and to practice it consciously, is very beneficial.  It helps to make you know what in you is father; to understand, or know, what you are doing.  The all-seeing eye still watches over what the mother in you is doing.

Question re Holy spirit and Son.  Answer  The churches are not clear (on this.)  Later the Roman Church did, on the whole, a wise thing, following the Pattern.  It made Mary the Mother: God the Father; Mary the Mother; Jesus the Son.  Then they had a veridical trinity.  The other was not.  Fuzzy.  The “Spirit” that will guide, or true Wisdom, is not part of the Trinity.  Some other lore would call it Hermes, or Thoth.

Wisdom is sometimes masculine and sometimes feminine.  All the great planes have in them masculine and feminine.  According to what is emphasized, it is either masculine or feminine.  If that Wisdom is active it is masculine.

Desire and will.   Desire….intelligence.  Desire becomes selective.  Determination follows for what is proven best, not just what is desired.  What man, mind, finds good is permanently good, provided mind is intelligence, not prejudice.  That determination eventually becomes will.

…………

A cosmogony;  To help you stretch your minds and see, behind names, great forces at work.  (Will discuss the Greek a bit this evg.)  Then perhaps next time do the same thing with a great legend or saga, until we have gathered something of the different traditions.

Unwritten, – not in a book, the one I will use.  It is a cosmogony in that it tells the story of beginnings.  I want to make you able to revere the tremendous grasp of minds long ago.

     From the Greek mythos – texts in Hesiod, Homer, Pharisides, Ovid.  Also later writers who quoted from books of the past, now lost.  Outline that will help you to see that there were great teachings in the past.  From the Orphic tradition – an old Teacher, from whom developed the Orphic tradition.

The Cosmos moves from one Day of Creation to another Day of Creation.  The way Great Mind works, seen from beginnings, – with mind.  Man moves from below up, and advances, but not Cosmic Mind.  It is full, complete, rich, has power.  So that the Darkness of this is not like anything we know.  It does not come out of the kind of thing from which we begin.  We begin at the opposite end of the pole.  Man starts from the beginning, – from a little, and grows.  As his body does, his heart, his mind.  Whereas Deity, or Cosmic Mind, or the Force that is behind Creation, does not work that way.  You cannot even premise that, because a majestic Creation cannot come out of an ignorance that is just coming into the beginnings of understanding.

With a Cosmic, you are actually working from the opposite end.  We are moving up, and this is coming down.  The great Cosmic Mind is coming again into active manifestation. And the beginning of the Cosmic Day is like an awakening; but not       in which the previous Day was a zero, or a darkness, or a negation.  That primordial Darkness is not like our earth darkness.  It is a darkness in reference to non-manifestation.  The offspring of Erebus and Nox is celestial Manifestation.

All manifestation is a limitation:  “The whole Creation travails, awaiting the becoming of the sons of God.”

Heaven works upon substance.  That is really what Heaven is.

You do not hear much of the Titans.  Chronus and Hephestus (?) you hear most about.  Symbolize forces, – and also the Beings who are controlling them.

Cronus and Rhea   Chronus        re-formation of worlds where (?) the substance begins to solidify.  Represents the “time” state of things.  But not our kind of time.  Vast ages.  Rhea, his counterpart.  Is a portion of the substance, earth, which then is localized to our earth.

 

Jupiter  Chronus “swallows his children”, except Jupiter.  Time gives birth to certain processes, – and again consumes them.  Jupiter, Climax of this stage of the beginning of the lower world.  When this stage emerged, then the other processes were able to come into functioning.  After the “swallowing”.  Jupiter rebels.  War of the Titans:  war between the substance and the idea.  Always.  A constant drawing down and building up.  The two forces are at the opposite ends of things.

Atlas, the space between heaven and earth .

As a further result of that war, because Jupiter released these forces, Cyclopses.and Hundered Handed helped to fight the giants.  Result was that the giantswere pushed off and away.  As a result, the division of the regions that belong to our earth.  And now the three kingdoms: the lower heavens, not the celestial regions. Heaven, Jupiter; Neptune, the god of the great sea; Pluto, the underworld, our earth plane.  A territory still below, like Hades.

Cosmogonies come from above down.  Given by the Teachers.

The forms which men wear did come out of the seas and the rivers and from the trees.

Then the story of Prometheus.  The forms come from below up.   …Pattern man.  The ideal image.  The perfect pattern.  The fire that was stolen was the seed of nous – the seed of the ability to become as a god; attain (?) the status of the gods on Olympus, as in the language of the myth.  Prometheus has that which brings the higher factors into man.  The animal has the physical, etheric and psychic.  Man has the ability to bring all these up further, because he has mind.  That is the fire.  It is the only one worth having.  The others are preliminary.  “In the sweat of thy brow” – all the suffering.

