“A Sane Mind, A Soft Heart, A Sound Body” September/October 2002—$5.00

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS THROUGH OCCULTISMTHE LAST ENEMY TO BE CONQUERED

LIFE AND FORMCURED BY ANGELIC VISITATION

A CHRISTIAN ESOTERIC MAGAZINE

“By its own weight, a body inclines

towards its own place. Weight does not

always tend towards the lowest place, but

towards its own place. A stone falls, but

fire rises. They move according to their

own weights, they seek their own places.

Oil poured into water rises to the surface;

water poured on oil sinks below the oil.

They act according to their own weights,

they seek their own places. Things out of

place are restless. They find their own

places, and then they rest.

My love is my weight. Whithersoever I

am moved, I am moved there by love. By

thy gift [dono tuo, the Holy Spirit], O Lord,

we are set on fire, and are borne aloft: we

burn, and we are on the way. We climb the

ascents that are in the heart....With thy

fire, with thy good fire, we burn and go on,

for we go up to the peace of Jerusalem.”

Front cover: Intimate Landscapes, Corel Professional Photos. Back cover: Planet Art. Above: Text from Augustine’s Confessions; picture from The Doré’s Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dover Pub., Inc.

This Issue...Feature

Wherein Lies Happiness...John Keats...................................................................2

EditorialWhatever It Takes..................................................................................................3

Readers’ ResponsesThe Incarnation Mystery—Four Viewpoints...Holly Cornell, Andre Morel,

Elsa Glover, Dan Antohe...........................................4Mystic Light

Pilgrim’s Progress Through Occultism...A. T. Savage..........................................6The The Speeding of a Thought...Agnes Cook...................................................11The Last Enemy to Be Conquered...Friedrich Rittelmeyer................................12Life and Form...C.W............................................................................................17Nature Spirits...Danielle Chavalarias..................................................................21Petitionary Prayer...C.E.S. Gunasekera...............................................................26

From Max Heindel’ s WritingsBut One Thing Is Needful...................................................................................29

Readers’ Questions“Pearls Are Not Whiter”; Capital Punishment....................................................31Alchemy and the Garden of Eden.......................................................................32

Western W isdom Bible StudySongs of Initiation...Corinne Heline...................................................................33

AstrologyOn This Firm Basis...M.B...................................................................................36Revelation...Bessie Leo.......................................................................................38Cured by Angelic Visitation...Max Heindel........................................................41An Allegory...Anonymous...................................................................................43White Light Astrology...Elman Bacher...............................................................45

Religion and the Public RealmBetween Beasts and God...Gilbert Meilander.....................................................48

Book ReviewsHappiness and Contemplation...C.W...................................................................55

Nutrition and HealthAn Invisible Helper’s Story...Max Heindel..........................................................56

HealingReleasing Our Inner Powers...V. May Cottrel.....................................................58

For ChildrenThe Discontented Spark...Grace Swensen..........................................................59Doctor Know-All...Grimm Brothers...................................................................60

MiscellaneousThe City of God (text quote)...St. Augustine..............................inside front coverViewpoints (poem)...Elsa Glover.........................................................................16On Prayer (text)...Max Heindel...........................................................................27An Astrologer’s Song...Rudyard Kipling............................................................37September/October 2002 Ephemerides..........................................................61-62

“A Sane Mind,A Soft Heart,

A Sound Body”© 2002 The Rosicrucian Fellowship

A Christian Esoteric Magazine

Established byMax Heindel

June 1913

Volume 94, No. 5

September/October—2002USPS 471080—ISSN 0744-432X

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Wherein lies happiness? In that which becksOur ready minds to fellowship divine,A fellowship with essence; till we shine,Full alchemized, and free of space. BeholdThe clear religion of heaven! FoldA rose leaf round thy finger’s taperness,And soothe thy lips; hist, when the airy stressOf music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,And with a sympathetic touch unbindsAeolian magic from their lucid wombs;Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;Ghosts of melodious prophesyings raveRound every spot where trod Apollo’s foot....Feel we these things?—that moment have

we steppedInto a kind of oneness, and our stateIs like a floating spirit’s. But there areRicher entanglements, enthrallments farMore self-destroying, leading, by degrees,To the chief intensity: the crown of theseIs made of love and friendship, and sits highUpon the forehead of humanity.All its more ponderous and bulky worthIs friendship; whence there ever issues forthA steady splendor: but at the tip-topThere hangs by unseen film, an orbed dropOf light, and that is love: its influence,Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,At which we start and fret; till in the end,Melting into its radiance, we blend,

Mingle, and so become part of it—Nor with aught else can our souls interknitSo wingedly. When we combine therewith,Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith,And we are nurtured like a pelican brood....

—John Keats, from Endymion

2 RAYS 02

Wherein Lies Happiness?

FEATURE

Painting on canvas (detail), Salvador Dali, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Sacrament of the Last SupperThe rite of the eucharist was instituted at the Last Supper tocommemorate the final Sacrifice to be made by Love incar-nate. In Church iconography Christ has been depicted sym-bolically as a pelican who feeds its young with its own blood.

IS THERE A PILL to alter my destiny, toimprove or cancel my karma? This is theunspoken assumption of some research sci-entists and others who seek new drugs to ridthe world of illness and debility. Implicit in

this noble intention is the belief that sickness andweaknesses are aberrations or miscues and thathumans are essentially victims of nature’s randomoperations. In this scenario, biochemists and geneti-cistsare modern white knights who will eventuallyslay the dragons of cancer and all the other insultsand assaults to which human flesh is heir.

