Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 6:30 am

Be Here Now
by "Ram Dass," aka The Lama Foundation
First published 1971

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The spirit that creates poetry moves within those who show weighty matters represented in pictures, for what is a picture but a silent poem?

-- The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer: The True Society of Jesus and the Rosy Cross, by Daniel Cramer


Symbols of divine truths were not invented for the amusement of the ignorant; they are the alpha and omega of philosophic thought.

-- The Beacon Light of Truth, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


Some uses of myths and symbols are employed to condition people as you train animals, as you train a dog.

-- William Yandell Elliot Archives, Hoover Institution, Box 1


Table of Contents:

Opening Pages
1. Journey (The Transformation: Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D. Into Baba Ram Dass)
o Money Yoga
o Our Story
o Success
o Dissatisfaction
o Turning On
o Coming Down
o Environmental Changes
o Bhagwan Dass
o Ashtanga Yoga
2. From Bindu to Ojas (The Core Book)
o The Heart Cave
o The Butterfly
o Gate / Gate / Paragate
o Metamorphosis
o You Are a Totally Determined Being
o William James Said
o Realized Beings
o Surrender
o That Unfulfilled Thing
o First Moment
o 1-2-Me
o Hippies Create Police; Police Create Hippies
o Yin & Yang
o The Way is The Way Is The Way
o Surfing
o Shiva's Dance of Life
o Desire
o Buddha's 4 Noble Truths
o The Big Ice Cream Cone in the Sky
o Gates
o Faith
o Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me
o You are In Prison
o Let Me Help You
o Sadhana
o When You Meet a Being Who is Centered
o The Subtle Mother
o Divine Mother Kali
o Ocean of Existence
o Making it Sacred
o You Can't Rip the Skin Off the Snake
o The Guru
o The Way Bhakti Works
o You are the Guru
o The Chicken Sees
o Sahaj Samadhi
o Lest Ye See Miracles Ye Will Not Believe
o Start My Church!
o In the Beginning Was the Word
o You Are the Universe
o Here & Now
o Nothing to Do
o Return to the Roots
o I And My Father Are One
o No Matter, Never Mind
o Formlessness
o Listen to Those Words You're Singing!
o You've Got to Be Really Pure
o Outer Darkness
o The Next Message
o They're Not Secret!
o Suffer Baby!
o You're Standing on a Bridge Watching Yourself Go By
3. Cookbook for a Sacred Life (A Manual for Conscious Being)
o Introduction
o Readiness
o Guru and Teacher
o Renunciation
o Tapasya
o Sleeping
o Eating
o Study
o Asanas
o Mantra
o Transmuting Energy
o Pranayam
o Sexual Energy
o Siddhis
o Satsang
o Getting Straight
o Truth
o Drop Out / Cop Out
o Money and Right Livelihood
o Karma Yoga
o Bhakti Yoga
o Dance
o Meditation
o The Rational Mind
o Time and Space
o Psychedelics as an Upaya
o The Course of Sadhana
o Setting
o Family Sadhana
o Sadhana if You Live Alone
o Dying
o Glossary
4. Painted Cakes
o Books to Hang Out With
o Books to Visit With Now & Then
o Books its Useful to Have Met

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“Dots, Lines, Triangles, Cubes, Circles” and finally “Spheres” — why or how? Because, says the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature geometrizes universally in all her manifestations: “The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life. She scatters her spawn and the Breath heats and quickens it. The grains are soon attracted to each other and form the curds in the Ocean. The larger lumps coalesce and receive new spawn, in fiery dots, triangles and cubes which ripen, and at the appointed time some of the lumps detach themselves and assume spheroidal form. Motion becomes the whirlwind and sets them into rotation."

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky [1] [2]

***

There is great insistence on geometry, and it is spiritualised for Knights of the Temple after the following manner: (1) There is another geometry besides that which relates to lines and angles. (2) It sees God behind the circle and triangle. (3) Those who can penetrate its intellectual mysteries will understand the geometrical point as representing a given disposition in the state of inaction. (4) A symbolic right line is duty persisted in, uninterrupted pleasure, happiness and so forth. (5) As regards a symbolic right angle, the perfect sincerity of one right line to another is as the line of that angle, the line of duty being radius. (6) An acute angle is imperfect sincerity. (7) An obtuse angle is injustice. (8) A perfect junction between sincerity and duty forms justice, and is equal to an angle of ninety degrees. (9) A symbolical perpendicular signifies fortitude, prudence, temperance; while (10) a symbolic solid "is the whole system of Divine Laws as existing in practice." A Ritual of this kind is unworthy to wrap the worst commercial fats which are used as substitutes for butter, but it belongs to the Senate, and its "moral geometry" is supposed to purify the Temple of the body. Hence, presumably, its initiates are Knights of the Temple: in any case no other warrant transpires for the name of the Grade and the dignity conferred therein.

-- A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, by Arthur Edward Waite

***

The following particulars are drawn from a Directory of Lodges and Chapters under the Obedience of Annie Besant. (1) HUMAN DUTY, No. 6, London. (2) H. P. B. Lodge, No. 14, Bradford. (3) CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUZ, No. 18, Edinburgh. (4) HERMES, No. 20, London. (5) GOLDEN RULE, No. 21, London. (6) MANCHESTER Lodge, No. 22, Manchester. (7) EMULATION Lodge, No. 24, London. (8) HARMONY Lodge, No. 25, Southampton. (9) PLATO Lodge, No. 31, Leeds. (10) UNITY Lodge, No. 35, Bournemouth. (11) VERITY Lodge, No. 38, Brighton. (12) FIDELITY Lodge, No. 49, Bath. (13) ARBOR VITAE Lodge, No. 50, Letchworth. (14) DHARMA Lodge, No. 101, Benares. (15) SANGHA Lodge, No. 102, Bombay. (16) SHANTI Lodge, No. 105, Bombay. (17) RISING SUN OF INDIA, No. 107, Adyar. (18) BODHI Lodge, No. 108, East Rangoon. (19) SAN FRANCISCO Lodge, No. 358, California. (2) HELIOS Lodge, No. 360, Los Angeles. (21) UNITY Lodge, No. 359, Oakland, Cal. (22) MELBOURNE Lodge, No. 401, Melbourne. (23) VICTORIAN Lodge, No. 403, Melbourne. (24) SYDNEY Lodge, No. 404, Sydney, N.S.W. (25) BRISBANE Lodge, No. 405, Brisbane. (26) ADELAIDE Lodge, No. 406, Adelaide. I presume that the Lodge numbers are those of the Original Roll belonging to the French Obedience and the enormous gaps between represent in this case the issue of intervening charters which are not under Theosophical influence. It will be seen that LA MACONNERIE MIXTE, its derivations and developments are a power to be reckoned with and that the conventional titular description of "Clandestine Masonry" would be imbecile in reference thereto, or indeed to "Ancient" Masonry. I have seen also reports of an AMITY Lodge, No. 220, Durban, South Africa, of a STAR IN THE EAST Chapter of the ROYAL ARCH, without number of location, of a ROSECROIX Chapter, Tolerance, No. 2, London, and another at Edinburgh, being ST. ANN, NO. 3. Whether the other Lodges enumerated about are confined to Craft workings I do not know.

-- Universal Co-Freemasonry, by Arthur Edward Waite

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The Master is the overseer who sets the craft to work and gives them proper instruction.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

The artisan gives the craft his love; and to him the craft responds by making him one with his work. But the craftsman gives the craft his passionate research into the laws of Nature which govern it; and the craft teaches him Wisdom.

-- "Be Here Now," by Ram Dass

***

Magic is that which it is; it is by itself, like the mathematics; for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and its laws.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

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This is the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the JUSTICE which is GOD.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

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It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the Symbols. [3] [4]

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

Notes:

1. The Empty or vacant Chair ceremony dates back to 1875, a decade after the close of the American Civil War when it was used in Masonic lodges to pay tribute to those who did not return from the war. Since then it has been used by many lodges at Remembrance Day to pay homage to those Brother Masons who fell during WWI, WWII, and other wars; or it may be adapted to remember Past Masters, or Members.

-- TheMasonicTrowel.com

2. The growing volkisch movement began an active battle against the Jews, the defilers of their blood, reinforced by a pseudo-scholarly writer [Arthur de Gobineau] who satisfied their desire for academic respectability. Rightist Pan-German groups also bolstered their ideology by citing the dubious philosophical, historical, and scientific analyses laid out by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman in love with German culture. He told a mass society, at the mercy of the impersonal forces which were crushing it, that the Teutons were indomitable master builders, that in mysticism was freedom, that "every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite," and that Darwin's theory of natural selection justifies the stricture against mingling of the races. Even before Chamberlain, volkisch thinkers had tried to weave together lessons from history proving the heroism of the ancient Germanic past. Many of them were admirers of the Theosophical Society, which combined for the first time certain elements into a cohesive system considered by some people to be the beginning of modern occultism. The Theosophical Society was organized in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian expatriate countess known to her disciples as H. P. B. At age forty she decided to come to New York to investigate spiritualism, which had become an American craze. She delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe, if they had been presented by traditional organized religions, would not have been credited. But people were perfectly willing to suspend disbelief of a huge Russian countess with magnetic eyes who smoked cigars and used bawdy language.

-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

3. The animals regarded as sacred in the Bible are not few: the goat for one, the Azaz-el, or God of Victory. As Aben Ezra says: “If thou art capable of comprehending the mystery of Azazel, thou wilt learn the mystery of His (God’s) name, for it has similar associates in Scriptures. I will tell thee by allusion one portion of the mystery; when thou shalt have thirty three years of age thou wilt comprehend me.”

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

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4. The "Brownie," as the cyclopeaedia informs us, springs from an old Scotch tradition.

-- The Origin of the "Brownies," by Palmer Cox
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 6:34 am

"'Be Here Now' was at one time the best selling book in the English language except for Ben Spock and the Bible."

-- Dr. Larry Brilliant, Co-Founder of the SEVA Foundation, from "Fierce Grace," directed by Mickey Lemle

***

First Class. Grand Cross of the Order. This consists of the jewel of the second class, reposing on a full sun of silver clasped to the left breast; also a grand cordon or sash, four inches wide, violet with white stripe one-fourth of an inch wide, and edged with crimson a fourth of an inch wide. These are to be worn by Sovereign and Past Sovereign Grand Commanders, and by Eminent Patrons and Protectors of the Order, and other distinguished Masons of foreign countries to whom they may be decreed by the Supreme Council, and also by its special deputies and representatives in foreign countries with plenary powers. The Sovereign Grand Commander and Past Sovereign Grand Commander alone are privileged to wear the Grand Cross with brilliants.

-- The Thirty-Third and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Called Sovereign Grand Inspector General, by Charles T. McClenachan, 33º


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"THIS ONE IS DEDICATED TO THE ONE EYE LOVE" -- Ram Dass, "Be Here Now"

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"We want to be one people!" -- Adolph Hitler

-- "Triumph of the Will," directed by Leni Riefenstahl
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 6:37 am

JOURNEY (The Transformation: Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D. Into Baba Ram Dass)

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MONEY YOGA

The three cost pies shown on the previous page show where the green energy would go for each of three proposed retail prices for this book. We have chosen a price of $3.33 trading off our desire to provide this book at lowest possible cost against our need to help sustain the work of the Lama Foundation.

Our share of the green energy will be used for similar publishing endeavors, for the continued development of our center in New Mexico, for the right livelihood of resident members and students at the Foundation, and for work on the Path here and abroad guided by Baba Ram Dass.

The operating and sustenance costs of our center in New Mexico are met by a $2/day room and board fee paid by each student and resident member. In the absence of right livelihood at the center, this green energy must come from elsewhere. Our construction, development, and school costs have so far been met by moneyed generosity, on which the Foundation's existence has depended.

We incorporated in the spring of 1968 as a non-profit foundation with the sole purpose of serving as an instrument for the awakening of consciousness. Guided by the premise that "The essence of spirituality is practicality," we are attempting to develop our bodies, minds, and hearts in an integrative way.

We don't fully understand the relationship between the energy formed here and the green energy that flows through us. Practicality suggests that we here should work toward economic self-sufficiency by means of publishing and of "cottage industries" such as woodworking, pottery, printing, and textiles. Toward this we are working.

Yours in the Dharma,

The Lama Foundation

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OUR-STORY

There are three stages in this journey that I have been on! The first. the social science stage; the second, the psychedelic stage; and the third, the yogi stage. They are summating -- that is, each is contributing to the next. It's like the unfolding of a lotus flower. Now, as I look back, 1 realize that many of the experiences that made little sense to me at the time they occurred, were prerequisites for what was to come later. I want to share with you the parts of the Internal Journey that never get written up in the mass media. I'm not interested in the political parts of the story: I'm not interested in what you read in the Saturday Evening Post about LSD. This is the story of what goes on inside a human being who is undergoing all these experiences.

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SUCCESS

In 1961, the beginning of March, I was at perhaps the highest point of my academic career. I had just returned from being a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. I had been assured of a permanent post that was being held for me at Harvard, if I got my publications in order. I held appointments in four departments at Harvard -- the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service (where I was a therapist); I had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. In a worldly sense, I was making a great income and I was a collector of possessions.

I had an apartment in Cambridge that was filled with antiques and I gave very charming dinner parties. I had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and an MG sports car and a sailboat and a bicycle. I vacationed in the Caribbean where I did scuba-diving. I was living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world of "he who makes it." I wasn't a genuine scholar, but I had gone through the whole academic trip. I had gotten my Ph.D.; I was writing books. I had research contracts. I taught courses in Human Motivation, Freudian Theory, Child Development. But what all this boils down to is that I was really a very good game player.

My lecture notes were the ideas of other men, subtly presented, and my research was all within the Zeitgeist -- all that which one was supposed to research about.

In 1955 I had started doing therapy and my first therapy patient had turned me on to pot. I had not smoked regularly after that, but only sporadically, and I was still quite a heavy drinker. But this first patient had friends and they had friends and all of them became my patients. I became a "hip" therapist, for the hip community at Stanford. When I'd go to the parties, they'd all say "here comes the shrink" and I would sit in the corner looking superior. In addition, I had psychoanalysis at a cool investment of something like $26,000.

Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn't label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn't make it, that the psychologists didn't really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren't getting to the crux of the matter.

My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being "objective" for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out. And whatever the psychoanalysis did (and it did many things, I'm sure) I still was a neurotic at the end of those five years of psychoanalysis. Even my therapist thought so, because when I stopped analysis to go to Harvard, he said, "You are too sick to leave analysis." Those were his final words. But because I had been trained in Freudian theory, I knew his game well enough to enjoy this terribly sophisticated, competitive relationship with my analyst, and I would say to him, "Well in Freud's 1906 paper, don't you recall he said this, and when I'm saying this you should be interpreting ..." For this I was paying $20 an hour!

Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn't know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn't add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable. And I was getting very good at bouncing three knowledge balls at once. I could sit in a doctoral exam, ask very sophisticated questions and look terribly wise. It was a hustle.

DISSATISFACTION

Now my predicament as a social scientist was that 1 was not basically a scholar. I came out of a Jewish anxiety-ridden high-achieving tradition. Though I had been through five years of psychoanalysis, still, every time I lectured, I would get extraordinary diarrhea and tension. Lecturing five days a week made it quite a complex problem to keep my stomach operating. But whatever my motivations, they drove me so hard that despite the fact that I was a very mediocre student (in fact, I could never get into Harvard no matter how hard I tried, even using all my father's political influence) I finally found myself on the faculty of the "good" universities.

I could study 10 hours and prepare a really good lecture on Freud or Human Motivation, but it was all as if it were behind a wall. It was theoretical. I theorized this or that. I espoused these ideas, these intellectual concepts, quite apart from my own experiential base. Although I could bring all kinds of emotional zeal to bear on my presentation, there was a lack of validity in my guts about what I was doing. And, to my suppressed dismay, I found that this stance was considered acceptable by most of my colleagues who seemed, in their attempt to become "scientific", to think of personality in terms of variables. Children were nothing but ambulatory variables, and no matter how hard we tried, by the time we got to the legitimacy of a highly operationally-defined variable. it had lost its gut feeling. So the concepts we were working with were intellectual fun and games, but they weren't affecting my life.

Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled. There was not enough human beauty, human fulfillment, human contentment. I worked hard and the keys to the kingdom were handed to me. I was being promised all of it. I had felt I had got into whatever the inner circle meant: I could be Program Chairman for Division 7 of the A.P.A. and I could be on government committees, and have grants, and travel about and sit on doctorate committees. But there was still that horrible awareness that I didn't know something or other which made it all fall together. And there was a slight panic in me that I was going to spend the next forty years not knowing, and that apparently that was par for the course. And in off hours, we played "Go", or poker, and cracked old jokes. The whole thing was too empty. It was not honest enough.

And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read In books and they'd all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered -- that was real.

And as a therapist I felt caught in the drama of my own theories. The research data showed that Rogerian patients ended up saying positive statements, and Freudian patients ended up talking about their mother because of subtle reinforcement clues -- it was so obvious. I would sit with my little notebook and when the person would start talking about his mother, I'd make a note and it didn't take long for the patient to realize that he got his "note" taken, he got his pellet, every time he said certain things. And pretty soon he would be "Freudianized."

In the face of this feeling of malaise, I ate more, collected more possessions, collected more appoints and positions and status, more sexual and alcoholic orgies, and more wildness in my life.

Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn't know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.

I had an empire in a placed called Center for Research in Personality: a corner office in a building I'd helped design; with two secretaries and many graduate and undergraduate research assistants. I had done all this in about three years. I was really driven. Until you know a good, Jewish middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic, you haven't met a real achiever!

My Judaism was a political Judaism. I came out of a tradition of folk religion -- the spirit escaped me somehow, although we did all the Yom Kippur and Passover Services. But Dad was on the Board of Trustees that hired and fired Rabbis, so how could I get into a feeling with a spiritual leader if my father was hiring and firing these guys.

Down the hall from my big empire, there was a little office. It had been a closet and they needed an extra office, so they cleared out the closet and put a desk in there and in that closet was Timothy Leary. He had been bicycling around Italy, bouncing checks, and David McClelland found him and brought him back as a creative gift to western science. Tim and I became drinking buddies together. Then we started to teach courses together, such as the first year clinical course -- practicum -- on "Existential Transactional Behavior Change."

The more time I spent with Tim, the more I realized he had an absolutely extraordinary intellect. He really knew a lot. I found him extremely stimulating and the students found him exciting to be around, because of his openness to new ideas and his willingness to take wild risks in thinking.

One night when we were drinking together, we plotted a trip across North and South America, and when I said I flew a plane, he said, "Great, we'll fly in your plane."

And I said, "Wonderful," and neglected to tell him that I had only a student license.

So I secretly set about getting a license in order to meet him on August 1st in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was summering. There we would start our journey.

At the time I was a consultant for a School Mathematics Study Group, a mathematics program in Education at Stanford. I got my license and an airplane on the same day and flew to Mexico the next day in a death-defying leap. When I got there, I found that Timothy had done some other type of flying, just about the week before. Frank Baron, who was a psychologist at Cal, an old friend of Tim's, had introduced him to anthropologist in Mexico and they had come to know about the Tionanactyl, the flesh of the Gods, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico, which one obtained from Crazy Juanna, a woman up in the mountains who ate the mushrooms all the time. Contact was made with her and the mushrooms were obtained.

Tim had eaten nine of these mushrooms -- so many male and so many female mushrooms -- with a group of others around a swimming pool and had had a profound experience. He said, "I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist."

That is a strong statement!

When I arrived in Cuernavaca, the mushrooms were all gone, and so was the zeal to go on a trip across South America, because what was the sense in doing external journeying when obviously what Timothy had been looking for was inside his own head.

So I hung out in Tepetzlan with David McClelland and his family and in Cuernavaca with Tim and his entourage, and then flew back to the United States with Tim and Jackie his son, and an Iguana.

And I went to be a visiting professor at Cal and Tim went back to Harvard. And by the time I got back, Timothy had a large psychedelic project going.

He had consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was then visiting at M.I.T., and Aldous and Tim and a number of graduate students had contacted Sandoz, who produced a synthetic of the magic mushrooms called Psylocybin, and they had gotten a test batch of this and were busy taking it and administering it. When I got back to Cambridge in the spring, I was invited to share in this bounty.

TURNING ON

The night that was chosen turned out to be the night of the biggest snowstorm of the year and it was to be at Tim's home in Newton, a few blocks from the home of my parents where I had been visiting for dinner. I plowed through the snow, came in and we sat around the kitchen table and there were about three or four of us and we passed the bottle of pills and I took my 10 milligrams. That was my preparation and my set and setting, but beyond that I trusted Timothy. I had seen that Timothy had had a profound experience and he was somebody with an intellect that I understood. I knew that he was not interpersonally destructive -- he might be destructive of institutions, but not of individuals. He was a very loving person.

We took a very small dosage, (later we were using 5 or 10 times as much) and the first part of the experience was comparable to a strong pot-high, I'd say. A little more dramatic, a little more intense. Clearly though something happened.

During the first part of this experience with Psylocybin, we got into a very low-level tragi-comedy type thing. Tim's son's dog had been running in the snow and upon entering the warm kitchen lay gasping and panting. To our timeless minds, his struggle for breath continued too long and we thought he was about to expire. What could we do? We could hardly carry the dog through a blizzard in the early Sunday morning to the vet's some four miles away, especially since we were all very high, and thus not sure about the dog's state. It seemed our concerned mounted and the dog passed into a nearby room where it appeared to collapse. We finally decided the only path was to summon 11-year old Jackie from the Late TV show upstairs. Since he wasn't under a chemical influence, we would watch his interaction with the dog, rather than frighten him with our own suspicions.

Jackie was not pleased at being disturbed by us, (merely to find out what he was watching on TV), but the problem was quickly solved by the dog, who, upon hearing Jackie's voice, leapt back to life, ready to play.

Now a few hours later I had gone off by myself to reflect upon these new feelings and senses. A deep calm pervaded my being. The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me. Then I saw a figure standing about 8 feet away, where a moment before there had been none. I peered into the semi-darkness and recognized none other than myself, in cap and gown and hood, as a professor. It was as if that part of me, which was Harvard professor, had separated or disassociated itself from me.

"How interesting ... an external hallucination," I thought. "Well, I worked hard to get that status but I don't really need it." Again I settled back into the cushions, separate now from my professorness, but at that moment the figure changed. Again I leaned forward straining to see. "Ah, me again." But now it was that aspect of me who was a social cosmopolite. "Okay, so that goes too," I thought. Again and again the figure changed and I recognized over there all the different aspects I knew to be me ... cellist, pilot, lover, and so on. With each new presentation, I again and again reassured myself that I didn't need that anyway.

Then I saw the figure become that in mc which was Richard Alpert-ness, that is, my basic identity that had always been Richard. I associated the name with myself and my parents called me Richard: "Richard, you're a bad boy." So Richard has badness. Then "Richard, aren't you beautiful!" Then Richard has beauty. Thus develop all these aspects of self.

Sweat broke out on my forehead. I wasn't at all sure I could do without being Richard Alpert. Did that mean I'd have amnesia? Was that what this drug was going to do to me? Would it be permanent'? Should I call Tim! Oh, what the hell so I'll give up being Richard Alpert. I can always get a new social identity. At least I have my body ... But I spoke too soon.

As I looked down at my legs for reassurance, I could see nothing below the kneecaps, and slowly, now to my horror, I saw the progressive disappearance of limbs and then torso, until all I could see with my eyes open was the couch on which I had sat. A scream formed in my throat. I felt that I must be dying since there was nothing in my universe that led me to believe in life after leaving the body.

Doing without professorness or loverness, or even Richard Alpertness, okay, but I did NEED the body.

The panic mounted, adrenalin shot through my system -- my mouth became dry, but along with this, a voice sounded inside -- inside what, I don't know -- an intimate voice asked very quietly, and rather jocularly, it seemed to me, considering how distraught I was, "... but who's minding the store?"

When I could finally focus on the question, I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware "I" was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion.

Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness -- one of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that "I", that scanning device -- that point -- that essence --that place beyond. A place where "I" existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something else -- that "I" Knew -- it really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurancc -- David Reisman's other-directed being, was over. Now I need only look within to that place where I Knew.

Fear had turned to exaltation. I ran out into the snow laughing as the huge flakes swirled about
me. In a moment the house was lost from view, but it was all right because inside I Knew.

Around 5 in the morning I walked back, plowing through the snow to my parents' home, and I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice; I'll shove the walk -- young tribal buck shovels the walk." So 1 started to shovel the walk and my parents' faces appeared at the upstairs window.

"Come to bed, you idiot. Nobody shovels snow at 5 in the morning."

And I looked up at them and I heard the external voice I had been listening to for 30 years, and inside me something said, "It's all right to shovel snow and it's all right to be happy."

And I looked up at them and I laughed and did a jig and went back to shoveling snow. And they closed the windows and then I looked up and inside they were smiling too. That was my first experience of giving a contact high!

But also, you can see in that moment in the early morning the seeds of the breakaway. The seeds of the ability to be able to confront, and even disagree with, an existing institution and know and trust that inside place that says it's all right. It's something I could never have done without anxiety until that moment -- until that day.

Now I thought at that moment, "Wow, I've got it made. I'm just a new beautiful being -- I'm just an inner self -- all I'll ever need to do is look inside and I'll know what to do and I can always trust it, and here I'll be forever."

But two or three days later I was talking about the whole thing in the past tense. I was talking about how I "experienced" this thing, because I was back being that anxiety-neurotic, in a slightly milder form, but still, my old personality was sneaking back up on me.

Well. the next day I had to give my lecture in Social Relations 143, Human Motivation, and it presented me with a bit of a problem because I couldn't find anywhere in the psychology teachings anything about what had happened to me the night before.

Now, what we did at first at Harvard was to tell all of our colleagues about this extraordinary thing that was happening to us, and they all shared our delight, as any scientists do when a fellow scientist finds a new avenue into the unknown. And so the first week they listened with delight, And then at the end of the first week we all went back into our experimental cell -- the living room by the fire and opened the bottle again and took some more psylocybin to chart this course further. And the next week we had shared a deeper experience and we came back and we spoke to our colleagues. Now they couldn't hear us quite as well. It wasn't that they were changing, it was that we were. We were developing a language among ourselves. If Admiral Byrd and an exploratory party are going deeper and deeper into the polar region, the things they think about and are concerned about and are interested in become less and less relevant to somebody living in New York City. This was our situation.

We had the choice along the way of stopping to bring everybody else along, or going on. But these experiences quickly became indescribable. I'd get to a point with my colleagues when I couldn't explain any further, because it came down to "To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible." And we would feel this frustration when they'd say "It sounds very interesting." And we'd say, "In order to know, you've got to try it." And they'd say, "No, that isn't scientific. It isn't appropriate to test your own product. You do it first on animals and then on graduate students ..."

So then the next week, we'd sit around on Saturday night and say, "What should we do?" and we all knew what we were going to do, and we would "turn on." We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it. At the same time, of course, by the second week, it was as though we had just been traveling in Tibet, and now, back in the school lunchroom, who do we hang out with? We hang out with the guy with whom we went to Tibet, because we shared this very powerful experience.

Pretty soon there were five or six of us and we were hanging out together and our colleagues said, "Ah ha, a cult is forming," which was true for us. A cult is a shared system of belief.

As to how to work with this stuff, Tim said, "We don't know what this is about yet and there are many models, but it would be best not to impose a model too soon, because a model that exists in the west for these states is pathological, and the model that exists in the primitive cultures is mystical and religious and it's better we keep wide open ..."

So we did what would be called a naturalistic study: we gave the Psylocybin to maybe 200 people who were physically healthy enough and we said, "You take it under any conditions you want and all you've got to do is answer this questionnaire at the end, so we'll know what happened. You do it however you want to."

So we gave it to jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists. And at the end we had these 200 protocols and the first analysis we did showed up very clearly that the reactions were a function of set and setting -- a function of their expectations of what was going to happen, and the environment in which they took the drug. If they had it in a very paranoid environment, and they were expecting to have excitement, they tended to have paranoid excitement. All it did was intensify one's expectations.

However, the data also showed something else. Out of these first few hundred, you cold see that there was some kind of a step ladder of experience. There was a kind of probablistic hierarchy of experience, so that the most likely experience everybody had was a heightened sensitivity to all of their five senses and speeding up of the thought process.

Then the next type of experience that people would frequently report was an interpersonal shift of figure and ground, where they would look at another person and see the way in which the other person was similar, rather than different from themselves. And it was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you'd look at another human being and say, "Here we are." You'd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff. This was a profound perceptual experience for many people.

For example, we had a Negro psychiatrist, Madison Presnell, working with us, and I had been trained to be a very liberal person about Negroes, which meant that you didn't have feelings. It was a phony kind of liberal thing. I went out of my way to be liberal. You know, that very self-conscious kind of equality. And Madison and I turned on together and I looked at Madison, and there we were, the same human beings. It was just that he was wearing that skin and I was wearing this skin. And it was no more or less than that. It was that shirt and this shirt and it had no more relevance than that. And I looked at that, and suddenly there we were, whereas before I had been so busy with my super-liberal reaction to color of skin, that I couldn't relax enough to share this unitive place.

"... I remember being in a dark room with another person and one of us spoke and one of us said, 'Who spoke, you or me?' It wasn't clear from who's mouth the words came."

And then there was a still less frequent experience where one looked at somebody and he started to see the other person as cellular structure or patterns of energy rather than as a person.

And finally, a few subjects (maybe 3% or something like that) transcended all form and saw just pure energy -- a homogeneous field. It has been called the White Light.

There was research being done by the group with prisoners, to try to change their rate of recidivism. And there were attempts with ministers: a study was run by Walter Pankhe and a group of the research community on Good Friday in Boston University chapel, with twenty ministers -- advanced minister-training students -- ten received psylocybin and ten a placebo. It was a double-blind study on Good Friday in a chapel. It was absurd, because a double-blind study was absurd. Everybody knew something was happening. It was as if you were proving the obvious. Somebody who had taken the placebo which made their skin crawl reacted by saying, "Well, maybe something's happening", and then another minister would stagger into the room and say, "I see God! I see God!" and it was all too obvious in a short time who had had the psylocybin.

Now my own experiences were horrible and beautiful and I kept working in different environments and settings and whenever anybody that I trusted brought along some new chemical, I would open my mouth and off I'd go. I was interested in doing this exploring.

For example, at one point I had been in the meditation room in the community house we had in Newton, and I was for four hours in a state of total homogeneous light, bliss, and then I recall starting to "come down" and this huge red wave rolled in across the room. It looked like a cross between a William Blake (that picture of the wave) sketch and a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and it was all my identities, all rolling in over me. I remember holding up my hand and saying, "NO, NO, I don't want to go back." It was like this heavy burden I was going to take on myself. And I realized I didn't have the key -- I didn't know the magic words, like "Abracadabra" or "Hocus Pocus" or whatever it was going to be that would stop that wave, and it rolled in over me and then ..."Oh, here I am again -- Richard Alpert -- what a drag!"

