THE WILDERNESS ALLEGORY

Lecture 6

MBM – January 15, 1932

This evening we begin the second book in the Old Testament, Exodus.  The real significance of Exodus may be found in the first chapters, where it says the people all multiply greatly. . . . . the return from Exodus toward the Promised Land, where the leaders had been passing through in their various stages of progression.

Multiplication of the peoples in Egypt, on the first turn of the dial, means that humanity profits greatly — multiplies its powers many times – by its experiences in earth, through the body.  But the time comes, – the condition, when it is necessary to release yourself from that absorption in this dimension.

The significance of sin: the philosophy of fixation in a state from which you should be legitimately passing.  So what is sin for one is not sin for another; but when your condition is such that you are ready to pass on, via the sword of last night is sin.  Hence, in the pattern written out (?) by the Jewish people there is now the drive to get the multiplied faculties out of the earthly condition.  And the entire story of Exodus, into Leviticus and Numbers is the story of the return, or upward movement of the soul.

The soul must now return, in conscious qualities, faculties, to those states from which it descended.  We descend potentially; we return potent.  In this allegory the return begins after the faculties have multiplied in Egypt.

To accomplish this it is necessary to set up a leader.  The first leader in the allegory is Moses.  We have had figure-heads on the descent down.  Now we shall have them – illustrations of leaders, on the way back.  But a different type of leadership.  If you think you can go back without leaders you are mistaken.  Of course, the leadership you obtain from them must be set up in the self, so that you pass on from grade to grade of leadership.

Moses was born of parents who were both from the tribe of Levi, the priestly tribe, the ministering tribe.  He was born in Egypt.  We are too familiar with the outer story of his being found in the bulrushes.  But the significance of the story is not as it is written.  We do not care so much for the literal facts.

At any rate, Moses is brought up in the household of the king.  That is as it should be; and he is taught the wisdom of the Egyptians.  Egypt was a peculiar country, in that king and priest were both initiate to the Mysteries.  Hence Moses, the first leader, is disciplined in the Wisdom-lore of Egypt.  Therefore the stories are in the key of Egypt.

Moses, after partaking in a battle between two Hebrews, and killing one, escapes, from the abuse of the people, when he is quite a young man, to a place in the peninsula of Sinai.  He lingered there for years.  That is important, because, on this peninsula, was a center of occult training, and had long been known to the Egyptians as a highly conditioned place.  At a later place, when as leader he takes them out of Goshen, he comes there.  He was to go there, and learn to know it, so he could lead the people out.

So he escapes to Sinai, is taken into the household of the priest, and marries his daughter.  The priest is Jethro.  Watching flocks and learning of the inside wisdom.  While there he has a curious experience, that of the burning bush.  What is a burning bush?  The bush had become the center, or the focus, of power.  Hence you could say: a focus of power, which made it a radiant center — radiant for heat and light.  Whenever power is focused from another dimension, as it is focused it changes the character of that substance.  Physicists have yet to learn it, and will have to reckon with it.

Through this focus, or place where energy was focused from another dimension, came a voice, a challenge, to lead the people.  Moses objects to the terrific burden to be placed upon him, on two scores: first that the people will not believe him, and second, that he has no eloquence to persuade them.  They are the two protests people have when they begin the return.  How can you convince yourself that these things are true.  The people are the other selves in you; apply the allegory.  How are you going to persuade these trends in yourself?  Jehovah answered him satisfactorily; and Aaron, Moses’ brother is to aid him.  Because another aspect, called Aaron, has the eloquence, and shall be the mouthpiece for Moses.

Moses moved, with the consent of Jethro, toward the land of Goshen; and bit by bit persuaded the people.  And, having done that, Moses and his brother approach the king….to leave them out.

Then comes the story of the so-called plagues, – merely reminding you that when you move forward you are bound to be plagued very much if you don’t do, that is, if you let go.

When the last plague has taken place, and the people are ready to move and follow, – ready to yield, he tells them that they must prepare what has since become known as the Passover; and that a lamb must be prepared, and kept for a period of time (note how long) and slain, roasted, and partaken of at night, after the blood has been spread on the lintels of the door; the angel of the Lord will stop at these doors and will kill others, who are of the Egyptian race.

What does it mean: to slay the lamb, and partake of it?  The lamb is the forerunner symbol of what culminates in the symbol of Jesus slain — but not slain in the way most people think.  The blood and the substance are to be used, one for sprinkling and the other for eating.  The lamb symbolizes that type of life which submits to the will of Deity  Hence, the people are, by partaking of this lamb, to indicate that they are partaking of its nature.  They partake of the body of the lamb indicating that it is their intention to become obedient as the lamb — the lamb being a very high, or remote, symbol. The lamb, something which they cannot comprehend at this stage, is, in its ultimate, the Cosmic life, which becomes obedient.  Dismembered in manifestation.  For manifestation, by the pairs of opposites, means dismemberment.  So it is the first Sacrifice, and therefore the prototype of that obedience which is to bring about the Return.

We must not forget that incipient humanity is not descending to remain down but is descending to experience, to become potent instead of potential, and to return up.  Hence they must have signs along the way of what they must do.  This is one of the great signs.  The blood is the life of the higher planes; and the life of the higher planes sprinkled on the door is the sign that your household is consecrated to become like the lamb, – a motif in what is ordinarily called redemption.

The Passover takes place.  The people are prepared for flight.  They are to eat;  all girded to move on.  When you are ready to partake of the Passover you must be ready to move on.

And they set forth.  That setting forth is, from one point of view, reminiscent of the single family, the undifferentiated pattern of Abram when he left Ur.  See how Abram, which is you, has become multiplied by the progress experienced and (?) its sojourn in the earth.  The tree widest in its branches, (here a reference to the “upside down” tree.)

Now begins the return.  In that return we find the echoes of some of those early stages . Hence the peoples leaving Egypt — the many trends in you leaving absorption in the third dimension, are slightly (?) related to the movement of Abram from Ur.

So our selves leave the absorption, – polarization, in the things of this dimension, – richly developed, – and cross the Red Sea.

Then begins the long process in the Wilderness.  Many experiences there. I call your attention merely to a few points.  Ever and again the people complain to Moses about not having water.  They are traveling in a desert country.  And Moses has to supply them with water.

Once they came to a place where there was bitter water (Mara) Moses was told to cast a tree into the water, and it would become sweet.  The waters are bitter — the experience now of the psychic which is drawing away from earth and is not finding all it wanted.  It has been lost in the things of earth, and finds therefore some of these experiences bitter.  It reminds one of the earlier octave, – and famine in the Promised Land.

The tree thrown into the water: The tree is the growth from below up — the progression already made.  He explains, makes clear, and so makes those experiences which belong to this stage sweet.  Some of you have already learned that those things which seemed bitter become sweet through your understanding.  That is the tree cast into the water.

At another time they are hungry.  Manna falls from the heaven.  What is manna?  This is primarily an allegory.  The food that falls from heaven is that food which nourishes the soul.  We are on our way up.  At these stages it is as necessary to find food for the soul and for the mind as for the body.  Manna is a sign that you must have bread to feed the soul.  Manna becomes a symbol, and remains a sign, all through the return, of the necessity of food from heaven — philosophically, the food of fire and air, to feed the soul and the evolving mind.  The things of earth are not sufficient.

Another symbol of importance is the rod.  Sometimes it is in the hand of Moses, sometimes of Aaron.  It is always a symbol of power, in the hands of one who knows how to use it.  After the need for logical thinking is the need for abstract thinking.  The rod of power is the use of power external to the self.  Leaders must always have it.  Used not unlike the rod used now by Aaron, and now by Moses.

Another high point at this period is the Law, given on Mount Sinai.  Moses went up this highly conditioned mount, and there had communication with other planes.  He brought back with him tablets of stone.  On them was recorded what is the ethical and moral law at this period — the law of humanity as it has traveled in the early stages in the Wilderness.  Most people do not know they are in the world of Pluto.  (You will) later, too, know you are in the Wilderness.  When you have cognized that this world is one of ignominy, and full of illusions, then you discover you are in a wilderness, and you have to get out.

The Tablets of Stone, therefore, are the moral law — duty to God and man.  You know where the rung of duty is.  Mind has not come even so far.  But that is the stage at which you are, or we are, at the time that corresponds to this part of our allegory.

Moses received instructions for the setting up of the Tabernacle, the forerunner of the later Temple.  The Temple is set up later in Jerusalem.  What does Tabernacle mean?  It means the Tent of Jehovah.  Remember the tent-dwelling people.  All through this it means movement; hence, tent-dweller.  The Tabernacle is the temple of Jehovah while the people are on the march.  The instructions for it are from Deity.  They are full of the symbolism, on the one hand, of geometry and on the other of number.  Those won’t concern us so much tonight as larger motifs.

Why was it necessary to set up a tabernacle?  It is necessary at all times while traveling in the Wilderness to have a tabernacle.  If not, you are lost.  It is the tabernacle of man’s orientation to the Larger.

It was to be built in three parts: the outer court, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies.  It is body, soul and spirit.  And man, who is beginning his return through the Wilderness, must know that he is body, soul and spirit.  Moreover, he must orient body, soul and spirit to Spirit, – which is implied in the position in which the Tabernacle, the Temple and churches are set up —from west to east.  The sun is the symbol of spirit, and the spirit of man must orient itself to the Great Spirit.  That is why the altars in churches are at the east end, wherever it is possible.

The Tabernacle is to be set up by the aid of all the people – that is, by all your selves, not just by a part of you.  There has to be contributed both stuff and labor.  You can’t set up a tabernacle unless you do.  With silver, metals, tapestries, drapes, and labor.

Now study the courtyard of the Tabernacle.  It corresponds to the physical side of things.  It is open.  The Holy Place and the Holy of Holies are in a different category.  The outside is surrounded, as a tent, by drapes.  There is much wood and metal used. Metals symbolize virtues won, in the sense of strength attained.  What is usually called brass, in the translation, is incorrect.  The ancient peoples did not know brass; they knew copper.

Wood represents that which grows in the earth.  Sometimes you will find that wood is underneath, and is then covered with metal.  Sometimes you will find something is of metal through and through.  There are different types of metal.  All these things have significance.

Our outer court, as we enter it, is fairly spacious.  We meet, just before the door, an altar — the altar for burnt offerings.  There are two types of altars — the altar for burnt offerings and the altar which we find within the Holy Place, for incense.

The altar in the outer court is for burnt offerings.  A little farther in the courtyard is a censer for burning incense.  And still farther in is the’ laver, or receptacle, which contains water for washing.  What do these mean?  The burnt offering is a symbol of the sacrifice of the animal nature; for on this altar we are offering animals without blemish.  Most people think of sacrifice as terrible.  A sacrifice is a culminating act.  Nowheres, in any religion, have animals been accepted for sacrifice that have been imperfect.  Your animal nature must be fulfilled.  You must learn its lessons; and when you have fulfilled it you are through with it, and it is not a sacrifice.

That is one of the illusions of this world.  Those who are moving forward veridically are not sacrificing.  They are through.  Do see that there is science in progression, not a sentimental, bloody rite.  It looks bloody to you, who do not know; and that is the way you are kept out till you know better.  When you know better you discover that it is much like other things you have learned in this Training School: that when you are through, you are through — and there is no sacrifice in turning to something else.

But the altar in our courtyard is a reminder of the ways of humanity, the lower nature; and fire is the most radical eliminator.  There is death and destruction by all four elements; and all four have been used in regard to dead bodies.  But fire is the most effective.  Hence it is rightly used in a symbolism that is highly condensed.  Therefore at the very entrance to the court is the altar for burnt sacrifice.  And you do not get beyond that till you have gotten beyond misunderstanding.

Then you use the censer.  You burn incense.  Incense is the upward moving of things within the heart, – desires turned upward, – on our Ladder of Set starting with wonder.  So our movement is already dual: eliminating the lower nature and going up.  Already a sense of swift change.

Then we pass on to the bowl containing water.  Water there is the cleanser.  One must, as it were, give a sign of having completed this process, – washed his hands of it, before one enters the Holy Place.

Thus, these are three steps which are taken in regard to the body and right living.  Else you are not burning the incense.  Therefore you must show it.  These are things that belong to the objective world.  If you have demonstrated them, that is your burnt offering; showed by right living, friendliness, kindliness, generosity, all that belongs to the censer in the outer court; and have washed your hands, you then enter the next place, the Holy Place.

There is important symbolism in the way these objects are constructed, but that would take us too much into detail, and we may not pause at it.

Now we come to the Holy Place.  It is curtained off from the Holy of Holies.  It is a kind of double cube, and contains, again, the three objects: first, an altar for incense, a golden candlestick and the table of show bread.  Now we enter into the soul world.  Fourth dimensional.  Therefore it is logical that the first thing you meet is the altar for incense.

Now that becomes the keynote.  The soul must move, being the primary agent, as the body was in the first — must set the key on an altar, not a censer.  There then the incense is burned.  This altar, the incense altar, is always indoors.  The sacrifice altar is always outdoors.  The soul life is covered to objective sight.  The activities that belong to the body and the objective world are visible.  These are covered over to ordinary sight.

The altar was made of acacia wood.  An important symbol — important from old Egypt, where they got it.  This altar is a place of special sanctity.  It is made of gold.  It belongs to the type of thing called “the table that is before the Lord.”  It is also a bloodless sacrifice.  The altar is covered with gold.  They grew up in earth, and began to be covered with gold, or metals, later.  The higher you go the more the metal replaces the wood, until we come to the symbolizing of what comes from the higher regions, like the candlestick.  It is of solid, beaten gold.

By the time we come to this altar we have learned something of blood sacrifice, and no longer have illusion of this hoary act; so the incense sacrifice is known as the bloodless sacrifice.  So the pure feelings and yearnings of the soul, – the thoughts driven upward by the fire of the heart, are here indicated.  Again, you hear of the fragrance of prayer, – the fragrance of incense.  At the corner of this altar are horses.  Horses represent power.

Now the candlestick.  It is seven-branched; made of beaten gold, according to a very minute description.  It stood, usually, beside the table holding the show bread, – and has a relation to it.  This seven-branched candlestick relates to powers outside of man, to which man has answering notes.  And when he achieves soul consciousness he knows of these factors in himself, and gives answer.  As you give answer when someone greets you, so, from a higher point of view, when your consciousness is able to realize what is known as the Seven, you can answer.

As we move onward, there is higher courtesy, – there is necessary response — the behavior of this plane, plus.  If you have learned anything of good manners in this earth it is more to be employed as you ascend.

The gold is a symbol of the spiritual nature — therefore the lowest level on which these Seven can function as they are; the lowest level to which they can descend, and remain true to their own nature.  The Larger cannot come down into the smaller, – cannot come down below a certain area.  That area is symbolized by gold.

Why candlesticks?  Because the candle is that which contains both light and heat, and is necessary for man’s life.  Man gives sign of it in himself — sets up bit by bit the answering notes.  Hence we have that familiar quotation: the spirit of man is a candle of the Lord.  In the early days they did not use wax or tallow, as now, but the oil of the olive.  And the olive has ever been a symbol of mildness, peace, kindliness, – thus a forerunner of love.

Thus the light burning in these candlesticks was a light burning in this oil of the olive: meekness, generosity, friendliness.  Oil rises, doesn’t it?  (used this way) all the way through the scriptures, not only in the Semitic.

The Table of Show Bread.  It should really be called the bread of the faces.  Faces are things turned outward.  It therefore means manifestation, or externalization.

There is a definite description of how the bread should be made. It was to be changed every sabbath.  The twelve have to do with the twelve aspects man must bring into manifestation, or turn outward into expression.  And this is for an everlasting sign that he shall do that thing.  (Heaven shareth with the children an everlasting covenant.)  Hence, with a certain logic, symmetry, in a spirit of deference to the seven-branched candlestick, this is changed every seventh day.

So bread is manifestation, the substance of life you show in your living, because you have become soul conscious.  Leaven means desire.  Therefore you have a key as to when you should have leavened and unleavened.  When you are learning to be without desire, this kind of thing is the unleavened bread.  When you must have action you must put in leaven.  The illustration of leaven being put in the three measures of meal.  Presently desire, or that which is derived from Eve, or the “mother of all living”, gets into the measures and leavens it.  When learning to become without desire you eat unleavened bread.  Because there are areas in which you must still go, you must still put in leaven.  There are areas in which you should be through, and there you eat unleavened bread.

The ideal is the soul that has mastered all desire, – which we have in all great stories of redemption, or the return Home.  Indicated with the bread in the twelve.

These three are indications of that which is necessary to accomplish in the soul life, as the other was in the body life; and you move only from that into the world of spirit.  Even the high priest entered the Holy of Holies only once a year, indicating how rare it is that man attains spiritual stature.  At this stage it is very rare.  Nevertheless, the progress is toward that.

The Semites in their pilgrimage were to carry this Tabernacle with them, – as a constant reminder of their three-fold nature, made perfect through the use of mind.  It is the pillar that guided them through the Wilderness.  The pillar is understanding — foresighted understanding, – the light that goes before.

And so mind is the only thing that can lead you out of the Wilderness.  Therefore mind aids you to remember what is necessary, by obliging you to carry with you on your travels the Tabernacle.

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A few references:

Sinai — you seek a spiritual teacher

Twelve plagues — Egypt

Red Sea: separation.  You take an irrevocable step

Wilderness: so it might seem at first

Rebellion — pull of the old

Mara — bitter water sweetened

Elim – 12 trees

Wilderness of Zin — manna received

Horeb: waters of temptation

Amalakites: battle with the pull of the good things of earth

Jethro advises organization

Laws imposed on the Hebrews

Kadesh – Barnea

spies return, Joshua and Caleb

 

Wilderness Allegory

Additional fragmentary notes.

Wouldst thou journey to the Promised Land?  Then commandeth thee the Science of the  Soul .

Follow thy Moses, who heareth the voice of the Larger in the burning message of the higher planes.

Break from thy fixations, which plague thee in the planes of earth.  The earth, like Pharoah, will react.

Gird thee for the journey of the Passover.

The Lord (the Light) is with thee, and thy selves will follow thy mind across the Red Sea into a new condition.

A wilderness of doubt and insecurity will stretch before thee.

The bitter waters of Marah will be a tribulation, but thou shalt see the Pattern in the twelve trees at Elim; and if thou press on the manna food will feed thy soul.

Thou shalt do battle with the Amalakites of the earth temptations.  And if thou win thy mind shall commune (?) on the Heights, and thy Joshua become the valor of thy household.

Led by thy Moses, and counseled by thy Aaron and thy Jethro, thou shalt begin the building of thy Tabernacle, according to order of the Light.

Thou shalt beware the lure of the Golden Calf (that is, concretizing the Higher idealities.)

Thou shalt take stock of thyself and observe, in the near, the laws established in the far.

And thy soul march on, rejoicing, with the sound of trumpets.

Excerpt from MBM series on Biblical

Interpretations, Feb-Mar. 1928, Lect. II

Mar. 2, 1928

Genesis, Ch 16:  Abraham not yet ready to bear fruit through the higher psychic, Sarah. Sarah regrets that her time of bearing has not yet come.  Sarah takes Hagar, her maid, an Egyptian, or lower levels of the psychic world and gives her to Abraham.  Abraham mates with her and becomes the father of Ishmael, the earth man, the result — like Cain but in a later stage.  He is the result of collective man mating with the earth desires, whereas the time will come when collective man will mate with Sarah.

Ch. 17:  Abraham with Sarah, who is to be fruitful.  That which is to be born of Sarah is distinctly not an earthly child.  Both are ninety.  When Abraham is getting through with the earth the fruit of mating with the higher psychic can be born.  Now (the hither psychic) can receive impregnation from the earth man working from below up.  Therefore Isaac is born.  When Sarah put out Hagar (into the desert) it is the higher psychic putting out the lower psychic.  Abraham objects, because he is still attached to the lower psychic.  Abraham unites with other wives, other desires.  Represents the stage of the great activity in the psychic – much energized by, the psychic, called Eve.

Ch.24, v. 3:  Isaac must have as wife a woman of his own stock.  The Canaanites symbolize conditions which do not belong to the making of the higher man, and were to be resisted.  That desire which should be a true mate for the next stage of man’s evolution was not to be found but in the very stock of Abraham.  Abraham represents that which had the courage to make the great pilgrimage, – who left the old successfully.  And from that stock must come that with which his son mates.

Rebekah found by a well.  Water, the symbol of the psychic world; and water that gives to drink is a symbol of the higher psychic world — that which gives refreshment to the evolving man because it is related to the higher psychic — that which can nourish through water.  That water is an aid to the development of the higher sensitivities — kindliness, sympathy, wonder, awe, etc, which the psychic has not yet been able to touch.  From that is born Esau and Jacob — two directions — Esau, the earth man, and Jacob, that which is in service to the higher.

Ch. 29:  Jacob that stage of man working out the pattern of the evolution of the soul in earth, and which is in service to the higher, falls deeply in love with Rachel. (23)  Jacob cohabits with Leah, not knowing who she is.  Earth man, in his struggles with earth and the desires, even though he would serve for the higher, is ever and again betrayed by darkness, by his own ignorance, when he could not tell the difference between Leah and Rachel.  It happens to everyone conscious of their own processes.  But when they come again to another stage of consciousness they see that one part betrayed another part.

Jacob, who represents loyalty in service, is not content with the figure of the lower form of the psychic, and again undertakes to work for Rachel.  These two forms of the psychic symbolize the affectional nature, which is being developed at this stage of man’s experience in earth — a gentleness, and loyalty, a warmth which comes into the stories at this point.  It is the right thing that we make the process from below up, and that is why Leah is first.  Follows the pattern indicated by Cain when he slew Abel.  Logically, Rachel does not bear any children in the beginning.  (30)  The soul could not yet bear fruit, with the contact with the lower man.  Same as with Sarah and Hagar (but) in a later octave.  The anger of Jacob is the protest of the lower self, which is rebelling.  Rachel says: go in and bear more fruit of the earth — Billah (hand maiden)

Joseph is born to Rachel,- representing that which was able, through much suffering, to win high attainment in earth.  The women represent the forces which, working through earthly man, make for life.  So it is not wrong that the soul in manifestation, or Eve, is called the mother of all living.  Without Eve, or the power of desire, there would be no life.  So she is the mother of all living, which manifests as activity.  That which manifests through the psychic, or the soul, is the very essence of all life, – a kind of vital fluid which gives the action to all that belongs to human life.  Without it, no experience, knowledge, or consciousness — mother of all that is; in it the breath of life.  In the early stages it means……… the serpent forces meeting resistance; the curse is: shall bruise thy head.  Head is at the head of the line of force.  The T-cross… divinity, differentiation (?)  Without it (curse ?) there would have been no divinity.  And finally, the mastery that comes through it.  The woman shall bruise his heel.  When the soul has developed it will control the consequence of desire.  Through the soul, it is the breath, – so important.

The soul, having caused the progressive descent into ever more sensible, or material, worlds will be bruised, because through it expresses the serpentine forces; and they will be bruised on the head.  But in turn, as you evolve, you will bruise the heel, that is, control by the end – as you have run the whole gamut of experience you will control it.

The Book of Genesis is not a book of the coming of man but of the generations of all that belongs to man’s processes.  Throughout the book you can watch how the soul plays its dominant part, even though in the beginning it is subordinate to the earth man, which is head over it.  Later he comes to the place of knowing.  Therefore, the women in the Old Testament are illustrations of the conditions through which, and by which, the soul forces work.  In the Old Testament man may be seen in development, in the spreading out of the tree, manifesting varieties of experience.  In the New Testament, generally speaking, it is the redemption, or the turning in again of what was turned out – the upper part of the T cross.  In the New Testament the subordination of the psychic shifts, and the processes of redeeming the soul — where it learns to find the tail of the serpent, is illustrated.