Certainly we should do every reasonable thing inour power to reduce human sickness and suffering.But without real knowledge, the most concerted effortand however much money will achieve little of lastingvalue. Real knowledge includes understanding thelaw of cause and effect and realizing that the phys-ical body is the end product of thoughts, desires,and impulses arising in the mind and desire body.

If humans do not want to take full responsibilityfor their lives and bodies, if they expect doctorsand research scientists to offer magic bullets,elixirs, miracle cures, then they will have to paythe consequences of well-meaning but often inepttherapies and drugs whose side effects are notinfrequently more dangerous than the symptomsthey are formulated to treat.

For instance, while 87% of volunteers for newdrug programs participate expecting relief or cure,only 5% actually experience any improvement, andpart of that is attributed to the placebo effect.Drugs are a double-edged sword: Women take themto abort (kill) their babies, but one such drug haskilled the mother-in-the-making. While most drugsare taken to enhance life by mitigating pain orreducing the symptoms of disease, some drugs aretaken to stop life.

Our current culture has a love affair with drugs,licit and illicit. It’s about the manipulation of expe-rience, about producing body comfort on demand.This faith in chemicals and biologicals has dis-placed faith in what the Great Physician prescribesfor us through the unfolding of events, orchestratedby the Recording Angels, who give each of usexactly what we need for our optimum develop-ment. They, unlike the most earnest and sincere ofphysicians, are above mistakes. In other words,what humans experience in and as their uniquephysiology is not a mistake. This concept is notfamiliar to many and it is agreeable to even fewer.Why? It means we must live responsibly. It meansthat we inherit the effects of our prior actions andthoughts. While we carry our own self-made crosses,we would have others bear them. Many of us act asif blind fate has dealt us a bad hand. So we consultthe medical “authorities” for a remedy and sufferthe double consequence of the primary problemand the often ill effects of the solution.

Is there an alternative? Most certainly. As Christians,we accept our self-made lot. We made it, we bearit. We bear up under it. We may complain, we mayeven curse, in spite of ourselves, but we continuein life—for the duration. We refuse the temptationto turn the no of a defiant thought into the radicalno of an action that flaunts God’s will and uprootsthe life He gave us from the soil of its appointedearthly span. While humanity crucified Christ, weeach are our own Pilate, and inclined to accede tothe moment’s passion rather than choose the lumi-nous Truth. A sick man, Max Heindel reminds us,is a scoundrel in the act of being exposed. We areall scoundrels in the process of becoming betterpersons. We do this by claiming responsibility for ourlife and circumstance and in freely choosing to growin spirit and in truth—whatever it takes ❐

RAYS 02 3

Whatever It Takes

EDITORIAL

INCARNATION: The Life-Spirit will implantand ripen the facilities.I must say this particular subject inspires me

with such a love. I love everything about it. Yet,my answer to your* burning question is a waterysolution, maybe even a bit steamy.

About the Incarnation and how to solve it:maybe it is not to be solved. One must not solve it,but experience it. I’ve been to college and studiedphenomenology, which ever struggles to solvesuch problems. But the door is closed to phenom-enonlogists because one must be an initiate of suchmysteries to know them. They need faith andGod’s free grace to find what they are looking for.

This is when that “powerful intellect” is silencedby intuition. It is when pain and joy combine. It isa reaching of God, or Life Spirit, within us. Onecannot always take a straightforward linear approach,which tends to be the logical way to answer thisproblem, because it is not a problem to be solvedbut more likely an initiation to be experienced.

We must understand spirally, or, as I call it, withheart and mind weaving. For example, take a bookfrom the Old Testament, such as Song of Songs. Toread it from beginning to end is not the true way toread it. This would be only a beginning in under-standing it, just a lesson in concentrating on it.

I have found that when one starts weaving heartand mind, or perceiving in a spiral manner, thenone might start with the middle of the book, thengo to the end, and then go to the beginning again.It is then that the book comes alive and presentsitself in its spiritual form. The mind is a powerful

tool of focus, but it is in our hearts that Christ haswritten the answers to our problems.

This is my answer to you on how I am solvingthe problem, or as I am experiencing it. It is a liv-ing and breathing with the weaving, and it takesone to an intuitive knowing, yes painful, but sobeautiful that it is beyond words of joy.

I am doing this type of weaving while readingfrom the New Testament, with Ephesians wherethe “ambassador in chains” is helping me so muchto help you with this question, along with MaxHeindel and Corinne Heline.

Max Heindel tells us in his book RosicrucianChristianity Lectures, “We are evolving reason bythe activity of the Ego, which is the threefold Spiritacting solely through its outermost veil, theHuman Sprit, and in the Sixth Epoch the LifeSpirit will implant and ripen the facilities of intu-ition and love” (p. 337). “And God raised us upwith Christ and seated us with him in the heavenlyrealms in Christ Jesus”—Ephesians 2:6. ThankGod for The Incarnation of Christ Jesus.

—Holly Cornell

IN ORDER TO ACCOMPLISH his mission,Christ needed a physical vehicle to appear

among us like one of us.Jesus, a high initiate, had the best vehicles

(physical and vital) humanity could offer to Him. Ibelieve that at the Baptism Jesus surrendered hisphysical and vital body and Christ took possessionof them as a discarnate entity takes possession ofthe vehicles of a medium.