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COMING DOWN

In these few years we had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you enlightened forever. We saw that it wasn't going to be that simple.

And for five years I dealt with the matter of "coming down." The coming down matter is what led me to the next chapter of this drama. Because after six years, I realized that no matter how ingenious my experimental designs were, and how high I got, I came down.

At one point I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day, which sounds fancy, but after your fist dose, you build a tolerance; there's a refractory period. We finally were just drinking out of the bottle, because it didn't seem to matter anymore. We'd just stay at a plateau. We were very high. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down!

And it was a terribly frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was and you felt these new states of awareness, and then you got cast out again, and after 2 or 300 times of this, began to feel an extraordinary kind of depression set in -- a very gentle depression that whatever I knew still wasn't enough!

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES

Now at the same moment, there were obvious changes going on, because that checking back, over and over again, to the inner place inside myself, made me less and less attached to reassurance from the environment that I was all right. So I remember the moment when I was thrown out of Harvard ...

There was a press conference and all of the reporters looked at me as if I was a prizefighter who had just lost a major fight, and was headed for oblivion, that kind of look you have for losers -- real losers! And they stood there looking at me that way. Everybody was looking at me that way, and inside I felt, "What I'm doing is all right."

Everybody, parents, colleagues, public, saw it as a horrible thing; I thought inside "I must really be crazy, now -- because craziness is where everybody agrees about something -- except you!" And yet I felt saner than I had ever felt, so I knew this was a new kind of craziness or perhaps a new kind of saneness. But the thing was, I always seemed to be able to skirt the line: to keep it together. I didn't ever DO anything quite crazy enough.

I was the guy that people would come to and say, "Look, would you calm Tim Leary -- he's too far out. If you'll calm him and protect him and so on." And I'd say, "I'll help him with pleasure 'cause he's that great a being." And I'd help raise money and run the kitchen and clean the house and raise the children ...

Well, we realized then that what we needed to do was to create certain kinds of environments which would allow a person, after being into another state of consciousness, to retain a certain kind of environmental support for new ways of looking at himself. After all, if you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back into the model of "I'm Sam who empties the garbage." You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage.

Now in 1962 or 3, Tim and Ralph Metzner with him (I was just given author's credit because I took care of the kitchen) had come across the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was a very close description of a number of these experiences. This book was 2500 years old, at least, and it had been used all those years for preparing Tibetan Lamas to die and be reincarnated. And when we opened it, we would find descriptions of the 49 days after death before rebirth, that were perfect descriptions of sessions we were having with psychedelics.

How could this be? The parallel was so close. Tim rewrote the book as a manual called "The Psychedelic Experience," a manual for psychological death and rebirth, arguing that this was really a metaphor about psychological death and rebirth and not necessarily physical death and reincarnation.

REINCARNATION AND MASONRY: The idea of re-embodiment, and more especially that form which restricts the mode of its operation within a single planet of the solar system, occurs definitely in only one Masonic Rite -- as it happens, being that of MEMPHIS. A so-called Indian Catechism is attached thereby to the Second of the Craft Degrees, and supposes an amicable debate between Reason and Divine Wisdom. It affirms that the souls of men are distinguished from those of other animals by rationality, including a knowledge of good and evil. The souls of good men are liberated from their bodies by death, and being absorbed in the Divine Essence are no longer reincarnated on earth. But the souls of the wicked remain clothed by the four elements and -- after a period of punishment -- assume new bodies. Those who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad suffer in proportion to their guilt, after which they ascend into heaven, to receive a temporal reward for their good actions and then reassume flesh. That participation in the Divine Essence which is the recompense of real virtue does not depend from a doctrine of pure pantheism, as the terminology seems to indicate; for it is said that "the soul is plunged in eternal felicity," implying preservation of identity. Presumably the catechism is called Indian, because it is thought to reflect doctrines of eastern psychology, concerning which, however, no real knowledge is exhibited....

While the MEMPHIS version of the ROSE-CROIX Grade is not without features of interest, its prolonged recitations are fatal to that dramatic element which is so essential to symbolism, presented in the guise of Ritual; its melange of philosophies, represented by inchoate extracts, and its chips of doctrinal thought from a variety of religious sources result in an eclecticism of the most vague and uncritical kind. In a word, it is a product of its period and is without much title to consideration at this day, while on the historical side its inventions are of the clumsiest order. The hand of the rogue in history should at least be a skilful hand.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite


Tim had gone to India, Ralph had gone to India, Allen Ginsberg had gone to India, I checked with everybody when they came back. There was Tim, being Tim and there was Ralph, being Ralph, and there was Allen, being Allen and I realized that they had all had lovely experiences and seen a beautiful country and so on, but they were not finished looking for something.

And by 1966-7, I was in the same predicament. I was aware that I didn't know enough to maintain these states of consciousness. And I was aware that nobody else around me seemed to know enough either. I checked with everybody I thought might know, and nobody seemed to know.

So I wasn't very optimistic about India or psychedelics. By 1967 I had shot my load! I had no more job as a psychologist in a respectable establishment and I realized that we didn't know enough about psychedelics to use them profitably.

But at that time I was still lecturing around the country on psychedelics to such diverse groups as the Food and Drug Administration, and the Hell's Angels.

Then, along came a very lovely guy whom I had guided through some psychedelic sessions, an interesting guy, who had gone to the University of Chicago in his early teens and had taught seminars in Chinese Economics, had started a company called Basic Systems, which had been sold to Xerox, and now he had retired. He was about 35 and he had retired and taken his five million dollars or whatever he made, and was now becoming a Buddhist. He wanted to make a journey to the east to look for holy men and he invited me to go along. He had a Land Rover imported into Teheran and this was my way out. What else was I going to do at this point.

So I left to go to India, and I took a bottle of LSD with me, with the idea that I'd meet holy men along the way, and I'd give them LSD and they'd tell me what LSD is. Maybe I'd learn the missing clue.

We started out from Teheran, and for the next three months we had lovely guides and a most beautiful time and we scored great hashish in Afghanistan, and at the end of three months, I had seen the inside of the Land Rover, I had 1300 slides, many tape recordings of Indian music; I had drunk much bottled water, eaten many canned goods: I was a westerner traveling in India. That's what was happening to me when I got to Nepal.

We had done it all. We had gone to see the Dalai Lama, and we had gone on horseback up to Amanath Cave up in Kashmir; we had visited Benares, and finally we ended up in Katmandu, Nepal. I started to get extremely, extremely depressed. I'm sure part of it was due to the hashish. But also, part of it was because I didn't see what to do next.

I had done everything I thought I could do, and nothing new had happened. It was turning out to be just another trip. The despair got very heavy. We didn't know enough and I couldn't figure out how to socialize this thing about the new states of consciousness. And I didn't know what to do next. It wasn't like I didn't have LSD. I had plenty of LSD, but why take it. I knew what it was going to do, what it was going to tell me. It was going to show me that garden again and then I was going to be cast out and that was it. And I never could quite stay. I was addicted to the experience at first, and then I even got tired of that. And the despair was extremely intense at that point.

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We were sitting in a hippie restaurant, called the Blue Tibetan, and I was talking to some French hippies ...

I had given LSD to a number of pundits around India and some reasonably pure men:

An old Buddhist Lama said, "It gave me a headache."

Somebody else said, "It's good, but not as good as meditation."

Somebody else said, "Where can I get some more?"

And I got the same range of responses I'd get in America. I didn't get any great pearl of wisdom which would make me exclaim, "Oh, that's what it is -- I was waiting for something that was going to do that thing!"

So I finally figured, "Well, it's not going to happen." We were about to go on to Japan and I was pretty depressed because we were starting the return now, and what was I returning to? What should I do now?

I decided I was going to come back and become a chauffeur. I wanted to be a servant, and let somebody else program my consciousness. I could read holy books while I'd wait for whoever it was I was waiting for while they were at Bergdorf Goodman's and I'd just change my whole style of life around. I could just get out of the whole drama of having to engineer my own ship for a while. This is a funny foreshadowing, as you'll see.

The despair was extremely intense at that point. I was really quite sad.

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BHAGWAN DASS

I was in the Blue Tibetan with my friend and these other people, and in walked this very extraordinary guy, at least extraordinary with regard to his height. He was 6'7" and he had long blonde hair and a long blonde beard. He was a Westerner, an American, and was wearing holy clothes -- a dhoti (a cloth Indian men wear instead of pants) and so on, and when he entered, he came directly over to our table and sat down.

Now, up until then, I had found this interesting thing that I don't think I could have labeled until that moment. Once, when I had met Gesha Wangyal at Freehold, N.J., I knew I was meeting a being who "knew", but I couldn't get to it because I wasn't ready, somehow. We were very close -- we loved each other extraordinarily, but I hadn't been able to really absorb whatever I needed to absorb. Now here was this young fellow and again, I had the feeling I had met somebody who "Knew".

I don't know how to describe this to you, except that I was deep in my despair; I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like "Do you know?" Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyes "Do you know'?" And there we were, "Do you'?" "Do you'?" "Maybe he ..." "Do you ...'?" And there was always that feeling that everybody was very close and we all knew we knew, but nobody quite knew. I don't know how to describe it, other than that.

And I met this guy and there was no doubt in my mind. It was just like meeting a rock. It was just solid, all the way through. Everywhere I pressed, there he was!

We were staying in a hotel owned by the King or the Prince, or something, because we were going first class, so we spirited this fellow up to our suite in the Sewalti Hotel and for five days we had a continuing seminar. We had this extraordinarily beautiful Indian sculptor, Harish Johari, who was our guide and friend. Harish, this fellow, Bhagwan Dass and David and I sat there and for five days high on Peach Melbas and Hashish and Mescaline, we had a seminar with Alexandra David Neehl's books and Sir John Woodroffe's Serpent Power, and so on. At the end of five days, I was still absolutely staggered by this guy. He had started to teach me some mantras and working with beads. When it came time to leave, to go to Japan, I had the choice of going on to Japan on my first class route, or going off with this guy, back into India on a temple pilgrimage. He had no money and I had no money and it was going to change my style of life considerably. I thought. "Well, look, I came to India to find something and I still think this guy knows -- I'm going to follow him."

But there was also the counter thought, "How absurd -- who's writing this bizarre script. Here I am -- I've come half-way around the world and I'm going to follow, through India, a 23 year old guy from Laguna Beach, California."

I said to Harish and to David, "Do you think I'm making a mistake?" And Harish said, "No, he is a very high guy." And so I started to follow him -- literally follow him.

Now I'm suddenly barefoot. He has said, "You're not going to wear shoes, are you?" That sort of thing. And I've got a shoulder bag and my dhoti and blisters on my feet and dysentery, the likes of which you can't imagine, and all he says is, "Well, fast for a few days."

He's very compassionate, but no pity.

And we're sleeping on the ground, or on these wooden tables that you get when you stop at monasteries, and my hip bones ache. I go through an extraordinary physical breakdown, become very childlike and he takes care of me. And we start to travel through temples -- to Baneshwar and Konarak and so on.

I see that he's very powerful, so extraordinarily powerful -- he's got an ectara, a one-stringed instrument, and I've got a little Tibetan drum, and we go around to the villages and people rush out and they touch our feet because we're holy men, which is embarrassing to me because I'm not a holy man -- I'm obviously who I am -- a sort of overage hippie, western explorer, and I feel very embarrassed when they do that and they give us food. And he plays and sings and the Hindu people love him and revere him. And he's giving away all my money ...
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 6:40 am

But I'm clinging tight to my passport and my return ticket to America, and a traveler's check that I'll need to get me to Delhi. Those things I'm going to hold on to. And my bottle of LSD, in case I should find something interesting.

And during these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,

"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..."

And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now."

Silence.

And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"

And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now."

I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..."

"Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."

He had just sort of wiped out my whole game. That was it -- that was my whole trip -- emotions, and past experiences, and future plans. I was, after all, a great story teller.

So we were silent. There was nothing to say.

He'd say, "You eat this," or, "Now you sleep here." And all the rest of the time we sang holy songs. That was all there was to do.

Or he would teach me Asanas -- Hatha Yoga postures.

But there was no conversation. I didn't know anything about his life. He didn't know anything about my life. He wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected ... He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't care.

And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home.

If we went to a Thereavaden Buddhist monastery, he would be welcomed and suddenly he would be called Dharma Sara, a Southern Buddhist name, and some piece of clothing he wore, I suddenly saw was also worn by all the other monks and I realized that he was an initiate in that scene and they'd welcome him and he'd be in the inner temple and he knew all the chants and he was doing them.

We'd come across some Shavites, followers of Shiva, or some of the Swamis, and I suddenly realized that he was one of them. On his forehead would be the appropriate tilik, or mark, and he would be doing their chanting.

We'd meet Kargyupa lamas from Tibet and they would all welcome him as a brother, and he knew all their stuff. He had been in India for five years, and he was so high that everybody just welcomed him, feeling 'he's obviously one of us'.

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I couldn't figure out what his scene was. All I personally felt was this tremendous pull toward Buddhism because Hinduism always seemed a little gauche -- the paintings were a little too gross -- the colors were bizarre and the whole thing was too melodramatic and too much emotion. I was pulling toward that clean, crystal-clear simplicity of the Southern Buddhists or the Zen Buddhists.

After about three months, I had a visa problem and we went to Delhi, and I was still quite unsure of my new role as a holy man and so when I got to Delhi, I took $4.00 out of my little traveler's check and bought a pair of pants and a shirt and a tie and took my horn-rimmed glasses out of my shoulder bag and stuck them back on and I became again Dr. Alpert, to go to the visa office. Dr. Alpert, who had a grant from the Folk Art Museum of New Mexico for collecting musical instruments and I did my whole thing.

I kept my beads in my pocket. Because I didn't feel valid in this other role. And then the minute I got my visa fixed, he had to have his annual visa worked over, and he had to go to a town near-by, which we went to, and we were welcomed at this big estate and given a holy man's house, and food brought to us, and he said, "You sit here. I'm going to see about my visa."

He told me just what to do. I was just like a baby, "Eat this," "Sit here." "Do this." And I just gave up. He knew. Do you know? I'll follow you.

He spoke Hindi fluently. My Hindi was very faltering. So he could handle it all.

We had spent a few weeks in a Chinese Buddhist monastery in Sarnath, which was extraordinarily powerful and beautiful, and something was happening to me but I couldn't grasp the total nature of it at all.

There was a strange thing about him. At night he didn't seem to sleep like I did. That is, any time I'd wake up at night, I'd look over and he would be sitting in the lotus position. And sometimes I'd make believe I was asleep and then open sort of a half-eye to see if he wasn't cheating -- maybe he was sleeping now -- but he was always in the lotus posture.

Sometimes I'd see him lie down, but I would say that 80% of the time when I would be sleeping heavily, he would be sitting in some state or other, which he'd never describe to me. But he was not in personal contact -- I mean, there was no wave or moving around, or nothing seemed to happen to him.

The night at that estate, I went out -- I had to go to the bathroom and I went out under the stars and the following event happened ...

The previous January 20th, at Boston in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, my mother had died of a spleen illness -- the bone marrow stopped producing blood and the spleen took over and grew very large and they removed it and then she died. It had been a long illness and I had been with her through the week prior to her death and through it we had become extremely close. We had transcended mother-child and personalities and we had come into true contact. I spent days in the hospital just meditating. And I felt no loss when she died. Instead there was a tremendous continuing contact with her. And in fact, when I had been in Nepal, I had had a vision of her one night when I was going to bed. I saw her up on the ceiling and I was wondering whether to go to India or go on to Japan and she had a look that was the look of "You damn fool you're always getting into hot water, but go ahead, and I think that's great." She looked peeved-pleased. It was like there were two beings in my mother. She was a middle class woman from Boston, who wanted me to be absolutely responsible in the most culturally acceptable fashion, and then there was this swinger underneath -- this spiritual being underneath who said, "-- go, baby." And I felt these two beings in that look which supported my going back into India.

This night I'm under the stars, and I hadn't thought about her at all since that time. I'm under the stars, urinating, and I look up and the stars are very close because it's very dark and I suddenly experience a presence of mother, and I'm thinking about her -- not about how she died or anything about that. I just feel her presence. It's very very powerful. And I feel great love for her and then I go back to bed.

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Of course, Bhagwan Dass is not the least interested in any of my life, so he'd be the last person I'd talk to about my thoughts or visions.

The next morning he says, "We've got to go to the mountains. I've got a visa problem. We've got to go see my Guru."

Now the term "Guru" had meant for me, in the West, a sort of high grade teacher. There was a Life article about Allen Ginsberg -- "Guru goes to Kansas" and Allen was embarrassed and said, "I'm not really a Guru." And 1 didn't know what a Guru really was ...

Bhagwan Dass also said we were going to borrow the Land Rover, which had been left with this sculptor, to go to the mountains. And I said, I didn't want to borrow the Land Rover. I'd just gotten out of that horrible blue box and I didn't want to get back into it, and I didn't want the responsibility. David had left it with this Indian sculptor and he wouldn't want to loan it to us anyway. I got very sulky. I didn't want to go see a guru and suddenly I wanted to go bock to America in the worst way.

I thought, "What am I doing? I'm following this kid and all he is ..." But he says, "We've got to do this," and so we go to the town where the sculptor lives and within half an hour the sculptor says, "You have to go see your Guru'? Take the Land Rover!"

Well, that's interesting.

We're in the Land Rover and he won't let me drive. So I'm sitting there sulking. He won't let me drive and we are in the Land Rover which I don't want to have and I'm now really in a bad mood. I've stopped smoking hashish a few days before because I'm having all kinds of reactions to it, and so I'm just in a very, very uptight, negative paranoid state and all I want to do is go back to America and suddenly I'm following this young kid who wants to drive and all he wanted me for was to get the Land Rover and now the whole paranoid con world fills my head. I'm full of it.

We go about 80 or 100 miles and we come to a tiny temple by the side of the road in the foothills of the Himalayas. We're stopping and I think we're stopping because a truck's coming by, but when we stop, people surround the car, which they generally do, but they welcome him and he jumps out. And I can tell something's going to happen because as we go up into the hills, he's starting to cry.

We're singing songs and tears are streaming down his face, and I know something's going on, but I don't know what.

We stop at this temple and he asks where the guru is and they point up on a hill, and he goes running up this hill and they're all following him, so delighted to see him. They all love him so much.

I get out of the car. Now I'm additionally bugged because everybody's ignoring me. And I'm following him and he's way ahead of me and I'm running after him barefoot up this rocky path and I'm stumbling -- by now my feet are very tough but still his legs are very long and I'm running and people are ignoring me and I'm very bugged and I don't want to see the guru anyway and what the hell --

We go around this hill so that we come to a field which does not face on the road. It's facing into a valley and there's a little man in his 60's or 70's sitting with a blanket around him. And around him are 8 or 9 Hindu people and it's a beautiful tableau -- clouds, beautiful green valley, lovely, lovely place -- the foothills of the Himalayas.

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And this fellow, Bhagwan Dass, comes up, runs to this man and throws himself on the ground, full-face doing 'dunda pranam,' and he's stretched out so his face is down on the ground, full- length and his hands are touching the feet of this man, who is sitting cross-legged. And he's crying and the man is patting him on the head and I don't know what's happening.

I'm standing on the side and thinking "I'm not going to touch his feet. I don't have to. I'm not required to do that." And every now and then this man looks up at me and he twinkles a little. But I'm so uptight that I couldn't care less. Twinkle away, man!

Then he looks up at me -- he speaks in Hindi, of which I understand maybe half, but there is a fellow who's translating all the time, who hangs out with him, and the Guru says to Bhagwan Dass, "You have a picture of me?"

Bhagwan Dass nods, "Yes".

"Give it to him," says the man, pointing at me.

"That's very nice," I think, giving me a picture of himself, and I smile and nod appreciatively. But I'm still not going to touch his feet!

Then he says, "You came in a big car?" Of course that's the one thing I'm really uptight about.

"Yeah."

So he looks at me and he smiles and says, "You give it to me?"

I started to say, "Wha ..." and Bhagwan Dass looks up -- he's lying there -- and he says, " Maharaji, (meaning 'great king'), if you want it you can have it -- it's yours."

And I said, "No -- now wait a minute -- you can't give away David's car like that. That isn't our car ..." and this old man is laughing. In fact, everyone is laughing ... except me.

Then he says, "You made much money in America'?"

"Ah, at last he's feeding my ego." I think.

So I flick through all of my years as a professor and years as a smuggler and all my different dramas in my mind and I said, "Yeah."

"How much you make'?"

Well, I said, at one time -- and I sort of upped the figure a bit, you know, my ego -- $25,000.

So they all converted that into rupees which was practically half the economic base of India, and everybody was terribly awed by this figure, which was complete bragging on my part. It was phony -- I never made $25,000. And he laughed again. And he said,

"You'll buy a car like that for me?"

And I remember what went through my mind. I had come out of a family of fund-raisers for the United Jewish, Appeal, Brandeis, and Einstein Medical School, and I had never seen hustling like this. He doesn't even know my name and already he wants a $7,000 vehicle.

And I said, "Well, maybe ..." The whole thing was freaking me so much.

And he said, "Take them away and give them food." So we were taken and given food -- magnificent food -- we were together still, and saddhus brought us beautiful food and then we were told to rest. Some time later we were back with the Maharaji and he said to me, "Come here. Sit. So I sat down and he looked at me and he said,

"You were out under the stars last night."

"Um-hum."

"You were thinking about your mother."

"Yes." ('Wow', I thought, 'that's pretty good. I never mentioned that to anybody').

"She died last year."

"Um-hum."

"She got very big ill the stomach before she died."

... Pause ... "Yes."

He leaned back and closed his eyes and said, "Spleen. She died of spleen."

Well, what happened to me at that moment, I can't really put into words. He looked at me in a certain way at that moment, and two things happened -- it seemed simultaneous. They do not seem like cause and effect.

The first thing that happened was that my mind raced faster and faster to try to get leverage to get a hold on what he had just done. I went through every super CIA paranoia I've ever had:

"Who is he'?" "Who does he represent'?"

"Where's the button he pushes where the file appears?" and "Why have they brought me here?"

None of it would jell.

It was just too impossible that this could have happened this way. The guy I was with didn't know all that stuff, and I was a tourist in a car, and the whole thing was just too far out. My mind went faster and faster and faster.

Up until then I had two categories for "psychic experience." One was 'they happened to somebody else and they haven't happened to me, and they were terribly interesting and we certainly had to keep an open mind about it'. That was my social science approach. The other one was, 'well, man, I'm high on LSD. Who knows how it really is? After all, under the influence of a chemical, how do I know I'm not creating the whole thing?' Because, in fact, I had taken certain chemicals where I experienced the creation of total realities. The greatest example I have of this came about through a drug called JB 318, which I took in a room at Millbrook. I was sitting on the 3rd floor and it seemed like nothing was happening at all. And into the room walked a girl from the community with a pitcher of lemonade and she said, would I like some lemonade, and I said that would be great, and she poured the lemonade, and she poured it and she kept pouring and the lemonade went over the side of the glass and fell to the floor and it went across the floor and up the wall and over the ceiling and down the wall and under my pants which got wet and it came back up into the glass -- and when it touched the glass the glass disappeared and the lemonade disappeared and the wetness in my pants disappeared and the girl disappeared and I turned around to Ralph Metzner and I said,

"Ralph, the most extraordinary thing happened to me," and Ralph disappeared!

I was afraid to do anything but just sit. Whatever this is, it's not nothing. Just sit. Don't move, just sit!

So I had had experiences where I had seen myself completely create whole environments under psychedelics, and therefore I wasn't eager to interpret these things very quickly, because I, the observer, was, at those times, under the influence of the psychedelics.

But neither of these categories applied in this situation, and my mind went faster and faster and then I felt like what happens when a computer is fed an insoluble problem; the bell rings and the red light goes on and the machine stops. And my mind just gave up. It burned out its circuitry ... its zeal to have an explanation. I needed something to get closure at the rational level and there wasn't anything. There just wasn't a place I could hide in my head about this.

And at the same moment, I felt this extremely violent pain in my chest and a tremendous wrenching feeling and I started to cry. And I cried and I cried and I cried. And I wasn't happy and I wasn't sad. It was not that kind of crying. The only thing I could say was it felt like I was home. Like the journey was over. Like I had finished.

Well, I cried and cried, and they finally sort of spooned me up and took me to a temple about 12 miles away to stay overnight. That night I was very confused. A great feeling of lightness and confusion.

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At one point in the evening I was looking in my shoulder bag and came across the bottle of LSD.

"Wow! I've finally met a guy who is going to Know! He will definitely know what LSD is. I'll have to ask him. That's what I'll do. I'll ask him." Then I forgot about it.

The next morning, at 8 o'clock a messenger comes. Maharaji wants to see you immediately. We went in the Land Rover. The 12 miles to the other temple. When I'm approaching him, he yells out at me, "Have you got a question?"

And I take one look at him, and it's like looking at the sun. I suddenly feel all warm.

And he's very impatient with all this nonsense, and he says, "Where's the medicine?"

I got a translation of this. He said medicine. I said, "Medicine?" I never thought of LSD as medicine! And somebody said, he must mean the LSD. "LSD?" He said, "Ah-cha -- bring the LSD."

So I went to the car and got the little bottle of LSD and I came back.

"Let me see?"

So I poured it out in my hand "What's that?"

"That's STP ... That's librium and that's ..." A little of everything. Sort of a little traveling
kit.

He says, "Gives you siddhis?"

I had never heard the word "siddhi" before. So I asked for a translation and siddhi was
translated as "power". From where I was at in relation to these concepts, I thought he was like a
little old man, asking for power. Perhaps he was losing his vitality and wanted Vitamin B 12. That was one thing I didn't have and I felt terribly apologetic because I would have given him anything. If he wanted the Land Rover, he could have it. And I said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry." I really felt bad I didn't have any and put it back in the bottle.

He looked at me and extended his hand. So I put into his hand what's called a "White Lightning". This is an LSD pill and this one was from a special batch that had been made specially for me for traveling. And each pill was 305 micrograms, and very pure. Very good acid. Usually you start a man over 60, maybe with 50 to 75 micrograms, very gently, so you won't upset him. 300 of pure acid is a very solid dose.

He looks at the pill and extends his hand further. So I put a second pill -- that's 610 micrograms -- then a third pill -- that's 915 micrograms into his palm.

That is sizeable for a first dose for anyone!

"Ah-cha,"

And he swallows them! I see them go down. There's no doubt. And that little scientist in me says, "This is going to be very interesting!"

All day long I'm there, and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing -- nothing happens! That was his answer to my question. Now you have the data I have.

ASHTANGA YOGA

I was taken back to the temple. It was interesting. At no time was I asked, do you want to stay? Do you want to study? Everything was understood. There were no contracts. There were no promises. There were no vows. There was nothing.

The next day Maharaji instructed them to take me out and buy me clothes. They gave me a room. Nobody ever asked me for a nickel. Nobody ever asked me to spread the word. Nobody ever did anything. There was no commitment whatsoever required. It was all done internally. And that day I met a man who was to become my teacher, Hari Dass Baba.

Hari Dass Baba is quite an incredible fellow, as I found out. I spent five months under his tutelage. He is 48 years old. He weighs 90 pounds. He is a jungle saddhu. He went into the jungle when he was 8 years old. He is silent (mauna). He has been mauna for 15 years. He writes with a chalkboard. He only uses his voice to sing holy songs. He reads and writes six or eight different languages, including Chinese, English, French, Hindi. He taught me always in beautiful English.

This guru -- Maharaji -- has only his blanket. You see, he's in a place called SAHAJ SAMADHI and he's not identified with this world as most of us identify with it. If you didn't watch him, he'd just disappear altogether into the jungle or leave his body, but his devotees are always protecting him and watching him so they can keep him around. They've got an entourage around him and people come and bring gifts to the holy man because that's part of the way in which you gain holy merit in India. And money piles up, and so they build temples, or they build schools. He will walk to a place and there will be a saint who has lived in that place or cave and he'll say, "There will be a temple here," and then they build a temple. And they do all this around Maharaji. He does nothing.

Hari Dass Baba -- this little 90 pound fellow -- architecturally designed all of the temples and schools, supervised all the buildings and grounds, had many followers of his own, slept two hours a night. His food intakc for the last 15 years had been 2 glasses of milk a day. That's it. His feces are like two small marbles each day. His arms are about this big around, tiny, but when the workmen can't lift a particularly heavy rock, they call for 'Chota Maharaji' -- the little great king. As in a comic strip, he goes over and lifts the rock, just with one-pointedness of mind. He had met Maharaji in the jungle 15 years before, and he had become a disciple of Maharaji.

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As an example of Maharaji's style, I was once going through my address book and I came to Lama Govinda's name (he wrote Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism and Way of the White Cloud) and I thought, "Gee, I ought to go visit him. I'm here in the Himalayas and it wouldn't be a long trip and I could go and pay my respects. I must do that some time before I leave."

And the next day there is a message from Maharaji saying, "You are to go immediately to see Lama Govinda."

Another time, I had to go to Delhi to work on my visa and I took a bus. This was the first time after four months that they let me out alone. They were so protective of me. I know know what they were afraid would happen to me, but they were always sending somebody with me ... They weren't giving me elopement privileges, as they say in mental hospitals.

But they allowed me to go alone to Delhi and I took a 12 hour bus trip. I went to Delhi and I was so high. I went through Connaught Place, which is the western hustle part of New Delhi. It's mostly BOAC and American Express and restaurants that serve ice cream sodas. The whole scene, which is right in the middle of India, has nothing to do with India particularly and all the Indians who hustle westerners walk around in this block. And I went through that barefoot, silent with my chalkboard -- I was silent all the time. At American Express, writing my words it was so high that not at one moment was there even a qualm or a doubt. I got so high that I went into some stores to buy things -- right in Connaught Place, which is designed to hustle westerners ... And everybody knew I was a westerner, and yet they insisted on giving me the stuff free!

"You are a saddhu -- it's a blessing to me that you'll take my goods." That's how powerful the thing was that I was into at that time.

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So after all day long of doing my dramas with the Health Department and so on, it came time for lunch. I had been on this very fierce austere diet and I had lost 60 lbs. I was feeling great -- very light and very beautiful -- but there was enough orality still left in me to want to have a feast. I'll have a vegetarian feast, I thought. So I went to a fancy vegetarian restaurant and I got a table over in a corner and ordered their special deluxe vegetarian dinner, from nuts to nuts, and I had the whole thing and the last thing they werved was vegetarian ice cream with 2 english biscuits stuck into it. And those biscuits ... the sweet thing has always been a big part of my life, but I knew somehow, maybe I should be eating those. They're so far out from my diet. It's not vegetables -- it's not rice. And so I was almost secretly eating the cookies in this dark corner. I was feeling very guilty about eating these cookies. But nobody was watching me. And then I went to a Buddhist monastery for the night and the next day took the bus back up to the mountain.