Excerpts from MBM course, Biblical Interpretations, 1928

Hagar, Sarah  Hagar, the early mating of the soul with earth; her son Ishmail in the desert; Sarah the later mating.  The son Isaac, meaning Laughter, the well being of the higher states.  Born very late.

Rebecca.  Found at the well.  Symbol of the psychic world and water that gives to drink.  Rebecca is symbol of the higher psybic world; that which gives refreshment to the evolving man because it is related to the higher; that which can nourish through water.

Leah, Rachel Jacob, that stage of man working out the pattern of the evolution of the soul in earth, and which is in service to the higher, falls deeply in love with Rachel. (Genesis 23) Cohabits first with Leah, not knowing who she is.  (Leah sometimes translated tender-hearted; MBM says it should be dim sighted).  Earth man in struggles with earth, even though he would serve for the higher, is ever and again betrayed by darkness, by his own ignorance, when he could not tell the difference between Leah and Rachel.  When they (man) come to another state of consciousness they see that one part has betrayed another.  Jacob is not content with the figure of the lower form of the psychic, and again undertakes to work for Rachel.  These two forms of the psychic symbolize the affectional nature, which is being developed at this stage of man’s evolution in earth.  It is right that we make the process from below.  That is why Leah comes first.

Anna Luke 2.  (Preceding material: Heart is developed by first being turned down and then being turned up.)  Anna, that aspect which is devoted to the good, as seen in God, and labors to develop the faculties inherent in itself, as did Simeon.  This makes for clear vision, seeing ahead; hence, Anna is seen as the prophetess.  Anna comes from a word, known in western Asia, that is like sun.  She is devoted to that All-Father, which makes her see in advance, and through it anticipate the redemption.  Every soul must develop something of that sort, enabling it to work far ahead.  It is a faith based on knowledge.  Anna, the precursor even before the figure known as the Christ is cradled.

Elizabeth, another precursor of the Christ (Luke 5.)  Leah and Rebecca.  Hagar vs Sarah, who did not bear until she was old.  Elizabeth, the last figure of that kind.  The mother of John the Baptist.  Means those qualities in yourself which belong to the higher cannot be born until later.  The last will be first.  That which is born of Sarah is greater than that which is born of Hagar.  The last refrain of that motif is in Elizabeth.

Anna and Zacharias are righteous people; the soul coming into right relation with the Cosmic forces.  John, the masculine forerunner of Jesus.  The soul must be in right relation with the Cosmic God and all His commandments. . . . (Here more about Gabriel, but not copied.)

Mary and Martha.  Faint echo of the two wives, Hagar and Sarah.  Just preceding Christ consciousness.  Both recognize the beauty of fine living.  But Martha represents that which is earthly.  Both sisters loved by Jesus.  Martha represents the psychic turned down and outward, extravert; on the one hand concerned with duty, on the other, with the form side.  Mary, who sits at the feet of Jesus, represents wonder, the psychic turned up.

Mary Magdalene sums up the gamut of depths and heights.

Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The Greek form of Miriam, which means sad, or bitter one.  Mary is one of the most significant names in allegorical literature.  Found everywhere. Mare, sea, reservoir of all life.  In this Great Sea, or Great Psychic, we find a variety of experiences.  As it changes to Miriam, it is the sea of bitterness. Suffers in materiality, ignorance, pain.  Prophesied in Genesis, (Must be re Moses and Miriam.  She was rebuked by Moses. When she died a stage of desire was past.) before the soul has come out of the sea of bitterness and ignorance to knowledge.  Then “there shall be no more sea.”

The Great Mother has its correspondent on the different octaves, and out of that line is man born in any one of the planes.  When he attains some of the higher octaves he becomes man regenerate.  Mary, the mother of Jesus is M (?) on a higher octave, not on the physical, nor on the ordinary psychic.  She symbolizes Virginity, secondly faith; thirdly, devotion.  Those three qualities the soul on the Mary Mother stage has developed.  Virginity is the opposite of the Mary Magdalene motif we have just seen.

Cyphers and Allegories of the Old Testament

Symposium conducted by MBM

The Promised Land: Consciousness is not the goal, but simply a means.  Development of your self, even to the 13th man, is not the whole thing.  You make the screw to become part of the machine.  It has no value as a screw.  But if you don’t find a use for the screw in a mechanism that is compatible with its perfection, there is no point in it.  You must also evolve something else to which you are going to be related.  The Promised Land is a land, place, region, condition, in which individual people — figures who attain that state – are active, have consciousness.  The land, or sphere, to which the individual relates himself and in which he uses his consciousness to the common purpose. Consciousness, which is merely the field of awareness, not the thing itself.  Like light in a room.  Secondly, a sphere, a state, a land.  Thirdly, relationship to it, the share of the screw in the machine.

What is the purpose of the Promised Land?  What kind of man functions in this condition?  The thirteenth man.

Joseph does not himself go to the Promised Land, but the residue of him goes; the values of the earthly dimension are forever conveyed to the soul, and by the soul are conveyed to the spirit, and through the spirit alone enter the cosmic.

The quality at the Joseph state, his pattern, was to the accumulation of that which makes possible the later actual living in the Promised Land.  The Promised Land symbolizes an ultimate stage.  We will see what queer things occur in the Promised Land.  Abram passed through the Promised Land before going to Egypt.  You often get the sensitivity of something — it almost seems as if you had the thing.  You try to hold and grasp it, and then you have a terrifying experience.  Then you know you have only touched the rim of it, and now you have to do the work and reach it.  You do pass through the boundaries but you can’t dwell there and set up the temple.

The coat of many colors.  Colors symbolize attainments.  It is a sign of the attainments, or stature of Joseph’s state that he wore the coat of many colors.  Jacob was the father of 12 sons, representing the whole gamut, or range, of development.  Therefore you might say they all had a color.  The effective, or dynamic, figure out of the 12, who carries on the pattern and moves toward the 13th man, is Joseph.  Therefore something of the 12 is in Joseph.  Therefore he has the coat which represents the powers of all 12.

The same idea is hidden in the “white garment”.  At a later stage you have them (the colors) but at this stage they should be shown.  (Joseph) in contrast to the uncolorful father.

Joseph has power over men because he has now in his possession three faculties: masculine, feminine and the fruit thereof, Is-ra-el.

Cyphers and Allegories ©f the Old Testament

Symposium

(Partial report of questions and answers, according to notes of G.B.)

Ques.: How do we get inspired Scripture like those?

Ans. (MBM)  Those who are Knowers have the sensitivities to select out of the data of history those figures which would lend themselves effectively to an allegorical or a deeper cypher.  They delete what is not necessary.  An economy.  They are either sensitives being used by those on the other side, or else they are Knowers doing it purposively.

No one knows who wrote the five Books of Moses.  Some speak of the “seventy-two figures in Alexandria” but we have no proof.  (Septuagint because of the seventy)  Some say Estras wrote it later.

The other significances of Egypt:  In reading Scripture you must always ask through which tradition is it coming to you.  As you will see from the symbolism of geography, every great mythos draws on symbolical geography, but obviously from the point of view of that particular race.  To another race it might be completely the reverse, and with equal logic.  To the Semites Egypt, in its first code, represents the body and the densest world, and all the problems that belong to physical, or material things.  From the standpoint of the mythos of Egypt it is just the opposite.  Center of the land distribution, so that, symbolically and through its position, it is the land.  To the Egyptian, the pupil of the eye, the center where the mind contacts the earth.

MBM: Name four states in the allegorical patterns of the 0ld Testament that represent the earthy side of things.  Lot, Cain, Laban, Esau; on the female side Dinah, Leah, Hagar.

The difference between Adam-Kadmon and Red Adam.  In the first, the masculine and feminine principles are still involved.  The rib represents separation.  Red Adam is the earth side.

Why was Joseph concerned about the disposition of the body?

MBM: We must consign all that we have to the Goal.  One step: render unto Ceasar.  Next, in the cosmic, “love the lord thy God with all thy strength with all thy mind….” When you are obedient to the Pattern everything goes to it.  Everything you do is to be done in the nature, or the spirit of; you even cut your toenails in the flavor of larger things.  That the whole scheme of evolution is for one purpose only – the becoming of the sons of God.

The dogma of the Church was not set up by Knowers.  It attempts to answer big questions. Three persons in one, or a Trinity that is separate.  The Knower knows, but those building from below up, like the tower of Babel….  Good muscle for the mind.  Do these things come from deity; are they all aspects of deity?  Is God one or is he many?

Question: Where does involution stop in the allegories?

MBM:  The densest place illustrated in the Pattern is Egypt.  Some do not really go down far and well.  Do not become well-rounded.  Do not get the strength to go up.

With Abram we have the Pattern as etched by the Semetic race.  Up to Noah, for the whole of humanity.  Adam-Kadmon through Noah belongs to all humanity.  With Abram, that by the Hebraic race and the beginning of individuation.  At Abram you get what is mystically known as “the call”.  You single yourself out.  When you are beginning the student work here you are beginning the call of Abram.  The stiffest tests come toward the end – the most radical bondage before the finish.  The last hours of darkness of Jesus.

In a deeper cypher Egypt is different too for the Hebraic race.  It was from Egypt that the wisdom that belongs to the Semites was born.  Moses was trained in Egypt.  Joseph took an Egyptian wife and had good fruit – Manassas and….?  Therefore the very best that could be gotten in earth, multiplying in Egypt.  But the mystery tradition, in another code, gives wisdom.  Jesus did not go into Egypt by accident — “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”.

At the beginning of Noah you begin to individuate.  Prototype of the second birth.

Babel:  People who think they can build all things from below up.

Abram:  If we do not learn to walk on faith you never get beyond where you are.  There is also knowledge-faith, which is based on intelligence, to a knowledge which is not yet reached.  Because it has the faith, and a certain amount of knowledge, it brings that faith into the bearing of fruit, and so stands on what it before only apprehended.

But that is not the faith of Abram.  His is a super-rational faith, incomparably bigger.  Knowledge-faith would be the faith of Jacob.  From one point of view.  Because there has been a considerable accruing of knowledge and developing of the faculty for it, so the mind has the faculty of foreseeing and anticipate it.  But the soul must nevertheless learn the faith of Abram, that super-rational faith, which meets its test in such tasks as Job or Jesus.  So if you haven’t stretched the muscles to that point you won’t manage it.  Job’s faith is the development of the Abraham faith.  Where there is progress the mind must grasp what has been faith up to this.  But you must go on faith until you know.  And then there are crises where super-rational faith is necessary.

The Garden of Eden Story

Cyphers and allegories of the Old Testament

Series of five lectures given by MBM November 20, 1931 to January 15,1932

Lecture I November 20, 1931

(The transcription of this series is according to the notes of GB.)  The notes are verbatim in part, but there are also condensations and abridgements and a few gaps.)

The first two chapters of Genesis are highly involved metaphysically.  Hence, I shall pass rather quickly over the first chapters.  My choice has been in favor of the human problems, the development of man rather than the metaphysical.  A swift review of the first three chapters,  touching the high points.

There are two stories of Creation in the Book of Genesis.  The first chapter, through the first few stanzas of Chapter two (because the books are divided incorrectly) has to do with the setting up of the archetypal pattern.  This archetypal pattern the creative Hierarchies found good.  In chapter II the Creation is done all over again, but this time the archetypal patterns that belong to chapter I are carried through in various types of formation — the second and third the making of the stuffs following the patterns.  Some of the most interesting cyphers are there.  I will go more directly to the allegorical aspects, when incipient humanity is on the scene.

After the conditions are prepared we are told the Creative Hierarchies make man in their image.  Plural not singular. (man). Man is set up, and the breath of life set into him, into incipient humanity.

There are many stages beyond Adam (adams).  Adam in different degrees means incipient humanity.  As you uncode the different stages of Adam you come to know the different stages in which Adam is.

First comes Adam-Kadmon.  He is related to the archetypal Pattern.  He is Hermes~Aphrodite.  It is the dual aspect in all being, the masculine-feminine.  These two are together in the first Adam and therefore symbolize, or describe, humanity at an early stage, long before we know it as humanity.  He is said to be in a deep sleep and a rib is taken from him.  Rib means side.  If we have two sides together, masculine-feminine, and one is separated from the other, we have these two separated for action, so that Adam and Eve, or the second stage of humanity is Adam Kadmon divided.  Never a man or a woman but two principles operating.  These symbolize further the power of effectiveness.  What is too close could never be humanity, but had to be divided.

Eve, called the mother of all living.  Desire is the mother of all living, that is , the psychic principle.  Without that psychic principle separated from the masculine, there would be no movement, activity, involution or evolution.  Therefore the Aisha (Eye) aspect had to be separated from the Adam-Kadmon, or duality, to give opportunity for effectiveness — the very source of all that belongs to human life.

The Elohim bring to Adam and Eve all creatures that have been made.  This has to do with stimulating certain points of consciousness, which become enwrapped, to be later unwrapped when humanity is capable of reason, those points set up as memory.  Memory was enwrapped at this point.  (See Principle of Causation)

We are told that this combination, Adam and Eve, were placed in a garden.  Not a place at all.  In the original you would cognize that that was never intended.  It has to do with a condition, and is sometimes alliterated with the concept of a cave or an enclosure.  The translators call it a garden.  But it means an enclosure, a condition. This garden is to the East, the place of beginnings for the earth; so it means at this point, the stage is at the East, representing the beginning of a long stage of involution and evolution.

There are many good things in the Garden, but especially the two trees, the Elohim tell these two — yourselves at previous states — humanity is told that it may eat of all things except the one tree, of the knowledge of good and evil.  A taboo is set up against eating of that tree.  Really means, to those who know, that there is something of tremendous value behind it.  Some of incipient humanity knew it at the time.  A bid to the partaking of it.

Then comes the maligned serpent — the inciter, the instigator – outside of Eve.  The Eve principle par excellence.  It is as though the desire principle, which is symbolized by Eve, had to be stimulated from the outside.  Something stimulates you from the outside to go into action.  Until you are a highly evolved being; then it may operate from outside of you on another plane.

So the serpent was really a cooperator of the Elohim, but it is told in a queer fashion.  You discover that the serpent force is the beneficent force that operates with the whole system of evolution.  It started with the inciting into action of the Aisha principle.

Eve listens to the come-on stuff. . . . .if you eat of this apple you will die.  He was right.  They would die to that particular plane or condition.  He would have to leave that enclosure.  That should be left.  Instead of dying, you only die to a plane — a relative death and a beginning of a long procession that leads to the descent into the third dimension.  The serpent forces incite the desire principle to do that and they would become, as a result, as gods.  A corresponding passage in the New Testament implies that the whole object of the evolution is to become sons of God, “co-heirs with Christ”.  In the New Testament what is said by the leaders including the Leader himself has to do with the taboo the Elohim put on eating the apple.

So Eve takes the apple, the fruit of these things.  The apple is the promise of the tree, and had humanity, through this desire principle, not reached for the fruit it could not have started building the tree of human life.  Starts its growth through that moment, that condition.

Red Adam, — earth, is the second type of Adam — earth and blood symbol of the earth man.  The physical man was affected by that which Aisha, the desire principle, undertook.  As a result of the physical and psychic being stimulated from without, the serpent forces, a new condition arose and Adam-Eve, earth-water, had to die to the state known as Eden.  They were thrust out.  Cherubim with flaming sword were put at the gate, a sign that humanity cannot go up backwards.

The Garden of Eden stage is closed and humanity descends to a denser condition.  Not yet in this condition, but more and more gravity toward it.  Presently the Elohim make for incipient humanity — or connect them up — with the physical forms which have been evolving from below up – coats of skin, the early stage of the bodies you are in.  Has to do with light-sparks being drawn down into denser conditions, like vapors becoming liquids, and then solids.

And so a new stage begins.  In the passage following, Jehovah-Elohim, a new title, tell humanity something of what is in store for them.  In the Pattern it is inherent that the light-sparks, come down in the thick coats of skin, will suffer much.

What occurs next?  Adam and Eve mated and had two sons, Cain and Abel.  Don’t be literal.  The figures in the Old Testament are code words, and the characters describe the stages of humanity.  What might occur?  Humanity came into a denser condition from a higher one (or a high one).  You have to work for what you get.  In the psychic stage you dramatize it and you have it.  What would occur?  A certain amount of memory of the pleasanter things you had left behind — a memory of the serpent forces, of Jehovah Elohim.  Also a dramatic, dynamic, gripping with the things of this dimension, which do not yield so easily, but which require that you will make effort to get — a body that can be injured etc.  Those are some of the results of coming down into thick coats of skin.

Two types of things go on, one harking back and one going down.  That is what Cain and Abel symbolize.  Abel means something like vapor, mists.  Cain means begotten, quite different.  It is not chance that these names were given.  The writers of these chapters were very wise indeed.  Therefore there is purposiveness in these names.  The vapor state is the memory of the Edenic happiness, of deities, the Elohim.  Cain, on the other side, a tiller of the soil, the very stuff of the world into which humanity has come.  Simplest humanity beginning to work in this dimension, but at an infantile stage.

The two are incompatible.  That quarrel is not a fight between two brothers.  It is a description of the conflict between two movements – described by Jung as the two currents in the stream, the one to the source, the other out to the sea.  They are in friction.  It makes for conflict.

The story in Genesis is highly condensed.  Covers vast areas.  We will have to stretch it a bit.  Cain grappling in a primitive sort of way, because it is a new world, because he is incapable of high things.  They brought offerings to God.  Abel’s sacrifice is accepted.  Not Cain’s.  Why?  Why was Jehovah wrathful?  It means that at a certain stage the results are not those which are the ones sought, and therefore, the Cain type, or trends, in humanity have to be thrust out again to work further.  Abel, on the other hand, symbolizes those left-overs of the Edenic stage, which are therefore in rapport with that state and do not want to put on the animal nature.  Wanted to sacrifice it.  From the one point of view acceptable, but here immature.  Can’t put by the animal nature till you come out at the other end.

Cain did away with Abel, who was premature.  He, Abel, would sacrifice without having possessed.  Though his sacrifice was acceptable he nevertheless was eliminated.  Cain, whose sacrifice was not acceptable remained.  So Abel is out of the picture and those traditions that belong to Cain continue.

We have been describing what is known as the fall.  Get a sense of how valuable that fall is.  It is worthy of note that it is almost exclusively in the tradition of the Semites that this is spoken of as a fall, or as something undesirable.  Not when you come to its actual meaning, but in the Hebraic and Christian exoteric teachings — they disobeyed the commands of Jehovah, and that we must somehow atone and get back to the stage through sacrifice, when we would confess our fault to Jehovah for having disobeyed him.  Nothing of the kind!  These patterns are inherent.  The fall is merely a descent into a denser state, and is no more terrible than it is when rain falls.  Rain is only vapor condensing.  It is beneficent.  By the same token, once you follow the schemology of these processes, the fall is not a thing of terror but something that has been wholly misunderstood.  It is in an essential, constructive pattern which develops humanity.  If we had had only Abels, there would be no humanity of today.  Now humanity is well on its way of evolution.  At this stage our story is still involution.

Man has come to the thick coats of skin and has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If man had not come down into this state he would not have known the difference between good and evil, and he would have been an unconscious being — without our mental consciousness.  The whole mental octave would not have been; because it is built up on the perception of the differences of things – the tree of the knowledge of the difference between good and evil.

Good and evil are condensed words.  It really means the entire schemology of the perception of differences between things; and in the area of the differences man may become selective, and therefore learn a basis of constructive or non-constructive choice, that he may evolve the potentialities within himself.  It is only through leaving Eden and coming down into matter that this is possible.  So our eating of that tree means development of the mental faculty.

Tree of Life. What of this other tree (of Life)?  Man must get out of Eden swiftly, so that he does not eat of that tree.  It would bring about a kind of fixation.  If the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means a descent, a knowledge of the fruit of the tree of life would have meant a staying in that condition (Edenic).  That is why I say fixation.  And it would have been a most unfortunate, indeed a terrible thing.  Man could not have made his way forward.  Had he eaten of this tree while in Eden he could not have eaten of the other tree.  So there were, it appears, two possibilities open to humanity.  It became humanity after it ate of this one tree.  Had it not eaten of that tree, and eaten of the tree of Life, it would have remained Adam-Kadmon, and the very thing we call the human evolution would not have taken place.

Adam and Eve and their two children.  Two types of forces — the things that belong to the earth and to the psychic, desire, and the result becoming operative in the third dimension.  The first result of that is to be known as Cain and Abel.  But the momentum that has taken humanity down is too strong for the survival of Abel.  Hence, the story is, Cain murdered Abel.

Now a most extraordinary thing takes place in reference to Cain.  A curse is laid by Jehovah-Elohim upon Cain.  He is told where to go, — down, to the land of Nod.  Nod means exile.  It means that that trend downward, which was intended, is now quite away from the Edenic state, is exiled – land of Nod.  And there is further a curse laid upon Cain (Genesis IV, 9).  You are all of you Cain’s, continuation of Cain — vagabonds in earth.  Not till you are conscious do you know what you are after.

The root of the word curse is cross.  And what is a cross?  Forces meeting resistance.  Means two types of things at cross purposes.  The thing that is inherent in Cain, really the Abel nature, vapor rising and wanting to get back quickly, is limited by something else that is a block.  Thus these two things are at cross purposes.  But it is this very friction that makes later for life.  Halo at the cross piece of the cross.  A bringing out into potency of what is involved in the curse of Cain.  The uprising Abel trend blocked with the crosspiece.  Friction.  So the mark of Cain is on all of you.  You may try to forget it but it always comes back.  Presently comes the light.

Cain is terribly depressed.  A stage of human development.  You think that is the end of you.  It seems to be too much.  The memory of the Abel is in him (cain).  Cain protests.  The Lord says Cain shall not be slain.  The Lord says there shall be vengeance on those who try to do it — a “seven-fold vengeance”.  A mark was set on Cain.

What is this seven-fold vengeance which is going to be on anyone who attempts to kill Cain?  The seven influences, the seven planets. . . there are the seven everywhere (here MBM referred to an old story of the contribution of the seven to the making of incipient humanity, an old Greek-Egyptian story).  The marking of these seven is thus registered within incipient humanity (see Gnostic document “Virgin of the World”).  But the same thing is here implied.

And it is in regard to the contribution, or gift, of the seven toward incipient humanity that each one of these powers – sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc., will all protest, or resist, the killing off of Cain.  If we literalize that a little — a little more, by the same token, should anything occur to this incipient humanity, to whom they had contributed their mite, they would do battle for that which had been implanted in humanity.  Hence the seven-fold threat on anyone who should do violence to Cain.  Really a kind of protection against the elimination of the Cain trend.  Fare more beneficent than Abel.

So Cain goes out on the long pilgrimage, which is now the human evolution.  The descent, in a sense, is accomplished at the point described in Genesis as the land of Nod.

Another brother was substituted for the slain brother.  Not a brother literally.  You can’t kill off that memory but you kill it off in its first aspects.  It is replaced by Seth, and Seth means substitute.  Symbolizes the beginning of the higher development parallel with the development of the lower Man being, each individual as well as humanity, being highly complex, many trends functioning at the same time.  Our story describes it as aspects — lower man and the higher man.  The lower man develops via the land of Nod and change.  The higher begins to be started again in Seth, an aspect of the same type of thing we have called Abel.

(Read carefully the first 5 chapters in Genesis)

Cyphers and Allegories of the Old Testament

Lecture II

MBM

December 4, 1931

Section I

Go back to the four rivers of the Garden of Eden — a river that subdivides into four.  These are not to be seen as rivers but as indications of the four elements that go to make the substance of all Creation:  earth, water, fire, air, the four factors stream from the great Source or Reservoir.  Also, in man, physical, psychic, higher psychic, mental.  Or later, when man is evolved, earth, water, air, fire, when the fire of the psychic is replaced by the fire of the spiritual.  In this procession of figures as seen in the Books of Moses we have to take into account that these factors are available.

