

## THE GRYPHON MYSTERY

PHILIP MATTHEWS

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Philip Matthews

September 1999 – May 2015

ISBN 9781310161155

"And there is a certain great law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. Namely, it is what man works at to help _others_ attain such consciousness which contributes most to its development."

Rudolf Steiner
PREFACE

The essays presented here were not conceived as a series; they have grown one from the other in the order in which they are arranged. You will find that each essay introduces and explains itself as needs be.

Access to the _Journal of the Anthroposophical Society in Ireland_ was the occasion for writing the first essay, **The Spiritual Organs**. The companion essay, **The Spiritual Body** , is in direct continuity with it, in effect the second part of a single work. I separated them simply because as one essay it would have been too long. **The Spiritual Organs** was published in the Summer 2000 issue of the Journal.

Though **The Encounter with Christ** came third in the series, it is for obvious reasons the pivotal work. The subject is momentous, but I have added nothing to the revelations recounted here, hoping in this way to encourage readers to seek their own individual encounters with this being.

**Activating the Spiritual Organs** completes the description of the spiritual organs begun in **The Spiritual Organs** and **The Spiritual Body**. It gathers together much of the material disclosed in the preceding three essays. **The Seth Meditations** is an addendum to **Activating the Spiritual Organs.** While it is intended to illuminate an important aspect of that essay, it stands in its own right as a significant spiritual experience.

The completion of the Gryphon Mystery led on into a long period of new insight, which took many years to understand. But it would be expected that the achievement of the _Hieros Gamos_ (Sacred Marriage) – which is what the successful activation of the Spiritual Organs amounted to – should lead to the release of the Wisdom which the "female" part of the Adam Kadmon possesses. The last five essays introduce the main outlines of that Wisdom.

The sixth essay, **On the Division of the Human Being and the Advent of the Ego,** details the context for the creation of the Spiritual Organs and their relation to the destiny of mankind.

The seventh essay, **The Same and the Other – the Nature of Human Will** , is an attempt to outline the larger destiny of mankind and its place in the great spiritual drama that shapes the whole of reality.

The next essay, **Soul and Will – the Phantom of Life** , elaborates the description of reality introduced in the previous essay.

The ninth essay, **On the Incarnation of the Ego** , is an account of the final development of mankind, while the last essay, **Desire and Beauty – The Ego and The Other** , examines the two great stimuli in human life and their very different influences upon us.

The **Appendices** contain further reflections on the nature and destiny of mankind in relation to the Ego. The **Endnote 1** looks back across the entire process from the perspective of the cycle of novels that constitute **The Dark Liberation**. The reader should consult the novels listed in the Endnote for fuller accounts of the woman's role than can be provided here. **Endnote 2** examines death and the thereafter. Finally **Endnote 3** examines the phenomenon of the Mother.

The motivation for bringing these disclosures and experiences to the attention of others is detailed in **The Spiritual Organs**. My hope is that reading these essays will stimulate the spiritual element that resides in all human beings to the point where each individual becomes aware of its presence and will thus be encouraged to open his or her own spiritual organs.

THE GRYPHON MYSTERY

THE SPIRITUAL ORGANS

Manifestations of life are always sevenfold.

Rudolf Steiner

The Riddle of Humanity.

To be candid, I am not sure what kind of reception this essay will receive. The world is certainly overburdened by now with diagrams, maps and figurations of occult and sacred symbols. The result is that many have come to believe that possession of a map of heaven is at once a passport to that region.

I bear in mind also Rudolf Steiner's remark that the images perceived during spiritual development are merely indications of one's progress and not as such of much value to others. In any case, we bear the signs of our spiritual state upon our being, signs that are perceptible to the spiritually advanced, so reporting our visions adds nothing to their assessment of us.

I accept this point. Almost from the beginning I recognised that many others have experienced what I experience, and that most of them maintain silence and strive on in humility for deeper spiritual understanding. Nonetheless, I have decided to bring forward this particular set of images. I do so for two reasons.

The first reason I will leave aside for the moment until I have created a context for it, which I will do below. The other reason is this: as you will see, the set of images is peculiarly complete in specified ways. By this I mean that the images form a complete set without at the same time disclosing all the knowledge that might be obtained from them.

In view of what I am presenting here, I should observe that the forms of the Chakras have remained largely unchanged over the last two thousand years. In fact the only deviation of note from the pattern familiar today is to be found in the 6th century AD _Yoga Upanishad,_ where the root Chakra is said to be triangular in shape. Even C.W. Leadbeater, who based his study, _The Chakras,_ on his own clairvoyant investigations, maintained the forms in substance, deviating only to move the second Chakra up to the spleen, and to subdivide the brow Chakra's two petals into 48 'undulations' each. The well-known model of the Chakras as lotus flowers with their associated figures and symbols date from an Indian compilation of the 17th century.

Rudolf Steiner for his part accepted the traditional Indian interpretation of the Chakras, going so far as to adopt the didactic superstructure developed over the centuries. Even so, there is a case to be made for interpreting certain 'living' aspects of his teaching by reference to an exploration of the depths to be found in each of the Chakras. There is no doubt that the seven lotus flowers were of great significance to him, and that he explored them ceaselessly, with truly wonderful results.

Until I perceived this aspect of Dr Steiner's insight, my interest in the Chakras had been peripheral, just another part of the wide spectrum of occult knowledge and speculation. My first experience of them came during a course of yoga I undertook with Lily Donat in London in 1977. Towards the end of the course she led us to contact the base Chakra. I was very surprised when the Chakra actually made its presence felt! However, I was much more taken by a painting of the Chakras, done by one of her students, that hung in the exercise room. Years later, at Christmas 1985, I managed to create my own painting of the familiar tree of lotus flowers. It was a profoundly satisfying experience.

I became immersed in Rudolf Steiner's works during the late 80's, concentrating upon the cross-structure of the epochs of the Earth's evolution and the development of the human bodies or sheaths. At the same time, my meditation began to develop in the early nineties, as a result of completing a project that had spanned twenty years. These private experiences ranged in a systematic way – seen retrospectively – through familiar and unfamiliar regions, culminating in January 1996 in the series of images set out below.

I feel I should say something about the nature of the sources I am using to give this account. Like so many, I have kept diaries and account books. When the present series of meditations began in late 1991, I was content to hold them in memory. Only in early 1992, when I realised the scale of the inner activity, did I begin to keep notes. It began as an expediency: I jotted down abbreviated accounts of my experiences in pencil on folded sheets of unruled A4, thus obtaining 4-page units of writing space. I filled these pages with condensed accounts plus whatever images, shapes and transforms occurred. The handwriting is tiny – I need a glass now in order to read it.

These accounts were intended to serve three purposes. One was to make an accurate and _sufficient_ record as soon as possible after the experience. The second was to hold a comprehensive record of the whole cycle of mediations in the hope that I might better understand it in the future. The third reason is in some ways the most important. _I write down my experiences in order that I might forget them._ I do this in order to forestall the modern habit of labelling the new and the unknown (and the spiritual world is unknown to each of us prior to our _experience_ of it) with preconceived concepts and names. I forget my experiences so that I do not contaminate future experience with spurious expectations derived _indirectly_ from past experience. I stress this now because it was only when I went back over my notes of the Chakra meditations earlier this year that I began to grasp their possible significance and value.

I now intend setting out the accounts of the Chakra meditations in a 'raw' state, as a Diary. Only the relevant entries will be given, all abbreviations will be expanded and personal elements will be excluded unless they convey necessary information. Square brackets enclose explanatory notes not in the original account.

I am aware that these entries will appear extremely cryptic at first sight, but the commentary on the individual Chakras that follows on the Diary should help to explicate them.

Please note that I refer to the Chakras by the number of petals each possesses – the most unambiguous way to refer to them in shorthand. Thus the base Chakra has 4 petals; the sacral plexus Chakra has 6; the solar plexus Chakra has 10; the heart Chakra has 12; the throat Chakra has 16; the brow Chakra has 2, and the crown Chakra has 1000.

This is the Diary:

In addition to this: you can see that on 15/1/96 I set up a 'plan' for reference. I drew the Chakras in ascending order in the traditional lotus form. Then, as the meditations progressed, I set alongside each Chakra the new image(s) as I experienced them. They are laid out here (see the last page of this essay) substantially as I saw them. The only modification is an adjustment of the root Chakra. I first drew it thus:

The modification is intuitive, but it does not change the import of the image at all.

At the beginning I said I had two reasons for deciding to communicate these new images. One was because they form a complete set. I think you can see that this is true. The other reason, the compelling one for me, is the encounter with the spirit who called himself 'RUDOLF' at the start of the sequence, and a second encounter, this time in dream, with Rudolf Steiner.

Now, I want to emphasise that it is this aspect which compels me to disclose these images. It is not an authority to do so, nor does it underwrite my doing so. Believe me when I say that I only became aware that the Chakra meditations were bounded by these two encounters earlier this year, when I first set out to study my notes of the meditations in detail.

It seems to be a common factor in spiritual development that spirits – good and bad – are drawn to the opening one is creating. It is my conviction that if one is obliged to remain silent about one's visions, one is doubly obliged to maintain silence about the spirits one encounters. Delusion in the matter of images is one thing; delusions about spirit beings is a graver and more frightening matter.

 W                            ith this caution in mind, I am prepared to submit to the impulse to make these meditations known to those they might interest. I am presenting them here in a 'raw' state so that no one is seduced by persuasive presentation of pretty pictures. In the end, you will have to judge their worth for yourself.

Before I undertake what I intend will be a fairly concise commentary on the images, I should indicate a certain liberty in presenting them here. You will notice that colour is an important element in the images. While the colours attributed to the various images here follow the disclosures, I have added to them in small ways in order to elucidate some of the implications apparent in the images themselves. In the following commentary I will detail these additions.

THE KUNDALINI GARDEN

This image is novel in the context of the Chakras and totally new in my experience. I see it as a hollow building block filled with earth (green) from which two plants grow, one 'hot', the other 'cold' – red and blue, which form the interlacing currents, Pingala-Sun and Ida-Moon of Indian tradition, that are said to rise from Chakra to Chakra to the brow Chakra.

The injunction in the 11/1/96 meditation to 'always return' reminds us that the Kundalini must always be returned to its resting place in the Garden after any exercise involving it, a caution repeated by most authorities on the subject.

Much is said of the Kundalini Garden in the meditations, more than I am prepared to absorb even yet. But a word of caution: the rising of the Kundalini is represented by many authorities as a traumatic event. One must be careful then not to confuse the knowledge imparted in these meditations with one's experience of the events referred to. In other words, I know important things about the Kundalini, but I am less certain of my experience of it.

ROOT CHAKRA – 4 petals, at base of spine.

Colours: Base, red; armature, blue; globe, yellow; tip, white

This is a truly transformative image. Fourfold as the four bodies of the human being – red for physical, blue for ether, yellow for astral, white for Ego. Best images: an egg in an eggcup; a chalice with host; Grail with stone; a shaving mirror.

Notice how the fundamental nature of this organ is signalled in the 20/1/96 meditation by the echo set up in all the other organs, like a roll call, excepting the organ immediately above, the 6.

I will refer to it again at the end of this discussion.

SACRAL PLEXUS CHAKRA – 6 petals, below navel.

The colouring is as indicated in the meditation of 3/3/96. I feel that the gold and yellow triangles rotate against each other. I have little meditational experience of this lotus and only one physical experience. Even my reception of the images has an element of confusion. You see that on 20/1/96 I raised the question of the status of this lotus after I listed only six lotuses as opened or closed. The arrow through the six means to point to the hexagram in the 15/1/96 entry. I forgot then that the hexagram there is linked to the throat lotus and seems to refer back to the content of the 24/12/95 meditation, which precedes the series proper.

I don't intend pursuing this matter further here – it is one aspect of the meditations that I cannot yet fathom. There may be a link, to do with alchemy, between the hexagram of the Throat Chakra – the 'mineral disposition' – and that associated in detail with the Sacral Plexus Chakra, but I am not prepared to speculate on this.

The physical experience, by the way, was one of intense joy rising from that part of my body at the sight of a group of obviously happy people in a park. It seems thus linked with the Solar Plexus and Heart Chakras. See below.

SOLAR PLEXUS CHAKRA – 10 petals, above the navel.

Colour, pink, violet-pink, red-pink.

I have seen this Chakra vividly a number of times. I call it the lotus of wrath, but suspect it is also the source of the love felt in the heart lotus. The opening of the Chakra brings all your anger and resentment to the surface. In anger you will see the lotus – a congeries of bulbs/spheres like a blackberry – bristle with what can be best called erect nipples. It is shockingly erotic to behold, but it is the seat of our moral feelings even so.

This is another fundamental organ, witnessed by the crosses I placed around the entry and by the fact that all the other organs are checked, here in terms of a kind of reducibility to simple pattern. I have not investigated this yet.

A warning. The opening of this Chakra seems also to draw a great deal of disturbance to you, not necessarily directed at you, but such that you will be upset, angered and frustrated to a degree that might surprise and dismay you. This experience lasted over eighteen months for me.

It is nonetheless a deeply beautiful Chakra. It is one that abides always with you once opened.

HEART CHAKRA – 12 petals, behind the heart.

Colour: the reference is to the Rosy Cross, therefore red plays a part. But I have connected the _form_ this lotus takes with another aspect of Rudolf Steiner's description of the spiritual world, one I developed to its final form during a study of _The Fifth Gospel._ Succinctly, the heart lotus is the image of the Macrocosm in us. Conversely, the spirit world is precisely of the form of the heart lotus. In a sense, then, the heart is both a door to the Cosmos and also the Cosmos already there. Otherwise: the Ego has its home _for_ us in the heart, the heart is its true image.

Thus I colour the lotus as green in all parts except the outer sections of the diagonals, which I colour red.

Love pours from this lotus. It can suffer greatly too. Neither its love nor its pain is of the Ego, but of us as living beings. It is in the heart that the Ego _can_ learn about earthly life, if it can be brought to recognise the _fact_ that it is immersed in this life.

The instruction of 13/2/96 that one should begin all activities with the spiritual organs at the Heart Chakra follows the advice given by Rudolf Steiner. While it is necessary to contact the brow Chakra first at the beginning of our relationship with the organs – because this organ protects us – all subsequent activities should start with the heart Chakra. Taken with the earlier ruling that the Kundalini should be restored to rest in its Garden, these rules are clear and simple. You will find that you follow them in any case, if you enter upon this activity with due reverence.

THROAT CHAKRA – 16 petals.

As a gas ring, it is coloured blue and pale blue. However, the face, with its twelve points, is white with the points in red.

This is a complex Chakra, an extremely complex structure. Image it as the Claddagh ring, two hands holding a heart. The heart is the principle of the circulation I have seen in this image. But it is a difficult Chakra to experience. I instinctively prayed on 7/2/96 before receiving details of it. Jiddu Krishnamurti's spiritual growth culminated in the opening of this Chakra amid very great anguish, where he felt the two arms reach up into his head to his brow.

It is in some ways the most highly specified of the Chakras, with its heart face, its horns and its arms. As for the horns: only recently have I seen that these horns are the equivalent of a crown. Thus the heart is crowned here.

BROW CHAKRA – 2 petals, just above the nose.

Colours: the central ring is silver, dark at centre. The petals are white, with sun and moon inscribed upon them, sun on right and moon on left to correspond to the terminals of the Kundalini currents.

This is the most traditional of the images here. It is the easiest to open and should be opened first, as advised by Rudolf Steiner. It is the seat of a kind of knowledge, almost like a companion, a supportive and generous one at that. But discipline is needed here. Its easy embrace can spell loss of consciousness, that can tempt one to the bad habit of using meditation as a sedative.

CROWN CHAKRA – 1000 petals, above the head.

Colour, white, or scintillating and multi-coloured: flashes out sprays of light.

This lotus appeared easily several times as a flashing light. I feel I experienced not the Chakra itself, and certainly not its transcendent nature, but a distant, very distant image of it that served as an occasion for the imparting of an important insight into this scheme.

Though not detailed in the 2/2/96 meditation, the meditation on 2 (the brow Chakra) referred to there had the form of a line of movement from the crown lotus down to the brow. You will notice in the full scheme that the centre meridian, called Sushumna, is absent below the brow Chakra. When I first painted these images I thought afterwards that I had overlooked putting in the Sushumna and got into a bit of a fuss over it. Only by rechecking my notes did I see that it was not to be included.

This is a significant deviation from the traditional plan, but here the Kundalini currents rise to meet the descending current from the crown. There is authority in the Indian sources for seeing the Sushumna as descending into the body, rather than rising from the root Chakra as some assume.

Finally, there are two last features I would like to draw to your attention. The first I can best illustrate by means of the following table:

I = defining image (the image which appears in the final chart).

X = details of image presented (extra details that helped define final image).

O = other reference to Chakra (significant references containing no images).

Kund = Kundalini.

The numbers in the top row represent the Chakras in ascending order.

Notice that the Chakras are revealed in a distinct order, and that some revelations have a kind of echo among other Chakras. Thus an aspect of the Kundalini Garden is revealed along with the disclosure of the image of the 6-petal Chakra(no. 2). Again, the image of the brow Chakra is repeated as the difficult throat Chakra is revealed. See how preparatory images of the heart Chakra appear as echoes of other disclosures.

The order of disclosure is meaningful. First the Kundalini, the energies of the Chakras, then the first Chakra, then the guardian brow Chakra. Next the Chakra of wrath is revealed before the obscure throat Chakra, then the hidden sacral plexus Chakra, whose hexagram structure is echoed in aspects of the throat Chakra itself. Then comes the heart Chakra after much preparation, then finally the crown Chakra, the Cosmos itself.

I did not notice the second feature until twenty months after the meditations! Learning from experience is surely a lengthy process.

In the last meditation the top three Chakras are linked in a composite structure. Now, look at my version of the base Chakra, the chalice-like bowl and host above it. Can you see the throat Chakra in the base and armature? See the brow Chakra stripped of its petals/wings in the globe and see the remote crown Chakra in the white spot at the tip of the globe.

I believe there is a great mystery in this coincidence of forms.

Now notice that the sacral plexus and solar plexus Chakras are excluded from this scheme. Notice also how unique each of these forms is. Both are very active Chakras – both are _living_ Chakras. I believe that we, as human beings, have made these Chakras. I believe it is these Chakras that are to be transformed into the higher natures. See that the heart Chakra, the Chakra of the transforming Ego, has already begun this process in the throat Chakra.

9/9/99

The Spiritual Organs

THE SPIRITUAL BODY

Initiation is nothing other than man's gaining the capacity of developing organs of vision in his higher bodies.

Rudolf Steiner, _Egyptian Myths and Mysteries_.

I want here to extend the scheme laid out in my last essay on the Spiritual Organs. You will find that the means used to gain this new knowledge differs significantly from that used in my previous essay. There, if you remember, disclosure was by and large involuntary and complete in every instance – I mean that the images revealed were complete in themselves, even though they might be extended or augmented at a later stage by other images. Here, as you will see, knowledge is gained in a more piecemeal way, often by simply studying familiar schemes in a new light. And while an overall pattern will emerge, many details will remain hidden, awaiting future investigation.

These very different spiritual experiences arise because they are received by different parts of our being. Characterising these experiences as image-concept and form-presence, we can pinpoint the sources of the experiences in the astral-mental and the etheric-will respectively. The nature of these experiences can be contrasted as light to dark, voice to form: that which calls to us in contrast to that which impresses us. Our response differs too: we welcome the astral experience because of its apparent familiarity, but are apprehensive of the etheric experience because the forms discovered there are often strange.

A deeper reason for this dichotomy can be discerned. The primary aim of spiritual experience is to help us achieve the full unfolding of our spiritual natures. This involves initially an awakening to our own spiritual selves, and then a gradual revelation of the whole spiritual world of which we are an integral part. The first task is concerned with the future, with the complete spiritual beings we are to become. The second task is concerned with what is eternally present, but which we experience in our limited being as arising solely from the past.

It is understandable that the promise of the future – the unrealised ideas – the call to be enlarged in love, should fill us with happy anticipation. It is also understandable that the encounter with the eternal should daunt us, should seem almost an obstacle to our bright future. It is not for nothing that we are told that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: anyone who has entered on the spiritual work knows how easily we are put in fear by the awesome reality of our being and that of the spiritual world.

Even so, there are aids that can serve us in our experience of the etheric-form world. The most obvious is the light of consciousness which arises in us through our experience of the astral-concepts. This consciousness is not merely the means whereby we have knowledge of our future-ideas, it is an accompaniment of these ideas which we are expected to use in our encounter with the etheric-forms. As well as this, our etheric will-nature offers us assistance through the means more usually called the artistic or creative power resident in each one of us.

In these days of excessive 'head-work' and the pre-eminence of the concept in aesthetics, it is often forgotten that art is in essence an operation of the will. Art-work is realised through the limbs: every artist knows the phenomenon of the 'wisdom of the hand', how the appropriate expressions – words, brush-strokes, notes – flow from an _active_ hand. It is by means of this wisdom of the hand that the initial contact with the etheric-forms is achieved. It is the hand that must open this book, draw this shape, arrange this list of terms or attributes. Consciousness serves here by permitting an increased sensitivity to the impulses of the hand. Later, it will serve to register what arises from the contact of our hand-will with the dark forms that have resided since before birth in our etheric bodies.

Now, what arises here is only superficially similar to our experience of the astral-ideas. The latter flash upon us, bright, detailed, complete. Then they are gone – yet we have clear memories of them, as though they have been imprinted in our minds. But the images that arise through our hand-work are often uncoloured and reserved, though they will persist under our inspection. They are also strange, sometimes because they seem out of context, other times because they are incongruous in detail. We always regret their passing and remember them as something lost – this despite the fact that they can be easily recalled to mind as memory-images.

*

Astrology is a most complete science, of astounding detail and complexity. It claims to convey complete knowledge of man and the stars. Constructing a natal horoscope can be an overwhelming experience; attempting to analyse the structure of the Zodiacal sequence can lead to a profound confusion in the face of the wealth of relations implicit in its apparently simple structure.

For many years I was intrigued by this Zodiacal form, often laying out the circle of the houses and listing attribute after attribute. In time I came to focus on an obvious curiosity: why are some of the planets attributed to more than one sign? One evening I finally did what I had long felt urged to do: I made a list of the planets and laid against them their attributed signs, thus

I was very surprised by this. I had never seen this list in a work on astrology. (I have since only seen one instance, which I will discuss later.) But despite feeling that this arrangement was of some significance I could find no way of developing it, except perhaps calling one list day and the other night, light and dark, and so on.

It was only when the spiritual experiences of early 1996 brought me to link my own preoccupation with the Chakras with Rudolf Steiner's teaching on the Spiritual Organs that the seven-fold array implicit in my astrological list became significant. I was aware of Rudolf Steiner's schemes of 12-fold and 7-fold orders, but only now did I begin to feel the urge to construct a plan relating the Zodiac circle of signs to the diameter of seven planets. It was a slow, blind groping over a period of months, which crystallised during a study of the _Fifth Gospel_. Here Rudolf Steiner brings together the numerical elements important to his teachings, and also underlying the astrological plan. These are:

Finally, in the middle of a night in August 1996, I brought these various schemes together for the first time: a circle of 12 nodes, a central spine of 7 nodes, a cross of four elements, and a suggestive figure of the three remaining elements. This was the plan:

This is the bare scheme. I made the following attributions:

12-fold circle = physical body

7-fold spine = etheric body

3-fold figure = astral body

4-fold cross = spirit-ego

But it was soon evident that to place my initial astrological list on the Zodiacal plan the outer nodes must be displaced from their clock-face positions, thus:

Now the planets and signs are aligned in their respective relations, with only the Sun out of place. This new layout occupied my attention for many months and led me into pretty arcane corners. The outcome, however, was the recognition of the importance of the three-fold astrological sequence of Cardinal, Mutable and Fixed signs. Lay them out on the new scheme:

C = Cardinal M = Mutable F = Fixed

This immediately suggests a new arrangement of 4-fold and 3-fold elements. It is now apparent that the Mutable signs are the focus of a relationship between the 3- and 4-fold orders. It was then that I saw the relation of this astrological scheme to the 12-point layout of the Heart Chakra, which I had received in meditation early in 1996. At once the whole scheme came together in principle, with the outer 12-fold structure pointing to Rudolf Steiner's schemes of 12 physical organs and 12 senses (both related explicitly to the astrological scheme), and the inner spine of planets repeating the seven-fold tier of Chakras or spiritual organs. Here the Heart Chakra mirrors exactly within the spiritual organs the external physical form – thus:

When you consider that Rudolf Steiner repeatedly says that the 12-fold scheme of physical organs is a projection of a 12-fold _spiritual_ order, then it is possible to see in this scheme not only a plan of the human being but also a concise representation of the whole spiritual order.

This, then, is the fundamental scheme discoverable by means of the wisdom of the hand. Now, following on this achievement, it became possible for consciousness to press against the meanings of the scheme and to register in meditation what various aspects of the scheme have to communicate about their natures. As you will see, such communications are partial and strange, but thankfully further light can be shed on them by reference to Rudolf Steiner's encyclopaedic disclosures.

I must emphasise here that my researches are _not_ systematic. I dread leading the witness, as it were, aware of the temptation to clutch at pat answers to what are deep and serious enquiries. It is like walking on thin ice.

The first insight arose in the hand, in a conviction that a dynamic relation exists between the opposing Mutable nodes. I saw this as a motion from the Cardinal mode through the Mutable node to the Fixed node – from Libra through Virgo to Leo, for instance – that involves a reciprocal interaction between the Mercury Mutable Virgo and its opposite, the Jupiter Mutable Pisces, which in some way assists the transitions from Cardinal to Fixed signs in both 3-fold schemes, thus:

This in turn suggested a comprehensive dynamic, with the heart as centre:

C = Cardinal M = Mutable F = Fixed

It was hard to know what to make of this curious scheme, until I read Rudolf Steiner's account of Nietzsche's intellectual career in _Human and Cosmic Thought_. Nietzsche's inability to advance from an intellectual outlook related to the sign Taurus caused him to shift to the intellectual outlook characterised by the sign opposite Taurus, that is, Scorpio. Rudolf Steiner offers no explanation for this reciprocation, but it must surely be connected with how the four elements are distributed about the Zodiacal signs. The 3-fold dynamic of Cardinal, Mutable and Fixed signs can only include three of the elements: the fourth is always found in the opposing Mutable sign, thus:

A = Air F = Fire W = Water E = Earth

Notice also that the elements reciprocate with those they have an affinity for: Fire to Air, Water to Earth. There is a mystery to be drawn from this scheme that will reward the effort required.

The second instance is clearer, though once again not coinciding exactly. In December 1997, during a particularly deep meditation, I saw elements of the plan laid out, then saw imposed upon it two angelic figures extending out along the two lower Mutable lines. However, while the being on the left was clearly seen, that on the right was obviously truncated at the chest, so that only the lower part was visible. Above both, and above the plane of the Sun-Heart Chakra, there was a Pentagram within a circle, and above that again a white dove, its wings raised upwards. This is the plan:

I was for a long time perplexed by this vision, unable to account for the truncation of the figure on the right. Then late in 1999, while studying Rudolf Steiner's _The Effects of Spiritual Development_ , I found an answer. Discussing the changes that occur in the etheric body in the course of the year, Dr Steiner describes how the head of the etheric body grows indistinct through spring into summer, then becoming more distinct again during the autumn. The process involved here is quite complex and I will touch on some general features only.

The Earth sleeps in the summer, thus leaving the human being alone. At this time we can perceive our etheric body more clearly than in the other seasons. The upper part – specifically the head – of the etheric body becomes indistinct in the summer because of our growing awareness that beings, whom Rudolf Steiner calls Amshaspands, are working on the etheric organisation of the brain. Our understanding of this process is extended when it is realised that the lower right Mutable sign in my scheme is Gemini, which is the locus of the Ego.

I cannot expand upon the presence of the aspiring white dove in this vision without resort to symbolism. However, I had previously seen, very clearly and repeatedly, a pentagram imposed on the upper part of the Chakra spine and centred on the Pineal/Brow Chakra. I have found that the pentagram indicates our 'inner being', that being who becomes through spiritual development our 'spiritual vehicle'. This vehicle will bear the Christ when we invite Him to accompany us on our journey. The pentagram appears in a number of guises, as dove, vulture, and often as an eagle. One of the most memorable visitations of the latter occurred while I was writing the essay on the Spiritual Organs, when it appeared as an eagle with two heads – as in the Austrian and Russian Imperial crests – distinct and persistent, as though to signal an important achievement.

This process of conscious penetration into etheric forms extends in time until it begins to encounter the will-forms that underlie the Spiritual Organs themselves. One example of this occurred recently. I had a persistent discomfort in the region of the pineal gland, which involved a feeling that a spring there had been overwound, and which induced a sense of darkness as though something was being wasted. I finally pressed into the area during a meditation, hoping at the very least to relief the pressure there. Suddenly the darkness cleared and I saw the following:

This indicates the meeting point of the three forces that flow in the Spiritual Organs: the Solar and Lunar forces that rise through the Organs from the Earth, and the descending Stellar force that enters us through the Crown Chakra. Through the serendipity that accompanies these experiences I found out that this juncture is called _The Arch of Heaven_.

Only recently has a major question arisen, though perhaps I should have raised it myself before then. It is this: how is the pattern orientated along the Chakra spine? This can be reduced here to the question of how the planets are to be attributed to the Chakras – thus:

I had instinctively chosen the arrangement on the right, mainly because I perceived the Solar and Lunar forces rising into the body from the earth. However, in the only work I have found dealing with the relationship of the Chakras to astrology, Jean Hodgson's _The Stars and the Chakras_ , the attributions are those on the left. Ms Hodgson is a person of significant spiritual authority, who builds moreover on the work of her mother, Mrs Grace Cooke, so it was necessary to give deep consideration to her scheme. I came to the conclusion that while the attribution of Mars to the Solar Plexus Chakra, the organ of wrath, might be plausible, there was little in Ms Hodgson's account that spoke of any original perception. Many of the attributions, in fact, have a mechanical quality, associations created by coinciding distinct lists, on one hand of the Chakras, and on the other of the Zodiacal signs.

For my own part, I feel that the attribution of Venus to the Solar Plexus Chakra indicates the deeper nature of this organ, as the source of love in us. Furthermore, Rudolf Steiner's account of the etheric body's transformation through the seasons, taken with my vision of the truncated angelic figure in the lower right portion of the pattern, indicate that this is the quadrant of the summer, not of the winter as it would be if the left-hand list above obtained.