Two days later, we heard Maharaji was back -- he had been up in the mountains in another little village. He travels around a lot, moves from place to place. I hadn't seen him in about a month and a half -- I didn't see much of him at all. We all went rushing to see Maharaji and I got a bag of oranges to bring to him and I came and took one look at him, and the oranges went flying and I started to cry and I fell down and they were patting me. Maharaji was eating oranges as fast as he could, manifesting through eating food the process of taking on the karma of someone else.

Women bring him food all day long. He just opens his mouth and they feed him and he's taking on karma that way. And he ate eight oranges right before my eyes. I had never seen anything like that. And the principal of the school was feeding me oranges and 1 was crying and the whole thing was very maudlin, and he pulls me by the hair, and I look up and he says to me, "How did you like the biscuits?"

I'd be at my temple. And I'd think about arranging for a beautiful lama in America to get some money, or something like that. Then I'd go to bed and pull the covers over my head and perhaps have a very worldly thought; I would think about what I'd do with all my powers when I got them; perhaps a sexual thought. Then when next 1 saw Maharaji he would tell me something like, "You want to give money to a lama in America." And I'd feel like I was such a beautiful guy. Then suddenly I'd be horrified with the realization that if he knew that thought, then he must know that one, too ... ohhhhh ... and that one, too! Then I'd look at the ground. And when I'd finally steal a glance at him, he'd be looking at me with such total love.

Now the impact of these experiences was very profound. As they say in the Sikh religion -- Once you realize God knows everything, you're free. I had been through many years of psychoanalysis and still I had managed to keep private places in my head -- I wouldn't say they were big, labeled categories, but they were certain attitudes or feelings that were still very private. And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that.

I said to Hari Dass Baba, "Why is it that Maharaji never tells me the bad things I think?", and he says, "It does not help your sadhana -- your spiritual work. He knows it all, but he just does the things that help you."

The sculptor had said he loved Maharaji so much, we should keep the Land Rover up there. The Land Rover was just sitting around and so Maharaji got the Land Rover after all, for that time. And then one day, I was told we were going on an outing up in the Himalayas for the day. This was very exciting, because I never left my room in the temple. Now in the temple, or around Maharaji, there were eight or nine people. Bhagwan Dass and I were the only westerners. In fact, at no time that I was there did I see any other westerners. This is clearly not a western scene, and in fact, I was specifically told when returning to the United States that I was not to mention Maharaji's name or where he was, or anything.

The few people that have slipped by this net and figured out from clues in my speech and their knowledge of India where he was and have gone to see him, were thrown out immediately ... very summarily dismissed, which is very strange. All I can do is pass that information on to you. I think the message is that you don't need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.

So there were eight or nine people and whenever there was a scene, I walked last, I was the lowest man on the totem pole. They all loved me and honored me and I was the novice, like in a karate or judo class, where you stand at the back until you learn more. I was always in the back and they were always teaching me.

So we went in the Land Rover. Maharaji was up in the front -- Bhagwan Dass was driving. Bhagwan Dass turned out to be very high in this scene. He was very very highly thought of and honored. He had started playing the sitar; he was a fantastic musician and the Hindu people loved him. He would do bhajan holy music so high they would go out on it. So Bhagwan Dass was driving and I was way in the back of the Land Rover camper with the women and some luggage.

And we went up into the hills and came to a place where we stopped and were given apples, in an orchard, and we looked at a beautiful view. We stayed about 10 minutes, and then Maharaji says, "We've got to go on."

We got in the car, went further up the hill and came to a Forestry camp. Some of his devotees are people in the Forestry department so they make this available to him.

So we got to this place and there was a building waiting and a caretaker --"Oh, Maharaji, you've graced us with your presence." He went inside with the man that is there to take care of him or be with him all the time and we all sat on the lawn."

After a little while, a message came out, "Maharaji wants to see you." And I got up and went in, and sat down in front of him. He looked at me and said,

"You make many people laugh in America?"

I said, "Yes, I like to do that."

"Good ... You like to feed children?"

"Yes. Sure."

"Good."

He asked a few more questions like that, which seemed to be nice questions, but ..:? Then he smiled and he reached forward and he tapped me right on the forehead, just three times. That's all.

Then the other fellow came along and lifted me and walked me out the door. I was completely confused. I didn't know what had happened to me -- why he had done it -- what it was about.

When I walked out, the people out in the yard said that I looked as if I were in a very high state. They said tears were streaming down my face. But all I felt inside was confusion. I have never felt any further understanding of it since then. I don't know what it was all about. It was not an idle movement, because the minute that was over, we all got back in the car and went home.

I pass that on to you. You know now, what I know about that. Just an interesting thing. I don't know what it means, yet.

Hari Dass Baba was my teacher. I was taught by this man with a chalkboard in the most terse way possible. I would get up early, take my bath in the river or out of a pail with a lota (a bowl). I would go in and do my breathing exercises, my pranayam and my hatha yoga, meditate, study, and around 11 :30 in the morning, this man would arrive and with chalkboard he would write something down:

"If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets."

Then he'd get up and leave. Or he'd write,

"If you wear shoeleather, the whole earth is covered with leather."

These were his ways of teaching me about how motivation affects perception. His teaching seemed to be no teaching because he always taught from within ... that is, his lessons aroused in me just affirmation ... as if I knew it all already.

When starting to teach me about what it meant to be 'ahimsa' or non-violent, and the effect on the environment around you of the vibrations -- when he started to teach me about energy and vibrations, his opening statement was "Snakes Know Heart." "Yogis in jungle need not fear." Because if you're pure enough, cool it, don't worry. But you've got to be very pure.

So his teaching was of this nature. And it was not until a number of months later that I got hold of Vivekananda's book "Raja Yoga" and I realized that he had been teaching me Raja Yoga, very systematically an exquisite scientific system that had been originally enunciated somewhere between 500 BC and 500 AD by Patanjali, in a set of sutras, or phrases, and it's called Ashtanga Yoga, or 8-limbed yoga and also known as Raja or Kingly yoga. And this beautiful yogi was teaching me this wisdom with simple metaphor and brief phrase.

Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey. One can share a message through telling 'our-story' as I have just done, or through teaching methods of yoga, or singing, or making love. Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message ... the living faith in what is possible.

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--OM--

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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 6:43 am

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FROM BINDU TO OJAS

At this stage of the re-awakening of the Universe, the sacred symbolism represents it as a perfect Circle with the (root) point in the Centre. ImageThis sign was universal, therefore we find it in the Kabala also. The Western Kabala, however, now in the hands of Christian mystics, ignores it altogether, though it is plainly shown in the Zohar. These sectarians begin at the end, and show as the symbol of pregenetic Kosmos this sign image Image, calling it “the Union of the Rose and Cross,” the great mystery of occult generation, from whence the name — Rosicrucians (Rose Cross)!

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As may be judged, however, from the most important, as the best known of the Rosicrucians’ symbols, there is one which has never been hitherto understood even by modern mystics. It is that of the “Pelican” tearing open its breast to feed its seven little ones — the real creed of the Brothers of the Rosie-Cross and a direct outcome from the Eastern Secret Doctrine.

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Whether the genus of the bird be cygnus, anser, or pelecanus, it is no matter, as it is an aquatic bird floating or moving on the waters like the Spirit, and then issuing from those waters to give birth to other beings.

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The true significance of the symbol of the Eighteenth Degree of the Rose-Croix is precisely this, though poetised later on into the motherly feeling of the Pelican rending its bosom to feed its seven little ones with its blood.

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-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

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Picture of the Pelican, the vessel in which the circulatory distillation takes place. Page from Rhenanus, Solis e puteo emergentis sive dissertationis chymotechnicae libri tres (Frankfurt a. M., 1613).

-- Alchemical Studies, by C.G. Jung

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Again, let the reader read the Hindu “fables,” as the Orientalists call them, and remember the allegory of Visvakarma, the creative power, the great architect of the world, called in the Veda “the all-seeing god,” who “sacrifices himself to himself” (the Spiritual Egos of mortals are his own essence, one with him, therefore). Remember that he is called Deva Vardhika “the builder of the gods” and that it is he who ties (the Sun) Surya, his son-in-law, on his lathe, in the exoteric allegory; on the Swastika, in esoteric tradition, as on earth he is the Hierophant Initiator, and cuts away a portion of his brightness.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

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Patriarch of the Vedas. -- In a rational succession the alleged relation between Masonry and Egyptian religion would be carried to its conclusion without going off at a tangent into questions of Vedantic faith. But the Twenty-sixth Grade of the ANTIENT AND PRIMITIVE RITE is that of PATRIARCH OF THE VEDAS, and it intervenes to the confusion of the Candidate before a substituted Isis unveils in the next section. It may be compared with PRINCE BRAHMIN, which is No. 66 in the original Rite of MEMPHIS, and DOCTOR OF THE SACRED VEDAS, being No. 78. When an Expert introduces the Candidate he is told that he enters an Academy of Eastern Theologies, for the title notwithstanding, it is no less concerned with the Laws of Buddha and the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster than with Sacred Books of the Brahmins. In other words, "the religions of the world are studied, compared and analytically examined." For the rest, there are "no mystic ceremonies, no fearful ordeals to encounter." The origin of the Sacred Vedas and Brahminical doctrine are expounded by the Orator; the First Mystagogue summarises the teachings of Buddha; while a second of that denomination has charge of the tenets embodied in the Zend Avesta. Egypt is said to have derived its religious dogmas from the same primitive source as the Aryan peoples. The unity of all is in the idea of one Supreme Being common to every religion, not excepting those which are polytheistic and idolatrous on the surface.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

One man of science who would come to personify this uneasy truce was a Blavatsky enthusiast who became influential in the German movement. Dr. Franz Hartmann (1838- 1912) ... Hartmann was in Adyar as acting president of the Theosophical Society and remained in India until 1885.... Hartmann is of considerable interest to this investigation as it was he who helped create the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German occult society formed around the idea of sexual magic. Other illustrious members of the OTO will include another Theosophist, Dr. Rudolf Steiner...Another personal friend of Mme. Blavatsky was Dr. William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925), another coroner and a Theosophist who founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England in 1888...Whatever the reason, we have the Theosophical Society, the OTO, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Golden Dawn all intertwined in incestuous embrace....Upon his return to Europe in 1885, Hartmann took up residence at a town near Salzburg, and the directorship of a Lebensreform sanatorium. Lebensreform (or "life reform") was a back-to-nature movement that espoused a wide range of "clean living" practices that would be the envy of any New Ager of today....A few years later, Hartmann became involved with another Lebensreform community, this time at Ascona, in Switzerland, where we will eventually find his associate and fellow OTO initiate Theodor Reuss sitting out the First World War in 1917. There Hartmann began his own journal, the Lotusbluthen, (Lotus Blossoms) in 1892, which printed translations of many Theosophical and related writings. Lotusbluthen's logo included the ubiquitous swastika....Thus Hartmann will become involved, in 1902, with one John Yarker whose Masonic order, the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Mizraim, would claim many otherwise-sincere individuals as members. It would be from among the German leadership of this organization that the future founders of the OTO -- including Hartmann himself -- would be selected. Hence, it is Franz Hartmann who provides us with some excellent connections between the seemingly apolitical Ordo Templi Orientis and the rest of the German occult community, which was, more or less, aligned with either the Lebensreform movement or directly with the Pan-German, anti-Semitic movement which gave birth to Nazism. Thus Hartmann is the axle on which this peculiar Wheel of Life will turn. Wherever we pick up the thread of twentieth-century Western occultism and ritual magic, we can follow it back along a trail that leads to Hartmann.

-- Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, by Peter Levenda

***

Called hakenkreuz (or "hooked cross") in German, the swastika is an ancient design, much revered in India and the Far East....To a German of the twentieth century (as for a German of the thirteenth century) the word cross has decidedly Christian overtones; a hooked cross therefore implies some deviation from, or modified form of, Christianity.

-- Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, by Peter Levenda


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The Square within the Circle is one of the most potent of all the magical figures.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The fundamental truth of occultism is allegorically represented in the interlaced double triangles. He who has succeeded in bringing his individual mind in exact harmony with the Universal Mind has succeeded in reuniting the inner sphere with the outer one, from which he has only become separated by mistaking illusions for truths. He who has succeeded in carrying out practically the meaning of this symbol has become one with the father; he is virtually an adept, because he has succeeded in squaring the circle and circling the square.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

The cube 'twas ever symboled man,
And doubled ... be but born anew!
***
Athene grave-eyed hath granted our boon,
Yea wisdom unweighted enveiled the rune!
And stone to be doubled, ... the riddle is ceased;
In new birth is now added, ... of the Best to the beast.
Now him double-natured, ... the mortal adds man,
No longer obdurate, Jove's purpose can scan.
Trust now to ordeal, seeking laurel coronal.
Diadem rarest of Saturn's supernal.

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Double the cube -- It is recorded that in the dim antiquity a fearful plague ravaged Greece and when the Hierophant inquired of the oracle at Delphi how the plague might be stayed, the enigmatical answer of doubling the stone was given.)

-- The Fire Regained, by Sidney M. Hirsch


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Representation of the Five Worlds (the comprehensive categories of spiritual realms in Kabbalah in the descending chain of Existence) with the 10 Sephirot (the 10 attributes in Kabbalah through which Ein Sof -- The Infinite -- reveals himself and continuously creates both the physical realm and the chain of higher metaphisical realms) in each, as successively smaller concentric circles, derived from the light of the Kav after the Tzimtzum (a term used in the Lurianic Kabbalah teaching of Isaac Luria, explaining his concept that God began the process of creation by "contracting" his infinite light in order to allow for a "conceptual space" in which a finite and seemingly independent world could exist. This contraction, forming an "empty space" (חלל הפנוי) in which creation could begin, is known as the Tzimtzum).

-- Zohar, by Wikipedia


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TO
MAHARAJ-JI

OF WHOSE
ASHIRBAD
(BLESSING)
THIS
IS
A MANIFESTATION

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-- Rama Atrium Group, Rosicrucians in New York


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THE HEART CAVE

The bhakta seeks the Psychic being that is in the cave behind the heart centre. If devotion is to ripen, then the devotee must become free of attachment. He must detach himself from the wife, children, house and possessions.

-- Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, by The Mother's Service Society

***

Gautama Buddha limited his public teachings to the purely moral and physiological aspect of the Wisdom-Religion, to Ethics and man alone. Things “unseen and incorporeal,” the mystery of Being outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving the hidden Truths for a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the famous Saptaparna cave near Mount Baibhar. The caves of the Rishis, the abodes of Tiresias and the Greek seers, were modelled on those of the Nagas — the Hindu King-Snakes, who dwelled in cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Sesha, the thousand-headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Python, the dragon serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of the myth.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The Heart: The septenary disturbance and play of light around the pineal gland are reflected in the heart, or rather the aura of the heart, which vibrates and illumines the seven brains of the heart, just as does the aura round the pineal gland. This is the exoterically four- but Esoterically seven-leaved lotus, the Saptaparna, the cave of Buddha, with its seven compartments.

-- The Esoteric Papers of Madame Blavatsky


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The heart here refers to the indwelling spiritual self of Mankind, the spiritual core, which finds its inner home in Man's soul being, in the heart-center, the central chakra of the soul. In the stage of ASPIRATION, the heart seeks to escape the limitations of the worldly realm. We see this expressed in [the emblems] which show the heart flying and seeking a new realm.

-- The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer


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Solomon decorated his Twelve Masters with a sash on which was embroidered a flaming heart, as a token of ardent love among Brethren.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

[Parsifal] Amfortas! The wound! The wound! It burns here in my side! Ah! The cry! From the heart's depths it shrieketh up to me! Poor wretch! Ah, miserable! I saw the wound to bleed: -- now it doth bleed in me! -- Here! No! 'Tis not the wound. May his blood stream forth herein! Here! In the heart, 'mid flames!

-- Interpretation of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, directed by Hans-Jurgen Syberber -- Illustrated Screenplay

***

At this divine flame, The “One,” are lit the three descending groups. Having their potential being in the higher group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called the “Virgins of Life,” the “Great Illusion,” etc., etc., and collectively the “Six-pointed Star.” The latter is the symbol, in almost every religion, of the Logos as the first emanation. It is that of Vishnu in India (the Chakra, or wheel), and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, the “He of the four letters” or — metaphorically — “the limbs of Microprosopos” in the Kabala, which are ten and six respectively. The six-pointed Star refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the Star. All these, the upper and lower hierarchies included, emanate from the “Heavenly or Celestial Virgin,” the great mother in all religions, the Androgyne, the Sephira-Adam-Kadmon. In its Unity, primordial light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daivi-prakriti, the light of the unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation it becomes Fohat, or the “Seven Sons.” The former is symbolised by the Central point in the double-Triangle; the latter by the hexagon itself, or the “six limbs” of the Microprosopus the Seventh being Malkuth, the “Bride” of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

"As the sky with its stars and constellations is nothing separate from the All but includes the All, so is the 'firmament' of Man not separate from Man; and as the Universal Mind is not ruled by any external being, likewise the firmament in Man (his individual sphere of mind) is not subject to the rule of any creature, but is an independent and powerful whole." -- This fundamental truth of occultism is allegorically represented in the interlaced double triangles. He who has succeeded in bringing his individual mind in exact harmony with the Universal Mind has succeeded in reuniting the inner sphere with the outer one, from which he has only become separated by mistaking illusions for truths. He who has succeeded in carrying out practically the meaning of this symbol has become one with the father; he is virtually an adept, because he has succeeded in squaring the circle and circling the square. All of this proves that Paracelsus has brought the root of his occult ideas from the East.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

Like many other cultures Tantric Buddhism makes use of the hexagram, a combination of two triangles. The masculine triangle, which points upward, represents the phallus, and the downward-pointing, feminine triangle the vagina. Both of these sexual organs are highly revered in the rituals and meditations of Tantrism....The word (evam) is already to be found in the early Gupta scriptures (c. 300 C.E.) and is represented there in the form of a hexagram, i.e., the symbol of mystic sexual love. The syllable e stands for the downward-pointing triangle, the syllable vam is portrayed as a upright triangle. Thus e represents the yoni (vagina) and vam the lingam (phallus). E is the lotus, the source, the location of all the secrets which the holy doctrine of the tantras teaches; the citadel of happiness, the throne, the Mother. E further stands for “emptiness and wisdom”. Masculine vam on the other hand lays claims to reverence as “vajra, diamond, master of joys, method, great compassion, as the Father”. E and vam together form “the seal of the doctrine, the fruit, the world of appearances, the way to perfection, father (yab) and mother (yum)”. The syllables e-vam are considered so powerful that the divine couple can summon the entire host of male and female Buddhas with them.

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, by Victor & Victoria Trimondi

***

Six (6, VI) seks, sehs, saihs, sex is perfected creation, the Third Logos, and therefore this word indicates procreation, both divine and human. The word se-ask or se-aks, that is formed from a combination of the Ur-words se = "sun" and ask or ahs = "arising or causing to arise (generate)," therefore this means: 1) the arising of the sun or creation of the world and 2) generated by the sun, i.e. a) creation of the macrocosm, and b) that of the microcosm or of humanity, which regenerates itself. It is of mystical importance that six, seen as a number, is the first perfect number: It can always be divided in equal ways, when one takes 2 x 3; half of the diameter of a circle divides that circle into six parts, the entire diameter into three parts; therefore the circle encompasses either an equilateral triangle Image or two such triangles Image -- which then form the mystical six-star, i.e. the well-known hexagram. If six equal-sized circles are drawn around a circle of the same size in such a manner so that all seven circles touch each other without overlapping the adjacent circle, the circles so arranged form what is called the mystic or geometrical rose and, similar to the hexagram, give shape to a significant holy-sign pertaining to the mystery of the creation of the world and of humanity. Similarly the perfect cube has six surfaces, which, when unfolded, results in either the mystic thau ("Armanic Hamcar") Image Image, the crutch-cross or Latin Image -- each of which also has its own significance with regard to cosmogony and anthropogony. Image

-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List

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-- 33rd Degree (1802) of the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States, called Sovereign Grand Inspector General, or Supreme Council of the 33rd, by Anonymous

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A nine-pointed star, formed by three triangles of gold, one upon the other, and interlaced ["333"].

-- The Thirty-Third and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Called Sovereign Grand Inspector General, by Charles T. McClenachan, 33º

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THE GRAND DECORATION OF THE ORDER, 33º -- The Grand Decorations of the Order rest on a Teutonic Cross. They are a nine-pointed star, formed by three triangles of gold, one upon the other, and interlaced ["333"].

-- The Thirty-Third and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Called Sovereign Grand Inspector General, by Charles T. McClenachan, 33º

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Solomon's Seal

-- Isis Unveiled, by Helena P. Blavatsky

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JEWEL of a Present or past Commander-in-chief of a Consistory. The jewel of SImagePImageRImageSImage on the decorations formed by two crimson enamelled equilateral triangles. The two triangles thus forming two St. Andrew's Crosses [and one hidden Star of David].

-- The Thirty-Third and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Called Sovereign Grand Inspector General, by Charles T. McClenachan, 33º

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[T]wo triangles, representing the positive and negative, one the exact opposite and antithesis of the other. The triangle represents in its character, and has always done so from earliest history, first, the physical body as the base, with the spiritual and the soul or mental nature standing over; one side of the upper part of the triangle represents the soul, the opposite upper part represents spirit. These trinities, blended together, form the six-pointed star, and, in and through the workings of this double trinity, creation is what it is.... [T]he positive is centrifugal, goes out from the centre, scatters, ramifies, goes into space, ceases to be solidified, knows no bounds; while the negative reaches out and gathers in, lays hold of the positive and inspheres it, binds it within its own limits, and forms to itself the germ of being.

-- The Seven Creative Principles, by Hiram Erastus Butler


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"EXCEPT YE BE CONVERTED
&
BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN
YE SHALL NOT ENTER
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN"

UNLESS * YOU
START AGAIN
BECOME THAT TRUSTING
OPEN SURRENDERED BEING
THE ENERGY CAN'T COME IN
THAT IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

[A]ccording to the well-known dictum the world is upheld only by the merit of the "breath" of little school children who have not yet tasted sin. Breath is itself a mixture, being composed of air and moisture, and through it the world is carried on. Esoterically speaking, the breath of the little ones becomes "voice", and spreads throughout the whole universe, so that they become the guardians of the world.

-- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon

***

The spiritual temple is locked with many keys, and those who are vain enough to believe that they can invade it by their own power, and without being shown the way by the light of wisdom, will storm against it in vain. Wisdom is not created by man; it must come to him, and cannot be purchased for money nor coaxed with promises, but it comes to those whose minds are pure and whose hearts are open to receive it. It is said that those who wish to become wise must be like children, but there are few amongst the learned who would be willing to undertake such a feat. There are few who would be able to realise the fact, even if they were willing to do so, that they themselves are without life, without knowledge, and without power, and that all life and consciousness, knowledge and power, come from the universal fountain of all, of which they are merely imperfect instruments for its manifestation. There are few amongst the learned capable of giving up their pet theories, their accepted opinions, their dogmatic reasoning and speculations about possibilities and probabilities, and sinking their own personal will entirely into the wisdom of God. Humanity resembles a field of wheat, in which each individual represents a plant, attempting to grow higher than the others and to bear more abundant fruit; but there are few who desire to be nothing themselves, so that God may take full possession of them and be all in and through them.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

The founder of the Christian Religion stated an occult maxim when He said: "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall not enter therein" (Mark X:15). All occultists recognize the far-reaching importance of this teaching of Christ, and endeavor to "live" it day by day....It is frankly ignorant, unfettered by preconceived opinions and therefore eminently teachable. It takes everything with that beautiful attitude of trust which we have designated "child-like faith," wherein there is not the shadow of a doubt....In all occult schools the pupil is first taught to forget all else when a new teaching is being given, to allow neither preference nor prejudice to govern, but to keep the mind in a state of calm, dignified waiting....That is the only way to cultivate an absolutely certain perception of truth....he must cultivate an attitude of mind which "believeth all things" as possible.... he would not allow himself to look upon anything as "an established fact," for he realizes thoroughly the importance of keeping his mind in the fluidal state of adaptability which characterizes the little child....he is ever on the alert, yearning for "Light, more Light."...Statements which appear positively and unequivocally contradictory, which have caused an immense amount of feeling among the advocates of opposite sides, may nevertheless be capable of perfect reconciliation, as shown in one such instance mentioned in the present work. The bond of concord is only discovered by the open mind.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel


THE ENERGY
IT IS THE SAME THING
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 7:09 am

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KNIGHT OF THE SERPENT: The story is that an "illustrious knight," not otherwise specified, founded the ORDER OF THE BRAZEN SERPENT -- "in the time of the Crusades" -- for the relief of pilgrims to Jerusalem. The allusion is of course to the Serpent uplifted in the wilderness by Moses for the healing of the children of Israel. There is no very convincing analogy between ministration to pilgrims and the restoration of those who had been punished for their disobedience and rebellion, nor can we look for any light of symbolism in the parable of the Brazen Serpent, for the RITE OF MEMPHIS -- which dispenses this Grade -- carries little of such light in its wallet. The Candidate and his sponsor in the Ceremony are children of Israel who have been "wandering in the wilderness for many days" and for no particular reason are arrested as spies. When they have justified themselves there is nothing to do but to pledge, invest and entrust the Candidate, who receives thereafter the accolade of the Grade and then listens to a discourse on the antiquity and diffusion of serpent-worship. It contains no single allusion to the Christian understanding of the story in the BOOK OF NUMBERS, nor to the commentary of alchemists thereon, though in the classification of 1856 this Grade was included in the Senate of Hermetic Philosophers. It ranks as No. 25 in the general enumeration of the RITE OF MEMPHIS and as 15 in the reduction of the ANTIENT AND PRIMITIVE RITE. It is nothing and leads to nothing.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

Jung noted that there were many accounts in mythology of the relation between a hero and a serpent, so the presence of the serpent indicated that "it will again be a hero myth."

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


CONSCIOUSNESS EQUALS
ENERGY =
LOVE =
AWARENESS =
LIGHT =
WISDOM =
BEAUTY =
TRUTH =
PURITY.
IT'S ALL THE SAME TRIP
IT'S ALL THE SAME
ANY TRIP YOU WANT TO TAKE
LEADS TO THE SAME PLACE

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PURIFY ENOUGH
BECOME IMMERSE
BEAUTY
BECOME
IT

THE POTTER BECOMES HIS POT
EMBRACE THE 10,000 BEAUTIFUL VISIONS
BECOME
1
WITH THE UNIVERSE

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The “word” of the Sepher Jezirah, called in the Secret Doctrine “the One Number issued from No-Number” — the One Eternal Principle. The esoteric theogony begins with the One, manifested, therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence; the number of the numbers and numbered — the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vach, Satarupa “of the hundred forms,” or Nature. It is from this number 10, or creative nature, the Mother (the occult cypher, or “nought,” ever procreating and multiplying in union with the Unit “1,” one, or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeded.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

**

All numbers are multiples of one, all sciences converge to a common point, all wisdom comes out of one centre, and the number of wisdom is one.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

Now as yet we had not seen the dead body of our careful and wise father, we therfore removed the Altar aside, there we lifted up a strong plate of brass, and found a fair and worthy body, whole and unconsumed, as the same is here lively counterfeited, with all the Ornaments and Attires; in his hand he held a parchment book, called I. the which next to the Bible, is our greatest treasure.

-- Fama Fraternitatis, by Wikipedia


ALL THE ENERGY
PASSES THRU YOU
YOU ARE ALL THE ENERGY

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& IT ALL RESIDES IN YOUR HEART
IF YOU CAN GO WITHIN TO YOUR SPIRITUAL HEART
YOUR HRIDAYAM
YOU WILL THEN KNOW THAT:
YOU ARE HE

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The cyclopean eye and Wotan's single eye, the Egyptian eye-amulet and the Eye of God in the Triangle portrayed in our churches, the Arimaspians of Herodotus in the north of Europe are clear and unmistakable reference points.

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

***

Let us remember how it is written and said that the soul of Christ had two eyes, a right and a left eye. In the beginning, when the soul of Christ was created, she fixed her right eye upon eternity and the Godhead, and remained in the full intuition and enjoyment of the divine Essence and Eternal Perfection; and continued thus unmoved and undisturbed by all the accidents and travail, suffering, torment and pain that ever befell the outward man. But with the left eye she beheld the creature and perceived all things therein, and took note of the difference between the creatures, which were better or worse, nobler or meaner; and thereafter was the outward man of Christ ordered.

Thus the inner man of Christ, according to the right eye of His soul, stood in the full exercise of His divine nature, in perfect blessedness, joy and eternal peace. But the outward man and the left eye of Christ's soul, stood with Him in perfect suffering, in all tribulation, affliction and travail; and this in such sort that the inward and right eye remained unmoved, unhindered and untouched by all the travail, suffering, grief and anguish that ever befell the outward man. It hath been said that when Christ was bound to the pillar and scourged, and when He hung upon the cross, according to the outward man, yet His inner man, or soul according to the right eye, stood in as full possession of divine joy and blessedness as it did after His ascension, or as it doth now. In like manner His outward man, or soul with the left eye, was never hindered, disturbed or troubled by the inward eye in its contemplation of the outward things that belonged to it.

Now the created soul of man hath also two eyes. The one is the power of seeing into eternity, the other of seeing into time and the creatures, of perceiving how they differ from each other as afore-said, of giving life and needful things to the body, and ordering and governing it for the best. But these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once; but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead.

For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward outward things; that is, holding converse with time and the creatures; then must the right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contemplation. Therefore whosoever will have the one must let the other go; for "no man can serve two masters."

-- Theologia Germanica, by Anonymous (Meister Eckhart)

***

Wuotan appears before our eyes as the reflection of the All as an individual self: "He consecrates himself, consecrated to himself," he consecrates himself -- as a self-sacrificer to himself as a self-sacrifice -- to the passing away in order to arise anew. The nearer he feels to the point in time for this passing away toward a new arising -- his death -- the clearer the knowledge grows in him about the secret of life which is an eternal arising and passing away, a constant transformation, an eternal return [ewige Wiederkehr] -- a life of constant cycle of being born and dying. "This knowledge completely arises in him only at that twilight-moment in which he is sinking (dying) into the Ur out of which he will once more arise, and in this twilight-moment (death) he gives his eye as a pledge in exchange for elevated knowledge. However, this eye remains his property -- even if it has been pawned. He will reclaim it upon his rebirth out of the Ur. For this one is is his physical body, while his other eye, which he retains and takes with him into the Ur, is his spiritual body, his soul. The one physical eye, that is, the physical body itself, is only temporarily lost in the transitional phase of death, but it nevertheless remains his own, and is reunified with his other (spiritual) eye at the moment of his return out of the Ur -- upon his rebirth. This latter is his spiritual body (the soul), but the primeval knowledge gained from Mimir's well also remains his property upon his rebirth, i.e. the property of the All. It is the sum of the experience (Gjallar) of thousands upon thousands of ages which is preserved and inherited -- unconsciously through the mind and consciously through language and writing. Thus the knowledge of Wuotan, and that of each individual self, is increased by means of the drink from Mimir's well using the Gjallarhorn, he enriches it through his questions to the Wala (Lady of Death, Totenwal, Helja), as well as through his dialog with Mimir's head. Through this knowledge he became wise and found both the science surrounding the fate of the world by his own life being consecrated to death, and the solution to the riddle of the cosmos, which -- as it says in the "Runatals thattr Odins" -- "he will never ever reveal to a woman or a girl."