Our next step is to follow the line of Cain and the one who replaced Abel, Seth.  The names, as you get them in the usual translation are not very helpful, but still there is a suggestion.  The tradition, or line, of Cain carries on in six steps.  He does not, strictly speaking, belong to the line of Adam at all.  Adam really is the beginning of the line of Seth, who continues up to Noah in ten steps — six in the line of Cain and ten in the line of Seth.  Six has to do with the number of work, or labor.  And the work of the Cain-tree is the worker in earth.  You remember, Cain is a tiller of the earth, the things that belong to earth.  His sons became artificers in metals, set up cities.  The line of Cain represents an earthly civilization, and that is work – hence the number six.

Why was it that the compilers of these old books worked out so well the numbers and other symbolism?  They were Knowers and contrived them in codes so that those accredited to such knowledge should have it available to them.  Contrived them in histories, so that they carried the allegory.  They (the compilers) were content that those who knew what the human evolution was to be could read them as set up in the Hebraic scriptures.

The line of Seth, in contrast.  The line of Seth is the interesting one.  You remember he replaces Abel.  It starts with the line of Adam.  From Adam to Noah is ten.  Enos is the first figure of corporeal, or earthly man.  If we follow the whole process further we come to Enoch, who is the seventh.  The corporeal man means man and mind.  At the time of Enos men began to call “on the name of God”.  That is, the quality which was in Abel, and carried on by Seth, is now coming to a degree of consciousness — seeking out the natureof God.

Follow further till we come to the seventh, Enoch.  Enoch has much in common with Enos, but there is something further about Enoch: “he walked with God and was not”.  Enoch was translated, transmuted.  He passed up, being in a vaporous state, into the higher regions, without continuing the evolution.  And was far from the line started by Abel of the higher self.

Cain is earth-water, and those that play into the genealogy of Seth are fire-air.  Following along the tradition to Noah – the name usually given as meaning rest, but it means a rhythm accomplished and therefore a period of rest.  What is Noah?  It is said he was a just man, and he also “walked with God”.  While a thread continued, the relationship with the higher, something of the same, but more dynamic, occurs as between Cain and Abel.  Now by the motif of the flood.  For just as Cain, following the earth-water evolution, had to overcome Abel for a time, so the earthly evolution had grown so profuse that it was necessary to clean the slate.  That is inherent in the motif of the Flood.

With the flood we get the first presentation of the methods by which upward transformation shall take place.  Because Noah was just, kept in touch with the larger laws, and being fire-air, he was to be salvaged.  Aspects of the Cain motif had been contributed to Noah.  Jehovah-Elohim is said to have “repented” and, it is said, wiped out man; and instructs Noah to build an ark, an enclosure.  (see Silberer for “enclosure”, and the way of rebirth or regeneration)  This flood motif is the first picture in the books of Moses about the schemology of regeneration.

The Flood.  Wiping out via water means repentance.  The building of the ark symbolizes the withdrawal that everyone must go into if he seeks rebirth.  It is worthy of your notice that this appears so early in the allegorical symbols.  We might spend considerable time at the working out of the symbol of the ark.  It was made of wood, trees that grow up from below.  Things that grow up from below have to be cut down.  There were very few openings.  Noah was instructed to go in with his family and to take a pair of each kind of animals, both clean and unclean – again a symbol.  Animal is the psychic nature, the emotional.  The clean animals are those emotions which go upward — they are acceptable.  The others, anger, hate, lust, pride, etc. are the unclean animals.  But at this stage of the human evolution, unclean animals are necessary; for if man did not have anger, hate, etc. he would not have been able to survive.  They belong to the tradition of Cain.

They are all taken into the ark, so as to reproduce their kind.  That is, germinal points of emotion shall be taken into this enclosure with those higher aspects symbolized by Noah.  The rest are cut off, via the symbol of the flood.  They are set for a time in this ark, while the whole world is covered with water.  Noah obeys the instruction of Jehovah-Elohim and goes into the ark with the animals.

After a time the Flood subsides and he sends out a dove.  The dove comes back.  At intervals of seven days the dove is sent out again, and this is done three times.  The third time it does not return.  That would get us too far into metaphysics.

The next step is that the ark rests, not at a place on the Caspian sea etc. – it is a philosophical point.  When the ark rested Noah and his family, and the animals, went out.  Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice of the clean animals.  This, it is said, was sweet to the nostrils of Jehovah.  Jehovah made a covenant that never again would he do this terrible thing, the Flood.

Undoing the allegory, it means that the aspects which had been incarcerated in the ark, which belonged to all humanity.were turning upward now, in terms of the higher emotions.  The lower emotions were, for the time being, quiescent.  A new period in the human evolution has taken place.

What is the next step? Genesis VI, 1 and 2: Men multiplied and daughters were born to them.  The male aspect here represents the active thoughts, mind and the active principle, and daughters means the feelings, emotions, attachments that result from active thoughts.  So daughters are born to men.  And there is a terrific multiplication.  “The sons of God went in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children”, and there were mighty giants in those days.  The “sons of God” meant light-sparks, out from himself, who represent the mind, or thoughts.  “Sons of God” are something different.  These are light-sparks who go in to the daughters of men, or the desires of the lower world, and, light-sparks being highly dynamic, bring forth giants.  The result of this, a period of intense wickedness.  This (stage or event) should have come in before the Flood and lead up to the onslaught of the Flood.

After the Flood, the beginning of the new rhythm and the repetition of what had occurred before.  Noah has three sons:  Shem, Ham, and Japheth.  There is valuable metaphysical content in their names.  Shem means upright, going up, perhaps vertical.  Ham means going down, and it was Ham who mocked his father when he lay uncovered after he had partaken of the grapes.  Japheth means extension, a dweller in tents.  Tents are an important motif in the Hebraic pattern.

What do you get when you take these three names, upright, down, and extension — a solid, a cube.  From Noah, the one who is carrying on now, the state of the light-sparks in their involution, they have again to separate in all direction, as it were, three-dimensionally.  The direction which moves up is that of Shem, and he carries on some of the important truths in another place of our story.  Ham goes down, is related to the tradition of Cain — just as important as Shem.  And Japheth is the dweller in tents, and is sent out in all directions, expands to the stage of the third dimension, the very world in which we are.  A new rhythm again is underway.  These three aspects expand, up, down, to the right and to the left.  A long period of experience in earth is to be covered.

The next high point is in the tower of Babel.  What is the tower of Babel?  They prepared bricks, burned them, wanted the tower to go to heaven.  Ego is developing.  Something like the Cain motif.  Cain offered Jehovah the fruits of the field, and they were not accepted.  If you follow that tradition awhile, you will cognize that the work from below up is not acceptable to Jehovah.  It is not that which is desired, though it has a very important place in between.

So the tower of Babel represents the effort of mind working from below up – reason thinking, intellectual thinking.  It thinks it can set up so high a tower that it can pierce the sky and can answer every enigma — those thoughts that think they are the end.

The next step:  Jehovah-Elohim see this tower, and descend and scatter the people, and there is a confusion of tongues.  What is the confusion of tongues?  Here is this tower — intellectual thinking, reason thinking, has an answer to everything, that is at it were from heaven knocked down, and by being knocked down is scattered, because Jehovah-Elohim knew that this type of activity was useful and therefore scattered it abroad.  It shattered the illusion that the lower mind could penetrate into higher realms, but it was useful and therefore scattered.  Each go off in their own direction for further experience.  Confusion, something like that in the household of the self.  Cain could not go up either, but Cain is so valuable that a mark is put upon him, and he shall not be killed.

And again a new octave.  Have you ever known, in the Hebraic Scripture, that the real Hebraic Tradition does not begin until you come to Abram.  Until then it is, as it were, a description of all humanity.  But when we come to Abram we come to a line that belongs to the Semitic Tradition.  The Semitic stock had an important part to play in the scheme of human evolution.  They were a chosen people.  That is they were chosen because of certain characteristics of them as a race, to cradle certain ideas, certain forces, and to achieve certain patterns.  They were, with the exception of their leaders, unconscious of it.  Therefore with sure logic, there appears projected in the picture at this early stage the motif of the Semitic line as described via Abram.

With Abram, therefore, we are watching something like a pattern within a pattern.  Abram is the father of the Jewish branch of the Semitic peoples.  Therefore the beginner of that line which cradled important leaders regarding the human evolution, culminated in the figure of Jesus.  The work of the Jewish race was over at that time.  When then this new pattern begins to appear we should have double eyes.  This pattern now becomes doubly valuable.  Why?  Because it is, in a new sense, the necessary step by which all larger evolution now takes place.

So, with the very first appearance of Abram on the scene we get a sign of what it is necessary to do if we undertake this pattern.  Step for a moment into the Christian Tradition.  Jesus is the Pattern maker.  He has long antecedents.  Before he can be born, all that is reported, allegorically, in the Old Testament must take place.  Jesus, in his work as the Pattern maker becoming the Christos or the anointed, is a symbol, or a Pattern, which you, when you are enlightened enough, will undertake to follow.  It is the great Pattern.  But before it can appear in you, the Christ in you, these steps that belong to what Abram sketches must take place.  Hence, the double importance of watching what Abram is.

Abram lived with his father Terah, way up in the Mesopotamian valley, in Ur of the Chaldees.  He receives instruction to set forth.  He is, as the whole Semitic peoples were, nomads.  Japheth is a tent dweller – nomad, wanderer.  Does not stay long at any one place.  Those who build cities build places of fixation.  In allegories the city builders, a la Cain, are on the solid side of things, whereas the nomads, or tent dwellers, move rapidly from place to place.  And that is something that belonged to the entire Semitic tradition.  They are tent dwellers.  Part of them became city dwellers — the Lot family, but the true pilgrim never dwells in cities, so he can move quickly.

Abram sets forth with Terah, his father.  That is an allegory that that which has been in a condition shall move forth from it.  It invariably moves forth with its father, the authority of the old.  As you set forth, even today, you do so with Terah, or the father.  It takes some time before you have overcome the father.  In the pattern as outlined in the Semitic tradition, Terah dies early.  Abram did not stay long at a place – he moved swiftly from condition to condition in himself — overcame his fixations, dies to the old.

And Abram leaves the country.  Sets forth from Chaldea.  When the father dies he is moving into a new condition.  So, as the father dies, — your old attachments, creeds, illusions, mores — you are literally in a new country.  So the pilgrim starting the pattern for the Semitic race.  So he leaves that country and goes to a far country, with Sara (Sarai) his wife and Lot, his nephew.

Sara is what we might call potential spirit.  Lot is the outer.  He continues.  Again the line of things.  So we have again the whole picture: Abram consciously, voluntarily obedient to the call from Jehovah Elohim, accompanied by the higher psychic nature, still potential, waiting; and Lot, the nephew, representing the outer world, and who later goes into the cities, moving south and westward from Ur, and crosses the Jordan.  There an altar is built, and there is a promise of Jehovah that a race shall spring forth from the bowels of Abram.  Why?  Abram is a type of humanity; and this type of humanity was indeed to be the source of a new tradition.

It was so.  And the cognition of that nature in Abram which was responsive to the challenge in Jehovah-Elohim sets up the first order.  Some of you have been following this same pattern in the small.  And you have experienced the next step.

Famine!  The next step is famine.  It seems strange that, after Abram has been called to leave a condition where he was comfortable (the father dying), promising him so much and then facing a famine.  But it is always so.  You may be sure of that every time you set your feet forward, following this pattern, there will be a famine.  Why?  Many reasons.  The most of this is psychological-philosophical.  Abram, who has moved into the new country, is not familiar with the new country.  After you have left your old faiths etc. you don’t know the laws by which the new country functions.  You can’t plant a seed and have it multiply.  When you have begun anything new you are as a child and at the mercy of the conditions.  There are other, more mystical, reasons.

Egypt.  Abram now goes to Egypt in the Semitic tradition, the body, the lower world.  You must always ask from what racial point of view are you reading.  From other points of view Egypt is just the opposite.  To the Jews it was because of the bondage – analogy to the bondage in the body.  Extraordinary things occurred there.  Abram passes Sara off as his sister.  Pharaoh is enamored of Sara and would take her.  Then Abram steps into the picture and is rebuked by Pharaoh.  What is the point?  You see, if he keeps Sara as his sister, and does not mate with her, there is no fruit — result of the mind(?) Abram mating with the higher, or potential, spiritual nature.  As though Abram at this stage was not willing to accept the spiritual nature.

Separation from Lot.  He (Abram) now returns north.  Lot, the trends which continue the earthly evolution, sets out for the cities – again the line of things.  And Abram goes in another direction.  He dwells in tents.  At Mamre, the oak tree.

Battle of the kings.  Lot is taken into captivity.  Sodom and Gomorrah here.  Lot has gone down into solid earthy flesh — and Abram does battle for him.  They are one you know.  He does what the higher aspect in you will inevitably do.  It will do battle for the sake of releasing the lower from those conditions that are symbolized by Sodom and Gomorrah.

On the way back from this battle Abram meets Melchizedek. Melchizedek is one of the greatest figures, perhaps the greatest with the exception of Jesus the Christ, in the entire Bible.  Abram was a very great man indeed, the greatest of the peoples in the western part of Asia, and yet, we are told, Abram gave tribute to Melchizedek; so he must have been a very great being indeed – voluntary tribute.  We are also told that Melchizedek observed a certain ritual, and that ritual is the archetype for the ritual used by Jesus in the new testament.  In fact he (Jesus) is referred to as a follower of the order of Melchizedek.  But Melchizedek is not our story.

Again Abram travels on.  He has no offspring, and there is great distress.  You remember Sara offers her handmaiden Hagar.  Of Hagar is born Ishmael.  Who is Hagar?  Remember, the feminine figures of the old Testament are the psychic, or the soul side of things, descended along the line Aisha, or Eve, therefore desire — both lower and higher.  Sara is the higher psychic, and Hagar the lower.

Ishmael born of that lower stock.  Inevitable that this should take place first.  Inevitable, because Abram had passed off Sara as his sister.  He has to pay a price for it.  This story is your story.  That is why it is set up.  You remember that later Sara also has a child, but that the child of Hagar mocks Sara’s child, and Sara requests that Abram send Hagar and her child out into the desert.

Sara symbolizes a state of the soul.  She was right.  This allegory is that that which belongs to the lower cannot live under the same roof with the higher, until it is atoned.  It is not at one, at this stage.  Therefore must be sent out into the desert.

The desert is that sterile place where Ishmael almost dies of thirst, and Hagar weeps bitterly because Ishmael is dying.  An angel comes, or an entity from another plane, and provides Hagar with sustenance for Ishmael, for his stock is also to continue, like Cain’s, but within the royal House of Abram, in which the stock of Abram-Sara has place.  You remember how hard it was on Abram.  He was loathed to obey the wishes of Sara, but finally did.  Again the cleavage.  And the tradition of Cain, Ham, Lot, Ishmael and Hagar must continue its evolution, for the struggle of the light-spark with earth is only beginning.  But earth-water goes one way, fire-air another.

 

Cyphers and Allegories of the Old Testament

Lecture III MBM

December 11, 1931

Our allegory is really a Pilgrim’s Progress of the light spark descending, and then evolving after leaving the Garden of Eden.  From one point of view the real progress does not begin till after the Flood, or the first great repentance.  Nevertheless, all the way through, we see the conflict between the lower man and the higher man.

It is your struggle, although told as though of a third person.  Really the story of humanity.  One striking difference between the progress of humanity and the way it is told in the Scriptures is that there it is highly economical.  So condensed that the steps by which the Pattern is set up are cleaned away from the debris of everyday behavior.  It takes time to release ourselves from the problems of everyday in an ordinary life.

Following the processes from collective Adam, and Adam Kadmon, the processes set up by Enoch, Enos and Noah, culminated in Abram.  Abram1s story is in itself a complete cycle.  He leaves with his father the land of Mesopotamia.  We always start off with the father, the old.  Get the accuracy of this pattern.  It is not until considerably later that the father dies and that the new man, or the son, sets forth alone.  As he sets forth into the Promised Land he goes with Lot, the earthly strain.  Lot illustrates the old (Terah) his brother’s son, therefore the nephew of Abram.  So the old in you, as you attempt to make the progress, has a way of hanging on.

When Abram’s name is changed to Abraham we have a new consonant, H.  When he is given the promise that his seed will multiply — the power that is in him — the aspirate H is added — the out-going breath, or the power of Jehovah spread out through the ideal symbol of Abram.  His name first was a great king, or a high king.  Abraham means father of a great, or a mighty, multitude, because he has become worthy to become the father of that which later bears the ideal seed, first in Isaac, then in David, then in Christ.  He has obeyed Jehovah.  Power to breathe out in power, via one of the great letters in the secret name of Jehovah.

Famine in the Promised Land.  At first dearth.  Has to go into the land of Egypt, or denser condition, into the body, and there he gives off his wife as his sister, to preserve his own life.  Shoddy but true.  We give off that which is most profound in order to maintain our self-respect in a community.  Abram makes that mistake once again.  The king of Egypt, being wise and sensitive, knows who Sara is, and she is returned with gifts to Abram.  He travels north, back into the promised land, and divides the country with Lot.

Lot chooses what is best — not wisely, but literally.  So he goes into the cities.  Later to Sodom, which means self-love, narcissism, or eroticism.  Abram travels north and west.  Oak of Mamre.  A tent dweller.

Abram, as he sits in the door of his tent, sees three figures approaching.  These are sometimes translated as angels.  They are materializations.  Abram, being a true sensitive, cognizes them for what they are.  He wishes to wash their feet.  They abide with him and go into his tent.  In contrast with that, we are told a little later that two messengers, not three approach Lot, who is sitting in the gate of a city, the place of fixations, as against the place of movement, the tent.  Lot asks them to come in but they refuse to do so, and remain in the streets of the city.

Why three to Abram and two to Lot?  Three, the number of completeness.  They go because Abram is complete, Abraham; but Lot, though related to Abram, can only see two.

These messengers say strange things to Abram: that he shall have seed.  So far he has had seed only through Hagar, and Sara can not, being the higher psychic and the forerunner of the spiritual, cannot bear seed until the end of a cycle.  Even Sara laughs.  Sometimes even the highest in us has not faith enough to believe in miracles. When our mind is clear we will know that everything we experience is, in a sense, a miracle.

What has occurred with them and the two messengers?  The entities had drawn into the house, and the people of Sodom come upon the house and try to break in.  Why?  This is sometimes reduced to a psychological dilemma like homosexuality.  It is homosexuality, but not on the physical plane.  Men sought them because these two strangers were beautiful — tried to beat down the doors.  Lot, with a strange and dramatic gesture, offers his two daughters, but they will have none of it.

They want the two angels.  It all sounds like a vile mixture of physical problems with those of a metaphysical nature.  The masculine cannot mate with the masculine; it must mate with the feminine.  No fruit in the mating with the same sex, and it is therefore an occult problem, incidentally a physiological one.  Therefore, unless one part of you is receptive to thought, to feeling, or whatever the oncoming masculine principle may be, there is no result.  If you are resistant to a productive idea you are aiding homosexuality on another plane.  That is the first turn of the key on the problem of Sodom and Gomorrah.  No fruits out of that relationship.  Therefore that city, being a place of fixation, is like the land of the Flood, to be wiped clean.  Fire and brimstone.

The angels say to Lot:  Get out of this city and go forth, so that you and your family are safe.  Because Lot had something of the Abram motif in him.  He is reluctant to go — part of you looking back with attachments.  Lot’s wife looking back and is turned into a pillar of salt – the psyche held, so that it cannot go further, by its attachment to the past; and being attached to things, does not want to go up to a mountain, as the messengers say, a higher state of consciousness.  Want to go into a little city near by.  At least it is out of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But later he has to go to the mountain.  Insistence on that pattern.

So Lot and his two daughters escape.  Later the two daughters cohabit with Lot, he being first given wine to drink.  Wine, in the scripture, means that which intoxicates, not physically, but that which intoxicates the higher psychic.  Add the fire to the fire.  Where the soul becomes, at least for a time, enamoured of the Larger; therefore for a time intoxicated.

Lot, without knowing it, impregnates the two daughters.  Because the line which Lot represents must continue.  The daughters know this, and the older says to the younger: Let us give our father wine to drink, so that we may spread his seed on the surface of the earth — need of the lower man to continue the evolution so that eventually the higher man will be completed through the labors of the lower man.

One point I have omitted: Ishmael, known as the wild ass man.  The ass, especially in the symbology of the Semites and Hammites was a great symbol, but unobtrusive, so that it may escape you.  Ishmael the first ass man.  Think of Balaam and his ass.  It was the ass on whom Balaam rode that saw the mystic vision before Balaam did.

The ass is a curiously sensitive creature.  The outer interpretation is that of humility, but that only scratches the surface of things.  It is said later that Ishmael shall beget twelve princes,  Twelve, the full gamut of the human evolution, and for us reminiscent of other symbols of twelve, the fulfilled octave.  It therefore represents the whole process of the lower man.  Ishmael is brought back via Hagar into the service of Sara (Sarai) because the lower man is in service to the higher — as Anubis, in the Egyptian tradition is in service to Isis, not to his so-called mother Nephthys.

Melchizedek, in regard to a question:  Melchizedek was a great leader outside of the Semitic tradition — so great a leader that the semites, even in their ultimate pattern of the five books of Moses, give tribute to him.  He was called the King of Peace, but he belonged to something else – the pattern of the king-priest, the two aspects in one, that is, as they must be.  By the same token, so was Jesus king-priest, as he emphasized, but not a literal king.  The Semitic uses the ancient ceremony, known on earlier continents, long before Asia and Europe — bread and wine.  Therefore Jesus is said to be a priest and king after the order of Melchizedek.  There are ultimates in patterns, such ultimates that they are sustained over epochs of time, and history, and geography.  This “order of Melchizedek” was long before the date of Europe.

When Abram is 99 yrs old, that is, at the end of his cycle, the covenant is made that he shall have a child through Sara (Chapter XVII).  They are positives — I will.  The emissaries of Jehovah tell Abram to do a curious thing — magic.  Usually the Christian and the Hebraic tradition eschew magic.  The sacrifice of five kinds of animals.  He lays them in certain ways.  You must get a different idea of magic than is in the ordinary sense.  After this ceremony is accomplished Abram has to keep off the wild beasts of the air from eating up . . . . that is the lower mind activities from spoiling the condition of the higher mind and the psychic.  It is as though, in magic, you had to observe a condition of a higher mind and of the higher psychic simultaneously, without those things of the lower mind coming in.  If that is done, and it was done in this case with Abram, something occurs analogous to what occurred with Abram.  He fell into a deep sleep (trance).  The old testament is full of magic, psychic phenomena, apports; but the ancients knew them and how to accomplish them.

So Abram falls into a deep sleep.  He has been able to transmute his consciousness, through a magic ritual, and sustain that higher state, so that now he is completely in it and so is in rapport with emissaries from another dimension.  Read the things he is told to do.

When Sara is at the end of her cycle, and Abram at the end of his, the child that was promised them is born.  Sara’s name becomes Sarah, which means princess.  As a result of this promise.  To Abram a new covenant is in order.  When Ishmael is 13 yrs of age he is circumcised.  Circumcision is a thing of the heart and spirit, and not the physical.  What has occurred in our pilgrims Progress?  We are watching the struggle of the light spark with conditions, as part becomes involved in matter and other parts try to release themselves.  Abram is the part that is trying to release itself and take out the gold that is won.  The Lot side is not through, but the Abram side, starting out with Abel, is gradually storing up gold, as it were one bit at a time, and it is the accumulation of these grains of gold that finally accomplishes sufficient so that the whole being is changed by the catalyst.