     The vulture eats the liver of prometheus.  The vulture, a sacred bird.  Eats it,     In the daytime the liver grows again – the desire world.  “Every day, every night” are a lifetime in the allegory of the life of Prometheus.  So, with the digestion and assimilation of the values of desire comes another manifestation in the individual life.  The desire grows again in the night, when the consciousness is not there.  In the daytime, in the enlightenment, the vulture eats up the desire.

Hermes. Magi  A few things quickly about some of the activities of Zeus as father, – male.  The origin of Hermes.  An exquisite logic underlying these stories.

Zeus and Maya, the daughter of Atlas.  If Atlas is the space between heaven and earth – mind as the ladder to be filled in between heaven and earth – then you can see why Hermes is the son of Maya, the daughter of Atlas, who holds up the sky.  Therefore Hermes, or mind tradition is the tradition of spanning the gap between earth and heaven.  Hermes, the mediator, the leader of souls.

Vulcan.  Hephestus, or Vulcan.  Son of Zeus and Hera; or Jupiter and Juno.  Hephestus-Vulcan, the great artificer.  He is the shaper of things between heaven and earth.  He is the one who builds for the gods.  Chariots.  Said to be lame.  Why?  Because all (?) manifestation is limited.

Athena “out of the head of Zeus.”, with armor on.  She is the symbol of Wisdom, on the feminine side, the mother side.  It is that wisdom which watches over, or relates itself, to all that Zeus is to do.

Venus.   Two stories about Venus.  Hesiod says she is as (?) foam born.  Homer says she is born of Zeus and Dione, a goddess of the earth.  Venus is according to what level you take Venus on.  Is born of earth, if you take it on the lower level; foam, if you take it on a higher.  Both are true.

Apollo.   Associated with the sun.  Son of Zeus and Diana, the moon.  So the son comes after the moon.

Cosmogonies , in and through names, and the offspring of personified forces, give you the clue to something of the immense stages before the beginning of man.  Most people are so provincial that they are interested only in man – in fact only in themselves and their own little circle.  Stretching of the mind……until it becomes cosmopolitan.

It is not all done.  If there is any value of knowing anything outside your little apartment there is value in relating yourself to that which is outside your immediate.

Feb. 14, 1946

War, Communism, Democracy, World Organization

(after definition of an instinct.)

Is war instinctive.  Definition: A driving force that is coming from below the threshold of consciousness.  There is disagreement as to the number and nature of instincts.  All agree that pugnacity is an instinct.  Huxley says that pugnacity can be instigated and leads to war.  Self-preservation.  Therefore it is right.  There are two kinds of meek.  There is such a thing as yielding your life in weakness, – and in strength.  One purposive; one passive.  Degrees of giving it up in strength and understanding.

Pugnacity has been stimulated to make the war.  Self-assertiveness wounded and the battle in the heart inflamed, until you are part of a tremendous force.  Huxley calls war: organized conflict on behalf of food.  Hunting (?) centers, power centers, etc.  If the sections that make for separation, like nations the war instinct will be overcome.  Supplemented by making the world available to as many as possible, without putting a premium upon them.  That would help partially.  It is only a partial answer.  People have not learned to think in terms of world organization.

What does esoteric teaching say about this?  It is a slow process to build the understanding of all peoples.  Integration of the Teachings of all the races.  As in our “Hours of Conciliation.”  Need of supplementing outer change by change in man himself.  Repressed energy, and the outlets.  Supplementing with various kinds of education and experience.  Security of another kind.

While we are all here on earth, attending class, getting experience, learning according to our volition and consciousness, we, nevertheless, must be active in taking part in things, whether or not they follow through to the desired goal.  It is too easy to go about your own business and ignore what is going on in the world . We all tend to do that Our job?  But that is not enough.  What are you doing in any of these directions that are mentioned?  Dharma is, again, according to the extent of your insight.  Your seeing is the moral equivalent of your action.

Freedom from attachment.  Look at all this from a higher level of attainment.  For those who have gone through the school, and have no desire, or attachment, to this world.  Can be attained.  Gautama worked out, specifically, a road to obtain that.  The four great truths of which Gautama speaks: the Way leading to the Path.  The way to overcome suffering . The Noble Eight-fold Path.  In this tradition, desire is emphasized as that which makes for attachment to the things of earth.  It is desire, of course, that leads to war.  To overcome desire is to free yourself from partaking in a war.  The example of Gautama, Jesus and every other Teacher.

     If you lift yourself beyond desire, you are still bound to aid those who are not so lifted.  That is the moral imperative category of action.  Illustrated in all Teachers.  No matter how freed they were, they were still active on behalf of those in the lower planes.