If a master, in imitation of Wuotan the "transformer" [wandler] (not the "wanderer" [wanderer]), slowly but surely acquires knowledge through constant transformation (being born, living, dying, entering the primeval state, and being reborn), through constant pledging of his one eye in the cycle of immeasurable spans of time, and through all of this finds the lost name of the divinity, then he himself becomes the hawk that sits between the two eyes of the eagle, then he will no longer be reborn, for then he will have found the lost master-word, and then he himself will have become God.

-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List

***

They strew in the path of kings and czars
Jewels and gems of price:
But for thy head I will pluck down stars,
And pave thy way with eyes.
I have sought for thee a costlier dome
Than Mahmoud’s palace high,
And thou, returning, find thy home
In the apple of Love’s eye.

-- Hafiz, quoted in Letters and Social Aims, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

And the real symbolism of the pyramid is alchemical, of course. The traditional code represents the three kinds of sex by a cube, a pyramid, and a sphere. The cube is that travesty we call 'normal sex, in which the two nervous systems never actually merge at the orgasm, like the two parallel sides of the cube. The pyramid is the two coming together and joining, the magical-telepathic orgasm. The sphere is the Tantric ritual, endlessly prolonged, with no orgasm at all. The alchemists used that code for over two thousand years. The Rosicrucians among the founding fathers used the pyramid as a symbol of their kind of sex magic. Aleister Crowley used that symbol the same way, more recently. The eye on the pyramid is the two minds meeting. Neurological interlock. The opening of the Eye of Shiva. Ewige Schlangekraft—the eternal serpent power. The joining of the Rose and Cross, vagina and penis, into Rose-Cross. The astral leap. Mind escaping from physiology.

-- The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

***

Said R. Hizkiah: 'I have learnt something about this which I hardly like to disclose, showing how wisdom is embodied in a common practice.' R. Abba clapped him on the shoulder, saying: 'Speak out and do not be afraid; in the days of R. Simeon there is no need for secrecy.' He then said: 'I have seen in the chapter of R. Jesse the Elder regarding customs, that if a man has a son, when he dies the son ought to put dust on his eyes at the time of his burial, and this is a mark of respect to him, being a sign that the world is now concealed from him, but his son inherits the world in his place. For the human eye represents the world with its various colours. The outer ring of white corresponds to the sea of Oceanus which surrounds the whole world. The next colour represents the land which is surrounded by the sea. A third colour in the middle of the eye corresponds to Jerusalem, which is in the centre of the world. Finally there is the pupil of the eye, which reflects the beholder and is the most precious part of all. This corresponds to Zion, which is the central point of the universe, in which the reflection of the whole world can be seen, and where is the abode of the Shekinah, which is the beauty and the cynosure of the world. Thus the eye is the heritage of the world, and so as the father leaves it the son inherits it.' Said R. Abba : 'You are quite right. But there is still a deeper significance in the practice, although men do not know it. For when a man departs from the world, his soul is still enclosed in him, and before his eyes are closed they see certain recondite things, as we have explained in connection with the verse, "For a man shall not see me and live", indicating that they see things in their death which they do not see in their life-time. Then it behoves those who are present to place their hands on his eyes and close them, and, as we have learnt in connection with customs and manners, if he has a son, it behoves the son in the first place to do so, as it is written, "And Joseph shall put his hand on thy eyes." The reason for the closing of the eyes is because some sight the reverse of holy might present itself, and it is not meet that the eyes which have just beheld a holy vision should now dwell on a sight of a different character. A further reason is that the soul is still attached to him in the house, and if the eye is left open, with that unholy vision still resting upon it, everything it looks upon is cursed; and this is not respectful to the eye, to allow it to gaze upon anything improper. The best sign of respect, therefore, is that a man's eyes should be closed by the hand of the son whom he has left behind him.'

-- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon


& IT IS FROM THIS PLACE IN OUR HEART CAVE
WHERE WE ARE NOW
WE WATCH THE ENTIRE DRAMA
THAT IS OUR LIVES
WE WATCH THE ILLUSION
WITH
UNBEARABLE COMPASSION

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THERE IS WRITING HAPPENING
MAYBE THAT'S HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND
I AM HERE BUT "I" AM NOT HERE.
I AM WRITING BUT "I" AM NOT WRITING
INSIDE OF ME IN THE HEART CAVE IS A
MANTRA GOING ON THAT REMINDS ME
WHO I REALLY AM
OVER AND OVER AGAIN
IN THIS INNER PLACE
I AM

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The fundamental principle, is the reconciliation of the opposites. We cannot choose one opposite over another. We must experience the relationship between the two and reconcile them into a higher synthesis. This does not mean to be in the middle. For instance, the proper balance between wealth and poverty is not the mathematical average between $1,000,000 and $1, i.e. $500,000. There are people who are poor at $1,000,000, others who are rich at $1. Reconciling the opposites is not that simple. It would be a great help if someone who has gone before us would describe the experience. What would he say of himself if he had reconciled the opposites? I AM the bread of life (John 6:35); I AM the light of the world (John 8:12); I AM the door of the sheepfold (John 10:7); I AM the good shepherd (John 10:11); I AM the resurrection and the life (John 11:25); I AM the way the truth and the life (John 14:6); I AM the true vine (John 15:1). "I AM" is the most powerful statement any person can make.

-- Reconciliation, Orientation and Unity, by Jack Courtis, Rosicrucian Archive

***

It is not the comments or harangues of unlearned and fanatical preachers that I have in my mind, but sermons of great and deserved celebrity, and divines whose learning, well-regulated zeal, and sound scriptural views are as honourable to the established church, as their piety, beneficence and blameless life, are to the Christian name, when I say that passages occur which might almost lead one to conjecture, that the authors had found the words, "I will come and join you," instead of, "I am in the midst of you," -- (Compare 1. John, III. 24) -- passages from which it is at least difficult not to infer, that they had interpreted the promise, as of a corporal co-presence, instead of a spiritual immanence (Image) as of an individual coming in or down, and taking a place, as soon as the required number of petitioners was completed! As if, in short, this presence, this actuation of the "I AM," (Image) were an after-consequence, an accidental and separate result and reward of the contemporaneous and contiguous worshipping -- and not the total act itself, of which the spiritual Christ, one and the same in all the faithful, is the originating and perfective focal unity. Even as the physical life is in each limb and organ of the body, "all in every part;" but is manifested as life, by being one in all and thus making all one: even so with Christ, our Spiritual Life! He is in each true believer, in his solitary prayer and during his silent communion in the watches of the night, no less than in the congregation of the faithful; but he manifests his indwelling presence more characteristically, with especial evidence, when many, convened in his name, whether for prayer or for council, do through him become ONE.

-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

***

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Ibn Mansur Al Hallaj, the "Qu'ranic Christ," making the dangerous and fatal "ejaculation," 'ANA' L HAQ (I AM the Truth)
IF HALLAJ HAD SAID
"ALLAH AL HAZ -- GOD (IN HIS TRANSCENDENTAL ASPECT) IS THE
TRUTH, OR "HUWA AL HAQ" (HE IS THE TRUTH) IT WOULD HAVE BEEN
A COMMON STATEMENT. HOWEVER AL HALLAJ DECLARED THAT
GOD ALONE EXISTS: THEREFORE HE IS THE ONE SUBJECT AND THUS
HE ALONE CAN WITNESS HIS EXISTENCE.

-- Toward the One, by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

***

Take the famous utterance, 'I am God.' Some men reckon it as a great pretension; but 'I am Gael' is in fact a great humility. The man who says 'I am the servant of God' asserts that two exist, one himself and the other God. But he who says 'I am God' has naughted himself and cast himself to the winds. He says, 'I am God': that is, 'I am not, He is all, nothing has existence but God, I am pure non-entity, I am nothing.' In this the humility is greater.

-- Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Arberry

***

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[Gozer] Are you a God?

-- Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman

***

When what we should term the historical age emerged from the twilight of tradition, the Ana were already established in different communities, and had attained to a degree of civilisation very analogous to that which the more advanced nations above the earth now enjoy. They were familiar with most of our mechanical inventions, including the application of steam as well as gas. The communities were in fierce competition with each other. They had their rich and their poor; they had orators and conquerors, they made war either for a domain or an idea. Though the various states acknowledged various forms of government, free institutions were beginning to preponderate; popular assemblies increased in power; republics soon became general; the democracy to which the most enlightened European politicians look forward as the extreme goal of political advancement, and which still prevailed among other subterranean races, whom they despised as barbarians, the loftier family of Ana, to which belonged the tribe I was visiting, looked back to as one of the crude and ignorant experiments which belong to the infancy of political science. It was the age of envy and hate, of fierce passions, of constant social changes more or less violent, of strife between classes, of war between state and state. This phase of society lasted, however, for some ages, and was finally brought to a close, at least among the nobler and more intellectual populations, by the gradual discovery of the latent powers stored in the all-permeating fluid which they denominate vril.

-- The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer Lytton

***

Every individual says with the God of the Egyptian mysteries: "I am who I am," and stands before us a new, inscrutable, unfathomable thing.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain

***

Aham Brahmasmi. Translation: aham = I; Brahmasmi = am Brahman. Meaning: I am Brahman....It is an expression of "I am ness".... We can discern at least five different states of "I am ness" in beings (jivas). The fifth one is the state of "I am I am"....This is a pure state of "I am only". This is the indescribable state of Brahman in its absolute aspect....In Atman every experience is subjective. Atman does not interact with any object or use any external means to know or experience. It exists by itself and knows by itself. In contrast the experience of elemental self is objective....All is Brahman. There is nothing else other than Brahman. He is the cause of all causes. He is also called Atman. In reality there is no distinction between the two. Atman is another name of Brahman or a mental construct we use to make sense of Brahman as the self of individual beings. There may be many beings in the creation, but there is only one Brahman in all of them. During creation Brahman projects himself out as everything and at the end of creation withdraws everything into himself. The phenomenal world is unreal. It an illusion or an apparition, which disappears when we overcome our ignorance and realize the true state of Brahman.

-- Aham Brahmasmi, by Jayaram V

***

The distinction between a Patriarch of Isis and of Memphis is apparently that between the Lesser and Greater Mysteries which were enacted in the world of the Delta. The Candidate testifies to the eternity of the universe, but above all of each human soul. His soul testifies to itself, in the words of "our ancient books": I am, I am one being: I am one.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

The author is reminded of William Dudley Pelley, the leader of the fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s, who eventually abandoned organized Nazism and went on to help found the "I AM" movement: a cult that believes in ongoing human contact with alien space creatures, and Soulcraft, a similar movement. To Pelley, the "Aryans" are descendants of an alien Master Race.

-- Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, by Peter Levenda

***

Some of the original members of the original Ascended Master Teachings religion, the "I AM" Activity, were recruited from the ranks of William Dudley Pelley’s organization the Silver Legion.

-- Silver Legion of America, by Wikipedia

***

THE term “New Age” was restricted, until the late 1960s, to a relatively narrow group of people, although the New Aeon concept has been present in esoteric circles from the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The popular culture of the 1960s brought the idea into focus for large numbers of people, which have continued to increase.

One of the first ventures beyond the immediate confines of the occult movement (which had a hard core of mere hundreds) was in Guy Warren Ballard’s I AM movement. The term I AM became, for many years, a kind of “cipher signal” held in common by those ‘in the know’ about the New Age movement. In the 1960s, the term I AM began to be replaced by the metaphysical cipher WE ARE ONE....

It is rumored that Ballard’s son Mark, who virtually disappeared during a period of legal trouble for his father, resurfaced as the famous trance channel Mark Prophet, one of the key players in the modern “New Age” movement.

I AM = 45 = NOT. I AM was replaced by the phrase WE ARE ONE = 112 = WHO AND WHAT I AM. It is also the value of Ballard’s student George Hunt Williamson’s magical name MARK III. WE ARE ONE also equals WORD OF THE LAW. NEW AGE = 79 = WILL KEY.

-- Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, by Allen Greenfield


AND EVEN AS I WRITE, WHERE THIS
MANTRA IS GOING ON I'M JUST WATCHING WITH
GREAT AWE AND WONDER

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THE AWESOME DRAMA OF NATURE
UNFOLD BEFORE MY VERY EYE
BEFORE THAT EYE I I WHICH
SEES ALL AND KNOWS ALL.
AND ON
AND ON
INSIDE GOES:
AUM MANI PADME HUM
ALWAYS BRINGING ME RIGHT TO MY HEART
WHERE I DWELL ETERNALLY.

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WHEN YOU HAVE QUIETED YOUR MIND
ENOUGH
AND TRANSCENDED YOUR EGO
ENOUGH
YOU CAN HEAR HOW IT REALLY IS. SO:
WHEN YOU ARE WITH A CANDLEFLAME
YOU ARE THE CANDLEFLAME
AND WHEN
YOU ARE WITH ANOTHER BEING'S MIND
YOU ARE THE OTHER BEING'S MIND
WHEN
THERE IS A TASK TO DO
YOU ARE THE TASK

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THE MINDLESS QUALITY OF TOTAL INVOLVEMENT
THAT COMES ONLY WHEN THE EGO IS QUIET
AND THERE IS NO ATTACHMENT

IT IS ONLY WHEN YOU RESIDE QUIETLY
IN YOUR OWN HRIDAYAM
THAT YOU BECOME
HE OF TOTAL LIGHT
UNBEARABLE COMPASSION
AND INFINITE POWER

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SEE:
IF YOU GET FAR ENOUGH IN
YOU CAN SEE ... KARMA
YOU CAN SEE PATTERNS UNFOLDING
(OF WHICH THIS LIFE
IS ONLY A PART
PART OF A MOSAIC)
BUT:
IN ORDER TO DO THAT
YOU HAVE TO HAVE LEFT
THE GRAVITATIONAL FIELD
OF
TIME AND SPACE
(AS A MATRIX)
YOU CAN'T THINK IN ... TIME & SPACE

Mandamus 4

Mandamus 4, which is to be read in your fourth week, begins -- in a very subtle way -- to separate members from the world as they knew it and put them under the complete control of AMORC. The technique used for this purpose is called "Redefining the concept of time."

In very slick and persuasive language, Mandamus 4 explains that the concept of time is wrongly defined in the ordinary world. Of course AMORC has the "right" definition of the concept of time.

In the Mandamus, AMORC criticizes today's scientific view of time. Since time is such a basic concept, a concept generally defined and utilized by science, getting the member to accept the Rosicrucian definition is a big step in disengaging him from the authority of science and outside standards for reasoning about things in the ordinary world.

If AMORC can succeed in creating this level of doubt about science, the member will be forced into reconsidering the validity of many things he might believe. This is part of what Schein calls the "unfreezing" stage, where the basic concepts of a new recruit into a cult are forever shaken up.

Despite the language of the monograph, it was hard for me to completely grasp the Rosicrucian claim that their wisdom could redefine time. Let us say that in distinguishing between objective measures of time (like a pendulum, an hourglass, or a clock) and subjective experiences of time (as when one is watching an exciting movie, engaged in a deeply engrossing conversation, or sharing a highly romantic moment), one notices that the experience of time can depart very much from any kind of objective measurement. Subjectively, time can move slowly or very quickly.

Here are some more examples of the types of exercises outlined in Mandamus 4:

1. Have the postulant walk down a certain road, then go back and ride on that same road by bicycle. Finally, have the postulant drive a car on the same road. Have the postulant make a note of his impressions.

2. Walk for fifteen minutes in a straight line in a place that, scenically, is just ordinary, nothing special. Then, choosing a place that is scenically very beautiful, take a walk for the same length of time, in a not-so-straight line. Have the postulant make a note of their impressions.

These experiments prove that, although the objective measurements of time spent may be completely the same, the subjective arena is vastly different. Objective and subjective criteria are quite different. The Rosicrucian concept of time, as proposed by AMORC, stresses the subjective and casts doubt on the importance of the objective.

Since the Mandamus indicates, but does not closely define, the Rosicrucian concept of time, the suggested constant rereading of the home-study lessons and meditating on their contents merely reinforces AMORC's point of view, which is that subjective time somehow trumps and is more real than objective time.

Mandamus 5

After rejecting the contemporary scientific view of time in Mandamus 4, AMORC addresses the scientific view of space in Mandamus 5.

Again, the dictionary definition of space, which reflects the contemporary scientific world view, is wrong. The AMORC definition of space is the right one. To validate the so-called Rosicrucian view, this monograph quotes ancient mystical and spiritual writings to support its position.

I am troubled particularly by a phrase from this monograph: "The Rosicrucians have asserted for centuries ... " The question here is, who? Rosicrucians from a variety of orders, representing a common view of space? Or AMORC, a monolithic organization whose archives exclusively bear the secret fruits of ages of study? The answer, as exhibited in the monographs, is AMORC itself.

This not-so-subtle claim of authority caused me to doubt my desire to leave AMORC when I began to question the validity of the Rosicrucian message. Was I really informed enough to question their authority? If these people know so much that they have affirmed these things for centuries, who was I to question them?

Basically, AMORC claims that time does not exist for a Rosicrucian -- except, of course, when your membership fee is due. In fact, time becomes so real at this point that you become very aware that if your membership commitments aren't met on time, you will be automatically cut from the egregore.

Severing one's connection to the egregore, the sacred pattern of the order on other planes, may not sound so severe to an outsider, but to a Rosicrucian now dependent on the organization, this is a powerful threat. Remember that a Rosicrucian believes that his fundamental connection to God is linked to his association with the egregore of AMORC.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


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YOU CAN'T BE IN ... YOUR THOUGHTS
ANY MORE!
BECAUSE: YOUR THOUGHTS ARE STILL IN TIME
& SPACE & YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF TIME
THROUGH THEM. YOU'VE GOT TO BE OUTSIDE
THAT. YOU'VE GOT TO BE IN THE PLACE WHERE
YOU SEE YOUR OWN

BIRTH * CHILDHOOD * ADOLESCENCE * MATURITY * AGE * DEATH * CONCEPTION
AND:
NOT ONLY THAT ONE BUT THAT ONE & THAT TOO ...
THAT ONE & ...

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THE BUTTERFLY

It was the celestial or ætherial principle of the human mind, which the ancient artists represented under the symbol of the butterfly, which may be considered as one of the most elegant allegories of their elegant religion. This insect, when hatched from the egg, appears in the shape of a grub, crawling upon the earth, and feeding upon the leaves of plants. In this state, it was aptly made the emblem of man, in his earthly form, in which the ætherial vigour and activity of the celestial soul, the divine particula mentis, was supposed to be clogged and incumbered with the material body. When the grub was changed to a chrysalis, its stillness, torpor, and insensibility seemed to present a natural image of death, or the intermediate state between the cessation of the vital functions of the body and the final releasement of the soul by the fire, in which the body was consumed. The butterfly breaking from the torpid chrysalis, and mounting in the air, was no less natural an image of the celestial soul bursting from the restraints of matter, and mixing again with its native æther. The Greek artists, always studious of elegance, changed this, as well as other animal symbols, into a human form, retaining the wings as the characteristic members, by which the meaning might be known. The human body, which they added to them, is that of a beautiful girl, sometimes in the age of infancy, and sometimes of approaching maturity. So beautiful an allegory as this would naturally be a favourite subject of art among a people whose taste had attained the utmost pitch of refinement.

-- A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus: And Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, by Richard Payne Knight


I AM WITHOUT FORM
WITHOUT LIMIT
BEYOND SPACE BEYOND TIME
I AM IN EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING IS ME
I AM THE BLISS OF THE UNIVERSE.
EVERYTHING
AM I
RAM TIRTHA

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We must, moreover, remind those who try to prove that the ancient Egyptians knew nothing of and did not teach Reincarnation, that the “Soul” of the defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal, “co-eval with, and disappearing with the Solar boat,” i.e., for the cycle of necessity. This “Soul” emerges from the Tiaou (the realm of the cause of life) and joins the living on Earth by day, to return to Tiaou every night. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

"Into thine eyes gazed I lately, O Life: gold saw I gleam in thy night-eyes, -- my heart stood still with delight:
-- A golden bark saw I gleam on darkened waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swing-bark!

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

***

The ship is also symbolically the cradle and the coffin -- and therefore the earth itself, upon which gods and men sail through cosmic space.

-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List

***

The solar barge is a common motif in ancient Egypt. The barge was seen as the typical means of movement of the sun. In Egyptian mythology, the Sun God struggled against the monster Aphophis, who attempted to swallow the solar barge as it traveled across the heavens each day. In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912) Jung discussed the Egyptian "living sun-disc" (CW B, §153) and the motif of the sea monster (§ 549f). In his 1952 revision of this text, he noted that the battle with the sea monster represented the attempt to free ego-consciousness from the grip of the unconscious (Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, §539). The solar barge resembles some of the illustrations in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (ed. E. A. Wallis Budge [London: Arkana, 1899 / 1985]), i.e., the vignettes on pp. 390, 400, and 404). The oarsman is usually a falcon-headed Horus. The night journey of the sun God through the underworld is depicted in the Amduat, which has been seen as symbolic process of transformation.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the “Book of the Dead” contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the concealed side of the moon. The human being, in their esotericism, came out from the moon; he crossed the whole cycle of existence and then returned to his birth-place before issuing from it again. Thus the defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the god Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot (the celestial abyss), returning once more to Tiaou: an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life and reproduction, inhabits the moon.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

One day the father of the gods swallowed the female Titan Metis. (In Greek, metis means “wisdom”.) “Wisdom” survived in his belly and gave him advice from there. According to this story then, Zeus’s sole contribution toward the development of “his” wisdom was a cunning swallow. With this coarse but effective method (upaya) he could now present himself as the fount of all wisdom. He even became, through the birth of Athena, the masculine “bearer” of feminine prajna. Metis, the mother of Athena, actually gives birth to her daughter in the stomach of the father of the gods, but it is he who brings her willy-nilly into the world. In full armor, Athene, herself a symbol of wisdom, bursts from the top of Zeus’s skull. She is the “head birth” of her father, the product of his ideas. Here, the swallowing of the feminine and its imaginary (re)production (head birth) are the two techniques (upaya) with which Zeus manipulates wisdom (prajna, Metis, Athene) to his own ends ... the symbolic scenario of alchemy: the swallowing of the moon (of the feminine) by the sun (the masculine).

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, by Victor & Victoria Trimondi

***

According to Jan van Helsing (Geheimgesellschaften und ihre Macht ... [“Secret Societies and their Power”], 1993), Tibetan monks worked together with Templar Knights who were organized in the highest lodge of the “black sun” on the establishment of the Third Reich. The secret order had (and still has) an important base underground in the Himalayas. The ruler of the underground kingdom is said to be “Rigden Iyepo”, the king of the world, with his representative on the surface, the Dalai Lama. In Die schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo [The Black Sun of Tashi Lhunpo] (1996), McCloud reports on the survival of the national socialist Thule group in Tibet. They are the followers of a “sun oracle” there. For Wilhelm Landig (Götzen gegen Thule ... [Idols against Thule], n.d.), Tibet is also “the realm of the black sun!"

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, by Victor & Victoria Trimondi

***

The THIRD GRADE OF ELECT MASON, which proves to be one of Knighthood: Chevalier Elu, Troisieme Grade, governed by a Most Illustrious Grand Master. It opens at midnight, but a sun shines thereon, for it is in the full light of Christianity, the chivalry being devoted by day either to warfare with the infidels or to works of hospitality, while at midnight they give account of their progress. The Historical Discourse is important, as it comprises a particular version of the alleged transmission of Masonic secrets from the age of Solomon to that of the Crusades. It sets aside as fabulous those reveries which ascribe the origin of Masonry to Moses, Noah and Enoch. The true history of the Institution begins with Solomon and that of the Elect Grades with the Nine Masters, chosen to go in search of the traitors who assassinated the Master-Builder. When the Temple was finished these Masters elected a Chief, and when they found anyone who deserved to be enrolled among them he was pledged to faith in God, loyalty towards princes, charity towards Brethren and neighbours. They withdrew from worldly business, spending their life in prayer and ministering to the needs of the poor. The majority of these Illustrious Companions embraced Christianity when its light dawned on the world, and were more devoted than ever to works of mercy. The Order is said to have flourished till the end of the seventh century, after which it declined, till at the opening of the twelfth century it was reduced to a few persons gathered in a single Lodge, but following strictly therein its rule of life. This Lodge seems to have been established in Palestine, and indeed it is not suggested that the chivalry had existed so far outside the Holy Land. Various Christian pioneers joined its ranks during the Crusades, all indifferently being pledged to the rebuilding of Christian Temples, for it appears that the Chevaliers Elus still held themselves Masons. A time came when the Order united with that of St. John of Jerusalem. In this manner, carried back by Crusading royalties and nobles, it began to be known in Europe. Lodges were established in Italy, Spain, France, England, whence it passed into Scotland and took root at Kilwinning. When Edward the Black Prince returned from the eighth and last Crusade he became Protector of the Order in England, where it assumed the name of Freemasonry.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee. Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect? My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight brighter? The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. ...Just now hath my world become perfect, midnight is also mid-day.

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

***

And thus I went out in that night (it was the second night of the year 1914), and anxious expectation filled me. I went out to embrace the future. The path was wide and what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall."

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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The moon in Egypt was both the “Eye of Horus” and the “Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


BUT YOU'RE STILL ONLY SEEING HINTS
YOU'VE GOT A WAY TO GO YET

GATE / GATE / PARAGATE
PARASAMGATE
BODHI SVAHA!

GONE / GONE / GONE BEYOND / GONE BEYOND BEYOND
HAIL THE GOER

BEYOND EVEN CONCEIVING OF A PLACE
BEYOND WHICH YOU CAN GO BEYOND

WHO'S ADVENTUROUS ENOUGH TO WANT TO GO
ON THAT JOURNEY?
DO YOU REALIZE WHEN YOU GO ON THAT JOURNEY
IN ORDER TO GET TO THE DESTINATION
YOU
CAN NEVER GET TO THE DESTINATION?
IN THE PROCESS
YOU
MUST DIE
MUST DIE



PRETTY FIERCE JOURNEY PRETTY FIERCE REQUIREMENT
WE WANT VOLUNTEERS

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There is a deep philosophy underlying the earliest worship in the world, that of the Sun and of Fire. What says the esoteric teaching with regard to fire? “Fire,” it says, “is the most perfect and unadulterated reflection, in Heaven as on Earth, of the One Flame. It is Life and Death, the origin and the end of every material thing. It is divine ‘Substance.’” Thus, not only the Fire-Worshipper, the Parsee, but even the wandering savage tribes of America, which proclaim themselves “born of fire,” show more science in their creeds and truth in their superstitions, than all the speculations of modern physics and learning. The Christian who says: “God is a living Fire,” and speaks of the Pentecostal “Tongues of Fire” and of the “burning bush” of Moses, is as much a fire-worshipper as any other “heathen.” The Rosicrucians, among all the mystics and Kabalists, were those who defined Fire in the right and most correct way. Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles, and fires of the whole globe without diminishing that flame.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

I stand with tingling feet!
The flame to speed consumes me!
Oh. ... I flame ... I flame....

-- The Fire Regained, by Sidney M. Hirsch

***

This monograph quotes Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.... The monograph states that by going through karma and reincarnation, you will raise yourself to the state of "rose-croix" and will no longer have to live in the physical world.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


NOW: WE'LL MAKE THE JOURNEY
AS COMFORTABLE AS POSSIBLE
BUT: YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT
(AFTER YOU PASS THROUGH THE VAN ALLEN BELT)
YOU'RE GOING TO GET OUT
TO ANOTHER BELT OF RADIATION
WHICH IS GOING TO CRISP YOU COMPLETELY
AND
YOU WILL DIE
BUT THERE WILL BE AN
ESSENCE
LEFT THAT WILL GET THROUGH.
NOW: WHO WOULD LIKE TO VOLUNTEER?
READY?

WELL: COULDN'T WE MAKE
A SPECIALLY INSULATED SUIT?
NO. SORRY. CAN'T DO IT.
BUT: IF YOU PROPEL HARD ENOUGH
THERE WILL BE GOING THROUGH
THERE WILL BE SOMETHING THAT WILL
GET THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE
WE CAN'T REALLY DEFINE WHAT YOU'LL BE ...
BUT YOU'LL BE BEYOND THAT
WHY WOULD ANYONE GO ON A TRIP LIKE THAT?
ADVENTURE?
WELL: THE ONE THING ABOUT AN ADVENTURE IS:
THE ADVENTURER WANTS TO STAY AROUND
AND ADVENTURE. AND:
IF HE'S GOING TO BE CRISPED IN THE PROCESS
THERE'S GOING TO BE NO ADVENTURER LEFT
TO HAVE HAD THE ADVENTURE.

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BUT YOU SEE: THERE'S SOMETHING THAT
PULLS A PERSON TOWARD THIS JOURNEY
WAY AWAY BACK
DEEP INSIDE
IS A MEMORY
THERE IS SOMETHING
INSIDE EACH OF US
THAT COMES FROM BEHIND THAT VEIL

BEHIND THE PLACE OF OUR OWN BIRTH
IT'S AS IF YOU HAVE TASTED OF SOMETHING
SOMEWHERE IN YOUR PAST
THAT'S BEEN SO HIGH
SO MUCH LIGHT
SO MUCH ENERGY
THAT NOTHING YOU CAN EXPERIENCE
THROUGH ANY OF YOUR
SENSES
OR YOUR THOUGHTS
CAN BE ENOUGH!

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Conjunction or Coupling: O Luna, by means of my embracing, and sweet kisses, Thou art made beautiful, strong and mighty like as I am. O Sol, thou art to be preferred before all light. But yet thou needest me, as the cock does the hen.

-- Rosarium Philosophorum of the De Alchemia Opuscula, complur veterum philosophorum, by Johann Daniel Myliu

***

"To burn" means the same thing as ''to copulate."

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels


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SOMEWHERE INSIDE
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THERE IS A PLACE
WHICH IS TOTALLY FULFILLING
NOT A DESPERATE FLICK OF FULFILLMENT
IT IS A
STATE OF FULFILLMENT

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There are no ancient symbols, without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them; their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to nature and her Gods, and represents the abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both spiritual and physical nature. It was held sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the Buddhists after them; revered in China and Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who made of it a messenger as the Christians do now, who replace it with the water lily. It had, and still has, its mystic meaning which is identical with every nation on the earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones. With the Hindus, the lotus is the emblem of the productive power of nature, through the agency of fire and water. “Eternal!” says a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, “I see Brahm the creator enthroned in thee above the lotus!”; and Sir W. Jones shows, as noted in the Stanzas, that the seeds of the lotus contain, even before they germinate, perfectly-formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what one day, as perfected plants, they will become. The lotus, in India, is the symbol of prolific earth, and what is more, of Mount Meru. The four angels or genii of the four quarters of Heaven stand each on a lotus. The lotus is the two-fold type of the Divine and human hermaphrodite, being of dual sex, so to say.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


YOU MAY EXPERIENCE DESPAIR
THAT YOU'LL EVER KNOW THAT.
GOOD! BECAUSE THROUGH THE DESPAIR
AND THROUGH
THAT SURRENDER
COMES SURRENDER
YOU GET CLOSER TO IT.