Mediumship is certainly wrong, but for sucha noble cause, for our Salvation, I don't see any-thing wrong with the way our Saviour entered our

4 RAYS 02

The Incarnation Mystery—Four Viewpoints

READERS’ RESPONSES

*The three statements in this section are responses to thearticle written by Dexter Christianson on the IncarnationMystery that appeared in the May/June 2002 Rays.

physical world.Christ said: There is no greater love than to give

his life for his friend. —Andre Morel

CONCERNING the question of whether thenature of Christ-Jesus was divine, or human,

or part divine and part human: In mythology, thedifference between divine and human beings isthat the divine are immortal and the human aremortal. There are also semi-divine beings whohave both humans and one or more gods in theirlineage, who are mortal, but also have greatstrengths. When myths are interpreted, however,all of the characters represent aspects of each of us.Thus, we all have immortal parts and mortal parts.If we are to become heroes, the immortal parts ofour being must unite with and work together withthe mortal parts. It is thus reasonable to assumethat Christ-Jesus (along with all the rest of us) hada human part and a divine part.

Concerning the relation of Christ to Jesus duringthe three years of ministry: Max Heindel’s argu-ment is reasonable: Christ, the highest initiate ofthe Archangels, had never previously built physi-cal and etheric bodies and therefore needed to useJesus’physical and etheric bodies, which, in com-monterminology, could be called spirit possession.This does not bother me for the following reason:

Prior to initiation (unification of the self-consciousness with the All-consciousness), theRecording Angels maximize our opportunities forspiritual evolution by (among other things) helpingus enter or leave manifestation when it is best forus to do so. If we are not initiates and by our ownchoice let discarnate entities take control of ourbodies, then we are letting the discarnate entitiesenter manifestation when they should not be man-ifested and we are ourselves withdrawing frommanifestation when we should be in manifestation.Thus, we hinder the work of the Recording Angels inpromoting the evolution of both the spirit controlsand ourselves. The situation is different, however,for initiates. They have the ability to see the stateof their and other peoples’souls and thus are qual-ified to make their own decisions about when it isbest to enter or leave manifestation.

For non-initiates, periodically entering intomanifestation is necessary because initiation ofactions is difficult when one is out of manifesta-tion. But there comes a point for initiates whenincarnation becomes optional, because they havesufficiently developed their self-consciousness thatthey are able to continue to initiate actions whenout of manifestation. Thus, to choose to spendsome time out of manifestation may sometimes beappropriate for them.

Thus, although non-initiates should operate underthe mandate that they should not let any outsidespirits enter and control their bodies, initiates shouldbe free to use their own judgment in such matters.

Jesus, presumably, was an initiate and was ableto understand the intent and needs of the Christ andthe role he (Jesus) could play in facilitating theincarnation of the Christ, and also his own evolu-tionary needs and thus could make a well-consid-ered decision as to whether he would let the Christuse his physical and etheric bodies.

—Elsa Glover

IHAVE FOUND no other place in literaturewhere the Christian Mystery of Incarnation is

explained so clearly, so kindly, with such heart,and capable of being understood by all as in TheRosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by (with greatrespect I write his name) Mister Max Heindel.

I would like to praise the author of the article“The Incarnation Mystery” for the conclusion heexpresses on page 12: “Perhaps we don’t haveenough information. Perhaps this writer misunder-stands the information. Perhaps most of us misun-derstand and have not taken the time to think itout...”

Bearing these comments in mind I would like toadd two mottos I think fit well with another pointof view:

“Too much education—not enough understand-ing!”

“Explanation is for the mind. Inspiration andvision are for the soul.”

Jesus said: “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them

be afraid.”—John 14:27—Dan Antohe

RAYS 02 5

FOR SOME TWO THOUSAND yearsmany schools, both orthodox and het-erodox, have sought to convey the fullmeaning of the word Christian. The stateof the world today, in all departments of

human relationship, would indicate that a completeunderstanding has not yet been widelygiven outand that the need for it has never been greater.

Orthodox Christianity does not call for greatindividual effort and is largely dependent uponprecedent for its authority. Orthodox religiousthought, orthodox scientific thought, and orthodoxphilosophic or occult thought all conduct theiractivities, by definition, along established lines,adequately serving the majority of persons. Thespiritual pioneers, those who more energeticallyseek to know and live life’s fundamental truths,require more than what is disseminated throughtraditional institutions. The pioneer probes deeperinto reality and discerns more with a compassion-ate heart and an intrepid mind.

The materialist stresses his physical body. Infact, it is who he is. So he favors it. But if he meanswell and wants to live right, he does not indulgehis body. It must be conditioned and made sensi-tive and responsive to impacts coming from thephysical world, the only one he recognizes andbelieves in. The materialist engages in little activi-ty pertaining to his emotional or mental bodies,except as that activity relates to his physical needsand provides for his material comfort.

After a time he will feel that something about hislife is lacking and he may join one of the orthodoxreligious denominations, hoping to benefit himself

thereby. Now he is known to the world at large asa Christian, from which fact he derives, for a time,a degree of satisfaction. Here his emotional natureis worked upon in what proves to be a rather uncer-tain manner. Again he may soon feel that some-thing is wrong with him or with his place in thescheme of things. He has been told that there is aheavenly life after this mortal existence and he isthereby given a hope for better things to come. Butthe moment he forms the thought that somethingdefinite might be known about the hereafter, he isgiven a rather wide berth by the orthodox commu-nity, for its doctrines teach to leave well enoughalone. Thus he feels his first pangs of religiousloneliness.