War fanned  It is true that, through ignorance and greed – all derived from desire – war is fanned by organized groups.  That world organization which breaks down, or replaces, separated groups by a single group, is a step in the right direction.  These other suggestions: education, esoteric lore and its understanding what the “school” is, continuity of life, the place of progression in the individual life and in the race life, – all belong to it, but none of them free you from action in reference to the situation. If you are freed you lift your weight from the earth, and are able to aid others.  You must first free yourself, so that you are able to free others.  Then it is not selfish but it is the progressive pattern of the individual.  We never go forward by masses, groups, races; only individually.

Freeing from fixation  The whole earth and the peoples on it are slowly moving forward in their education and development.  In the course of that there will be gigantic breakups of old forms.  Sometimes old literal things, like buildings, cities…..the places of beauty.  They are all meant to go, swept out by the floods of destruction.  We have this paradox: that while man rightly fights against war, war has nevertheless done him enormous good from time to time, and will continue to do so.  It is a rapid and ruthless destroyer, and only a ruthless destroyer can be rapid.  The other side of the picture.

Solution between communism and democracy.

If you make your way forward the way will open to that which is nearest to your heart.  But you must start with two legs.  Don’t tell.  Challenge to inquiry.  You know that the mind is the way out, not the heart.

(Answer to question)  From the point of view of scientific achievement man is moving on rapidly. ………There is presently a dead end to that.  By coming against that dead end man comes against a physical corrective, namely, that the survival of men is dependent on the non-misuse of the powers that are being tapped.  And we are not at the end of it with the present atomic bomb.  It will be realized increasingly that something has to be done for the sake of survival, or of the equivalent of civilization.  On another angle, something of the same is going forward when you go across from the Pacific to the Atlantic in a few hours; there is no longer a sense of separation.  Slowly it will dawn on men – it has not yet – that they recognize the import of that.

     If man won’t learn it from the profounder aspects he will learn it from the point of view of physical experience.  Therefore he is going to be forced, through his intelligence, presently, to accept that the world is to be organized as a mighty organization – that that is the only safety.  There will be recalcitrant groups for years.  But that is not the higher mind.  Those are just some of the fruits of thinking further along the level of physical development.  Higher mind works with things of higher planes, not the etheric or psychic.

Higher mind development  We will presently be through with telephones and psychic communication, except as we have some occasion for them.  It will serve its day.  Will be replaced by something else.  Just as, in the physical world at the present time, what we do serves or injures the coming generation, so what the present generation does in reference to world affairs will benefit or injure that which comes later.  If it is not solved now, the examination comes up later, until it is answered and the proper solution given.  We will have as many wars as is necessary until humanity has gotten the one worldperspective.  But that is not yet.  The higher mind (is) just planetary sense.

After the war there is a period of exhaustion.  You won’t find the effect now.  For, though we are at a rhythm they will prepare (?) on a little (of) that which is to be done later.  There are many workers in the earth, helping to set up that which belongs to the future.  In every country.  But they have to work with things as they are.  Need not be conscious.

     It might be interesting to make a list of those things that have gone out under the bridge.

     There are many levels on which to work: economic, that of esotericism, integrating religions, and others.

Question: What is meant by Cosmic?  Answer: That is according to who uses it.  To the astronomer it is one thing; to the philosopher or esoteric student, it is another.  From the dictionary: “Cosmic is the idea, or concept, of a universe which is in harmonious organization” that is, a physical Cosmos.  To the philosopher, or esoteric lore, it is different, and in most schools of mysticism.  Raise the physical definition up to the noumenal worlds.

     The philosopher knows the lower worlds are not perfect – trial and error for the gods as well as men, – and that they are changing.  That is not a harmonious, or organized, universe, except in a general sense.  The Cosmos which is in Universal Mind, that is the Cosmic region.  It is above anything that belongs to the human evolution. Just lift the idea of the astronomer’s interpretation, and that of the physicist, up to a higher octave.

Iron Ceiling  Boundary between the Cosmos and the lower worlds.  Has been called also the Great Firmament, Ring Pass Not.

     The Cosmic regions are the regions where the gods dwell.  The phenomenal world includes the physical, etheric and psychic, and lower mental planes.  They are below the Iron Ceiling.  They are meant to be.  Those who operate can make changes in the lower worlds.  Not errors in our human sense.  Species which are extinct.  Served their purpose.  Evolution (is?) on this side of the Ceiling.  Therefore slips, re cosmogonies of last week.

     The lower manifestation is at the place where Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto stay (?), – the regions assigned to them.  All those regions belong to the lower regions.  The things that we do not hear of, above, are still going on.  The three Titans that we hear about.  Our earth is not the measure of things.

 

Re the gods

There is no experience that does not add stature.  But their evolution is different from ours.