Circumcision.  When man is on the first rung of the cosmic (6th rung of the Ladder of the Mind) he again relates himself to spirit.  Thus, in circumcision, we have the symbol of the mind releasing the soul from attachments, so that it again begins to know the higher planes as they are.  Therefore Abram is told he must be circumcised, and all his family before they can enter the Promised Land — a condition, illustrated by a land.  Many things must be accomplished before one can sojourn in that state.  Abram is making a noble effort to do.  A great figure on the way.

One bitter test Abram has still to undergo, when he returns to the land of the Philistines.  He again gives out Sara as his sister.  Amazing, that after all the discipline he has had, and his communications with the emissaries of Deity, that he should make so serious an error again.  How reluctant you are to acknowledge the place which the spiritual life has, or should have.

So Abimelech, the king of this country, sees Sara, and draws her to him.  That is a forerunner of what occurred later with the Jewish race when it, as a people, did not comprehend the mysteries that were cradled in it, and the Gentiles grasped the point more swiftly than the Jews.

Abimelech is a forerunner of that, just a Pharaoh in Egypt.  He saw more quickly than Abram the rare beauty of Sara, or the spiritual nature.  But since the Philistines were not in the pattern as it had been schemed out, Sara could not remain with the Philistines.  Read especially Chapter XX.  The conversation of the messengers and Abimelech.

Thus the race which is beyond the Semitic, the outer world, has come to the swift recognition rather than those who are dealing with them constantly.  (Presumably “them” means intimations from higher planes.)  Great powers were outside of the race.  The Semitic race had a special thing to do.  They did it well only in terms of their leaders.

After Isaac is born there is a covenant with the Philistines.  Isaac’s name means laughter, joy.  The fruits of the long, long struggle of humanity, now out of the spiritual note through Sarah.  This is now gold.  And in that which is spiritual there is always joy.  It is one of the signs of true spiritual living that it is joyous. Therefore a certain consonance in that name.  The first real fruits of the struggle of man with matter.

Abraham and Sarah, these two aspects of humanity, are very happy.  They are living in joy at the effectiveness of right living.  Therefore a covenant can now be made with the outer world.  Have you noticed in yourself, when you have gotten right with Larger things, it makes for better adjustment with material things.  Thus you make a covenant with material things.  Thus Abraham made a covenant with Abimelech and his people.

So a new octave begins.  But it is a solemn one, for it is the most severe test that can be given to anyone who is attempting to follow the Pattern — the test of the sacrifice of Isaac.  Here we have, in the human side of the picture, two figures who had looked for a son, and at last, beyond the time when these expectations could be reasonably permitted, Isaac is born, and now the demand from the very figure who seems to be responsible for it, demanding the return of it.  There are very few who can stand the frightful test.  The mind cannot stand it in its ordinary state.  Only the spiritualized mind can.  It is so irrational.  Of course no deity could do a thing so absurd as this!  It must be a misunderstanding, etc, etc.  But if you look at it rationally you don’t understand the steps that are inevitable in any true rhythm.  For the story of Abram is one rhythm in the progress of the soul.

So Abraham is told to go up a certain mountain and offer up Isaac as a burnt offering to Jehovah.  A bloody sacrifice, say the Frazers (and other writers).  Isaac accompanies his father to this mountain, in evolution.  They ascend the mountain, and in that higher state of consciousness, Isaac says:  Father, where is the sacrifice?  The simple words Abraham says sustain the proper key.  The motif that sustained Abraham all the way through was faith.  Abraham is able to sustain his faith.  You must do the same, or you won’t break through — perhaps just before the dawn of your octave.  Abraham says:  The Lord will provide the sacrifice.  And Isaac, that is, the new being emerged out of Abraham, this new being goes willingly with Abraham.

Isaac is laid on the alter.  Abraham raises his arm with the sacrificial knife.  The knife symbolizes the readiness to go to the ultimate, at whatever cost.

And only at that moment of complete testing does the voice — again a messenger, speak up and say:  Wait, Abraham, thou hast passed thy test.  The extraordinary thing is that that can be said to you.

When that is accomplished Abraham sees another figure there, exactly as he had foreseen in his faith.  In other words, his faith is literally fulfilled.  Your faith is literally fulfilled when it is in key with higher laws.  Thus there was literally a ram in the story which Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac.  And so the rhythm of Abraham-Isaac comes to a close.

Isaac and Abraham are the first forerunners in the Old Testament of the great pattern of the sacrifice of deity in the creation of the Cosmic Day, and deity’s sons as finally illustrated in the New Testament through Jesus.  The incorrect words say it is the only son sacrificed to the Father for the sins of the world.  “The only begotten son” means that the son is begotten only of the Father-Mother, not of lesser things.  The birth of the higher consciousness is symbolized (?) in the birth of Jesus.

So the call (glory) is that of one born rightly — without adultery.  The “parents” in you are doing (?) adultery every hour of the day and night.  You are mixing your breeds, without the mixture of bloods.

By the same token “the only begotten son of god” is incorrectly translated.  It means the son begotten of cosmic parents, though the body may be begotten of earthly parents.  But the earthly parents are used in the allegory as a symbol only – mileposts — but the content is on another level.

Hence Isaac is the first forerunner of the pattern of Jesus, in the Semetic scheme of things.  Because of their passionate nature and intensity they (the Semites) were admirably designed to carry out the pattern, better than any other race.  Within it could be set up the milestones that indicate the processes of involution and evolution, or Pilgrims Progress.  That progress goes right through the picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus, or the culmination, the opposite end of Aisha.  Thus Aisha becomes Mary, and Mary is the fulfillment of Aisha, as Jesus is the fulfillment of the masculine picture, symbolized by Adam.  But Adam – red Adam, not Adam-Kadmon.  Thus there is a certain interconnection, inherence, that makes the mission (or meaning) of Jesus and Mary band together as they do.

Re. the development of names.  Gen. XV, 2nd vers. etc.  You will find here Lord used.  In the old language it means Adonai, or Aton, in Egypt, meaning Lord, or the One Lord.  Beginning Chapter XVII:E1 Shaddai that is really the mother principle, the nourishing principle; it should be translated “the nourishing breasts”.  Thus intimately related to the breasts of the cow of old Egypt.  So you have the very first answer to where is the mother side of things in the background of the Christian tradition.  Shaddai as different aspects of the “one which brought into activity”.  You need flexibility.  You would expect that in the representations of deity you will find it recorded. (mother side)

Lecture IV

MBM

December 18, 1931

The pattern in the Old Testament is first for the race in total and then, with the birth of Abram, the pattern worked out by the Hebraic peoples.

Abram symbolizes the higher man at the stage where he has evolved faith.  The Abram, Abel, Seth, the spiritual man, or what has evolved toward spirit, and that is in contrast with that which is going about its pilgrimage in the third dimension.  How the higher, or evolving spiritual life, is dependent on the experiences of the lower man, or man in the third dimension.

We have watched the birth of Isaac, the son so called, of Abraham and Sarah.  Today we come to the close of the stage called Abraham, follow Isaac, and then his two sons, further stages of humanity.

Sarah dies at the age which numerically makes 10 (127).  The feminine side, descended from Aisha, or the psychic plane, is more associated with cosmic numbers, and therefore the perfection of a cycle which is perfect in itself, the number 10.  Abraham died at the age which is numerically equivalent of 13, the pattern evolving in earth, whereas the soul never comes to earth but is bound to the earth as is the moon.  Sarah’s age 127.

Abraham in his later days seeks a wife for his son Isaac — Isaac, joy, faith that is able to go through great tests.  Abraham commands his servant to go into a far country for a bride for Isaac.  Isaac in this stage does not go himself.  In this stage he should not descend into the worldly country from which he came – or rather Abraham, from Ur.  After the servant brings up some questions, and is rebuked, he becomes the pattern of the ideal servant.  He sets forth to the far country.  In a place there is a well.  He has prayed that he should receive a sign at that well.  If he is given water he will know it is the wife for Isaac.

What does that mean?  A well brings up water from the depths – like water from the heights.  There are types, or degrees, of wells.  Rebekah gives water to the servant and to the camel.  Then the servant and Rebekah hasten to the home.  The servant is welcomed.  He won’t eat till he has accomplished his task.  He asks no questions but does what should be done.

Rebekah goes immediately — the swift response of the soul to the challenge of its work in earth.

Different types of well . . . . . . rapport with larger conditions, where vision is achieved.  That too is water which quenches thirst.

So Rebekah and Isaac meet and go to the tent of Sarah for mating.  Sarah is the forerunner, the first mate of faith, in the key of which all later activities that are productive for the soul, take place.

We return to Abram for a few moments.  He marries again, with Keturah.  What does humanity do when it mates with Keturah?  After the state of humanity that has gone through great tests it is in a state of such well being, fruitfulness and right living in this dimension, that it is said to mate.  There is productiveness in ease – in all sorts of things: relations with people, speech, act — that is the marriage with Keturah.  It means that state, after great testing, when there is the harmonious living that can only come after critical tests.  The mellow period of life.

Keturah, significantly, has six sons: the number of fruitful labor in earth.  Shortly after, Abraham passes out of the picture, at the age of the numerical value of 13.

In the story of Isaac in the new Testament (Romans IX, 7) it is said: In Isaac shall the seed be called.  Isaac, the quintessence born of faith, the perfect son, obedient even to the ultimate sacrifice.  Why should Isaac have difficulty in bringing forth truth?  He is married to Rebekah, who is really spirit of higher things — that is, higher psychic — spirit struggling toward truth.

Why should she be barren so long?  You are familiar with the earlier fruit of relationship being earthly or material: Cain, Ishmael.  So Rebekah.  After 19 years Isaac begs Jehovah, and in the 20th year Rebekah brings forth life.  She is in great distress.  In her prayer to Jehovah, the soul struggling toward truth, she says:  I feel something strange within me.  The answer: Yes, from you shall be born two fruits, two children.  Two children are born, Esau and Jacob.

Esau and Jacob are twins.  It is said that Esau came out red all over, like a hairy garment.  After that came his brother, and his hand took hold of Esau’s heel, and he was called Jacob.  (Later Esau is called Edom, which also means red; associated also with red adam).

Esau belongs to the line of Cain and Ishmael.  Jacob belongs to the other line – Abel, Seth, Noah.  Abram-Isaac.  Esau means red, vigorous physical life, strong red blood.  Esau is the quintessence in the Old Testament of physical life, the higher point of it.  Here means strength, power, beauty.  Symbolizes the vigor and beauty, the ultimate of physical life.  Jacob is the twin.  Jacob’s name means supplanter.

What is the heel?  In the earlier chapters of Genesis there is the warning from Jehovah to “bruise the head of the serpent”; but that the serpent, in turn, would put his fangs in the heel of man.  A paradox.  The heel, that which is perhaps lowest in the physical body.  Also, that by which man walks.  The heel symbolizes that nature in man which is deepest in matter.  The ancient myth of Achilles’ heel.  Also in one of the tales of Krishna.  There is a variation of it in Siegfried.

Esau, the symbol of service, work, labor, activity.  A strong man, a cunning hunter, proud, skillful.  Jacob a simple, plain man.  Dwelt at home.  The favorite with the mother.  Esau the favorite of his father.  The symbol of Jacob is a subduing of the lower nature, and the pattern is begun at a stage before waking consciousness sets in, when, in birth, Jacob grasps the heel of Esau – the beginning of the bruising of the serpent via man’s heel.

We will take up the thread when they are young men.  Allegorically. Jacob is at home, cooking a mess of lentils, food for the lower man.  Esau has been out hunting — the lower man doing all sorts of things, out on jobs.  Being lusty, healthy and beautiful, he is hungry.  Since he has.been activating the beautiful animal nature in him, he smells the brew.  He says, give me some.  Jacob is learning to work from a very different angle.  He is foxy.  That is the way humanity is when it tries at first to go the larger path.  He asks for Esau’s birthright.  Esau says, I must have the things of this world.  So he gives up his birthright.

What is the birthright?  The lineage of that which comes from Isaac.  The evolution toward spirit.  It was in the Pattern that Esau should not have the birthright.  He cannot have it because he always makes the things of earth first.  Doing that, he sells his birthright.  So the birthright passed over to Jacob.

Jacob is rather afraid of Esau all the way through.  He represents those stages of humanity when you are working hard to accomplish, doing things for the Larger, but haven’t yet gotten on top.  When it seems that the things of the physical world are more enduring and valuable.  Jacob repeatedly addresses his brother as: my lord Esau.  But Jacob implies what must be done to get out on top.  It is through Jacob that the line of Abraham-Isaac is carried on.  So there is conflict between these two.  Jacob continues, still a little beguiled by the physical but working away from it.  So the pattern he initiated in the birth act, of putting his hand on the heel of Esau continues.

Another serious episode.  Isaac comes to the end of his stage.  Do that which is the act of the hunter: bring me game.  (This is what he is saying to Esau).  It is hard for the evolving life to accept that the physical life should be secondary.  For now and then it says:  Give me the beauties of the physical world.  So it sends out Esau for the game.

But Rebekah has overheard this conversation.  Her favorite, in earthly language, is Jacob.  To his she says: Quick, go out and bring something from our hearts, take it in to your father.  Do not let him know you are not Esau, and he will give you the blessing. Jacob is frightened.  He says:  He will know my smooth body.  Rebekah gets fur.  Rebekah and Jacob belong together in the picture.  They represent that stage in evolving life which has not yet the power to accomplish, and so must, from time to time, use the means that are available at that stage.

Jacob fools his father.  Isaac eats the potage, and gives the blessing.  Then comes in Esau.  He cries aloud.  Isaac says: It is done.  Isaac has great difficulty in finding the possible blessing for Esau.  It means that, however much we strive to find logical reasons to bring the tribute of physical things to the Larger, it is not within the domain of the physical to carry on the Larger tradition.  It is not via the Cain line, symbolizing the development of man in earth, it is not through that that the line is carried on.  “In Isaac only shall the seed be called”.  The things of earth must be made secondary.  The seed is carried on through Jacob,

Esau and Jacob are enemies.  Rebekah, representing the cupidity of the psychic world at this stage, sends Jacob from the home.  The physical world in utter rebellion at the inevitability, or the condition, that makes of the larger the preeminent thing.  So Jacob leaves, and he too is sent into the distant country.

Jacob, the plain man, not dramatic, but the simple man, must sometimes intrigue us as nothing in the spectacular can.  Beauty in the physical world is alright, but it is not safe until it is below the heel.  Jacob has not much resource, power, skill.  So he is lonely, fearful.  At one place he takes a stone for his pillow.  This is followed by the story of Jacob’s ladder.

To rest your head on a stone is to carry on the tradition of faith, but this time via the head, not the heart.  The head rests on the stone.  Mind, as against the heart:  Abraham over Jacob – working in earth, learning law.  When mind begins to understand.  So knowledge-faith replaces the faith of the heart.

As a result, Jacob, or humanity, has an experience.  He sees in a vision a ladder stretching from earth to heaven, and on it messengers moving up and down.  Hears a voice speaking.  He dwelt too at the well of wisdom.  So Jacob, having put his head on a stone, having rested his mind on principles, not his heart, sees a vision.

The ladder is the progression in relation from the lower to the higher.  The process of relationship between the lower and the higher, via degrees.  Up and down it move forces, energies, powers.  Those who are able to rest their head on principles will sooner or later have this experience.  Out of that experience comes to Jacob great strength and comfort.  The comfort of the heart, but above all the richness of the mind — the mind which has had the courage to rest its head on a stone.

Jacob comes presently too into this far country.  There he meets the symbol of the psychic plane, the feminine principle, again at a well — Rachel.  Wells re-occur.  Isaac is not to go into the far country, because, at an earlier stage, it is not safe to go down into the lower world and grapple with things as they are.  Because faith is still a thing of the heart.  When faith is gradually transmuted to knowledge-faith through work, symbolized by Jacob, through simplicity, through being a plain man, then it is safe and it can go into a far country.  You can go into the lower regions and work out the next step of your process.  So Jacob comes to the well, where is Rachel.

Rachel. Jacob, as with the servant with Rebekah, is drawn into the home.  Laban welcomes him heartily.  There is great festivity.  After he has been there awhile Laban says to Jacob: It is not fair that you should work with me here without pay.  Name your wage.  In other words, it is not consistent that you work, even in things of the third dimension, without getting results — fruits, wage.  What results do you want?  What wage do you want for your work in earth?  Will you give the answer of Esau or of Jacob?  Laban, the brother of Rebekah, symbolized the stock of Abram — the brother who stayed in the home country.  Rachel, symbol of the soul, the woman, who is held in bondage until man in earth has evolved far enough to claim her.

Have you claimed your soul?  Is it in the far country?  Have you set out as Esau or as Jacob?  Does Jacob want the mess of pottage?  He says: I will serve thee seven years, for that relationship — though each comes out of that stock — Rachel.  And so it is ordered.  It is Jacob who wants the fruits of the soul moving towards spirit, not the things that were sought by Esau.

After seven years Laban brings to Jacob the older daughter, Leah.  Leah is usually given as tenderhearted.  It is really weak eyed.  It has not the power, the virility, indicated by Rachel.  So Leah is brought to Jacob in the night.  He cohabits with her and in the morning discovers who it is.  So humanity, in its pilgrimage, even when it has served a long time, discovers there is so much subtlety, so many things it must know, that it frequently thinks it has cohabited with the Larger, and finds it is of the things of earth – Leah — that mind has not evolved the conditions that belong to Jacob.

So Jacob rebukes Laban for treachery.  He offers to serve still further.  He has continuity of purpose.  Insists on having Rachel.

Time passes.  Laban has noticed that the flocks that are under the care of Jacob have multiplied much.  Offers him pay.  Jacob says: I will take the spotted kine from your flocks.  Laban is rather pleased to get rid of them.  He keeps the pure stock.  Jacob belongs, after all, to the lineage which knows.  He performs a magic ritual. Uses different twigs; puts them in the trough where the cattle drink.  Twigs are code of power — therefore, forces which one who knows uses, separating first the wheat from the chaff.

What are these speckled cattle?  Those things which are not pure, which are mixed stock.  Here in Pojodag too we go after the spotted cattle.  We leave those things that are good alone.  Jacob had the right magic in what he did.  Then, with the power further that was in him, compacted into a magic ritual, he transformed the cattle.  Through power you transform that which is in one way, to another.  Alchemy.  Jacob is an alchemist.

Then his flocks multiply, and bit by bit those things which were in the possession of Laban come into the possession of Jacob.  Little by little all things come into the possession of the true worker, who works with his head resting on a stone.  There is nothing surer in the universe.  Not for the opportunist.  Simple, plain, does the work.  That is the lineage of what belongs to the true pattern at certain stages.  And that which had been in the possession of the worldly ones slowly passes over into the possession of Jacob.

Jacob possesses the flocks, also Leah, and presently, likewise, Rachel; so that the goods of earth, symbolized by the flocks, are his; alchemy, through right work, to transform; the power to multiply in terms of earthly things via the symbol of Leah; and the power to multiply, via Rachel, the higher psychic – all three in the possession of the true worker.

Jacob, starting out, was colorless.  That of the earth, starting out so colorfully, so significant as the mighty hunter, faded out.  And out of the very lower worlds into which Jacob has gone, where Abram and Isaac could not go, but the later stage, which rests on knowledge, can go, indeed must go, that wrests all things from the earth.

Note, in reading, who the sons of Leah are and who the son of Rachel is.  The son of Rachel, who carries on the next step of our story, is Joseph.  The son of Leah is Judah, the ruler, the one who had learned via the true alchemy in earth — who is sired by Jacob, the true worker.  A little like the Egyptian pattern of Anubis, who is born of the earthly mother Nephthys, and who becomes the great follower of Isis – who does the work of Isis in earth.

Rulership is learned through the control of those things that Jacob stands for when he goes down into the country of the lower worlds, but works as the alchemist.  It does not do to go down into the lower worlds via Esau; but if you go via the head on the stone, via Jacob, then that is able to sire the fruit known as Joseph.  For that the aspect of Leah comes in.

Lecture V

Cyphers and Allegories of the Old Testament

MBM

January 8, 1932

(MBM started with a little review of points in the chapters around Chapter 31 of Genesis.  How humanity had married the two daughters of that foreign land and brought forth fruits of that union.  The changing of the cattle.  Oxen, asses, a great many.  Having won these things he was ready to pass on.  At this stage Jacob, plus his wives, is ready to go back to the Promised Land.  It is necessary for incipient humanity to go into relationship with the things of this world.)

Jacob leaves while Laban is away.  After three days Laban hears of it and follows Jacob and upbraids him for going.  And for taking so much of what had originally been Laban’s, the outer world, and also for having stolen the Teraphim, or magic images.  Jacob continues to carry those images until a later point, the place of the House of God, El-Bethel.

Laban overtakes him.  That means that when you try to leave the outer world it is after you.

Why does man who is going toward the Promised Land go off in such a fashion?  …… the outcome is that they (Jacob and Laban) set up a mound of stones, to mark forever those things that belong to Laban and those things that belong to Jacob.  A kind of peace is established.  One does, when you move toward the Promised Land, mark off the things that belong to the outer world.

Is he now free to go on?  He is, as it were, between two forces.  He has left his brother Esau behind, and now that he is going back to that land he is afraid to meet Esau.  He sends peace offerings.  The dangerous pull, which a hero, who knows what he is moving toward, dreads.  Esau stands for the compulsive beauty of the outer world, man.  The esthetic rung.

What does he do?  What must be done at this stage in any mystical pattern.  He wrestles with a man.  He is lamed in the thigh.  He prays to Jehovah to save him from “my lord Esau”.  Jacob refers to him still as “my lord Esau” – the danger of the outer world in its beauty.

The prayer was: save me from the result, as it should be in a constructive pattern.  He was given the power to be stronger than Esau.  So presently Esau came to him.  Something of the same sort as with Laban.  The soul that has worked quietly and effectively must guard itself, and set up boundaries against the outer world and the magic pull of beauty.

A compact between Esau and Jacob.  The big thing is that at this stage Jacob becomes, because of his successful wrestling, a new being, and becomes a new name.  Instead of being a “supplanter” of the first born he is now called Israel.  He is also called a prince of God, who has power with man and God.

What is necessary to become an “Is-ra-el”?  The first steps are the quiet, effective work of what Jacob himself has done.  Then the boundary between the outer world, Laban, and the pull of beauty, more subjective, Esau, so that one knows the place of each.  That makes productive living possible.  So the three factors involved in Is-ra-el.  Is, the feminine principle, Ea, the masculine principle, the El, the son, the result of.  There we have the power of the productive trinity.  This name simply implies the powers which he, (Jacob) has achieved.

The next step.  After you have conquered anything you tend to rest.  The up and down rhythms in a gradually ascending spiral.  That is the thing you must not do.  Our hero was wrong in that he bought a piece of land and began to dwell there, and presently built a city.  His daughter, Dinah, beautiful, the values born out of such a mating as that of Jacob and his wives.  The story says of one of them, a prince of that land, seduced her.  It means that, as the result of pausing at a place, certain desires, or aspects, are caught and held at that stage.  The danger of setting up a fixation.  Out of it arises gradually a race mingling between the peoples of that land and the families following Jacob.  Jacob does not object.  But the next step is that several brothers of Dinah object and ruthlessly slay the people.

Psychologically, it means a conflict between the movement forward and a movement back.  They fight, and there was a fight and in the allegory the people were killed.  Jacob rebukes his sons: “Your wrath was cruel”.  It is not necessary to return in such a fashion.  “Resist not evil”.  When one knows better, one forebears.