So he makes another move. He looks for answerselsewhere. He may leave the halls of emotionalism

6 RAYS 02

Pilgrim’s ProgressThrough Occultism

MYSTIC LIGHT

Engraving, William Blake, from For Children: The Gates of Paradise, 1793, British Museum

Aged IgnoranceHis eyes closed, his spectacles of no value, his back to therising sun, the elder is about to clip the wings of youthfulvision which is open to flights of imagination and intuition.

and turn to the religion of the mind. He discoversthat he can learn to improve his mind and strength-en its cognitive powers. But since the physical andemotional aspects of human existence are not con-sidered, once more he turns away, again feelingthat something is wrong but not knowing what it is.

By this time he has at least a passing interest inthe existence of invisible worlds and he begins toexplore one or another of the negative occultschools. Things begin to look promising and a realenthusiasm is awakened in him. He satisfies him-self that there is a hereafter and that a connectionwith it may be made while one is still on earth. Buthe eventually learns that he is involved in mediu-mistic practices consisting of attempts to contactdubious spirit entities by negative methods. Thesemethods do not proceed from any constructiveplan, they do not improve his character or makehim a better person. Indeed, passivity is empha-sized. He is given no responsibility to carry posi-tive projects forward to completion. He has seensomething, but it is yet a thing apart from him. Hecan find no way to satisfy his need to be construc-tive and creative and to better accomplish what isfundamentally good.

So he looks elsewhere. After leaving the schoolsof mediumship and phenomenalism behind him,our friend the truth-seeker will more than likelytake up the work of one of the Eastern occultschools. He learns many valuable things here, suchas the fact that he is not his bodies, visible or invis-ible; that there is a law of rebirth, which explainssomething of his greater destiny; that the law ofcause and effect ever redirects him away from hismany mistakes back onto the right path; and thathe himself is of some importance in God’s uni-verse. He is given much information concerningthe path he has taken to date. He is given someinformation about the future and his place in it. Buteven here he is not shown how to shoulder respon-sibility in this School. He is obliged to deciphermany concepts formulated in the older languagesof Eastern origin. It is all good. But it also puzzleshim the more he tries to work with it, until finallyhe despairs of understanding it correctly and com-pletely, and so he gradually separates himself from it.

By this time our friend has become convinced

that there is a tremendous Something Definiteback of all this intricate structure that he has beeninvestigating. He wants to go behind the scenesand see what it is that lives in this garment ofoccultism, as it were. Throughout his pilgrimagehe has been forming himself into an ever moreefficient discoverer and investigator of truth. Thereis needed but the lamp of discrimination by whichhe may find the reality that lives in Truth and thefinal success of our friend is assured— provided hepersists in his search.

But hold! We have at last given him somethingto do. Surely this is a simple commission that allmay undertake with confidence and safety. Lifecommands that we be doers, not mere speculatorsor dreamers. So now our friend is intent on becom-ing more of a doer, a co-worker with life, in orderto develop discrimination and discover reality.

In time he finds his way into one of the WesternMystery Schools whose key principle is the Ego’sspiritual growth whereby it increasingly manifestsits latent divinity.

Right here in the Mystery School our friendmakes a new beginning. He is promptly shown thatGod exists in the world of form. It is easier tospeak of things than to explain them. Orthodoxyspeaks of them. The Mystery Schools explainthem. It is this power to explain life’s mysteries interms that win the consent of the reasoning mindthat distinguishes these teachings from the theolo-gies of orthodox schools. Our friend learns thatGod has a Great Plan, and he is shown his placeand assignment therein. He becomes a willing andenthusiastic co-operator with God in the greatwork of life.

Growth of the total person in esotericChristianity finds an analogy in the educationalmethods of the East, where the pupil searches forand commits himself to a Master. In the WesternSchool, the student or personality—comprising themind, emotional body, etheric body, and the phys-ical body—pledges its obedience to and trust in theMaster of its higher Self, whose counsel is alwayswise and helpful. We all have within us this higherMaster nature. And we have the lesser self, whichlikes to be comfortable, runs after whims, falselights, side issues, and, like an undisciplined child,

RAYS 02 7

may get into all sorts of trouble. When thelower nature resolves to become the obedientservant of the Higher Nature, it shows its firstspark of wisdom. Thereafter the Higher Natureor God within ever labors to fan that spark intoa brighter flame.

Properly understood, Christianity is designedto organize, purify, and transmute all of thebodies of man, as well as to assist him in devel-oping his latent forces. This refining process isa spiritual operation.

Self-purification must precede the deeperwork of the Mysteries. Only highly purifiedbodies can sustain the spiritual impacts sentthrough them by the Master within. Even thefirst impacts of these higher energies give thespiritual aspirant a sense that he is dealing witha holy Power. And when he has evolved to con-sciously register the greater currents of inter-planetary Cosmic Life he realizes that he hasbeen wise indeed to have committed himself toa program of thoroughly cleansing his physicalbody, emotions, and thoughts.

When our friend associated with the variousnegative schools of occultism, he was instruct-ed how to direct refining influences to one andthen another of his bodies. No one strategyworked with all of his bodies together in a bal-anced manner as do the methods of the ChristianMystery School, and that was exactly what wastroubling him during his long and necessary pil-grimage through these other schools. So be had tolook elsewhere to find a greater measure of wis-dom to apply to himself and his problems. .