It is by trials only, by the agonies of sorrow and the sharp discipline of adversities, that men and Nations attain initiation. The agonies of the garden of Gethsemane and those of the Cross on Calvary preceded the Resurrection and were the means of Redemption. It is with prosperity that God afflicts Humanity.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


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AND WHAT KEEPS YOU FROM
THAT PLACE
THAT GIVES YOU THAT
TOTAL FEELING
EXPERIENCE
KNOWING
OF FULFILLMENT IS
ALL OF THIS POSTURING ALL OF YOUR THOUGHTS
ALL YOUR WAY OF ORGANIZING YOUR WORLD
ALL OF YOUR PLANS ALL OF YOUR GAMES
YOUR EXPLORING.

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-- Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, English Grand Lodge for the Americas
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 7:31 am

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SOME OF US DO GO ON THIS JOURNEY
WE DIDN'T STAND UP AND SAY WE VOLUNTEER
(IT DIDN'T WORK THAT WAY AT ALL
IT'S NOT LIKE YOU HAD A CHOICE
OF VOLUNTEERING OR NOT VOLUNTEERING)
THAT ISN'T THE WAY IT WORKS.
IT'S AS IF YOU'RE PROPELLED INTO IT
LIKE THE MOTH INTO THE FLAME

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The same passionate longing of the moth for the star, of man for God...

Under the symbol of "moth and sun" we have dug down into the historic depths of the soul, and in doing this we have uncovered an old buried idol, the youthful, beautiful, fire-encircled and halo-crowned sun-hero, who, forever unattainable to the mortal, wanders upon the earth, causing night to follow day; winter, summer; death, life; and who returns again in rejuvenated splendor and gives light to new generations. The longing of the dreamer concealed behind the moth stands for him....

[T]he symbol of moth and sun is a condensation of two ideas, about one of which we have just spoken; the other is the moth and the flame...."Moth and Flame" may easily have the well-known erotic meaning of flying around the flame of passion until one's wings are burned. The passionate longing, that is to say, the libido, has its two sides; it is power which beautifies everything, and which under other circumstances destroys everything....

To be fruitful means, indeed, to destroy one's self, because with the rise of the succeeding generation the previous one has passed beyond its highest point; thus our descendants are our most dangerous enemies, whom we cannot overcome, for they will outlive us, and, therefore, without fail, will take the power from our enfeebled hands. The anxiety in the face of the erotic fate is wholly understandable, for there is something immeasurable therein. Fate usually hides unknown dangers, and the perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to venture upon life is easily explained by his desire to be allowed to stand still, so as not to take part in the dangerous battle of life. Whoever renounces the chance to experience must stifle in himself the wish for it, and, therefore, commits a sort of self-murder. From this the death phantasies which readily accompany the renunciation of the erotic wish are made clear....

Love raises man, not only above himself, but also above the bounds of his mortality and earthliness, up to divinity itself, and in the very act of raising him it destroys him....If, indeed, longing for the highest things -- if I may speak so -- is legitimate, then it lies in the circumstances that it leaves its human boundaries, that of sinfulness, and, therefore, destruction. The longing of the moth for the star is not absolutely pure and transparent, but glows in sultry mist, for man continues to be man. Through the excess of his longing he draws down the divine into the corruption of his passion; therefore, he seems to raise himself to the Divine; but with that his humanity is destroyed....

"... and now, behold! it hath
Returned to night, as rippling foam,
Which the leviathan hath lashed
From his unfathomable home,
When sporting on the face of the calm deep,
Subsides soon after he again hath dash'd
Down, down to where the ocean's fountains sleep."

Thus like the leviathan! We recall this overpowering weight in the scale of God's justice in regard to the man Job. There, where the deep sources of the ocean are, the leviathan lives; from there the all-destroying flood ascends, the all-engulfing flood of animal passion. That stifling, compressing feeling of the onward-surging impulse is projected mythologically as a flood which, rising up and over all, destroys all that exists, in order to allow a new and better creation to come forth from this destruction....

[W]ith the death of the moth in the light, evil is once more laid aside; the complex has once again, even if in a censored form, expressed itself. With that, however, the problem is not solved; all sorrow and every longing begins again from the beginning, but there is "Promise in the Air" -- the premonition of the Redeemer, of the "Well-beloved," of the Sun-hero, who again mounts to the height of the sun and again descends to the coldness of the winter, who is the light of hope from race to race, the image of the libido.

-- Psychology of the Unconscious, by Carl Gustav Jung

***

Reason is like a moth, and the Beloved is like a candle. Whensoever the moth dashes itself against the candle, it is consumed and destroyed. But the moth is so by nature, that however much it may be hurt by that consuming and agony it cannot do without the candle. If there were any animal like the moth that could not do without the light of the candle and dashed itself against that light, it would itself be a moth; whilst if the moth dashed itself against the light of the candle and the moth were not consumed, that indeed would not be a candle.Therefore the man who can do without God and makes no effort is no man at all; whilst if he were able to comprehend God, that indeed would not be God. Therefore the true man is he who is never free from striving, who revolves restlessly and ceaselessly about the light of the Majesty of God. And God is He who consumes man and makes him naught, being comprehended of no reason.

-- Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Arberry

***

Once again, if I find my way to the tavern of the Magi
The goodness of robe and rug I’ll gladly myself deny.
Like the pious, if today I put this wine behind
The keeper of the tavern will keep my cup far and dry.
And if moth-like, I spread my wings with ease
Into the heart of the flame, I’ll gladly fly.
Tell me not of Paradise, as long as I have your thought
With you in my heart, with nothing else identify.

-- Hafiz Ghazals 1-495, translated by Shahriar Shahriari


BUT YET NOBODY'S
PUSHING YOU. NOBODY'S
STANDING AROUND SAYING: GET IN!
TAKE EVERY THIRD MAN! HE GOES!
IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY EITHER.

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IT'S A LITTLE MORE LIKE THE IMAGE OF A
CATERPILLAR-ENCLOSING ITSELF
IN A COCOON IN ORDER TO GO THROUGH THE
METAMORPHOSIS
TO EMERGE AS A BUTTERFLY
THE CATERPILLAR DOESN'T SAY:
WELL NOW. I'M GOING TO CLIMB
INTO THIS COCOON AND COME OUT
A BUTTERFLY.

IT'S JUST AN INEVITABLE PROCESS
IT'S INEVITABLE
IT'S JUST HAPPENING
IT'S GOT TO HAPPEN THAT WAY

WE'RE TALKING ABOUT A METAMORPHOSIS
WE'RE TALKING ABOUT
GOING FROM A CATERPILLAR TO BUTTERFLY
WE'RE TALKING ABOUT
HOW TO BECOME A BUTTERFLY.
I MEAN: THE CATERPILLAR ISN'T WALKING AROUND
SAYING: MAN I'LL SOON BE A BUTTERFLY
BECAUSE: AS LONG AS HE'S BUSY
BEING A CATERPILLAR
HE CAN'T BE A BUTTERFLY.
IT'S ONLY WHEN CATERPILLARNESS IS DONE
THAT ONE STARTS TO BE A BUTTERFLY
AND THAT AGAIN IS PART OF THIS PARADOX
YOU CANNOT RIP AWAY CATERPILLARNESS

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THE WHOLE TRIP OCCURS IN AN UNFOLDING PROCESS
UNDER WHICH YOU HAVE NO CONTROL
WELL:
WHAT AM I DOING HERE
IF I HAVE
NO CONTROL?

THAT'S A HARD ONE!

CAN'T I SAY THIS IS
NONSENSE?

YOU MEAN
I DON'T HAVE
ANY CHOICE?

YOUR LECTURE
CHANGED MY WHOLE LIFE!

CAN'T I SAY
THIS IS IMPORTANT?

YOU THINK
THAT'S CHOICE?

NO. NOT AT ALL.
IT'S AN UNFOLDING PROCESS

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NO ACCIDENTS

In the Apostolic Constitutions it is singularly expressed: "As the pagans say now, that the resurrection was shown to us through an irrational man, on account of which they ridicule our doctrine when we confess that he who turned non-being into being through his power, can also bring the redeemed to resurrection."

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels


IF YOU COULD STAND BACK FAR ENOUGH AND
WATCH THE WHOLE PROCESS YOU WOULD SEE
YOU ARE A TOTALLY
DETERMINED BEING
THE VERY MOMENT YOU WILL WAKE UP
IS TOTALLY DETERMINED
HOW LONG YOU WILL SLEEP
IS TOTALLY DETERMINED
WHAT YOU WILL HEAR OF WHAT I SAY
IS TOTALLY DETERMINED
THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS IN THIS BUSINESS
AT ALL. ACCIDENTS ARE JUST FROM WHERE
YOU'RE LOOKING. TO THE EGO, IT LOOKS LIKE
IT'S MIRACLES AND ACCIDENTS.
NO MIRACLES. NO ACCIDENTS.
IT'S JUST YOUR VANTAGE POINT THAT
YOU'RE SORT OF ... STUCK IN.

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THIS WHOLE TRIP I'M TALKING ABOUT IS FRAUGHT
WITH
PARADOX PARADOX PARADOX PARADOX
THE MOST EXQUISITE PARADOX

The idea of Eternal Non-Being, which is the One Being, will appear a paradox to anyone who does not remember that we limit our ideas of being to our present consciousness of existence; making it a specific, instead of a generic term. But no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence and in such flowing language, as Eliphas Levi. He leads his reader through the most lovely, gorgeously blooming valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren rocky island. Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind? And this paradoxical element, minus its innermost significance, has now passed entirely into Christian theology and dogma!

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

But after all we do have some knowledge of Marxism and have learned how and when opposites can and must be combined; and what is most important is that in the three and a half years of our revolution we have actually combined opposites again and again."Nonetheless we have studied Marxism a bit, we have studied how and when opposites can and must be combined. The main thing is: in our revolution… we have in practice repeatedly combined opposites.”

-- The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes, by V.I. Lenin

***

It is necessary to note that opposite things work together even though nominally opposed.

--Discourses of Rumi (Fihi Ma Fihi), translated by A. J. Arberry

***

In Qabala, the world is reduced to nothing or, better NO-thing at the highest level, that is, the apparent Opposites are resolved; anything is true only insofar as the reverse is true also -- false, only insofar as the reverse also is equally false.

-- Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, by Allen Greenfield

***

"The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd." This statement saved me, and like rain after a long hot spell, it swept away everything in me which was too highly tensed....As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning....So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning....The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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Paracelsus, not Mesmer, is the original discoverer of so-called Mesmerism.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

Mesmerism is the most important branch of magic; and its phenomena are the effects of the universal agent which underlies all magic and has produced at all ages the so-called miracles. The ancients called it Chaos; Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World. According to the Hindus, the Deity in the shape of Æther pervades all things. It is the invisible, but, as we have said before, too tangible Fluid. Among other names this universal Proteus, or "the nebulous Almighty," as de Mirville calls it in derision, was termed by the theurgists "the living fire," the "Spirit of Light," and Magnes. This last appellation indicates its magnetic properties and shows its magical nature. For, as truly expressed by one of its enemies — mavgo" and mavgnh" are two branches growing from the same trunk, and shooting forth the same resultants.

Magnetism is a word for the derivation of which we have to look to an incredibly early epoch. The stone called magnet is believed by many to owe its name to Magnesia, a city or district in Thessaly, where these stones were found in quantity. We believe, however, the opinion of the Hermetists to be the correct one. The word Magh, magus, is derived from the Sanskrit Mahaji, the great or wise (the anointed by the divine wisdom). "Eumolpus is the mythic founder of the Eumolpidæ (priests); the priests traced their own wisdom to the Divine Intelligence." The various cosmogonies show that the Archæal Universal Soul was held by every nation as the "mind" of the Demiurgic Creator, the Sophia of the Gnostics, or the Holy Ghost as a female principle. As the Magi derived their name from it, so the Magnesian stone or Magnet was called in their honor, for they were the first to discover its wonderful properties. Their temples dotted the country in all directions, and among these were some temples of Hercules, hence the stone, when it once became known that the priests used it for their curative and magical purposes, received the name of the Magnesian or Heraclean stone. Socrates, speaking of it, remarks: "Euripides calls it the Magnesian stone, but the common people, the Heraclean." It was the country and stone which were called after the Magi, not the Magi after one or the other. Pliny informs us that the wedding-ring among the Romans was magnetized by the priests before the ceremony. The old Pagan historians are careful to keep silent on certain Mysteries of the "wise" (Magi) and Pausanias was warned in a dream, he says, not to unveil the holy rites of the temple of Demeter and Persephoneia at Athens.

-- Isis Unveiled, by Helena P. Blavatsky

***

'I have long held an opinion,' says that illustrious experimentalist, "almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin, or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call "atmospheric magnetism", they can influence the variations of temperature -- in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, etc., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril.'

-- The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

***

Christ is the magnet that draws to itself those parts or substances in man that are of divine origin, the Image; (signs of the Father), and carries them back to their heavenly birthplace.

-- Aion, by C.G. Jung


AS SOON AS YOU GIVE IT ALL UP
YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL
HOW ABOUT THAT ONE?
AS LONG AS YOU WANT POWER
YOU CAN'T HAVE IT.
THE MINUTE YOU DON'T WANT POWER
YOU'LL HAVE MORE THAN YOU EVER DREAMED
POSSIBLE
WHAT A WEIRD THING!
AS LONG AS YOU HAVE AN EGO
YOU'RE ON A LIMITED TRIP

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YOU'RE ON A TRIVIAL TRIP THAT'S GOING TO LAST
? MAYBE WHAT? 60 -- SAY 70 -- MAYBE 80 YEARS
AND FULL WITH FEAR OF ITS END
TRYING TO MAKE ITS OWN ETERNITY.
WELL: IF "I" AM NOT SPEAKING
IF "I" AM NOT WHAT "I" THOUGHT "I" WAS
HOW DID "I" GET INTO THIS
WHO AM "I"

FOR ONLY WHEN "I" KNOW WHO "I" AM WILL "I" KNOW WHAT IS
POSSIBLE

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UNDERSTANDING THE
POSSIBILITY
THERE ARE 3 WAYS IN WHICH ONE KNOWS
WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT TONIGHT
ONE WAY IN WHICH YOU KNOW ABOUT IT IS
THRU DIRECT EXPERIENCE

THRU SOME WAY OR ANOTHER
THRU BEING ALONE IN THE DESERT
THRU FALLING IN LOVE
THRU BEARING A CHILD
THRU NEARLY DYING

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It is good to die in the fire kindled by the good gold, at the place where sparks fly on every side, each one ascending to three hundred and seventy-five rows of angels, and each of which spreads itself to thousands and myriads, until they reach the Ancient of Days, who sits upon the Throne.

-- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon


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The spiritual body of man, receiving its nutriment from the spirit, could not unfold and develop if it were not for the presence of the physical body of man, with its elementary and elemental forces; for the physical body is comparable to the wood from which is produced the fire which gives light; there would be no light if there were nothing to burn. "The more there is wood to burn, the greater will be the combustion, and thus it is with the Lapis Philosophorum or Balsamo perpetuo in corpore humano."

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

“Eight Sons were born from the body of Aditi; she approached the gods with seven, but cast away the eighth, Marttanda,” our sun. “Eight houses were built by Mother. Eight houses for her Eight Divine sons; four large and four small ones. Eight brilliant suns, according to their age and merits. Bal-ilu (Marrtanda) was not satisfied, though his house was the largest. He began as the huge elephants do. He breathed into his stomach the vital airs of his brothers. He sought to devour them. The larger four were far away; far, on the margin of their kingdom. They were not robbed, and laughed. Do your worst, Sir, you cannot reach us, they said. But the smaller wept. They complained to the Mother. She exiled Bal-i-lu to the centre of her Kingdom, from whence he could not move. He watches and threatens. He pursues them, turning slowly around himself, they turning swiftly from him, and he following from afar the direction in which his brothers move on the path that encircles their houses. From that day he feeds on the sweat of the Mother’s body. He fills himself with her breath and refuse. Therefore, she rejected him.” In the Vedas he is called Loka-Chakshuh, “the Eye of the World.”

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


THRU TURNING ON
THRU YOGA
THRU TAKING ANY ONE OF YOUR SENSES
& PUSHING IT BEYOND ITSELF

GOING THRU IT YOU HAVE TOUCHED A PLACE INSIDE
YOURSELF THAT HAS AN INTUITIVE VALIDITY
IT'S INTUITIVELY VALID. INSIDE YOU KNOW IT'S RIGHT

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I'VE BEEN WITH (LITERALLY NOW) WELL OVER
100 PEOPLE WHO HAVE HAD SUCH AN EXPERIENCE
WHICH WAS POWERFUL AND VALID BUT IT WAS SO
DISCONTINUOUS WITH THEIR NORMAL CONSCIOUSNESS
THAT THEY SCREAMED FOR HELP

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THE HELP
THAT WAS
AVAILABLE
TO THEM
WAS A
GROUP
OF MINDS
WHICH SAID
'THAT'S ALL RIGHT
YOU'VE JUST GONE CRAZY'
THAT IS
THE EXPERIENCE YOU'VE JUST HAD
IS THE EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOSIS

In the initiation, AMORC makes the claim that their order is empowered by an egregore, or group consciousness, consisting of both incarnated beings and non-incarnate spiritual masters. The sincere members, who study and practice the teachings of the monographs, receive a spiritual energy or influx from the egregore, which provides the student with regenerative energy and a sense of direction.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 7:41 am

WILLIAM JAMES SAID:

OUR NORMAL WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS
IS BUT ONE SPECIAL TYPE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
WHILST ALL ABOUT IT
PARTED FROM IT BY THE FILMIEST OF SCREENS
THERE LIE
POTENTIAL FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ENTIRELY DIFFERENT

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We find, in the next place, the doctrine of Elemental spirits. "When you shall be numbered among the Children of the philosophers," says the "Comte de Gabalis," "and when your eyes shall have been strengthened by the use of the most sacred medecine, you will learn that the Elements are inhabited by creatures of a singular perfection, from the knowledge of, and communication with, whom the sin of Adam has deprived his most wretched posterity. Yon vast space stretching between earth and Heaven has far nobler dwellers than the birds and the gnats; these wide seas hold other guests than the whales and the dolphins; the depths of the earth are not reserved for the moles alone; and that element of fire which is nobler than all the rest was not created to remain void and useless." According to Paracelsus, "the Elementals are not spirits, because they have flesh, blood, and bones; they live and propagate offspring; they eat and talk, act and sleep, &c.... They are beings occupying a place between men and spirits, resembling men and women in their organisation and form, and resembling spirits in the rapidity of their locomotion." They must not be confounded with the Elementaries which are the astral bodies of the dead. [2] They are divided into four classes. "The air is replete with an innumerable multitude of creatures, having human shapes, somewhat fierce in appearance, but docile in reality; great lovers of the sciences, subtle, serviceable to the Sages, and enemies of the foolish and ignorant. Their wives and daughters are beauties of the masculine type.... The seas and streams are inhabited even as the air; the ancient Sages gave the names of Undines or Nymphs to these Elementals. There are few males among them, and the women are very numerous, and of extreme beauty; the daughters of men cannot compare with them. The earth is filled by gnomes even to its centre, creatures of diminutive size, guardians of mines, treasures, and precious stones. They furnish the Children of the Sages with all the money they desire, and ask little for their services but the distinction of being commanded. The gnomides, their wives, are tiny, but very pleasing, and their apparel is exceedingly curious. As to the Salamanders, those fiery dwellers in the realm of flame, they serve the Philosophers, but do not eagerly seek their company, and their wives and daughters are seldom visible. They transcend all the others in beauty, for they are natives of a purer element."

-- The Real History of the Rosicrucians, by Arthur Edward Waite


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Skandhas may produce Elementals by unconscious Kriyâshakti. Every Elemental that is thrown out by man must return to him sooner or later, since it is his own vibration. They thus become his Frankenstein. Elementals are simply effects producing effects. They are disembodied thoughts, good and bad. They remain crystallized in the Astral Light and are attracted by affinity and galvanized back into life again, when their originator returns to earth-life. You can paralyze them by reverse effects. Elementals are caught like a disease and hence are dangerous to ourselves and to others. This is why it is dangerous to influence others. The Elementals which live after your death are those which you implant in others: the rest remain latent till you are reincarnated, when they come to life in you.

-- The Esoteric Papers of Madame Blavatsky


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The true doctrine has also been taught by Jacob Boehme, an uneducated shoemaker but illuminated seer, from whom all of our great philosophers have borrowed ideas. He says: "The constellation is the outspoken Word. It is the instrument through which the holy, eternally speaking Word speaks and produces objective forms. It is like a great harmony of many voices and musical instruments. They are interacting powers, wherein the essence of sound (Akasha) is the substance, and this is taken up by the Fiat and causes corporeity. This substance is the astral spirit. In it the elements become coagulated (corporified), and thus forms are born, comparable to the hatching of an egg brooded over by a hen" (Myster. Magn., xi. 26).

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.


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"The Central Sun causes Fohat to collect primordial dust in the form of balls, to impel them to move in converging lines and finally to approach each other and aggregate.... Being scattered in Space, without order or system, the world-germs come into frequent collision until their final aggregation, after which they become wanderers (Comets). Then the battles and struggles begin. The older attract the younger, while others repel them. Many perish, devoured by their stronger companions. Those that escape become worlds.” -- To put it briefly, the Curds (world-stuff) become wanderers, (Comets), these become stars, and the stars (the centres of vortices) our sun and planets.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


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WE MAY GO THROUGH LIFE
WITHOUT SUSPECTING THEIR EXISTENCE
BUT APPLY THE REQUISITE STIMULUS AND AT A TOUCH
THEY ARE THERE IN ALL THEIR COMPLETENESS
DEFINITE TYPES OF MENTALITY WHICH PROBABLY SOMEWHERE
HAVE THEIR FIELD OF APPLICATION AND ADAPTATION

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead. In sober truth, every “Spirit” so-called is either a disembodied or a future man. That a Spirit is endowed with intelligence is a proof to the Occultist that that Being must have been a man, and acquired his knowledge and intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole finite Kosmos. But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or Intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually. This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact, in Esoteric philosophy, and a very apparent one too.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


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The crocodile is the Egyptian dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the sun in a ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a crocodile “to show the motion of the Sun in the moyst (Space)”. The crocodile was moreover, the symbol of Egypt herself — the lower, as being the more swampy of the two countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the sun in the ship on the Ether of Space meant that the hermetic matter is the principle, or basis, of gold, or again the philosophical sun; the water, within which the crocodile is swimming, is that water or matter made liquid; the ship herself, finally, representing the vessel of nature, in which the sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot: because it is the sun which conducts the work by his action upon the moist or mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


NO ACCOUNT OF THE UNIVERSE IN ITS TOTALITY
CAN BE FINAL WHICH LEAVES THESE OTHER FORMS
OF CONSCIOUSNESS QUITE DISREGARDED.
HOW TO REGARD THEM IS THE QUESTION
FOR THEY ARE SO DISCONTINUOUS WITH ORDINARY
CONSCIOUSNESS. THEY MAY DETERMINE
ATTITUDES, THOUGH THEY CANNOT FURNISH FORMULAS
AND OPEN A REGION THOUGH THEY FAIL TO GIVE A MAP.
AT ANY RATE, CONCLUDES JAMES,
THEY FORBID OUR PREMATURE CLOSING OF ACCOUNTS
WITH REALITY
IN SPITE OF WHAT HE SAID
WE'VE CLOSED OUR ACCOUNTS WITH REALITY
(MOST OF US)

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HA HA HA

Ha explained: "Now, however, you make a bridge between you and the one longs for the below. But the serpent crawls at the top and draws the sun up. Then both of you move upward and want to go to the upper (Image), but the sun is below and tries to draw you down. But you draw a line above the below and long for the above and are completely at one. There the serpent comes and wants to drink from the vessel of the below. But there comes the upper cone and stops. Like the serpent, the looking coils back and moves forward again and afterward you very much (--) long to return. But the lower sun pulls and thus you become balanced again. But soon you fall backward, since the one has reached out toward the upper sun. The other does not want this and so you fall asunder, and therefore you must bind yourselves together three times. Then you stand upright again and you hold both suns before you, as if they were your eyes, the light of the above and the below before you and you stretch your arms out toward it, and you come together to become one and must separate the two suns and you long to return a little to the lower and reach out toward the upper. But the lower cone has swallowed the upper cone into itself, because the suns were so close. Therefore you place the upper cone back up again, and because the lower is then no longer there, you want to draw it up again and have a profound longing for the lower cone, while it is empty Above, since the sun Above the line is invisible. Because you have longed to return downward for so long, the upper cone comes down and tries to capture the invisible lower sun within itself. There the serpent's way goes at the very top, you are split and everything below is beneath the ground. You long to be further above, but the lower longing already comes crawling like a serpent, and you build a prison over her. But there the lower comes up, you long to be at the very bottom and the two suns suddenly reappear, close together. You long for this and come to be imprisoned. Then the one is defiant and the other longs for the below. The prison opens, the one longs even more to be below, but the defiant one longs for the above and is no longer defiant, but longs for what is to come. And thus it comes to pass: the sun rises at the bottom, but it is imprisoned and above three nest boxes are made for you two and the upper sun, which you expect, because you have imprisoned the lower one. But now the upper cone comes down powerfully and divides you and swallows the lower cone. This is impossible. Therefore you place the cones tip to tip and curl up toward the front in the center. Because that's no way to leave matters! So it has to happen otherwise. The one attempts to reach upward, the other downward; you must strive to do this, since if the tips of the cones meet, they can hardly be separated anymore --therefore I have placed the hard seed in-between. Tip to tip -- that would be too beautifully regular. This pleases father and mother, but where does that leave me? And my seed? Therefore a quick change of plan! One makes a bridge between you both, imprisons the lower sun again, the one longs for the above and the below, but the other longs especially strongly for the forward, above and below. Thus the future can become -- see, how well I can already say it -- yes, indeed, I am clever -- cleverer than you -- since you have taken matters in hand so well, you also get everything beneath the roof and into the house, the serpent, and the two suns. That is always most amusing. But you are separated and because you have drawn the line above, the serpent and the suns are too far below. This happens because beforehand you curled around yourself from below. But you come together and into agreement and stand upright, because it is good and amusing and fine and you say: thus shall it remain. But down comes the upper cone, because it felt dissatisfied, that you had set a limit above beforehand. The upper cone reaches out immediately for its sun -- but there is nowhere a sun to be found anymore and the serpent also jumps up, to catch the suns. You fall over, and one of you is eaten by the lower cone. With the help of the upper cone you get him out and in return you give the lower cone its sun and the upper cone its as well. You spread yourself out like the one-eyed, who wanders in heaven and hold the cones beneath you -- but in the end matters still go awry. You leave the cones and the suns to go and stand side by side and still do not want the same. In the end you agree to bind yourself threefold to the upper cone descending from above. / I am called Ha-Ha-Ha -- a jolly name -- I am clever -- look here, my last sign, that is the magic of the white man who lived in the great magic house, the magic which you call Christianity. Your medicine man said so himself: I and the father are one, no one comes to the father other than through me. I told you so, the upper cone is the father. He has bound himself threefold to you and stands between the other and the father. Therefore the other must go through him, if he wants to reach the cone" (pp. 13-14).

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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Hermetists called into being, out of the elements, the shapes of salamanders, gnomes, undines, and sylphs, which they did not pretend to create, but simply to make visible by holding open the door of nature, so that, under favoring conditions, they might step into view. For instance, if man has a preponderance of the Earthly, gnomic element, the gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals — money and wealth, and so on.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious creative powers, the gnomes who work under the earth, i.e., below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also lay all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were 'on the tip of the tongue,' making us say the wrong thing, etc. They give an eye to everything that has not already been anticipated by consciousness and the functions at its disposal ... deeper insight will show that the primitive and archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of significant relationships and symbolic meanings, and instead of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wisdom.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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'THAT EXPERIENCE YOU HAD IS PSYCHOTIC'
'I'LL GIVE YOU THORAZINE'
'IT'S NOT VALID'
'YOU'RE HALLUCINATING'
'WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'RE GOD?'

THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE POSSIBILITY MAY
HAVE COME TO YOU DIRECTLY THROUGH THE
EXPERIENCE ITSELF OR:
IT MAY HAVE COME TO YOU THROUGH INFERENCE,
THROUGH YOUR INTELLECT:
YOU MAY HAVE REASONED & REASONED UNTIL YOU
SAW THE PECULIAR POSITION THAT RATIONAL MAN
IS IN & YOU REALIZED THAT THERE MUST BE
SOMETHING ELSE ALTHOUGH YOU HAVE NOT
EXPERIENCED IT. YOU JUST INFER THE PRESENCE
OF
"SOMETHING ELSE"

What we call the Reason, that is, our imperfect human reason, not only may, but assuredly will, lead us away from the Truth in regard to things invisible and especially those of the Infinite, if we determine to believe nothing but that which it can demonstrate, or not to believe that which it can by its processes of logic prove to be contradictory, unreasonable, or absurd. Its tape-line cannot measure the arcs of Infinity.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


IT DOESN'T QUITE MAKE SENSE
NOTHING "TURNS YOU ON"
YOU HAVEN'T EXPERIENCED IT DIRECTLY BUT
YOU FIGURED THERE MUST BE
SOMETHING ELSE SOMETHING THERE
& THEN YOU READ ALL THE WRITINGS OF
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS & ST. THERESA AVILA
& ON & ON ALL THE MYSTICS
& VISIONARIES IN RECORDED HISTORY
& YOU SAY: 'WELL, THEY CAN'T ALL BE NUTS
THEY MUST BE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING
SO YOU SORT OF INFER THE PRESENCE OF THIS
OTHER THING, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT IN YOUR GUTS

NOW THAT'S A TOUGH ONE.
TO BE IN THAT POSITION

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The Dhyani-Buddhas of the two higher groups, at the upper rung of the ladder of being, namely, the “Watchers” or the “Architects,” furnished the many and various races with divine kings and leaders. It is the latter who taught humanity their arts and sciences, and the former who revealed to the incarnated Monads the great spiritual truths of the transcendental worlds, the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity, the “Wise Men” of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last cataclysm and shifting of continents, who had passed their lives in learning, not teaching, men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree. None of these Beings have either individuality or personality as separate Entities, i.e., they have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, “I am myself and no one else;” in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the characteristic of their respective hierarchies, not of their units. The collective “Creator” of the Universe is no personal deity, i.e., an imperfect extra-cosmic god, but only the aggregate of the Dhyan-Chohans and the other forces. By eating of the fruit of knowledge which dispels ignorance, man becomes like one of the Elohim or the Dhyanis; and once on their plane the Spirit of Solidarity and perfect Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him and protect him in every particular.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


THEN THE THIRD WAY IS
YOU TRUST THE FACT THAT
THERE ARE
REALIZED BEINGS
AND THEY SAID IT
& THEREFORE YOU KNOW IT TO BE TRUE
IT'S NOT INFERENCE ANY MORE
IT'S NOT AN INTELLECTUAL PROCESS
YOU JUST ACCEPT WHAT THEY HAVE SAID
THAT'S FAITH

Islam means submission, that is, submission to the will of God. The believer can just commend himself to the will of God simply because it is the will of God. He feels secure and does not ask why this is so and that is different -- he fulfills the divine law simply because it is the revealed law of God. He accepts his fate as being immutable and at the most attempts by means of prayer to implore for mercy from God when the burden becomes too great for him. But the sign of the true believer will consistently be that he does not ask for release from the burden, but rather for the strength to the bale to bear it. "Lead us in the way of those who do not err," the Prophet prescribes to those who pray. This faithful condition is what is most worthy to strive after according to all religious systems.