But the outcome of that is that Jacob and his families are forced to move on.  When there has been a conflict of the stream going forward and the downhill, the fight is on.  And as a result of the fight there is something: Cain.  Pain is meant to be — a movement which causes action, and it does, here, in the Jacob pattern.

As Jacob moves on he heads toward Bethel, which is the place of communion with God; that is, a state of consciousness to which Jacob returns, where he has again rapport with Deity.  You must go where there is a condition for larger conditions if you want to communicate with them.  You must put yourself in condition.  El-Bethel is a condition, labeled as a place, to which Jacob comes.

At this place he puts by the golden earrings and the Terafin (images).  If he comes to a place of communion he does not need images, which were the preliminary, or magic, way of communication.

There are many ways of communicating with higher realms.  The way symbolized by magical means is one.  But when you come to this state you put by the images.  That means that there is a certain cleansing and renewing of the relation of humanity with deity.  When you are moving toward the Promised Land the Cannonites harass.  But now he stands under the law.

Three feminine figures now pass out of the picture.  It is necessary that the earlier forms of desire die.  If they don’t you don’t go on.  One is Deborah, nurse or caretaker.  Another is the handmaid of Rachel, who incidentally had been defiled by the first born of Jacob.  The third is Rachel.  They are three phases of desire — a test of moving forward.

Jacob at first is innocuous.  He works.  So he is the forerunner of the 12 labors of Hercules.  Six of his sons are by Leah, that is, related to the outer world.  Time and again the evolution has to wait till the outer world has done its bit.  Reuben, Simeon.  Understand service, communion, dwelling together.  Obedience, service, joy in the reward of work.  Communion or the capacity to dwell together.  These are the six sons of Leah — that is, fruits of struggle in the outer world.

There are two sons born of Rachel.  They come later – two.  The first is Joseph and the second Benjamin.  And with his birth Rachel passes out of the picture.  Ben-oni, “fruit of my sorrow”, is what Rachel wants to call him.  For that wife suffers much.  The other wife has more outer success.  But Jacob changes this sons name to Benjamin, “son of my right hand”.  Four are borne by the handmaidens:  two of Rachel (handmaiden), and two of Leah’s.  The names of those born of Rachel’s handmaiden are Justice and Conflict (Naphtali).  The names of the two born of Leah’s handmaiden are Power and Happiness (Gad, power; Ashar, happiness1).

Joseph.  We must follow him next.  Born of Rachel.  Shows a sensitivity which the earlier stages do not have.  It is recorded via his ability to interpret dreams.  Joseph’s brothers were always wary of him.  But when he told a dream, that gave him power over the others and they did not like it.  They stored up resentment, and it came out later.  That means the resistance of the sons who are not mystically called, as against the son who is.  The gift that was on the threshold of two worlds.  That power was in the dream itself:  “You are all going to bow down to me”.

In the story, they take away his coat and say he was killed by wild animals.  Joseph is sold into Egypt.  He becomes the possession of the chief of the executioners, the captain of the guard.

The story means that Joseph is the chosen one, the mystical one, who culminates in Jesus, who also went down into Egypt, the densest state of matter – our pattern in the densest, lowest part of human involution.  From here it begins to go out again via Joseph and Moses.  What Jesus did when he put on the body.

So Joseph goes down into Egypt, and by the same token becomes enslaved there.  Held by the conditions of that dimension.  That is inevitable.  That slavery, note, is in a sense a progressive one.  It goes through stages.  The first is that he is sold into slavery with the moving caravan (the Ishmalites).  Then he is sold to the chief of the executioners, and serves there.  Then, because he did not succumb to the domination of the sensuous pull, represented by Potiphar’s wife, in its will to dominate,; the myste resists it and therefore flees, with the coat left behind.

Joseph cannot help himself at that stage.  For a time he is more limited than he was before.  Inevitable when the outer interpretation has told his story (or his way).  So his slavery is intensified by going to prison.  Worse than the dense state of Egypt itself.

Presently come into the picture two figures, the chief butler and the chief cook (or baker, as in some translations).  For a time Joseph waits on them.  They tell him their dreams and he interprets them.  Sooner or later there comes to the one who can endure the abilities by which, slowly, the pattern can be righted.  He who is hasty, and must always justify himself before men, has not the stuff necessary for the making of a Joseph — his mystical capacity.

Joseph says the power to interpret dreams is of God.  The butler’s dream was about a grapevine; he squeezed the juice of the grapes and put it into the cup for Pharaoh. Joseph says:  You will be free.

The cook’s dream was about a basket full of goodies, and that it was put on his head.  Joseph’s interpretation:  In three days you will be executed.

The grape is one of the old sacred symbols of certain powers.  It does not grow through man.  It is derived from deity.  Hence the butler, who uses what comes from deity, and shares it out, is on the right side.  The other has the things that man has done, and puts it on top — the activities of the lower man, and will be rationalizing about that – and so is on the way to death.

The butler did not help Joseph.  Those who are aided by the mystical use of dreams do not always remember that which aided them.  They often turn on it.

Time goes by.  Presently Pharaoh has a dream.  (Seven fat kine, seven lean kine)  He remembers the poor chap in the prison.  Joseph interprets the dream (fat years, lean years).  Pharaoh is used as the highest power over the physical world.  He cognizes in Joseph this mystical quality, honors him, and immediately says: You are the man to carry this thing through – the seven years of plenty and the seven of famine.  Joseph’s power liberated will do the work of solving this problem.  Joseph is instituted as second only to Pharaoh — this at the age of 30.  Regalia that is the symbol of the powers received and ruling over the outer world.

Now comes into the picture the family of Jacob.  That there should be a famine in the Promised Land!  Net for the first time.  All countries of the world came to Egypt to get corn, and go to Egypt to get corn.  So Jacob sends several of his sons down.

They do not recognize in the major domo their son and brother, but Joseph, being a myste cognizes them.  The family tie strains after its heritage.  Symbolized by that hunger of Joseph toward his family.  He asks about his youngest brother and his father.  The result is they come down to join the others.  The second time Joseph contrives it that the whole family should come down and there should be a reunion between him and his father.

Pharaoh, the ruler of that which belongs to earth, is sympathetic and does what he can to aid Joseph to establish the race which is to carry on the Pattern, follow the pattern of Joseph into Egypt.  New Testament: “Out of Egypt have I called my son”.  The forerunner of that is what we have this evening.  Joseph goes down into Egypt, followed by the entire family, which dwelt for a time, and must dwell, in Egypt.

Then begins what is known in history as the period when the Semites dwelt in Egypt.  Pharaoh gives them land, a fertile piece of land, and the people prosper.  Several of the sons undertake to be herders of the cattle of Pharaoh.

The Semites multiply greatly.  Why should they multiply in Egypt, when a little while ago we find Jacob getting in trouble because he built a city and loitered?  Here the whole mass loiters.  Egypt must be different.  So our peoples multiply.  They will, when the soil, or conditions are right.  In other words, given the right conditions in the physical plane, there is then rapid and great multiplication.

But even that comes to a halt.  And the halt is when it is said that the kings of Egypt changed and there was a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.  That is psychologically, philosophically, mystically the time for the race to move on.

Two points to note: The death of Jacob, over which Joseph had much concern, grief.  That means that there is always a consigning of all things toward that which is known as the Promised Land — namely the Goal.  All things should be turned to the purpose of your goal.  The bones of Jacob are consigned to the Holy Land, the Promised Land.  But Joseph, the last pattern-maker of this pattern, arranges that his body too shall be taken into the Promised Land.  It is consonant with the whole stock of Joseph that he foresees, or anticipates.  Allegorically, Joseph is the interpreter of dreams.

By the same token, he closes the picture with the same type of seeing – foreseeing — and makes arrangements that that which he is is consigned to the Promised Land.  So that he anticipates, mystically, his own death.  A mystical thing.

This closes the book called Genesis, or Beginnings.  The next great step in the study of allegories is the Pattern of moving through and out of Egypt, through the Wilderness.

What is for you the Promised Land?

January 26, 1934

Typology Old Testament

I.

Cyphers and Allegories of the Old Testament

This teaching is used primarily in regard to Christianity.  Refers to the concept that occurrences in the O.T. are fore-runners or types of that occurring in the New Testament.  Types or patterns set up, of a mystical process — not necessarily that of the Hebrews.

Two ways of writing the Scriptures:

1. Facts

2. The picking out of facts, of essentials in history, which illustrate a process carrying the replica of a mystical experience.

Thus scripture is not to be seen wholly as historical.  There is a discrepancy in stating historical facts, for the writers haven’t cared about historicity, but have sought that which demonstrates a spiritual reality.

The Old Testament sets up 7 steps – octaves — stages — of a pattern.

(5 – 2 in New Testament)

1. From Adam and Eve through Noah to Abraham.

A tale told by the Hebrews, but relating to all humanity.  (The tower of Babel — a concept of psychological and metaphysical truth, with certain concomitants of mental and spiritual history.)

Do not think that there is no truth in them unless they occur literally.

The setting up of a cosmogony through Hebrew eyes

2. Abraham through Joseph.

The beginning of Hebrew history

Now a glorious drama, in that instead of Adam, Seth, Cain, we have a whole people beginning to establish a pattern.  No people have established a pattern so colossal in scope.  It is finished now.

It is the story of the beginnings of one who becomes the Father, leaves the homeland in the East, and moves west toward the setting sun, he moves down to the land called Egypt.

An illustration of the descent of the Light Sparks quickly marked by the leading figures until they are all in Egypt.  Joseph who was sent into slavery, and carried into Egypt.  An allegory of the story of the Light Sparks who leave their brethren and pass down into slavery.

A restating of the leaving of Eden but more powerful.  Closer.

Joseph – the type of the Beloved Son.  Just as Jesus was sold down to earth conditions, and pays the same price as Joseph.

Joseph is imprisoned — is called a dreamer by his brothers, who scorn him.  Later he becomes an interpreter of dreams and makes his release through them.  (So you here win your release by working with them, and doing according to the demands of the pattern in your dreams.)  Joseph lived as do all the wise, between two worlds.  And thus he learned the wisdom belonging to Egypt.

His brothers stayed in the upper country and sent down for food.  It not seemly to the spirit that that which is below be brought up, so in the allegory there is the need of those who won’t come down; their plight is such that they are forced down.  The significance of the change between Joseph and his brothers, and the bringing down of his father.  Now when they are all in Egypt, the descent of the Light Sparks is completed.

Jacob — the father of Joseph, had 12 sons.

The totality of humanity in the germinal state.  As later, the cup made full is 144,000 or 12 by 12.

Joseph as a leader, replacing Jacob is called Israel.

For a time all goes well because of his rapport with two worlds.  He had made allegiance wisely.  Then there came a king who did not know him.

Things began to go wrong; Egypt is now the evil Egypt, the land of captivity (for the Hebrew)

(“Out of Egypt have I called my son.”)

Also in carrying this amazing allegory through, remember that Jesus also went to Egypt and left it again.

This is the lowest point mystically in our allegory.

 

3. Moses and the Exodus.

The beginning of the ascent or the evolution of the soul — through mind to spirit.  Redemption, salvation.

4. The building of Jerusalem in the Promised Land.

The node of the Hebraic people.  They were unable to hold it.  Remember you too are not always able to hold.

 

5. The nucleolus — the building of the temple.

The overtone – the further development of that already set up in the ark of Noah.

6. The New Testament writes this octave.

The story of the fore-runner of Jesus — the mystical story written by John the Baptizer.  He belonged to a mystical sect and probably quarreled with Jesus.

Read Mead on John the Nazarene.  He selected from the acts of John, the important things that brought out the allegory.

 

7. The pattern as lived by Jesus.

Seven parts in an all inclusive allegory of the descent and ascent.

Now let us return to Moses and the book of the Exodus.  Exodus is the beginning of the ascent.  We shall only watch the high points — mileposts — the demands which are for everyone to meet.  I can only show you the code.

Moses — born in Egypt — land of captivity, — the earth plane.  Of the tribe of Levi — born of Leah not Rachel.  Seven of the Levi were set apart for the call to minister in the temple.

He was picked up by an Egyptian princess and (in fact) became grounded in wisdom at the court of the Egyptians.  His books are steeped in Egyptian wisdom.

He was three months when he was put in the river, and he lived for 40 years imbibing their wisdom.

Then he travelled into the land of Goshen and saw the Egyptians oppressing the Hebrews.  This is the first time he has identified himself with the Hebrews.  The point of becoming conscious of the self and selves and of humanity.  At which point he realized he was not material, but of another race.  He slays the Egyptian — the material world when it oppresses the soul.  (The writers were concerned with recording a profound process – it tallies with every new student here.)

So Moses flees to the neighborhood of Mount Sinai.  He sits by the well.  (Note how many people are found at wells.)

Seven young women come to draw water and the shepherds (Arabian — out of the fold — pseudo) try to interfere, but Moses helps them.  They are the daughters of an Egyptian priest.  Friend of God.

He invites Moses to remain with him.  Moses remains with him for 40 years and marriesone of the daughters Zipporah (bird).  He also learns from the priest, getting more intimate wisdom than at the court.

He has two sons — first fruits.

1. “Stranger” strange condition
2. ElizerGod is my help

They are powers that have grown out from him.  He too has become a shepherd.

The shepherd has many meanings — false and true shepherds.  Those who watch the flocks — in the allegory — Mind, the great Mind Shepherd.  So with the microcosm — your mind is shepherd over the selves.

Now the episode of the burning bush.  It is very probably made saturate with a vibratory condition which made it luminous.  And from it came a voice: “Take off thy shoes.  This is holy ground.”  This is not mock humility but the dynamic of the mind — taking off the old ways of going.

Now he (is told ?) to release his people from the Egyptians.  Moses refuses – says he is incompetent.  Aaron his brother is to assist him.

The angel of the Lord appears.  (Christianity says angel is used as a name for “deity”, but this is an emissary.)  It is: “I am that I am” that has sent me.  “So tell the people that you are to go.”

Moses asks for signs.  He is told to throw down a rod which will become a serpent.  That which is inert becomes living.  The people started on the path of energy.

He is to put his hand in his garment – find it leprous, draw it out, it is not.  The hand, the way of doing.  Symbol for the unclean soul, his ways of doing, filthy.  The power of purification of the soul which it was Moses’ task to initiate.  He didn’t finish it.  But he set the key for the ethical laws, and made them conscious as a people.  Afterwards he was to be superseded.

So Moses consents and asks the priest for permission to go and he gives it.  So Moses set out with his wife and 2 sons.  He meets Aaron and tells him to go into Egypt and gather the Hebrews — show them the signs and convince them that the time has come for release.

The Pharaoh doesn’t know about this.  (No regard for historicity.)  How could he have convinced the Pharaoh?

The people are not long jubilant.  Moses is to tell the King of Egypt that the god of the Hebrews had asked them to go out and do some rituals for him.

But the angel says: “I am going to ask the Pharaoh to harden his heart against you.  (Start something new and the price comes.)  But Moses is not afraid.  He is a glorious type, and has learned much.

He goes to the Pharaoh — who says yes, no, yes, no.  Then come the 9 plagues – read them.  They represent in the large the dilemmas put up by resisting aspects in the transliminal — in society – psychical, metaphysical, spiritual ardors that belong to a spiritual movement.

On the way from Mount Sinai to the land of Goshen.  4th Chapter Exodus, 21st verse.

Israel is the first one, in the allegory, to make the ascent.

The Old Covenant – the circumcision of the lower man for the sake of the higher.  The pruning off of excessive absorption in pleasures and activities of the 3rd dimension.

Now Moses had not circumcised his sons, so the angel comes again and says: “Look out.”

Zipporah — rebellion of the lower man against the sacrifice of anything in the lower world.

Circumcision — the sign by which you shall know them.  It is a literal act, but carries a higher significance.  Only those who sacrifice the lower for the higher may be called Israel.

The Egyptians had practiced circumcision long before the time of Moses, but it is not in the allegory.

The 10th alone brought results – then the setting up of the ritual of the Pass-over.

Typology — the slain lamb in the Christian tradition. “No bones were broken in this lamb” — kept until the 14th day of the month — the fulfillment of the fulness of the soul through the region of the 14th stage.

The Pascal Lamb is slain, and is to be eaten only by those who are girded as though for travel.  Those who, in the allegory, completing the stages of the soul are going on the long journey.

The blood from the lamb is to be sprinkled on the 2 door-posts (Joaquim and Boaz).  They are to be covered with the symbol of the slaying of the lower man for the higher.

“To be eaten with bitter herbs.”  Symbol for that which grows up from below — the attachments caused by them.  So the lessons of the natural law are to be eaten with bitter herbs.  This is true of the process here also.

The Jewish people are to receive voluntarily the jewels from the women of Egypt — the values won in Egypt which no one can take away.

February 2, 1934

notes of B. A.

Typology II

The number of the Hebrews was relatively small.  They were halted because in the allegory no one was willing to go the short, direct way.  In the history Jehovah said they would meet with much war.  (They have to be led to the larger process gradually.)

The demand was that the first born be sacrificed.  To the first born of the male line, animals be sacrificed—why?  The demand is always there.  The first born male is the symbol for the Will – Logos of Deity – and thus he is sacred, sanctified – is always holy; i.e. the first born male in the pattern — the first will in you is to be given over to the service of Jehovah, and the first born male of animals is to be burned.  Earth-water is always to be eliminated.

In the pattern of the trek is emphasized the difference between the male of humans and of animals.  Later, Jesus is represented as the beloved Son — the same idea as the first born.

The bones of Joseph are taken on this trek.  Why?  Because Joseph as the last leader before Moses — his good is to be assimilated into the forward movement and Joseph represents the height of attainment in earth.  The essence to be taken on.

The compact with Jehovah in terms of the pillar of light.  A cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.  Knowledge by day, faith by dark.

In the dark you still walk by your faith.  Faith is the fabric of your daily behavior.  You can’t comprehend everything, but what you have allows you to throw forward your anticipation.  If you are dealing with fire-air you must also have faith.  Chaos, perplexity, disorder, may come in the way, but you must be able to walk by the fire you have seen, which is there in your mind and soul.  The pillar goes before the people. (The story of your pilgrim’s progress.)

Jehovah has ordered them to come back to Bel Zehar.  The Hebrews are at the point of a very crucial step.

The Red Sea – division between Egypt and Asia.  When they cross it they will be out of Egypt.  (Waters are always of travel – divisions, barriers.  Just before they take the step, there is a pause.  They stop, go back, relax, not ready to shoot off into the new.)

Then says Jehovah: “If you can sustain, the forces will act.”  “The Lord will fight for you.”  Part of the great task of the Hebrews is to swing humanity toward monotheism, but the Hebrews in their zest had to overemphasize.  When you become philosophers, you become both polytheists and monotheists.  The translators try to twist everything to mean Jehovah.  Read Exodus critically and note what occurs.  The people are now as much lost in monotheism as in polytheism.

Let us translate Lord as Powers.

The Hebrews are encamped now.  They see the Egyptians coming and are frightened.  (What happens if you let go of the world?)  They upbraid Moses — there is constant clamoring, fear, protest; Remember it is you in your mystical processes.

Moses says:  “Be not afraid.”

(This was written with the idea of lifting up certain episodes in history to describe what was incomparably more important.)

The people pass over.  The Egyptians are wiped out.

Why is there no record in the Egyptian annals of this?  There was an exodus, there was a Moses.  Much occurred like this.

Now in the allegory we are out of the land of Egypt — no longer grasped in entirety by the things of the outer world.  Two aspects – the outer and the subjective.

They are the place of bitter water.  They can’t drink.  It is a wilderness. A strange price to pay!  Someday you will know how and why.  You do get into the wilderness where there seems no chance of refreshment, and what you do get is bitter.  You are really still harking back.  You are in a new world, strange — you want more understanding, you rebel and fight.

Then after three days, Moses throws a tree into the water to make it sweet.  The tree of life has its correspondent in the new Testament — the cross of Jesus — and it is that which makes for the picture of fulfillment, so fine, sweet, utterly beautiful, that anyone who has the vision of it accepts it, and the waters become sweet.

(Correspondence – One wife of Abraham, Hagar, was found by the angel at the well of water, and was promised that she would be taken care of to give birth to Ishmael.)

The Hebrews have been delivered outwardly and now are to begin to suffer and learn and be lifted up to the next stage.  In the allegory you will reach the Promised Land.  (Now) the stage of “Wilderness Training.”

The people will learn to call on Jehovah.  If you see Jehovah as moving toward a specific goal, it makes for onepointedness and you understand.

The Hebrews yet have no perseverance.  They don’t remember what they have learned.

What comes next?  The father-in-law of Moses who is wisdom which goes along.

The diseases of the Egyptians — fixations to three dimensional things. (?) “Obey and you will not suffer the diseases of the Egyptians.”  All gods have said the same.

They come to a place where are the 12 wells of water — 12, 12 trees, gates.  Water — refreshment – to have seen something of the schemology of life is to have found water.

3 score and 10 palm trees.

Now another wilderness of Sin — name of Mesopotamian valley.

They have learned to travel, but have begun to suffer for the kind of food needed in travel.  They are again tent dwellers, and are again annoyed with Moses.

Mana — a small white seed from heaven — they had mana for 40 years.

There were entities watching over the Hebrews hammering on the 7js for 40 years. Have you learned the lessons of the 7s? It belongs to tKe story of mana through 40 years.

The powers of larger planes step it.  (founded on a point of fact — these stories)

A very curious tree grows in Sinai — in the night it exudes a peculiar juice – it is collected by the natives and must be collected before daw – the tarpa tree.

But the allegory goes further.  There are two kinds of food, bread and water.  Water from above – understanding.  Try to separate in your mind those things which are water and which are bread.

“Give us this day” Wisdom teaching from above — that which nourishes the soul.  It is plentiful – is from above.

Some of the mana is to be gathered into a pot.  (to be put into the ark.)

They start for Rephidim — another lap of the journey — they will find support here but again no water (Bread, learning).  So they become more desperate and angry at Moses.

They arrive at Horeb.  The situation is very tense.  This is the place where Moses smote the rock.

Go over the water motives — altar — mountain motives.  They are like a musical score — it is all important how you play them.

It has been a place of tremendous feud.  Many drop by the wayside, Moses had battled hard and was very annoyed with the people.  He calls Horeb “Massah” — temptation.  Meribah — waters of strife.

People have again gotten water and are once more on their journey.  They discover that if they persist in going, they learn the importance of faith, prayer, and obedience.  Stages of the journey of the learning of the soul.

Now they are at Moriah.  Again and again Moses is tempted to deal with the people in a most summary fashion.

The neighborhood of Mount Sinai.

You, like the Hebrews, will tend to literalize.

February 9, 1934

notes of B. A.

Typology III

Now there is nothing more to be feared from the Egyptian side.  Only the desires for which Esau stands.

New figures appear.  Joshua is called upon by Moses to do battle with the Malachites.  Meanwhile Moses is going up into the mountain.  He held up his arms until the sun was set.  (This done for the sake of the allegory.)  The enduring and embracing arms of Deity, — the inclusive, supporting laws of the good, sustaining until the end of the cosmic day.

He needs the support of 2 persons — like Jachin and Boaz — two aspects which must support all things.  For man who would go forward, against man who would go back.  Esau is not evil, but the minute you want it it is evil.  The Israelites will win, because the all-embracing arms sustain the forward march.

Jehovah tells Moses he is to write for a memorial in a book — a big event — the first outward battle written in the book of memory.

If you keep all experiences as of equal value, you have no discrimination.  It is necessary to set up important markers.  It is a command to set up the altar.