Even so, it is not simply a matter of either/or. Ms Hodgson's scheme pertains to the _plant-world_ , illustrated by her preoccupation with the question of goodness alone. The right-hand list, then, pertains to the human being, where the concern is with freedom, with love rather than judgement. Nonetheless, justice is an issue with us, so it can be proposed that a trace of a more ancient plant form exists in us as an inversion of the dominant human structure. Such an echo can be discerned in the Solar Plexus Chakra, where the force of Justice seems the Guardian of a nascent power of Love. I find an echo in the Throat Chakra, too, but there it is evanescent and I have not had yet the occasion to experience it clearly. If this plant form is to be examined, it would be better approached through someone like Jacob Boehme, whose seven-fold scheme is quite obviously related to the life of the plant and rests on a very pure spiritual vision.

I have said that the pattern completed here is the product of an initial spiritual revelation, in which the Spiritual Organs were detailed for us in the form of idea-images. The later element, the 12-fold structure, is a product of an essentially artistic impulse, achieved by what I have called the wisdom of the hand, which is then, and only then, illuminated by the penetration of a disciplined consciousness on to the ground of the etheric-form. This exploration has been only partly achieved, and there is no guarantee that it will be completed by me alone, or in one life-time anyway. It may well be part of a larger co-operative work, the foundations of which already exists in the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner, together with the offerings of other, associated individuals.

Altogether, this is the Spiritual Science of which Dr Steiner spoke so much.

Whitsuntide-Michaelmas 2000

The Spiritual Body

THE ENCOUNTER WITH CHRIST

It is a truism that as a mountain seems highest and hardest to climb when closest to it so it is in spiritual endeavour that what is easily accepted when read in a book becomes incredible when it appears to one as a reality.

The experiences I wish to relate here began at a time when a path of spiritual pursuit seemed to end in utter failure and doubt. I had experienced a long and complex sequence of alchemical development over a period of years beginning in late 1991. At the very end I had answered a real impulse and had sacrificed myself and had witnessed my flesh cook in a hot spring until it fell away from my bones and sank to the bottom of the pool. Then, two days later, I saw a terrible truth: a situation where one has contrition but cannot even so discharge the debt – because one cannot understand the nature of the profit from the transgression that one must renounce. The truth was terrible here because I knew that I could not or would not acknowledge the failing in me – in my karma – that had sought this profit. The pain of this experience was so great that I wrote a plea in capital letters in my notes: LET THIS BE THE LAST TIME.

Nonetheless, the process I was undergoing required one last step. In alchemy, the _athanor_ is a vessel in which transformative processes can be conducted under controlled conditions. Such a vessel is an essential instrument in the material alchemist's laboratory, but it is also a requirement of spiritual alchemy. In fact it is the creation of the athanor that permits the inner transformation that constitutes Rosicrucian alchemy to begin. Now, the final act in the process involves the opening of one's athanor and bringing to light, like a child from the womb, the product of transformative activity. But when I opened my athanor I found only a _white_ plant. I was deeply disappointed by this. I did not know what to expect, but my wish was for some kind of _final_ thing that would signal the completion of what had become an exhausting experience.

I had been guided during the long process by the spirit of the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius (see note at end of this essay). He had been a strange guide – at least in terms of my notion of how a guide should behave – most of the time he seemed motivated by curiosity about what I was doing rather than advising me out of his greater knowledge. Now I appealed directly to him for help, the first time I had done so. He promptly told me to return the plant to the athanor because it was immature. This judgement only deepened my sense of loss. I pressed Michael Sendivogius for help and he was obliged to admit that he could no longer help me because his understanding had reached its limit.

I felt utterly helpless then, alone and slipping towards a frightening despair. I prayed for a new guide. Tycho Brahe came. I asked in astonishment how an astronomer could help me. He told me to seek Christ as my guide. I promptly asked for Christ. My immediate impulse then was to dedicate each part of me to Christ after the manner of the prayer known as St Patrick's Breastplate. Then I was numb with doubt and despair: I had reached the limit of my own understanding.

These events occurred in early April 1994 while I was living in Brighton in Sussex. During the following fortnight I had a series of dreams, the burden of which indicated the sloughing off a body or sheath characterised as female and the acceptance of a condition called Kingship. Then came the insight into my condition (I quote from my notes): 'Approach always engenders a failure of faith because perception expands so that experience becomes more important than idea, and the experience is that of a NOTHING.' This means that with the failure of understanding, our experiences are like experiences of nothingness. However, this nothingness is not necessarily dark, it seemed then to me to be bright, 'like cool water in the sense of volume (not space but something entered into, as into a pool of clear water).' Here I entered my SELF, which I described as 'sudden, dry, empty, one because so powerful and all-embracing of our faculties: feeling, will, intellect; beyond the sublime.' This being, I realised, is within each one of us at all times.

Then, finally, on 19 April 1994, I broke through and could report a 'vision so clear that nothing can be seen at last.'

The first encounter with Christ occurred at about 10.00pm on 6 May 1994. It happened without any deliberate preparation, though I had lain down as though to think. This is a transcription of my note of the occasion:

Told by C[hrist] that I was on an island of punishment: (very reticent, usu[ally] answers with "yes", silence for "no"; otherwise economical with words: not thru' impatience or condescension): told me my suffering coming to an end: I constructed a boat, vivid images: given a chalice and a host to take:

then asked if he would come too: he merged SHADOW-LIKE into me (v[ery] surprising): mast of the boat like cross-beam of pentagram; a significance I don't understand. Underway: shown some images 1) of two horses 2) cat chasing bird 3) flower: asked for explanation of one, and was merely shown image in more detail: didn't understand any of them (recording them here, as with the rest of this journal, in case I understand them better in the future). 3) the flower was in monochrome rather than simply white + black, though centre proved to be a hole in a saucer-like piece of white metal. Felt irritable after merger; so impatient and perhaps less attentive than I ought to images than I should[sic]. But the merger caps the faint worry I feel that Christ should be my guide. Perhaps Christ is a symbol, label etc for a power in each of us, or like [a] guardian angel. Anyway, Christ is now within.

I was perplexed after this event. While I had dreams that were obviously portentous, I also had bouts of extreme dejection and loss of faith, culminating on 23 May with the recognition that 'Belief grows less possible: a concomitant of an entrance upon reality.' And though the alchemical process, which had begun in October 1991, had ended with the discovery of the immature plant in my athanor, the imagery derived from alchemy continued to pervade my dreams in the form of an association of a male-female polarity with water.

On 27 June I finally grasped something of what was occurring. The effect of the Christ merger was like a _weak_ power of restraint. What confused me initially was my failure to understand that _two_ processes were occurring simultaneously. On one hand, the spiritual experience left me prey to more worldly temptations, witnessed in the dreams as various female figures who sought to draw me back by (1) inciting my vanity, (2) by entangling me in possessions, (3) by buying my commitment. The other process appeared as a preoccupation with two lights. These I came to understand were the two waters of alchemy, the fixed water and the mobile water. Here Christ is the fixed light, which rises steadily towards the soul – the mobile light – in order to unite with it to produce the one light, known as 'The Child.' You can readily understand how a soul threatened by spiritual restraint on one side might be tempted to flee to a spurious material freedom, which would prove in time to be a greater entrapment.

There is usually a break in my spiritual activity during July, and so in that year only a few short entries mark the period between my insight into my situation and the next stage of my encounter with Christ, which occurred on 3 August 1994. This time I initiated the encounter by deliberately entering into a phantasy state. I would not usually do this, I do not trust free-form phantasy, but in this case it must have been a matter of feeling drawn to do it. This is the phantasy as I recorded it immediately afterwards:

My way was blocked – I realise then that my way has been blocked for a long time – by two animals that frighten me. But I go forward in friendship and pat them. They move apart – as though uncoiling from around each other. I see they are two lions and that they are very friendly towards me. They accompany me along the path I go, one on either side of me. Then I suddenly fly up and lie along a pole – like a witch's broom, which has a small extensible [ _recte_ : extended] cross-like structure to rest my arms on. I sleep during the long flight. I come to a gigantic wall or door with a cross-like hole

in it. The cross-like pole is inserted here and turned, so that a way opens and lets me in. At once I am whooshed up in the air, either borne by an eagle or possessing wings myself. I find I can direct the flight – as I strive to control all the activities in the phantasy. I rise up to a kind of corner where sits an old man. I approach him and he becomes a serpent. I go up to the serpent – I am not afraid of it – and enter it. Entering it is like entering a yellow flower.

At this point I realised two things. One, I had been deeply preoccupied since the initial Christ-encounter with the fact that Christ had appeared to me as a _shadow_ , and two, that this shadow-like being had to do with a kind of death for me. This lay at the root of my perplexity and was the cause of a profound unease in me I was hardly aware of before that moment.

Now I called on Christ to ask him about the shadow. I asked Christ to show himself to me. I was frightened of what was coming, but I declared my love for Him and willingly embraced the dark presence. Then I saw _yellow_ eyes. I was startled, then shocked to the core. I realised now that his appearance really would terrify me. Then I saw his head, yellow eyes, nose like that of a gryphon-eagle, very pronounced, but noble, beloved, incomprehensible. Then a moon-like orb rises from the horizon beyond, then brilliant white light peeks over the edge of the horizon. I go towards it, but what looks like vegetation blocks the light, so that only a lustrous glow remains. I push on, sometimes seeing a bright yellow complex structure, but I cannot get to the light, no matter how far or how fast I travel.

Between the time of this experience and my departure from Brighton in early September 1994, I slowly came to see that the elements of the phantasy – the lions, the flying pole and key, the eagle, the old man and the serpent – when combined with the features Christ had revealed to me suggested an ancient composite figure, the GRYPHON, as the unifying image-expression of the whole experience. As well as this, while preparing this account I have come to see that the images shown to me during the first encounter – the two animals (horses), the cat and bird, the flower – were themselves simply an early attempt to communicate this symbolic form.

The Gryphon (also spelled Griffin or Grifon) is first attested in ancient Persia, though it might be older than this. Later the Greeks and contemporaneous Middle East civilisations placed the Gryphon in the company of the Sphinx in their temples. No reason for this grouping has ever been found, nor do we know what the ancients understood or believed about the figure. The Assyrian name of the Gryphon, _k'rub_ , is also the source of the Hebrew word _Cherub_. The only piece of specific lore that has survived tells us that the Gryphon guarded the treasure of the Hyperboreans, and for this reason they are now considered as guardians of treasure and of secret things. Under the inspiration of Dante, the Gryphon came to symbolise Jesus Christ as a being both divine and human.

The Gryphon has a lion's body, either winged or wingless, and a bird's head, usually an eagle's. I model it as follows:

Lion's body,

Eagle's head,

Eagle's wings,

Serpent tail,

A rod surmounted by an X cross in its right paw.

This picture will give you a good idea of what the Gryphon looks like.

I will leave these disclosures to speak for themselves, only pointing out that much lies below the surface of what is apparent here. The immediate aftermath of the Christ encounters was the beginning of a new process of complex meditations and rituals, which moved me deeper into more and more arcane aspects of the Christ-encounter.

I had brought some beech-nuts with me from a particularly fine tree in Preston Park in Brighton. Once settled in Dublin I was moved to undertake a spiritual planting of one of the nuts in October 1994. The tree grew to full height in four days, but led on swiftly within two days to a new crisis of vision, where I found myself crying votive tears before the 'veil', lamenting the continuing restriction upon me. Then began a long series of meditations, lasting into the following summer. These meditations are still a mystery to me (they are detailed below in the essay _The Seth Meditations_ ), but I can indicate a number of experiences that are relevant here.

The first was the realisation that Christ and I are close in the way that brothers can be. This implies a consanguinity and a karmic relationship. The second came shortly after Christmas in 1994, when, calling upon Christ in a start of frightful loneliness during a very deep meditation, I saw his 'light lustrous on his shoulders and arms, his face all a-glow' – I knew this was the case even though I could not see it – 'it is the means by which I see at all'. Then I added in my notes: 'this means that the shoulders and arms I see are? MYSELF?'

You can see from this that the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of Man, that the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of me, the Mystery of you, the Mystery of all mankind individually. To begin to know Christ is to begin to know yourself. If it is a long and arduous process, that is because we are a profound Mystery, a Mystery hardly at all plumbed yet. It is a task that still awaits us in the future: to know Christ, to know ourselves individually.

Before I conclude I would like to address a question that will surely arise: Why must we rest content at this stage with only a symbol of Christ? After all, did the Christ not incarnate in a man? While it is true that Christ did incarnate _in_ a man, He did not incarnate _as_ a man. Thus Christ even now remains at a remove from the human plane of experience, the physical-sensuous plane. It would therefore be impossible for us to comprehend Christ with our senses or by means of knowledge derived directly from our senses. Christ appeared directly to me as a shadow-like presence, for that is how an etheric being would appear to us. The imagery presented on three occasions, during the two encounters and in the intervening phantasy, are intended as a kind of plan or map of the nature of Christ. The fact that an existing ancient form – the Gryphon – answers very exactly to this map both assures us of the validity of the imagery and indicates that it was previously experienced by mankind at a time when direct vision of the etheric was still possible. The vision is becoming available to us now as we rise again towards that etheric vision: what Rudolf Steiner meant when he said that the encounter with Christ would become an increasingly frequent experience of mankind.

Note:

Michael Sendivogius(1556-1636) is little known today, his once high reputation having been besmirched by accusations of plagiarism and theft of the alchemical secrets of others. His best known work, _A New Light_ ( _Novum lumen chymicum_ ), published anonymously in 1604, went through 56 editions in all the major European languages over the following 200 years. There is evidence that he was closely involved in the group responsible for disseminating the early Rosicrucian documents. Certainly, the simplicity of his life, his continued anonymity despite pressures to the contrary, and his preoccupation with healing indicate a man of Rosicrucian sensibility.

6 November 2000

ACTIVATING THE SPIRITUAL ORGANS

It is important to remember that while we should be fully conscious of any given spiritual experience, it is not necessary – or desirable – to be fully conscious of the wider context for that experience. This limitation serves to prevent us from imposing ready-made labels on what are in fact creative events. In any case, there comes a time, always, when an impulse sets us to collate our experiences and to construct, by careful scrutiny and cross reference of our experiences, a context that permits us a wider understanding of what we are undergoing.

Thus, I did not collate the events I call the Chakra Meditations, narrated in the essay _The Spiritual Organs_ , until August 1998, over two years after I experienced them. Again, the material for the second essay, _The Spiritual Body_ , was not gathered for another year, fully three years after the events occurred. Such distance in time is needed not only in order to see the wider picture, but also to weaken the impulse to subordinate these experiences to already formed opinions and prejudices.

The experiences I propose narrating here were still in the process of disclosure while I was preparing and composing the two essays on the spiritual being. I was completely unaware that such a process was in train at the time and had no reason to expect it to happen. In fact, as you will see, the work on the essays formed part of the process – more, I will not be surprised to discover that the work of preparing and writing this essay is itself part of the process.

The process of activating the spiritual organs began in March 1997, exactly a year after the Chakra Meditations had ended. This process runs like a thread through a larger body of spiritual experience, so I intend here concentrating on the main disclosures to do with the sequence of activation of the organs and the associated events, which occurred over a period of twenty months to late 1998. The process is extremely complex in detail, an indication, I think, of the spiritual depth and significance of human beings themselves in their relations with the spiritual world and its beings. However, it has been possible to construct a plan of the process that shows the overall sequence of events in relation to the spiritual organs. I propose now to lay out this sequence here at the beginning, so that it can serve as a guide – a map – to what follows:

The first part of this plan, to do with the opening of the organs, is detailed in _The Spiritual Organs_ , and the second part, to do with the activation of the organs, will be detailed below. The method I will use here differs from that of the earlier essay. I will assume some familiarity with the organs in the reader. I will only quote directly from my journal where it seems to be required, otherwise I will initially concentrate on the images and related events. Afterwards, I will attempt to organise the images and inter-relate them meaningfully. I emphasise again that what I have to show here is not by any means the final word in these matters. We must allow that individual experiences of the fundamental event – the creation of a conscious relationship with one's spiritual organs – will vary greatly from one person to another, though the basic process undergone is the same for us all.

From October 1996 – when the impulses that led to the elaboration of the Spiritual Body came to an end – until February 1997 there was little of no spiritual activity. Then, on the 14th, I dreamed that I discovered a bag of white powder hidden in a cave, which I then had to smuggle away past guards. I felt that at last I had found the ELIXIR and learned that I need no longer conceptualise my experiences. A week later, I dreamed that I found clues to the whereabouts of treasure. I resist the impulse to search for this treasure, and wake up with a feeling of great joy and a sense of PURITY.

On March 14th the process itself began with the opening of the Solar Plexus organ amid deep anger. But I saw love then, as its counterpart.

On the first of May I understood that the Root organ and the Brow organ are always open, the Root organ from childhood and the Brow organ from the eighth or ninth year. I saw that the Root organ as a 'plant that grows without growing', and the Brow organ as like a 'bird that flies without flying'. The Root organ is a kind of animal while the Brow organ is simply there in its beingness. In an associated dream later that night, I attend a wedding where everybody is dressed in white, and buy an extremely expensive ground powder – garlic-like – to take with me to the wedding. We all travel to this wedding by boat.

In a meditation on the 18th May I see the Crown, Brow and Throat organs in the Root organ; then the Root organ expands to the Sacral Plexus organ, the Solar Plexus organ and the Heart organ. Two days later, on the 20th, I suddenly see the connection between the structure of the Root organ and the Chalice and Host given to me by Christ in May 1994. I suspect then that there is a connection between the images imparted in the Christ Meditation (see _The Encounter with Christ_ , ante) and those disclosed in the Chakra Meditations and also the images revealed in the process being narrated here.

In June I undertake a meditation on the Chalice and Host, which works 'perfectly', and a few days later I resume an earlier form of meditation based on the physical body, drawing energy through the feet and raising it in stages up to the Crown organ. The first result of this was the confirmation that the Crown organ was not open at all – but I learned also that the Crown organ is the 'Ornament of Grace'.

On the 16th, I saw that the Chalice and Host could be figured as the cat and bird image of the first Christ meditation – that together they indicate the astral realm. The plant image disclosed during the same meditation indicates the spiritual realm. I understood then that WILL is the 'material spirit' in us. It brings pain if the etheric does not (cannot) intervene at the behest of thought, our knowledge of the Spirit. Anger is a knot of will and thought at odds – a failure to understand.

On 18th June the Heart organ activates. My heart throbbed alarmingly and I see the image of an eye three times:  . This occurred quite suddenly.

On the 28th I see that the will is distinct from the physical activity it inaugurates, that it is not effort but more like 'growing wings'. Then on the 2nd of July I understand finally that will has no history. This insight results in a thrumming activity in the Sacral Plexus and Solar Plexus organs.

On the 26th of July I achieve consciousness in the dream-world, seeing a street bathed in a golden light. This signals the beginning of a very complex stage. In early August I experience myself in a long and detailed dream as a member of the 'space-people' who supervise and help humans on earth. Then on the 31st in conscious sleep I construct a set of wards within myself to a definite plan, with Fire at the brow, Water at the navel, Air at the right shoulder and Earth at the left shoulder. Within this plan there is a four-square array of Fire at top right, Air at top left, Water at bottom left and Earth at bottom right. Once in place, I see light flowing up and down from the heart centre towards brow and navel. Only in hindsight do I see that this stage is a process of purification of the body: on the 3rd September I see myself as a Satyr and learn that the 'consumption of the body has begun'. On 23rd November I experience 'separation from the Mother', very painful, and discover on the 30th that I have 'lost contact with the world', which upsets and frightens me.

December brings the culmination of this stage. On the 4th I reach the Crown spiritual organ at last. I find myself contemplating the green of plants for hours afterwards. A week later I envision the Spiritual Body like this:

I have previously referred to this image in the essay _The Spiritual Body_. In the context of the process I am narrating here, the vision has to do with the relation between the spiritual Father and the spiritual Son. This aspect is elaborated during a meditation of the 21st of December, where I see the Brow organ surrounded by the Pentagram and brilliantly lit. I understand that the cosmic being that I am witnessing here was born from 'union with' the Sacral Plexus organ. The meditation induced great anguish: there was real contact with the spirit on this occasion. On the following day I see the heart organ as a clock, with the 'hands' pointing towards 4 and 5. I see the Solar Plexus organ as a harp. I understand that a level of harmonisation has been reached, that the Heart organ has a relation to the process of activation indicated by the truncated angel-figure in the scheme above, and that the forces of love and ire have been balanced in the Solar Plexus organ.

In January 1998 there are a series of experiences. On the 21st I meditate on the sun and moon in Leo and Cancer; later I see the Brow organ animated and the Pentagram takes on the form of an eagle or a hawk. The following day I see a triple sun in connection with the eagle/hawk. The Heart organ animates, but not to my satisfaction. Nonetheless I do witness a significant movement from the Solar Plexus organ to the Heart organ. Then on the 23rd I see the Phoenix at the Brow organ and below it, at the Sacral Plexus organ, there is its egg. I have a very powerful emotional reaction to this event on the following day, when I see that the Heart organ is now properly animated and that the flow from the Solar Plexus organ to the Heart organ is as it should be.

After this I find my whole being animated during meditations on the spiritual organs, so much so that it begins to spill over into my everyday life. Much of this energy is directed into paintings and drawings of the spiritual organs, which in turn draw alchemical and Kabbalistic elements into my pictures. Finally, after months of work, the required separation within me is achieved on February 6th. I experience a huge outpouring of what I understand to be a 'Karmic eroticism' focused between the Brow and Sacral Plexus organs. I will quote from my journal:

notion that sexual energy is deflected spiritual energy in the service of a Karmic-sourced sexual motivation: treat others as you were treated: separation necessary in order to allow the spirit flow up again: Chk[Chakra] 2(6) as barrier and 6(2) as destination: eroticism evident only because I am acting on [the] Karmic source itself.

The spiritual animation in me generated an intolerance of noise and interference of any kind. My reactions at times were so strong that the spiritual organs themselves were affected. On one occasion the Heart organ was 'sore' for three days. Nonetheless, the inner activity continued. On 3rd March the Root organ became very active, and the Brow organ opened like a white egg with wings. I saw a strange image then:

On the 10th the Root organ was again very active, rising like a 'fountainous plant', a strong feeling of projected love accompanying this experience. In a dream on the 12th I inscribe a stone with an emblem of the Trinity at a vaguely unsettling religious ceremony. I understood that this ritual means the end of a stage of 'necessary phantasy', necessary because what is being achieved here lies beyond ordinary perception.

I open all the spiritual organs on the 21st of March. At the Brow organ a window with a _coloured_ world beyond appears, with figures of divine beings superimposed in black and white on this world. But at the Crown organ I experience a note of sadness, which surprises me. I learn that though the Throat organ has been open since childhood (speech), it must open now at a new stage or level, perhaps by a flow down from the Brow organ above.

The months following were a period of consolidation, with many dreams. In early May I undertook what turned out to be a twenty-mile walk to Tara along the back roads of County Meath. On the way I found an iron horseshoe. I discovered that the metal set up a connection between the Throat organ and the Solar Plexus organ, thus extending the active flow another stage, from the Brow organ down to the Throat organ. This was followed soon after by a meditation in which I saw how one could contact _all_ the water of the world at once. From this I understood that all the spiritual organs were now connected and active. Then in early June the ability to be conscious in dreams was extended. I asked spontaneously to see the Moon in day, and saw the Pentagram very clearly as a result. By this I understood that dreams must be brought into day, not vice versa. Thus dreams must be brought into consciousness, not consciousness introduced into dreams.

On the 22nd of June the whole process begins its culmination. I see the Egg in the Brow organ and set to growing the chick I know is within it. Grown, it thrusts its wings through the shell of the Egg, then its feet, then its head, until I see the Pentagram transformed thus:

The Spiritual Being is born. During the following days the process completes. I see on the 23rd the Pentagram in the Brow organ as the 'Temple of the North' and the Hexagram (Star of David) in the Sacral Plexus organ as the 'City of the South'. Finally, on the 24th, during meditation I see the Brow organ as the senses, the Sacral Plexus organ as the nerves, the Throat organ as breath, the Heart organ as blood, the Solar Plexus organ as metabolism, the Root organ as will, and the Crown organ as thought.

The full implication of this process only becomes clear a month later. I saw in a meditation on Rudolf Steiner's _The Four Seasons and the Archangels_ that the Will arises when the 'sun-thought' sets below the 'earth-dark', so that Will is the 'Dark Sun'. This idea could have been dismissed as a piece of speculation, except that I suddenly saw Fire as light(Air) entering the Dark(Earth) and Water as light(Air) escaping the Dark(Earth), modelled thus:

I found the whole experience of this meditation extremely disquieting, as though the knowledge it contained was either frighteningly profound or dangerously deluded. I was determined at this point to leave the whole scheme in the realm of speculation, until it reappeared in a momentous dream on 23rd July 1998.

In the dream, I found myself in a small clinic run by Rudolf Steiner, looking for advice about the scheme. I could see Dr Steiner sitting at a plain kitchen table with three women, who sought to be healed, seated around the table before him. I felt that these women had more need of Dr Steiner's attention than I did, so I decided I would go away and resolve my problem myself. I went out of the house, to be followed by a woman who told me that Rudolf Steiner had just died.

It was at this stage that I began the work of collating and studying the cycle of the Chakra Meditations of early 1996. I can point to no one reason for doing this, but I think now that the experience of the Black Sun meditation and its relation to the dream of Dr Steiner's death awoke an awareness of a new level of perception in me. It was not the content of the Black Sun meditation that shook me, but my response to it – my fear of it – coupled with what I knew to be the uncertain significance of the dream. I decided then that I had at last entered upon my own Work. I would accept responsibility for the burden of the Black Sun meditation, accept responsibility for the death of Rudolf Steiner in the dream, and accept responsibility for the spiritual Work I was about to begin in disclosing the matter of the Spiritual Organs to others.

Even so, the process of activating the spiritual organs continued on to its climax. On the 5th August I was able to activate all the spiritual organs, except the Throat organ. In the subsequent meditation I understood that the Egg of the Brow organ had to be laid in the 'cup' of the Throat organ. Upon waking the following morning I saw the 'egg cup' complete with egg. I understood this to be a true representation of a spiritual fact.

Then on 22nd August 1998, the whole process is rehearsed in one great meditation. The notes from my journal are cryptic but I will transcribe them here because I wish to give a direct flavour of the event:

Next, on 3rd September I see an image of a ship imposed on the top four organs, which I connect at once with the ship I constructed during the Christ meditation in 1994. On the 4th I see the elements of this ship as the four magical weapons, viz. the mast as the Spear, the spar as the Sword, the sail as the Pentacle, and the hull as the Cup.

On the following day I activate each of the organs in turn. I raise the Sun to the Brow organ, then bring the Moon down to the Root organ. I see a grainy blue light at the Heart organ during this descent. I understand that I must undertake this meditation two more times. I remember that we have priesthood in our own spiritual powers. I feel Rudolf Steiner's grace nearby, available to me if required as protection. The second meditation on the 8th September was influenced by a wetting I received that morning, which left my body stiff. Nonetheless, I raised the Sun-power and then brought the Moon-power down to the Root organ. There was perturbation of various kinds during the descent, fugitive thoughts between the Throat and Heart organs, then the image of the Solar Plexus organ leaped at me as I descended towards it. At the Sacral Plexus organ heat gathered like a ball extending to the diaphragm.

On the 12th I raised the Sun as previously but as the Moon-power descends from the Heart organ to the Solar Plexus organ, I suddenly see a white flower opening (a lily or a lotus) on the surface of water. I understand that I am looking at the Ego (Heart organ) in my Soul (astral - Solar Plexus organ). Then I watch the flower rise up to the Throat organ.

Finally, this last stage culminates on 6th October 1998 in a sublime meditation – I will give it verbatim from my notes:

This marked the end of the process, with a new cycle beginning within a matter of days. It coincided with two related significant events. Remember that I was not aware that this process was in train during this period. I had long planned to join the Anthroposophical Society, but had difficulty contacting a representative in Ireland. During the summer of 1998 I decided to write to the Rudolf Steiner Press in London and they very quickly put me in touch with officials of the Society in Ireland. By the end of September I had made arrangements to attend my first branch meeting on 12th October. Then on the 7th October, the night after the final vision of the active spiritual organs, I again dreamed of Rudolf Steiner's death. This time I was shown into a small bedroom in a modest house, where Dr Steiner was laid out in a winding sheet. A young female mourner unrolled the sheet for me. He was dressed in a formal suit, and seemed a very large man with a deep chest. Strangely, there were depressions in the trouser legs, as though the shins had been broken or sections of them removed.

Rudolf Steiner had three female companions in the dream and they took me to a small café afterwards. Coincidentally or otherwise, the group I attended had – for the first few months – three members, all female. I was unaware of the spiritual organ process under way within me, but I was very aware of the continuity from my dreams of Rudolf Steiner to this anthroposophical reality, especially as a small detail in the second dream was carried over prophetically into that reality.

**

I am not going to give a detailed explanation of the whole process. For one thing, I cannot, if only because much of the actual activity of the spiritual organs remains hidden from all but the most developed seer. Speculation in this circumstance is a waste of time. Another reason is this: I wrote and published the first essay, _The Spiritual Organs_ , because I felt that the presence of Rudolf Steiner at the beginning and end of the Chakra Meditations was an indication of the potential significance for others as well as for myself. The second essay, _The Spiritual Body_ , and this essay follow because I discovered that disclosure continued after the Chakra Meditations. Now, I communicate these events not simply to add to a body of knowledge about spiritual matters, but to stimulate in the reader _this very process itself_. It is my hope that the act of reading these pages, with their images and metaphors, will actually trigger the process in some of you, that you will feel the impulse to dedicate yourself to the task of activating the spiritual organs within yourself. And you will find that as you embark on this task that willing helpers will come, both spiritual and incarnate, to guide and support you, because this process of activation is a process above all of love, and love always calls to love and love always answers.

The process of activation is described very succinctly in the notes of the 22nd August 1998 meditation. In our Garden – the Earth – move two forces, that of the Sun and that of the Moon. The Sun force is raised up through the organs by means of the coils of the Kundalini to the Brow organ. Then the Moon force is raised in its Kundalini channel, also to the Brow organ. The Sun force is held in the Brow organ – it will be utilised by the organs for their own purposes – but the Moon force is initially pushed on up to the Crown organ. This is in one way only a symbolic act, but in another it indicates a wish. It is a message only, not an action in itself. Then the Moon force is taken back down through the organs and returned to the Garden. This exercise may be undertaken many times, and associated acts – of purification – may need to be performed, before the organs begin to stir. It has been shown that the organs open in a specific sequence (see _The Spiritual Organs_ ).

Once open, you will feel their presence to a greater or lesser degree depending on your karma and destiny. Now you will find your spiritual exercises changing as the organs themselves come to direct your activity. The organs will then begin to activate, again in a specific sequence. But this time the sequence will, I think, vary from person to person, but only reports from others will confirm or contradict this. Even so, the core activity will occur. The combined effect of the Sun and Moon forces on the Brow organ will open the Arch of Heaven, which allows the Stellar force to descend from the Crown organ, called down, as it were, by the Moon force message.