Movement twd. Cath.ch.    cosmogonies        winning the higher nature

sunspots                  involution         Hercules, Jason

human soul before body      evolution          process of evolution

shift in earth             epics, sagas        tale of Two Brothers

operators out of earth      hero               story of Jesus

Palestine                  canonization        Mahabarate of India

3 div. Wisdom-lore   focus for the people  Other subjects touched upon

Feb. 21, 1946

Catholic Church  Q. To what do you attribute the current influx into the Catholic Church of many prominent personages?  MBM:  First remember that at the roots of all of us is stirring a great hunger, which our ordinary way of life does not feed.  Ignores.  Henry Ford II, Luce, Heywood Broun, another Wagner.  Certain common denominators…..Example of a magnificent (?) incident.  Mgr. Sheen.  He himself is an artist.  He knows dramatic values in adding (?) to the power of the Catholic Church.  The Church and its pageantry, and its ability to cut right through the superficialities and appeal to the things that otherwise are ignored: the                                             streak of mysticism in people, the profound hunger for authorith.  Those are some of the things which are bound, under the guidance of a clever leader, to make inroads upon the consciousness of these people.  Perhaps scores of others.  For each one of these has either been a strong materialist, a practical worker, or an intellectual worker.  Both of those types, – in the subconscious of such types, is this hunger for the reverse. Together with something that is peculiar to this age, and which I think all these people have – a terrible mental and spiritual fatigue.

     The Catholic Church takes a responsibility.  It becomes the wise and final father. It has the answer to all things.  When you are in the army there is a part of you that can rest.  With that teaching at their finger tips the leaders of the Church can readily make converts of those who are tired of bearing the terrific burden of materialism and leadership.  A wonderful illustration of what can be done.  I hope it works to their good . The comfort with which this can put by certain problems.  Problems that are before you.  Over weeks and months they are indoctrinated.  The things that belong to pageantry, faith, mysticism, divine authority, so-called; and their role is relatively simple: to follow the dictates of the Church.  Receive absolution.  Must be superb (?) comfort and release to those who believe in it.  Pull of the heart.  Fatigue is great.  Especially in those who have spoken long and loud and actively on behalf of material and mental criteria as ultimates.  There must come sooner or later the abdication.  Compensatory way (?).  Until he can control both opposites.  That is the man on the Cross.

     The Catholic Church is an incident which belongs to the  age, – out of the age we are passing.  I will hazard something:  This is one of the several last upflings we are seeing now of the Roman Church.  I do not mean that the Teaching of Jesus is over.  Far from it.  I have an idea it will come to its own in the Aquarian Age, but in the sense of the organization, and power and teachings which belong to the faith side of things.  And there will always be children in physical bodies who will need that kind of thing.

     Movement toward the Church because everything else belongs to the physical plane, and everything in the material is so insecure.

1. Q. re “wars in the sun.” MBM. Will last a little longer.  Tongue in cheek.  Wars in the sun.  I do not mean tanks, etc.

Re vehicle for the human soul.  When the two mate, the human soul emerges on earth.  There are lives before the human soul can use the physical bodies.  The Greeks knew of the evolution of the body, that is, the Teachers.

Shift in the earth.  The readiness for changes, set off when the time is ready.  Biology of the earth.  Controlled by great Beings.  Some periodic, like sunspots.  Bring about more or less, when these cycles come, radical changes in the surface of the earth.  More would not mean anything to you until you filled up the gap in between.  Ponder on these great changes.  Majestic and powerful things occur.. And operators out of the earth use the things that belong to earth – the laws that govern it – to bring about changes.

Palestine  Jews to Palestine.  Threat to break up the Arab scheme of life.  It will begin to crumble.  A tangled question.  Basically, no justice in the Jews in being given Palestine.  A model (?) of force working.  No one side that is right.  “We Arabs have a priority in reference to holding the land.”  The Jews have never been ready to be absorbed.

     if a perspective       they will be able to see, in many of the catastrophes, nevertheless the movement toward a constructive future.  I believe the same thing will come out of this.  But in earth it will be determined in a battle of the six or eight important facets (?) which are there.  I think there is no right of a Jewish homeland, – any more than the colonists had a right to this country when they came over.  Or parceling out by kings in this country, who never came here.  Just a wave that was booked to come.  And the waves that are taking place in earth now are booked to come.  The Jews in Palestine give (?)   lead away from the old orthodoxy.

Wisdom-lore, divisions.  We continue with our survey of different types of knowledge.  Chart of the three categories, from Living  Second category: cosmogonies, stories of involution and of evolution.  Stories registered in earth by various Teachers, who knew these things, which man could not know, and which, in various forms, are found in all great racial teachings (the cosmogonies.)  Includes physical and metaphysical.  Known in an assimilative (?) way in Wisdom-lore, – like the bodies from trees, in the Greek mythos.

     Second, involution.  Has to do with men, or the beginnings of men coming to earth.  We are now within the great universes, and fixing attention on the way of humanity on a tiny planet and small sun system in one of the great nebulae of the skies.  We belong to the Milky Way.  Now we are talking of the concerns of little seeds of humanity and the story of what occurs in involution, or descent.  Not much told about that, because their minds are not opened up.  Concerned about themselves here and now.  Anything else does not mean much to them.  That is one of the main reasons why little is known about profundities.  Men don’t ask.  Don’t want to know.