Our friend is taught in the Christian MysterySchool how to so conduct his inner and outer lifethat he can advance in esoteric learning. When hedoes the necessary work he causes the latent sensecenters of his desire body to become active, thusproviding a means for super-physical investiga-tion. He may then plainly see the shortened wave-length light of the Desire World and the forms itreveals. It strikes unimpeded straight through thephysical planet far more easily than ordinary sun-light penetrates clear air. Really, it is all perfectlysimple. Ordinary daylight does not reveal desireforms to physical sight because it is a vibration in

ether. We are blind to the finer forms until we usethe right kind of revealing agency.

The Christian Mystery School enables our friendto learn the facts concerning Jesus and the Christ.Spiritual sight is a normal possession of the Initiateof the Mysteries. Mary and Joseph were bothInitiates. The Ego of Jesus attached itself to theaura of Mary, its future mother, several yearsbefore its intended conception. Instances areknown of this attachment as much as twenty yearsbefore birth and often well before the future moth-er has even thought about marriage. The intendedincarnation is directed by the Great Ones from thehigher worlds which interpenetrate the physicalworld. Mary and Joseph could see the incoming Egoof Jesus and sense its high vibration, and they wereinstructed as to its mission. So they married andprovided Jesus with a new physical body as a meansof aiding humanity. There is nothing unnatural in

8 RAYS 02

Engraving, Michael Maier (c.1568-1622), Atalanta fugiens, Oppenheim, 1618

According to some, Count Michael Maier was “the most learnedscientist of his time.” He was responsible for making the Rosicruciandocuments Famaand Confessiowidely known on the Continent.Maier taught that real knowledge results from combining nature,reason, experience, and study, “the four wheels of the philosoph-ical chariot.” Thus, the above illustration is not what it might appearto be, a satire, but rather direct visual symbolism: The footprints(designs) of nature are the pioneers, guiding and encouraging thequest for truth; the man’s walking stick represents reason; experi-ence provides the spectacles that correct vision; and the lanternrepresents the study of transmitted wisdom, which gives light.

Archives of A

lexander Roob

the whole matter. Certainly God would be the lastone to break His own laws in providing means forbody building in any of His worlds of form.

The Cosmic Spirit Christ entered and took pos-session of the physical and etheric bodies of Jesusat the time of the Baptism and the vehicles of ourplanet at the time of the Crucifixion. Thus Christpossessed a chain of vehicles reaching all the wayfrom man to God. Then He became the Messiah.But at the Crucifixion He was lost to our world ofmen, as far as use of a physical body was con-cerned, because at that time He entered the planet’sinterior. Now He is directing Earth as its Ego. Heis both a personal and a planetary savior. He ishelping us to use our etheric bodies as vehicles ofconsciousness and expression. When a sufficientnumber of humanity have developed spiritually soas to warrant His return, He will reappear in theetheric body of Jesus which has been preserved forHim, and take direct charge of human evolution.

The Mystery student’s increased understandingof the nature of Christ resolves most perceived dif-ferences between the orthodox and esotericChristianity. Seeming contradictions in all depart-ments of life may usually be overcome by deter-mining whether the question relates to the life sideof Nature or to the form side. Most students oforthodoxy have only learned to think in terms ofthe world of physical form, and so they becomequite tangled up in trying to understand andexplain matters pertaining to the life side of Naturementioned in the Bible. In one sentence Scripturemay be referring to the world of form and in thenext it may be referring to the worlds of life as inthe two Genesis accounts of creation.

Man possesses several bodies: the dense physi-cal body, the etheric, the emotional, and the men-tal. The etheric body is really a superphysical bodyin the correct sense of the word. It is composed offour grades of ether. The lowest is the chemicalether, which governs assimilation and excretion inthe physical world. The next is called the life ether,having to do with reproduction. The third is thelight ether, which is the medium of sense percep-tion, internal heat, and color. The highest orreflecting ether is the vehicle of memory. The thirdand fourth ethers play an vital role in the Christian

type of development.The Christian works along occult lines diametri-

cally opposite to the methods used in the schoolsof negative occultism. The only phenomena that heis interested in are the processes of soul growth bywhich he acquires soul power, soul light, and soullife, thereby becoming ever more useful as a co-worker with God. He is too busy serving to paymore than passing attention to such things as spir-it materialization and similar antics.

While our friend was investigating other occultschools, he was invited to develop along lines thatwere relatively easy but negative. Occult develop-ment depends primarily upon creating energy path-ways. The easy way to complete a circuit of humanmagnetism or life energy is to enlist the aid of like-minded others. So our friend joined hands with hisfellows in a circle to combine their ethers for spir-it materialization. Outside aids are also used, suchas incense, which provides an embodying sub-stance for disembodied spirits. Grave dangersattend mediumistic practices, including obsession.A great loss of the medium’s vitality usuallyaccompanies materializations, due to the drainingof his life energy.

This type of occult practice does not requirepurification of the vehicles or the development ofwill and self-discipline. If too great a stream ofpsychic energy is sent through the vehicles of theunfortunate medium, he may easily become unableto care for himself. Similarly, a light bulb or elec-trical device may short out if the voltage flowing inthe circuit is higher than what the wiring or fila-ment are able to carry.