Altars – the setting up of enduring concepts in the mind.  This one: Jehovah-Nissi ‘Jehovah is my banner.’  A setting up of an altar for relationship, through the understanding of the mind.

The letting go of false ideas is the sacrifice — is really a glad loss — never implies a real loss.

The permanent establishing of the recognition of certain ideas of relationships between man and Jehovah.

Later Jehovah tells the people not to make the altar of hewn stone, but of earth.  “He who shapes the stone, pollutes the stone.”  Natural stone or earth — the natural law with which the Hebrews are to grapple.  You must learn where you are.

The altar is to be handed down through tradition.

The Hamalikites — those who do not care for the larger.  They will always pay the penalty of the pressure of the hand of Jehovah.

The next step of great importance in wilderness training — What must they learn?

The father-in-law of Moses visits him.  He honors and respects him.  He observes him and sees that he is sitting all day in judgment with the people, and he advises him that he should not do this.

It is a discussion of the wisdom of organization in time and space.  “You must no longer exhaust yourself sitting with the people.  You must pick out leaders — delegate certain work — judge and correct them — always the parcelling out of responsibility.  Just as you must set up departments of behavior in yourselves, that they go on automatically.  Moses gets a new perspective.  A new stage in the organism is achieved.  (The same in the development of the soul.)

It doesn’t mean that Israel accomplished the steps that they wrote.

Chap. XIX

They came to the wilderness of Sinai, where they camped before the mountain.

Desert and wilderness are not contradictory.  What are mountains?  Aspirations, yearnings, higher states of consciousness, of understanding.  Moses had already had training, — had lingered with the sheep, had had the experience of the burning bush.

(The burning bush is primarily an Egyptian story.  You find it in the Pyramid texts and in the book of Coming forth into Day.  We are still in the Egyptian tradition.  The Hebraic tradition is steeped in Egyptian wisdom teaching.  We might tell this story all over in Egyptian fashion.  The Hebraic is an overtone or play on the Egyptian.)

Moses had fled there (to the mountain) at the killing of the Egyptian, and had lingered there for 40 years, had heard his first command there.

The mountain was electrically charged, and extraordinarily exposed to supernormal experiences.

At that time the speaker had made a promise.  “I will be with thee.  When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

In Egyptian lore, it is known as the mount of the sun-rise.  Is also the mount of the Equinox.  (Look up latitude.)  Amenta itself as the mount of the orbit or as sun-rise mount.  Shenni or Nut — sacred to Hathor – goddess of the Earth.  The Turquoise stone sacred to Hathor was mined here.  Therefore physiologically, geographically, mystically, occultly the mount was overdetermined.  Shenni could be changed to Sinai.  The whole Egyptian tradition is behind this mountain.

Moses remembers all this and goes up into the mountain.  Has a conversation with the Being who is leading this process.  A high step.  Says Jehovah: “I have shown the people that I am with them – that you have power as my leader.  Now will they undertake to carry on?”  We tend to move in a line — don’t keep our knowledge or experience in the present.  “If ye do, you shall be a peculiar people.”  “Yes” say the people.  All parts of your being don’t answer, but the leading aspects do, and that makes for special relations.

Now Jehovah calls for Moses to go forward into the electrically charged condition.  Moses goes up and down the mountain and then receives virtually 10 commandments – those who have studied them profoundly, deeply, say that they are all that is necessary to man.  No sooner than that occurs than the devil is around the corner.

3 times were the commandments given.  1-audibly.  2 & 3 – on the tablets of stone.

We hear first by ear, then the first resistance appears, for the human has started conscious evolution.  When anything sits upon the margin of choice, he fights desperately, the natural man rebels.  Evolution is always by right choice — obedience — right hearing.  His inherent love of liberty, paired with ignorance is his greatest danger.  There must be check ups — brutal, violent — is face to face with realizations, but going the ways of the lower man is not good.

We see we are not so smart and it hits our pride.  Not the will of the lower man, but of the pattern.  Only in obedience to law do you achieve liberty.  Only at the end of the process do you have liberty.

“Neither shalt thou go up by steps, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”  (?)

Chap. XXLV

Joshua goes up the mountain with Moses.  Aaron and Hur are left down below.  Then come the 40 days on the mountain and the writing of the tablets of stone. The instruction for the building of the tabernacle – symbols representing the microcosm and the macrocosm.  Why the tabernacle?

We have seen the powers of the Good watching over this development.  Then the question, “Do you mean business?”

The receiving of instruction for the building of a permanent node, the way of communion with spiritual realities.  It must be established according to the laws which govern it, in the structure of the tabernacle.

Now comes the first test of faith.  Moses is away for 40 days.  The people talk to Aaron.  He says, “Put all the jewels, and we will make a golden calf.”  There is a gay festival.  They are very happy.  (The fruit of the cow, Hathor, is the calf.  Horus, son of Isis, also associated with Hathor.)

Was it wrong?  Why was it not corrected before?  Now it is said, “Here are the gods that led you out of Egypt.”  Why is it terrible here?  Because of the allegory.  They are muffing the picture, if they use the concrete picture, instead of holding the ideal. They literalize.  They cannot still worship that which has no significance for evolution.

They are to be schooled to the concepts of philosophical principle through the structure of the temple.  They had regressed, but to a pattern true in itself.

Moses comes down and goes to the source of the trouble.  But he took down the calf and ground it to powder and gave it to the people to drink – in this a great meaning is implied.

Aaron explains to Moses but Moses was angry and here broke the tablets of stone. (I don’t believe this was in the picture.) Moses saw that the people were naked.  Aaron had made them naked to their shame among their enemies.  The lower nakedness – ignorance of understanding.

Nearly all allegories could be uncoded on three levels.  On the second and third the more secret meaning comes out.

Moses then called to the Levites.  “Kill all those who have had to do with this.” 1000 were killed.  Levites, of priestly rank, those functioning for Jehovah, those concerned for the pattern.  They put to route all the others.  (When you have regressed, you call to the Levites in yourself, and see that these trends wipe out all the others who interfere.  You would make a different type of progress if you did this.) Israelite — a code name.

The powers were very angry.  (wish I dared to be angry with you!)  In this pattern Jehovah is wrathy.  Moses pleads with him.  It won’t do to give up.  This is really to draw out from Moses, the leader, the full sense of the great and sublime call to the work which is to be carried out at all price. The challenge is needed — the action and reaction.

“If thou will forgive — if not, then blot me out.”  Moses pleaded.  Of such calibre alone are great leaders made.

Feb. 16, 1934

notes of B. A.

Typology

IV

Now we are to set forth on another stage of the journey, making toward the great crisis, the highest point in the whole story.

The Israelites had promised to obey Jehovah, and had established a covenant, a decalogue of laws; then had ordered a census. (Now in the book of Nos.)  Think of a census as a measuring of power and capacity which makes for conscious functioning.  There must be a taking of conscious measurement and the first ceremonial, or the keeping of the ritual.

It is important that an anniversary be celebrated, hence the Jews must celebrate first.  This is the Pass-Over – at the appointed (conditioned) time.  Then the setting forth to the Elders to be recognized.  All this belongs to the moving forward into a crisis.  (This is an allegory of the household and of humanity.)

They move forward now to a new point, Kadesh-barnea, and here an important preliminary experience takes place.

When we move away from the lower, it calls with additional power.  They are rebelling about the mana, say it is oily.  They want meat.  Then comes the plague of the quails.  Jehovah was that great flocks flew low and the people could catch them, so they were surfeited with flesh.

Oily food – the pouring on of oil, symbol of beneficent influence, which quiets the emotional nature.

But they didn’t want that which belongs to the larger.  The Israelites were fed up with oily food, thus they moved quickly into the flesh-pots of Egypt, into earth-water.  The plague of the quails — the appetites.

The wrath of the Lord was kindled.  (No great being becomes wrathy, but must sometimes use force to bring about results.)  The plague brings death, disturbances of the lower nature, until he dies.  At this place many are buried, the graves of lust, Gibra Fataba, (Nos XI V.34)

Now they moved on to Hazeroth where Moses married an Ethiopian, and Aaron and Miriam were jealous and angry.

Song of Songs “I am black and comely” connected mystically with the woman Moses married.  Who is she?  She represents the powers of great profundities which are dark to most people.  (Moses was marching on also in his evolution.)  So the earlier orders, Zipporah, were superseded.

Miriam pays severe price, for is afflicted with leprosy, which is uncleanness of soul.  Miriam and Aaron are supposed to be aids to Moses, but when they became jealous, were unclean.  Moses intercedes for Miriam, pauses from cleanness to return to her, then moves on, to another wilderness of Paran.

They are still close to the Promised Land (mystery of man’s evolution).  We must realize how close we are at this stage.

Jehovah instructs Moses to send 12 spies into the Land of Canaan and report what they find. (Chap XIII)  12 — the ideal qualities which later become the perfected heroes.  The 12 into the 4, into the one.

The spies go to Hebron, then return and report to Moses.  They find there milk and honey, grapes and pomegranates.  They agree that it is a wonderful land.

Time of the first ripe grapes — the first returned sons.  But ten of the spies said, “There are too many difficulties in overcoming these people — the Amalekites, the Hittites.  Now two of the spies were horrified, and rent their clothes (symbolic) saying, “Not so, let us go up and possess them, for we are well able to overcome them.”  Now there was dissension about these people, and the ten spies (went and ?) filled the Israelites with fear and trembling.

It was not a time when Moses could act.  He sent spies out but it was not for him to make the decision.  The significance of this story is overpowering.  The Israelites were very close to the Land, and in two years could have been well established, had they gone on according to instructions, kept their fears in their pockets and trusted to their leader.  But the ego came in, and the whole opportunity of the journey through the wilderness was frustrated.  The journey could have been made in two years, and it took forty.

So many times, things like the Promised Land are obtainable if we carry on.  Nothing was wrong with the Land.

A large part of the story is historically correct.  Some parts are filled in, but the writers knew their stuff and selected what would complete the allegory.

The rending of clothes — a violent dissociation with the attitudes of others – to show disapproval of the despicable work of others, which undermined the work of Moses, Aaron, Miriam.

Sons of Anak, the giants — gigantic forces, gigantic opportunities.  Every situation implies its opposite, if you can wrest it from it, the gold from beneath the dragon.

Now they rebel against Moses.  “Let us find a captain who will take us to Egypt — apractical leader.”  I have never seen a great leader who was practical.  The Israelites want the leader who will keep them safe in Egypt.

Jehovah cries, “How long will these people provoke me?”  Keep behind the curtain the concept of voluntary choice — the choice of the better against the worst.  When will you learn to choose on higher levels, as you do on practical levels?

“They won’t learn.  What is the use?”  If evolution were not on the basis of voluntary choice, we might set up laws: “Thou must.”  But there is nothing to compel you, until you learn to do it voluntarily.  The smiting is there; that none of that generation except Joshua and Caleb shall enter the Promised Land.

In another book we read that Caleb gets this country for his inheritance.  This fits with the courageous stand that Caleb took to hearten the people, and urge them to move to their inheritance.

Twelve spies die of the plague.  Many of us die to the higher by the plagues of things, so here is the smiting.  It is mystically in the picture that Moses and Aaron do not go in.  This is something like the flood story where Noah with the clean animals were the only ones allowed in.

The people were scared to have the promised inheritance.  One saw it in the large, one in the small.  (It is because we know these processes, that we try to guide them – so different from the ordinary dreams or analysis.)

Now under the natural law, we will go forward.  But Moses says it is too late.  It won’t do.  Later they tried it and were literally smitten and thrust back into the wilderness.

Allegory — “Not when you want it, but when the time is.”  Shall you do these things?  “Not my will but thine be done.”  So hard is it to develop faith.

Now there is a period of 30 years of wandering, and they are sent back by Jehovah into the wilderness, by way of the Red Sea.  Psychoanalysis didn’t discover regression.  Here is a dramatic story of a regression.  When you have been at a crucial point, you fall as you have climbed, back psychologically and metaphysically to where you started from.  (I couldn’t read into this allegory; I can only uncode what is there.)

This wandering is very different from the wilderness training.  The purpose for intensive training through the wilderness, to the Promised Land which had the capacity to be written by nomadic wanderings of a people.  A period of hither and thither movement might have been sufficient — is not of the same calibre — is in a different octave.

Did the people like it?  Who shall be their scapegoat?  Can you get the correspondence in the Household, rebelling against the scapegoat, the leader?

The next step is the subtlest kind of rebellion against Moses.  The people have grown in spite of their regression.  Now they are subject to some terrible disorders.

In Chap XVI we are told about 2 leaders — one of the tribe of Levi, one of Ruben, who with 25 princes start a rebellion.  They have learned by the other insurrections of the fleshpots, but what was hurt at not reaching the Promised Land?  Pride, ego, feeling reactions.  At first earth-water.  Now water-air with the emphasis on water.

“Aren’t we all holy before God?  Aren’t we a chosen people?”  When Moses heard this he fell on his face.  Then he said, “Very well, I will show.”  So he tries to reason with them.

The sons of Levi were set apart to be priests, with Aaron as the High Priest; and in this insurrection, the leader, Korah, tries to put Aaron out of the picture.  It was theirs to administer, but they were not High Priests.

“Do you not see what your place is,” and the decision is put to the test.  “If you see only that you are holy in the sight of God, you are very bland.  There are qualities, statures, attributes, that make for differences in the growth of the soul.  The older, chosen for leadership.  All belong to the picture.  Some trees are taller than others.

Miriam, Aaron, Moses, Joshua, Caleb could carry on the burden of leadership.  The power of discrimination in the size of trees is the balancing factor to “all are holy”.  Moses was really very meek, but power and anger are necessary for leadership.

A sign is now to be given.  Says Jehovah:  “To the people must be given signs.”  Definite harsh signs.  They.are asked to come up with their censors.  (Aspirations, prayers — incense.)

The earth opens and swallows up the rebellion.  Aaron’s censor stands in between.

Plague – movement in the psychic nature.

Aaron’s censor stops the earthquake, but not before many are destroyed.  Those whom the ego gets the better of, who see no differences, who cannot see leadership.  This is a justification of the leadership of Moses.  Now comes the leadership of Aaron.

The order is to put 12 rods, or sticks of wood in the tabernacle, and on each the names of the 12.  A symbol of the 12 labors.  These are left in the tabernacle overnight.  If the life should be in one of these rods, this rod would be the one who had life.  Moses said that if the people who rebelled had an unnatural death, it was as a test — this would be illustrated by the sign, and would mean that Jehovah was against them.

Here is a positive sign.  The rod that binds — the Amon rod.  This was Aaron’s budding of life as symbolized by Jesus.  Maybe, we don’t know, but we do see that Aaron’s leadership comes only from a sign from above.  (as in these days incidentally, a minister must be called, to get a job.)  A mystical experience written here in the allegory.  A sign that through the dead should come life.

Scorpio is the sign of the priest who knows the way of death and rebirth.  By this act, the lineage of priesthood has been established, the rod of Aaron buds, blossoms, fruits in one night.  XVII.  The people begin to realize that they have a leader.  “Shall we be consumed with dying.”

Allegories

(V)

February, 1934

notes of B. A.

Here a crucial point because the people didn’t trust sufficiently the larger laws.

The spiritual laws come first and need to fit into the pattern when the pattern is ready.  The power can no longer be held after a given time.  It must be done in the time of true condition.

The allegory of the cooperation of the larger forces with man.

Nothing is written of the next 35 years.  It is of no account.  Only when they catch up with themselves does the pattern move forward.

Now back to Kadesh-barnea.  You see what philosophy does to a regression.

Aaron, Joshua, Moses are well along.  Miriam dies; and now there occurs an outer expression of the act of Moses.  The reason he is banished from the Promised Land.

The people are again athirst and rebellious and Moses and Aaron consult together.  Jehovah gives instructions to Moses which he doesn’t obey.  Moses leader of the earlier stages, and so philosophically he would not be the leader to enter the new country.  He is somewhat as Virgil was as the leader to Dante, before the meeting of Beatrice.

Jehovah commands Moses. “Take the rod and (Nos 20) gather the assembly and speak unto the rock before their faces and it shall give forth water.”  It is logical that the rock should be struck by the rod (force) in the earlier stages — later, another type of energy – speech.

Then said Moses: “Must we fetch you water out of the rock?”  He smote it and the water came out but at this stage force should not be used, but understanding.

The Israelites were not competent to go forward without “Thou shalt and shalt not”, for they had no faith, no minds, no vision through their leaders.  But in the allegory it is to be written that understanding shall be the ideal.

Yet Moses continues to be leader in the land of Edom. The Edomites refused.. . . Then said Moses: You will go to the. . . .Edom — the material world . . . It is said that this is the sin of the lower worlds and that it belongs to the pattern.

Now they make a detour to Mount Hor and this brings us to the death of Aaron.  Aaron, the earlier stage of priesthood which must be followed by his son, Eleazar.  Moses is instructed to take Aaron up the Mount to transfer his garments to his son, and Aaron dies there.

(You can follow the whole story through by number symbolism.  The high state which Aaron represents as he takes off from that high place.)

The Israelites mourn for 30 days.  They met the Canaanites and the people vowed that if these were delivered into their hands they would destroy their cities.  They were delivered and the people for once kept their vow.  City — (sins ?) of the civilization (?) of the (cities ?) which there was danger of their taking over.

The waste country and the plague of the fiery serpents.  Serpents always at the point of parture toward something real.  Fiery – begin to feel the ego a bit — danger of growing — spiritual life being destroyed by the fiery impatient headstrong emotions.  They regressed in soul.

Moses to make a brazen serpent upright on a rock that al1 who look upon it shall be healed.  Aaron made a golden calf which had caused much trouble.  Now controversy about the serpent.  Shall the people look on images?  What does it mean?

Serpent — oldest great symbol of races — always indicates pattern of man’s life.  Body of snake, replica of spinal cord, the essential part of man’s intelligently governed being; thus the serpent goes through many postures and all are (sins ?) of man in animal stage.  When serpent is lifted and on a rod or cross (like Tau) – is the completion of man.  Those who understand the meaning of the pattern are saved.  Saving the soul life, not the physical.  The correspondence between Jesus and the brazen serpent.

All souls are bitten by the little malicious fiery movements and they are healed when they come to understand that the end of life is to move up, when they win the right to penetrate into the higher regions.  Nos XXI, 27th verse.

They are instructed to dig a well, and to sing a song to it. (understanding versus force)

Now they fought with other tribes — Moses was always with them, here a discrepancy between the allegory and history.  They were always working magic to try to bring about results and they did it.

Balak, the king of these tribes, is consulting all the people about, as to what shall be done about the spreading of the Israelites.  The councilors decide to call a man who lives far away, the wisest of men, of highest repute with a series of achievements behind him.  He lived beyond the Euphrates.  Balak sent ambassadors to him imploring him to come to them for they need his advice.

Balaam says he wi11 ask God whether he may go.  He is told he may not.  They are insistent, and this time he is told he may go but only say what he is told to say.

Christian stories make all sorts of innuendos about Balaam, but in the allegory Jehovah instructs him what to say.  Balak meets him and shows him the Israelites’ encampment.  (In Mesopotamia and Syria they worshiped God also, but they called him Baal.)  Don’t belittle their God, as did the Hebraic Scriptures.  We see that it was the same God.

Great influences were at work governing human life, then as now.  The pattern was woven of many threads and was highly complex.  It was part of the evolutionary process, now here, now there.  God was watching the advancing stages of the souls called men in earth.  If there is a veridical pattern there must be cooperation between forces.

Seven altars were erected and a sacrifice of animals made — the symbol of the sacrifice of the animal nature in worshipers.  Symbol for that to be done in man, like circumcision, not vicarious atonement.  The hope was that in the early stages something of the implication of that would penetrate into the thick minds of the crowds.  It hasn’t worked very well.  The Israelites were chosen for something, other races for something else.  Three or four races at the present time are chosen for certain things.

Balaam receives instructions from Jehovah for he puts himself in rapport with entities.  “Thou shalt not curse the people.  These people are blessed.”  Curse – cross — block.  The Israelites part was engendered by mighty forces, and Balaam would not interfere with these.  The Israelites cannot be blocked in their pattern.

Balaam tells the people they will come into this new country, for it is to be.  He leaves them but loiters and does what is the logical next step — intrigues the Midianites and the Edomites to subtle ways with the Israelites.  If they cannot overcome them, then “use subtler forces”.  “Whoring” — the men committed whordom with the women.  That is the Israelites were subjected to intriguing influences by those who could not conquer them by force.  Balaam is still necessary in the picture.

Now to Balaam’s ass.  The ass is halted because he sees the angel of the Lord blocking the way.  Balaam beats the ass.  Ass – symbol of spiritual power — sun power — in all secret teaching of Syria, Egypt, Northern Africa, Western Asia.  Even Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass.  It is the spiritual element in Balaam that perceives the angel, and the battle is between the elements in Balaam which belong to the world, and what the spiritual element in him sees.  That is why the ass speaks.  There are very few to whom the spirit can speak.  Balaam is of this stature.  He had just sung a beautiful hymn.  (Nos XXIV) (Balaam ?) had to learn that the powers of any wise man who can control magic cannot be halted, or used to halt spiritual forces, or processes.  So these people are presently killed off and Balaam with them.  (Balaam – No 31:8)

The event for which the Israelites are running this pattern, through history is to culminate only after 2500 years.

Allegories

(VI)

Feb. 1934

notes of B. A.

A stern law — the need of obedience while the people are yet young.

Moses now receives instruction to go up to the mount, for his death, and on his journey he recapitulates the whole content of his experience.

He ascends from the Plain of Moab to the Mount of Nebo, (Deut. 34:1) and looks into the Promised Land from where he is.  He is in the land that is to remain part of the Holy Land, but not on the west side of the Jordan.  He looks toward Jericho, and at the age of 120 years (the big picture) he passes out of the physical plane.

We must separate the historical from the allegorical aspects.

Moses literally has to accomplish certain stages, then it is time for his exit.  The adolescence of the people is over, and after a period of mourning, Joshua undertakes leadership.

Phinehas — the hero  (No. 25: 7&8)

Deceit to be struck through the belly.

A town — Shittim — acacia — sacred wood, which is used in the ark of the Israelites — from this town, journeys went out.

(No. 26:4)

The census — a number of power — a stock taking of the strength of the Israelites.  They are in part of the Promised Land, and possess all to the east of the River Jordan. They are also to get that which lies on the other side.

Jericho represents a nucleus.  With the death of Moses it is time for a radical change in leadership.

He recapitulates the whole story of Sinai and the Law, warns them of their pledge and of what it means to be disobedient, shows them that they are led by a God, and assures them of his support.  They are to be strong in faith.  He exhorts them to set the key for a new step.

Moses was the ideal leader in the Wilderness training, in their mystical adolescence.

The people, led by the ark, must cross the Jordon; and, in the allegory, something occurs like the Red Sea crossing — waters rise up like a wall — (a higher octave than the Red Sea.)

A reaffirmation of the rite of circumcision, at the point of the finale of the Wilderness story.  Thus a compact drawing together of all the elements in the story.

There was a bond or covenant between the Israelites and Jehovah; without it there could be no progressive evolution, nor could they be led.  So now they reaffirm their affirmation in the celebration of the Passover,- the first true Passover, for they are now fit for it.  The conclusion of the recapitulation, and Joshua is ready to lead them to the final act.  Joshua V, VI

The conquering of Jericho

In the grove of trees, inhabited by a king — set up as a gathering of forces of lower worlds — to be turned over to the Israelites.

While Joshua is praying for advice, he has a vision.  A man appears with a drawn sword – a messenger, an angel — he gives him definite instructions regarding the conquering of Jericho.