     Of the third category, evolution, the development of the soul through ages much more is taught.  And a great many of the       religious sources are profoundly connected up with that third category.    Help to simplify.

     I chose the Jonah legend because it has the advantage of showing you how a story can be garbled, half mis-told, taken from another tradition, and still contain some of the profundities which were originally in it.

Epics and sagas  Tonight I will talk generally about epics, or sagas.  They are on different levels.  They are in code.  On the other hand, anyone who really wants to will find a way to do it.  So the great texts are not to be discussed (?).     For the few students, the epics and sagas and legends.

Epics  The word comes from the Greek source, like the word hero.  A hero is one who lived heroically in the days of epics.  The two words are more or less interchangeable.  The epics, broadly speaking, tell the story of some hero, or hero god.  With it, in the ancient days, was associated something that we still have with us in ways, the so-called ancestor worship.  A great ancestor.  Hero, or someone who later became deified.

     It took a great deal in time and power to deify the hero.  Sometimes quickly.  With Jesus, quite quickly; with others more slowly.  Degrees of it, as you can remind yourself as you read from time to time about (such figures) as Mother Cabrini.  Stages    before this group of persons, who are all candidates, can be canonized.  None probably great enough to become the foundation of an epic.  In the epics the hero – I am speaking of those whose stories became the basis of Wisdom-lore – these persons were really great persons, and their lives in various ways lend themselves to dramatization, – to the surrounding of the events of their lives with mystical and romantic religious flavor.  They could, in various ways, be seen as symbols of those who had heard the voice of God, almost like some of the figures in the book “Men Who Have Walked with God.”  Those men lived, in part at least, some of the characteristics that go to.forming an epic.

     All great races have had their epics; and that is good, because the lives of these men, – sometimes women, become the focus around which the dreams and the hopes and faiths of the multitude can gather.  When they are of the great epics, such as I will list with you tonight, they further illustrate some of the problems and mysteries of evolution.  How man would overcome struggles with earth and the material plane.  How could he win the higher nature in himself; how could he liberate it, – conquer the dragons of the under-life, and so on.

     These all became symbols that to the multitude were precious, and were rightly so.  Often Teachers used such examples, later Teachers, to build further instruction about.  Sometimes the priest did it.  Sometimes lives so strong that they almost coerced it.  All of these epics are on the side of doing, not on the side of escaping life, or going off in a cave, or hibernating, but of doing, in the midst of the world.  If they attained the great Goal they became hero-gods.

Hercules  We might start with the Greeks. Hercules.  That story is one of the great epics of Greece.  The forms of recognition (?) of Hercules.  The human being……and Hercules who had attained the stature of being a god.  The Twelve Labors, – as a human marker of ways to the multitude.

Jason  Epic of Jason.  Pupil of Chiron (?), who represents Wisdom.  Winning of the Golden Fleece.

Theseus  Contrast (?)  who conquers the bull in the labyrinth.  Didn’t win the Golden Fleece, but conquered the bull – subordinating the lower world.  Later, story of Ulysses.  Stories of Homer.  Related to the growth of man out of the physical plane toward his higher stature.

Seustra (?) means the exceedingly wise.  Babylonian.  Correspondent to Noah.  Gilgamesh.  Sargon epics.  Oannes.  Isis.  Horus.  Were folk in earth, but later, as with Jesus, their lives lent themselves so amazingly to an epic which could allegorize the mystical meaning of things.  That it was not too long before they became not heroes but gods.  Had the most dramatic influence on the development of the people.  A little of the involution story and much of the evolution story – of the events and understanding that must take place in the rise above the earth plane.  Not just, be good.  That is ignorance.  Everything that is in earth is good, and is to be used, and has its place.  But to use a thing after you should be through with it (after it has been vital to growth) is called evil.  Evil is not inherent in a thing but in what you do in your life that makes it so.  You may be past the stage where that can serve you.  It may be hindering you.  A complicated science.  The lives of these figures portrayed some of these mysteries.

Tale of Two Brothers  Oldest story in the world.  Also (?) in the Hebraic lore.      ancestor worship.  Japan.  But the Jew is doing the same thing.  One of the earliest with a David.  Virile, lusty; at the same time very heart warming.  Not as complicated as the others.

Abram, Jacob, Joseph: those are all epics.  In the regard that the Jew has to them he definitely manifests ancestor worship.  To be eliminated, and what these figures did seen from the mystical point of view.  What occurs in ancestor worship is that the ancestor is worshipped as an ancestor, without his role being understood or used.  Are to be used differently.  Noah, Melchizedek, as the archetype of these.  Illustrations of other forms of epics.