-- The Practice of the Ancient Turkish Freemasons: The Key to the Understanding of Alchemy, by Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf

***

If we are to ask now, more than a generation later, how normal people could have committed the Nazi atrocities, we need only look at the normal people in American cults today. This may seem a harsh comparison; the parallels are certainly not universally applicable. Still, it would not be unfair to say that the same sort of normal people who obeyed the crazy commands of the Nazi hierarchy are today obeying the crazy commands of some contemporary cult leaders. The Brahmins, using the authority of the Vedas, created, through the laws of Manu, a totalitarian organization which corrupted the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and so invaded every area of private Hindu life that it was impossible to go to the bathroom without obeying certain strictures. They squeezed the heart out of India. Twentieth-century Aryans, emulating the Brahmins, set up their own ideas of caste, but instead of favoring hereditary aristocracy, made it possible for the credulous, ambitious, and unscrupulous to rise to the top.

-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

***

"God does not rejoice to see fools, blockheads, and simpletons, who are ready to believe anything, no matter how absurd it may be; neither does He desire that only one wise and learned man should be in each country, and that the other people should follow him blindly, as the sheep follow a ram; but we should all have our knowledge in God, and take it out of the universal fountain of wisdom."

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.


SEE: WE'VE GOTTEN SO SUPER-SOPHISTICATED
IN OUR EVALUATIVE MECHANISMS
THAT YOU QUESTION EVERYTHING YOU HEAR
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU'RE NOT BEING HUSTLED?
I MEAN: WHAT WAS JESUS UP TO?
WHAT'S THE GAME, MAN?
WHAT'S HE INTO?
& YOU ESPECIALLY FEEL PARANOID
IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE KEEPERS OF THE TABLES
IN THE TEMPLE
IF YOU ARE COMMITTED TO AN EXISTING SYSTEM
WITH GREAT ATTACHMENT
WITH GREAT ATTACHMENT

SOME WAY OR OTHER
MOST OF YOU IN THIS ROOM
(MOST OF YOU, NOT ALL OF YOU) MOST OF YOU
HAVE SENSED THE POSSIBILITY
BUT YOU CAN'T QUITE ...!

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"Christ says, 'He who is with Me denies himself.' This means that he must rise superior to that which belongs to Nature in him. He must take his cross upon his shoulders, namely, the cross which Nature has put upon him, Take Nature upon your shoulders and carry her, but do not identify yourself with her. Love your neighbour, and free yourself of that carnal reason which forces you to be a servant of self."

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

In order to reconcile the popular religions, and particularly the Christian, with this new system, he made the whole history of the heathen gods an allegory, maintaining that they were only celestial ministers, entitled to an inferior kind of worship; and he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an excellent man and the friend of God, but alleged that it was not his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons, and that his only intention was to ... reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the Wisdom of the ancients."

-- New Platonism and Alchemy, by Alexander Wilder

***

Chamberlain is careful to tell us that he does not intend to lift the veil which screens the Holy of Holies of his own belief. But it must be clear from such utterances as those upon which I have drawn above, how noble and how exalted is the conception of Christ and of His teaching which is borne in on the mind of one of the foremost thinkers of our day. He draws his inspiration at the fountainhead. For the dogmas of oecumenical councils, for the superstitions and fables of monks, he has an adequate respect: he preaches Christ and Him crucified: that is to him all-sufficing. Can there be a purer ideal?

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


SURRENDER
WHAT ARE YOU GIVING UP? A HOLLOW LITTLE TRIP
THAT'S GOOD FOR ANOTHER 40 YEARS AT BEST.
YOU'RE GIVING IT UP FOR:
ETERNAL UNION
WITH
PURE ENERGY & PURE LIGHT
BECAUSE SURRENDER MEANS
YOU
NO LONGER DIE
IT'S AS SIMPLE
AS THAT
THAT'S WHAT IT MEANS.
BECAUSE: YOU THAT LIVES AND DIES IS
YOUR EGO
AND FEAR OF DEATH ONLY COMES THROUGH
THE BRITTLENESS OF THE EGO
TOTAL TOTAL
SURRENDER SURRENDER
THERE'S NO MORE YOU, NO MORE
LIFE AND DEATH

YEAH I'M GOING TO DIE WOW! DIG THAT! I'M GOING
TO LIVE WOW! DIG THAT! GARBAGE WOW!
NEW BLOSSOMS ON THE TREE WOW!
PATTERNS OF ENERGY
ALL PATTERNS OF ENERGY
YOU'RE PART OF IT ALL
THAT'S THE PLACE!

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SO: MY FATHER SAYS TO ME:
WHEN ARE YOU GOING BACK TO INDIA?
AND I SAY:
I'M GOING BACK WHEN THE GURU SAYS
I AM TO COME BACK
IN TWO YEARS.
SO MY FATHER SAYS:
DO YOU DO EVERYTHING HE SAYS?
DON'T YOU HAVE A MIND OF YOUR OWN?

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FIDELIS SUM / I AM FAITHFUL -- Let the mind be trusting, let there be faith and concord, Even unto the destruction of death, And there will be, assuredly, a gilded door in the sky.

-- The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer


WE'RE GIVING YOU THIS EXQUISITE POSITION IN
THIS COMPANY AND WE WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU'LL
HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF INDEPENDENT DECISION-
MAKING-POWER ***

My Fuhrer (My Leader): Just as we have always done our duty to you in the past, so too in the future, we await your orders alone. And we, Comrades, know only to obey the orders of our Fuhrer and to prove that we have remained true to the Fuhrer. Our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. Hail Victory! Hail Victory!

-- Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Rifenstahl


WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO TODAY, MARTY?
I DON'T CARE
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

I REMEMBER A FEW DAYS STAYING IN LONDON, WE
HAD FLED FROM COPENHAGEN WHERE WE HAD A VERY
UNFORTUNATE SCENE AT A PSYCHOLOGICAL
CONVENTION. WE WERE IN LONDON AND TIM AND BILL
BURROUGHS AND I WERE WALKING DOWN THE STREET
HIGH ON SOMETHING OR OTHER AND WE WERE
SPENDING DAYS GOING FROM PARK TO TEA ROOM TO
PARK TO TEA ROOM: AND EVERY NOW AND THEN WE'D
HIT A CORNER AND SOMEBODY WOULD SAY: WELL
SHOULD WE CROSS THE STREET ... AND WE'D STAND
THERE AND NOBODY WOULD SEEM TO CARE,
BECAUSE WE WERE ALL FULFILLED AT THAT MOMENT,
RIGHT THERE ON THE STREET CORNER IN LONDON.
WE WERE ALL JUST
VERY
VERY
HIGH

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"That unfulfilled thing ... low-level tragi-comedy type thing ... this extraordinary thing ... a phony kind of liberal thing ... a horrible thing ... socialize this thing ... waiting for something to do that thing ... this interesting thing ... that sort of thing ... the whole thing ... a strange thing ... the one thing ... that powerful thing ... the last thing ... the bad thing ... the same thing ... a weird thing ... the other thing ... so many things ... this absurd thing ... the final thing ... a temporal thing ... do your thing ... good thing ... external thing ... a new thing ... a full-time thing ... a western thing ... an Indian thing ... beyond the thing ... the highest thing ... the Lama Govinda thing ... a combination of things ... a worldly thing ... doing its thing ... you do your thing ... your mind does its thing ... your senses do their thing ... the funny thing ... ten thousand things ... you still do your thing ... cars and things ... the minister's doing his thing ... the real thing ... that's the thing ... all things ... the only thing ... beautiful things ... wild out-of-control mind thing ..."

-- Ram Dass, "Be Here Now"


YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE
THAT URGE THAT DESIRE
THAT UNFULFILLED
THING

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Of that Equilibrium between Authority and Individual Action which constitutes Free Government, by settling on immutable foundations Liberty with Obedience to Law, Equality with Subjection to Authority, and Fraternity with Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will of the Present, expressed by the Vote of the People, and the Passive Stability and Permanence of the Will of the Past, expressed in constitutions of government, written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and authority; which is represented by the arch resting on the two columns, Jachin and Boaz, that stand at the portals of the Temple builded by Wisdom, on one of which Masonry sets the celestial Globe, symbol of the spiritual part of our composite nature, and on the other the terrestrial Globe, symbol of the material part.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


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JUST LET IT BE
JUST
BE
BE
BE
BE MORE

"The double lithoi [upright phalli] placed always in front of every temple, Christian as well as heathen."

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The great characteristic attribute [of the deity] was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions.

-- A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus: And Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, by Richard Payne Knight


MORE
MORE

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If you would know Him when He comes, then check the tendency to decry the great, and to find faults in what is noble. So many people, looking at the sun, only see the spots, and no man, they say, is a hero to his valet de chambre. But why not? Not because he is not heroic, but because the heart of the valet de chambre cannot appreciate heroism. We criticise; we find petty faults; we lay stress on petty mistakes, and we miss the soul of goodness and of greatness, perchance, in those who be against the common feeling of the time. Be not ashamed to admire. Be not ashamed to be reverent to that which is greater, nobler than yourself, for the power to admire means really the faculty to achieve. That which you recognise to be noble, by the very recognition you rise nearer to it and become liker to it. Reverence greatness wherever you see it, in outer life, in inner life.

-- The Order of the Star in the East: Its Outer and Inner Work, by by Professor E. A. Wodehouse, M.A.

***

Enoch, the fifth from Seth, who prophesied of the deluge and conflagration, lest arts and sciences should slip out of the knowledge of men, raised two columns, one of brick, the other of stone, and inscribed their inventions upon them, that, if the pillar of brick happened to be overthrown by the Flood, that of stone might remain.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

The Candidate for the Second, or Fellow Craft Degree (FELLOW CRAFT = 125 = SOTHIS ABLAZE) is told at his initiation that the last seven steps leading to ‘the Middle Chamber of King Solomon’s Temple’ represent: “…especially, the seven liberal arts and sciences, which are grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.” These are, of course, the very arts and sciences taught to humanity by the Gods of Sirius (Sothis) in ancient times. The candidate earlier is conducted by: “two large brazen pillars, one on the right and one on the left hand. The name of the one on the left hand is Boaz, and signifies strength; the name of the one on the right is Jachin, and denotes establishment…These are representative of the two pillars erected at the outer porch of King Solomon’s Temple. They are said to have been in height eighteen cubits, twelve in circumference, and four in diameter.” After an excruciatingly detailed description, the conductor points to the top of the pillars: “…on the top of each (is) a globe, or ball; these globes are two artificial spherical bodies; on the convex surfaces of which are represented the countries, seas, and various parts of the earth, the face of the heavens, the planetary revolutions; and are said to be thus extensive to denote the universality of Masonry.”

-- Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, by Allen Greenfield

***

In the Kathopanishad (chapter. v, verse 9) it is stated that "Some men, according to their deeds, go into the womb and others into the 'sthanu.'" "Sthanu" is a Sanskrit word, which means "motionless," but it also means "a pillar" ... In the Book of Revelation we find these worlds: "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God and he shall go no more out," referring to entire liberation from concrete existence.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel


WHAT'S HOLDING YOU BACK? YOUR THOUGHTS, HUH?
YOU'VE GOT TO GIVE THEM UP
JUST EGO PLANNING
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE?
WELL
IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW
BUT LATER? ... FORGET IT BABY
THAT'S LATER
NOW IS
NOW
ARE YOU GOING TO
BE HERE
OR NOT?
IT'S AS SIMPLE AS
THAT!

BUT I'M SO YOUNG!
I HAVE SO MANY THINGS TO DO YET!
WELL! THAT'LL SURE KEEP YOU FROM
BEING HERE & NOW
LIFE IS PASSING ME BY!
HMMMMMM
BUT, IF I LIVE JUST IN THE HERE & NOW
WON'T THERE BE CHAOS? WHAT HAPPENS
IF THE TELEPHONE RINGS?
WELL: THE HERE & NOW IS THE FACT
THAT THE TELEPHONE IS RINGING!
PICK IT UP!
WELL: WHAT IF SOMEBODY WANTS TO
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT TO SEE ME
3 WEEKS FROM NOW?
RIGHT!
WRITE IT DOWN. THAT'S HERE & NOW
WELL, WHAT HAPPENS 3 WEEKS FROM NOW
?
3 WEEKS FROM NOW THERE'S THAT
APPOINTMENT. THEN: THAT IS HERE & NOW

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WHEN YOUR CHILD COMES DOWN THE STAIRS
THIS IS THE FIRST MOMENT ALL OVER AGAIN
THIS IS
BUDDHA MEETING BUDDHA

OVER TOAST
OVER MILK
OVER MU TEA
& COFFEE
& PORRIDGE
& BROWN RICE

WE NEVER HAD BREAKFAST BEFORE!
THIS IS IT!!
THIS IS ALL THERE IS
RIGHT NOW!
IF IT'S NOT GOOD ENUF, MAN, IT'S NOT GOOD ENUF

Each of us makes such applications to his own faith and creed, of the symbols and ceremonies of this Degree, as seems to him proper. With these special interpretations we have here nothing to do. Like the legend of the Master Khūrūm, in which some see figured the condemnation and sufferings of Christ; others those of the unfortunate Grand Master of the Templars; others those of the first Charles, King of England; and others still the annual descent of the Sun at the winter Solstice to the regions of darkness, the basis of many an ancient legend; so the ceremonies of this Degree receive different explanations; each interpreting them for himself, and being offended at the interpretation of no other.

In no other way could Masonry possess its character of Universality; that character which has ever been peculiar to it from its origin; and which enables two Kings, worshippers of different Deities, to sit together as Masters, while the walls of the first temple arose; and the men of Gebal, bowing down to the Phœnician Gods, to work by the side of the Hebrews to whom those Gods were abomination; and to sit with them in the same Lodge as brethren.

The first Masonic Legislator whose memory is preserved to us by history, was Buddha, who, about a thousand years before the Christian era, reformed the religion of Manous. He called to the Priesthood all men, without distinction of caste, who felt themselves inspired by God to instruct men. Those who so associated themselves formed a Society of Prophets under the name of Samaneans. They recognized the existence of a single uncreated God, in whose bosom everything grows, is developed and transformed. The worship of this God reposed upon the obedience of all the beings He created. His feasts were those of the Solstices. The doctrines of Buddha pervaded India, China, and Japan. The Priests of Brahma, professing a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by Superstition, united together against Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism, exterminated its followers. But their blood fertilized the new doctrine, which produced a new Society under the name of Gymnosophists; and a large number, fleeing to Ireland, planted their doctrines there, and there erected the round towers, some of which still stand, solid and unshaken as at first, visible monuments of the remotest ages.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


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NOW: ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO I'M LIVING IN
THIS COMMUNITY IN CALIFORNIA, WITH
A VERY VERY BEAUTIFUL HIGH BEING,
STEVE DURKEE, A VISIONARY ARTIST:
A VERY BEAUTIFUL GUY, HIS WIFE
AND CHILD, AND I'D HAVE A DAY OFF.
IT WOULD BE SATURDAY AND WE'D GO
TO THE STORE, THE DOG, THE BABIES
WE'D ALL GET INTO THE VOLKSWAGEN
MICROBUS. THERE'D BE JANE,
THE GAL I WAS LIVING WITH, AND
HER BABY AND ME AND STEVE AND
BARBARA, AND THE
WHOLE SCENE, GOING SHOPPING.

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WAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH

WE'D GET TO THE DOOR AND DAKOTA (COBY)
STEVE'S DAUGHTER WOULD START TO CRY
WELL NOW. WE GOTTA GET TO THE STORE.
I HAVE SATURDAY MORNINGS FREE AND
SATURDAYS WE SHOP ALL RIGHT COBY. COOL IT!
COBY DOESN'T COOL IT. SHE CRIES.
WELL, MAYBE WE'LL
GO TO THE STORE
WITH COBY CRYING OR
MAYBE BARBARA
HAD BETTER
STAY HOME
WITH COBY.
NO, COBY DOESN'T
LIKE THAT.
SHE CRIES LOUDER.

LET'S GO! COME ON!
ARE WE GOING
OR AREN'T WE?

WHAT'S WRONG
COBY?

SHE'S JUST
BEING A KID.

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STEVE SAYS:
WHAT'S THE USE OF GOING TO THE STORE
IT'S LIKE WHAT PRICE EFFICIENCY
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VIBRATIONS WHAT
HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN BEINGS IN THAT SHUFFLE

SO WE'D DO THIS ABSURD THING
WE'D ALL STOP AND GATHER
WE'D ALL SIT DOWN & JOIN HANDS
AROUND THIS LITTLE KID
WE'D COOL OURSELVES OUT
COBY WOULD STOP CRYING
THEN WE'D GO TO THE STORE

AND STEVE TAUGHT ME THAT:

IF YOU GET SO EFFICIENT ...
IF YOU'VE GOT TO TURN OFF ALL THE
VIBRATIONS OF THE SCENE ...
BECAUSE YOU'RE SO BUSY
ABOUT THE FUTURE
OR THE PAST
OR TIME HAS CAUGHT YOU ...
IT COSTS TOO MUCH!!
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 8:01 am

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1-2-ME

From the Heavens come the spiritual and immortal portion of man; from the Earth his material and mortal portion. ... and he attains the purposes of his being only when the two natures that are in him are in just equilibrium.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

An adept keeps his two personalities — the spiritual and the physical — entirely separated.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

In man a twofold and discordant nature is discerned conciliated into one, i.e. the nature of soul and body; the former of which is divine, and the latter shadowy and dark, the source of contention and strife.

-- Two Orations of the Emperor Julian, One to the Sovereign Sun and the Other to the Mother of the Gods, by Flavius Claudius Julianus

***

In order to be able to acquire the primeval feminine force of the universe, a yogi must have mastered the appropriate spiritual methods (upaya), which we examine in detail later in this study. The well-known investigator of Tibetan culture, David Snellgrove, describes their chief function as the transmutation of the feminine form into the masculine with the intention of accumulating power. It is for this and no other reason that the tantric seeks contact with a female.... the powerful feminine creates the world, the “uncreative” masculine yogi can only become a creator if he appropriates the creative powers of the goddess. “May I be born from birth to birth”, he thus cries in the Hevajra Tantra, “concentrating in myself the essence of woman”. He is the sorcerer who believes that all power is feminine, and that he knows the secret of how to manipulate it.

The key to his dreams of omnipotence lies in how he is able to transform himself into a “supernatural” being, an androgyne who has access to the potentials of both sexes. The two sexual energies now lose their equality and are brought into a hierarchical relation with each other in which the masculine part exercises absolute control over the feminine....

Since the “bisexuality” of the yogi represents a precondition for the development of his power, it forms a central topic of discussion in every highest tantra. It is known simply as the “two-in-one” principle, which suspends all oppositions, such as wisdom and method, subject and object, emptiness and compassion, but above all masculine and feminine. Other phrases include “bipolarity” or the realization of “bisexual divinity within one’s own body”.

However, the “two-in-one” principle is not directed at a state beyond sexuality and erotic love, as modern interpreters often misunderstand it to be. The tantric master deliberately utilizes the masculine/feminine sexual energies to obtain and exercise power and does not destroy them, even if they are only present within his own identity after the initiation. They continue to function there as the two polar primeval forces, but now within the androgynous yogi.

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, by Victor & Victoria Trimondi

***

[T]he feeling-attitude breaks down and the progression of libido also ceases. The vital feeling that was present before disappears, and in its place the psychic value of certain conscious contents increases in an unpleasant way; subjective contents and reactions press to the fore and the situation becomes full of affect and ripe for explosions. These symptoms indicate a damming up of libido, and the stoppage is always marked by the breaking up of the pairs of opposites. During the progression of libido the pairs of opposites are united in the co-ordinated flow of psychic processes. Their working together makes possible the balanced regularity of these processes, which without this inner polarity would become one-sided and unreasonable. We are therefore justified in regarding all extravagant and exaggerated behaviour as a loss of balance, because the co-ordinating effect of the opposite impulse is obviously lacking. Hence it is essential for progression, which is the successful achievement of adaptation, that impulse and counter-impulse, positive and negative, should reach a state of regular interaction and mutual influence. This balancing and combining of pairs of opposites can be seen, for instance, in the process of reflection that precedes a difficult decision. But in the stoppage of libido that occurs when progression has become impossible, positive and negative can no longer unite in co-ordinated action, because both have attained an equal value which keeps the scales balanced. The longer the stoppage lasts, the more the value of the opposed positions increases; they become enriched with more and more associations and attach to themselves an ever-widening range of psychic material. The tension leads to conflict, the conflict leads to attempts at mutual repression, and if one of the opposing forces is successfully repressed a dissociation-ensues, a splitting of the personality, or disunion with oneself. The stage is then set for a neurosis. The acts that follow from such a condition are unco-ordinated, sometimes pathological, having the appearance of symptomatic actions. Although in part normal, they are based partly on the repressed opposite which, instead of working as an equilibrating force, has an obstructive effect, thus hindering the possibility of further progress.

-- On the Nature of the Psyche, by C.G. Jung

***

This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism -- is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

-- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell

***

Now we read in regard to Job that "his sons went and feasted ... and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them" (Job I, 4.).While they thus feasted and made merry the Accuser was daily present in their midst, but he could not prevail against them, as it is written: "Hast not thou made an hedge about him and about his house?" And when Job made sacrifices, he did not give Satan any part whatsoever, for it says, "He offered burnt-offerings according to the number of them all" (Ibid. 5), this being an offering which ascends ('olah) entirely on high, so that he gave no portion to the "other side". Had he done so, the Accuser would not have been able to prevail against him. Hence in the end he only took what was his due. As to the question which might be asked, why then did God allow Job to suffer thus, the answer would be that, had he given Satan his due, the "unholy side" would have separated itself from the holy, and so allowed the latter to ascend undisturbed into the highest spheres; but since he did not do so, the Holy One let justice be executed on him. Mark this! As Job kept evil separate from good and failed to fuse them, he was judged accordingly: first he experienced good, then what was evil, then again good. For man should be cognizant of both good and evil, and turn evil itself into good. This is a deep tenet of faith.'

-- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon

***

Serpent: "I am only my own half; I'm not one, but two; I'm the one and the other. I am here only as the serpentlike, the magical. But magic is useless here. I wound myself idly around this branch to await further developments. You can use me in life, but not in hanging. In the worst case, I'm ready to lead you to Hades. I know the way there."

A black form condenses before me out of the air, Satan, with a scornful laugh. He calls to me: "See what comes from the reconciliation of opposites! Recant, and in a flash you'll be down on the greening earth."

I: "I won't recant, I'm not stupid. If such is the outcome of all this, let it be the end." ...

Satan: "Reconciliation of the opposites! Equal rights for all! Follies!"

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


&
YOU FINALLY UNDERSTAND
THE MESSAGE YOU COMMUNICATE
WITH ANOTHER HUMAN BEING
HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LOOK
ON THE MUSCULATURE OF YOUR FACE
IT'S MUCH DEEPER THAN THAT
MUCH DEEPER!
IT'S THE VIBRATIONS
THAT EMANATE FROM YOU!

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IF YOUR VIBRATIONS ARE PARANOID
THAT'S WHAT'S BEING RECEIVED
AND WHEN YOU'RE AROUND PETS
(BIRDS OR CATS PARTICULARLY)
OR VERY YOUNG CHILDREN
OR VERY FLIPPED OUT PSYCHOTICS
THEY WILL KNOW YOU IMMEDIATELY.

YOU CAN COME AND SAY
"HELLO DEAR, HOW ARE YOU?'
AND THE DOG WILL GROWL ...

YOU CAN'T COME ON BECAUSE THEY'RE LISTENING
TO THE VIBRATIONS THAT HAND IS READING
OUT AND SENDING.
AND YOU REALIZE THAT EVERY MOMENT YOU ARE
A FULL STATEMENT OF YOUR BEING,
AND YOU'RE SENDING OUT VIBRATIONS THAT ARE
AFFECTING EVERYTHING AROUND YOU,
WHICH IN TURN IS AFFECTING
EVERYTHING THAT COMES BACK
AND
WHEN YOU MEET SOMEBODY WHO IS
CAUGHT IN THE WORLD OF
WE AND THEM AND YOU ARE HIM
TO THAT PERSON
AND YOU GET CAUGHT IN HIS MIND NET
YOU ARE BOTH
JUST
INTENSIFYING
ONE ANOTHER'S
PARANOIA.

The concurrence begins with a quotation taken from the work Le Passage de la Matiere a la Vie (The Passage of Matter to Life) by Emmy Guittes, who contends that the Buddha asserted that life began with the emergence of immortalized "spirit units," which essentially serve to build physical bodies....We are reminded that the terms cohesion, adhesion, attraction, and repulsion bear a relationship to the four forces manifested in matter due to the action of spirit. Spirit manifests through the universe in the form of vibration.... AMORC details what science says about vibratory frequency, but also states that science does not tell the whole story. Vibration also occurs in the spiritual world, where you need special faculties to perceive it. This will be an essential part of the Rosicrucian teaching....The rest of this monograph makes AMORC's case that all things vibrate at certain distinct frequencies. We are living in a world of vibration. The monograph concludes with an observation that the human body, just like all other objects in the universe, is also just a bundle of vibrations in the larger, vaster ocean of vibrations.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


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HIPPIES CREATE POLICE POLICE CREATE HIPPIES
IF YOU'RE
IN POLARITY YOU'RE CREATING
POLAR OPPOSITES
YOU
CAN ONLY
PROTEST
EFFECTIVELY
WHEN
YOU LOVE
THE
PERSON
WHOSE IDEAS YOU ARE
PROTESTING AGAINST
AS MUCH AS
YOU LOVE
YOURSELF

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LOVE HAS TO SPRING SPONTANEOUSLY FROM WITHIN: AND
IT IS IN NO WAY AMENABLE TO ANY FORM OF INNER OR OUTER
FORCE. LOVE AND COERCION CAN NEVER GO TOGETHER;
BUT THOUGH LOVE CANNOT BE FORCED ON ANYONE, IT
CAN BE AWAKENED IN HIM THROUGH LOVE ITSELF, LOVE
IS ESSENTIALLY SELF-COMMUNICATIVE. THOSE
WHO HAVE IT. TRUE LOVE IS UNCONQUER-
ABLE AND IRRESISTABLE: AND IT
GOES ON GATHERING POWER
AND SPREADING ITSELF,
UNTIL EVENTUALLY
IT TRANSFORMS
EVERYONE
WHOM IT
TOUCHES.

MEHER BABA

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AND THE FACT OF THE MATTER IS:
AS YOU GO OUT ON THE ASTRAL PLANE
YOU SEE MORE & MORE

Truly the astral light [as to the word "light," we might substitute the word "matter", but a kind of matter that was self-luminous; we might also speak of the astral plane] of the derided Kabalists has strange and weird secrets for him who can see in it; and the mysteries concealed within its incessantly disturbed waves are there, the whole body of Materialists and scoffers notwithstanding. These secrets, along with many other mysteries, will remain non-existent to the materialists of our age, in the same way as America was a non-existent myth for Europeans during the early part of the mediaeval ages, whereas Scandinavians and Norwegians had actually reached and settled in that very old “New World” several centuries before. But, as a Columbus was born to re-discover, and to force the Old World to believe in Antipodal countries, so will there be born scientists who will discover the marvels now claimed by Occultists to exist in the regions of Ether, with their varied and multiform denizens and conscious Entities. Then, nolens volens, Science will have to accept the old “Superstition,” as it has several others.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


& THE FINAL THING YOU SEE
IN THE WORLD OF FORM
BEFORE YOU GO INTO THE FORMLESS
& INTO TOTAL UNITY
YOU SEE THE WORLD OF
YIN &
YANG

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“Wheels” are the centres of force, around which primordial Cosmic matter expands, and, passing through all the six stages of consolidation, becomes spheroidal and ends by being transformed into globes or spheres. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of Esoteric Cosmogony, that during the Kalpas of life, motion, which, during the periods of Rest “pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom” assumes an evergrowing tendency, from the first awakening of Kosmos to a new “Day,” to circular movement. The “Deity becomes a whirlwind.” They are also called Rotae — the moving wheels of the celestial orbs participating in the world’s creation — when the meaning refers to the animating principle of the stars and planets; for in the Kabala, they are represented by the Ophanim, the Angels of the Spheres and stars, of which they are the informing Souls.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

By cooperation of the mighty wheels which direct every seed to some end according as the stars accompany.

-- Purgatorio, from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

***

Perceiving some, the wheel an endless saraband
None amaranthine but him, ... Thanatos.
O omniman nought constant is but change!
'Cept him who thinks on thought and nought can disarrange.