He is to lead the Israelites around the city, once every day for 6 days, — on the 7th day, 7 times, at the end of which priests are to blow blasts on their trumpets.  These priests are to carry rams horns on their trumpets.  (The Israelites a pastoral people, so had rams, but they rationalized about everything – thats stupid.)  On the 6th day, they are to blow, but not in a continuous blast.

The Israelites start out well on their new octave, and follow Joshua’s lead.  They do as instructed, and the walls of the city fall.

Joshua sends in advance two spies, and these find shelter in the house of Rahab, who dwells on the walls — a woman of the city of Jericho.  She tells them that she and her family have heard of the adventures of the Israelites and of the power of their god.  She is convinced that nothing can stop their power, and she shelters them.

The king and his couriers hear that two spies are lodged there and send for them, but Rahab advises them to flee, and hide for three days.  And in turn asks that her family be protected when the Israelites come to conquer.  The spies promise and ask her to put a red banner out of the window.

Red banner — as the Christian Church puts it – symbol of sacrifice, and a sign that Rahab is under the influence of the sacrifice.  This is only a part of its meaning, for it is at the same time the banner of life, – death and life, darkness and light – the sign of new life, under which Rahab is to be led forward.

When the Israelites have marched around on the last day, and the walls have fallen, the house of Rahab is led off to safety.

A curse is put up on it, according to Joshua – (on whoever will rebuild what Jericho stands for in the Israelite tradition.)

Ref. to Lot, nephew of Abraham — (Gigal ?) their separation from the line of mystical genealogy that Abraham’s line symbolizes.

(Lot is living alone with two daughters.  It is important, they say, that the seed of our father be not lost.

Lot’s daughters give their father wine to drink, and they cohabit with him.  Each one gives birth to a boy, called Moab and Ammon.  Their descendants are called Moabites and Ammonites to this day.

A side issue is being developed.  Lot is the opportunist, seeing the immediate as against Abraham, who is carrying out the great pattern; with offshoots like Lot’s daughters.  In the same fashion, Jericho is under a curse to this day.

The Israelites are now on the west side — have concluded their wilderness journey.

I should like to point the way into the next chapter, and close with the story of Samson.

The Israelites are now established in a state of being — a ground secure to them, if they remain obedient.  As we in the physical come to permanent growth — similarly, the Israelites.

But what occurs?  They have now within that territory to make themselves secure.  (Becoming acquainted with yourselves as an adult.)  They have many citadels to destroy, and tribes to conquer.  Battles which are close up, but no more great journeys.

Moses had warned them that they would be in danger of warring with the people — of crossing wills (?) with the purposes of other people.  (adultery)  And time and again they fail.  They didn’t always obey, and paid the price.  And bit by bit, they needed new leadership, called deliverers or judges — figures, literal and allegorical, who aided them back to the true way on which they had set out.

Here — a son-in-law of Caleb of Deborah – the woman heroine who overcame one of the enemy in her tents.  Gideon – an order of today is based on the stature and figure Gideon.

Now we pass on to Samson.  The Book of Joshua — a type of fore-runner – as the woman who had no child.  (Sarah, the spiritual state, which bears fruit only after the other state has grown up.)  In the same way, that which is of value is held back.  So this woman makes a pledge in the hope of a child.  She has a vision, telling that she will conceive.

You will find in the Greek-Egyptian stories, certain portents, indicating the stature of a coming great being.

Something is required of the mother.  The hair is never to be cut.  (They belong to the order of the Nazirites and there are orders there that literally never cut their hair.)  The mother here obeys.  The child’s hair is never cut.

Samson is the 13th judge — a symbol of the end of another octave.

Samson — sun power — sun radiation.  There are those who have made of hair a nature mythos.  (In psycho-analytical studies and folklore)  It is in reality a sun myth.  Hair— the rays of the sun — when strong, they are devastating.  When winter comes, Samson’s hair is cut, and periodically grows and shortens.

The hair on the head — is a sign of power.  Extending out beyond the head — intuition.  The powers of the sun – in turn — the symbol of the powers of the spirit.

Samson is dedicated to loyalty to the spiritual command, from childhood on.  And if you are loyal, you have power and so hair.  Powers of the spirit, true intuition, rapport with a world of spirit – something like gnosis.

As Jesus is the 13th man, so Samson is the predecessor of the Jesus pattern.

So Samson grows up in the allegory, very strong and self-willed.  And as he grew older he wanted to marry a woman of the Philistines, not of the Israelites.

Philistine – the next aspect to be overcome.  So Samson and his parents set out to visit them.  On the way he kills the lion, as though it were a kid.  Says nothing to his parents.  He picks the woman and returns.  Then sets out later to visit the Philistines.  Goes to where he has dropped the carcass of the lion and finds in it, a hive of bees.

He has 30 Philistine friends to whom he gives a riddle:

           Out of the eater, meat

           Out of the strong, sweetness.

The woman wreigles Samson to tell it.

The Philistine answers:  “What is sweeter than honey?  What is stronger than a lion?”

(13th man — end of an octave and the beginning of the next.  He makes a division.)

Samson – one who is obedient to spiritual power — a conquering of what the lion stands for.  The old authority – a trial of strength.  The hero is so strong it is small to him.

The bones of the lion remain.  The value.  (out of it — meat)  If you kill the old, without getting meat, you have not killed the lion.

He finds a hive of bees, who have collected honey — in deep gestation, they grew those values of sweetness.  Philosophically, milk is sweet, not rancid — in key with its own nature, not spoiled.

A process of interior development, which the Israelites will undertake in the 3rd octave, of which Samson is the beginner.

Samson meets another woman, Delilah, who beguiles from him the secret of his strength.

It is emphasized here that Samson has 7 locks of hair — (7 principles).  Delilah beguiles him to sleep and cuts his hair.

Samson is not the perfected hero – a great, glorious advance — not a culmination.  So here he is involved with the beguiling powers of the lower world — which cause him to betray his spiritual vows.

Delilah represents the succumbing of Samson at a point — just as Moses succumbed when he smote the rock instead of speaking to it.

In the allegory, Samson succumbs to her will.

Delilah is an Eisha — whose task it is to seek to betray, until the other part of the nature is immune, just as Kundry is forced to tempt Parsifal – and only when Parsifal resists, is Kundry released.  (2 aspects of the soul.  Not now sense pleasures.)

Samson’s eyes are put out.  He who betrays the spiritual law, loses rapport with the other side.

Samson, led a prisoner, calls together the powers he has had, and pulls down the structure in which he and his enemies are.  The close of the next octave.

The allegories continue through the Prophets, Kings, Captivities.

notes of G. Borchard

THE WILDERNESS ALLEGORY

as taken up by MBM with the Monday Training Group

Feb. 1937

What, in the large, do you conceive this Journey to be?   The Promised Land is not Amenti; it is the ascent of souls — one octave in it – but not the complete attainment.

What is the Promised Land?  Egypt is the physical world, – attachment to things of the flesh, – night, – darkness.  The Promised Land is reaching the stage in which there is security — getting on to another floor and being safe on it.  A new octave starts from the Promised Land.  But it is something like our Lotus Chart — the map of the first octave gives you the practical picture, and therefore a movement in the direction, and an opening of the eye.  You can’t know others (octaves) till you have done that.  It is not Nirvana, Amenti or Heaven.

It is the place that is yours.  Now, the place that is yours is the place, or stage, when you are frankly, honestly and boldly living the philosophic life.  You are not your body or psyche; you are living for your soul.  When you have achieved that you are in the Promised Land.

This is really the story of your life.  Something in you has been born, – some self that is ready, openly, to give service to the Larger.  That is to be born of Levi.  Moses and Aaron are both derived from that in you and me which is devoted to the Larger, – to do the service of the Tabernacle.

Hidden for three months: one octave for each of the three-fold man.  For a period of three-ness all the good in you is hidden: body, heart and mind.  A greater mother than his own (Moses’) brings him up.  Has to be done, for that in you which has to move up to the Larger.  Leah (?) is out of the earth — comes from below.  As this sprout in you grows,,more and more selves comprise it, and the battle is on between that which is attached to the lower and that which is moving toward the higher.

Resistance to bondage:  If there is nothing in you that is aware and resistant you haven’t the Levi stock yet….to things of this world.  Wonder the beginning of all philosophy.  Typical of the Hebraic to be resistant to the lower .

Re Moses slaying the Egyptian:  As the result of slaying the Egyptian you must flee standing on the thesis on which you have stood before.  You no longer can state life as you did before. You must ally yourself with a priest who has seven daughters, so that the span of seven – influences of the seven — first of the lower worlds, the planets — come into action.  He (Moses) takes one of these as his bride, and has children.

In the beginning one of the seven more than the others draw you, is your bride — the bride of this active will, which separates you from below.  Results within your being, whether you are more drawn to Mercury or Venus, etc.  One is stronger in you than another.  Since the Larger is coming into action it is beginning to mold you.  Alchemy.  Mystical transformation.

The resistance to bondage, when Moses killed the Egyptian, is the forerunner to a greater resistance.  In other words, if you are successful in little you shall be required to undertake more.  Corresponds to growth of dragons after resistance.  In ascending, the soul, having proven its desire, will be asked to undertake more.  If not, there could not be any growth.  A call to greater victories in the burning bush.

Reluctance of Moses to the greater difficulties: “Why should I trust spirit; here is matter — the forerunner of doubting Thomas.  Rational mind to super-rational.  Preliminary to Thomas.

Two signs:  Rod turned into a serpent, – the static into the living: that in you which is dead becomes alive, – eventually the Uraeus.  Second sign: the leprous hand.  Of that another sign later, when Miriam commits her sin.

Grand pattern of man’s first steps away from the flesh.  I know of no pattern like it.  The call to the Larger must go by a super-rational way, not a rational way, – and you have got to risk it.

The joining of Aaron to Moses: the one that faces to God and the one that faces to man; Moses-Aaron, but both of the stock of Levi.  That is why Moses was four-score years and Aaron four-score and three.  Really 40  and 43, but turned two ways.  Though he (Aaron) speaks to men he is mystically greater than Moses.  Aaron, the word of God, a preliminary Logos — that sensitivity in the human which has a sensitivity from the Larger, almost like true intuition, and speaks in harmony with that readily, whereas the Moses, who is disciplined in this earth, is a little more reasonable, intellectual, not pure intuition.

Command to Moses.  Preliminary word about “Spoil the Egyptians.”  All those powers which you have acquired in earth you take with you.

Release of Moses by Jethro.  “Go in peace”, – something of the position of Melchizedek at another time, outside the Hebraic tradition — understanding the Pattern, not interfering with it.  That harmony with the Larger, which is controlling (?) the Larger when you are honestly undertaking to break loose.  The Moses in you and the sensitivity in you, which we will call Aaron, have determined to break loose from the old forms of life.  But not the head alone must go forward, but all of it.

Therefore Moses and Aaron speak to the people, and they (the people) are happy.  The first reaction, but not the second, third or twelfth.

Then we have the beginning of the contest with Pharaoh: a request which is not acknowledged.  Then the twelve miracles.  They mean the irrational tragedies, difficulties, which beset the lower man once he has turned his eye to the higher.  It takes twelve contests — the whole measure of man, before Pharaoh and the Egyptians have let go of the Israelites.  So long do you have to labor until you have loosened up all parts of your being and gotten them to move forward.  (Rod changed to serpent.)  Twelve points of adhesion which you have to loosen before you could be on your way.  Otherwise just the Moses and the Aaron are on their way.

Last judgment: death of the first born.  Prolonged resistance brings death to the old life, in violence.

Preparation of the Passover, when the law of death will pass over the law of the living.  Sacrifice of the lamb without blemish, a male of one year.  That is the part of them that will go forward.  Only a very young (animal), only a lamb, – a male though, because it is active: passive to God, active to man — the dual aspect.

That duality you must have.  If you become active on the wrong side, a lamb toward the world and a ram toward God, it is not so good.  Ask yourself: Have I gone through the lessons of the twelve?  Have I still points of attachment?  Have I gone through the first death, the Passover, the first great cleavage in conscious evolution?  Many of the selves must learn the lesson forcibly, by blood sacrifice.  Blood is a sign of life, unless otherwise designated.  You must pour out the life of the lower for the sake of the higher: “Except a man die. . . . . .”  Your redemption by blood really means transmutation of (his) life for higher life, in an ascending spiral.

Seven days of unleavened bread.  Without earthly desire.  For a period of seven — not time but condition — you hold yourself.  The seven planets are that will on your part.  You are letting them work fully.  So you eat unleavened bread.  Then you wait through the night, all ready to go, for the dawn.

The hour of partition within the self takes place.  Taking the jewels of the Egyptians, – for the new life goes forward with the powers in the earlier stage.  The journey from Rameses to Succoth.  600,000 were on foot.  By labor they will go forward.

A mixed multitude; the unseparated aspects in the self; the things that have not yet come up.  How mixed are the feelings and thoughts!  Sometimes even in the later stages .

The “much cattle.”  Cattle usually means the higher emotions.  So they are going forward with much aspiration.  You go forward, at that stage, with much longing toward the powers of God, – in the first exuberance.

600,000 on foot, led by the Moses in you and the Aaron in you.  Journey from Rameses to Succoth.  You can find extraordinary things of practical value in this story.  Until you are secure, and you are not to go down into Egypt any more.  Except the Christ man, who goes down, for a super-purpose.  That is a mastery octave.  This is an octave of evolution.  (“Out of Egypt have I called my son.”)  Then you have begun, not the full measure of our grand allegory but the process of conscious evolution.

Moses more mind as a whole, Aaron a faculty of it — Intuition.

The miracles: just that to the lower world; things God has accomplished, not man.

Sincerity: the slaying of the lamb a sign that you understand .

Plagues: Egypt did not cause the plagues; they were caused by Jehovah, to loosen from Egypt; twelve points of attachment in earth; therefore plagues as the ways of Jehovah to loosen you from attachment.  The twelve drawn together into one when you finally make your journey.

Red Sea: definite separation between earth; when you finally undertake to go into a process; the radical cutting off of the life you have lived before, – when it is irrevocable; burning the bridges.  The desires may go back later, but literally you have gone to the . . . . .march.

////

600,000 on foot: work; self-activity

1320: pillar of cloud by day, fire by night.  (cloud, ectoplasm.

1413: pursuit of the Egyptians: earth interests pursue. Ch. 14,

the difficulties .

1523: Marah, tree, praise-giving, then complaint.  Bitter cup; really water of refreshment, but they could not take it.  Teachings that are hard to stomach; personality rebels;  Tree in water: you are helped to understand that this is part of the great process of life; the tree is the tree of life, the pattern.  You understand it is not because of hatred against you, or your teachers who make it hard; and it becomes sweet, and you can take it.  Complaint and praise-giving; the new presents its difficulties; a little stricter rhythm, you don’t like it; two steps forward, one back; when the mind becomes open it becomes sweet.

Ch. 16: Wells at Elim.  The earth in you – fixed, cardinal and mutable.  In the beginning your earth will wants to go its own way in earth; to sit tight in earth; and adjust itself to earth — that is, cardinal, fixed and mutable in earth.  You can’t have that water until they are first wrenched loose.  Elim: the type (?) of a refreshment applied to the twelve tiny seeds which were buried in Egypt.

Seventy palm trees: Beneficence of the larger laws overshadowing the life of the lower; that is, the seven from above.

Two things necessary to really go beyond Succoth.. . . .and get to the opposite side of the Red Sea.  Elim the place of refreshment for the beginning of the journey.  The journey is not really begun before.  It is the accomplishment of certain things you have to do to begin….including gathering yourself together.

Manna: forerunner to the bread from heaven is Teachings.  It is to be put into action immediately. If not, it. . . . If you know what to do that is constructive don’t wait till tomorrow.

Pharaoh represents the hold of the lower world, in its masterful sense.

Manna from heaven will accompany them till they get to the Promised Land.  Then it stops.  They have to prove themselves.

 

Ch. 17

Wilderness of Sin: dry period; thirst.

Water from the rock — refreshment from the great truth.

Conflict with Amalek.

 

Ch. 18

Jethro: Teacher of Moses.  The Wisdom outside of Moses in earth.  Moses as judge:  Ordering the household; division of labor.  Jethro well versed in organization and understanding.  Another branch of the same line that Moses asks to come with them, the brother-in-law.   …Anubis.  Eyes in the desert.  You do get help if you are really under way.

Ch. 19

Sinai:  higher consciousness.  The lesser selves not ready to mount.

Ch. 20, plus

Two sets of laws: Behavior regulations for things in this earth; then there are the tablets of stone, which contain the so-called twelve commandments…..Separate the moral laws from the social welfare laws.  Moses broke the tablets that contained the moral laws.  Those had to be . . . . .

Training under Moses:  The leader for a certain octave . . . . . dictatorial authority.  And you don’t get to the higher without the dictatorial authority.  The Cross replaces the Law.  The strict Law of Moses, the sharp discipline, is replaced by a later graciousness.  But the graciousness can’t come before the Law . . .technique achieved….the discipline…. the law of it.  Before, you have the training under Moses, the discipline, the sharp law.  The Promised Land under more intuition.  The finer sensitivities don’t develop until you have gone through the discipline.  Moses had it; for the rest it was not there yet.  It began to come along via some that were closer to Moses, like Hur and Joshua.  Joshua, the leader of the future.

Amalek:  desires; descendant of Esau.

Wilderness of Sin:  Wildernesses are places where you are frustrated, and where life is arid; you seem to make no headway.  The only thing to do is to follow the instruction of the pillar, or of the leader.  The step afterwards that shows the progress.  Come through with whatever tool you have: determination, knowledge, faith.

The cloud:  A precipitation.  The cloud over the mountain, a materialization.  Out of that cloud, the voice that everyone could hear.  Don’t literalize.  There were first the four, then seventy elders under (?) the advice of Joshua, and the multitude below that, who were carefully warned not to come close.  All the selves in the household will get the reverberation of the high parts, if you will have first made them clean.  The clean clothes; purifying.

 

NUMBERS, beginning at Ch. X

Sinai to Kadesh-Barnea; Hobab accompanies Moses.  The roundabout way, as most people do; accounts for the.forty years.

Ch. ll4: lusting , for,the fleshpots — earth desires dominate.

Ch. 118 : Manna baked into cakes — assimilating Teachings.

Ch. 15: Moses complaint.

Ch. 13: the wrath of God kindled against the people.

Ch. 121: Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses: Miriam becomes leprous,

symbol of the soul; hence the seven days.

Ch. 13: Spies sent to the land of Canaan: twelve spies; man’s number;

seven, the soul’s number.

Grapes from brook of Eshcol: great fruitfulness.  The higher states of life are very full of riches.  Progress up into that higher state; in that you will find those wondrous things.

land of milk and honey: all sorts of good things in it, from which they could have made milk and honey.

Giants. (reported in land by spies)

Ch. 14: Unbelief.  Only two out of the twelve, Caleb and Joshua want to go; therefore the price, forty years.

Ch. l5.  Offerings, when they shall have arrived.  He who turns back after putting his hand to the plow is to die; not worthy to go on.

Ch. 16; Korah:  rebels.  14,700 died in plague.

Ch. 17:  Aaron’s rod that budded.  Twelve rods.  At first the twelve plagues.  Points loosened.  Then refreshment at the first wells.  Many octaves.  Some of the old pass.  Sprouting of the rod a new stage.  The line that Aaron symbolizes, the priest, is the one that sprouts first in you.

Ch. 20: death of Miriam.  A feebler aspect of the soul dies.

Water from the rock: smiting the rock — force instead of persuasion.  You must be faithful to each octave.

Edom: refusing to let the children of Israel pass.  Same as Amalek.  Cain.  Lower soul as against higher descendants of Esau.

Death of Aaron: power to the new generation, his son.

Fiery serpents:  the little appetites.  The Lord does not send them.  If you let down on your watchfulness all sorts of little things come up.

Ch. 21: brazen serpents.

End. Joshua 6.

Exodus 33; golden calf; broken tablets.  Glorifying the old;  under the material law.  His wrath.

3311: first appearance of Joshua; side indication re Joshua.

Ch. 21: Victory over Canaanites.  singing at the well.  That is what Moses should have done instead of smiting.  Motives radiate out.  Becoming soul conscious.  Balaam psychic (?) nature; but don’t go into it.  But if you start up a path, keep it

Ch 25  A third generation from Aaron – different stage of the mystical nature.  Moses replaced by Joshua, who began in the tabernacle.

Ch. 26: The new . . . achieved by that which has been wandering thus far.  Well again.  Circumcision.  Then the repeating of the law for the new ones.  Recapitulation.  Victories over the physical: Amorites, Canaanites.  Only in later stages Anna and Mary.  Emotional conquering.  Here the attachment to earth for the earth’s sake.

Edom:  Moses shows (?) the attachments to the world in you; or the world and that which holds up the progress of those who seek to move forward.  Seen as an almost intolerable sin.  That nothing shall prevent the higher from going forward, – anybody who tries to interfere with your progress toward the Larger.  The objective – Balaam too is objective.

Rahab: like the old line of prostitutes; aspect of Mary Magdalene.  It is better to have lived than not to have lived.  Therefore in that is the power of action.  Without action you get nowhere.

Early chapters of Deuteronomy: Recapitulation.  They must be taught the law again — not go on glibly.

Joshua 6: Walls of Jericho fall.  Joshua, Rahab.

Numbers l425:  Refusing that opportunity to go direct to the Promised Land, they have to go back to the beginning (Red Sea).  If only we would strain a little more intensively, and get there — the next octave.

Harlot:  also Harlot on the seven hills of Rome.  Symbolizes the opposite of the lukewarm that is “spewed out” (Book of Revelations.)  Therefore there is power in it.  The harlot has expended many energies, and as a result of that is much life.  In the mystical tradition Mary Magdalene is claimed as having gone further than any other follower of Jesus.  Had more power to repent.

The danger of this is that you could say: Fine, I will go out and be a harlot, – and of course the example would not work at all.  It can never be done that way.  It does not mean only sex.  Nevertheless, there is peculiar power in one who has righteously lived the life of a harlot — to whom it has been on the way.  But woe to him who does it for whom it is not on the way.  Don’t ever go down to go up.  But, if in the course of your life pattern, things have come about, that is another matter.  If you do something that does not belong to your part, it is like mixing up your pattern.  If in the pattern, that type of life has a potency which can be assimilated by another type of life, – as the Jesus power assimilated the power of Mary Magdalene.  Not that it has something in its own right.  The power of Jesus transformed her.

THE WILDERNESS ALLEGORY

 

Single lecture by MBM

February 22, 1949

Journey of liberation toward the higher Realities.  Promised Land is not the end.  It is one rhythm in the journey of the soul, or monad.

Plagues: descriptions of that which has bound you in the past.  Realizations, – attachments which become evident when you start to go forward.   Passover: the first suggestion, or intimation, that there are powers outside of man which aid him once he gets under way, like sun and air on the seed conspire to do it.  From higher planes.

Next step: the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day.  That in you which lives will see it.

Number symbolism in six.

Moses represents the initiative – the highest in you, which begins to take hold of the Larger, and pull the rest with it.

A response to the challenge of the burning bush: when something in you responds to a call outside of you.

Red Sea: A barrier which can be overcome.  First initial serious step.  Bridges burned behind you.  The first real test.  To protect you from your vacillations and saftnesses the bridge is destroyed.  Closing of the sea a mystical fact.  Idea of the jealous God, the God of wrath, who is to be appeased, is in common with this idea of a God who is doing, not things of justice but things that are from one side.

Then sounds of jubilation when they are across. Miriam a syzygy.

Not at all adjusted in the new country.  The Wilderness is new territory, that has not yet been assimilated …. wild, …. desert …. waste … unused.  A bid to come and change it from wilderness to something that is useful.  This people were soft, undisciplined, rebelling – “Why did you start me on something so difficult?”.