Story of Jesus  (the?) Only one of the Christian tradition.  The Fourth Gospel, mystical sense; less so in the others.  Nevertheless, through the Synoptics, is the picture (?) of this regal figure showing and teaching the way of emergence from the things of earth into those of spiritual stature.  The teaching of Jesus will have to be looked at differently from that of orthodoxy.  Mutilated.  Even in the two thousand years, think of all the cults that have been built up on the Christian Teachings.  Yet the influence, though it has made for it an institution of the Roman Church, has actually changed the quality of the world.  Intimations of the     of the Roman Church, and of the strong leadership within the church, in the sense of spiritual figures.  The Western world is far from Christian .

Mahabarata;  Indian; contains several great epics.  The story of Rama and Krishna.  No book can fully tell the great story of the evolution of man.  The Egyptian the completest.  The most moving in our time is the one of Jesus.

Saga, Scandinavian word for the same thing.  Stories of beings who have lived in earth, who have dramatically illustrated some of the experience when a heroic struggle is made against the pull of earth and water.

I am not speaking of literary epics but those which contain secrets of the evolution of man.  Build bridges between man and that which he seeks, or yearns, to become.  Draw him on. That is their part.

Involution is pre-infancy.  What does he need to know about that until he has gone much farther.

March 7, 1946

(after interval of two weeks.)

If you had only two weeks more to live.  It would speed you up.  An ultimate challenge.  Would cause you to measure values.  (One says) I would pray much.  MBM; An aid to polarization; direction you wanted to go.

     We would all have some degree of an answer.  It would force everyone, no matter where they were, to some degree of question.  It would cause a serious note.  A motif of repentance; I mean repentance in the sense that there would be a swift or slow, according to the stature of the person, summing up of where one stood with oneself and with the things that are.

     We should live nearer to that continuously.  One of the by-products of this age of materialism is a sort of superior attitude about ultimate questions, and thereby removing ourselves from the service which great questions could do us.  They can move us.  That is a service.  If we become blasé, or materialistic, we are not open to that effect.  Bear in mind that there is a terrific area in you that is numb, not questioning the possibilities.  A much too literal, – too hard hearted interpretation.  We are not moved readily enough.  Let us remember as we enter the new age that we do not discard one thing for another but add one thing to another.  Advantages of this age are not to be discarded.

     We are living in the midst of a wonderful time in which to live.

Question re prophecy:  Communism and democracy in the present age.  In many ways and places are prophecies concerning the time in which we are living.  A critical period.  Culminating in 1953, the immediately critical period, and being succeeded by another period with a grand and final upheaval, and the beginning of a new age in 2001.

Nostradamus; Malachi, monk of Padua.  (prophecy) that there would be six more popes from now on.  Cataclysms before the termination of the popes.  The prophecies won’t work to the minute but certain transitions are in the picture.

The individual role.  Tendency is to become absorbed in our little earth and miss the larger picture.  You never know your own role except in terms of the background.  You will muff much of your own evolution if you don’t see it in key with what is going on in the world.  Outstanding conflicts in the world today, as between communism and democracy.  Why should they      at each other’s throats?  One, by the people; the other from a central organization.  Which is right?  Neither.  Yet both have a very important role in this period.

Though your part may be to enlist yourself on this side or that side – and you should; nevertheless, each is a corrective of the other.  That it does not dominate, to the exclusion of other movements.  Meant to be (?).  Simplifies the issues.  Nevertheless, neither side has the answer.  Josephus tells us why.

Theocracy.  Theocracy means the government from the gods, or God.  Because every other form of government is built from the point of view of the earth, and morals and ethics.  Popes governing the earth, or the divine right of kings; these forms were offshoots of the concept of ruling by the will of God; or the gods.  The real idea, that will prevail, is not ruling by the will of the gods or God but in harmony with, – which is something quite different.  So that the pattern, in ruling, is a segment, frankly seen, of a much larger Pattern.

     Therefore democracy and communism, you can see, are a long way from that ideal setup.  By narrowing it to two great concepts, to focus more and more attention upon government, – communism as a thorn in the flesh of democracy, causing a consciousness about governments that has not been so over ages.  That is necessary.  – to lift the development to another octave.

(A question re current religions and cults, in preparation for tomorrow.)  MBM: The Western world, until very recently, has taken upon itself the idea that it was the dominant, important and conclusive world as far as religions were concerned.  It came about through the terrific egocentricity of the Hebraic religion, which became a large foundation stone to Christianity.  The Western world was provincial.  If the world is to become One World then this has to be broken down.  And there are innumerable steps being taken to break it down.  Prior to the war was the gradual infiltration to the West of ideas of the East.  Schopenhauer.  Mme. Blavatsky.  The Secret Doctrine and the founding of the Theosophical Society became the direct challenge to Christianity in its (?) orthodox forms.  Drama (?) of the East, – of hidden regions above India, as important centers, and other things… .much degenerated.  Much of it is true and much of it is false.