The Christian occultist will not attempt anyinner development that relies principally on the aidof another. He stands alone, operating, not specu-lating, through his own power and under the super-vision of his own will. This method is slower thanthat in group endeavors, but the net results aresurer and more permanent. The aspirant has no“off” days and is therefore able to be of maximumuse in helping to implement God’s Plan. The writeradvises all readers of this article to reject foreverall forms of negative development as dangerousand unworthy of the attention of a Christianoccultist. In fact, one cannot cultivate negative

RAYS 02 9

practices and be a true Christian because they areof no lasting benefit to himself or to humanity. Inaddition, he must undo what he has done before hecan proceed on the positive path, which is thehigher way.

Christ Jesus did not tell us to be negative. Hetold us to do things. He told us to do unto otherswhat we would have others do unto us. That is any-thing but negative. Let our lower nature do untothe Higher Nature what it would have the HigherNature do unto it. Let them cooperate within ourindividual being to promote spiritual growth.Members of Mystery Schools are shown how,through loving service and unremitting self-con-trol, they may open new vistas and gain morepower to function in their inner cosmos. This isvastly different from relying on external aids andconstitutes an essential difference between Christianand non-Christian development.

The Christian gradually builds a soul body, theGolden Wedding Garment, in which he may travelinto and about our planet with the speed of lightand operate as a “Free Mason.” Is this “OperativeMasonic Craft?” Yes, indeed. In building the soulbody the Christian occultist attracts and weaveslarge quantities of the light and reflecting ethersinto his etheric body. He does not deplete his vital-ity in this activity as does the medium. Moreover,he must purify his desires and develop altruismbefore he can use his soul body. He fashions thisnew body by aligning himself with God’s will tosupport Life as it seeks to manifest in all of cre-ation’s innumerable forms. This love-labor is pri-marily done by the Life Spirit. When we live theChristian life the Life Spirit becomes active andbegins to build a suitable body through which itcan function.

Many people do not like the word occultismdue to a misunderstanding of the term. Christianoccultism, or any other type of authentic occultism,is devoted to the proper use of the forces requiredfor building our finer vehicles. It does not dabblein producing psychic phenomena or seek to nega-tively influence others, though the term is usuallyassociated with these practices. The Christ within,the Life Spirit, will come into fully consciousoccupancy of its individual human temple when

we will make it a suitable habitation for Him. Our friend, whose development we have been

following, purifies all of his vehicles as stated.Then gradually the creative force begins to rise inthe spine. This threefold spiritual energy is sym-bolized by the three-legged tripod of the DelphianOracle, and the three-stranded rope mentioned inEastern writings, which is thrown into the regionsabove, uncoiling as it goes, enabling the man toclimb to the home of the gods. In the East thisenergy is called the Kundalini. In the West it iscalled the Spear (of Life), the spear used byParsifal and abused by Klingsor. It is also theSpinal Spirit Fire of the Western Initiates of theFlame, the Rosicrucians. When active it may be

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The Oracle of Apollo at DelphiWhile the positive clairvoyant attains to a voluntary percep-tion of the supersensible worlds “from above,” the priestesstied on the seat atop the golden tripod was enveloped in fumesrising from telluric depths, which served as a medium for spir-it messages. The cave (the Greek delphos means womb) wasbelieved to be the lair of the serpent Python, and the fumes wereemanations from its decaying body, further confirming the pythi-anoracle as a negative manifestation of the serpent power.

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felt as a gentle heat rising in the spine, giving asense of immense power.

The movement of this energy causes the blos-soming of the seven symbolical buds on the Rod ofAaron, the flowering or leafing out of the Masonicsprig of acacia, the opening of the chakras or lotusbuds of the Eastern aspirant, and of the RosicrucianRoses on the Cross. We find this vitalenergy depicted in the occult lore ofall lands. It passes upward throughthe heart and into the head, whereit passes through the pinealgland and pituitary body. Thispathway is also symbolizedby the beads of the Catholicrosary; for the truth has beenin the world at all times, gen-erally unknown, but alwaysavailable to the Initiate.

When this energy completesits circuit in the brain, it makespossible a conscious birth into the

spiritual worlds. He who follows theChristian Path of Initiation is building the vehi-cles of the Adept, which will enable him to travel

with the instantaneous speed of thought throughall the worlds of our universe in conducting the

business of our heavenly Father. ❐—A. T. Savage

THE SPEEDING OFA THOUGHT

“He sought for others the good he desired forhimself. Let him pass on.”

—Egyptian Vale for the dead, 1600 B.C.

From the Logos at the heart of the universe theresped a beam of light. It was a thought of love. Iwatched its lightning-like flash through the worlds—heavenly, mental, desire and physical, and this iswhat I saw.

The dwellers in Heaven, already enjoying therhapsody of a great Love felt its presence and a crywent up “Glory to God in the highest.”

And it touched the dwellers in the world ofIntellect, and called new powers into their being,and great thought-waves took on a rosy tinge as

minds once more bent themselves to services oflove in the cause of humanity’s uplift.

As the starry abode of our radiant soul bodieswas lit up by its sword-like flame, I saw eachmember enveloped in a glow, the dull colors of thelower passions were consumed in its fires, andthen—Human hove became angelic and desire

burnt at white heat to serve the GreatBrotherhood.

Finally, now split up as in aprism, the flame of a Divine

Thought enveloped in radi-ance the earth-dwellers,according to their severalpaths.

Thus—the disciples ofDevotion became a focus forvapors of glorious blue-green,

those of the mystic ray takinga share of Heaven’s Azure.Artists and musicians, reveling

in beauty, received a baptism of rosyred flames—each one an inspiration.