Mara:  Bitter waters; weak soul.  Experiences hard to take…that it is still all a wilderness.  Return is blocked.

Have to drink.  Need reassurance.  Need those realizations which make it possible to go forward.  You have to learn how to make water sweet.  Voice tells Moses to put tree into the well.  Tree in Genesis.  Tree on which the apple grew — the fruit of experience.  The tree represents a plan, or pattern.  Related to certain words in the Prayer-Hymn.  Reminder that humanity is starting on this process of the pattern of the tree.  Evolution of man, and the individual man.  Sign of growth, through which comes understanding.  When you understand that it is for something that you are going through this, you can take it.  A small reflection of the Large.  You begin to see the order in the universe.  These people had to learn that all these steps are part of attaining the Promised Land.  Between here and spiritual development an immensity of development.

Birds: the receptivity in you which responds to the Larger.  Birds in the tree that grew from the mustard seed.  The fruit of that tree spiritual stature, and you have a rapport with the spiritual worlds.  A bird came to Moses repeatedly, and to other great leaders.

Mara is also a practical lesson that those on the pilgrimage learned in regard to the pairs of opposites.  The bitter and the sweet are two aspects of one thing.  In any mystic journey you must learn that lesson.  Because of your peculiarity as a human you have a preference for one or the other.  That is dangerous — a fixation.  You must learn to take the opposite with the same equanimity.

Can be a fixation if you are stopped by pain or by pleasure.  Always it is the pressing on.  More important to pass by going than in the physical.  You keep going, whether you gain or lose.  You are not stopped by either (pain or pleasure).  Victory and defeat, two aspects of one thing.  Every time you play a game there must be a winner as well as a loser.  Pressure is on the effort of the self to push, and it is incidental which occurs, provided you are moving.  You become less concerned about victory or defeat if it is about some personal matter.

If for a Larger thing, you work to the limit of your ability.  Like the tree, growth is the main thing.  Whether it is one or…. is incidental.  The things that go wrong strengthen us.  If the tree is the objective of the whole thing, what difference does it make what falls to the right or to the left.  You are not measured by what is visible.

Elim:  Twelve wells.  Palm trees.  A kind of oasis.  Encamped there; and well they might.  It is good to be there.  Wells are water that comes from the depth.  Two ways of describing water that does not come from man: one is by rain, the other by wells.  Comes from regions outside the contact of man.  The bitterness, when it is conquered, opens up to you the refreshment of insight.  You begin to understand something of the Pattern.

No one grows the tree of themselves without rules and regulations.  The emergence here of the Pattern, and the beginning of seeing it and finding it a refreshing thing.  A compensation, or reverse, of the bitterness, which has been accepted.  When you accept bitterness it becomes sweet.  Your work is acceptable to you because you are accepting it in the key of sweetness, because of what it is going to give you.

If you accept, you come to a state of insight.  This is the law: you never come to real insight without having gone over an obstacle successfully. . . Beautiful dreams are usually projections of people’s own ideals, – not a well.  Because the real thing is obtained by overcoming obstacles.  You can only get according to what you do, or give. That is justice.  Here the twelve wells are a beginning of understanding of the Larger — because the bitter waters have been accepted.

Bones of Joseph.  Twelve sons.  So there has been a previous reference to twelve.  Sons of Jacob.  Joseph the youngest; and the one who became a dweller in Egypt.  Always one of the twelve who stands out, because he is the candidate for the thirteenth man.  Like Prometheus in the Greek.  Continues with the twelve tribes.  Allegorically, they represent the development of the qualities, or powers, in each sign.

The bones of Joseph represent the taking along of the heritage.  The essence of your experience prior to this (life) goes along.  Some of the values that belong to life are called the “jewels.”  You can’t lose what is good.

The palm trees are seventy.  Associated with the seven stars revolving around the Pole.  Seventy because of emphasis on the power and immensity that derives from the seven.  Palms, another kind of glimpse into the Immensities.  You see in this the depths and the heights.  The palm trees, the heights.  They are the beauty of the laws of the Most High in action.  Activation of the real things, as contrasted with the transitory things.  Until we are such good builders that we can build in a world that is permanent.

Certain steps now have been accomplished.  Bitterness to sweetness, and coming to the opposite side.

I omitted the manna from this story.

fragments GB notes

Wilderness Allegory

 

Interpretation of various points by MBM

Sinai — You seek spiritual teacher.  Preliminary instruction

Burning bush – communication with other planes.  metaphysics.

12 plagues – Egypt

passover – girding for journey

Red Sea – you take an irrevocable step

Wilderness – so it seems at first

rebellion – pull of the old

Mara – bitter water.

Elim – twelve trees

Wilderness of Sin (or Zin ?) – Manna received

Horeb – waters of temptation and strife.

Amalakites – battle with the pull of the good things of earth.

Jethro – advised organization.

Sinai – ten commandments; stone tablets; blue

golden calf – temptation of concretizing the higher realities.

Kadesh-Barnea.  turning point reached in two yrs; could have accomplished balance to Promised Land quickly but most rebelled, so regressed; journey took 40 yrs.

Spies – ten return

frustration – back to Red Sea

wanderings – 38 yrs

Kadesh-Barnea – again

Edomites – material world won’t let loose; barriers

fiery serpents – appetites

Balaam and the ass – ass golden;

death of Moses – Joshua the new leader

Jorden – blue (this re coloring stages of journey.)

Jericho – yellow and blue.  (this re coloring stages of journey.)

Journey Through the Wilderness

1

Feb 15, 1949

Read Chap 15

Symbolism – invaluable discipline to the mind – counteracts the

            material – integral part of WL

            speaks of another plane

Title       a symbol

Triple code of scriptures

            1 – the story

            2 – allegorical

            3 – hieroglyph – profound and secret code

Story       not factual – mass migration — fact

Hebrews     persona non-grata in Egypt – (records}

Hibiri

Chapter 1 – 12 and 7 – Number symbolism

            12 complete in reference to man- leaders of 12 tribes

            multiply

            your story – make it subjective

            with 12 fully immersed in the physical plane

            all needs multiplied

Pharoah     1st born of Israel slain – (allegory slipped)

Moses       after three monthsy^oses. was found in the basket-

            Moses a double symbol – leader to be – in danger of being       slain – to be segregated – floats off on river,

three

Hepsethut   Picked him up (records)

Egypt       Double meaning*- the body

            Overtone of wisdom of Egypt . . the possession of Jesus

Leaven      Two kinds of leaven – leaven which makes bread rise

                                leaven – the action of lower desire

Salt        The same

Stature     The age of 40

40          40 days on Mt. Sinai

Mt Sinai   Neighborhood conditioned as a sacred place (records of

            things that occurred there) conditioned to relation with

            higher plane

Moses       saw people being persecuted – sense of his people – race

            Egyptian

Jethro king priest – had 7 daughters

            Moses helped them at the well

40          Lived with the priest for forty years

 

Moses       What goes on in you before you set forward  seriously?

            That In you which is awakening.

Hebrews     Worldly side – nothing to do with Moses

            Protest at any changes.

Moses       In retreat with profundaties.

Burning Bush    Leadership in you must grow

              illustration of the self

Rod    Turning death to life.

Serpent     In WT – moving from gross to the higher

            through the higher, the power of breath?

Aaron       The other side in you.

Miriam      Sisters – soul image – watched.

Pharaoh     Interview with pharaoh – the protest of conventional life

            in you

 

Moses       Realization of the actuality of the higher in you,

            which is to draw on others.

Series of contests with Pharaoh – This-school also – must DO

10          Ten times the pharaoh protested.

            As soon as you mean business, something is required of you

Preparation for the Exodus – people told what to do.

10th to 14th day

            lamb to be slain

10          echo of ten plagues, in conflict with pharaoh

14          Soul – lunation of the moon

Lamb        no self-will – Lamb of God follows the pattern of God

            Journey of the soul – must be like the lamb.

Q      conscience – derived from the Personality through the

            environment

Pass-Over   blood on door posts – of Israelites – so Lord would pass

            over in slaying  first born of Egyptians

Blood       Life on another plane – its blood –

            here sacrifice of the lower life

unleavened bread – begin to eat of the experience of life without

            desire – yield desire to lower

7 days      Chapter 12

            reference to the higher, with influence on the lower.

            if you will accept – wherever you start forward, the 7 is

            upon you.  East unleavened bread.

First born of Egyptians to be slain – breaking down the initiative

            of the lower

Pass-Over – leaving the old – the cleavage

Significant for everyman on way forward

ready to leave at the signal

on the signal, must act

momentum

otherwise old floods in (THE woman who swept and garnished her house)

Read continuation of Chapter 12 – Jewels of the Egyptians

II

Wisdom lore

Feb. 22, 1949

Promised land as one rhythm of the S of the Soul

No 10 – 10 plagues – one cycle derived from ten – 5 and 5 – fingers on 2 hands

certain types of octaves– 7-10-12

1- Pass – over – the  first suggestion of Powers outside of man to aid if he gets under the laws

 

illus – seed aided by sun

Aid takes different steps – so a double lineage

                          movement of the people-struggle with

                          growth of influences from Above

2- Pill of cloud by Day-  Fire by Night.

600,000 left

Chapter XIV  7 followed

Egyptian – 600 chariots – 6 as no. of work – old and new making effort

Who is Moses?  Response to the challenge of the burning bush –

     responded to call outside of you

Red Sea – burned bridges – no protest from vacillations –

     closed – a mystical fact

Hebraic – the jealous God- God of wrath – one sided God – through

     Hebraic eye

Sang song of jubilation – Lord – Man of Battles

                        Miriam dance

(Read the allegory of your own life)

Wilderness – the new territory not yet assimilated – the inevitability

            of these  stages

Mara – Bitter waters – hard to go forward – can’t go back – seed of

      something planted – impossible – must learn how to make water

      sweet

next point at which the voice speaks

In Hebraic tradition – fruit of tree – the apple – fruit of experience

Tree a Pattern of Growth (Prayer Hymn)

Starts in genesis – repeats here – reminder that humanity  is starting on the progress of growth like the tree – Process of man and the individual.  Way of growth which brings understanding.  Fruit comes later (Practical  illustration) Begin to see order instead of disorder.

N.T.  K of H llke mustard seed

Voices of the Larger – The Fruit of spiritual  stature

Rapport with the  spiritual world-

2nd point in Mara – and the Tree symbolism – The pairs of Opposites bitter and sweet – two aspects of one thing – essential to learn the pairs of opposites – 2 are one — paper, door, day and night – seasons-

              you – dangerous to become fixed in one–

take opposites with equanimity – go forward between them—

illustration (rich man – going through eye of needle

                   camel

Gita – take as equals

Gautama – the Middle Way

Jesus

outer expressions of universal principles – more important in regard to soul and spirit – tree needs both seasons – not measured by visible things

Elim  12 wells – score and 10

Oasis – and 10 palm trees

Make chart of this journey – see in terms of experience and growing insight

Wells – deep waters – 2 ways of describing water beyond man – rain – wells

Bitterness conquered opens up the wells of refreshment and insight understanding something of the pattern – insight results from going successfully over obstacles – insight seen into something outside the self

Bones of Joseph  one of 12 who stands out as candidate for 13th man

bones as heritage

12 – quality or dev. of powers of 12 signs, as heavenly- writing –

Jewels as values

70 palm trees – emphasis on power or the immensities deriving from the 7 palm –  its height – beauty of the laws of the most high in action

continue reading.

III

Wilderness Journey

March l, 1949

Serpent Symbol – pattern of undulation – Wave Frequency

You are to follow the high crest of the wave

Wilderness of Sin

Moses – at once the intelligence in the self and the leader outside the self

Lord – who is he? – Will take up later

Bread  for six days – Manna – what is it? Manhu – its origin – shortened to Manna

40 yrs – difficulty of historians in recognizing the fact

illus – article on Sinai in Encyclopedia

Mana – bread from heaven – bread – symbol  f wisdom – food for the higher man foreshadowing of the bread of which Jesus spoke.

In Egyptian lore – wheat and barley the outstanding symbols of bread and wine

water – refreshment for the soul – drink of water until soul stature is complete

wine  stature of spirit

spoiling of food – no compromise in the 7th day

Rephidum – no water

When did Moses use the rod – with the Pharaoh – at the Red Sea –

now smites the rock at Horeb people must be continually fed

(illustration of one who had one mystical experience and lived on it – talked about it – have to continue – food of previous time not enough)

Horeb – or Morah – and Sinai made synonyms

Historians can’t find where they, could have put 600,000

Rock – that which is eternally true

Massah – temptation – Meribah – rebellion – tempting fate – forward or back?

meet enemies outside

Esau – willing to yield the higher for the things of flesh

Joshua choses worriers – Moses stands on rock with hands up

rod-activity

Hur – a general

Not for you to say how long the battle will be

Through the rhythm of derth and refreshment vitality can be exerted.

Jethrow – resourceful – perceptive

Drawing toward the magnet of Jethro

Jewish God is to see power being demonstrated to the Israelites.

Where there is real power, there is no racial identification.

Jethrow – divide the load among the wise men –  organic life – refers to the organizationof the outside and of the self

Moses on his own again – the stresses and strains of the forward movement

Period  of three –

Sinai derived from Sin – old name for the moon – worship of the moon or likening the development of the moon to the soul.  Israelites followers of the moon cycle calendar still the moon calendar still base computation on the moon.  Easter computed on moon time

Chap 19 –  are the people really ready?

(mining expedition – records of kings  of Egypt – and mining of a blue   stone)

Sinai a conditioned mountain – evident from the priesthood

Now Will you obey the law?  First the period of probation

Series of steps at this point from elementary to a definite stage

1. Voluntary consent to accept leadership
2. Sanctification – action within that – set apart – to the becoming of true ?
3. Presentation of laws to be obeyed — told are to become a priesthood
4. Promise about the future

People gradually graded – come to crises – asked whether serious

Lord warns people not to come up

covenant –  an agreement – commandments and laws – 20,21,22,23,24

Motive of blood – initiation rite – the vital fluid becomes a link (Interesting to psychoanalyze from point of view of Jews of today)

Repeated statements that no man has ever seen God.  In 24, 10 –   saw God of Israel

2 points – God above the mental plane

Lord of Israel not the Supreme God – so there were lords of various peoples

25 to 31   All details given – no God would ever give such rules and regulation as given to Moses

what occurred to Moses up there – highly conditioned state – saw needs of people – had to lay out these patterns – why took him so long

priests, builders, worshipers, laborers

sense of race blended with this, Moses still a Jew

MT – high state of consciousness Jewish attitudes coming out – intensity, violence

I better than thou

Deity a jealous God – screen color given by the Jew

Separatism of the Jew – one of evils still following them

Today the unpredictable vicar England who gave order the 10 commandments no longer to be used in his church

but will see the noble sequence of the pattern of development in this Journey – nevertheless.

What happens after have entered into a covenant

illus – voluntary acceptance of idea of obedience

What next?

make chart

Accept leadership

Sanctification

Laws obeyed – Priesthood

IV

Journey

March 8

Must take  into consideration – the character of the race

The true allegory

the historicity

Nature  symbolism

number  symbolism

building, symbolism

according to a constructive idea

color symbolism

7  The tabernacle – a concept so profound, so sacred no man could touch it.

must have in you that which is analogous to the tabernacle

special symbolism of the rod – mixture of nature and man-made symbol

bread the same

Wisdom to be applied – implies a doing

10 – natural octave – ten fingers

 4 basic – mother substance – EWFA

New

Sabbath – an error – a sign between the Lord and Israel

7 – sign of relation between all people and the Source?

First manifestation of the unknowable Deity

We bear the scars of the misinterpretation – when we see, it can become a bond

How do you think the five books were written – of Moses?under the tremendous urgency of a mystical vision

For you, a covenant, a sign between you and the pole

Re calf – people couldn’t take the strain – only the advanced candidate could sustain

(The house of gloom, the house of ice – power to endure)

What do you do – revert back – the transfer, of allegiance from the visable to the invisable

N.T.  The Doubting Thomas – “Blessed are they who without a sign, can believe”

worship of golden calf at this point incongruous -cow – bull – taurus – went back to the visables.

Aaron – the voice – the I

the Logos doctrine – word made manifest – so must follow the bid of the word

conscious application – be conscious for a day of what you say as I

Whenever the high tension of organization slips – what happens?

What is occurring on the mountain?

When higher self is awakened, has faculties, power, the self hasn’t

The lord wrathful – a contradiction here – (Jewish)

The lord relented – also a projection

Meets- Joshuah – people dancing and shouting (Jewish reaction)

dancing  incongruous, irreverent – Their intensity remnants of pagan nature – a reversion here

Moses very angry – shall reap what they sow – drink the calf –

pay price – (like Karma) Cause and effect

First time, Aaron calls Moses Lord

down below the natural, ungroomed, unshaped qualities bent on mischief (Interest chart)

House of Levi – stepped to side of Moses

3 – play on the threefold man – all things alien to this

Pattern must be ruthlessly destroyed – (Jewish intensity)

Everything contrary must be eliminated

consecrated – set aside

Kaphar – cover – Lord does while people are children

Pass – Over

Moses – blot me out – Identified with the cause of the people – would rather remain with them

correspondence – advanced beings choose to come back rather to go on to Nirvana

no weakness may be included “Him will I blot out

ch – Hebraic approach to sin – Sins of the Father

Jewish Traits – Keeping of the Sabbath Day

Wrath of God

Ruthless destruction of the Pattern

sins of the Father.

V

Story  continued  in Chap 11 – Nos – skip from Exodus 33

Tabernacle of the congregation is carried before them

nucleus for your living – every thing tends to be gathered around

Replaced by the elaborate Tabernacle

Meaning of the word – Lord – Bread keeper – moved up and down – originally high – Lord of the manor – important role

in itself is like Deity

Lord trying to put people right in regard to Moses

The Prophet can impress by a vision, but Moses talks to the Lord face to face – it must be so with leaders

Lord knows Moses by name, by nature – tells Moses all goodness will go before him

(Experience of the mystic, when in contemplation he becomes aware of the wonder andgoodness of Deity)

Result of passing through the test – realization of deep seeing, not known in any other way

Prepare the Sontes – an entirely different set of Laws

Chap. 34 in Exodus – tribal laws

Chap. XIV 28 Leviticus – oil, ear – toe – regulations about women

also in India – in China – orthodoxy – incrusted with regulations

Not from the Lord

These, eternal, profound – requiring the energies of the  soul – but all kinds of other things dumped on it – possible to reconstruct the people from them

Pass – Over – second batch of Laws

Now numbers   Kadish Barnea  Israelites rebelled – stiff-necked people

place of joining of EW to head – bridge Plague of quails – surfeit of material things – spoiled to the  old

can’t have new unless work for it – too late to have old

Moses to select 70 elders to sit around the Tabernacle (local symbol of Deity

Miriam and Aaron turn against him – marries Ethiopian woman (With no people so persistent a taboo against inter-marriage)

Song of Songs – (My Beloved is black and comely) Dark from exposure to sun – spirit

Miriam – female – the goat – pays price – is leprous

rending of clothes – aspects of self turn to rend you.

Father – hit her in the face – Old way – if wicked, spit in face

Go away for cycle of 7 – for cleansing – separate racial quotient from allegory

Wilderness of Paran –  select leader of 12 – 12 in you

time of the first ripe grapes – one of gems in allegory

at top of any cycle – if you make it, you go over the top.  Have you?  In miniature?  Aspects of the self?

little parts of you – has the last full measure, of your effort been denied by you?

based on facts – elaborated to make an allegory of the soul

Now back to the Red Sea – from now on wandered 40 yrs

illus – neglect of plant or bird

     illus of a principle

if can’t deliver the last pressure that will take you over the top – the power must carry through the cycle to gain the fruits

next week different angle.

Skipped – Are you capable of going forward?

ahead the land of milk and honey – the walled city – the giants

Caleb said – lets go – people wept all night – turned against Moses

Caleb and Joshuah for going

people – lets have another captain

Why do they fall down? surrender – acceptance in agony of their condition

rend clothes acceptance of situation – breaking down of what set up

projecting on the pace

So orthodox Christian fears breaking taboos

Lord and Moses debate (Projection in mind of those who wrote it – put into it their own capacities)

Will not see the land – 4l – 23 – 25

Get you into the wilderness

VI

Wilderness

March 22

Refused the last mile – illustration: egg in nest – if cool, no bird Justice greater than mercy – wants full measure from you  Law

Force back to Red Sea – don’t forfeit everything, if put what you have gained into action – muscle of the heart and mind are still yours.

Troubles now multiply   Hindus, Chinese, Hebrews held  on to the old, the literal.

conspiracy against Moses – as in you rebellion against things of similar nature

part of the plague – spread of the poison

Earths-quake – swallows those who rebel against leadership of Larger

Censor – sways between the sick and healthy – those who are willing to obey

right action – fineness, beauty in living

12 rods – power of the Lord with Aaron – Lineage of priesthood in line of Aaron – dropping out those who can’t take it.

Powers expended coming to an end – Miriam’s death – though she had rebelled, she belonged – hard on Moses – equally hard when it happens to you.

Rebel  again about water – a barren land – they merit it

Rock – ideally, Moses should have sanctified the people – conditioned them for what is to take place

strike the rock – vision of Immensities can give refreshment

what sustains any great figure in a crisis

Lincoln, Joan, Socrates, Stephen when stoned

water of refreshment gushes out – if over step it – the flaw.

only that without flaw is capable of going forward.

Only Moses is left – the old is leading – look at the Jordan and Jericho on map

all the land will resist their passing.

Plague of the fiery serpents – passionate desires – testing endurance

beaten up – cant you take it, when plague of fiery serpents hits you

killed off – not a death

Brazen serpent on the pole – old symbol in Egypt – spinal cord – man erect

man shifts from animal man to the soul man

can only travel when.it is erect

4th Gospel of John – correspondence – Serpent and Joseph

             John 3 – 14-15  As Moses lifted … So son of Man.

Brazen Serpent – the Story of man – Son of Man – fruit of Evolution – the Christ principle – essence will go on

Camped on the East side of the Jordan.

Balak – knew much about magic and cursing – sent for Balaam

will not curse the people who are blessed

Balam told him to go – on ass – slow going – crushed Balaam’s  foot gaint

VIII

Journey

March 29, 1949

Prophesy of Balaam – the motif of the Chosen people – clue to the nature of what the people were chosen for

Chap. 24 (Doctrine of Balaam in the Christian church – Balaam practiced, insidious?method  whoredom — projection on Balaam.)

Eleasar – bloody story – either people were vicious, or is an allegory

wherever processes are necessary, nothing contrary comes in.

(adultery – adulteration)

Karmic effect on those who literally believe, and apply to problem of Jewish people.  A clue to the people

plague – is adulteration

Chap. 33 summary

numbers

Deuteronomy – another telling of the same

guidance and advice between planes,

Mt. Horeb – on East side of Jordon – Pisgah – Raga –

Moses looked into the Promised Land – mystical seeing of one who had led.  The IP – the state, stature from which can see that which is to be.

Book of Joshuah completes the 5 books of Moses – loaded with mystical and occult teachings.

spies – harlots – at Rahab

Feudal period – facing the HH – all those who see, worthy of being saved

crossing of Jordon – a memorial – encamped – a company of the lords hosts enlisted on the other side – mystical and occult story of winning of J?

Historically – vibrations engendered by marching, set off earthquake

              so walls fell – not a pretty story – gory

Karmic action – killed off every man and woman in the place.

allegorically – nothing of the old to contaminate the building up of the Jewish people

2nd circumcision – the power of enormous dynamic – strain of something  built up literally – no such thing as a Jew

sensuality, profundity, intensity, dynamic in this story