     Cults.  Los Angeles has hundreds.  New York too.  All this is meant to be.  Why some of it must be.  Souls are in different stages of evolution.  The same thing cannot therefore. serve all souls.  Orthodox Jew and Christian compliment themselves on not doing it.

     The period into which we are moving is one of brotherhood, based on understanding.  Therefore the breakup of orthodoxy and cults and religions is analogous to the shattering of the persona in the early steps of Tutoring.  To the extent anyone leaves their home dogmatism, or doctrine, to that extent it means they have begun to think for themselves. The cults and so on prepare the soil, break up the fixation from the past.  They are not ends, only intermediate means.

One of the reasons for this upheaval is to sheer off the habits and customs of the past.  (Here MBM must have made some reference to the then proposed alliance with the United States and Britain against Russia.

     Where there is a position to hold there will be coloration.  (A propos a speech by Bishop Spellman.)  Jesus does not do it, but there are few figures like that.  Churchill holding the backwash.  Have their place too.  More stresses and strains in the structure of human society than in any building of the 20th century.  There needs to be a holding at various points so that the running ahead is not too sharp, – can be tempered by something else.

The two ideologies   now have more importance than any time preceding because they are coming to a status where they are involving the whole world.       the issues for the whole world.  Eventually neither (will win) but (there will be) something like theocracy – but that which takes account of other planes of life, and the reality of other planes of life.  It won’t settle down until that is so.  Because this plane is only one plane.  Like a school which has many grades.  When again men walk with the gods – not in our present religious sense, and nothing like the Roman Church.  When men will so order their lives that their sojourn in life is a chapter in a continuous series, – know that all men are souls in evolution, and live by that.

     Nothing like that has been attempted as yet, though the idea of the divine right of kings, or of the pope, has carried on from time to time and place to place.  The mass of people, the multitude, have now access that has never been accessible to the multitude before.  Not only in regard to standard of living but in increased leisure, accessibility of all kinds of good things, has lifted the understanding of the multitude up far beyond what it was in the past.  Therefore theocracy is not in terms of a king or priesthood but in terms of the multitude.

There are now already in earth many who have been training, who have been interested, who have been learning on the other side, who have come over to loosen up and educate the mass.  Therefore what was before under a large head now is broken up under many, many headings.  As with education.  Once for the very few; now obligatory.  With that, the gradual indoctrination by lessons of what we might call “advanced ideas.”  That is what is taking place, so that the general quality is being raised, even of the multitude.

     Plato means, first of all, those who love Wisdom and have learned the underlying principles of things.  (This, re the “rulers” in The Republic.) They are the only ones, in a larger sense, competent to govern.  The others will govern according to special interests, politics, etc.  Plato safeguarded the position, that no one would do it from personal desire or interest.

     Centralized government better for the development of backward peoples than democracy.  That is true.   And that is from above down.  The leaders may not remain sincere and selfless.  Can’t be guaranteed in communism.  Has not been demonstrated by leaders of unions, etc. here in this country.  The other is that, by continued teaching from above down, the tendency is not to the benefit of the mentality of those below.  Because they are not forced to think.    (But) as for quick results democracy is not in it.

     Neither democracy nor communism have lifted themselves off the earth.  And when democracy gives freedom to methods of worship, that is a very negative        .  It does not do anything.  That is not theocracy.  The setup of a theocratic government would be the establishing of machinery that is related to the here as well as to the there.  And that, while everybody will not follow that 100 percent.  any more than they do in government now, nevertheless that would be the pattern outlined, the machinery in terms of which government is set up.  The earth cannot come to its true Golden Age until that kind of a pattern is set up.

     In this particular period we are taking one big step, or many little ones, toward a new shift in that direction.  Continuity of life is recognized.  When in scriptures you read of the Golden Age, when gods walked with men, if you will take that now on the ascending side, and see that the period we are moving toward slowly but surely, when men will walk with gods; or that the recognition of this little planet in the scheme of things is no longer a theory but an acknowledged fact; when souls incarnating are part of series (?) in a large evolution; when places are not isolated, so our earth is not provincial.  From the larger point of view this earth is provincial.  Because what do you know of anything beyond this earth?

     When that is changed, so that it is not a question of theory or dogma, but common knowledge, and that men and women live in the understanding of that, then you will have your theocracy.  It won’t be a case of indoctrination from above or below but common ground in which men live.  That is the point to which the earth is moving.

     Theocracy will place the value on the human soul.  Therefore freedom to grow.  Now the error is to give too much license to the human being, or government too much.  Those are opposites.  They will modify, with democracy gradually taking more hold on the latitudes given to the people.  Neither is the end; because the humanity of the present day has not gone sufficiently through the fires to realize that it cannot live by the flesh alone.  It has to get rid of its pseudo, sugary ideas about goodness and translate them into knowing.  It is not doing that rapidly.