And I could see many philosophers and seek-ers in cloister, laboratory, or library, solitarily pur-suing an everlasting quest, and these seemed to bein the direct ray of sunshine caused by the yellowvibration, and with songs of hope in their hearts,they bent once more to their several tasks.

Others of god-like radiance, in whom I coulddiscern those on the “way of the cross,” were hew-ing out paths for weaker brethren through endlessforest tangles, some of them finding precariousand painful foothold on precipitous cliffs. Andthese looked up in ecstasy as a fountain of violetspray descended upon their bleeding brows, a bap-tism of Divine Fire.

And they began to sing, and the burden of thesong was of a glorious future, yet not a future buta condition in which time, space, past, present andto come were all one, when all will live in the eter-nal Now—gathering and harvesting experiences oflove and service to a great brotherhood whichincludes the lowliest herb and meanest insect, andstretches far away into the heart of the Universewhere dwells the Logos—The Spirit of Love. ❐

—Agnes Cook

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WE HAVE NOW REACHEDthe crowning point of ourexer-cises for the will—Christ at thegrave of Lazarus. From deathHe wrests life. This is the sum-

ming up of all struggles. From sickness, healthmust be won; from sin, resurrection; from need,love; from weakness, faith; from darkness, light.From behind all these worlds, death gazes at us, asthe end of all. If life is wrested from it, that is as if“heaven” were brought to earth. With this, the newpower of willing began for us, therefore this sev-enth deed of Christ is really the summing up andthe climax of Christ’s work.

Christ at the grave of Lazarus. Today there arestill many people who do not know what to makeof the “miracle” of an awakening of the dead. Letthem first give heed to the little details of the story(John 11): How Christ is deeply moved with sor-row for His friend, and yet immediately attacksdeath; how the gravity of the hour appals Him, andyet He does not for a moment recoil; how Hereceives into His soul the mood of the mourners,and at the same time speaks in words which bearwithin them great cosmic decisions; how He feelsthe individual event strongly, and yet with highresolve looks into the eyes of the enemy of thehuman race; how He carries His friend in His soul,and yet is full of light from the Father; how Heleads everything step by step towards the finaldecision; how He, in the full power of the con-

queror, opposes Himself to death. All this isalready a picture which works on us so powerfullythat it awakens the last and best powers of ourwill—whatever attitude one may take up to thestory. One must not allow oneself to be weakenedin the study of this picture by having in one’s mindthe esoteric conception that here an initiation istaking place which leads over from the old myster-ies into the new time. For Lazarus was dead andwould have remained dead, had Christ not come. Itis a triumph of Christ’s power of life which we arepermitted to witness.

If we look at Christ as He stands before us in thestory, it is as if a prisoner in our souls hears the voiceof his liberator; as if the Gospel were continued in

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The Last Enemy to BeConquered

MYSTIC LIGHT

This is the 19th in a series of articles taken from FriedrichRittelmeyer’s Meditation, Guidance of the Inner Life, pub-lished by Floris Books, Edinburgh. Reprinted with permission.

Tempera on wood panel, Luca di Tommè (1355-1389), Vatican Picture Gallery

The Raising of LazarusSpeaking the Word of power, for in Him is life, Christ echoesthe act of Genesis Jehovah and Lazarus inspires new life. Toprotect at birth and death, Jews swaddled the physical body.

us; as if the call, “Lazarus, come forth!” soundedinto the grave of our own being, and deep within itsomething which we ourselves did not know wasthere seeks to arise. An overwhelming love forChrist, for this Christ, can then stir in our souls. Wefeel that He is quite different from that which wehad till now thought Him to be; more of a con-queror, more mighty in His strength, more majes-tic. This man or none—so our soul tells us—is thevictor over death, the liberator of men who live “in darkness and in the shadow of death,” the kingof humanity. We feel in every limb to what battlebetween Christ and the powers of the enemy weare called by Him. We feel—this is the battle forman.

When we build up before us this picture for ourmeditation in its great principal features, we see inLazarus man himself lying in the grave. It isindeed the end of the individual life, it is the end ofhumanity—if Christ is not there. The sicknessunder which humanity suffers leads to death—andyet does not lead to death. The stone lies upon thegrave. In this stone we see the picture of matter.Novalis uttered the remarkable saying, “The earthhas hardened into stone out of fear for men.” Thatthe world seems to us so heavy, so dark, so impen-etrably material, comes about because man hashimself sunk down into matter. In Egypt once, asman sank more and more into this material earthlyexistence, they raised the stone upwards, as aprayer. Upon the same stone Mount Sinai fur-nished from its spurs, the stone with which theEgyptians raised their massive buildings, Moseswrote the divine commandment. But the Mosaiclaw itself lay like a stone upon mankind. “Whowill take away the stone from the door of thisgrave?” That was humanity’s question. All this,when we have brought it to life with feeling in ourconsciousness, lives in the picture we are studying.Round about this grave is mourning, the mourningof the world. We have already seen how doubt,Martha, and sorrow, Mary, are the two guardiansof the world-grave.

Then Christ appears. We see Him as we havebefore described Him. From the heights of theworlds to the depths of the earth sounds the call:“Lazarus, come forth!” He says that, who can say

of Himself, “I am the resurrection and the life!”We ourselves arise out of the earthly grave. Weunite ourselves to Him. We now stand with Himover against the grave. With Him we feel: Deathought not to be! Death in all its thousand formsmust be vanquished! Into every corner of our beingwe fill ourselves with this divine willing! We shallbe resurrection! We shall be awakeners!