Now begins the crucial stage of the process. The image is of an egg fertilised by a stellar sperm. The Stellar force is embraced by the Sun and Moon forces, both coiling about it, thus creating a channel for it to descend directly down to the Root organ. Here the fertilisation occurs. This egg is then raised up through the organs to the Throat organ, where it is incubated. In time it hatches in the Brow organ to produce a spiritual being, figured for me as a hawk or an eagle.

I would like to conclude this essay by looking more closely at two aspects of the process.

1. Notice that during the initial opening of the spiritual organs I received two images for the Throat organ and two also for the Sacral Plexus organ. Initially I saw the Throat organ as a blue ring, later I saw it open like a horseshoe with a medallion attached, the composition resembling the design of the Claddagh ring. Likewise, I first saw the Sacral Plexus organ as composed of two sets of three moon-like orbs in counter-rotation, then later saw it as two interlaced triangles with an orb at each angle.

Now in the process of activation, these two organs must undergo change, but for different reasons. It is clear from the meditation on 16 February 1998 that the sexual focus gathered at the Sacral Plexus organ acts as a serious barrier to the descent of the Stellar force. How is this overcome? In my case the images disclosed during the Christ Meditation played an important part in allowing forces from the Root organ – signified as plants – to convert the sexual forces into acceptable vegetative powers (see meditation of 22 February 1998). Meanwhile the transformation of the Throat organ was underway, aided it would seem by iron forces, so that the Ego power that resides in the Heart organ raised the Throat organ to a new level – symbolised by two white cocks – that allowed the organ serve for the incubation of the Egg.

The rays are bright and the figure is felt to be 'silent and modest'.

It was only with the final Seth meditation, on 6th July 1995, that the expected Pentagram appeared. This time, however, the Fire element was experienced on the right side, but weighing down rather than rising. On the left a 'dark' down-poured. In the centre two green shoots rose, with yellow light descending onto them. Then 'clearly' the Pentagram appeared, pearly in colour. The form had such a presence that I found it both unnecessary and impossible to comment on the experience.

Both the Root organ and the Brow organ have a connection with the Christ meditations. The structure of the Root organ resembles that of the Chalice and Host gifted to me by Christ, while the Pentagram figures the boat-vehicle which bears both me and Christ in company. A plant grows from the Root organ which is instrumental in transforming other organs. The Brow organ is repeatedly figured as the abode of the spiritual being, figured variously as Pentagram, as phoenix, eagle, dove, or hawk, who is the spiritual Son.

2. The question of the role of the assistant Sun and Moon powers is a vexed one. I wrote above that first the Sun power and then the Moon power are raised to the Brow organ, after which the Moon-power rises like a message (prayer) to the Crown organ, thus initiating the beginning of the descent of the Stellar force so crucial to the whole process. Then both the Sun and Moon powers create the channel down which the Stellar force descends to the Root organ. I accept the impulse that brought me to describe this part of the process in that way, but I have not experienced this for myself. I also find it difficult to explain the sense of these movements within the context of the Chakra meditations and the meditations narrated here. I do not regard the exercise of raising the power up through the feet to the crown and then returning it to the earth as a true picture of the actual spiritual process. It helps prepare us for the process only.

However, I think now that the series of fourteen meditation I call the Seth Meditations may provide some pretty solid clues. Without going into detail here – I will attach a short addendum to this essay later – the meditation had the objective of opening the path to Osiris, 'the face of Christ', figured in the final meditation as the Pentagram. Now, the meditations involved a three-fold focus, on the left and right hands and on the centre as a line down my body. Schematically, the powers flowed as follows:

The Sun power, figured mostly as fire, appears on the left, while the Moon power, figured as water or cold, appears on the right. The initial meditations concern the growth of a plant in the centre, while the Sun and Moon powers spiral about it, the Sun power ascending, the Moon power descending. After the appearance of the 'dark' in the seventh meditation – which is described in the eighth meditation as the Soul – the flow of the powers tends to change. In the eighth meditation the Sun power manifests on the right and the Moon power appears as a glowing pearl on the left. In the next two meditations both powers rise as flames of one kind or another, while a variety of associated phenomena appear in the centre. Then in the eleventh and twelfth meditation both the powers press down, becoming progressively heavier. But as a response there is first a zig-zag counter-motion upwards in the eleventh meditation and then a deliberate pushing up by me in the twelfth. In the thirteenth, the second last meditation, all three foci unite in a great upwards surge, figured as a fountain that is also a plant. In the final meditation, the pressure is at first downwards on left and right, with a yellow light descending on a young plant in the centre. But then the Pentagram suddenly appears as the culmination of this process.

It can be seen that the Seth meditations fall into two parts. In the first part, up to the seventh meditation, there is a countervailing rotation of the Sun and Moon powers. Then in the second part, the two powers act in unison, rising together at first, then both pressing down with increasing weight until the Pentagram appears.

I must admit that I had previously approached this issue from the perspective of the traditional account of the rise of the Kundalini, prompted by the appearance of the coiled powers in the 'Kundalini Garden' in the first Chakra meditation. But it can now be inferred that the Sun and Moon powers do not rise in some natural or automatic way along respective channels connecting the spiritual organs. The early Seth meditations indicate that they interact in complex ways, with the Sun force serving to facilitate the operation of the Moon force. It is clear that they are more than blind forces shooting up and down a Kundalini circuit, that they are in fact participants in the whole mysterious process, here complimenting one another, there acting in concert, adjusting their valency as specific stages of the process require.

There is another way of approaching this question. In Indian tradition the Kundalini is conceived as a 'serpent' power, that is, it is seen in the context of the astral forces, and its rising up is regarded as a kind of autonomous animal motion, autonomous in the sense of being independent of its environment. But in the meditations being narrated here, this central force has all the appearances and behaviour of plant-life. Why such a radical difference? It is evident that Indian seers came to witness the Kundalini in their souls, part of a wider tendency resulting from the descent of the Ego into the Soul. Thus they saw the Kundalini in a soul-guise, a reflection of a reality rather than the reality itself. However, there are features of the Kundalini that would act to reinforce this error. The Kundalini is a plant-like activity, but it is a _hidden_ plant activity.

The human being can be broadly characterised as a plant turned on its head, a plant with reversed orientation. This is most evident in the disposition of the sexual organs. But the Kundalini retains the original plant orientation within us, though with one very important difference. In this epoch plants are basically an earth element (crystal) disposed by Moon forces, where the Moon power ascends by a kind of stacking up of earth crystals until it encounters a descending Sun force. The interaction of these forces then produce the flower, fertilisation, and ultimately the seed that will prolong the plant activity beyond one generation. But in the Kundalini, because the plant form is separated completely from the natural environment, the Sun force first rises from the earth – the Garden – in order to provide the means to draw up the Moon force. The Seth meditations describe the process of raising the Sun power and its blossoming in the Brow organ as the Pentagram. That the Moon force is then able to rise further, like a prayer, to the Crown organ is evidenced in the phenomena accompanying the activation of that organ on 4th December 1997, where I spend hours afterwards gazing at green plants.

Considering the Kundalini in this way also explains why much of the birthing activity occurs in the upper organs, the Throat and Brow organ. The Root organ so-called is precisely that, the root of this Spiritual Tree that informs our whole incarnate being. I indicated in _The Spiritual Organs_ that the structure of the Root organ contains in compressed form the three upper organs, the Throat, Brow and Crown organs. Now this structure can be seen truly to be a Seed organ which, when fertilised by the Stellar sperm descending the activated Kundalini channel from the Crown organ, incubates in the Throat organ and is birthed in the Brow organ.

It is evident, even at this stage of the investigation, that the Spiritual Organs constitute an autonomous system within each one of us. It can be inferred that it is a developing system, that it changes over time, and that it serves a definite purpose of some significance to each individual human being. It is a real process, of crucial importance to us as incarnated human beings, and the transformations are genuine changes in our spiritual being. But what does all this signify?

Well, to start with, while the Spiritual Organs exist and have a definite purpose, it is clear the activation of the Organs requires the assistance of Christ. This fact tells us that the process involves the highest member of our being and that it is directed towards the establishment of a new condition within us in the future. In other words, it is a process of preparation. A being is to be born in each of us, a spiritual being of vast significance to the destiny of mankind. Each individual human being has an Ego. This Ego is related to the incarnated living person through the soul, which is in a way the Ego's 'window' on the physical world. The Ego has been descending in stages towards this physical plane, and is now at the point of taking control of the soul and its forces. The entry of the Heart organ into the Throat organ _is_ this process. But it is a very dangerous process, both for the incarnated person and for the spiritual being itself. From an earthly perspective, the Ego is both an almighty god and a tiny suckling babe. From the perspective of the Ego, this earthly world and its creatures is a place of profound confusion, a source of never-before experienced strangeness, otherness and, most of all, ignorance. For the incarnated person, the direct experience of the Ego is just as frightening. When you are horribly lonely, estranged, cold and isolated, be sure your have touched your Ego briefly – for as long as you can bear it. The Ego enters a hell of fire on earth; we become the stasis of crystal in heaven.

The process of activating the Spiritual organs is a preparation for the birthing of the Ego in us. There is a proper way of doing this, which we undertake with the help of Christ and other assisting spirits. There are also improper ways of doing it, both materialistic and magical ways, that lead to paranoia, megalomania, and quite deluded dogmatism or righteousness. One of the clearest examples of such impropriety is Adolf Hitler, an immature Ego let loose in this world.

There will be many more like him in future centuries, but be reassured – there is a proper way available to all. It requires only a moment's dedication to begin this process and lifetimes then of patient devotion in order to complete it, when you and your Ego will be one and the spiritual world will extend into this world.

8 December 2001

THE SETH MEDITATIONS

An Addendum to _Activating the Spiritual Organs_.

On Michaelmas Day 1994, shortly before the Seth Meditations began, I set out to paint a simple geometric work, in essence a vesica balanced on an associated crescent. I thought at first that the motivation to paint this picture lay in the geometric nicety that the pattern expresses. But I was drawn to the reproduction of Dürer's _The Virgin on the Crescent_ , which is on the cover of my copy of _The Chymical Wedding_. I was aware then that this event signalled the beginning of a new spiritual task, one that would involve 'virgin water / light: pristine'.

I will place these images here at the beginning of this account of the Seth meditations:

The Seth Meditations are unusual in that they involved a set ritual, so that all the disclosures had their source in this ritual. I had brought three beechnuts with me from Brighton, harvested from an exceptionally fine tree in Preston Park. The ritual involved placing one nut on the tip of my extended tongue, and one each in the centre of the palms of my left and right hands. My hands were extended before me at waist height, palms upwards and open, but they would move at times during the meditations in response to the sensations experienced in each: weight, heat, lightness and the like. I faced west, eyes closed, and I concentrated inwardly in a relaxed way. Notes were made immediately after each session. The meditations form a thread through much other spiritual activity, but I was aware when each meditation impended, though sometimes the notice was extremely short.

Something of the purpose and meaning of the meditations has been discussed in _Activating the Spiritual Organs_ , so I will restrict myself here largely to giving details of the Seth meditations and other closely associated experiences.

The Seth meditations themselves were prefaced by a short series of meditations in which a specific preparation was made.

On the 10th October 1994 I was made aware of the origin of the beechnuts I would use in the Seth meditations: that they came from the _Rose_ Garden in Preston Park, Brighton. On 14th October I clearly saw the seeds as though grown to full height. Then on the 16th I saw one of the trees, 'The Tree', stripped to its bare form and understood that 'we glimpse heaven in trees, and in flowers death'. I cried 'votive tears' then, 'lamenting the veil'.

I The first Seth meditation then took place on 4th November 1994. The ritual produced a powerful emotional reaction. I came to understand that this was a kind of test and that I was of sufficient purity for the process to continue.

II The second meditation, on 14th November, began with a direct reference to the first meditation. I then experienced 'red' on the left and 'pale yellow' on the right, with 'fire in the centre created by the interflowing of left and right: [a] passage opens down and down.' I noted at the time that this may still be a period of preparation, though I also noted that 'the fire is perfectly correct'. In brackets I remarked that 'seed is planted in autumn'.

III This meditation took place on 18th December 1994, and details of it appear in my notes in the form of a commentary. I will quote the entire entry:

The next three meditations occur in quick succession.

IV on 20th December: I see a knight on horseback made of stone, red and blue light at the edges, left to right. I will later understand that this is a vision of Osiris – see entry for 29th December below.

VI occurred later on 21st December: I see the image from that morning's meditation

VII This is the entry for the seventh meditation, which took place on 27th December:

A frightening kind of abyss beside me afterwards: beyond solitude, there's nowhere else to go: I feel alone, then I remember Christ, embracing him into me again, his light lustrous on his shoulders and arms, his face all aglow: - I know this latter, though I cannot see it: it is the means by which I see at all. This means that the shoulders and arms that I see are? MYSELF?

The following entry expands on this aspect in relation to the fourth meditation:

29th December:

Seth med[itation] IV; the knight is Osiris, he guided my vision from the [ _sic_ – that] point on: this is the Gift of Seth. Osiris is the face of Christ, the light there, an intellectual light + and so dark to the senses – OSIRIS IS THE LIVING LIGHT FOR US.

VIII The eighth meditation was undertaken on 30th December. This is the journal entry:

IX The ninth meditation followed on 5th January 1995. Here is the entry:

The penis of the dancer: right has weight, earth, from which grows a strong plant/tree, then with a surge it becomes a green flame. Left is hollow, then a globe, then a ring of fire. Both rise strongly together. The centre is dark until the serpent (the Lions) extends falling into this world – then a tongue of light, curving up to the right, lesser tongues around it: light tongues very smooth + firm

Began with awareness of base of rump warming, a ring of light in my mind: prompted me to do the med[itation]. Pulled out very quickly at end, both a sense of a 'gross' overextension and a finer awareness that burden of tongue of light could not be borne long at this point. The living shadow has become light: like a tree becoming a huge flame: this is about life, its relation to something characterised as fire (light).

Very down to earth... this med[itation] practice should run parallel to central concern: preparatory knowledge. SYNESIUS – guide now.

The Seth Meditation is about experience – direct experience only – I have no mental copy of the tongue of fire, tho' I saw it clearly. – Seeing trees light up in a green flame, and looking at the sun at zenith, the world dark afterwards: how the very intensity of the light creates the shadow we call the world.

X The tenth meditation occurred on 9th January:

I noted on the following day that 'TO WITNESS BEING IS TO BE DIVINE.'

XI On the 19th January the eleventh meditation took place. This is the entry:

Low key tho' I wanted more: heavy balls of fire in each hand, zigzag up arms to shoulder and head: using water to purify from here on.

XII The twelfth Seth meditation occurred on 23rd January 1995:

Reluctant tho' suddenly drawn: with weight in my hands heavier (still impressing, an hour later): forced back by weight of all seeds: then realised I could push up: the resistance gave way immediately: a slight flaring of white light, as ( _sic_ – at) bottom, then (afterwards) a[t] top of vision: DRAWN UP <no more images now, after 13/1/95> MATTER.

XIII It was some weeks before the next meditation was undertaken, on 16th February 1995:

XIV The final meditation did not take place until 6th July 1995, five months later:

The Seth Meditation is discussed in _Activating the Spiritual Organs_ from the point of view of the interplay of the solar and lunar powers. Here I want to examine the meditation cycle on its own terms.

Though I considered the first meditation at the time to be a kind of test, it would seem now that it also serves to create an initial "space" for the forthcoming process. The enactment in the second meditation leads to the creation of the Trident form that appears in the third meditation. Once established, the motions of the Kether triplicity are then indicated, the first side to side, the second from back to front, and finally the third still at the centre, and later elaborated in terms that are in fact an introductory description of the three stages of what will be a process of generation: " _Behind light there is an abyss that gives a place to light, behind that is nothing, place itself_." It was typical of my experience of this process that the unrealised stages appeared as disquietingly empty and vacant.

The first stage is fulfilled in the fourth meditation, where Osiris appears as the " _face of Christ, the light there_ " (though this was not understood until some time into the second stage). The beginning of the second stage itself is heralded by the realisation that a veil has been drawn back. Then in the fifth, sixth and seventh meditations can be seen the growth of the plant being that serves to make visible the locus for what will be realised in the second stage. This is revealed in the eighth meditation as the Soul.

The third and final stage begins in the ninth meditation. It is clear that some kind of conception is witnessed here, how the descending serpent interacts with the " _strong_ " plant by means of fire. The remaining meditations indicate stages in the gestation of this being, until the moment of its generation in the final meditation, signified by the Pentagram.

The full course of the process can be indicated now. The first stage concerns the establishment of the "Light", which appears in the form of Osiris, who is the " _face of Christ_ ". The next stage involves the creation of the plant-like being that makes possible the discernment of the Soul itself. This is an important precondition for the final stage, in which the Pentagram appears in the Soul.

It can be asked, what is the Pentagram, that its appearance here is such a mighty and obviously overwhelming event in itself? The Pentagram permeates the whole Mystery, centred on the Brow Chakra and symbolised in bird forms from Dove to Eagle. Its role seems best defined in the course of the encounter with Christ, where I construct a boat with a mast and sail modelled on the Pentagram to serve as a vehicle for both Christ and my own Ego. Thus the Seth Meditations served to establish the actual spiritual vehicle which is an essential precondition for the incarnation of the Ego, a process that has been detailed in the _Activating of the Spiritual Organs_ essay above.

21 December 2001

### THE WISDOM

ON THE DIVISION OF THE HUMAN BEING

AND THE ADVENT OF THE EGO

Despite its provisional appearance, this essay is to be regarded as complete and properly ordered. Some attempts were made to rework these notes into a proper essay format, but I soon realised that any attempt to rearrange the material would interfere with the power of expression the notes themselves already contain. I would rather the reader discovered these truths for himself or herself; failing that I am obliged to pass on the truths in a form as close to that in which I received them. I do this not out of some principle of authenticity – no more than I resist reworking the notes for fear that some principle of rational clarity might uncover delusion or error – but solely in the knowledge that what I have called above the power of expression contained in the notes will act to stimulate the spiritual capacities in the reader.

This essay, then, in substance repeats what is in my notebook. But the notes were written hurriedly in order keep pace with the flow of insight, therefore some ellipses and omissions were unavoidable, as were grammatical and syntactical errors. I am therefore augmenting and correcting the notes here, but I assure you that what you read will be in its entirety what I have to report of my insights. You will notice remaining errors and uncertainties. New knowledge always seeks a home in old knowledge, and existing knowledge greets and enfolds new knowledge as a mother greets her newborn babe. Thus some entanglement, but you will notice that later insights operate to untangle most of these lapses.

24/3/2000:

"incarnating causes truth as a whole to be reduced to a copy, a picture of truth, and it is this picture which is seed for the following incarnations" (Rudolf Steiner, _Aspects of Human Evolution_ , 136). This truth is thus incomplete.

p134: what is at work between death and new birth "are the will impulses from the previous incarnation". Thus it is the _will_ that is continuous from incarnation to incarnation. An image of this: An ocean in which fish move. The ripples they create when they approach the surface are our feelings. The Ego (that is, the sun) only knows of the fish in this way or if they leap up out of the water. Below the ocean is the rocky bed – the physical body. The Ego knows nothing of this directly. It will take the Ego 2000 years to penetrate this ocean. Only its 'light' does so at present, by means of the fish life in the ocean.

But see the will more like a serpent and consciousness a kind of halo around its head.

6/4/2000:

The Indian Chakras are a _memory_ of the spiritual organs, handed down unchanged for generations. New developments become noticeable in the Middle Ages: Master Eckhart taught the advent of the 'I' consciousness – but with the consciousness of the _plant-being_ only in man. In Boehme and Swedenborg there is the advent of _direct experience_ of the plant-being in man – but now there is a sense of _inadequacy_ , that the being experienced is not the entire human being. This explains the pages of quite useless exegesis and ranting found in their works.

Rudolf Steiner explained the entire human being and he was content to lay out all the details of that being, leaving it for others to demonstrate the entire being through direct experience.

In _The Spiritual Organs_ there is direct _idea_ -experience of the spiritual organs/chakras. But only the _first five_ organs (to the Larynx organ) are directly experienced in this way. The Brow and Crown organs appear in their traditional form. But what is significant is that the important nexus at the Brow – the Arch of Heaven – has been _encountered directly_ , as detailed in _The Spiritual Body_.

What of direct experience of the spiritual organs?

7/4/2000:

Evil: we keep evil alive by passing it on. The essence of _forgiveness_ is that we keep the evil in ourselves – we suffer it then, until we overcome it in ourselves. _But_ the benefit of this overcoming goes primarily to aid the evil doer – that he or she can thus be helped to overcome the evil in themselves. For us, we are strengthened by our struggle with the evil, which permits us to better bear the next evil done to us, thus reducing the chance (temptation) that we might pass this evil on.

28/5/2000:

Women will not be made full priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches because they have, as it were, breasts. The Sacrifice of the Mass is possible because a power can arise in the ordained priest – seen like two internalised wings (as though the priest is an angel turned inside out) rising up his flanks. This is an etheric power that parallels the milk-producing power in the physical body of the woman. So if a woman exercises the power of the Sacrament of the Mass, the etheric impulse would ground/earth in her breasts. Then one would have the erotic fascination with the woman's breasts that is encountered in the practice of magic.

Christ's injunction to "feed my flock" refers to an etheric activity, not a physical one.

12/6/2000:Whit Sunday

When a woman speaks or sings (especially the latter) she performs a function similar to that of the priest performing the Sacrifice. A spiritual power flows into all: in men it tends to exit through his sexual organ, as sperm; in women it tends to exit through gestation and birth. The priest is celibate so as to divert this power, by reflection against his sexual organ, so that it rises again in him, exiting in the course of the Sacrifice, as though his arms were splayed on the Cross.

In women this power cannot be deflected by her sexual organ (it is 'open'), but only against her diaphragm. A power does rise from her sexual organ, but only up to her breasts in order to provide milk. Hence the woman expresses the spiritual power in speech and singing, where the priest does so in the Sacrifice.

Man can of course deflect the power at the diaphragm too, this gives him speech and song too, but his expression does not carry the analogous-sacramental power that a woman's does.

The spiritual power can be deflected by both sexes at the throat, which reserves the power for 'head-work' – thought and visualisation. The disposition of the spiritual organs in this scheme can be seen thus:

Note that the spiritual organs do not themselves reflect the spiritual power – they create or control the means to do so. Note also that the powers described here are not those active in the spiritual organs themselves. The descending power here is an astral formative power and the rising power is an etheric one of growth. They are influenced by the spiritual organs but do not exert any reciprocal influence on the organs; instead they flow on either into the physical realm of human sexuality or else are reflected into the astral body as instruments for the creation of spiritual bodies.

It is the 'heart-crown' in the Throat organ that reflects the power back to the Brow organ, thus permitting thought-reflections and consciousness. However, it is the fact that we created both the Sacral Plexus and Solar Plexus organs that permits the Solar Plexus organ to reflect the power into the Heart organ. Before this the power ran freely through to the Root organ, not as a sexual energy but as a creative power building up the essential body-form of the human being, that is, constructing itself as an etheric model for the physical human body to come.

Remember that at this point the Heart organ had a different structure – a dormant one (Ego-less) – like a _seed_ (still to be seen at the base of the Root organ). The role then of the other organs, the Brow, Larynx and Heart organs was to beam themselves down by means of astral power onto the forming Root organ, each forming a copy of its own nature in the Root organ, the etheric, the astral, and the spirit (Ego-seed). Thus the Brow organ was the sun, the Larynx organ was the moon and the Heart organ was the 'initial' earth – thus creating the Sun-Moon-Earth being, in effect the Cosmic Being itself.

The entry of the Ego into man was both the cause and effect of the setting of the Heart organ into motion. In a sense the Ego meets itself in the Heart – as though it has reached right round the Cosmos to encounter itself. (Of course, the Ego is in a way the Cosmos itself.)

The Solar Plexus organ resulted from the etheric spirit's attempt to find itself on earth. In the same way the Sacral Plexus organ formed as the astral spirit tried to find itself in a more dense earth bereft of the Sun and Moon. It could only do so by drawing up the solar and lunar energies from the earth and setting them in an opposition-combination to each other, wherein the astral spirit finds a place.

The etheric spirit had only the Sun's absence to contend with. Hence only one energy flows there, but divided ten-fold in order to create a habitation for the astral spirit. This replicates the actual spiritual form of that being but vulgarised to the earthly level: the astral spirit has ten faces (countenances) but can only express itself here in a _polarity_ the sources of which cannot be specified within the form of the ten-fold Solar Plexus organ, that is, which 'nipples' are positive, which are negative.

The etheric spirit on the other hand expresses itself as a kind of self-grinding, a constant in-turning against an in-turning activity, differentiated only by the different earth-cosmic energy drawn in – solar or lunar. A polarity here is only incipient because the Earth element is also present, as a kind of ground (always giving way) for the in-grinding solar and lunar energies. And yet it is not a trinity, because the elements cannot be separated within this activity – and yet it is _not_ a unity either.

Death arises in what this etheric spirit forms here on earth because the lunar power is not drawn off by the astral spirit in the Solar Plexus organ. Only the Heart organ (the Ego-being) can do this, but drawing it through the Solar Plexus organ nonetheless. Death occurs because the Solar Plexus organ draws the solar energy away more quickly than the Heart organ draws the lunar energy away. Death will be overcome when the Ego better understands its earth-cosmic tasks and makes proper use of the lunar power.

The Ego does not yet understand that it, too, must be born into the earth-life – that it must acquire a mother. The lunar power is the hidden mother of the Ego – hidden because the Ego cannot perceive it: the analogy is the infant suckling the mother's breast, the milk then the lunar power.

The Ego will then overcome the impasses confronting its extensions, the astral and etheric spirits. It will begin this by drawing up the lunar power at a proper rate. The Ego in a sense thus 'hollows out' the Solar Plexus organ – in time the solar power in the Solar Plexus organ internalises and unites within the lunar channel. Now the solar power flows in the Heart organ – where previously it had washed across its 'surface', creating a gleaming aspect. Then the Ego acquires also a father, who rises above the ego like a shining star. This is the crowning of the Ego. Whereas the mother feeds the Ego, the father sun dresses the Ego – as the physical body dresses spiritual man. Thus the Solar Plexus organ is transformed, appearing now in the Throat organ – that is, in its spiritual form – thus the Ego finds its home in the earth-cosmos.

Now it must find its limitation proper to the earth cosmos. To do this, the Ego will have to understand the terrible burdens before it. It must understand that it is no longer 1. universal, 2. equivalent, and 3. all-knowing.

1. The etheric spirit Earth base must be seen in its restricted facticity: that this earth of this Ego is only part of the earth-cosmos.

2. The etheric spirit lunar activity of this Ego is isolated from other Egos: that the light of the sun only shows this more clearly.

3. The etheric spirit solar activity is limited in what it knows: the darkness of the moon indicates this – that it cannot be lit without the sun's effort, it will not otherwise stay bright (be known).

The Ego must first learn these bitter facts, then it will begin the task of overcoming them. Thus the Ego will draw the etheric spirit to itself also. The secret of the overcoming lies in the fact that earth existence of all kinds (including earth cosmic existence) allows for _learning_. While the Ego cannot in the earth-cosmos _be_ everywhere or _be_ every other Ego, it can learn (gain knowledge) about them. In time the Ego will come to shed light on all things and each Ego will illuminate each other Ego, and through learning each Ego will remain illuminated by other Egos.

Thus finally the Ego attains the state of the Crown organ, shedding light on everything and everyone everywhere.

22/6/2000:

With reference to the last note. The production of semen requires a direct intervention/injection of _life_ by the etheric power. It is this capacity to inject life-ness which is diverted into the Eucharist. The equivalent power in the woman is a power of _maintenance_ not of origination. It enters the infant at birth and supports the child until its own etheric body can take over in the period from the fifth until the eighth year. This power is, or can be, augmented by means of the mother's milk, that is, through the breasts.

_The semen of the priest_. The sexual nature is entirely a life/etheric matter: that is why plants can have sexuality. But sexuality in its bipolar form arose through an intervention at the astral level, associated with the separation of the Moon from the Earth (Rudolf Steiner). Originally, the human seed – that is, primordial semen – was enwombed in the Earth but cared for by the Moon. The latter served to 'draw' the semen-being out, by a process of elongation, like pulling at dough, except that this drawing-out allowed a lunar water enter the space created in the semen-being. Thus the semen-being became a semen-plant, with roots, stem, branches, and leaves like fingers. However, it did not flower; instead, it rose up into the astral level (plants cannot enter the astral plane – they flower when they make contact with that level, like impressions they make on the 'surface' of the astral plane), rotated and then began to accrete a physical body from the mist-air that surrounded it. The nearest equivalent in nature now is the _sea-horse_ , except that originally the semen-plant swam in a mist-air.

The effects of the separation of the Moon and Earth meant that some other means were needed to incubate the semen-seed. This was done by splitting the human being into two sexes, one which continued to produce the semen-seed, the other to incubate it. Now, because the latter sex, the woman, would need to hold large amounts of the lunar power, she was compensated for this by an extra infusion of the solar power. It is this surfeit that makes the woman more graceful and aspirational than the man. Even so, the presence of the excess of lunar power made her simultaneously a being attached to appearances and the concrete. The man, on the other hand, was depleted in solar power but augmented in a complex indirect way by the earth-crystal power, which made him more physical – less outrightly materialistic (that is, less prone to mistake the appearances imposed of necessity on matter for the matter itself). Nonetheless, the man felt a powerful attraction to the earthly crystalline element itself, and his suffering (isolation) here made him potentially a self-pitying and violent being. The aggression arose from the man's weakened sense of identity, which in turn has its origin in the fact that man is pointed towards the earth-crystal element, which always gives way, so that he experiences earthly reality as something that constantly undermines him. But he remained less prone to delusion than the woman, who retains in rudimentary form the original human ability, provided by the lunar power, to enter the astral world, which is however usually restricted by the increased solar power within her to a capacity to reflect herself on the 'surface' of the astral plane; a power similar to that in plants but much much weaker. Put otherwise, man experiences the world as though it was still in the fluid Moon-epoch, while the woman looks to heaven – the astral plane – as though she was still in the Moon-epoch.

A point will come when this situation will need to be overcome, when the sexes will reunite into one, but at a higher level. This will be done, firstly, by drawing the lunar power back to the man by means of a technical abstraction from the earth, that is, the male physical-crystal element will be replaced a direct physical element – the _technology_. On the other hand, the excess lunar power in the woman will be weakened by means of a redirection of this power to the man. This interchange will be difficult for most to achieve, because they will not know (even then) what is happening. This will be witnessed by a fall in female fertility, a growing desire to abort foetuses, and because of the concentration of power in the man, solar and lunar (the solar power in man will be increased relatively due to the increased abstraction of man from the earth-crystal force), most children born will be male. Women will die out in a kind of despair – a dreadful experience for both sexes.