-- The Fire Regained, by Sidney M. Hirsch

***

Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way. Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there. There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again. Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


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AND THE WORLD OF YIN & YANG
IS ANOTHER ASTRAL PLANE
& IT'S ONE OF THE HIGHEST PLANES
IN THE WORLD OF FORM
BUT IT'S STILL DUALITY
IT IS STILL POLARIZATION
THERE IS GOD THERE IS MAN
THERE IS GOOD THERE IS EVIL
YES NO
PLEASURE PAIN
LOSS GAIN
THE WORLD MOST EVERYBODY IS LIVING IN
MOST OF THE TIME

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THE ONLY WAY OUT OF THAT IS TO TAKE
THE POLES OF EVERY SET OF OPPOSITES
AND SEE THE WAY IN WHICH
THEY ARE ONE
AND: IF YOU CAN GET INTO THAT PLACE
WHERE YOU SEE THE INTERRELATEDNESS OF
EVERYTHING
AND: YOU SEE THE ONENESS IN IT ALL
THEN: NO LONGER ARE YOU ATTACHED
TO YOUR POLARIZED POSITION

Incessantly the great currents and rivers of air flow and rush and roll from the equator to the frozen polar regions, and back from these to the torrid equatorial realms. Necessarily incident to these great, immense, equilibrated and beneficent movements, caused by the antagonism of equatorial heat and polar cold, are the typhoons, tornadoes, and cyclones that result from conflicts between the rushing currents. These and the benign trade-winds result from the same great law. God is omnipotent; but effects without causes are impossible, and these effects cannot but sometimes be evil. The fire would not warm, if it could not also burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons are the most sovereign remedies, when given in due proportion. The Evil is the shadow of the Good, and inseparable from it.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


THE WHOLE THING ABOUT GENERATION GAPS
IS A HYPE
THE SPIRIT
IS
THE SPIRIT

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"At last from this dimness, upon some eyes, the light broke; but think not that to those over whom the Origin of Evil held a sway, that dawning was vouchsafed. It could be given then, as now, only to the purest ecstasies of imagination and intellect, undistracted by the cares of a vulgar life, the appetites of the common clay. Far from descending to the assistance of a fiend, theirs was but the august ambition to approach nearer to the Fount of Good; the more they emancipated themselves from this Limbo of the planets, the more they were penetrated by the splendor and beneficence of God. And if they sought, and at last discovered, how to the eye of the spirit all the subtler modifications of being and of matter might be made apparent; if they discovered how, for the wings of the spirit, all space might be annihilated; and while the body stood heavy and solid here, the freed Idea might wander from star to star: if such discoveries became in truth their own, the sublimest luxury of their knowledge was but this -- to wonder, to venerate, and adore!" (Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton quoted)

-- New Platonism and Alchemy, by Alexander Wilder

***

In the Bible the word "spirit" should technically always be thought of as a living entity. The spirit has wings in Os. IV.19. Accordingly II. Cor. III. 17, which says "God is a spirit," should be interpreted: God is a winged entity in an entirely zoological sense. God has wings and flies (Ps. XVI.8; XVII.11; XXXV.8). In Ps. LXIII.6-7 we read: "I remember you under the esmerot, you are my 'ezer, in the shadow (sel) of your wings I rejoice."

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

***

From earliest times the soul, whether of angel or human being, has been represented by a bird. The ducks or geese come from spiritual realms (air), swim on the "oceans of the spirit on earth" and "breed on land".

-- The Pictorial Language of Hieronymus Bosch, by Clement A. Wertheim Aymes


WHEN YOU CAN CENTER AND SEE YOUR WHOLE LIFE
AS A STORY IN WHICH CHAPTERS ARE

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UNFOLDING
THEN: THE MOMENT TO MOMENT EGO INVOLVEMENT
"AM I GETTING ENOUGH AT THIS MOMENT?"
CEASES TO BE A DOMINANT THEME
AND: YOU START TO LIVE IN THE
TAO
(THE WAY)
JESUS SAID: I AM THE WAY
IT'S THE SAME WAY!
THE WAY
IS THE WAY IS
THE WAY

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The battle for what is positive is now depicted on the next highest level. As is usual with Jeroen Bosch, he has presented what is most important and positive, in small insignificant figures, so as not to force his own view of the world and his most intimate thoughts upon those who would not understand him anyway.

-- The Pictorial Language of Hieronymus Bosch, by Clement A. Wertheim Aymes


THE WAY IS THE HARMONY
OF THE UNIVERSE
WHEN ONE COMES INTO THE SPIRIT
WHEN ONE SEES HOW IT IS
ONE UNDERSTANDS THAT BEHIND ALL THE INDIVIDUAL
DIFFERENCES
MAN-WOMBMAN
BIG-LITTLE
OLD-YOUNG
GOOD-BAD

EVERY LABEL YOU CAN THINK OF
BECOMES BACKGROUND INSTEAD OF FIGURE
WHAT STANDS OUT IS:

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Lucifer, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light and with its splendors intolerable, blinds feeble, sensual or selfish souls? Doubt it not!

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


Image

The Fifth group is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with the Microcosmic Pentagon, the five-pointed star representing man. In India and Egypt these Dhyanis were connected with the Crocodile, and their abode is in Capricornus. These are convertible terms in Indian astrology, as this sign of the Zodiac is called Makara, loosely translated “crocodile.” The word itself is occultly interpreted in various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt the defunct man — whose symbol is the pentagram or the five-pointed star, the points of which represent the limbs of a man — was shown emblematically transformed into a crocodile: Sebakh or Sevekh “or seventh,” as Mr. Gerald Massey says, showing it as having been the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a crocodile. He is the “Dragon of Wisdom” or Manas, the “Human Soul,” Mind, the Intelligent principle, called in our esoteric philosophy the “Fifth” principle. Says the defunct “Osirified” in ch. lxxxviii., “Book of the Dead,” or the Ritual, under the glyph of a mummiform god with a crocodile’s head: “I am the god presiding at the fear . . . at the arrival of his Soul among men. I am the god-crocodile brought for destruction” (an allusion to the destruction of divine spiritual purity when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil; also to the “fallen” gods, or angels of every theogony). "I am the fish of the great Horus. I am merged in Sekten.”

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The wisdom which man ought to have does not come from the earth, nor from the astral spirit, but from the fifth essence -- the Spirit of Wisdom. Therefore man is superior to the stars and the constellation, provided he lives in the power of that superior wisdom. Such a person, being the master over heaven and earth, by means of his free will, is called a Magus, and therefore Magic is not sorcery, but supreme wisdom (De Peste).

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.


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Five (5, V) fem, fim, fimf, funf, funf. Fem means that which is homogeneous, therefore even today it indicates the guild or corporation in the Dutch word veem. It had its origin in the five correlated fingers of the hand, in the correlated five senses that form man and it signified the elven cross or the witches' foot [Drudenfuss] also signified by the pentagram (femsteor) Image .This homogeneity also belongs to the Feme, that part of the Armanenschaft devoted to the cultivation of the law. It was the Femanen who, after the forceable Christianization under Karl, King of the Franks -- or the Saxon-slayer (Slactenaere) -- came more into the forefront in the defense of everything that was indigenous (homologous) in opposition to that which was foreign; asserting indigenous law against Roman (in)justice in the high secret tribunal [Acht]. The symbolic holy-sign of the homologies was this very five-pointed star and it remains so in the secret script even today, just like all other things grouped by fives (fem), from which the numerical value was derived. Just as One was born from itself, Two from One, Three and Four also from One, five -- which grows out of 1 + 4 -- is the second odd number. From the One (Ginnungagap) grows the Four (Muspellsheim, Adhumbla, Ymir and Niflheim) which then form the Five -- the homogeneous One. When we consider the Feme as a court of law we find numerous examples, e.g. the so-called Funfe ["fives"] at Nuremberg, in the Council of Five in Venice, and in our contemporary Five-Judge Colleges which have come down to us as a compilation of single courts of law. The frequent occurrence of the number five in symbolism, as well as mysticism, makes this highly meaningful.

-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List

***

The Vulcan greeting is based upon a blessing gesture used by the kohanim during the worship service. The kohanim are the genealogical descendants of the Jewish priests who served in the Jerusalem Temple. The actual blessing is done with both arms held horizontally in front, at shoulder level, with hands touching, to form the Hebrew letter "shin." This stands for the Hebrew word for "Shaddai", meaning "Almighty [God]." Nimoy modified this gesture into one hand held upright, making it more like a salute. So, technically, the Vulcan greeting is not the same thing as the ceremonial Jewish blessing. Still, the resemblance is close enough to evoke instant recognition among knowledgeable Jews. During the synagogue service, the worshippers are not supposed to look at the kohanim while the blessing is being given. The real reason is simply to focus on receiving blessings directly from God, not from human beings.

-- The Jewish Origin of the Vulcan Salute, by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom


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The seventh of the Seven-gods, is Saturn Image . The name consists of the two Ur-words: sa = "generate" and turn = "turn," i.e. to cause something to stop, and therefore is the equivalent of death, or passing away, or transformation toward a new arising. This name Saturn, like so many other mythological names, is only a functional characterization which became the name of an anthropomorphized elaboration of a divine essence. In the understanding of Armanism it is, however, a circumlocution for Surtur (Satur) and means "continually in the Ur," i.e. in the eternal. Through the portal of birth, in coming into being, a human encounters things such as essence, objects, events, times, etc.

Thus we have the course of becoming, life in our world of the senses, which allows us to leave this world through the gate of death -- by dying once more, and to be prepared in the Ur for a renewed arising, for rebirth. Even in the Christian Middle Ages the state of the soul in death was called the "primeval state" [Urstand] , i.e. the condition within Ur. Therefore the hieroglyph of Saturn (Surtur) is the sign of increase Image together with the sal- rune Image or Image, meaning an increase in salvation.

-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List

***

The Author says of the great Magic Agent — “This ambient and all-penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the (Central or ‘Spiritual’) Sun’s splendour . . . fixed by the weight of the atmosphere (?!) and the power of central attraction . . . the Astral Light, this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines round two poles . . . and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn” — emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos — “Time” — not the god Saturn or the planet. “It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau . . . lastly, it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force (it is not blind, and Levi knew it), which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth; ‘for if they should not,’ they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire.”
***
It is “Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god,” and this without any allusive metaphor to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos, “the first son, eldest of the gods,” in the order of microcosmic (divine) evolution; Saturn (Satan), astronomically, “is the seventh and last in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the kingdom of which Phoebus (the light of wisdom, also the Sun) is the centre.” The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish god “an angel of matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and he whose planet was Saturn....

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


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HERE WE ARE
HERE & NOW
THAT'S ALL THERE IS
AND IF IT ISN'T BEAUTIFUL, MAN
THERE'S NOTHING

“The Kosmos is eternal in its unconditioned collectivity, and finite but in its conditioned manifestations.” It is only “with a mind clear and undarkened by personality, and an assimilation of the merit of manifold existences devoted to being in its collectivity,” that one gets rid of personal existence, merging into, becoming one with, the Absolute, and continuing in full possession of Paramartha.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

Whereas Communism set itself up in opposition to all religion, Nazism supported a pagan revival to replace the existing religions. It is perhaps this strategy more than any other that has allowed Nazism in various forms to survive its calamitous defeat in World War II and to continue to exert an influence over young people and old down the years into our present decade.

-- Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, by Peter Levenda


SO YOU SAY:
WELL. I CAN'T HAVE IT BEAUTIFUL NOW, BUT, LATER! WHEN WE GET THE FOOD HOME
IT WILL BE BEAUTIFUL
LATER NEVER EXISTS
WHAT'S HAPPENED TO LIFE INSURANCE, TO TENURE, TO PLANNING, $AVING, RESPONSIBILITIES?
NOTHING'S HAPPENED TO ANY OF IT!

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SURFING

EITHER YOU DO
IT LIKE IT'S
A BIG
WEIGHT
ON YOU
OR YOU DO IT
AS
PART OF THE DANCE

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND
"THE THOUGHT IS THE THOUGHT
OF THE THOUGHTLESS
YOUR SINGING AND DANCING
IS NO OTHER THAN THE VOICE
OF THE DHARMA"
HAKUIN

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SINGING
AND
DANCING
AND
INSURANCE
AND $AVINGS
ACCOUNT$
AND
JOB
AND
RESPONSIBILITY

SHIVA'S DANCE OF LIFE

DO YOU DO IT FROM
UUNNNNKKKK ...

OR DO YOU DO IT FROM
AAAAHHHHH!!

DO YOU SURF
THROUGH IT ALL?

OR DO YOU CARRY IT
AROUND LIKE A LOAD?

IF ONLY
YOU COULD
THROW IT OFF!

IF ONLY
I DIDN'T
HAVE THESE
KIDS AROUND
MY NECK ...

YOU CAN'T GET
AWAY FOR THE DAY BECAUSE:

IT'S IN
YOUR HEAD!

THAT YOU'RE
TRYING TO GET
AWAY FROM ... AND THE ONLY WAY TO
GET AWAY
IS TO
CHANGE YOUR HEAD!
SIMPLE AS THAT!
YOU WANT TO
CHANGE YOUR
ENVIRONMENT?
CHANGE YOUR HEAD!!
IT'S ALL THE
ECSTATIC MOMENT!
IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DIG IT ... IF NOT ... IT'S A
TRAVESTY ... THAT'S ALL. PROFANE ...

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DESIRE

THE FIRST THING IN MY TEACHER'S BOOK,
THE FIRST THING HE EVER WROTE ON HIS
SLATE (BECAUSE HE WAS SILENT) WAS:
DESIRE IS A TRAP
DESIRELESSNESS IS MOKSHA
(LIBERATION)
DESIRE IS THE CREATOR
DESIRE IS THE DESTROYER
DESIRE IS THE UNIVERSE

AND: THAT APPLIES TO THE PHYSICAL PLANE
THE ASTRAL PLANE
THE CAUSAL PLANE

HEAVEN
DEMONS
HELL
(THE DEMONS ON 43RD ST.
AS WELL AS THE DEMONS
ON THE ASTRAL PLANE!)
ARE ALL THE CREATIONS OF DESIRE!
ALL THE MANIFESTATIONS
OF THE DIVINE MOTHER
ARE CREATIONS OF DESIRE!

* THAT'S WHY NAGA, (THE NAKED ASCETIC),
WORKED ON GETTING RAMAKRISHNA TO
GO BEYOND HIS LOVE FOR KALI.

What is asceticism? To forsake the world, and to turn one's face to obedience and the world to come. Well, it is necessary to know this world, its foulness and impermanence, to know the charm and permanence and everlastingness of the world to come, and to strive to obey, saying, 'How shall I obey, and what is obedience?'

-- Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Arberry


GIVE UP EVEN THE
DESIRE TO BE EXPERIENCING THE BLISS
OF BEING IT ALL
OF BEING WITH THE DIVINE MOTHER

THE BUDDHISTS SAY: (I'M TALKING ABOUT THE NON-DUALISTIC
BUDDHISTS)
CUT OUT ALL THIS MIDDLE STUFF!
THEY SAY:
DON'T GET HUNG UP ON ALL THESE DIFFERENT
DESIRE TRIPS. JUST GO BEYOND IT ALL.
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Re: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Postby admin » Fri Sep 25, 2015 8:15 am

BUDDHA'S 4 NOBLE TRUTHS
ARE VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD AND VERY SIMPLE.

THE FIRST ONE
CONCERNS THE FACT THAT LIFE ALWAYS HAS IN IT
THE ELEMENT OF UNFULFILLMENT:
CALL IT SUFFERING
BIRTH OLD AGE SICKNESS NOT GETTING WHAT
YOU WANT GETTING WHAT YOU DON'T WANT EVEN
GETTING WHAT YOU WANT IN THIS PHYSICAL WORLD
IS GOING TO BE SUFFERING BECAUSE:

Image

YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE IT!
IT'S ALWAYS IN TIME!
ANYTHING THAT IS IN TIME IS GOING TO PASS AWAY
LAY NOT UP YOUR TREASURES

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

WHERE MOTH AND RUST DOTH CORRUPT
THAT'S THE TRAP OF TIME AS LONG AS YOU WANT
ANYTHING IN TIME IT'S GOING TO PASS BECAUSE
TIME PASSES

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Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the serpent. For, with the Phoenicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the Divine Nature, and was sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was deemed to be immortal, unless slain by violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into and consuming himself. Hence the Serpent in a circle, holding his tail in his mouth, was an emblem of eternity.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

A serpent, having its tail in its mouth and thus forming a circle, held to represent "the immensity of the power of God," which has neither beginning nor end.

-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Excerpts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite

***

En-Sof in Hebrew literally means "there is no end...the very absolute as such, or positive nothing ...the principle of unconditional unity or 'unityness' as such, the principle of freedom from all forms, from all manifestations, and, consequently, from all being)... eternally finds its opposite in itself, so that only through a relationship to this opposite can it assert itself, so that it is perfectly reciprocal."

-- Vladimir Solov'ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews, by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt

***

"A living mobile trinity of moments": [Hegelian] Dialectics describes the movement of the subject of history, the spirit [Geist], passing through three main stages: first it is posed in itself (an sich, thesis), then it develops out of itself and for itself in its manifestation (fur sich, antithesis), in order to return then into itself (an und fur sich, synthesis) and be with itself as an actualised and manifested being.

-- History, Sophia and the Russian Nation, by Manon de Courten

***

"The outer darkness is a great dragon, whose tail is in his mouth, outside the whole world and surrounding the whole world. And there are many regions of chastisement within it. There are twelve mighty chastisement-dungeons and a ruler is in every dungeon and the face of the rulers is different one from another....the soul[s] of the blasphemers and of those who are in the doctrines of error and of all who teach doctrines of error, and of those who have intercourse with males, and of those stained and impious men and of atheists and murderers and adulterers and sorcerers, -- all such souls then, if while still in life they do not repent but remain persistently in their sin, and all the souls which have stayed behind without, that is those which have had the number of the circuits which are appointed them in the sphere, without having repented, -- well, at their last circuit will those souls, they and all the souls of which I have just told you, be led out of [?] the jaws of the tail of the dragon into the dungeons of the outer darkness. And when those souls of the doors of the dungeons have been led into the outer darkness into the jaws of his tail, he turneth his tail into his own mouth and shutteth them in. Thus will the souls be led into the outer darkness....

And the disk of the sun was a great dragon whose tail was in his mouth and who reached to seven powers of the Left and whom four powers in the form of white horses drew.

-- Pistis Sophia, translated by G.S.R. Mead

[I]n the idea of each power the lower derives its intelligibility from the higher: and the highest must be presumed to inhere latently or potentially in the lowest, or this latter will be wholly unintelligible, inconceivable -- you can have no conception of it. Thus in sensibility we see a power that in every instant goes out of itself, and in the same instant retracts and falls back on itself: which the great fountains of pure Mathesis, the Pythagorean and Platonic Geometricians, illustrated in the production, or self-evolution, of the point into the circle.

-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

***

In October of the same year, Jung presented two talks to the Psychological Club. The first was titled "Adaptation." This took two forms: adaptation to outer and inner conditions. The "inner" was understood to designate the unconscious. Adaptation to the "inner" led to the demand for individuation, which was contrary to adaptation to others. Answering this demand and the corresponding break with conformity led to a tragic guilt that required expiation and called for a new "collective function," because the individual had to produce values that could serve as a substitute for his absence from society. These new values enabled one to make reparation to the collective. Individuation was for the few. Those who were insufficiently creative should rather reestablish collective conformity with a society. The individual had not only to create new values, but also socially recognizable ones, as society had a "right to expect realizable values." The second talk was on "Individuation and collectivity." He argued that individuation and collectivity were a pair of opposites related by guilt. Society demanded imitation. Through the process of imitation, one could gain access to values that were one's own. In analysis, "Through imitation the patient learns individuation, because it reactivates his own values."...

Jung argued that one needed to separate oneself from the unconscious by presenting it visibly as something separate from one. It was vital to differentiate the I from the non-I, namely, the collective psyche or absolute unconscious. To do this, "man must necessarily stand upon firm feet in his I-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty toward life completely, so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of society."

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


Image

THE SECOND NOBLE TRUTH
IS:
THE CAUSE OF SUFFERING
IS DESIRE
(OR CRAVING)
IF YOU DON'T TRY TO HOLD YOU DON'T SUFFER
OVER THE LOSS
IF YOU DON'T
WORSHIP LIFE
YOU DON'T
FEAR DEATH
BUT IF YOU TRY TO HOLD ON TO LIFE IT'S
VERY SAD YOU CAN HONOR LIFE BUT IF YOU
TRY TO HOLD ON TO LIFE ... IT'S VERY SAD

Image

DID YOU EVER SEE A REALLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
LIKE A TOP MODEL WHO IS JUST GETTING
TO THAT POINT WHERE HER LOOKS ARE
CHANGING INTO WHAT COULD BE AN
INTERNAL BEAUTY IF SHE HADN'T
BEEN SO BUSY WITH HER
EXTERNAL BEAUTY? SHE IS CAUGHT
IN THE BEAUTY OF TIME
WHICH WITHERS
HOW POIGNANT!
& YET
WE'VE ALL TOUCHED PEOPLE
WHO WERE SO BEAUTIFUL
AS BEINGS THAT WE
NEVER NOTICE WHETHER
THEY ARE PHYSICALLY
BEAUTIFUL IT'S LIKE
AN ETERNAL BEAUTY
LIVES WITHIN THEM

WELL
IF YOU ATTACH
YOURSELF
IF YOU CRAVE
TEMPORAL THINGS
BEAUTY POSSESSIONS
ACHIEVEMENT
ANYTHING
HOW POIGNANT!

Image

EXAMPLE: SOMEBODY LOOKS AT YOU SEDUCTIVELY ...
AN ICE CREAM CONE GOES BY ... WILL IT EVER BE
THE BIG ICE CREAM CONE
IN THE SKY?
WILL IT EVER BE AN ETERNAL ICE CREAM CONE?
OR ... IS IT ALWAYS GOING TO MELT?
YOU GOTTA KEEP EATING IT YET IT MELTS & MELTS
THAT'S ITS PROBLEM
YOU GOTTA KEEP EATING IT CUZ IT WILL MELT ...
... & THEN IT'S GONE
& YOU KNOW THAT TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU
FINISH & ... YOU WANT A GLASS OF WATER? RIGHT? ...
THEN YOU HAVE A GLASS OF WATER & THERE'S THAT
BLOATY FEELING?
THEN YOU'RE READY FOR THE NEXT ONE ...
TO GET RID OF THAT ONE ...
LET'S TAKE A WALK ... & YOU TAKE A WALK ...
IT'S COLD OUT. LET'S HAVE SOME HOT CHOCOLATE.
YES, LET'S HAVE SOME, & ON & ON & ON & IT'S CALLED
LIFE
YOU SEE: THE OPPOSITE OF CRAVING IS SAYING
BABY, THIS IS THE WAY IT IS YEAH
OK HERE & NOW THIS IS IT
I ACCEPT THE HERE & NOW
FULLY
AS IT IS
RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT!!!

Image

LAME, HALT, BLIND, DYING
WE'RE ALL DYING

AT THIS MOMENT
YOUR BODY IS DISINTEGRATING
BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES
IF YOU'VE TAKEN LSD YOU KNOW
IT'S HAPPENING ANYWAY
IT'S ALL A DOWNHILL TRIP
ALL THE WAY
BOY, WHAT A FUNNY PLACE TO GET ATTACHED!
TO SOMETHING THAT'S GOT TO GO LIKE THAT
SO BUDDHA SAYS: THE CAUSE OF SUFFERING
IS ATTACHMENT
OR DESIRE
THEY ALL SAY THE SAME THING!

THIRD NOBLE TRUTH
GIVE UP ATTACHMENT
GIVE UP DESIRE
YOU END THE BIRTHS
YOU END THE DEATHS
YOU END THE SUFFERING
YOU END THE WHOLE THING THAT
KEEPS YOU STUCK!

IF I'M NOT ATTACHED TO THIS PARTICULAR
TIME-SPACE LOCUS THEN I CAN FREE MY
AWARENESS FROM MY BODY AND I CAN BECOME
ONE WITH IT ALL
I CAN MERGE WITH
THE DIVINE MOTHER

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FOURTH NOBLE TRUTH IS:
THE EIGHTFOLD PATH
(FOR GETTING OUT OF DESIRE)

WHICH SAYS:
GET YOUR
LIFE
STRAIGHT
DO YOUR WORK. DO EVERYTHING
YOU'VE GOT TO DO.
WATCH YOUR SPEECH. WATCH YOUR THOUGHT.
WATCH YOUR CALMNESS. GET YOUR CALM
CENTER GOING. LIVE YOUR LIFE IN SUCH A
WAY AS TO GET YOURSELF STRAIGHT, TO
GET FREE OF ATTACHMENT THAT JUST
KEEPS SUCKING YOU IN ALL THE TIME.

Image

GET FREE OF DESIRE
GET FREE OF DESIRE. IT'S A LITTLE
LIKE A ROLLER COASTER. THIS IS
JUST THE WAY IT WORKS. IF YOU READ
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS "DARK NIGHT OF
THE SOUL"
YOU KNOW HOW IT IS

However greatly the soul itself labours, it cannot actively purify itself so as to be in the least degree prepared for the Divine union of perfection of love, if God takes not its hand and purges it not in that dark fire.

-- Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross

***

According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the profane for once correctly, if only partially, so “Light and Darkness are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind”; and according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible” (On Rosenkranz). According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Maya.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


YOU'VE REALLY BEEN WORKING ON YOURSELF
AND YOU'RE VERY PURE AND SOMETHING VERY
HIGH HAPPENS TO YOU: YOU FEEL LIBERATED
AND
THEN:
YOUR EGO WALKS AROUND AND PATS YOU
ON THE SHOULDER: "PRETTY GOOD!
LOOK HOW HOLY YOU'RE BECOMING."
AND YOU FALL ... AGAIN ...

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The hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided into seven (or 4 and 3) esoteric, within the twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the seven of the manifesting scale being connected, moreover, with the Seven Planets. All this is subdivided into numberless groups of divine Spiritual, semi-Spiritual, and ethereal Beings. The Chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the “four bodies and the three faculties” of Brahma exoterically, and the Panchasyam, the five Brahmas, or the five Dhyani-Buddhas in the Buddhist system. The highest group is composed of the divine Flames, so-called, also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior divine World. They are the formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the “Archetypal World.”

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


THAT'S ONE OF THE TRAPS
IN FACT THE HIGHER YOU GET
THE HARDER YOU FALL
EACH TIME
IT'S THOSE FIERCE LIONS GUARDING THE INNER
GATES

ALL THIS STUFF HAPPENS
WHEN YOU ARE EXTRICATING
YOURSELF FROM THIS WEB OF
DESIRE WHICH IS YOUR
EGO WHICH IS YOUR COGNITIVE
FRAMEWORK OF THE UNIVERSE
(IT'S ALL THE SAME THING)
AND THIS EXTRICATION
(BELIEVE ME) DOESN'T HAPPEN
WITHOUT AN INTERNAL STRUGGLE
THIS IS CALLED TAPAS
TAPASIA
STRAIGHTENING BY FIRE

Herakleitus, the Ephesian, who lived five centuries before our era; the "crying" philosopher who declared that "fire was the great cause, and that all things were in a perpetual flux -- his opinions about the origin of things were the same as those of Hippocrates. Both entertained the same views of a supreme power, and, therefore, if their notions of primordial fire, regarded as a material force, in short, as one akin to Leibnitz's dynamism, were "less precise" than those of modern philosophers, a question which remains to be settled yet, on the other hand their metaphysical views of it were far more philosophical and rational than the one-sided theories of our present-day scholars. Their ideas of fire were precisely those of the later "fire-philosophers," the Rosicrucians, and the earlier Zoroastrians. They affirmed that the world was created of fire, the divine spirit of which was an omnipotent and omniscient GOD. Science has condescended to corroborate their claims as to the physical question.

Fire, in the ancient philosophy of all times and countries, including our own, has been regarded as a triple principle. As water comprises a visible fluid with invisible gases lurking within, and, behind all the spiritual principle of nature, which gives them their dynamic energy, so, in fire, they recognized: 1st. Visible flame; 2d. Invisible, or astral fire — invisible when inert, but when active producing heat, light, chemical force, and electricity, the molecular powers; 3d. Spirit. They applied the same rule to each of the elements; and everything evolved from their combinations and correlations, man included, was held by them to be triune. Fire, in the opinion of the Rosicrucians, who were but the successors of the theurgists, was the source, not only of the material atoms, but also of the forces which energize them. When a visible flame is extinguished it has disappeared, not only from the sight but also from the conception of the materialist, forever. But the Hermetic philosopher follows it through the "partition-world of the knowable, across and out on the other side into the unknowable," as he traces the disembodied human spirit, "vital spark of heavenly flame," into the Æthereum, beyond the grave.

-- Isis Unveiled, by Helena P. Blavatsky


IF A MAN GIVES WAY TO ALL HIS DESIRES,
OR PANDERS TO THEM, THERE WILL BE NO
INNER STRUGGLE IN HIM, NO 'FRICTION'
NO FIRE. BUT IF, FOR THE SAKE OF ATTAINING
A DEFINITE AIM, HE STRUGGLES WITH THE
DESIRES THAT HINDER HIM -- HE WILL
THEN CREATE A FIRE WHICH WILL GRADUALLY
TRANSFORM HIS INNER WORLD INTO A SINGLE
WHOLE. -- OUSPENSKY
-- IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
... P. 43

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FAITH

HAD YE BUT FAITH, YOU COULD
MOVE MOUNTAINS, SAID JESUS

AND THAT IS LITERALLY TRUE
THE BIBLE IS NOT A METAPHOR
IT'S NOT A STORY MADE UP TO TEACH US
HOW TO BE MORAL BEINGS
IT'S A STRAIGHT MESSAGE OF HOW IT IS
WHEN MAN LIVES IN THE SPIRIT, AND
THE SPIRIT IS RIGHT INSIDE.
THE WAY TO GET INTO THE SPIRIT
IS NOT A LOT OF HOCUS-POCUS.
IT'S A VERY SIMPLE METHODICAL,
MECHANICAL SET OF STEPS
BUT THEY'RE ONLY AVAILABLE
TO HIM WHO CAN HEAR
LET THOSE WHO HAVE EARS HEAR
TEACH NOT HIM WHO DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW.
THE WHOLE GAME IS BASED
ON FAITH.

WHAT YOU MAY NOT UNDERSTAND IS: THE WHOLE
GAME YOU HAVE BEEN PLAYING IS ALSO BASED ON FAITH
YOU HAVE HAD FAITH IN THE RATIONAL MIND
WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY WHICH IS A TEMPLE
DEDICATED TO THE RATIONAL MAN. EVEN THOUGH
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT SAYS:

I AM THE LORD THY GOD
THOU SHALT HAVE
NO OTHER GODS
BEFORE ME

There is no thoughtful soul that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all that think at all of anything beyond the needs and interests of the body, that is not at times startled and terrified by the awful questions which, feeling as though it were a guilty thing for doing so, it whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some Demon seems to torture it with doubts, and to crush it with despair, asking whether, after all, it is certain that its convictions are true, and its faith well founded: whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and Beneficence rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and iron Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their sufferings and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds, are of no more interest or importance than the motes that dance in the sunshine. The philosophical and scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the result being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as rationalism. Many a thoughtful mind has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt, who ruminate in patient contentment like the kine, or doze under the opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow which is the absence of the Divine Light.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike

***

Perhaps no word in the English language has been so misinterpreted and abused as the word "Faith." In the various creeds Faith has been degraded to a caput mortuum of dogmatic teaching, which neither saved nor damned anybody but in the imagination of those who framed the creeds; whereas faith -- used in its real sense -- is that condition of mind essential not only to "salvation," but to the performance of any act whatsoever. Without faith I could not take a single step, or write a single line. Faith is the very groundwork of our lives. It is a living force within man, not a dead make-believe in events which are recorded as having occurred in certain places and at certain times. Faith is a power, the manifestation of which lifts man to inconceivable heights of might and grandeur, and the absence of which renders him a helpless molecular mass. "He that believeth not shall be damned." "I don't believe it," says the sceptic. But, all the same, it is true that he who does not believe, not only shall be damned, but is already damned by the negative state of mind he is in -- damned much more effectually than he could be by the fire and brimstone of theology.