     The new kind of government will come about as a normal process, but there are many who are coming in to leaven the mass now.  Socrates has multitudes in earth right now.  So has Khufu.  Little by little; but nevertheless it is going on.

Humanity of today has not learned the lesson.  (Thinks) this earth the measure of things.  Yet it is a process in which we are taking a part.  Like planting an orchard.  The humanity that comes will be ready for it.  The distresses of today, because we are not yet beyond it.  Our job is to move that (?) little bit toward the unification.  Part of the role of theocracy is to prepare for better alignment with larger planes.  No more barriers.

Question: Can such people consciously choose their roles before reincarnation, or is this determined for them by their heritage and stature?  Ans: Like airmen who have gone through their course of instruction and are being proved.  When such men and women come into earth they may not remember that they have been proved.  Socrates and Khufu proved many who are in earth.  They may not remember it.  They may be acting like those who have received suggestion in a hypnotic state and who, after waking from the sleep, will be carrying out the post-hypnotic suggestion.  But don’t think Socrates or Khufu are hypnotizing you.  But lay hold of what occurs.  Because very few in earth remember what preceded the earth.  And even when they come to earth under the influence of teaching in a class in other planes, – as for instance my airmen in the previous analogy.  If you can think of those airmen carrying on consciously unconsciously you have the picture.  They are not folk working independently.  There is no such thing.  You can’t live to yourself alone.  Certainly not if you are talking of the Immensities.

So there many who have been with groups and classes on the other side who are capable of presenting certain ideas and enhancing of the restlessness of peoples.  And that ferment is what they undertake to do – maybe the whole of it.  There are jobs of all kinds, of degrees.  But they are not undertaken alone, or chosen alone.  The mission may fail, if they meet unexpected obstacles.  From one point of view there is no failure.  No one can foresee all the obstacles.  So that a set of ideas may not work so well.  So it is not really ever lost.

Before you can build a new structure you must destroy the old.  Some of the important work now is the destroying of the old.  Making people restless and rebellious against the old forms.  Has nothing to do with our comfort.  We did not come down to have nice times.  Let us get that illusion out of our minds, and find out what the larger facts are.  Get chips off our shoulder.  Democracy or communism, get to know the danger of your own colorations.  Never judge by them.  It leads only to opinions, and is dangerous.

If anyone has undertaken to do something large it may not come about visibly, because of the failure of some objective circumstance, – something like a cooperation (?), organization, etc. – but that force has nevertheless been set into action.  There is no loss of energy.  It may not work there where you wanted it to work, but the energy is operating.

We all go to school over ages, until we are capable of carrying out something objective.

Fragments on LOVE*

as given by MBM to Tuesday Group in preparation for the Solstice

11/28/1938

(At this time MBM was discussing the little book THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD by Henry Drummond as a fine expression on the subject FOR THE PISCEAN AGE.)

The essence of love is selflessness.  But the selflessness which many people preach is one not based on strength or stature, understanding or knowledge, but rather on weakness and a kind of escape from the self to others.  It is in line with the illustration of one who becomes a doctor; he goes into training and internship intensively, only to come out again to others.  No one can know the first thing about Love who has not left the self behind.  And that means in ways, behaviors, preference – needs even, of the self.

You have been working intensively on yourselves, but you have come – and must come now – to the place where what is necessary for the self, is never at cross purposes with the needs of the Group.

If you have not made that discovery, you have not been born into mystical understanding.  The things which belong to the Larger worlds are really colossal in their implication, and they cannot bide nor abide with small stature. …..

There are certain safeguardings we should practice on the way.  One is in reference to the choice between the self and the Group.  The screw will never question which has greater value: the screw or the machine.

He who is moving forward acts according to a mystical science in which his acts never violate the Group.  And the force which accomplishes this is love for the Group and the members thereof.

It is not effort.  That is one thing that Love removes.  It grows with that speed and effectiveness of which only Love is capable.  It is all over.  It knows no resistance……  There is a strange power in love to bear stresses and strains that in conditions without Love would be unbearable.  For Love is a mighty power.

So I am asking you, as we move toward the Solstice, to measure the love you bear each other.  This is something by which you can test where you are, with respect to where your preference is; as to where your loyalties are; as to where your thought and heart are.  And if they are not first and naturally with the Group, then you have not Love.  For Love comes only out of the ability to rightly and mystically transcend the self.  When that is born, is really born, so that it is there, a living seed, that is the birth of the Christ.

………..

Remembering that Love has strength, dignity, forbearance (cf. Paul), – and that it is always outpouring, never taking. ….. See if you can find that any of that force has worked within you the last two days…..Look, as you look for a precious jewel……