Now, the role of Christ in the etheric body is as follows. The clue is _sin_ and the overcoming of sin. Sin arose from the division of the sexes and the incompleteness evidenced in each sex. Sin is thus the transgression of the new order in an attempt to restore the old order – the man to recapture his lost solar power, the woman to regain the lost power to engender semen and to surrender the burden of the lunar power. Christ first corrects the imbalance (actually, the consequences thereof) on the spirit plane. Then, as is beginning now, to correct the imbalance in this world. Christ is a solar power in man and a depletion of lunar power in the woman. Thus the priest creates a spiritual semen and engenders this semen in a spiritual earth, in a kind of rehearsal of the future of human generation. The woman becomes a 'nun', the only way she will have of counteracting her despair. Ordinary secular man, however, is put in a bind. Any increase in solar power at present makes him, not simply materialistic, but tempted to try to rule the earthly physicality. Thus the abstraction by means of technology becomes, not an escape from the burden of physicality, but a kind of revenge of the physical, in which man is tempted to rule the physical earth-crystal – the equivalent to preferring cinders to live coals. Thus the man in Christ can become sterile in a physical sense rather than fecund in a spiritual sense, unless he understands the priestly role – that period of renunciation and spiritual engendering.

3/7/2000:

The Holy Family is a model of serial generation: Father to Son to Father to Son and so on. But where does the _generative_ power lie? Usually the Mother as the Eternal Female is assumed to be the source of this generation. But it actually lies in the man. That which nurtures life can be conceived of as 'eternal' so far as the continuity of generation is concerned. But what generates and is generated of necessity is not eternal but mortal. The life impulse is like a spark from a fire dying in the cool air, a piece of molten iron solidifying in a cold sea.

But it is not this life impulse, soon extinguished, that is of importance – the life impulse is a vehicle, bearing a higher power. This power – Soul – has the task of preparing an environment for an even higher power. It, as it were, creates a particular environment for the spirit.

11/7/2000:

This is how the sexes divide. The female genitals are an involution of those of the male. The breasts of the woman are a kind of development of the original single-sex being's sense-organ. The nipples had been its 'hearing-sight' organ – more like radar than eyes or ears – responding to the position of the radiation it sensed. In the woman, the breasts still have a vestige of this sense-organ, much more so than in men. There is a sense in which women 'know where they are' by means of their breasts in a way unknown to the male.

2/7/2001

_The sexes do not divide_.

The earlier hermaphrodite being resembled the modern sea-horse, and lived in the thick fluid of the Old Moon epoch. It had two sense organs, one 'hot', the other 'cold'. The latter was a kind of voice/vibration instrument – by means of which the being transmitted its experiences to others like itself using impulse waves through the thick fluid it was immersed in. The 'hot' organ was a kind of experience receptor, like a tongue, which picked up the vibrations in the fluid. Of course, experience, as such, was extremely limited – so that the vibrations from each being resembled in a general way those of all the others. However, _all_ knowledge available to these beings was communicated in this way all the time, so that the fluid pulsed with the rhythm of this knowledge, which was a total knowledge of all things, spiritual and existential. The nature and experience of this communication survives in our epoch as music.

In most ways this being was in thrall, its existence mirroring that of its spiritual author as closely as would be possible in a material medium. But the hermaphrodite was not a spiritual being itself, the _polarity_ of reception and expression shows this. One can see in it a stage in the process whereby what is a unity in the spiritual world, a kind of cosmic simultaneity, tends increasingly to polarise in the physical world – first warmth and movement, then light and air, and so on.

The separation of the Moon from the Earth finally collapses the polarity within this being, so that it tended to become fixed on one or other of the foci, to become either male or female. The other focus remains in the being – fully dormant: it is a spiritual collapse, so that the hidden focus is a spiritual element and does not appear directly in the physical incarnation. It only appears in deep memory as a component of sexual attraction and in other kinds of longing.

The course of this event can be illustrated as follows:

The spirit/Ego first appears in physicality as a seed embedded in a 'star-soul'. Here the spirit/Ego is almost still fully in the spirit world, for though the star-soul is truly its product, it alone was not the agent of this production, _but_ physicality was the result of this production of the star-soul. It was the ground, as it were, that permitted the possibility at all of a star-soul distinct from the whole spiritual realm.

Caught as it were between the spiritual being and an inert 'ground', the star-soul was slowly pressed into motion, a kind of circulation about the Ego. This was a hapless condition entailing much suffering on the part of the spiritual beings ( _not_ the Ego) which oversaw this process and on the part of the other spiritual being who maintained the ground.

The outcome here is that the star-soul developed ('grew') a ROBE of a kind, which reflects the 'livingness' in the soul (derived in turn from the being of the Ego). This livingness is the suffering of the soul. It appears in a 'dissipated' form in the Robe as a _life_ -energy and leads to the elaboration of the life-impulses that emanate from the soul as living forms.

Now, it is important to be aware that this circulation in the Robe or etheric/life body never ceases. This is significant when considering the complex relations between the sexes.

This is to be asserted: while the star is _spherical_ , the Robe is _cubical_. The star is spherical because it arises in a pure (simple) polarity of two foci – seed-spirit and 'physical' ground. But the Robe is cubical because, as well as the central seed force, _eight_ other spiritual powers work upon it. The eight powers are arrayed according to a geometrical principle – as perceived by us from the point of view of the descended looking back through the layers/levels of extension/emanation into the spiritual. A number of important revelations arise from this understanding – these will be elaborated later.

For now, what is of importance is this: the total of nine powers are arrayed in a 3 x 3 formation. One of these triplicities is a polar array that traverses the cube from, say, the top right to the bottom left. Initially, it was a service by two senior powers to the central seed-spirit in order to regulate the circulatory motion coming into being in the Robe/Soul. The other two triplicities then came to absorb and oversee the two elements in the circulation, that derived from the spirit seed, and that induced in the physical ground: one that is 'hot', the other 'cold'. (The 'physical' here can be regarded in the Kabbalistic sense as the 'face of God' – i.e. God 'looks' so that something is 'seen'. If the spirit-seed reaches out from the spirit world then something must be there to receive it – part of the spirit world, to be sure, but now made different by the event of reaching out – or being reached out.)

There is a plan in all this. In time the Robe comes to contain two elements: the 'hot' circulation and its attendant power and the 'cold' circulation and its attendant powers. And a form of communication is established, as must occur where difference comes into being. The hot 'speaks', the cold 'hears'; the cold experiences and the hot 'learns'. Thus that which hears can experience also, one fitting to the other by and large – with a slight and all important lack of fit. Experience contains something new, but that which speaks cannot also learn with ease. Thus in one case a lack of fit: but the processes go ahead even so. In the other a conflict grows: learning undermines speech. What is a secondary gap in the cold, between experience and what it hears, is a primary fault in the hot, between what is already known (assumed to be the case) and what is newly learned. This latter is the grit that will eventually produce the _pearl_ (of wisdom).

The first result of this is that the soul begins to act as a reflector. The disparity growing is such that the wisdom of the Gods must shine back from the soul in order to maintain the total-ness of the spirit world in the soul. The Ego finds itself reflected back in the soul. That which is not represented here – that which is learned from the soul's experience of the physical – now tends to separate off. This becomes the life body: the great reservoir of human experience as memory. And the polarity between the hot and the cold circulations intensifies, _until the soul splits in two_.

This is the myth of the Cosmic Egg and the creation of the Cosmos/World. But this split re-occurs again and again down the great Chain of Being, down, down until the Moon is separated from the Earth (already separated from the Sun). Then the human being, at once author, as Adam Kadmon, of the universe and an actor within it, now is also split, into two sexes.

The split can be presented schematically in this form:

that is, like a square cut diagonally. The division of the senses has already been detailed: to the female sex was apportioned the organ of expression, to the male, the organ of reception. A number of further insights can be added here. The soul is split in two: thus in any incarnation the human being lives on earth with only half of his soul. But the life-body, the Robe, is also split in two, thus he or she also lives with only half of the life-body too, the hot part if he is male, the cold part if she is female. It is no accident that the original organs are taken over for specific purposes. The organ of expression/speech serves the purpose of nurture, so that the mother's milk can be seen as a kind of wisdom passed to the child, and the breasts themselves having a residual function as an organ of communication, seen in the obscure impulse to lay one's head on a woman's breast. The organ of experience/listening becomes the sexual organ, involuted in the woman, evoluted in the man. This is a sublime mystery. The organ responsible in a sense for the rupture in the spiritual endeavour that leads to the establishment of life is itself the source of the _living seed_ on earth – that what is now heard is the flow of _true life_ from the soul. Thus the man now listens to the woman and hears there spiritual truth (that most cannot recognise), while the man can talk to the woman, telling her things she does not wish to know. Thus the man is the conduit for the living seed on earth, how the Ego will finally establish itself here, while the woman is _as though_ the spirit seed itself, cloistered in the hall of mirrors called the Soul. Yet, the woman is the earth – the cold – the nurturer, bending down in suffering to draw up the new life – turned away from the Heaven that is her inner contemplation.

Thus the woman has speech in her soul, and in her circulation she raises the physical to life, a process of conversion essential to the spirit's purpose here. The man for his part is priest in his soul, the midwife of the Gods, and in his circulation is the living seed, a pure astral force cutting into his own life processes: an uneasy being, heaven in his soul, pain in his life, back to the spirit, face to the flat unyielding plane of the physical-crystal. The woman to the man is a moon reflecting heaven, and the man to the woman is like a sun lit red.

But above all this, there is one key fact: in splitting the soul, _the Ego-seed is released_. The mirror is broken. This is why there are two sexes. Physical man cannot be immortal – the physical is incapable of this: but a free Ego could not relate directly to the earth, as Adam Kadmon once did, in order to generate. So the earth is enwrapped in each woman, enclosed in her involuted genitalia, and the man – part of him surrendered to the earth – must now impregnate the woman, not the earth. So the Ego is released from the soul, but nonetheless maintains its relation (downwards) to the soul. But now it begins, once it perceives (is brought to perceive) its destiny here, to convert the soul from mirror into window.

Then the excluded experience/memory in the life body/Robe will be revealed to it and a new stage of conversion will begin. Thus what was once split away in polarity begins to be reabsorbed.

16/7/01:

Ego = Utopia.

How the Ego sees us:

The Ego does not understand motion/action in the limbs/body.

How the etheric body sees us:

The heart scintillates like the sun (the heart here is the soul or the astral vision of the body as fog).

1. The Ego sees heaven in stones and rock; hence the earliest Ego actions were the carving of rock and carving _on_ rocks. But crystal is the grave of the Ego, rendering it inert.

2. The Ego can enter metals. Enters most strongly into iron – hence the Iron Age as the first age of the newly liberated Ego. But care here: metal is a kind of Ego-head and make the Ego hunger for a body. Modernly, this is consumerism. The relation of the Ego to _gold_ is a mystery even Isaac Newton could not fathom. To spiritual vision, the Ego disappears into gold: this indicates error – gold was intended as an earthly habitation for the gods, the human Ego already dwells in the Soul and therefore has no need of gold, for it makes the Ego _stupid_.

3. The Ego is mesmerised by water. One should take care, for the Ego sees everything in nothing here.

4. The Ego sees itself almost completely in plant-life, especially in deciduous trees in the summer. The Ego can hardly believe the colours of flowers – they are so utterly of the spirit.

There is a danger of confusing the 'soul-ego' with the 'earth-ego' (physicality). You will know you are in contact with your Ego when you feel loneliness, isolation, coldness, abandonment. The soul remains the Ego's comfort, where it looks at itself as in a mirror. This why water is such a danger: the Ego is inclined to confuse water with the soul – though water has none of the soul's power of reflection – spiritual 'form-reflection'. When you feel joy and a strong interest when looking at a tree in sunlight in June, then you know that you are looking at your Ego, at your _self_.

*

There are several features regarding the cubical array of the spiritual powers in the Robe to be noted in relation to the physical-crystal.

One:

The eight powers are arrayed around the centre, containing the spirit-seed of man and the ninth power – the companion of man.

The 3 x 3 arrays are best seen as follows:

And schemed as follows:

The cube has a diagonal along which the polarity within, of hot and cold, is organised. Thus the cube splits into two triangular sections:

And the spiritual powers are distributed thus:

This organisation shows which powers are shared between the sexes and which are not. The lowest order, here numbered 7, 8, 9 are shared in their entirety, while each sex lacks two members of the two other groups. Notice also that each sex now has _seven_ spiritual powers in attendance, a number corresponding to the number of spiritual organs.

_Two._ The cubical organisation of the spiritual powers, the Celestial Hierarchy, has significance in other areas of human destiny.

For instance, the cube can be rotated until this layout is arrived at:

The layout is somewhat exaggerated, but the relations between the cubical array of spiritual powers in nonetheless accurate. This plan helps to explain the nature of the otherwise elusive second spiritual organ – the Sacral Plexus organ. The spiritual powers numbered 7 and 9 are situated in the organs above and below, that is the Solar Plexus and Root organs. This substantially the visions of 18th and 22nd August 1998.

_Three_. There is an operation among the Zodiacal Twelve involving a 3 + 1 order that can be explicated also by the cubical array. It is a curiosity of the Zodiac that if organised on a four-fold triplicity basis, the elements of each successive triplicity acquire the fourth element in the Mutable sign directly opposite the Mutable sign of the given triplicity, thus:

It is a reciprocating arrangement involving a kind of transfer between opposite mutable signs. Now isolate one axis of such an exchange:

And you have the 'embedded' array:

Thus the Zodiacal 12 is in effect an organisation of two intersecting cubes:

This explains the significance of the first information I received regarding the Heart organ on 13th February 1996, where it is described as 4 x 3, then 3 x 4.

_Four_. It is obvious from _One_ above that two of the spiritual organs have both male and female aspects. As disclosed in The _Spiritual Organs_ and further expanded in _Activating the Spiritual Organs_ , there are two organs that have dual natures: the Throat and the Sacral Plexus organs. Moreover, the crisis that occurs in the Sacral Plexus organ has a strongly sexual quality, and the overcoming of the barrier here aids in the transformation of the Throat organ. It is clear that the process of activating the spiritual organs, which leads to the spiritual birth within us, requires that the sexual duality be overcome. It is to be expected that the two organs that by inference can be said to have dual male/female aspects should be involved in this crisis.

3/11/2001:

1 _. Heat and cold_. Our bodies heat up in order to balance outside temperature – they are not heated by outside influences. Our limited tolerance of heat and cold is due to the limitations of the physical body. Spiritual 'warmth' becomes a 'state' – there is no measurable element in the spirit realm – becomes definable only by reference to the physical world. Cold is a positive condition: _if you could understand cold, you would understand materiality._ It is condensation, crystallisation, densification; it is not merely the absence of heat.

2. _The Sexes_. Presexual man had only one sense – a _soul_ -based organ, which was a kind of receptor at one point and an expressor at the other. The spiritual world requires no senses; the soul-world required this polarised sense organ because the soul-world contains only a simple thing, fluid-like, that varied only slightly. This sense organ was orientated along the soul body of man:

With the division into two sexes, one or other pole became 'exposed', one pole transformed by the etheric power into the bosom in the woman or the other becoming the sexual organ in the man. But the original sense activity continues in these transformed sense-points, though it is far too delicate for modern human consciousness to register. It is the source of the unique sensations experienced in physical love relations. This organ did not interfere with man's communication with the spirit world, as our etheric-based senses do. During love relations, men and woman catch snatches of this primeval spirit communication. It is this experience that defines the value of human physical love. But it can also induce a profound frustration in some, who realise, if only vaguely, just what has been lost to us.

Sexual difference created by splitting the human being leaves one half – the female in the man, the male in the woman – hidden in a fold in the soul, which is sited in the Root spiritual organ. This fold has an important role in human life...

3. The Ego will make use of the primeval soul-organ. The image of this is _the eagle bearing the snake in its claws_. The present intellect and its etheric sense organs will die away once they have completed their task of 'recording' material reality.

5/11/2001:

Reference note 2 above. The function of the 'fold'. Three elements are related here: the fold itself, the Root spiritual organ, and the hidden half of the human being – like a seed in the spiritual organ. The fold is the foundation upon which the spiritual organs can be constructed. It has this shape:

The Root organ nestles in the centre. From the 'earth' – the Kundalini Garden – flows the sun and moon powers, rising through their respective channels and crossing at the Root organ. They then continue in this way up to the Brow organ:

This column is anchored by successive 'rotations' of the soul over the long period of man's earthly existence. It is a circulatory system, with the sun rising in its own channel and then descending by means of the lunar channel, and vice versa for the moon power. There is a pain in this that we are all inured to.

Note that the sun/moon circulation is suspended at this point. They return only as far as the Root organ, where they accumulate. This is a dangerous situation at first. These forces should be earthed every three days at least.

27/11/2001:

The Ego/spirit witnesses to the lower world (Earth) in the Soul, where it appears in forms transmitted by the senses. The impact of these forms has increased as the Ego descends until they awaken or draw the attention of the Ego.

We, in turn, also increasingly pay attention to these soul forms, but seeing them from the other side, as it were, by means of our intellect – which has come into existence outside (on this side of) the Soul. It exists in a state of 'attraction', kept in being by sense-activity.

We see, in this situation, our individual Ego as the _Sun_ , and fascinated by the glamour of this vision, we love everything bathed in the yellow light of this apparent-Sun. Thus we love this world with this false devotion, mistaking reflections and images for a reality.

Thus we do not see a real world, only reflections in a hall-of-mirrors Soul, and our sense experiences are only reflections in this Soul-world.

30/12/2001:

The sexual 'remainder' in each human being resides in _astral form_ in the Root spiritual organ. It is this remainder which is active in the spiritual organs. The two sexual elements in each human being are orientated on the _same_ polarity – male to the front, female to the back. As the remainder in each sex is in effect the opposite sex, this means that each human being is orientated differently to his or her remainder, behind in the man and in front in the woman. Thus the man experiences the activation of the spiritual organs as occurring behind him, near his spine, while the woman will sense it occurs to the front, as though rising through her womb.

Clairvoyantly, the respective spiritual organ 'plants' are also different in appearance. The female organ-plant is seen to grow straight up, with leaves unfolding at each organ and the as yet unopened organs folded in at the top of the plant, so as to seem like the sections of a pineapple or pine cone.

The male plant, however, is more complex: the leaves are crinkled or gathered along their edges, and the whole plant appears as though twisted by a rising circulating force.

The reason for this difference lies in the relation of the sexes to the lunar forces. The moon force is active in the woman before the spiritual organs are activated, it accounts both for her menstrual periods and her ability to produce milk for her offspring. This means then that the spiritual organs rise in an already present moon stream, up until the sun forces are encountered at the Brow organ.

In the man, on the other hand, the sun forces reach right down to the root organ – and it is by their power that the moon forces are raised in the male spiritual organs.

*

This points to a cosmic fact of some significance. Cain's murder of his brother stunned and frightened the Gods. They thought that they alone could administer death, but Cain showed by his action that man also has this power. Part of Christ's mission (integral to his entire mission) was to experience human death at first hand, in order that the Gods could understand the quite traumatic effect death has had on the human race – like a wall or dam that stops the flow of a river.

Now, Jahve gave Solomon the freedom to understand man, but he was deeply angered when Solomon elected to worship the god of his wives. There is a _Mystery of sex_ here that the Gods still do not understand. The Gods made man in their own image, but Solomon elected to worship the God-image the women chose to worship. Why? The God-image of the woman is the man himself as she sees him. Solomon saw himself in his wives, and considered this a more true experience than worshipping the Gods who had 'made' man by splitting the original human being – Adam Kadmon – into two sexual elements.

All this indicates that in the future the Gods will act in order to gain direct understanding of human sexuality, on analogy with their mission to understand human death. Christ's mission took place in the Heart spiritual organ, as it were, the mission to understand human sexuality will occur in the Throat organ, one of the two organs with a dual (sexual) nature – symbolised already by the Claddagh ring – _two_ hands embracing a crowned heart.

January 2002:

To the woman, the emerging Sun stream that accompanies the activation of the spiritual organs appears as a pillar of fire. The fact that the moon forces already active in her are built on memory – the cosmic memory contained in the female sex element – means that this image of the sun power is extremely potent and could mislead her.

The situation confronting the man is somewhat different. First, the sun power in him has already two aspects. Observed, it is seen to rise from the region of the heart as a series of fire-rings of ever larger diameter until it hangs like a huge radiance at the Brow organ. Looking down, however, from the heart region towards the Root organ, the sun power appears as a series of brilliant pearl-like droplets, each dropping into a sea of light (like a sea of quicksilver) to create a glowing ripple, each of which grows until it merges with the rings of radiance that floats at the Root organ.

For the man, raising the lunar power is like _liberating_ his female half, but also like dousing the pool of fire in the Root organ. For the woman, opening the solar element is like _embracing_ her male half – an action that enflames her to a frightening degree.

These experiences frighten both sexes. Initially it is a positive fear, but very quickly both the man and the woman realise that in fact while this spiritual union of their dual sexuality signals the end of many of their habitual pains and discomforts, it exposes them to a new phenomenon: the pain of absence. This pain is like a hunger for the old existential agonies that each is long used to. In time they come to understand that the old pains masked a deeper discomfort – the absence of the spirit. Now they suffer the absence of the spirit and long with renewed pain for Heaven.

But we must try to understand that this is now a longing for a future to come – not for a past that is lost – a longing for union with the Ego.

_Note on technology_ :

The source of the material earth lies in the death of living things, as the source of metals lies in the dead of the 'living' on the other planets. Again, the water and air we breathe are known to possess unique properties as liquid and gas forms respectively; they are unique because they derive from the decay of the etheric and astral bodies of earthly beings, including mankind.

What we call nature exists in part as a 'foregoing' of mankind, that permitted the human etheric and astral powers to create a place for mankind on earth. That is, plant-life and later animal-life were the means whereby these powers created a habitation for man on earth, first by discovering the best disposition of the powers in relation to the earth – how life and soul are best sustained here – and later by acting as supports for human life and soul existence. If plants provide sustenance for the body then the animals provide sustenance for the soul.

But as mankind comes to create its own place on earth it will depend less and less on the support of the plant and animal life. Instead, it will create more direct relations with the earth, will draw both body and soul sustenance straight from the earth itself. The means used will vary greatly but all of them can be put under the heading of _technology_.

This development is unavoidable, but it is surrounded by many traps and dangers. Mankind has fallen into delusion on many occasion in its relations with plant and animal life, and still does, for that matter. But these delusions grew in many circumstances from a want of power or knowledge, from a loss of faith or divine support. In the future, mankind will make mistakes in its relations to the earth that will arise, on the contrary, from an excess of faith in itself, an over-valuation of its own knowledge and most of all from an excess of power. Mankind will fall into three kinds of traps, some obvious but others far less so.

Obviously, human _megalomania_ will take the form of believing itself divine in a debased way. Less obvious will be the megalomania that arises from the belief that mankind replaces nature in relation to earth. This can be seen already in the more extreme forms of environmentalism, where people think they can sustain what they believe are 'natural' ways of living by artificial means. 'Organic-ism' is ultimately a technology, too.

Then there will be delusions derived from the _paranoia_ that result when untutored Egos encounter one another. This will be the basis of the War of All upon All.

The third kind of delusion is more subtle. In the spirit world the Ego is co-terminus with everything, while on earth it is restricted to this place and time and to this particular incarnation. There will be philosophies of Everything – developments from contemporary theoretical science – where it will become impossible for anyone to admit to ignorance in any subject whatsoever. People will come to know nothing while believing they have access to all information.

The technological basis of these delusions is obvious. A moment's reflection will show that human pursuits normally classed as arts and humanities are in fact technologies. Scholasticism was a technology; Renaissance art was a technology. These delusions will come into being because many people will not fully understand the function of technology and will imbue it with etheric, astral and Ego qualities.

But the earth of the future will finally be seen to be the cold, dark, dead place it always was. As such, mankind will finally know that it is the ultimate home of the Ego, the place where we will finally come home to ourselves, and the vantage point from which we can turn and look directly into the spirit world as fully realised human beings. At that moment mankind will have completed its spiritual mission – it will have extended the realm of the Spirit, that must be extended in this way for a reason few living now could fathom.

13 January 2002

THE SAME AND THE OTHER –

THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN WILL

This essay will contain little or no evidence for what it asserts. This is because, by its nature, very little evidence can be produced. But some readers will feel spontaneously that what is described here is true – or has truth in it. Others will reject the whole subject as so much nonsense.

Now, I ask that those who see some truth in what is asserted here take time to imagine what it is like not to find truth here – that is, that they attempt to grasp something of how those who reject this essay come to do so. And I also ask those who reject this essay to take the time to imagine what it is like to accept the burden of the essay in principle, that is, to act for a moment as though they do see some truth in it.

The reason for asking readers to make these imaginative leaps is to point to a crucial aspect of what will be shown here: that within our reality, at all levels, at all times, and in all places, there is an element present that is utterly beyond our knowledge, though not beyond our experience.

The way to introduce my subject is in the form of a story.

There was an entity once that existed entirely alone. Because it had no contact with anything whatsoever, it had no sense of time or place. It had no consciousness – there was nothing to be conscious of. So it had no knowledge – there was nothing to be known.

Then it encountered something. It had absolutely no understanding of what was happening; it did not even know that it was encountering another entity.

The crucial feature of the encounter is this. As the two entities collided, their respective substances intermingled. The effect of this commingling was to produce new "elements" composed of varying proportions of each substance. Furthermore, these new "elements" continued to interact with each other – and severally with the original substances – to produce even more complex elements composed of varying amounts of the original substances, primary "elements", and, as the process of interaction continued, secondary and tertiary "elements", and so on.

This is the gist of the description of how our reality came – is coming – into being. There is this entity, call it the SAME, and there is that entity, call it the OTHER, and the universe comes into being as a result of an encounter of one with the other. The universe is a mixture of the two, a mixture and a re-mixture, each admixture forming an element having a distinctive character. This is an important fact. Mixing the Same and the Other is not like mixing black and white in varying proportions to produce a range of greys, from light to dark. An admixture of the Same and the Other will produce a particular element that depends on the proportion of the Same and the Other it contains, and will be distinct in nature and behaviour from another admixture containing different proportions of the Same and the Other.

Why is this? It can be asserted that the universe contains a principle that appears in all phenomena as a kind of addition to how we consider those phenomena need to be in order to be physical facts. Put simply, the modern description of the physical universe is of a manifold of laws and distinctive natures that _need not be known_ in order to be and to function.

Yet the universe can be known. How can this be, except that the universe contains a principle of knowability – of intelligibility – surplus to how we believe the universe needs to be in order to be what it seems to us to be. Thus, the universe contains a principle that appears to be in excess of what is needed in order for it to function.

Accepting this to be the case, two questions can be asked: (1) what is the source of this principle of intelligibility? And (2) what is its purpose?

As to (1), it can be asserted that the principle of intelligibility points to a fundamental or primary condition underlying reality. It is not merely a formal principle, because form need not imply intelligence, being at best no more than a fact of stability. Nor is it an active or activating principle in itself, because activity at best needs be no more than the fact of reaction between matters. Nor is it a reflection of reality, because a reality that needs not be known does not contain the principle of knowing, so that knowledge could not arise through reflection alone.

It seems then that intelligence must have its source in the origins of reality itself, in either or both of the entities involved in the original encounter. However, we can narrow the focus more closely than that. To the extent that one of these entities is unknown to us – that entity called the Other – then we can say that the principle of intelligence has its source in the entity called the Same. This does not exclude the possibility that the Other could also possess an intelligence; we simply have no access to it.

(2) The question of the purpose, or task, of intelligence is as much a question about the nature of intelligence. In the same way, there is a better chance of discovering the purpose of knowledge by understanding the nature of that knowledge. What is knowledge but an answer to a question? And what is intelligence but the capacity to ask that question? And why would a question be asked, except that some circumstance has changed, so that some new experience was undergone?

Much about our reality can be explained by reference to this process of finding an answer to a fundamental question. For instance, the whole of existence can be viewed as a kind of articulation by means of which the question can be answered. And the Other can be defined in terms of the question as unanswered.

Thus, while reality is the result of a very complex series of admixtures of the Same and the Other in varying proportions, this reality is at the same time also a process of organisation whereby a specific intelligence is articulated throughout this admixture in order to gain knowledge about what is being experienced.

How is this possible? How can what appears to be an accident on one hand also appear to contain a highly specified purpose on the other?

The explanation must lie in the nature of the Same, that it can remain coherent in all its parts even as it is fragmented into admixtured subnatures. It is not merely that the fragments of the Same obey some surviving central authority, and organise themselves so as to serve its purpose. It is simply that the Same follows its own nature in all its parts – surviving intact even quite radical admixture with the Other – and it is its nature to behave as it does, to organise itself in order to understand its own experience.

An indication of how this organisation is achieved and to what end can be seen in the apparent evolution of life on Earth. The Earth itself can be conceived as a condensation arrived at through a long series of admixtures and re-admixtures of the Same and the Other. Life, however, to the extent that we are aware of it, must partake of the same nature as we do, so it should be viewed as an emanation of the Same. The development of life on Earth can then be seen as a series of preparations of the locus Earth for habitation ultimately by mankind. Thus eons of plant-life both laid down the material-rock foundation of the Earth we know, and tested for optimal living conditions for subsequent life on Earth. Then followed animal life, which provided new, sturdier rock formations, and also prepared the Earth for human mobility. Successive waves of hominoids refined this process of preparation until the Earth was fit for human habitation.

It was not a determined process; there were many blinds alleys. The dinosaurs, for instance, were for a time intended as habitations for humanity. This living environment is not perfect – it was never intended to be – it is no more than an adequate work-place for the human species, in which it labours to achieve its objective.

Isaac Newton described the human race as the "sensorium of God". There is some sense in this, but it should be borne in mind that the Divinity that is the Same really has no inkling of what man experiences until mankind itself is in a position to tell It. Thus the task of mankind is not alone to experience this traumatic encounter between the Same and the Other, nor simply to gain some understanding of this event, and – hopefully – gain some understanding of the nature of the Other. We must also discover a way of communicating our findings to the Godhead, the Spiritual Being that is the Same, of which we are an integral, if projected, part.

Each level of this mission of humanity places distinctive demands upon human beings. Each human being has a part to play here – there is no exception. Each man and woman is open at all times to the experience of living and so must endure this dreadful burden. Again, each person strives for a particular type of understanding of his or her life-experience. It is not simply a matter of knowing what is experienced, for instance by naming or otherwise creating a narrative. Rather, we understand by absorbing the experience, by allowing the pain and tribulation, the trial of life, to impose itself upon us. It is in the resultant "shape" imposed on us that understanding lies.