-- Ars Vivendi (Art of Living), by Arthur Lovell

***

This precious jewel
Upon the which is every virtue founded...
That as unjust our justice should appear
In eyes of mortals, is an argument
Of faith, and not of sin heretical.

-- Paradiso, from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


EVEN THOUGH THAT HAS BEEN SAID
& EVEN THOUGH WE REPEAT IT
WE STILL WORSHIP THE RATIONAL MIND AND ITS PRODUCTS
WE WORSHIP OUR OWN SENSE DATA.
IT'S ONLY WHEN WE SEE THE ASSUMPTIONS THAT
WE'VE ALREADY BEEN FUNCTIONING ON THAT
WE CAN START TO EXTRICATE OURSELVES.
WE HAVE GOT TO HAVE HEARD THE FIRST
MESSAGE
BEFORE ANY OF THE KEYS OPEN ANYTHING.
YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THERE ARE DOORS
UNTIL YOU HAVE HEARD THE FIRST MESSAGE

Image

GEORGES I. GURDJIEFF,
A WESTERNER WHO WENT ON THIS HIGHER TRIP
OR AT LEAST ON A LARGE PART OF THE TRIP, SAID:
YOU DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND
YOU ARE IN PRISON
IF YOU ARE TO GET OUT OF PRISON
THE FIRST THING YOU MUST REALIZE IS:
YOU ARE IN PRISON
IF YOU THINK
YOU'RE FREE YOU CAN'T ESCAPE.

CHAPTER 16: The relativity of the concept of Time

AFTER A BRIEF silence Beelzebub continued "In order for you to have a more exact idea of the strange psyche of those three-brained beings who have taken your fancy and who breed on the planet Earth, and in general a better understanding of everything about this peculiar planet, in my opinion it is very necessary for you to have an accurate conception of how they calculate Time, and of how the being-sensation in their presence of what is called the 'process of the flow of Time' has gradually changed and what it has become today.

"This must be made clear to you because only then will you be able to represent to yourself and understand the events on that planet I have already spoken about and those I shall tell you about later.

"First of all, you must know that in calculating Time the three-brained beings of that planet take the 'year' as the basic unit, just as we do, and they define the duration of their year as the time it takes for their planet to make a certain movement in relation to another cosmic concentration—that is to say, the period during which their planet, in the process of 'falling' and 'catching up,' describes what is called a 'krentonalnian revolution' around its sun.

"This corresponds to our reckoning of a year on the planet Karatas, based upon the period of time between those moments when the sun 'Samos' and the sun 'Selos' are nearest to each other.

"A hundred of these years of theirs the beings of the Earth call a 'century.'

"They divide the year into twelve parts and each part they call a 'month.'

"And they determine the duration of this month by the time it takes for the larger fragment, separated from the Earth—the one they now call 'Moon'—to complete, according to the cosmic laws of falling and catching up, its full krentonalnian revolution around their planet.

"It must be remarked that twelve krentonalnian revolutions of the Moon do not correspond exactly to a single krentonalnian revolution of their planet around its sun, and they have therefore made some compromise or other in calculating these months of theirs, so that the total corresponds more or less to reality.

"Further, they divide their month into thirty 'days,' as they call them.

"And a day they reckon as that span of time during which their planet makes a complete rotation on its axis, under the action of the same cosmic laws.

"Bear in mind, by the way, that they also use the word 'day' to mean that 'trogoautoegocratic' process we call 'kshtatsavakht,' which periodically takes place in the atmosphere of their planet, as on all other planets where the cosmic process called 'ilnosoparno' is actualized. And when this occurs, they say 'it is daytime.'

"As regards the opposite process, which we call 'kldatsakhti,' they call it 'night' and say 'it is dark.'

"Thus the three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth call their longest unit of measure of time a 'century,' and this century consists of a hundred 'years.' A year has twelve 'months,' a month has an average of thirty 'days.' Further, they divide their day into twenty-four 'hours,' their hour into sixty 'minutes,' and the minute in its turn into sixty 'seconds.'

"But since you, my boy, do not yet have any idea of the exceptional peculiarities of Time, you must first be told that genuine Objective Science defines this cosmic phenomenon thus:

"'Time in itself does not exist, there is only the totality of the results issuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place.'

"Time in itself no being can understand by Reason or perceive by any outer or inner being-function It cannot even be sensed by any gradation of the instinct present in every more or less independent cosmic concentration.

"It is possible to evaluate Time only by comparing different cosmic phenomena occurring under the same conditions and in the same place where Time is being considered.

"It should be noted that in the Great Universe all phenomena, without exception, wherever they arise and are manifest, are simply successive, lawful 'fractions' of some whole phenomenon which has its prime arising on the Most Holy Sun Absolute.

"In consequence, all cosmic phenomena, wherever they proceed, have an 'objective' significance.

"And these successive, lawful fractions are actualized in every respect, even in the sense of their involution and evolution, according to the fundamental cosmic law, the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh.

"Time alone has no objective significance, since it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomenon Issuing from nothing, but always blending with everything while remaining self-sufficiently independent, Time alone in the whole of the Universe can be named and extolled as the 'Ideally Unique Subjective Phenomenon.'

"Thus, my boy, Time or, as it is sometimes called, the 'Heropass,' is unique in having no source on which its origin depends, and it alone, like "divine Love," always flows independently and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in all the arisings in any given place in our Great Universe.

"Again I say, you will only be able to understand clearly everything I have just told you when I specially explain to you, as I have already promised, all the aspects of the two fundamental laws of world-creation and world-maintenance.

"Meanwhile, simply remember this: since Time has no source of its arising, and its presence cannot be precisely established, as can be done for all other phenomena in every cosmic sphere, Objective Science has, for its examination of Time, the same 'standard unit' that is used to determine exactly the density and quality, in the sense of the vivifyingness of their vibrations, of all cosmic substances present in every place and in every sphere of our Great Universe.

"And this standard unit for the evaluation of Time has always been the moment of what is called 'sacred egokoolnatsnarnian sensation,' which appears in the Holy Cosmic Individuals dwelling on the Most Holy Sun Absolute whenever the vision of our Uni-Being Endlessness is directed into space and directly touches their presence.

"This standard unit was established in Objective Science to make it possible to define and compare with precision the different degrees of subjective sensation of conscious Individuals as well as what are called the 'diverse tempos' of the various objective phenomena which are manifested throughout the spheres of our Great Universe, and which engender all cosmic arisings, both large and small.

"The chief particularity of the process of the flow of Time consists in this: it is perceived in the same way and in the same sequence by the presences of all cosmic formations of different scales.

"To give you at least some notion of what I have just been saying, let us take as an example the process of the flow of Time in any drop of water in that decanter on the table.

"Each drop of water in that decanter is, in itself, a whole independent world—a world of 'microcosmoses ' In that little world, just as in other cosmoses, there arise and exist relatively independent, infinitesimal 'individuals' or 'beings.

"For the beings of that little world, Time flows in the same sequence as that in which it is sensed by all individuals in all other cosmoses These infinitesimal beings, like the beings of cosmoses of other scales, have the experience of a definite duration for each of their perceptions and manifestations and, like other beings, sense the flow of Time by comparing the duration of phenomena around them.

"Like the beings of other cosmoses, they are born, grow up, unite and separate for what are called 'sexual results', they also fall ill and suffer, and ultimately, like everything existing in which Objective Reason has not become fixed, they are as such destroyed forever.

"The entire process of existence of these infinitesimal beings in their tiny world requires a proportionate duration of time, which as in other worlds ensues from all the surrounding phenomena manifested on that cosmic scale.

"For them also a definite length of time is required for the process of their arising and formation, as well as for the various events in the course of their existence up to their final and complete destruction.

"In the whole course of existence of the beings in this drop of water certain definite and successive what are called 'periods' of the flow of Time are also required.

"A definite time is needed for their joys and for their sorrows, in short, for every kind of indispensable being-experiencing, down to what are called 'runs of bad luck' and even including 'periods of thirst for self-perfection.'

"I repeat, among them, too, the process of the flow of Time has its harmonious sequence, and this sequence ensues from the totality of all surrounding phenomena.

"In general, the duration of the process of the flow of Time is perceived and sensed in the same way by all cosmic individuals and by all completely formed units endowed with instinct, the only difference being due to the quality of their presence and of their state at the given moment.

"However, my boy, it must be pointed out that although, for separate individuals existing in independent cosmic units, the definition of the flow of Time is not objective in the full sense of the word, their experience acquires a sense of objectivity for them, since they perceive the flow of Time according to the completeness of their own presence.

"The same drop of water we have taken as an example can serve to give you a clearer understanding of this thought of mine.

"Although, from the standpoint of universal objectivity, the period of the process of the flow of Time in that drop of water is, for the whole of it, entirely subjective, yet for the beings existing within the drop of water itself, this same period of the flow of Time is perceived as objective.

"To clarify this idea, those beings called 'hypochondriacs' who exist among the three-brained beings of the planet Earth can serve as another example.

"It often seems to these terrestrial hypochondriacs that time passes infinitely slowly or, as they would say, it 'drags phenomenally tediously.'

"In exactly the same way, it may occasionally seem to some infinitesimal beings in that drop of water—assuming, of course, that there happen to be 'hypochondriacs' among them—that time drags phenomenally tediously.

"But in fact, according to the sensation of the duration of Time of your terrestrial favorites, the whole existence of these 'microcosmoses' lasts only a few of their 'minutes,' and sometimes only a few of their 'seconds.'

"Now, my boy, so that you may understand Time and its peculiarities better, let us compare your age with the corresponding age of a being existing on the planet Earth.

"And for this comparison we must take the same standard unit of Time that Objective Science uses for such calculations.

"Bear in mind, first of all, that Objective Science has established— according to data about which you will learn later when I have specially explained to you the fundamental laws of world-creation and worldexistence— that all normal three-brained beings, and among them of course those arising on our planet Karatas, sense the sacred 'egokoolnatsnarnian' action, by which they define Time, forty-nine times more slowly than it is sensed by the Sacred Individuals dwelling on the Most Holy Sun Absolute.

"Consequently, the process of the flow of Time is forty-nine times quicker for the three-brained beings of our Karatas than for the beings on the Sun Absolute, and this is the speed at which it also should flow for those breeding on the planet Earth.

"Moreover, it is calculated that, during the period of time in which the sun Samos completes its movement of closest approach to the sun Selos—the period considered as one 'year' on our Karatas—the planet Earth completes 389 krentonalnian revolutions around its sun Ors It follows from this that our year, according to the conventionally objective calculation of Time, is 389 times longer than the period which your favorites consider a year.

"You will surely be interested to know that these calculations were given to me in part by the great Arch-Engineer of the Universe, His Measurability, the Archangel Algamatant—may he be perfected unto the Holy Anklad! He explained them to me when, on the occasion of the first misfortune to the planet Earth, he came to the planet Mars as one of the sacred members of the third Most High Commission And further calculations were given me by the captain of the trans-space ship Omnipresent, with whom I had several friendly talks on my journey home from exile.

"Now you should note that you, as a three-brained being who arose on the planet Karatas, are at present only a twelve-year-old boy and, with regard to Being and Reason, exactly like a boy of twelve on the planet Earth who is still unformed and not yet aware of himself, an age all three-brained beings there live through in the process of growing up to the Being of a responsible being.

"All the features of your whole psyche—your 'character,' 'temperament,' and 'inclinations,' in short, all the particularities of your psyche that are manifested outwardly—are exactly the same as those of an immature and still pliant three-brained being there at the age of twelve.

"And so, from all I have just said it follows that although, according to our calculation of Time, you are only a boy of twelve, not yet formed and not yet aware of himself, like any boy of that age on the planet Earth, nevertheless, according to the calculation based upon the subjective understanding of your favorites and their being-sensations of the flow of Time, you have already existed not twelve but all of 4,668 years.

"Thanks to all I have said, you will have material for clarifying certain factors that later were the cause of the gradual diminishing of the average normal length of their existence, until it has now become, in the objective sense, 'almost nothing.'

-- Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, by G.I. Gurdjieff


"While embodied in matter," [the ancient Nyaya Philosophers] said, "the Soul is in a state of imprisonment, and is under the influence of evil passions; but having, by intense study, arrived at the knowledge of the elements and principles of Nature, it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL"

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


Image

The “fire,” “heat,” and “motion” here spoken of, are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of physical science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of the essence of these material manifestations — the “things in themselves,” which, as modern science confesses, entirely elude the instruments of the laboratory, and which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally little avoid the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. Physical Science is welcome to speculate upon the physiological mechanism of living beings, and to continue her fruitless efforts in trying to resolve our feelings, our sensations, mental and spiritual, into functions of their inorganic vehicles. Nevertheless, all that will ever be accomplished in this direction has already been done, and Science will go no farther. She is before a dead wall, on the face of which she traces, as she imagines, great physiological and psychic discoveries, but every one of which will be shown later on to be no better than the cobwebs spun by her scientific fancies and illusions. The tissues of our objective framework alone are subservient to the analysis and researches of physiological science. The six higher principles in them will evade for ever the hand that is guided by an animus that purposely ignores and rejects the Occult Sciences. What is our scientific philosophy but that which was so justly and so politely defined by Kant as “the Science of the limits to our Knowledge”? Where have the many attempts made by Science to bind, to connect, and define all the phenomena of organic life by mere physical and chemical manifestations, brought it to? To speculation generally — mere soap-bubbles, that burst one after the other before the men of Science were permitted to discover real facts. All this would have been avoided, and the progress of knowledge would have proceeded with gigantic strides, had only Science and its philosophy abstained from accepting hypotheses on the mere one-sided Knowledge of their Matter.

Dzyu is the one real knowledge, or Occult Wisdom; which, dealing with eternal truths and primal causes, becomes almost omnipotence when applied in the right direction. Its antithesis is Dzyu-mi, that which deals with illusions and false appearances only, as in our exoteric modern sciences.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

The eyes of a world that stepped out from a night of bigotry into the light of day were dazzled and blinded for a while by the vain glitter of a pile of rubbish and broken pots that had been collected by the advocates of material science, who palmed it off for diamonds and precious stones; but the world has recovered from the effect of the glare, and realised the worthlessness of the rubbish, and it again seeks for the less dazzling but priceless light of the truth. Treasures that have long been buried and hidden away from the sight of those that were neither able to realise nor to appreciate their value are now brought to light; pearls of ancient wisdom are brought from the East; fountains of knowledge that have been for centuries closed up are again opened, and a flood of light is thrown over things that appeared impossible, mysterious, and occult.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

'Whoever desires to sit with God most High, let him sit with the people of Sufism.' These intellectual sciences are a game and a waste of life, compared with the spiritual experiences of dervishes. When a man has reached the age of discretion and is intelligent and completely formed, he no longer plays; or if he does, he keeps it secret out of exceeding shame so that no one may see him. This intellectual science and discussion and worldly whims are as the wind, and man is dust; when the wind tangles with the dust, wherever it reaches it makes the eyes sore, and nothing but conturbation and protestation accrues from its existence. But although man is dust, with every word he hears he weeps, and his tears are as running water. Now when instead of wind, water descends upon the dust, undoubtedly the exact opposite comes to pass. When dust gets water, fruit and grass and fragrant herbs and violets and roses grow. This way of poverty is a way in which you attain all your desires. Whatsoever thing you have longed for will certainly come to you on this way, whether it be the shattering of armies, victory over the enemy, capturing kingdoms, reducing people to subjection, excelling your contemporaries, elegance of speech, eloquence, and all that is like to this.

-- Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Arberry

***

In our civilization the chasm that stretches between mind and heart yawns deep and wide and, as the mind flies on from discovery to discovery in the realms of science, the gulf becomes ever deeper and wider and the heart is left further and further behind. The mind loudly demands and will be satisfied with nothing less than a materially demonstrable explanation of man and his fellow-creatures that make up the phenomenal world. The heart feels instinctively that there is something greater, and it yearns for that which it feels is a higher truth than can be grasped by the mind alone. The human soul would fain soar upon ethereal pinions of intuition; would fain lave in the eternal fount of spiritual light and love; but modern scientific views have shorn its wings and it sits fettered and mute, unsatisfied longings gnawing at its tendrils as the vulture of Prometheus' liver....

As surely as the pre-existing light created the eye whereby the light is seen; as surely as the primordial desire for growth created the digestive and assimilative system for the attainment of that end; as surely as thought existed before the brain and built and still is building the brain for its expression; as surely as the mind is now forging ahead and wringing her secrets from nature by the very force of its audacity, just so surely will the heart find a way to burst its bonds and gratify its longings. At present it is shackled by the dominant brain. Some day it will gather strength to burst its prison bars and become a power greater than the mind....

Man has within himself faculties which eliminate distance and compensate for lack of size to a degree as much greater than the power of telescope and microscope as theirs exceeds that of the naked eye. These senses or faculties are the means of investigation used by occultists. They are their "open sesame" in searching for truth....

The occult scientist sees in everything that happens a cause of a spiritual nature manifesting itself, not omitting the prevalence and alarmingly increasing frequency of seismic disturbances, which it traces to the materialistic thought of modern science.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel

***

You should become serious, and hence take your leave from science. There is too much childishness in it. Your way goes toward the depths. Science is too superficial, mere language, mere tools....
I believe that we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. The ashes are suicide to me.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

***

"You see, my boy, what coincidences occur in our Great Universe. This etherogram refers to your favorites in connection with the 'ape-beings' I just mentioned. It was sent to me from Mars and informs me, among other things, that the three-centered beings of the planet Earth are once more troubled by the 'ape question.'

"I must first tell you that on account of their abnormal being-existence, there was long ago crystallized and there is periodically intensified in the presence of those peculiar three-brained beings arising and existing on the planet Earth a strange factor, producing from time to time a 'crescendo impulse,' under the action of which they wish to find out at any cost whether they have descended from these apes or the apes have descended from them.

"Judging from the etherogram, this time the question is agitating chiefly the biped beings who breed on the continent called 'America. '

"Although this question always troubles them somewhat, every once in a while it becomes for a long time, as they express it, the 'burning question of the day. '

"I remember very well that this 'agitation of mind' over the origin of the apes occurred among them for the first time when their 'center of culture,' as they also like to express it, was the country of Tikliamish The starting point of this 'agitation of mind' was the wiseacring of a certain 'learned being of new formation' named Menitkel.

"This Menitkel became a learned being because, in the first place, his childless aunt was an excellent 'matchmaker,' and mixed a great deal with 'power-possessing beings', and because, in the second place, at the age when he was on the threshold of being a responsible being he was given as a birthday present a book entitled Manual of Bon Ton and Love-Letter Writing. As he was financially secure and therefore quite free, thanks to an inheritance from his uncle, a former pawnbroker, he compiled, out of boredom, a massive and erudite work about the origin of these apes, in which he 'cooked up' an elaborate theory supported by all kinds of 'logical proof,' but of course such 'logical proof as can be conceived and crystallized only in the Reason of those freaks who have taken your fancy.

"This Menitkel then 'proved' by his theory that their 'fellow countrymen,' the apes, were descended from none other than people who had, as they say, 'gone wild ' The other terrestrial beings of that period, as had already become proper to them, believed implicitly this Auntie's darling, without any 'essence-criticism' whatsoever, and from that time on this question, agitating the strange 'Reason' of your favorites, became the subject of disputes and fantasies, right up until what is called the seventh 'great planetary process of reciprocal destruction.'

"Thanks to this maleficent idea there was fixed in the instincts of most of the unfortunates of that period another abnormal so-called 'dictatorial factor,' which began to engender in their common presence the false feeling that these ape-beings were sacred. And this factor, which engendered such a sacrilegious impulse, passed by heredity from generation to generation and reached the instincts of many beings even of the present time.

"As for the false notion cooked up by that 'pawnshop progeny,' it held its ground for nearly two of their centuries and became an integral part of the 'Reason' of most of them. But due to various events growing out of the seventh planetary process of reciprocal destruction, which lasted nearly half a century, it gradually faded away and completely disappeared from their common presence.

"But when their so-called 'cultured existence' became concentrated on the continent of 'Europe,' and when the time again came around for that peculiar disease known as 'wiseacring' to manifest itself with maximum intensity—for this disease, by the way, had long before become subject to the fundamental cosmic law of Heptaparaparshinokh, according to which its intensity had to fluctuate with a certain periodicity—then, to the grief of three-brained beings of the whole Universe, that 'ape question,' or 'who is descended from whom,' once more arose and having become crystallized again became part of the abnormal 'Reason' of your favorites.

"In this instance also, the 'ape question' arose from the stimulus given by a learned being, of course again a 'great' one, but of an altogether 'new formation,' by the name of Darwin. This 'great' scientist, basing his theory on that same logic of theirs, set about 'proving' exactly the opposite of what Menitkel had said, that is, he 'proved' that it was they themselves who were descended from these Mister Apes.

"As for the objective reality of either of the theories of these 'great' terrestrial learned beings, I am reminded of one of the wise sayings of our esteemed Mullah Nasr Eddin:

"'Luck smiled on them both, for they both managed to find the authentic godmother of the incomparable Scheherazade on an old dunghill.'

"In any case, bear in mind that for many centuries this question, among others just as ephemeral, has provided material for the kind of thinking your favorites consider the 'highest manifestation of Reason.'

"In my opinion your favorites could get a correct answer to this question that always agitates them of how the apes arose, if only they really knew how to apply another of the maxims of our dear Mullah Nasr Eddin, who often used to say:

'The cause of every misunderstanding must be sought in woman. '

"If they had made use of this wise maxim to resolve their enigmatic question perhaps they would have finally discovered the origin of these fellow countrymen of theirs.

"As the subject of the genealogy of these apes is indeed exceedingly complicated and unusual, I shall inform your Reason about it from every possible aspect.

"The fact is that neither are your favorites descended from apes nor are apes descended from them, but the cause of the arising of these apes is in this case—as in every other misunderstanding there—their women.

-- Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, by G.I. Gurdjieff


WHAT CALMING THE MIND IS ALL ABOUT
WHAT MEDITATION IS FOR
IS TO COOL YOU OUT SO YOU
RE-MEMBER
SO YOU SEE HOW IT ALL IS

Image

TRY SITTING AROUND WHEN YOU'RE FULL OF SELF-PITY
YOU SIT DOWN IN FRONT OF YOUR PUJA TABLE
AND YOU TAKE A PICTURE OF MEHER BABA
AND HE'S SMILING AT YOU LIKE HE'S
THE OTHER MARX BROTHER AND HE'S SAYING:

LET ME HELP YOU

OH, I WISH YOU WOULD, MEHER BABA

(WOW! DIG THAT SELF-PITY ISN'T THAT EXQUISITE IT'S SO HARD
FULL BLOOM! WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY COLOR IT MUST BE A NEW BRAND OF SELF-PITY
A PARTICULARLY FRAGRANT VARIETY I JUST REALLY WANT TO SMELL THAT ONE
TO SIT AND SMELL IT FOR EVER SO LONG. SUCH A GOOD ONE.)

I MEAN: I WISH I COULD HAVE TIME TO GROOVE W/
YOU BUT I'VE GOT TO GET ON W/LIFE.
I HAVE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO TODAY.
ALL RIGHT BABA!
I'LL SIT WITH YOU FOR ONE MINUTE. OKAY?
HERE WE ARE. YOU'VE GOT ONE MINUTE.
DO YOUR THING. FORTY SECONDS LEFT!

Image

SADHANA
YOU'VE GOT TO BE QUIET INSIDE TO DO
THAT KIND OF PHOTOGRAPHY
IT'S VERY EASY TO "PHOTOGRAPH"
'INANIMATE OBJECTS' -- LIKE OTHER PEOPLE
BUT: TURN THE LENS RIGHT IN ON
THE VERY STUFF YOU'RE HIDING IN --

SHOOT THE CAMERA THIS WAY!
VERY POWERFUL STUFF!

Image

The personality is the reflected picture of the Spirit, the mind being the mirror, or focus. As when reflected in a pond, the images of trees appear inverted, the foliage seeming to be the deepest down in the water, so the highest aspect of the spirit (the Divine Spirit) finds its counterpart in the lowest of the three bodies (the dense body). The next highest spirit (the life spirit) is reflected in the next lowest body (the vital body). The third spirit (the human spirit) and its reflection, the third body (the desire body), appear closest of all to the reflecting mirror, which is the mind, the latter corresponding to the surface of the pond -- the reflecting medium in our analogy. The Spirit came down from the higher Worlds during involution; and by concurrent action, the Bodies were built upward in the same period. It is the meeting of these two streams in the focusing Mind that marks the point in time when the individual, the human being, the Ego, is born -- when the Spirit takes possession of its vehicles.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel

***

AMORC analyzes the five senses, focusing on the eyes. In its discussion, it utilizes the example of movie projection, citing the scientific explanation of the process as correct -- but not complete.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman

***

The power of vaticination, popularly denominated "second sight," appears to have been possessed by [Emerson and Plato]. Apollonius asserts his own possession of the faculty as follows:

"I can see the present and the future in a clear mirror. The sage need not wait for the vapors of the earth and the corruption of the air to foresee plagues and fevers; he must know them later than God, but earlier than the people. The theoi or gods see the future; common men, the present; sages, that which is about to take place. My peculiar abstemious mode of life produces such an acuteness of the senses, or creates some other faculty, so that the greatest and most remarkable things may be performed."

This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our everyday world of limits, all is as one day or state -- the past and future comprised in the present.

-- New Platonism and Alchemy, by Alexander Wilder

Image


SO ALL I CAN DO ALL THE TIME IS TO
COOL MYSELF OUT ...
THAT'S ALL I'M DOING -- I DO NOTHING BUT
SADHANA
IF SOMEBODY SAYS: WHAT DO YOU DO, MAN?
I SAY: I DO SADHANA
SURE, BUT DON'T YOU LECTURE?
SURE, LECTURING HAPPENS BUT
I'M DOING SADHANA
THIS TRIP IS HELPING ME GET FREE OF MY EGO.
BECAUSE: IF I GET FREE OF MY EGO
WE ALL GET FREE OF OUR EGO
BECAUSE: THAT'S THE WAY THE TRIP WORKS
BECAUSE: WE'RE ALL THE SAME BEING AND
THAT'S THE PROBLEM -- WE CAN ONLY MOVE AS
FAST AS WE ALL CAN MOVE ...
YOU CAN HEAR THIS MESSAGE ONLY AS PURELY AS
I AM PURE. THAT'S THE WAY IT BOILS DOWN --
I CAN RESONATE WITH YOU IN THE HIGHEST PLACE
I AM
SO: I CAN DO NOTHING FOR YOU BUT
WORK ON MYSELF ...
YOU CAN DO NOTHING FOR ME BUT
WORK ON YOURSELF!

Image

OH! I'M GOING TO DO GOOD THINGS FOR MY CHILD. BALONY!
THAT'S ALL EGO. JUST WORK ON YOURSELF
AND: EVERYTIME YOU WORK ON YOURSELF,
YOU GET CALMER
YOU HEAR MORE
YOU SENSE MORE
YOU ARE MORE
YOU'RE MORE PRESENT
WHAT ARE YOU OFFERING A CHILD?
NOT A SET OF SOCIAL ROLES
PASSING IN THE NIGHT ...
YOU'RE OFFERING A CHILD HERE AND NOW-NESS

THE TREASURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE TREASURE OF AWARENESS.
IF YOU DON'T HELP OTHER BEINGS CUT
THROUGH THE ILLUS-ION BECAUSE YOU'RE
THROUGH THE ILLUSION
WHAT ELSE???
WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DOING MORE OF THE DANCE
WITHIN THE DANCE??? ?
ARE WE ALWAYS GOING TO MEET ON THE STAGE?
DON'T WE EVER TAKE OFF THE COSTUMES?
THAT'S WHAT I FELT AS A CHILD.
WE ARE ALWAYS ON THE STAGE.
IN OUR COSTUMES
(I'M A GOOD CHILD
THAT'S WHAT I AM)
I KNOW TO PLAY
GOOD CHILD
I'VE BEEN IN THAT ROLE FOR YEARS
I KNOW HOW TO DO IT.
DON'T TALK BACK
GO TO BED EARLY
I'M A MASTER AT THAT GAME
DON'T GET YOUR KNEES
DIRTY
IS ANYBODY HOME???? ? EAT ALL THE FOOD ON
YOUR PLATE.
HELLO. I'M HOME. IS ANYBODY HOME? SURE I'LL HAVE
SOME FOOD.
IF I GIVE YOU THE EXTERNAL THINGS
I'M A GOOD
PARENT

Image

YOU AND I CAN ALWAYS STARVE TOGETHER
WE'RE BACKSTAGE IN THE HERE & NOW
IF WE'RE NOT IN THE HERE & NOW
NO MATTER HOW MUCH FOOD
WE PUT IN OUR BELLIES
IT'S NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH
AND THAT'S THE FEELING OF WESTERN MAN

IT'S NOT ENOUGH

HE'S GOT IT ALL GOING IN
AS FAST AS HE CAN SHOVEL IT
HE'S GOT EVERY SENSUAL GRATIFICATION
HE CAN POSSIBLY DESIRE &
IT'S NOT ENOUGH
BECAUSE THERE'S NO
HERE & NOW-NESS ABOUT IT

Image

HERE & NOW
IS THE DOORWAY TO ALL THAT
ENERGY
BECAUSE IF YOU'RE TRUTHFULLY HERE & NOW
THERE'S NO MORE YOU THAT'S THE WAY IT WORKS

DID YOU EVER GO TO THE MOVIES AND GET SO CAUGHT UP
IN THE MOVIE THAT YOU FORGOT WHO YOU WERE
AND THEN THE LIGHTS CAME ON AND
YOU WONDERED ... WHERE AM I?
WHAT'S GOING ON? OH IT'S A MOVIE

WHAT YOU'VE GOT TO DO IS CREATE IN YOURSELF
AN
ABSOLUTELY CALM CENTER WHERE IT'S
ALWAYS RIGHT HERE & NOW IT IS JUST
LIGHT IT IS JUST IS-NESS GETTING INTO THE
EATING
GOING TO
THE TOILET
GETTING INTO BED
UP THE STAIRS
JUST THE IS-NESS
TALKING
RUNNING DOWN THE STREET

Image

WHEN YOU MEET A BEING WHO IS CENTERED
YOU ALWAYS KNOW IT
YOU ALWAYS FEEL A KIND OF
CALM
EMANATION
IT ALWAYS
TOUCHES YOU
IN THAT
PLACE
WHERE
YOU
FEEL
CALM

Image

BUT: YOU CAN'T HUSTLE IT
YOU CAN'T MAKE-BELIEVE YOU'RE CALM
WHEN YOU'RE NOT.

IT NEVER WORKS
EVERYBODY KNOWS
YOU KNOW
IT'S HORRIBLE

YOU MUST CENTER
FIND THAT PLACE
INSIDE YOURSELF
AND:
WHATEVER
YOUR
DANCE
IS
YOU'RE DOING
IT FROM
THAT PLACE
ALWAYS RIGHT IN HERE RIGHT IN
YOUR HRIDAYAM
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