The final task is the hardest by far: communicating this understanding to Divinity. It is not simply that the Spirit does not want to know – though the Spirit has asked a question, it has no expectation of receiving an answer – the message to be communicated is so strange and so awful that any attempt to speak it is greeted with complete incomprehension. So, the task of communicating with the Spirit – the ultimate task and destiny of mankind and the main reason for the existence of the human race – must be undertaken only after elaborate and lengthy preparation.

The initial task here is for each person to educate his or her own Ego. This task is undertaken by means of a series of conversions, so that the brute experience of the physical body is refined and understood at successive levels within each human being. Experience survives in us first as memory, so that our initial task is to become reconciled to each memory and the force it exerts on us. Some memories are easily absorbed, either because they are pleasant and so we are willing to identify with them, or because they repeat memories we have already absorbed. Other memories, however, will require a lifetime – and more – to absorb, memories that arouse not only pain and guilt, but that fill us with profound, inexplicable shame.

It is necessary to absorb experience as memory before we can undertake the next task, that of identifying the pattern to be found in experience. In a sense, this means passing from our lived experience, as it impresses on our feelings, to witness to the objective expression that underlies our experience. This objective expression is only superficially the "cause" of what is experienced, considered as an object or set of objects in the outside world. Behind these objects and situations can be glimpsed a ghost-like pattern, which can indicate to us something of _why_ the experience occurred. In other words, the objects in the world are seen to be disposed in relation to us, as being capable of intelligence, rather than mere accidents that we encounter under one circumstance or another – that is, intentionally or otherwise.

The oriental concept of Karma bears in part a sense of this disposition, but leaving aside the teleological overtones that have been laid upon this concept. The ancient idea of Necessity is in some ways a better description, but here the deterministic overtones must be put aside. The world, the whole universe, is at any moment a coherent disposition, not a mere aggregate of accidents.

There is now a final task to be undertaken before our experience is sufficiently refined to serve as spiritual communication. At the level of recognising the patterns of our experience, we find that disparate experiences, originating at different times and places, reveal intimate connections with each other. As this level of understanding proceeds, we discover that large parts of our life-experience fall into quite remarkable coherent "shapes". The word shape connotes pattern, but it is used here to indicate an important difference in this new level of understanding.

Up to now, our experience, though refined in ways that can astonish, remains whole and in a sense complete – nothing is felt to be lost in the process of refinement. Now, however, when we review the new shapes we discern through broad swathes of our lives, we see on one hand something of what was previously called the intelligibility of the world: what we can justifiably call a Discernment of the Spirit. But, at the same time, we have the profoundly disquieting sense that something is lacking in the Discernment.

This sense of lack can have a devastating effect on people. It generates intense hungers and desires, great violence and anger. Most of all, we feel an intense and abiding disappointment. We feel cheated that all our efforts should lead to what we inescapably feel is error, even delusion.

This lack is our experience of the Other. It will have no locus or form; it will simply permeate our understanding of the Spirit – that is, the Same – as a formless, meaningless absence.

This is the understanding that we must convey, first to our own Ego, then to the various spiritual hierarchies that are arrayed as emanations out from the core Divinity to us here on Earth. You can appreciate the difficulty the Spirits have in accepting this knowledge as the fruit of a mighty endeavour. You can also appreciate the extreme distaste human beings have for the task of preparing this incomplete knowledge and then conveying it to beings they consider superior to themselves.

This process of refinement of experience is undertaken by all human beings, regardless of race and religion, education or even apparent mental ability. Much of the activity of mankind, rational and irrational, moral and immoral, is in fact part of the response of humans to the demands of this process of refinement of life-experience. For instance, the process of reconciling ourselves to our memories of experience often involves deep pain and anguish, and human beings are strongly tempted to ease this suffering by projecting it – like a contagion – on to others. The disappointment experienced by those who manage to discern the larger patterns and shapes in their lives is often vented in anger and violence upon others. Whole societies can be convulsed by the need to absorb collective experiences, and these societies can behave exactly like individuals in visiting their pain and frustration on other social groups in acts of war.

Of course, it is not all gloom: humanity has happy experiences, and so there are memories it celebrates, and disappointments that are tempered by hope. It is significant that human happiness is expressed in ways very different to human unhappiness. The former is usually regularised as festivals, religious and cultural festivals, diligently prepared for and fully shared, while unhappiness erupts into human affairs, unpredictable and singular, flaring up and then dying away as the fury or resentment is vented.

It should be clear from the account above that the world, or indeed the universe, does not exist in time. The universe exists only at this instant of experience, and that instant is annihilated as it is succeeded by the next instant of experience. But the world does live on in us, as an effect upon us, like a wound which we then strive to heal. The patterns and shapes we discern ultimately in ranges of experience do not exist outside our witnessing of them: they simply indicate the disposition of the Same – and perhaps the disposition of the Other too – an expression of the natures or essences of these spiritual beings.

Formal knowledge, then, philosophy, theology, and the sciences, are really responses to life-experience, though we often treat them as explanations that in some way substitute for the content of experience, or, worse, as some kind of fruit of experience that leads us to an abstract conceptual reality hidden behind what our senses tell us. In fact, formal knowledge as a response to experience is on a par with our festivals and our wars – it is simply another way we have of coming to terms with our suffering and confusion.

But the most important insight here is this: that the human endeavour can fail, either because what is being sought – knowledge that will inform the Gods of their present situation – cannot be achieved, or mankind will be overcome by the conflictual nature of its response to its experience of the Same and the Other. Thus mankind, along with all the other spiritual emanations, could be condemned to a blind endurance of pure experience, unrelieved by hope or by the certainty of any cessation, which is at present the actual agony of the Same, the core Godhead.

A major consideration arises from the foregoing: can the human will be free?

The modern concept of free will implies that we can act from some point outside the whole universe, an unconditioned and undetermined origin point from which we can exert a force upon the universe and its contents.

Originally, the idea of the freedom of the human will was quite different. The human being was seen to be free in the sense of not being determined, by fate or by necessity, and so essentially a chaotic being subject to every whim and passing influence; in fact, the equivalent of a headless chicken.

By comparison with this view, the modern version of human freedom sees man as a god, capable of doing anything he wants to do, a being capable of anything and, ultimately, everything.

In both versions, man is seen to be beyond morality, in the classical Stoic version incapable of moral self-control, in the later modern version above and beyond – by definition of being free – all moral restraint, subject only, as Nietzsche rightly conceived of it, to his own unbounded will to power.

In both these accounts the concept of the freedom of man seems to mask a deeper concern – a fear of loss of control, a very real fear of descending into darkness and chaos. This is obvious in the Stoic account, which has continued to underpin the Christian view of mankind, but appears only in the modern account in our own ambiguous attitude to personal power, an awareness of both its desirability and its temptation.

Now, the content of this fear of loss of control contains the possibility of gaining direct understanding of the nature of the universe and of man's situation within it. It is clear that the divine Same is not a being of power, as commonly understood. It has abilities, most obviously its intelligence, but these powers flow from this Being in a way similar to how natural powers behave, how gravity appears when certain material preconditions are met, how water will flow to achieve equilibrium.

Thus, there is no room in the Same for the idea of a will-power; therefore no possibility of applied forces in the universe. Yet there are natural forces, gravity and various chemical and electro-magnetic energies.

The encounter of the Same and the Other leads to a manifold of distinctive enmixed elements composed of the Same and the Other in varying proportions. These elements bear the energies brought into being during the encounters of the Same and the Other and of the various enmixed elements with each other. In these later encounters between various elements, the reactions will vary depending on the formation of the elements involved. Some will be more powerful than others, so that a whole complex of motions and reactions is created. And it is out of this complex that the universe of forces we experience comes into being.

Inasmuch as the universe is constituted at any instant as a disposition, rather than as a mere aggregate of accidents, its array of forces must also be disposed in some order. This is possible because the Intelligence of the Same (at least that; the nature of the Other remains unknown, so its influence on the disposal of the universe cannot be discerned) is not alone capable, by its very nature as intelligent, of imposing an order on the universe, it is also invulnerable to the forces of the universe. Thus these forces wash against the Same's Intelligence and recoil, an endless flow of force and recoil, many kinds of forces, each with its own distinctive recoil.

Thus, the freedom discerned in man is this Intelligence. It is not a power or active force: it is a resistance, a nature finally detached from the universe, yet capable of organising it, capable of ordering – not the forces of the universe – but the recoils that these forces become upon contact with the Intelligence. In this way we act by manipulating forces already in action, not by initiating action.

As an aside: this human Will-Intelligence is discerned spiritually as an image only; it has no dimensions of its own. In appearance it is like a pearl, but shaped like a head of chicory, glowing very softly. This is the Light that all seek.

The spiritual emanations that preceded mankind have tasks similar to that of man, except that they have the additional task of preparing a way for mankind to return to the Godhead or the Same. Earlier spiritual hierarchies would have a greater proportion of the spiritual Intelligence and would also be less projected into the darkness of the Same-Other admixtures. They would thus have experience not only of the effect of the Other, but also a more or less direct perception of the divine Core would remain available to them.

In the case of mankind, direct perception of the spiritual Source would need to be occluded, for the mundane experience would be utterly unbearable if even the slightest vision of the Pristine State be permitted to them. Yet the human hunger for its origin remains unabated, no matter how deeply we are immersed in the toils of the Same-Other encounter. It informs, as a memory, all human desire and acts as the deep motivation of all human action.

This situation is made worse by the fact that after death, most of mankind turns immediately to face, as it were, its divine Source, and eagerly abandons all memory of its earthly experience. Thus the human race is in constant danger of failing to fulfil its task, which crucially involves the survival of the lessons of human experience while incarnate. This danger grows greater as human consciousness of its earthly situation increases generation by generation, and as the human ability to create substitutes for their Heaven, to ease their pain while alive on Earth by artificial means, improves.

It is the role of Christ in this case to bolster the _courage_ of human beings, so that they can overcome their hatred of Earth in order to recollect the fruits of their individual lives on Earth after death. In this role, Christ is like a light, a companion light, who serves to remind individual men and women of the reason for their task on Earth, and to bear witness at all times to the value of that task. Christ, in other words, presents mankind with the _reality_ of Heaven, as a correction to the human dream-memory of a state of repose, already affected, and so changed, by the vicissitudes arising from the Same-Other encounter.

In effect, Christ reminds each of us that we, as spiritual beings in union with all other spiritual beings, are engaged in building a new Heaven, a Heaven at present unknown, that because of the nature of our reality cannot be known until it is achieved.

DG: Good Friday 2005

SOUL AND WILL – THE PHANTOM OF LIFE

Jesus Christ admonished that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. He preached against the common truism that we do to others what has been done to us. There is an obvious reciprocation here – human behaviour is a matter of learned response. Long before the child can be taught through images and words, it will have already learned much of the fundamental lessons of life through imitating what he has sensed others do.

How can an infant do this? It is clear that memory is not involved, because the ability to remember will not develop until the child is in its fourth or fifth year.

One way to approach this question is to ask what happens when an action is performed – say raising an arm. The normal view is that there is an operation internal to the body that performs the action, though it seems impossible to locate the actual site of the operation, though the mechanism of the limb movement can be detailed. If the action is closely observed, it is apparent the event is initiated by a kind of release that takes place "behind" the locus of the action. In the case of raising an arm, for instance, this sense of release is experienced up near the shoulder. In a way, we initiate actions by permitting them to happen.

But what of the actual mechanism? Let your arm rise and it seems as though drawn upwards into a particular position. Flex your fingers arbitrarily and again it will seem as though the digits "flow" to fill a space prepared for them. It is as though the space in which the action will take place is somehow prepared in advance, and that we then perform the action much as water would flow to fill a hollow space available to it.

What is happening here? Consider that if our actions are learned through imitation, then when we raise our arm we are simply imitating an action we had witnessed another undertake. It is as though the actions of others have the effect of creating a kind of form within us – a kind of mould – which can then be used to perform similar actions ourselves. This suggests, then, that there exists a depository within each of us capable of receiving and maintaining these impressions and in turn disposing them externally when we permit similar actions to occur. One important feature of this depository is that it is not dependent upon memory; nor does it require any act of representation – in image or word – in order to retain the impressions.

A fundamental point to be grasped in all this is that _no action is original_. Every action repeats a previous action. This implies that there must have been a _first act_ , a primary event.

The previous essay described our reality as composed of multifarious combinations – and recombinations – of two entities, called for convenience, the Same and the Other. There must have been an instance when these two entities first encountered each other. In this encounter – and in every other one that followed – new elements composed of combinations of the Same and the Other would be formed. But, even so, the entities themselves – the Same certainly, the Other assumed by inference – did not lose their identities in such mergers.

Yet there was – always – some change. Prior to the encounter with the Other, the Same would have abided utterly alone. Then, suddenly, it was no longer alone. One result of this was that the Same now had a boundary. Moreover – to the extent that the Other remains unknowable – it would have been a boundary defined by an unknown.

This primary encounter is the only event that has occurred to the Same, and while it has been repeated many, many times – and continues to occur now – it remains the same primary event. The Same is being repeatedly defined by an entity that is unknown to it. This is the fundamental fact of existence.

The effect of this event on the Same is impossible to describe, but features of it can be indicated. The phenomena of knowledge and its instruments are the most important evidence. The encounter of the Same and the Other and its ramifications need not be knowable in order for them to be. The existent could be in all its complexity without knowledge of the fact that it exists. Therefore it can be assumed that some quality in either the Same or the Other – or in both – makes knowledge possible.

It follows, then, that there must have been _two_ moments in the Same's reaction to the primary encounter. The first moment would have been some kind of detection of the limitation placed upon the Same. Then the second moment must have been some kind of understanding of this fact of limitation. Is this possible? Unfortunately, such an interpretation is based on deep seated intellectualist assumptions. It ignores the fact that while the Same experienced limitation, it had no sense of what caused that limitation, because the Same can have no direct experience of the Other. Thus the Same's experience is more like reacting to an event but then finding no evidence that such an event occurred.

Of course, there is no mental content in the Same's experience here. In fact, there is little content in the Same's response except a momentary reaction that has no further effect. What is significant here is not the Same's experience as such, but the fact that it is repeated over and over, repeated so frequently that it becomes a continuous stream of reaction. And as the Same continues its encounter with the Other and the multitude of combination-elements come into being, this reaction-limit event is repeated across the full spectrum of the emerging reality. This is because the Same encounters the Other repeatedly wherever these elements exist, a phenomenon that continues without cessation throughout all space and time.

This response of the Same to the Other can be characterised as an _incipient reflex_. It is an extremely limited articulation, involving no more than the possibility that something else might happen. Yet the net effect of this "startlement" – when repeated over and over is to create a kind of screen, the possibility implicit in the Same's response writ large throughout the whole universe. This extremely limited act is the source of all that reflection we call _knowledge_.

The word that most adequately describes this screen is Soul – an ancient and fully developed concept that fully describes the screen and all that has been developed from it. Thus we can to begin with posit a Universal or Cosmic Soul, a pervasive field of possibility that accompanies all interactions between the Same and the Other, and their many resultant elements. This Cosmic Soul is not at all necessary for the organisation and processing of the universe: it is a pure epiphenomenon arising from a proclivity in the Same – that it can notice difference from itself. (Whether the Other responds in a similar way or not cannot be known, certainly not known directly.) To call this reflex in the Same intelligent is really a back-formation from our notions of what constitutes intelligence – but what we regard as intelligence has arisen without exception from that initial incipient response.

As an aside, it should be borne in mind that what is here described as Soul exists not only as a result of the Same's initial reaction, but also to the fact that the Other – though utterly unknown and un-evidenced – is the actual "background" making the Soul's existence possible. Thus the Soul has two components: one is the possibility implicit in the Same's response; the second is the fact of the existence of the Other. The Soul – in other words – hangs upon what is to us a void. If the Same tries to ask the question "What is it?" in reaction to its encounter with the Other, then the Soul is the beginning of the formulation of that question.

Before describing the elaboration of the Cosmic Soul, it needs to be pointed out that despite the very complex and ramified intermingling with the Other, the Same remains always a unity – no part of it ever becomes detached from the whole. At the same time, remember that the Cosmic Soul itself is discontinuous: in fact, it is a congeries of dis-continuous primary events.

A distinction can be drawn between the Same – and presumably the Other – on one hand and the various elements that result from the mingling of the Same and the Other. While the Same continues to react as described to its encounters with the Other, once in combination with the Other, its further reactions in relationship with the Other are submerged in the combinations, so that the resultant elements exhibit characteristics peculiar to the individual elements themselves. These characteristics, however, are not merely combinations – so that the respective contributions of the Same and the Other can be separated out. This is also true of secondary element formations, where the Same and the Other merge with elements already formed from Same-Other encounters. Again, tertiary formations – of secondary elements with other secondary elements, primary elements, and even the Same or the Other – all have characteristics peculiar to themselves.

Of course, there comes a point where this process becomes evident to human senses and instruments. There seems no way of knowing how many levels of elements exist between the primary encounter and what we sense: it could be many or it could be few. However, what is obvious about these formations is that they are not in themselves intelligible. This means that they can only be sensed rather than intuited, and thus can be known only because they register in some way in the Cosmic Soul. While the Cosmic Soul is constituted by serial reactions of the Same to limitations placed on it in its encounters with the Other, elements register in the Cosmic Soul by means of an "evacuation" of the Other material that in part constitutes them. Thus, in witnessing the presence of an element we sense only the portion of the element derived from the Same.

These are secondary phenomena in the Cosmic Soul, both the foundation of the Soul itself and the forms it enables are dependent upon the absent-presence of the Other. And this is how the whole manifold of the Universe appears to us. Though we see light and shade, feel heat and cold, touch the hard and the soft, we are at every point only witnessing the Same in its stupendous intermingling with the Other – all made possible by the absence to us of the Other's presence in intimate contact with the Same at every stage.

How we experience this manifold is made possible by the obvious fact that we ourselves are composed of both Same and Other, intermingled in our bodies in a myriad of elements, simple and complex. Thus in each of us occurs the same primary reaction of the Same to the limitation placed on it by the encounter with the Other and the reflex that both encounters and fails to register the presence of the Other. The same eternal question – "What is it?" – is asked continuously within us, and the same failure to receive an answer occurs in response over and over.

*

Once, man deified what they perceived to be the forces of nature. They also deified animals, both those they hunted and those they tamed. In time, they even deified themselves, man and woman. Then, about two thousand years ago two changes occurred almost simultaneously. One, a god was made to become a man; and two, men became persons.

A persona was initially a legal fiction, intended to create a rational being who could answer to the rationality of legal systems. Then even gods were given personalities and so they too could be brought into a legal framework.

The question here is this – how was all this possible? How could a universe of process create narratives of being in this way? In an obvious way, these narratives are answers of a kind to the question "What is it?", while yet they are – seen against the backdrop of a universe that poses an unanswerable question – no more than fantasies.

Even considered as fantasy, the question remains, How could they come into being? To answer this question it is necessary to examine man in two ways: as a congeries of the Same and the Other, and in terms of the Same's reaction to its limitation by the Other.

The congeries that is any human being is – like all elements composed of Same and Other – in itself unintelligible. This mean that the knowledge we have of ourselves and of others is not derived from the "internal" composition of our bodies. Instead, all our experience of our selves – like our experience of the universe itself – is derived ultimately from the same archetypal arrested reflex of the Same to its encounter with the Other. And the formation of knowledge in the human being depends upon the two moments of that arrested reflex, the "question" asked, "What is it?" and the non-answer that is received.

The human sensorium is engaged solely in responding to changes in the sensibilia. Thus it mirrors exactly the primary response of the Same to the presence of the Other. And its data partakes of the Same's experience too – what registers in the various senses is normally interpreted as positive data, while in fact the senses merely register limits. This is most clearly seen in the sense of touch – the solid "matter" it seems to encounter is actually a register of the sense's limited experience – the "matter" appears solid simply because the sense cannot penetrate further there. Like the Same's experience of the Other, in touching a surface we are actually encountering nothing – which of course we could not sense.

But the sense of touch also reveals another dimension to the act of sensing. In registering sensibilia, the sensorium also encounters some aspect of itself as a kind of reflex. That is, in encountering the nothingness of "matter", the sensorium at once registers its own encounter with this nothingness. There is a double-ness here that is extremely important. All sense experience contains a kind of echo that acts to create an impression of depth.

This echo is obvious in the sense of touch, where both the surface touched and the surface touching have a distinctness that is apparent. But how is the depth experienced in the other senses, in the senses of sight and hearing especially, where the content of the phenomena of appearance and sound seems less tangible and even perhaps fanciful?

It may seem here that some senses have more features than others. Touch, for instance, seems in a way self-present, while sight and sound – especially – involve processing, so that the raw pulses of energy become sounds such as music and images filled with colour and shape. But touch is not merely a neutral sensation: there will be an experience of texture and temperature involving fine aesthetic discriminations as subtle as those that sound and vision convey. How, then, are the data of the senses "bodied" – that is, how do they come to have the characteristics they have?

The two levels in sense experience are possible because there are two moments in the Same's primary experience. But we have seen that there is an extra component in the sense experience that arises from the first moment of the primary experience – while the sensorium responds to sensibilia, there is also a kind of echo response in the sensorium's self-experience. Likewise, we can see in the sensorium's response arising from the second moment of the primary experience – the non-answer arising from the Same's contact with the Other that is at once a non-contact – that there is an extra component, which is made possible because though the sensorium is in "non-contact" with the Other, the complex lineaments of the Other's absent-presence has the effect of throwing the otherwise unintelligible elementary Same and Other compositions into relief. Thus, while the elements that compose the universe are directly unknowable – the Same component of these elements can only know its own limits, and the Other component is completely unknowable because absent – they can be sensed against the backdrop of the Other's absence.

The point being made here is extremely obscure, involving as it does a distinction between intelligibility and sensibility, between knowledge and experience. The argument thus suggests that while we cannot know the world, we can experience it. This implies that what we would consider the knowledge gained through sense experience is inferior to another knowledge – one that is extremely limited in scope: no more that a reflex response to an experience of a limitation. And yet all possible knowledge is based on that experience of limitation.

One possible inference from this argument proposes that there is no such thing as knowledge in the accepted sense, that what we call knowledge is simply something else – experience, obviously – which we are encountering in another mode. The only problem here – as already pointed out – is that the experience upon which knowledge is based is extremely limited. How then can the phantasmagoria of images and sounds, for example, come into being?

There are two moments to the Same's primary encounter with the Other. First there is the reflex upon the Same experiencing its own limitation. Second, there is the response-like answer. While this second moment is empty – the Other cannot be sensed by the Same – it nonetheless is an event. It must therefore contain a content, even if this is absent to the Same. What if this content is real and could be "cloaked" and so become apparent in the guise of what cloaks it? Here the non-apparent Other acts like a screen that throws some other phenomena into relief.

On this basis, our sense experience has tangible content because some feature or features of the sensibilia can be thrown into relief by the disposition of the Other which accompanies all primary Same experience. This is not to say that what becomes apparent to us in this way is real – that is, the actual form of what we are sense-experiencing. We may see only what becomes apparent of the sensibilia against the hidden Other disposed as it happens to be in this instance of experience. Again, we do not necessarily have experience of any part whatsoever of the Other, only of how the Same content of the elements we are sensing is disposed among these elements.

This, however, does not explain how anything at all can come into presence against the backdrop of the absent Other. The organs of sense perception themselves are composed solely of Same and Other elements, which are – like all the other elements – both unintelligible and unintelligent. So only the Same – from our perspective, having no access to the Other – could have knowledge of the Same. What the Same _could_ see, beyond this, is how it – the Same – is limited and thus in a way formed by the Other. The implication here is that what is actually sensed is already part of both the sensorium and the sensibilia, filtered by the omission of the Other. It is not that we know everything: in some way – most likely as part of the Same – we _experience_ everything but limit this experience by means of the limitations of our senses.

This proposal might explain how some kind of representation of sensibilia could become apparent through sense experience. However, it cannot explain how memory can exist – that is, how these representations can be sustained free from the original sense experience. If our reality springs from a continuous flow of the Same's primary experience of its own limitation repeated many times over, and all "reflection" of the Same-content of the elements arise solely from this stream of reaction, then how can representations that arise in the course of this flow be sustained beyond the initial events? The universe is in effect an event horizon for our sensibility only as wide and as long as the range of our sense organs. The universe is lost utterly to us almost as soon as it happens.

But does the universe for itself cease thereby to exist once the present events have occurred? Yes: the primary Same-reflex is repeated over and over by the same entity, but always the exact same reflex and thus always a primary event. The universe itself exists solely in terms of that primary event and though the universe is an elaboration of combinative elements of varying degrees of complexity, as an _experience-event_ it can be reduced to the primary event alone.

*

What is memory? Memory underlies all knowledge, imagery, thought. Memory makes possible the retention of experience beyond the event itself. But could memory exist in a universe composed solely of a primary response to the fact that one entity is encountering another entity? It is impossible to explain this. While the universe in itself is composed of a layering of elements that are combinations of the Same and the Other, and of later elements derived from successive re-encounters of elements at different orders of remove from the primary encounter, the sensibilia themselves are restricted to the single layer of the primary reaction of the Same alone. There is then the second moment of the Same's primary reaction which – though empty from the perspective of the Same – nonetheless has a content. But it seems impossible to retrieve directly that content without now presupposing the very agent – memory – that we are examining.

It seems then that while spiritual insight can provide a valuable understanding of the roots of the Will, it cannot meaningfully examine the content of the second moment. The presence of the Other can be sensed, but only as an absence of the Same due to the latter's curtailment by the encounter with the Other. It is best then if the phenomenon of memory be traced back from our present experience of memory and its container, the Soul.

The Soul has already been characterised as arising from the second moment of the Same's primary encounter with the Other. Thus the Soul's continuous presence/being is tied up with the Same's continuous encounter with the Other. The question then is: What survives the second moment, when apparently nothing can survive the first moment – the initial reaction to the encounter with the Other? Well, we can assume that the "absent/presence" of the Other survives. It is obvious that though the Same recoils from the encounter with the Other at the level of experience, it remains in contact with it as an entity – hence the creation of the elements which go to construct the objective universe. Thus – without knowing how the Other contributes to the sustaining of what is for us the Soul beyond the primary encounters – we can infer that the Soul is in some way constituted by the Other.

Does this make sense? Consider that a distinguishing feature of the Soul is that it has no form of its own, that it can be witnessed only by means of its content. Is this not a very good description of the Other in relation to the Same, where its presence is felt only where it limits – and thus forms – the Same? And the only content we can witness in the Soul is ostensibly composed only of the Same.

This state of affairs can be modelled roughly as a screen – provided by the Other – which displays forms – provided by the Same. Now, it is obvious that while any contact between the Same and the Other, and their elemental derivatives are passing events, each such event will have a consequence insofar as new elements will arise from it. Thus while all interactions in the universe can be regarded as ephemeral, they nonetheless survive implicitly in their consequences. In a similar way, while each reaction of the Same to contact with the Other produces a passing experience of the absent-presence of the latter, there seems no reason to suppose that this experience survives the event. After all, the sheer multiplicity and continuity of interactions between the Same and the Other can account for the persistence of the Soul. Yet the Soul has content, so it must be concluded that at least some of these experiences of the absent-presence of the Other must survive. In fact, lacking any criteria which would select from among the experience events, it must be inferred that if any of these events survive, then all of them must. Thus the Soul is composed not alone of the absent-present event in itself, but also contains the Same's sense of this absent-presence.

This will seem at once a stupendous arrangement and yet full of redundancy. There appears no good reason in itself for retaining the purely experiential component of the primary encounter. But that is how it is – otherwise, this universe would be just a dumb clockwork.

Now, the cosmos is composed of more than the simple primary encounters of the Same and the Other. There are ranks of elements deriving from both the primary encounters and the subsequent encounters of elements of various orders of remove from the primary events. Within all these elements and their manifold of interrelationships, the Same discovers itself over and over again subject to limitation, and in each case it recoils and experiences its formation and reformation against the background of the invisible Other which is determining its succession of reformations. And it is among this gamut of formations that the universe as we know it comes into being, along with the whole play of sensibilia that accompanies it always. Thus all physical sensation, from the most subtle to the most concrete, is only an epiphenomenal surfeit made possible by the rudimentary intelligence of the Same and the void in which the Other betrays its presence only by the delimiting of the Same's abiding sense of its own boundless unity.

*

By the standards of modern theories of intelligence, the intelligent activity of the Same will appear extremely primitive. It is reactive rather than intentional and shows no evidence of any kind of consciousness. Yet this intelligence underlies every presumed development in all the mental powers of living creatures. At root, all intelligent activity is just that: reactive and blind. Intelligence is a reaction to restriction, and while this reaction has no consequences beyond the fact of this reaction, there is nonetheless a primitive sense of boundary and of what forms that boundary.

Thus, in the primary response of the Same to the Other a primitive abstraction from the actual event does take place. There is the fact of the encounter of the Same and the Other. This is experienced by the Same as a limitation put to its boundlessness – in the sense that where there was nothing there is now something. The Same's response is its recoil from this restriction. The recoil is simply a reflex – yet is contains something more. This automatic response _must_ contain something more – how else can we have the mental powers that we do. There is no other source.

Looking back through our own mental operations, we can picture a secondary action that accompanies the initial reflex response which _abstracts_ from the experience, so that something abides for the Same after the primary event has taken place. Now, this abstraction serves no practical purpose – the primary event is over and already in the past. But something nonetheless abides. It is not a memory, only an impression – a sense of the restriction the Same has just experienced as a phenomenon other than itself. This is the Same's sense of the Other.

What is happening? An aspect of the Same's primary reaction to the Other has already been characterised as an unspoken question of the form "What is it?" Now the component of abstraction can be characterised as a kind of _answer_. It is not that the Other answers in any way, just that having asked its question as a reflex, the Same now exists in part in a state of _expectation_. This is what abides in the Same – an openness towards what is not itself, and yet not anything else either, given that the Other remains unknown to the Same.

The other side of this coin is _receptivity_ : in being expectant, the Same is receptive to all kinds of answers, as it were. So, it is open to stimuli from the burgeoning range of elements that result from the interaction between it and the Other. And as before, these stimuli will have their roots not in the Same itself, but in the repeated encounters with the Other, where the latter is elaborated as a multifaceted boundary to the Same, though always hidden from it.

In this way, the Same's intelligence retains the same form, though hugely spread out over the whole range of elements that compose the cosmos. And even in the most elaborate forms of intellectual and artistic expression, intelligence operates always in this way – a recoil that is at once an enquiry and an expectation, always receptive to what appears to it as a pure emptiness. And what appears before intelligence in this situation is Soul, at once empty and across the whole spectrum of the universe filled with the myriad of forms that reveal the presence of the elements that constitute our reality.

*

The question can now be asked, How, if there can be no such thing as memory – that is, recall of a past event from some depository of such events – can past experiences be called to mind? The only answer possible is this: _we revisit the actual site of the event_. If this is true, then a number of startling conclusions can be drawn. First, the past of the universe survives in some way, and second, the Cosmic Soul must retain an active relation with all of that past. This can be figured in the following way. Allow that the universe has the extension in three dimensions that are apparent to us, and then add a fourth dimension that is not simply temporal but a real extension into what we consider the past. An example of this would be seeing a tree not only as it appears now in three dimensions, but to see also its progress from seed to its present state as part of our actual view of the tree.

Now imagine that the whole universe in all its four dimensions could be unravelled and laid out as a vast plane. Consider now that the Cosmic Soul would lie upon this plane like a thin layer of response to this elemental plane, figuring all the complicated lineaments of the Same against the backdrop of the absent-present Other. Now refold the entire universe back into its actual disposition – to us extended over four dimensions – and the past of the universe survives in some way, and second, the Cosmic Soul must retain an active relation with all of that past.

In this way is the entire universe accessible to us through what seems to be memory. Consider now that the partiality of our seeming-memories reflects the partiality of our experience of the original event, and it can be understood why a return to the original event itself would appear limited. The limitations here lie in the limits of our sensibilities, not in the actual universe itself.

But how can we return to these original events, if we have no memories even of the "way" back to these events? We are part of the Same, and the Same is everywhere one. It is after all only the limitations of our sensibility that restricts us: otherwise, we could be one with the Cosmic Soul and its intimacy with the entire universe.

*

What, then, is life? Well, to begin with, life in its elemental substrate is in direct continuity with all the other elementary constituents of the universe. This suggests that life is no more than a very complex combination of elements many orders removed from the primary event. The organs of living creatures, for example, can be viewed as elements in themselves, composed in turn – as are all elements beyond the first order that arise from primary events – of elements of a wide range of lesser complexity, from simple to intricate.

Of course, life is more than the sum of its parts, so that the question of the nature of living beings extends beyond the facts of their elemental constituents. The most obvious feature is that all living beings reproduce themselves. This is achieved by the relatively simple process of each kind producing copies of itself. Thus the process of reproduction is autonomous to each kind of creature: no outside agency is required. In fact, life in all its parts is produced by self-copying, down to the tiniest cell. Even the very kernels of life – the sperm and the ova – replicate themselves. Nothing new is ever added to life. It takes very little imagination to see how all life could in effect expand through the multitude of life forms and species from a single primary life cell.

A question that can arise here is this – Where did this primary life cell come from?

Another feature common to all life is awareness. This is witnessed in the microbe's ability to frustrate every attempt by medical science to annihilate it. Other self-preserving strategies can be more indirect, as in the camouflage assumed by animals that cannot themselves perceive how they are protected, yet which behave as though they know they are protected in this way. Then there is the more subtle – yet pervasive – experience as of a providential hand that supports human beings in their lives, that goes under the name of luck, fate or fortune. This awareness is experienced as impersonal yet compassionate, its adversities as prudent as its blessings. Overall, this providence appears as a power intent on preserving a balance that seems essential to life, but which life itself cannot provide.

It can be seen how this kind of balance might be required to temper a system such as life, which is in essence a one dimensional concern with survival through numbers. Yet, to the extent that an environment with finite resources would provide such a check, a qualitative element can be discerned in the actions of this providence. Above and beyond mere survival, there is a tendency among life forms towards improved efficacy, towards greater mobility and autonomy. This has so far culminated in the evolution of human kind into a self-conscious being, capable not only of ensuring the survival of the species in ever greater numbers, but also vastly extending its capacity for adornment and self-expression.

The pinnacle of this development is human self-awareness, which in many ways mimics the providential power. But there is a significant limitation here. The operation of the providence is both apparently disinterested and quite pervasive across the whole spectrum of the living forms. But it operates to ends that are not evident in its operation. Its prudence not alone relieves those it assists, it also seems to work in subtle ways towards some objective that is not necessarily essential to life itself. How necessary is the boundless beauty of almost every aspect of nature? Why does colour permeate even inanimate matter to such an astonishing degree? Why can no human being be happy, though all mankind craves happiness above all goods?

By comparison, what is the fruit of human self-awareness? It seeks to make man an end in himself, to make him what is understood as god-like, that is transcendent. Beyond the struggle for existence, mankind tries by every means to _abstract_ itself from the reality it finds itself in. But that is not possible, so men instead seek to create a reality for themselves at a remove – though still within – the given actuality.

Would it make any difference if mankind succeeded in doing this? No. Providence would simply bypass mankind – as perhaps it may have done before. And out of the debris it would prudently resume its work towards its objective, learning from its mistakes.

*

Can anything be understood of this End? For a start, it is obvious – as already remarked – that life as we know it is not involved. Though vibrant in its variety and exhibiting degrees of intelligence, _life itself is not intelligible_. As a composite of the Same and the Other it is only sensible – like every other element. It is also obvious that the End is not an objective of the Same entity. If it was, we would have some knowledge of it – to the extent that our capacity to know is derived from the Same. And we have no sense of it, except to the extent that we wish to believe it is part of human destiny. We must conclude then that the End to which the providential power is working is derived from the Other entity.

This conclusion is meaningful from at least one significant perspective. We can posit one feature of the Other that is manifestly incomplete. This is what has been described above as the Other's response to the question asked by the Same, "What is it?" In this case, the End would be a revelation of the Other to the Same in some form other than its present "absent-presence" relation to the Same. The form this answer could take is obviously unknown at present – it could only become knowable in some way at the instant of manifestation.

This may seem a farfetched conclusion. But considering how little is known about the ultimate destiny of the universe and of life itself, this conclusion is plausible. It has, at least, the virtue of being consistent with the other fundamentals disclosed here. Two entities collide – where-ever and why-ever this occurs – and while they can combine in such a way that a whole systematic reality can come into being, one of these entities responds reflexively so that a kind of question is asked, which has been framed here as "What is it?" Is it not inconceivable that if one of the entities can ask a "question", that the other entity could attempt a "reply"? And given our almost complete ignorance of the nature of the other entity, how should we presume to know what form this "answer" might take? All we can infer is that the phenomena of life may have a part to play in providing this answer. It could be, for instance, that life at its culmination may possess qualities that permit the Same and Other entities actually communicate with each other – though perhaps in ways unimaginable to us now. It could also be that life may be just part of a process beyond our powers of understanding, and that it will simply fizzle out when its task is complete.

But one thing is for certain. To the extent that we are, at present, in part composed of the Same entity – which we easily infer from the kind of intelligent insight we can have into the Same – we will in some way or other partake of whatever destiny the Same entity has in relation to the Other entity. Whether this relation will be intelligent or sensible remains to be seen, and what will ensue between the entities is of course beyond speculation.

8 December 2011

ON THE INCARNATION OF THE EGO

The greatest impediment to providing an account of the Incarnation of the Ego in man lies in the fact that the event has not yet occurred. Because it is a unique event – the culmination of a significant line of human development – no precursors of any kind, experiential or from insight, are available to us. Yet it is precisely because the event is of such significance that some attempts should be made to gain what understanding is possible. This can be done using two sources: 1. by examining the broad pattern of human experience in history and 2. by unpicking through insight what can be known of the constitution of the human being.

One of the most ancient images in the historical record is that of the Madonna and Child. It is usually taken on one level to represent the Mother of God and her infant Son and on another level to express the most fundamental experience in human life. But, strictly, these interpretations are dubious. Why would a God require a mother? And on the mundane level, even a cursory examination of the facts of human life shows that the man plays as important a part as the woman in the propagation of the species. So what then is the purpose of the image?

At the time of the division of the primordial man into the two 'sexes', that part which when active produces a female child was derived from the _receptive_ half of the Primordial Man, while the part which produces the male child was derived from the _expressive_ part. A significant consequence of this division was that the knowledge – in effect a knowledge of everything – the Primordial Man possessed became part of the Sophic being which, though not itself female, would when determinative generate a female child, while the male being was left with only the instrument of expression. Thus when early human beings saw themselves in the spirit they beheld the woman as filled with knowledge – wise and mature – while the man appeared as a mere potentiality – an ignorant child. In time this woman of knowledge would be projected as a goddess – Isis, for instance – and be celebrated in a later age as Sophia. The man meanwhile could only appear as a usurper in the course of his development, first as a god, then as hero, and finally as he exercised his unique ability – to learn from experience – as a technologist.

Of course, such a line of development did not occur by accident. Changes in the constitution of the human being in effect determined that the balance between the man and the Sophic being would change gradually over time.

The human being can be seen to have two main elements in its constitution, called here WILL and SOUL. Figure the Will as a tree – the Tree of Life – with its principle function one of growth. The Will is quite autonomous – it will function for all eternity if let – but only if there is something 'against' which it can grow. This is because the Will operates by reaction – it takes on the form/pattern of anything that impresses it and propagates that form/pattern endlessly in a way similar to how a plant expands by means of recursive branching. It is therefore the very principle of life – even though of itself it is not alive. The endless propagation of cancer cells is a simple but exact example of the autonomy of the Will.

Yet it is obvious that living beings – animal and vegetable – are not the products of an autonomous Will, even if this Will is the driving force of all life. Some other principle must be at work which gives shape to the activity of the Will. This can be seen most clearly in plant life, where the principle of growth predominates – plants are formed by the repeated addition of cells on and on – until the process stops – is stopped. The result is a myriad of shapes, small and large, all achieved by a simple addition.

The autonomous activity of the Will is sterile – it will always be a matter of adding more cells. All life forms, on the other hand, are characterised by a kind of meta-process where a form – of varying degrees of complexity – is reproduced over and above the simple process of cell addition.

These forms exhibit an extraordinary range in style, function and embellishment. And while many are explicable in terms of survival value, much of the detail seems to serve as little more than pointless decoration. Why do the leaves of trees, for example, vary so much in shape when the function they serve is substantially the same? So, while the rationale of these forms cannot always be demonstrated, at least a significant function can be indicated: life-forms serve as a limit upon the profligacy of the Will. Thus whatever source underlies these forms must be capable of establishing a boundary condition. The obvious candidate here is the Soul, which – having its origin in the Other – is in effect a boundary state between the Same and the Other.

Leaving aside the question of the how and why of the Soul's role in creating form, the salient fact here is that Form is in effect derived in some way from the Other. It follows then that the myriad of forms, with their unsurpassed variety of shape, function and expression, have their origin in detail in the Other part of our reality – a part that is otherwise unknown and unknowable to us.

Thus we have a model in which the Other, by means of the Soul boundary, presses in on the Will activity in such a way that the reality as we know it is created in all its detail. The Will of course continues to function, but now in the service of these Soul-forms, pressing on in its autonomy so that the whole of reality is constantly in motion, full of variety even though the Will's essential activity is simple to the point of banality.

And what is the origin of the Will's eternal impulse to reciprocate every element it encounters? Consider the motive of its operation: in effect the Will is impressed by every element it encounters and responds by expressing this impression in an automatic reaction. In other words, the Will behaves as though it seeks to restore the condition that prevailed prior to the encounter with an element by reversing the effect of this encounter. Does it succeed? Impossible to judge, if only because the Will immediately reencounters the element – or the copy it has been instrumental in creating – is impressed by it and at once expresses it. It is a blind operation, simply a reaction that seeks to restore a prior state.

It can be inferred that insofar as the whole Will process has a beginning in the primary encounter between the two entities – the Same and the Other – the Will has a primary state whole and entire. In other words, the operation of the Will is in fact the primary response of the Same to the Other but repeated endlessly and everywhere the Same and the Other re-encounter each other. Thus the interaction between the Soul and the Will is the basic interaction of the Same and the Other entities, but here detailed in terms of the formal structure of our reality.

It has been an esoteric tradition that the human being is composed of four bodies or sheaths: the physical body, the Life body, the Soul body and the Spirit or Ego body. Spiritual insight shows that there is a definite sequence in how each human being acquires these bodies during the first twenty one or so years.

When born the infant incarnates in the physical body alone. The growth process – undertaken by the life body – is controlled at first by the Life body of the mother. The infant's own Life body enters the physical body gradually during the first seven years of its life. There is a perceptible crisis when the child is between three and four as its Life body comes to predominate and take control of the growth process. This can be a significant crisis. Sometimes the mother will not surrender control, so that the child's Life body remains excluded. In this circumstance, the child will grow up lacking a sense of the reality of its own physical body. Such a person will be drawn to try to enter the body of another person – usually one who also lacks a sense of the reality of his or her own body. This is the source of much homosexual activity. Human sexuality is polyvalent and can be imprinted with many different forms of sexual behaviour. The simple close proximity of two bodies can easily stimulate sexual attraction regardless of gender.

The absorption of the Soul body begins once the life body has been established in the physical body. Here the father or father-figure plays an important part. The process will often take on a moral form, where imitation is as important as instruction, when the child can develop an intense regard for the moral guardian. Again, there can be a crisis half way through this development, when the child might have occasion to act as father to the man. The process can also fail if the father or guardian refuses to relinquish moral authority. The child will then become what is known as a "lost soul". Again, such a person will seek to enter another person – usually also a lost soul. Such relationships – once described as "platonic" – can offer much needed consolation to the participants. This situation can serve often as the foundation of a vocation, usually within a religious or military organisation.

The final process occurs during the teenage years and is still a very difficult, fraught experience, complicated as it is by the fact that a second process – of which most are ignorant – occurs in tandem

Up to the age of puberty the two elements – the male and the Sophic – that can determine the sex of the individual remain together in abeyance. But with the onset of puberty the element determining the sex of the individual in this incarnation draws apart in order to elaborate the individual's mature sexuality. Teenagers feel this separation very keenly; it accounts for both the introversion they suffer and the intense group dynamics that drive them as they search, all unknowing, for their now lost "soul-mate". Once again, the close contact this search stimulates – this time between the sexes – leads to the sexual imprinting of central importance to the survival of mankind. But it can also lead to love-matches – where an individual identifies a person of the opposite sex with the element latent within himself or herself. Whether such matches are successful or not, the experience serves as the motivation of much artistic expression – an indication of how central this experience of separation and loss is to human life.

It is within the bounds of this turmoil that the Ego begins its entry into the individual. However, there is a crucial difference here compared to the experiences with the Life and Soul bodies. The Ego is not yet capable of entering fully into the human body: only a "reflection" – to be described below – will enter. Otherwise, the process will appear very real to the teenager, and it will have perceptible crises and a culmination. As well as this, there is a tendency – especially among teenage boys – to conflate the emerging Ego presence with his active male identity.

Similar to the individual's experience of the entry of the other bodies, there is an initial culmination – when the Ego first makes known its presence in the Soul – about halfway through the seven-year process. Because the ego process does not involve another human being, this culmination appears as a purely personal event unique to the teenager. Between the ages of seventeen and eighteen there will be a momentary sensation of being elevated into an area of pure white light. Many teenagers will hardly notice this event amid the ongoing turmoil of the love search – in fact it may well appear as just another high among the welter of highs and lows. But for some males it will be an instant of clarity, quite distinct from the rest of their lives, that will abide at least as a sense of unsourced certainty. For a few, it might even suggest to them the approach of a saviour, coming to rescue them from an increasingly problematic existence. Thus is engendered the Self.

Before going on to examine the later stages of this process, it will be as well to review the incarnation of these supraphysical bodies into humanity as an historical sequence.

The incarnation of the Life and Soul bodies occurred so long ago that evidence for their inauguration will be slight though nonetheless significant. It seems that the incarnation of the Life body led to the establishment of the idea of a male god-being, less the idea of a god like Zeus, for example, more like a totemic being that the individual must absorb. The images here are obscure and seem to conjoin the ideas of climbing a mountain that is at once a very solid substance that is somehow ingested.

The incarnation of the Soul in humanity leaves evidence whose content only becomes clear to us at the later stage, when the Ego reflection first makes its presence felt, about three thousand years ago. At the time of the incarnation of the Soul itself, humanity would have had an increased sense of expansion, which however would have left them also with a sense of reduced support – without knowing beforehand that they had been supported. This experience affected the sexes differently. It simply made men more mobile, with the danger always that they would abandon themselves in what would have appeared as acts of madness. In women, however, this feeling of abandonment was primary and abiding. And while this sense of abandonment left women feeling utterly powerless, many also sensed that they could have complete control if only they could "turn" in another direction. What stopped them doing this was the presence of children, who appeared to women as a kind of residue of their powerlessness, as though they had been melted down so that little versions of men and women could come into being.

Of course, these were not real experiences in the sense that human life was changed intrinsically by the incarnation of the Soul, only that the Soul gave the individual a sense of his or her own inner life. It was a very strange mode of being for human beings, which resulted in an explosion of expression, in image, word and music, which they felt brought their inner selves to life, but without resolving the strangeness of it all.

With the advent of the Ego reflection begins history proper, so that quite a lot can be learned about this process and incidentally about the Ego itself.

The best way to approach the subject is to place it under three headings: Lucifer, Dionysos and Plato.

Light is regarded as an objective experience, though the truth is that it is only a reflection, an echo. But unlike an echo, which is a copy of the original sound, light is completely different from its source. Lucifer – the Light Bringer – is the most apt figuration of this fact, at once the bearer of the greatest gift and the Devil, the Prince of Darkness. More than any other being of light, Apollo, Krishna, Aengus and many many others, the story of Lucifer brings out the full impact that the advent of the Ego reflection has had on mankind. But the story is told from a particular perspective. Favoured by God, the angel Lucifer overreaches himself and falls to earth, where he corrupts mankind, so that it too falls away from God.

Next there is the figure of the Son-god, who is torn to pieces in sacrifice so that mankind can be made whole. Here the figuration can be confused, where many of the rended gods, Attis, Osiris, or Adonis, for example, are restored by a mother-goddess, while in the case of Dionysos/Bacchus it is women who actually tear the god to pieces. Appearing in the Middle East in the seventh century BCE, when it became an almost universal religious practice – now referred to as the Mystery cults – the core act of destruction makes very little sense. It has been rationalised as a dramatic ritual symbolising the growth of new life from the seed, and as man's death in sin and rebirth into purity. But the specific mode of destruction – tearing into pieces – has never been explained.

Now, putting the stories of Lucifer and Dionysos together, it is possible to uncover salient events that accompany the advent of the Ego reflection. The Ego is an entity such that a certain substance will throw back a reflection in its presence. Whether this substance is the Soul itself or the Will active in the Soul is not immediately clear, but whichever it is, the effect is what we experience as light. And what is illuminated by this Light? The Soul, of course, and its contents. Thus the world is lit for us – lit for us by the Ego reflection _in_ the Soul – though we firmly believe the external world of the sensibilia is lit for us by the Sun and our various lamps. But even the Sun, which seems to shine brightly for us in the Soul, would be dark without the presence of the Ego.

This irruption of the Light into human experience will provide the foundation of Greek philosophy – to be discussed in a moment – but the advent of the Ego itself had repercussions that radically transformed human existence. Crucially, the Ego individualised human beings – this is what the rending of the God indicates – though initially at a very primitive level: the last two and a half thousand years of human history can be seen as a painful maturation of this individuality. This has affected man and women in different ways. Individuation simply reinforces the man's sense of abandonment and isolation, and drives him to construct a world as his habitation. But in the woman, individuality acts to split her Sophic nature off from what she comes to regard as Heaven, so that rather than being in herself heavenly – in the Goddess sense – she comes to believe that she merely has a memory of Heaven.

These experiences of the man and woman constitute the lineaments of the Fall, where man becomes Adam, who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, and the woman becomes Eve, who, unable to see the individuated man, looks for the pre-Ego Primordial Man in order to save him, hoping in that way to restore herself to Heaven (and thus to God). It can be seen that while the Ego truly falls to earth in the man, in the woman it is as though turned back, not to its spiritual source but to the woman's idea of Heaven. Yet this is only a fantasy, for the Ego is reflected as fully in the woman as in the man.

And the Temptation itself? What the Luciferic serpent teaches is the lesson of relationship. The human Egos exist as one identity in the spiritual realm, but are separated one from the other in the process of reflection and incarnation in mankind, which is a catastrophic event for these Egos. What they seek to teach mankind is simply the fact of trust, that human individuals must learn how they can relate to one another, to give trust or to betray it, and how they will suffer real consequences through their decisions. Once incarnated, though still immortal, Egos themselves will also exist contingently, subject to the vicissitudes of human activity. Thus the Egos seek to prepare humanity during this period of reflection for their oncoming incarnation in human individuals.

The greatest effect on mankind of the advent of light has been the growth of the intellect. It is here that the phenomenon of Light has had the most radical influence, effectively transforming whole peoples, their beliefs and practices. The transformation has been so complete that it is hard to believe just how different pre-Ego people were. For instance, they were incapable of lying. (Strictly, there is no such thing as a lie – to the extent that reality cannot be falsified. But reality can be misrepresented, which is possible through the development of the Platonic theory of Forms, where real elements are abstracted as signs. It is through the manipulation of these signs – as arbitrary descriptors – that mis-representation is possible.) They would seem now to be simple minded in their sincerity. They could be violent, even vengeful, but they could not misrepresent the world or themselves. This was because they lived directly out of their Wills, so that they could only do what had already been done to them. Being subject to accident could make their behaviour unpredictable, but they could not be gratuitously cruel. They were not a moral people: they were simply innocent.

Though they were simple, they were not stupid. The Will is infinitely malleable, so that repeating an activity could lead to the development of very intricate skills. Stonework, carving, all plastic arts were highly developed, and the works produced were honest representations of what moved in their Souls. Because their knowledge was dependant also on their Wills, they could hold enormous amounts of past experience in their memories, aided by sometimes elaborate mnemonic techniques.

In all this, these pre-Ego people would appear stiff and robotic to us, which in a way they were. Throughout their lives, they were always only repeating actions, not in obviously ritualistic or mannered ways, but nonetheless always doing what had been done to them before, by others people or by the accident of circumstances. Yet, as detailed above, their inner lives were intense and – though they could not know this – personal. What lived in their Souls was real drama to them, in effect a history of their incarnations from the time of the separation of the sexes. Only the women could remember further back, and bearing the knowledge of Heaven gave them a status akin to divinity. The men lived on earth, while the women _moved_ in Heaven.

It is hard to accept that before the advent of the Ego human beings had no experience of light. Eyes are not light sensors, they merely register changes in specific kinds of radiation. The pre-Ego people used their eyes to "see", though to us they would be seem to be moving about in a darkness, sensing the placements of surfaces with their eyes in much the same way as bats do with their ears. Thus the appearance of the Light in the Soul was a radical event. Suddenly people could see the contents of their Souls. What did they see? They saw at first what they thought was Paradise. But they became aware that this Light was an _addition_ to their Souls, which engendered some unease, as can be seen in the variety of accounts of the source of this light, by gift of the Gods or by theft from them.

The situation here was made much more complex by the fact that the various levels in the human being were affected in different ways by the irruption of the Ego reflection. At base was the animal condition, concerned entirely with procreation and survival, that had previously felt to be overseen by a vague almighty power that provided a context for its existence. The effect of the Ego here was to crystallize this vague feeling into a more definite sense of a Father God, who appeared as a kind of terminus for the ceaseless strivings of the animal condition. Above this there were the elements that determine the sexuality of the individual humans, the male and the Sophic. Here the effect was ambiguous for both. The Sophic element both witnessed the Ego as a God in its Heaven and at the same time completely rejected the Ego presence, because it appeared as an addition to the Heavenly state familiar to the Sophic element. The male element found an echo of itself in the Ego and found itself much glorified in its Light reflection. This identification would produce the fantasy of the _Self_. If the perception of the Ego itself – as the Darkness in the Light – had produced the idea of the Devil in those with the residual spiritual sensitivity, it was the appearance of this fantastical Self that determined the common view of the Ego as a power-maniac.

To add to these strains, the effect of the Ego reflection on the human sensorium was to create a wholly new level of awareness that would come to determine the destiny of mankind for millennia. The human senses had been integrated in terms of the Will, where the changes registered by each sense were unified by the common impressions they made in the Will. It was an automatic system, really at base an instrument for maintaining the equilibrium of the Soul in a contingent environment. The Light reflection of the Ego interrupted this balance by granting primacy to the sense of sight. Though it would take many generations for the full effects of this change to become evident, the lighting of the Soul had analogous effects on the other senses. Fundamentally, the senses themselves became reflected in the Light, so that these echoes became kinds of sense-beings. This can be most clearly understood in the case of the senses of sight and hearing. Sight went from being a simple sensor to become literally the source of the World in which people lived, a world filled with objects, with colours and forms. Likewise with hearing, serial sound sensations became musical forms – harmony – in effect sequences of sounds unified through anticipation.

These changes in the sensorium flooded across the Will like clothing covering a nakedness. The senses became conscious of themselves. It is still only a matter of reflection, but this consciousness – in lying directly upon the Will – was capable of quite far-reaching development. The foundation of this consciousness is pictorial and based – given its origins in the senses – upon difference: thus there is the tendency to preserve what appears in the Light – simply because they are what appear in this divine Light – what Plato will come to call the Forms. In a very real sense, while it is the Light that creates the image, it is the image that makes sight, as it is sight that makes consciousness. Thus consciousness is a mechanism for preserving Forms by means of a continuous reiteration of images in memory. But this consciousness-memory is not part of the four- dimensional array of the Soul Memory described in the previous essay: this memory is dependent upon the Light, that is, it is dependent upon the Ego.

What of the Ego itself in all this? The Ego did not choose to descend into us – in fact it is an extremely painful experience for the Ego. Popular belief has the Devil residing in Hell, amid eternal hell-fire. This is a very true understanding of the condition of the Ego now. Mystics who could look into the Soul could see Heaven there – the lit reflection of this earth as it impresses upon the Will through the senses. But they could also see the dark place – the source of the Light – where for them the Devil resides. A common medieval image showing the Ego as a fiery meteor radiating the Light as it falls from Heaven to Earth is also very apt.

Before their entry into human beings, the Egos resided together in such a way that they existed as just one Ego. While men prior to the division of the sexes shared a common knowledge, they were nonetheless quite separate from each other as physical beings, though they could have no sense of this fact. The only distinction the Egos shared was a sense of individual integrity, a primitive awareness they derive from the Same entity itself. Yet these Egos are the cores of every incarnated human being, with each man – and later woman – centred on a specific Ego throughout his or her repeated incarnations. The Ego is not a kind of template or destiny for the individual, but more like a fractal attractor, at first a focus for the inception of the physical body in the womb, then providing an orientation to the Life body, which in turn draws the individual's Soul about itself like a node that is locally coherent while yet still in continuity with the Cosmic Soul.

Thus the Ego is a passive entity that is effective through what it is essentially. This means that the distinguishing feature of the Ego's influence upon individual is concerned almost entirely with wholeness, integrity. This may seem a benign influence, but the effect has been to introduce quite disruptive forces into human life over the last three thousand years, not least because it has set the Ego itself at odds with other powerful forces that govern human life.

As said, the Ego suffers greatly in the Soul, its agony the Light of the World there. The Ego finds its integrity under pressure in the Soul, and – like the Same in relation to the Other – it seeks always to withdraw in order to escape this pressure, which can even lead to what will appear to be motiveless suicide. This desire to withdraw is present as a kind of glamour in the Soul, a longing that appears to some as a pathway. Intellectuals, that is, those humans who perceive the Forms in the Soul, are drawn to organise knowledge as a kind of final Picture of the World, in the rarely spoken belief that such a vision is the purpose of human existence. If the World can be fully described then it will be completed and the Ego will be set free again. The irrationality of this impulse is seen in the extent to which dogmas and ideologies are at variance with lived experience.

Mystics can also be influenced by the glamour, though here the situation is compounded by the presence of the Self formation, which engenders the initial conviction that there is a transcendent salvation available to the individual. What happens is that the longing of the male element for its Sophic partner, from which it is separated, is identified with the longing of the Ego for restored integrity, such that the Ego now stands in the place of the male element, so that the search for the Sophic partner is abandoned.

For women, the situation can be even more complicated. The main reason for the separation of the sexes was that the Ego could never enter the Sophic knowledge that the Primordial Man possessed, if only because the presence of the Ego would contradict the apparent completeness of the Wisdom and would therefore be rejected as a matter of course. So, while the Ego reflection is present in the woman as well as in the man, the woman acts to keep it out of the Wisdom she bears. The Woman is not conscious of doing this, the Ego-consciousness is quite distinct from the Will – where the Wisdom resides – but the effect is to put the woman in the position where her awareness is in the Ego-consciousness while she acts out of the Wisdom in her Will. This accounts for the woman's preoccupation with appearance, for because her Wisdom is complete she treats the world as though it too is complete and so only in need of maintenance. It also accounts for the apparent strength of the woman's will – in the modern sense of determination and persistence – compared with the man, who deals with a reality always under construction, where flexibility of purpose is necessary.

While the Ego presence is generally benign – the human reactions dealt with so far arise from the human condition – there is one area where the Ego can have more negative effects. Prior to reflection into their human hosts, the Egos existed in such a way that there was absolutely no distinction between them, so that all the Egos could occupy the same "place". But with the advent of the Egos, they become aware of each other through the contact of one human being with another. Unfortunately, these encounters are incomprehensible to the Egos and the response of each Ego is the immediate and complete rejection of other Egos. In these situations human beings will behave with ruthless determination against each other, seeking always to extirpate the other person in order to annihilate the Ego that person bears.

Human societies have responded over the past two and a half thousand years to this experience by attempting to create a single overarching Self-being as a focus that subordinates individuals in rigid conformity. This has been done in both religious and secular modes as monotheism and imperialism. These large scale and often long-lasting social structures are possible because many people regard the Ego as an alien presence and its Light the source of a cold, dead reflection of reality, preferring instead the intimacy of the tangible immersion in the Will. Nonetheless, the Egos still react against each other, which leads to major conflicts as these Ego-rages are vented beyond the boundaries of the State or the Faith. Only a sustained effort by mankind to learn the lesson about trust, taught to them by Lucifer, will modify this behaviour. We must resist the Ego-reactions with fortitude and train ourselves to relate to others with dispassion, a task that is made easier by the Ego's reluctance to suffer this world. The sexes will be reunited within the next millennia, an essential precondition for the full incarnation of the Ego. This will be achieved as part of the general technological development of humanity, which will render the Wisdom the woman bears redundant, thus removing one of the main reasons for the sexual division. Life as such will die out, again as part of the technological advances, so that men will slough off the physical body and all that pertains to it: the Will, the sensorium and its associated consciousness.

But for the present, the individual experience of the Ego reflection beyond the initial event at around eighteen years of age can still be quite strange, both for the teenagers themselves and the adults who may have to support them. The young people can be subject to disturbing – even vivid – mental and emotional episodes that are still largely not understood by those who attempt to explain and treat them. A person's whole life path can change in a moment, much to the distress of parents and friends. It has to be appreciated that while the Ego itself is a passive entity in relation to the individual it enters, the disruption it causes – detailed in part above – can have far-reaching effects, which, to the extent that the Ego has not yet fully incarnated, have repercussions into adulthood. In fact, there is evidence that adults are subject to a number of stages of further Ego development, each lasting about seven years.

The whole process involved in constituting the individual man or woman as a congeries of physical, Life, Soul and Ego being – while yet radically divided in himself or herself – is always a uncertain affair, subject to the contingency of not alone this world, but of the whole universe. And all this is undertaken over millennia of human pain and incomprehension without any guarantee whatsoever that a fruitful conclusion will be reached. We are at root the Egos we find so strange, both the Egos and all the accoutrements we still need in order to realise ourselves.

Midsummer 2013

DESIRE AND BEAUTY – THE EGO AND THE OTHER

Does beauty excite desire? Put otherwise, does desire have its origin in beauty?

Consider the first effect of desire. There is a projection where the desire is "completed" in the object of that desire. It is a utopian experience of full satisfaction, complete in itself. Thus a desire is accompanied by a knowledge of what will constitute its satisfaction. This implies that desire arises not in the object that excites it into being, but has its origin in some past condition or memory.

The experience of beauty is very different. Beauty does not excite desire: it arouses our curiosity. No matter in what form it appears to us, we always respond to the _aura_ of beauty in this way. Only secondarily do we take notice of the entity that is bearing beauty. And while our curiosity is never satisfied, we nonetheless never lose our fascination with the beautiful – that is, our curiosity is never dimmed through repeated disappointment.

John Keats wrote that "Beauty is truth", an equation that became one of the central tenets of conservative aesthetics. He also wrote that "truth is Beauty", a much more problematical assertion. The felt incompleteness of the experience of beauty is compensated in an obvious way by equating it with "truth" – though the truth of beauty has never been detailed. Equating truth with beauty, however, makes no sense. While truth might add a needed content to beauty, truth hardly needs a decoration.

But allow Keats's poetic intuition some validity – that Beauty represents in some way a content other than itself – and it can be argued, to the extent that we cannot access this content, that Beauty could be said to stand in the place of a _secret_.

So, if desire has an origin in a past event, then beauty could be said to have an end in some coming event.

Though most are not conscious of them, each person has two streams of memories of past lives. There are the memories of past incarnations, which can vary in number according to the circumstances of the individual. Incarnations chiefly serve the development of mankind as a whole, but to the extent that incarnated life is subject to accident, imbalances can develop that influence the overall course of the individual's destiny – and cumulatively that of mankind itself. All existent entities strive at all times for balance, so a mechanism of compensation operates throughout all human incarnations. Viewed as Karma or Necessity, the tendency is to balance the good against the bad, such that too much of either kind of activity is balanced against its opposite. If there can be too much badness in a life, so also can there be too much goodness.

The second stream appears in memory as a row of water-drops aligned along, say, a blade of grass. It is in some ways a very strange and daunting stream, even though the water-drops indicate that it is the same experience that is repeated over and over. This is the Mother Stream and it contains the experience the individual has had of all the mothers who bore his or her incarnations.

To call this line of memories the Mother Stream is to indicate only its nexus in the incarnated lives. Our feelings for the mothers who bear us so utterly transcend the ordinary human-ness of these women that they need to be deified. Only as the _Mater Dei_ can the centrality of the experience be grasped. Even so, the actual event thus celebrated lies hidden deep in our individual being, to appear only in the magic of desire – that seemingly eternal flow of want that drives mankind on and on for millennia.

It is almost impossible to trace back from the phenomenon of desire to the event that engendered it. Only by stepping outside desire – by recognising that the desire is ultimately unrealisable – can a glimpse of the originary event be had. Deny desire and what is to be seen? An instant receding at a heartbreaking rate – a moment of contact, of joy turned to a bitter disappointment, experienced over and over again.

A man and woman engage in sexual congress. There is the possibility of a conception, but unless an Ego is present the inception of the new life is impossible. The relation between this Ego and the new life it makes possible is not essential – any Ego can inaugurate any new life. But once inception occurs, the Ego is bound completely to that new life. And while the genetic inheritance is solely from the parents, the core identity – that which distinguishes one human from another – is of the Ego. In fact, it _is_ the Ego.

What draws the Ego to a possible conception? The Ego has no memory, nor has it any motivation. But it bears its experiences as a kind of potential that can be triggered by events that echo those experiences. One such experience was the splitting of the Primary Man into the two sexes. For the Ego, a man and a woman joined in sexual congress both echoes that original split and seems to reverse it. Thus the Ego focuses on the conception of a new life as though it is the restoration of the original unitary man, the Primary Man. But of course it is not: hence the terrible disappointment – even as the quality of the Ego acts to give coherence to the new being, thus making possible the growth of a new human person.

The contrast between the experience of the human couple acting out their desire for union and the Ego's anguish is very real, where the failure of the humans is hidden in the exhaustion of their desire, momentary satiation a veil over a profound bitterness. It is no accident that the Mother is associated with the bitter sea and its dark silent depths; no accident that the Mother's primary function is one of consolation. But for the Ego there is no such apparent relief. Once it has taken the fertilized egg into its integrity, it is tied to that life and its fortune, until at the later stage of incarnation – as the Ego becomes directly subject to existential accident – when this bond can be severed in order to preserve the Ego's integrity.

This is the nature of desire – what of beauty? If desire has its ultimate root in the Same's struggle to maintain its integrity in the face of its encounter with the Other, then the curiosity that beauty awakens in us can be said to be similar to the expectancy with which the Same looks to the Other on the level of the intelligible. The parallel then is obvious – we respond to beauty in the same way that that the Same responds to the Other.

But the Other is unknowable, thus in Beauty we are presented also with the unknowable. Why then do we not despair of beauty as we do of desire? Not alone does beauty not disappoint us, many find beauty the only source of happiness in their lives. Examine your experience of Beauty and you find that where desire offers the prospect of reintegration only to disappoint us, beauty grants a feeling of wholeness that comes like a revelation of an abiding condition. In the presence of beauty we feel that we were never divided, that we could never be anything less than whole.

This is a very abstract experience and – without an objective correlative – purely a subjective one. It is impossible to say what beauty is. It is not a form, colour or mood. Yet we know instantly when we are in its presence, the recognition itself the guarantee of our certitude. And if we cannot pinpoint its locus or modality in the external world, we know that it is not a mere projection from some condition within ourselves. If we possessed Beauty, the external world would not exist for us – we would be oblivious of our incarnate existence, living and dying like blind animals. Thus beauty is real, yet we can only know it through its unique effect upon us.

It is at this point that mysticism could take over, losing us in ecstasy before Beauty as the Unknowable, the world of the incarnated abandoned – perhaps with relief. But beauty is not mystical, it is a very real phenomenon with real a effect on us. It should, however, be recognised that a distinction must be made between Beauty and its effect upon us, in the sense that the feeling that arises in us – of abiding wholeness – may not have its source in Beauty itself. There are reasons to see this feeling as an expression of the Ego itself. For instance, we have no image of Beauty, therefore we can understand that we do not witness to Beauty in the Soul. Again, we do not react reflexively to Beauty, which indicates that we do not witness to it in the Will either.

Hitherto we have seen that the Ego is almost completely concerned with its own integrity – which incidentally helps maintain the integrity of our incarnate being – now we can understand that the Ego has awareness of at least one external phenomenon, Beauty. More can be inferred here. If Beauty is not being witnessed at the level of the Will or Soul, it may be that the Ego experiences Beauty as an intelligible. This implies that the Ego relates to Beauty in a way analogical to how the Same relates to the Other as something intelligible. There is no indication that the Same has a specific response to the Other beyond an open expectancy – that is, that anything is added to the Same through its experience of the Other. However, the Ego does have a positive response to Beauty. Beyond the Ego's reflex to restore its integrity – which is the Ego's usual response to stimuli – the Ego here has the added awareness that, despite the apparent threats to its integrity, its wholeness will abide in any case.

Thus it is that through its experience of Beauty, the Ego gains a _knowledge_ that is not available to the Same; that is, the Ego _learns_ through its involvement with Beauty. This may seem a small thing in terms of incarnate experience, where learning is a necessary process in a realm of accident, but at the level of the Ego it is a phenomenon that has deep implications. For a start, it can be said that through Beauty the Other may be able to communicate with the Same by way of the Ego. Again, what is being communicated may seem a slight matter – that the Ego abides despite all its tribulations – but this is a truth not available to the Ego of itself, that could not be available to it. There is an objectivity here that utterly transcends the Ego, and more significantly, also transcends the Same. It is a real knowledge, and _it is available freely from the Other_.

Can more be understand about how the Other achieves this communication? Given that Beauty contains no content that we can discern, it might be possible to extent our understanding by searching for the medium whereby Beauty is presented to us. The obvious candidate here is the Soul, which is an interface that arises from the Other's contact with the Same. But we have seen that Beauty has no presence in the Soul. However, given that the Soul is the only relation between the Other and the Same, there must be some element in the operation of the Soul that could bear Beauty to us. And so there is. One of the most important functions of the Soul is the presentation of the forms that define the Will's activity. It is obvious that Beauty is not just an aspect of form – if it was, we could clearly describe Beauty, which we cannot do. But Beauty could be conveyed by the formal activity itself. In other words, Beauty is the process of informing that occurs continuously throughout the physical universe.

One implications of this conclusion is that – as many have asserted as though in ecstasy – everything is beautiful, that Beauty permeates our whole reality at all times. Thus there is a wholeness to Beauty, too, and it is this completeness that is conveyed to the Ego, that assures the Ego that it, too, is whole and undivided at all times.

So it can be said that – at this stage of the cosmic process, at least – that the integrity of the Other assures the Same of its own integrity. This may seem a relatively trivial conclusion to reach after such an extensive enquiry. But consider how central Beauty is to our lives, how universal is the hunger for it, and the enormous efforts we make to enhance our experience of Beauty. More, while most people regard Beauty as a gift, it has been shown here that it is also a disclosure of great value. And contrary to the belief that beauty is a mere epiphenomenon of a positive reality, it is quite obvious that Beauty is an essential component of our reality.

It is worth considering that our admiration of Beauty may be just the first stage of what could become a dialogue between the Other and the incarnated Ego. And as in the case of any initial encounter, it is essential to create a bond of trust. So it could be said that Beauty conveys, not truth, but _trust_.

13 July 2013

AFTERWORD

Motives are always open to question, and should perhaps be left open to question. The ultimate test of any claim made by others must be our own personal experience, despite the fact that our judgement of this experience can also be unreliable. There is no other foundation for discovering the truth.

Thus interpretation of personal experience can be faulty – most times it is – nonetheless the memory of the original experience can, with a little care, be retained and tested again and again by means of other interpretations. It is the experience that counts, not our opinions of it. Personal experience shapes us and prepares us for other experiences. If we open to experience, retaining the clearest possible imprint of it uncontaminated by opinion, then it becomes possible to learn directly from experience by permitting successive experiences to inform us to the fullest extent.

The hardest part of opening to experience lies in the act of opening itself. This is because it involves a process of purification. You can start this process of purification where and when you like, though it is best done simply by deciding explicitly to undertake the process. Bear in mind a few pointers: spare yourself for the truth, be minimal in your approach, of least expectation, using the least effort. What is required of you is openness, vulnerability in the real sense – _not submission_ , but permission.

This last point is important, the true secret of the process. You need not seek truth: it awaits always your invitation. That is what purification is: being able to grant permission to truth.

11 May 2005

APPENDIX 1:

THE EGO AND THE SOUL

While it appeared at first that the Soul was a mere epiphenomenon of the interaction of the Same and the Other – and incidentally a useful mirror for our reality – it is the case that the Soul in fact is a concomitant of the Other's formative effect on that reality. It is this formative activity of the Other that constitutes the background "screen" of the Soul.

Consider the Other's formative effect in this way: a beam of light that creates a blue surface will itself be blue. Likewise, the Other's formative effect that defines the Will's activity to produce a given form will bear that form in all its "projection". It is because of this that forms can appear in the Soul, a fact that led Plato to believe that there was such a thing as an ideal Form available to the intellect. The Ego projection into the Soul "interrupts" the formative "beam", so that the myriad of entities that the Other's formative effect creates in our reality appears to exist already in the Soul.

Thus the Soul is a kind of receptor upon which impinges (1) the form-power passing "down" and (2) the reflection of the phenomenal world "below". While the reflection of the world below resides in the Soul, the form-power element is simply registered as it passes through the Soul. There is only a loose coincidence of images here, so that what the Ego illuminates has a fuzzy shifting quality. It is here that Plato and Aristotle find their philosophies: Platonic Form and Aristotelian process.

What happens in the phenomenal world is that while the ideal form is streamed continuously down – every entity is constantly subject to the formative-power as a condition of its continued existence as that entity – it's perfection is tempered by the given actual disposition of the phenomenal world as it impinges on the ideal form. For example: two adjacent trees will be streamed down in ideal form, but their very contiguity will act to deform them both from the perfect. This is true for all formed entities, humans included. Our phenomenal world in informed in all its parts by perfection, but the processes of nature – which generate continuous change – have the effect of warping this perfection in often singular ways.

It is the projection of the Ego into the Soul that creates the World of Form for mankind. This World of Form is not real; in fact it is doubly false. The reflection of the phenomenal world that in part constitutes the World of Form already contains a distortion of the ideal forms, so that the distortion that occurs in the Wold of Form in the Soul is in effect a second distortion of the ideal forms. The reflection of the phenomenal world in the World of Form is real to the extent of the accuracy of the sense data, while the ideal forms cannot possibly have any reality at all in the Soul – despite the fact that the form-projection itself from the Other constitutes the "background" of the Soul. Only in a static universe could forms appear in their perfection, but that universe would be a set of crystalline archetypes inimical to all life.

However, there is one exception. Does the Ego perceive Beauty in the reflected World of Form? No. The Ego must perceive Beauty in the formative-power itself, because its experience of Beauty is in effect the experience of the ideal, the perfect – which for the Ego is the experience of Wholeness – and this could come only from a direct encounter with the Same's formative-power itself.

3 September 2014

APPENDIX 2:

THE EGO AND THE HUMAN BEING

While the Ego is the "attractor" about which an individual human is brought into being, it plays no direct part in that individual's life thereafter. Any relation between the individual and its Ego is initiated and maintained by the individual. In most cases the relation is delusional, where the Ego is regarded as some kind of saviour, or pathological, where the individual treats the Ego as a threat.

The source of these conditions lies in the fact that, while the Ego is unknowable to us as a phenomenon, it nonetheless constitutes the core of our self-identity. Consider a noun as possessing a content, say the noun "horse". This content – as a meaning or a reference – can be grasped, even though this grasping is often very fuzzy. How accurate is your image of a horse? How precise is your definition of a horse? Yet you are very sure that you know what you mean when you use the word "horse". Now consider the content of the noun "I". No doubt you are very sure of what you mean by this word, possess an accurate image of yourself, and can define yourself in great detail. Yet, while everyone can agree on the use of the word "horse", confident that each shares both meaning and definition, it is the case that each individual uses the word "I" in a unique sense, each knowing only one "I". More, any attempt to define that "I" leaves us confronting a void or – like the Mosaic God – simply mirroring the "I" in a tautology: "I am I".

The only person who knows who you are is you. And while you are very sure of what you know – that you are you – the actual experience of this knowing is very peculiar. You are certain that you are you, yet at the same time that "you" seems to melt away upon closer scrutiny. And this experience of melting away is also very peculiar, because no matter how vague, insubstantial, extended, fathomless this melting away becomes, you know that you are still you. Immanuel Kant's description of the Sublime is a very good description of our experience of the "I": the Sublime is experienced as infinite and yet we are convinced of its unity.

Is this our experience of the Ego? Well, another way to approach the experience is to conceive the "I" as an infinite sphere with its centre everywhere. Thus when you act, think, feel, each instance begins with a movement from that infinite sphere with its centre everywhere. The curious fact here is that if you were to take the time to trace back to that beginning, you would find yourself either lost in that sphere or sited in the centre of that sphere. And if you were lost, the instant you experienced this sense of abandonment you would find yourself at the centre of that sphere. And if you were at the centre of the sphere, you would immediately experience yourself lost in infinity.

Is this our experience of the Ego? Obviously not. We are hindered in our experiences here by our instinctive need for situation, for context. We are rooted beings, incarnated in a solid reality that is place itself. But nonetheless we are experiencing the Ego itself: how we veer about in its presence indicates that. Simply put, the Ego is of an altogether different nature. Even so, we can glean some insight into its nature. We know that it has a centred-ness, thus that it is a cohesive – perhaps even coherent – entity. It also has what we would call extension, that is, it has a presence somewhere, no doubt in a reality utterly different from ours. And yet it is connected to us – which means that its reality has some kind of continuity with ours.

This may seems a very paltry body of knowledge, but as will be seen in the next Appendix, this knowledge can be used to gain some understanding of the Ego's destiny. However, in the meantime, it is important now to examine how we humans react to the disconcerting presence of the Ego in our lives.

Our fundamental response to the Ego, described above, will only rarely become apparent, and then only in such extreme circumstances that it will easily be misconceived. Any situation that distracts us suddenly and sharply, for instance, will generate immediately the feeling that we are looking one way then another. Obviously, it appears we are looking for the cause of the distraction. Sometimes we react coolly and respond appropriately; other times feel we cannot focus, feel fear or even panic. What determines our response here is how we find ourselves disposed towards the Ego at that instant. More generally, we find that in every situation we feel we have the choice between grasping that situation and adjusting to it or else fleeing it towards some larger freedom. In fact, there is no situation in our lives where we do not feel that we can walk away from the confinement of this world and its demands if we wished.

Another aspect of our relation to the Ego is this: an avowal immediately prompts the disavowal. The conviction of faith bears with it always the falling away to doubt. The declaration of love is undermined by the temptation to betray trust. Loyalty stands at the edge of the abyss of treachery. Beside every angel stands a devil. This is how the Ego affects us: always the oscillation between centre and nowhere, between here and everywhere else.

The rise of communal living – civilization – was the most significant result of the projection of the Ego into the human being. Within the dialectic of centre and dispersion, humanity chose the centre. Almost every action by almost every human being in history has been to maintain this option for the centre. And yet: the dialectic is present nonetheless. This can be seen in the devastation caused by wars, in the mass migrations, the social turmoil of ambition and disenchantment. The lure of freedom never loses its glamour, even though its condition is little different from what we understand of death. To be free is to be without constraint or stimulus, a null state that would at once induce a loss of consciousness.

The drive to construct the centre – this is what civilisation is – makes enormous demands upon humanity. This is seen most clearly in the distortions introduced into the operation of the human Will. Before the advent of the Ego, the Will operated within a closed reflex of action and reaction, where man was an integral part of the phenomenal world. Under the influence of the Ego, the Will was drawn continuously towards an unbalanced state, where the reflex was damped in order to sustain activity at the expense of re-activity. The Will "hardened" and the human being as a consequence was "hollowed out", so that his world came to be purely objective – called reality. This hollow within man needed to be filled, thus came about the intellect with its images. The danger then arose that some individuals would come to regard these images as more true than reality, whereas in fact they were alienated reflections of an alienated world of pure activity. And therein lies all the madness of modern humanity, a hall of mirrors where anything can be made to appear true.

This situation has not arisen out of any requirement of human life. The features that distinguish human being from other forms of life – intellect, civilization and ambition – have arisen solely from the projection of the Ego into the Soul. And yet, despite this, it does not appear as though human destiny is the objective of the Ego; that is, the Ego does not serve us. Nor, it seems, do we serve the Ego. It is as though the human race in its entirety is serving as a medium for the Ego as it strives for some end utterly distinct from us.

20 September 2014
APPENDIX 3:

THE EGO AND THE WORLD OF FORM

The Ego perceives its own perfection in Beauty, the formative emanation of the Other. Thus, in perceiving its own perfection, the Ego is capable of recognising all perfections.

In the Soul, the formative emanation of the Other coincides with the phenomenal world as captured in the individual's sense data. Here, the Ego's projection into the Soul creates the World of Form. The significant point in this for us is that while we assume that it is our senses that give us the world – which certainly was true prior to the projection of the Ego into our Soul – it is the case now that what we perceive as the real world is actually the Ego's perception of the emanated Forms as distorted by the incidental disposition of the real world at any given instant. In other words, as detailed before, the products of our senses are only that – a measure of difference from the previous sensations. It is the Ego's capacity to perceive perfection that gives us our _pictures_ of this world. Thus we ourselves witness to perfection, too, albeit distorted from true by the vagaries of passing events. Incidentally, the Ego – and therefore we too – perceive the closest to the ideal Form in the images of flowers.

At the same time, the World of Form is not real; what we see by the grace of the Ego is not true. It is clear that for Plato the Form was an image: that the Ideal chair, for instance, resembled what we know as chairs, as sort of archetypal chair, basic and without distinction. In this way, Plato's World of Form would resemble a frozen image of our world with each Form a representation of the full development of every kind – species – of object that can exist here. There would be perfect images of full grown oaks, for instance, one for every species of oak. In a way, this World of Form would resemble an illustrated dictionary, except that this dictionary would list nouns only, no verbs or adjectives.

Could this be true as well of the Ego's experience of perfection? Would it too appear as a frozen collection of objects? Well, consider the Ego's experience of its own perfection. The point is, the Ego does not perceive its own perfection directly. What happens is that the Ego perceives in Beauty a wholeness which echoes in some way the Ego's own perfection. The Ego cannot witness its own perfection because it is not in its present mode perfect: it too is distorted by its projection into our Souls.

So what are we to understand here? Are we concerned with the Ego's experience of itself, of perfection, or of our mundane world? Obviously, the Ego can recognise perfection, but it does not perceive perfection directly. There is a disjunct here.

Another element to be considered is this: the Ego is present in the Soul only as a projection; it has yet to incarnate in the Soul. Thus the Ego is severely limited in its relation both to the Soul and the phenomenal world.

In order to accomplish the incarnation of the Ego in the Soul, it is necessary that the two elements that comprise the human individual – the Male entity and the Sophic entity – be united in the process known traditionally in alchemy as the Sacred Marriage. One of the main features of the union is that the Sophic element loses all of its knowledge of "Heaven", that is, its memories of the Primal Man, who existed before the division of the sexes. Given that the most outstanding capacity in the Male entity, the ability unique to him _to learn from experience,_ would be united with the Sophic entity, now simply a capacity to remember, it can be seen how this new Man would complement the Ego's unique capacity to recognise and thus perceive perfection. Rather than a simple passive succession of experiences of the World of Form – which is all that the Ego in itself is capable of – there would now be a being, composed of the incarnated Ego and this new Man, that could store and learn from that succession of experiences.

So what would we have then? There would be the flow of events in this world overlaid by the emanated forms. These forms would be distorted in different ways and at different rates. Stone, mountains, whole continents would change only slowly. Trees would change more quickly, though less quickly that most other life forms. In other words, we would have a tableau composed of a relatively stable background and an ever-changing foreground of life's teeming variety. In fact, it would be very similar to the modern experience of the cinema or video.

Is that all? Is the whole painful development of our reality intended only to serve the production of a motion-picture reflection of the phenomenal world? What of the formative emanation of the Other, is that only meant to provide the props for this video?

What if the forms that emanate to create our reality were some kind of alphabet, symbols, a language – that is, a form of communication? What if the dancing, changing kaleidoscope of the phenomenal world was a kind of message, each instant of the Ego's experience a kind of page of that message. Would the beings that we are to become then be part of an attempt to read this message, to learn the language and memorise the "text"?

In this situation, we human beings become more than just blind vehicles in an enterprise utterly beyond our comprehension. We would become the intelligence of an Ego conceived as a wholly new sensorium. We would read and come to understand the perfection, transforming our reality even as we comprehended its meaning, until what is our phenomenal world of accident was replaced by the direct perception of perfection, the Other's communication with us, that is, with the Same.

22 September 2014

Appendix 4:

On the Perfect

It is not difficult to define the Perfect: the Perfect is that which self-subsists. But it is difficult to experience the Perfect. Any experience of the Perfect would necessarily create a relation to the Perfect, which would thus render the Perfect imperfect. How then is any knowledge of the Perfect possible, even the very limited knowledge presented here?

There are two ways to approach this question. There is the argument that we can have the concept of, and word for, the Perfect only because we already have access to the Perfect. It is a worthwhile argument that can be sustained, but it will leave us with the concept only. Compare the situation with regards to the concept and word "I": it would be a mean existence if we had only the concept of our "I" and not also the paradoxical experience of its real presence.

Consider now how we have experience of the Perfect in some way through the Ego, even though the Ego can only know the Perfect by means of an imperfect perception of its own perfection. We already know how enthralling the experience of the World of Form is – how it stimulated the Platonic simulacrum Forms and the development of the intellect. Perhaps by interrogating the Ego's experience we might be able to rise towards a better experience of the Perfect, this time by means of our unique capacity to learn from experience.

How do we situate such an enquiry? We can make a number of distinctions. For instance, we can ask how we experience human inventions – considered as Forms distinct from "natural" Forms. We can also ask how we experience the utopian illusions of our cultures, for instance those that come to us through advertisements. In the latter case, it is clear that the values expressed in these illusions have a cultural weight – that changes over time as our cultural values change, from the religious, through the moral to the material. As will be seen, these utopian desires can be regarded simply as our response to the Forms we have invented, from God to the Good to consumer goods.

How do these invented Forms appear to us? The answer is obvious: as toys. Consider the amount of work children do with their toys, how they are tested exhaustively, often to the point of breaking – what we must learn from this activity, absorbed directly into our Wills long before we learn how to use the real devices these toys represent. Now notice the distinction between the toys of boys and those of girls. The latter abide through the generations, having to do almost entirely with the little girl's coming role as mother and home-maker. What is to be understood here is that the rearing and nurturing of human offspring is a technology: it is not a natural process like that found among animals. This is to be expected, given the special destiny of humanity.

The contrast with the toys that boys play with is clear, how these toys follow closely technological developments: swords, bow and arrows, guns, trains, cars, rocket ships, computers. As an aside, a noteworthy feature of this development is how children have now bypassed the play level in their use of computers: children no longer rehearse in the Will the forms of these devices but pass directly into real practice. What significance is there in this fact? Obviously, children no longer "grow up" in this context. And considering how ubiquitous computers are now, we can understand that for the future our world will be controlled by humans who are no more than undeveloped children. This could be regarded as unfortunate in traditional terms – in terms of maturity and moral responsibility – but it can also indicate how the significance of the real world of individual things is in the process of receding in importance. Computers, considered as machines, already control much of the world of things: in time they will control all of it, when the "real" world will be frozen as one gigantic machine. The situation would then resemble the social organisation of the great agrarian societies, deeply conservative and childishly credulous. Incidentally, only in the hunter/warrior clans did any form of Will formation survive, with specific initiation rites to carry the boy over into manhood. These rites were a protection against a demonic blood guilt, much as ordination rites in sacramental religions protect the priesthood from the negative forces that surround their sacrificial rituals.

To return to the question of the Perfect and human invention. The actual development of technology is not important here – we can take any one invention and the toy that embodies its Form as sufficient for this study. We will examine the Form of the motor car. The first thing to notice is that this machine can be characterised quite easily but that representations of its Form will be many and varied. In other words – and this is significant – the Form of the car will not appear in its purity. Thus each model of the car is imperfect with reference to the Form. And yet this suffices for the child, which implies that the Perfect may play no part in the child's absorption of the Form. Yet it must do so: we must conclude that while the child is learning about the Form of the car by means of an imperfect model, he must be able to grasp the perfection of the Form through some agent within himself. This must be possible, otherwise the boy would grow up with limited knowledge of the car's Form, which obviously does not happen – the boy becomes capable of recognising every instance of the car Form, even those he has never seen before.

Now the question arises: where is the source of this Form of the motor car? Is it with the inventor, the manufacturer of the machine, or the manufacturer of the toy? Once again we are faced with the problem of imperfection: what the inventor presents to the manufacturers can only be an imperfect prototype; it will be the responsibility of the manufacturers to decide how best to produce the machine for practical use. Even so, what is manufactured will be different models for a variety of purposes, all of which will therefore be imperfect renditions of the Perfect Form. But to the extent that everyone engaged in the supply of both the practical and play versions of the car can recognise the Form of the car in all their products, we can once again understand that each already possesses knowledge of that Form in its perfection.

This is a curious situation. It is as though the Idea expressed in an invention is at once grasped by all almost from the inception of that Idea. This would help explain the phenomenon that accompanies the introduction of each new technological advance: how suddenly there are many who exhibit an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of the new device, witnessed especially with the introduction of mechanised transport and the computer.

It is tempting now to ascribe this situation to a common sense grasp of a utility, or more persuasively to an extension by some kind of analogical thinking of already existing technology, such that the motor car is a (horse-drawn) wagon with an engine, or the computer is a sophisticated calculator. But this misses the point: the motor car and the computer _are_ different, and as such are new Forms. Development can be readily admitted, but the new device or machine is new, and it is the capacity of human beings to recognise the _universality_ of this new device or machine that is of concern here. Once the motor car came into existence, people very quickly could identify every manifestation of its Form, even if they had never seen it before.

So, can we press further into this mystery? Can we only recognise that we can grasp universal Forms as if by intuition, and not delve deeper than this? That might be so: we grasp "natural" Forms in precisely the same way. For instance, we can only encounter instances of the oak tree and yet we can nonetheless recognise other instances of the oak that we have never encountered before, exactly as we do computers, aeroplanes and motor cars. Thus we are left in the position that although we can act as though we know the Forms, both natural and invented, we can never actually encounter them. And we cannot appeal to the Ego here: neither the Ego nor the source of the formative power discussed earlier can be expected to possess in any way the Forms of the inventions of mankind. To attempt to do so would be to introduce a determinism that would confound the whole drama of the encounter of the Same and the Other.

This may seem to have been a futile exercise – best deleted from the Appendix – except that one valuable insight has been gained,: _human inventions may not have Forms._ What then do human inventions have in common?

Prior to the entry of the Ego reflection into the Soul humans could have no experience of the formative power. But they could nonetheless register the species-kind of every object in their world, which appeared to them as deities of each species. Human senses had a different nature then. With no abstractive consciousness to conceptualise sense experience, each sense was autonomous and operated across a much wider range than now. What is now limited as the sense of touch was capable of registering the species-kinds of all plant life, with the species identity of individual plants signed, as it were, by its deity. Again, what is now the sense of taste could register all animal life, again by identifying individual animals by means of their species deity. And it was by means of what is now the sense of smell that all minerals and rock could be registered. The senses of hearing and sight were still rudimentary then, with hearing operating as a balancing mechanism by sensing the shifting location of a single continuous tone. What is now the sense of sight noted changes in what would later be called light and shadow, but which then appeared as continually shifting waves of attraction and repulsion. The theory of magical correspondences is a survivor of that age.

Human inventions do not have a formative element, but are universalised by reference to function. Even so, this insight does not answer to the mystery of how human beings can classify objects that they have never seen before. But if the phenomenon of function is examined, it can be seen that all human activity comes under its heading. It was by means of discovering a function for many natural entities that permitted man to abstract those entities from nature, from their species deities. An example would be metals. Iron, for instance, has a nature that utterly transcends human use of it; a nature, moreover, many times more powerful than mere hardness or conductivity. Presently, we are in the process of abstracting animals from nature, in effect reducing their totemistic import to a foodstuff. The situation of plant life, however, is interesting. Each level of life had the primary function of preparing Earth for the arrival of the next level. Plant life prepared for animal life by creating the first rock stratum as a platform for that life, with the carbon of animal life preparing the way in turn for human life. And while animal life took on a secondary role in relation to early humans as conduits of superhuman powers, plant life continued to function as before, except that its products now provided food for both human and animals. Thus, while the minerals and animals have been abstracted to serve human functions, plant life has retained its original nature. This fact, however, is of no importance to human destiny and it will be simply bypassed once the Ego incarnates in man.

The question now is: what role does function have in the destiny of man? Consider that all the various species-deities are the same kind of entities as the Egos that are entering mankind, and that they have the same impersonal relation to their respective species as individual Egos have to human beings, except that they will never incarnate in their species, nor even reflect into them. Thus the abstraction of species to human functions is of no significance to the species-deities, no matter how traduced their natures are. In a sense, the species-deities are in service to the human Egos, their species at the disposal of mankind. To the extent that function becomes evident in human practice only after the reflection of the Ego in humans, it evidently must serve the destiny of the Ego. But to what extent does function itself derive from the Ego?

The abstractive element in function parallels the abstractive element in the intellect. But while this indicates a common origin in the Ego reflection, it does not explain the sense of purpose that is the chief characteristic of function, a dynamic that is not evident in the more static nature of the intellect. In fact, given what is known about the Ego, it would seem that the static intellect is more characteristic of it than teleological function. This implies that function may well be purely human in origin, though stimulated by our encounter with the Ego. But function points to envisaged ends rather than merely natural processes, which indicates that there must be a capacity in human beings themselves that rises above the natural.

Examine then the role of inventions in human life. What purpose do our inventions serve? They augment human powers: extend the range of sight, hearing and mobility; increase our destructive power and vastly extend our knowledge of nature itself. They have also greatly increased our wealth. So inventions may help us achieve the utopian dream of happiness for all. Yet we all die sometime, sooner or later. How much happiness does it take to make death worthwhile?

It can be assumed that if human beings shared one ultimate value, be it wealth, happiness, or pleasure, we would all be wealthy, happy or pleased by now. But we are not. So what is the purpose of invention? Ask what it is that our inventions do. They abstract from nature: not control of nature but a parallel mode of being. Our abstractive sciences tell us what we need to exist and our abstractive technologies provide us with those essentials. In time, we will break free of nature. With the incarnation of the Ego, we might even break free of life.

Imagine human existence stripped to its bare essentials: we would draw all sustenance directly from the mineral base, creating a body composed solely of those crystals. We could renew that body at will: we would be potentially immortal, though most likely we will survive only for as long as we serve the purpose that is our destiny.

Finally, we can now perhaps answer the question of the universality of inventions, of function. Consider the broad nature of function as a means prepared to achieve an end, an end that is already known. Is this not similar to the lineament of desire, where the satisfaction of that desire is envisaged at its inception? There is a further parallel: the root desire is a longing for union, specifically the union of the male and sophic entities sundered in order to create the two sexes, male and female. And the ultimate end of function? A salient feature of all functions is that they in one way or another "carry" mankind. Motor vehicles, aircraft, ships all convey essentially stationary human beings. Wired and wireless devices convey the communications of stationary humans over distance. Weapons kill on behalf of stationary humans. Micro- and tele-scopes see on behalf of stationary humans. And so on. Man is like a God within the immense web of the functions he has created, commanding everything within the reach of his technologies.

Herein lies the universality of function and its true utopian character: each human reaches for the same end, and so is capable of recognising every means invented to achieve that end. The motor car, for instance, is grasped as a universal because all humans seek the end served by the vehicle. And the crucial difference between desire and function can be seen here:

Desire harks back to a past loss in order to correct it, while function drives forward towards a future achievement, which as we will see next is the ultimate destiny of man.

If there is no formal element in human activity, it may be that, conversely, the Ego can have no experience of human inventions; more, the Ego may have no experience of any of the works of man. Another conclusion to be drawn from the above discussion is that humans can have no direct experience of the Forms themselves except through the experience of Beauty, which in this case appears to us as the Glamour of the Forms, that is, the Glamour of the Perfect. Beauty, from this perspective, appears more as a consolation for us, who are incapable of experiencing the Perfect directly.

It would seem, then, that the Ego experiences reality as a kind of Eden, the universe aglow with an imperfect perfection but with dull spots here on earth where our cities and towns are. The Ego will see the materials of our structures, metals, stone, the zip of electricity, but nothing at all of human intention. And what will happen when the Ego incarnates in us? Will we continue to construct our "World Machine" of interlocking machinery and devices of control while our Egos dream (as it will seem to us) their paradisiacal vision? Will there be a new techno-peasant society subordinated to blind mechanical routine and the Ego's New Heaven?

To some extent, yes. The preparation necessary for the incarnation of the Ego – the Sacred Marriage – will only gradually spread among men. Prior to the union, men will be still subordinated in their Wills to the Sophic dream of the Old Heaven, all their activity circumscribed by the woman's phantasy of perfect order in a realm of accident. Only with the union of the two entities, the Male and the Sophic, will man's Will be freed from the woman's enchantment. At this point, with the establishment of the new unitary man, the individual's relation with his Ego will undergo a fundamental change. At present, we struggle with our relation to the Ego, trapped within conflicting desires for security and freedom, seen in men in the cycles of war and peace and in women in her desire to maintain surface appearance, trapped as she is between the Old Heaven of Sophia and the New Heaven of the Ego. With the collapse of the sexual division, the man's Will becomes his own so that he can now register the Ego's experience rather than simply observe it.

The unified man will witness to the Ego's experience to the extent that he will come to see the universe in its archetypical state. For instance, he will see vegetation and other life forms as sparks with a particular species configuration, metals will appear as a kind of silent pounding, again of a specific shape and tone. But the stars will disappear. The Ego maintains the bright stars that we see at night; in reality the stars are dark aggregates of elements that in their archetypical state are present as low thrumming pulses that fill the universe. Human intentions will also be hidden from him, so there will be no evidence of human existence. Other unified men will appear as fractures in the panorama, threatening at first until the lesson of Lucifer is learned. The mode of observation here will be phenomenological: man in his awareness will act as a conduit between the objects observed and the registering Will. In a sense man permits the universe to speak to the Will. But given man's unique ability to learn from experience, this process is not simply a passive one.

Man will learn along two axes: the obvious one in which he collates the Ego's experiences in series for comparison, and a more occult impulse – having its roots in man's fascination with Beauty – which sets him to investigate the source of the Ego's experience. It will take the new unified man a long time to overcome this fascination. One of the first lessons for him will be to discover that the universe has no extension: it can just as easily be observed as a node of presence – the knowledge that the universe of imperfect Forms is there even though nothing can be seen. Likewise, it will be learnt that the source of the Beauty can also be regarded as a node. The New Man will want to approach this node but will find himself presented with a very serious dilemma. The New Man will not reproduce as we do: he will simply construct a new body for himself as needed, thus we will have no experience of motherhood. Yet he will insist upon regarding the origin of Beauty as the Mother, even though he knows he has absolutely no relation with this entity. This conflict will create a great deal of anguish in the New Man.

Only very slowly will the New Man come to understand the situation. He stands forward towards the Other as a manifestation of the Same. As such, he approaches the node of Beauty in a state of expectancy: a question has been asked and an answer is expected. But the nature of the answer cannot be known, so that the node of Beauty can be the source of any answer and thus potentially of every answer. For the reason, the node of Beauty appears as the source of All, and it is for this reason that the New Man calls it the Mother.

Once this is understood, the New Man will feel himself as though falling away into a darkness, wherein there is no consolation for his sense of loss. He will now begin a search for something to replace what he has lost. He will focus on the Ego's experience of the World of Form and, through the Sophic memory, he will absorb each and every experience automatically. Although he will not be aware of it, at this stage the New Man will come to transcend his Ego – which is restricted to its immediate experience only – so that the archetypal universe as it were comes alive in him. He begins to search here for meaning. But the archetypal universe is utterly lifeless, a matter of pure pattern in shape and sound, so how could meaning be discerned in the flow of this pattern? The New Man will search here until the hope that sustained him finally runs out, a long and frustrating search that pushes the New Man into a pit of utter aloneness.

Only then will the New Man understand that what had appeared to him as a hope for a new answer to his need was in fact his unresolved – and by now obviously the unresolvable – longing for what he still calls the Mother. At this point he can do no there than turn once again to the node of Beauty and allow the longing full rein. Now the feeling of aloneness is replaced by a sense of emptiness. At first there is a hunger to fill this emptiness, but such is the Glamour of the Beauty that though the New Man remains empty, he is filled with an abstract effulgence, a sense of warmth that is not simply a matter of heat but instead one of sustenance, of being sustained. And the New Man knows that this experience is not real, that he is not actually being sustained. No, he knows it is only a reflection in the Sophic part of him, that was seems to radiate from the node of Beauty is in fact rising in that Sophic part as an reflection of the node of Beauty.

The knowledge that the Beauty is not addressed to him does not dismay the New Man, though it might well have, because he knows that the meaning of Beauty is not intended for him. He knows that he can do no more than remain in contemplation of the Beauty. That is his destiny: to hold a mirror up to the Beauty that is experienced by his Ego. In this way, Beauty is made _intelligible_ and so can be communicated to another. Put otherwise, the Perfect can thus be reflected in imperfection in such a way that the Perfect can be transmitted as a meaning to another.

In this way does the Other speak to the Same, reflecting its own perfection by means of the New Man to the Same, creating at the same time in the New Man a reflection of the Same's own perfection. This is what is communicated: the Perfect speaks to the Perfect to relate the only matter that could concern them: their perfection.

Thus the destiny of mankind: to become the Mirror of the Perfect.

26 January 2015

Endnote 1: The Midwife – the Role of the Woman

It may appear that the woman has no direct role in the process that leads to the incarnation of the Ego. However, I have seen elsewhere that this is not the case. In a number of my novels the role of women as crucial actors in this spiritual process is apparent. In LUPITA, SOLOMON'S DREAM and above all in RESTORATION, for instance, the main female characters performs quite significant roles in the transformation of male characters.

However, the means whereby these women can exercise the faculty they obviously possess is not – and could not be made – manifest in what are purely creative works. Here I wish to indicate something of the source of this ability and its effect on the women.

Generally, the woman, as the Sophic entity, has the all-embracing capacity to act as the man's counterbalance to the Ego. This can be characterised by saying that the woman's control of the Will, as her Heaven, permits her act as a kind of mirror for the man, thus creating an arena that allows the man to work out part of his destiny. This may appear to be a merely passive role, but reflection shows that the woman must have a power of "containment" very great indeed. This containment is the ability to accept and hold dynamics or experiences that would overwhelm or delude the man. In the novels listed above are examples of the main transformations undergone by the man: the experiences of Grace, of Purification, and of the encounter with the Ego.

It is important to note here that no magical or special spiritual powers are involved in this process. To her, as to the man, these experiences will present themselves in the course of very ordinary circumstances if the processes that they are involved in are carried through properly. Any attempt to enhance, improve or accelerate a process will surely lead to failure. While this failure this might well express itself in ordinary ways too, as depression, compensatory compulsions, or simple irritability, the woman especially can be profoundly affected by such a failure. Though this might appear merely as a fugitive sense of a reluctance to submit – without being able to indicate what it is she is reluctant to submit to – it could impair this ability in her for the remainder of her life.

On the other hand, if the process is a success, the woman will be rewarded. While the woman is not herself transformed in any way beyond the ordinary through the exercise of this ability – she cannot be – she will find herself enhanced in such a way that will gain access to what she most wants in this incarnation. But it is a very peculiar reward. While the woman experiences a subtle reluctance in the course of a failing process, she experiences an equally fugitive sense of loss as the result of the success of a process. And yet she will get what she wants. From the man's viewpoint, this situation is replete with irony and he may well chide the woman for her materialistic outlook. Most men will fail to understand that the woman is condemned – in a way unknown to him – to the material. But insofar as she gains materially she has the growing sense of what is really lacking in her, which is of course the union with the Male entity – the Sacred Marriage – that is the immediate object of the whole spiritual endeavour.

The cooperation entailed in these processes could be regarded as the true relation between incarnated men and women, though it will often be worked through amid a welter of other needs and demands. At its core it contains great sublimity – something of which became apparent in the last appendix – and levels of recognition and understanding beyond comprehension from outside such a relationship. And yet. It will also contain a unique sadness: always the sense that what is possible – that will eventually be realised – cannot now be present. It is the cruelty of human love that so much is perceived that cannot be made real right now. It is the subject of most art.

More, while the woman suffers her sense of fugitive loss, the man will seem to her to draw away. Always she will have this sense of the man: that even as she engages with him in these mighty struggles, she feels the man going away from her towards something she simply cannot comprehend. The man could be standing before her, fully present to her as her partner, and yet she will feel that withdrawal in him. Many women will react by trying to attach the man to her, will bind him in as many ways as she can, through wiles, blackmail, entreaty. They may well succeed, yet the man will always elude her.

There is an aspect here of the man that few women can comprehend. Because the woman abides in her Heaven, she believes that the man also abides with her. She also believes that the spiritual processes she engages in with the man operate on her behalf too. She does not realise that the sense she has of the man moving away from her is an indication of how far the man is moving towards his own goal. And of course she has no inkling of what that goal is – even though her sense of loss is the obverse of the man's striving. In other words, the woman also wants what the man is striving for, except that the woman – the Sophic entity – cannot achieve it.

The end of the woman's relationship with the man occurs when he finally makes contact with the Sophic entity within himself. From this point on, the woman – any woman – can no longer help him: the process now continues between the man and his Sophic part, on through to the culmination, the Sacred Marriage. But the woman doesn't necessarily feel a sense of abandonment or rejection here over and above the abiding sense of loss: the material rewards are sufficient. They have to be: there is nothing else for her in this incarnation.

14 February 2015

_Endnote 2_ : Death and Thereafter

Ask the question: Where do we go after death?

The answer is: "We do not go anywhere."

It was and is among traditional societies a common belief that the dead remain among us. For these peoples incarnation is more like taking up a job of work than anything else, so that at the end of your shift, as it were, you simply sign out and go home again. And what is this home like? Seen from the incarnated existence it would appear as an aristocratic idyll, a life of pure leisure. In fact, the impulse to idleness is a very exact memory of life before death.

Of course, it is not so simple. For one thing, incarnation immerses us in a realm of accident, which distorts our fundamental nature or destiny through a host of temptations, illusions, and plain mistakes, all of which we take with us after death. Whether it is great evil or simple stupidity, we must continue to endure the results of our actions in this life. Seen from this perspective, the thereafter will appear little different to us from incarnate existence.

But there is one very great difference. In the afterworld we are not subject to accident. While we plunge on with our errors, delusions and regrets, there is the possibility of counterbalancing these actions through our encounters with others. In an obvious way, we will associate with those we knew in incarnate life. Our relations with them will be the obverse of those on earth. It will seem as though those we harmed now harm us, as though we are suffering for the pain we inflicted on them. This happens because of the reflexivity of the Will. We can undertake an action against another only by creating within our Will a potential that allows a similar action to be perpetrated upon us. That is, an action by us – good or evil – always invites reciprocation as a condition of performing that action. It is a phenomenon familiar to practitioners of magic, but the principle holds true for all of our actions. In the thereafter we seek to exhaust those dispositions not discharged in our lifetime, usually with the original subjects of our actions, but under certain conditions we have the possibility of rebalancing by means of a process to be described in a moment.

Bear in mind, however, that the range of these potentialities can be both very complex and deeply ramified. Most humans have already undergone many incarnations and have been subjected to contingency many times over, so that each human is by now riven by a wide variety of often conflicting reflexes, with the result that our actions on each other can at times produces unexpected responses. The reaction to kindness can be resentment, mockery or anger, as well as gratitude. The bad we do does not always result in pain, sometimes guilt may make misfortune welcome. In this situation, even the potentialities created in the Will through our own actions may be distorted by guilt, self-pity, or delusion.

There are two elements here that should be understood at this point. First, we are not conscious in the way that we are now of what transpires in the thereafter. The moment of death is like a light switched off, plunging us into a deep darkness: the light here being that Light of the Ego discussed earlier. Some cannot get beyond this darkness, so that they remain ignorant of their experiences after death. Others – who never took the Ego presence to heart – can experience the afterworld much as they did in the ages that preceded the entry of the Ego reflection into the Soul. Then there is a third level, where the essential character of the afterworld is grasped – that it is not contingent – so that a kind of freedom becomes available. Rather than simply rehearsing one's just-ended incarnation, it is possible to seek what can be called Recovery. This word best conveys the subtlety of what is involved here, healing, curing, renovation, quieting.

To describe further this process it is necessary to clarify the second element that needs to be understood. The experiences we undergo in the thereafter, at whatever level, do not have a _moral_ component. There is no forgiveness, no correction, no punishment. There is, simply, no agent in existence capable of judging and correcting error: every volitional being is marred either by contingency or the original reflex reaction of the Same to the Other. On earth judgements can be made as a matter of prudence, but in the thereafter no equivalent power exists. Prudence is possible because in a contingent world correction is possible; in a realm ruled solely by necessity – that what is simply is – correction is not possible: it is a realm of truth, and the truth cannot be changed. Thus in this situation the process of Recovery does not imply reconciliation or restoration.

Throughout its sojourn in the thereafter, the human entity is in a state of imbalance, bearing as it does all the accidents of its incarnations. These imbalances are experienced as a kind of itch that requires scratching, that is, there is no element of desire involved, only an inclination to resolve the imbalance. The realm of the thereafter is without spatial or temporal components, so that all the human entities that exist are gathered together there as one. This is similar to how the Egos group as though one Ego when not connected with incarnated humans, except that the marks of successive incarnations set human entities off from one another, in effect separated as personalities. These separate beings are gathered much like a swarm of midges on a summer's evening, the swarming activity bring driven by the impulses of the individual entities as they seek to discharge imbalances by means of contact with entities who bear complementary imbalances that they in turn seek to discharge.

As in the more localised situation, where the human entities interact with those entities they had encountered in their most recent incarnation, the entities in the "universal" swarm must suffer their discharges, pain, regret, horror, joy as the case may be. Of course, no entity actual can feel these emotions: no, they are as it were stored up in the Will. It should be understood that emotion, feelings – despite their vividness – are actually only epiphenomenon of Will reflexes, much as the sound of a hammer striking a nail is only an epiphenomenon of that useful action, in itself of no material significance. So the consequences of discharging imbalances are retained in the Will as a particular kind of impulse, which will only have a reality during the next incarnation, where they appear at the level of the imagination as dreams, phantasies, creative ideas and images, though sometimes also as cravings, obsessions or mental dislocations.

But by far the most important mode of expression of these "otherworldly" impulses is music. Despite what appears to be a rather meagre range of elements, at most twelve half-notes, music is capable of expressing the complete spectrum of human emotion through all ages and all cultures. Though founded on the pulsed communication among the pre-division men (the Adam Kadmon), it has been expanded during the period of sexual division to encompass what is in effect the spiritual heritage of mankind. It is very strange how what could be regarded as an incidental process, which to some extent allows us to conveniently unburden ourselves of – to us – redundant emotions in the thereafter, should at the same time permit a universal stream of – what? – music (it must be allowed autonomy, not reducing it to the visual or the linguistic) that so precisely fits into our suffering of accident in our incarnations. It is a miracle of providence, for otherwise incarnation would be utterly intolerable.

Incarnation would also be _meaningless_. While it is often said that music is a language, it is just as often felt that this language needs to be translated in order to be understood. But one aspect of music is beyond translation, and that is _dance_. In dance, the real foundation of music in the Will and its impulses is revealed. Music as dance is pure performance. _Music is done._ For this reason music is _true_. And the effect of music is to open the incarnated human entity to the non-contingent nature of the thereafter, thus allowing him to begin the process of Recovery. In effect you transcend death and lay yourself open to the truth.

This is possible because our response to music, as dance or a purely musical response to song, especially the singing of the woman (which, though inspired by her experience of the Sophic Heaven, nonetheless acts to loosen men from material existence), arises directly from the Will, from impulses in us that can only be balanced through Recovery – that is, those impulses surviving from previous lives. Music in this way opens us in the first place to our incarnation streams and secondly – through those ancient impulses – to the non-contingent fact of the thereafter and so to those other human entities beyond our most recent life and its karma. This is the only way our previous lives can be accessed by us, through the imbalances that remain in the Will from these lives. This is how what is called Karma operates: it is the process of Recovery.

A useful analogy for this process: Imagine a cold night, rain and wind, you reach shelter where it is warm and dry. The cold in you reaches for the warmth in the room, the wet seeks the dry, the dark seeks the light, hunger seeks nourishment and weariness seeks rest. You recover. But we reincarnate more frequently than most realise, especially if closely involved with others. The analogy then is that you only partially recover, perhaps warmth but not rest, dryness but not food, and then you must go out again into the storm.

If you think about it, you will see that all the imbalances of all human entities should balance out in the end. One condition for this, of course, is an end to incarnation, the source of all these imbalances. Even so, some will cling to beliefs, delusions, and attachments both material and personal, so that they can never rise to the non-contingent. What happens to these entities? With the achievement of the Sacred Marriage and the entry of the Ego that follows, incarnated existence will end. The Earth will shrivel as life becomes extinct and those who cannot or will not recover will abide in a nowhere state, each completely isolated in the thereafter. As for those human entities united with their Egos and so beyond death, Recovery will become a continuous process, until at last the Will is completely purified and transparent, capable now of reflecting the Perfect.

30 March 2015

Endnote 3: The Mother

This is the final essay; it is both the least relevant to the Gryphon Mystery and yet the most difficult to compose. In the first place, this note will most likely add nothing material to what has gone before; in fact, it may well open up areas of speculation best left for readers to discover for themselves. But the pressure to attempt this examination has remained very great, despite my reluctance to undertake it. Put succinctly, I can never approach this subject without feeling the pull of a quite fundamental desire to find here a wish satisfied once and for all.

Yet it is almost impossible to state what this wish is. It has to do on one level – the level easiest to comprehend – with the relation between the mother and her child; the child and his or her mother. But how is such a wish satisfied? By a return to the womb? But that is simply escapism: to resolve the dilemma by preceding it. How could such a wish be satisfied? Consider that every solution that might be proposed immediately presents a situation that is the opposite of what is proposed. Some kind of loving closeness with the mother, to the point of identification? Immediately there is the feeling of entrapment, the need to pull away completely.

It is very strange. But notice that there in an echo here of our relation to the Ego. There we switch between the one and the many; here we switch between something like immersion and separation. They are very different experiences admittedly, yet in each case there is the pull of identification, but with this difference: the pull of the Ego is real and valid, even though the end is not as we would like – we do not become the Ego; the pull of the Mother, though a real desire, is not real, that is, not possible. We know we cannot become the Mother; in fact, some of humanity's deepest taboos counteract this attraction.

Perhaps it is best to consider the Mother from a different perspective: that of Goddess. In the mythologies of the world, the Goddess is sometimes presented as a devourer: let us consider this aspect first. The sow that eats it farrow? Hungry pig. We make the gods and goddesses, so why do we invent a destructive Goddess? Why do we want to be destroyed by the being that gave us life? Well, for a start, the Mother does not give us life. The mother is an incubator, nothing of the mother crosses to the child she bears, only nutrients. The truth is that the mother and the father give us life. To the extent that this is true, we can assume that our ancestors also knew it to be true. So, why do we want the Mother to destroy us?

Death. Kali and Her skulls. The answer is the Ego. Not the revenge of a spurned divinity, but the expression of a human sense of betrayal. From the man's point of view, especially, something like a loss of faith – the need for faith already the betrayal. Man discovers the Ego and finds guilt: the historical charade of the Father usurping the Mother. This of course is not the fault of the Ego itself, but of man's identification with the Ego, his desire to become the Ego, to become master of reality and all the rest. Kali tells us that this is a lie and that the Platonic man knows this.

And the Goddess Herself? Patient with our faults, wanting the best for us poor deluded incarnates. Is this true? The protective Mother, watching over us? Allowed this to be true, then ask the question: does She know better than we do? The mother as adult, we the child, vulnerable in an adult world. And yet. In Christian terms she merely intercedes for us with the Father. How would it be with the old Goddess? Isis? Isis cried for her husband. So Cybele? Cybele keeps her counsel. Diana? Diana loves; which is why she is the virgin. If you could turn to an ancient Goddess, who would you turn to? Better still: if you turned to a Goddess, why would you do this?

I would turn to Aphrodite. Allow that these names were bandied about, Isis becoming or representing this or that other divinity; Aphrodite becoming Venus becoming sex. Why Aphrodite? Simple. Aphrodite indicates transformation.

Such a long detour to find the thread I wanted. This is who the Mother is for us, not birth, transformation. The human mother might seem inadequate to this task, but that is what the Mother does. Actually, the Mother does not do transformation, she prepares you for it; hence the solicitude of the Mother.

The Mother cares for you in Hell.

Best now to draw the distinction between the role of the Mother and that of the woman as Midwife. It can be seen from Endnote 1 above that the woman as Midwife acts as a kind of container for the man's experiences. That this container is sited in the woman's Soul explains why she has no immediate awareness of the details of the man's experiences. This is because the woman shields herself from her Soul's activity by means of her Sophic Heaven – in order to limit the Ego's presence. It is important here to note that the woman does not act on the man in any way.

The same can be said of the Mother, but here the arena is not the Soul but the Will. To start with, the Mother is so called because this entity introduced the life germ, the source of all life in this universe. Two points here.

One. The question of the development of life in all its variety need not be answered here, if only because the end/destiny of life is important and its development of itself does not contribute to that end. What can be observed, though, is this: the role of life – all life – is functional, that is, every individual life either fits or it does not; if it does, good, if not, no matter. Life is both one dimensional and a matter of numbers.

Two. However, the relationship between life and the Will is both very important and very subtle. Life in a way can be seen as a single Will reflex repeated over and over. It differs from the Will here in that life is not an attempt to re-establish a previous condition. It also differs in that it has a material substrate; here life can be viewed as a kind of wave impulse propagating through matter. The Will, on the other hand, is never trapped in the material, though it will often seem to be.

The Mother can thus be seen as the instigator of this life impulse (incidentally, the question of the origin of life is of no importance either; only the end of life signifies). But while this life impulse has a Will aspect, the Mother entity has not, and cannot have, any hold on the Will. So how could the Mother set this impulse in motion? The answer here lies in the relations between the Will and the Soul, and between the Mother and the Soul.

For our purposes here, the Soul is the Body of Form, while the Will is the enabler, the only motive potential in the universe, though it is only a reflex, a recoil. Reality is a romance of Soul and Will, the Soul pressing and the Will responding. Life has its origin in neither, but seemingly wriggles through the multi-faceted interaction between Will and Soul, partaking of both – a single Will impulse and a single Form that blossoms like a flower. The secret of the Mother's role here lies in the end of life, as though the end already exists and simply draws everything towards it, the Mother the thread that draws. This is possible because the Mother knows what the end is, and knows this because She defined the end.

But the Mother cannot simply prepare the end – the material world is contingent, the interaction of the Same and Other ongoing, unpredictable, producing new matter perhaps, certainly chaotic though not entirely so, given the specific natures of the Same and the Other. In a way, the Mother is life itself, an insertion into matter that to an extent complements the Same/Will recoil from matter. But from another perspective – from the fundamental human awareness derived from the Ego – the Mother appears as a starry firmament, the stars here like the aura that surrounds the Fairy Godmother of fairy tales. This is a primitive vision, present to every young child, full of the promise that underlies all human strivings. What does this Godmother offer? Why, the simple guarantee of wholeness. This experience might resemble that granted by Beauty, but with this exception: Beauty draws us away from brute reality, the Godmother is a presence within that reality, active for us with reference to the end of human life. A convergence could be proposed here, Beauty and the Mother drawing closer through human history until the end is achieved, when the Mother can at last present us to the final encounter with the Perfect.

Yet this scenario does not get to the heart of the meaning of the Mother for us. There is a personal element in our relationship with the Mother that has not yet been expressed. A good approach to this aspect is to consider how the biological mother and the Mother relate. There is a moment upon the death of your mother when a particular vision is possible. Most never notice it, those who do most likely put it down to shock. Among other roles, the biological mother is like a moon that eclipses a sun, so that upon her death this sun lies revealed: a flash from which almost all will recoil. That sun is the Mother – or, rather, how the Mother appears to our mundane sensibility.

Return now to the biological mother. Are we tied to her or to the Mother? If you have had a relationship with a grandmother, especially your maternal grandmother, you could grasp something of the difference here. While your mother is like an origin, the grandmother is like an opening – that is the difference between your mother and the Mother. You see now why the mother eclipses the Mother: you would pine always to return; the imperfections of this world would be completely intolerable. You would wither and die.

But the opening the grandmother provides: how is that remembered? A dancer, all in white or perhaps naked, androgynous and self-absorbed, turning and turning. Is there such an image? The Mother and her Son, the dancer. See here how two very different archetypal images intersect: the Mother with her infant son; Isis and Horus; Mary and Jesus; the Mother and her dancing Son, the Mother receding into the shadows, always receding even as her Son turns and turns. The first image is primordial, how the divided Adam Kadmon was seen: the Sophic mother and her infant Male counterpart. The second image tells the future: the Mother fading because her work is done: her Son is the New Man, the Dancer turning and turning, uniting the Same and the Other in their perfection.

This is the gift of the Mother to us.

25 April 2015

Is any of this true? Who knows. You ask a question, you get an answer. If you asked a question, what kind of answer would you receive? Would it be true? How would you know?

You could only know if you knew why you asked the question. You see? The question you ask already contains the answer. In other words, the answer simply discloses the truth that is already in you.

Bonne chance.

Philip Matthews

Dublin

1.5.15