At the end of our three series of studies we haveagain come to the resurrection. That is in accor-dance with the spirit of John’s Gospel. That is inaccordance with the will of Christ Himself. “Thereshall be no more death.” “The last enemy that shallbe destroyed is death.”

It will certainly come once again that man willbe able to awaken the dead. If already, the bringingof air, the outward stimulation of movement, theshaking of the body can call a man back to life,why should not the power of the spirit be able to doit—the power of the life which streams towardshim? Certainly it will be possible only in excep-tional cases. But can one not see the beginningsthere already? It can happen that joy may send tothe dying a power which fills them with new life.It can happen that in crises which are alreadydetermined towards death the victory is won by thespiritual strength of a man. It can happen that asick person, who according to all medical rulesought to be dead, can be kept alive, or can keephimself alive, by inward forces of health. That isnot much. But were we so to enter the sick-room,the room of the dying, that we were filled to over-flowing with life, if Christ’s power of resurrectionitself were within us, then we should experiencewonderful things. We should often have theimpression that death was flying before his victor,whom he had recognized. But even if his preycould not be torn from him outwardly, he wouldwithdraw as victor with worthless booty, and tri-umphal music would fill the room.

We may leave to the future that which man willyet experience in this way. But our meditation willstrengthen in us the consciousness that man maynot give up his arms in front of death, but muststand upright before death, must dare in the face ofdeath, if he is to be man in the full sense of theword.

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What we are first able to do, certainly able to do,is to beat down death within ourselves. Let us notbelieve that this has already happened when wehave a general hope beyond the grave. It becomespossible, however, if we call death again and againto be our companion. That which many painters ofearlier times, that which Boecklin represents in hisportrait of himself, that we should have deathbeside us and make him our inspirer, that is theway to release ourselves from him—and him fromus.

“Death is the means in nature’s hands by whichit may have the most possible of life.” This sayingof Goethe is beyond Buddha’s power to say,because it is only possible upon Christian ground.It was spoken of the thousandfold dying of nature.It must yet be recognized in its meaning for theinward life. When the last remnant of life has beenwrung from death, then death can really enter intoits rest. Death wishes to be the “friend” of man, notonly when upon the death-bed he puts an end to thesorrows of life.

Mighty feelings of triumph are developed inman by death. He gives us concentrated power oflife. The enemy, Death, becomes our friend in Life.To him who knows himself ready at any momentto pass over, quite freely, into the other world assoon as destiny calls, and who goes over the earthfeeling: “During the next hour, the bullet of a mur-derer may hit me. Then, not because a human will,but because a divine will enters into my life, Iwould throw aside my body, and go freely into theother world: “to him death has become a “freedeath” in a higher sense than Nietzsche meant. Forhim victory resounds throughout his life. For himdeath and the transitoriness of this world are onlythe means of gaining true life. He returns uncon-quer-able to the earth, with an exalted feeling offreedom.

All this slumbers in the depths of our meditation.We cannot gain these heights in life more certain-ly than when we unite ourselves with the victor’swill that makes Lazarus a John. We see inwardlyinto Christ, Who afterwards Himself brokethrough death.

But still more rests in our meditation. WhenChrist says, “Let the dead bury the dead, but go

thou and proclaim the kingdom of God,” one seesclearly that He felt the living around Him to bedead. The saying concerning the kingdom of Godis a call to life which sounds into the kingdom ofthe dead. We do not exist simply to continue toexist personally after death, but chiefly to conquerdeath. Deceitful appearances of life conceal deatheverywhere. Painted in the colors of life the deadgo about in the world. All this death, which we seein countless forms upon the earth, calls for life.When we fill ourselves to the brim with thestreams of life, when we go into the world as lifeitself embodied, then we shall rightly see this deathin its thousand changes of dress, and go to meet itas the call to life.

Again we may look at East and West in order toawake to the greatness of our calling. In the Eastthey saw death with sublime clearness. In all thebloom of life lurks the germ of destruction. Thisview of the awakened East is deeper than the viewof the West. But the will of the West is more in theright than the will of the East.

In the East they wish to escape from the earthwhose ruler is death. In the West they wish notthemselves, but death, to be taken from the earth.

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To wrest the most from life, we seek to live beyond appear-ances, keeping in mind the light behind both birth and death.

Osho International F

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But death is attacked by completely inad-equate means. They fight with rejuvenat-ing methods and hygiene. They fight fee-bly with all kinds of attempts to turndeath aside. They will not face death, orthey push him away as long as they can.To see what the East sees, to will whatthe West wills, but to be able to do whatEast and West cannot do: that is our mis-sion.

It is an awakening of the dead alsowhen in life we summon ourselves againto see in every man his spiritual being,when we look through the form, the bear-ing, the words of a man to his real ego.Even for this is required more spiritualpower and unwearied will to life than wecan usually summon up in our lives. Inour meditation we shall grow into thiswill and into this power. We shall thenexperience that men feel for the first timethat they are being rightly treated by us.

We have reached a further height whenwe go with awakening power throughnature. We see in it not death, but thespirit; not the earthly kind, but the divineimage; not what passes away, but a mes-sage from higher kingdoms. Every plantcan be so regarded. We shall not reachthis by a single resolve. In one single walk we canguess at it. But we can strengthen ourselves for thisand exercise ourselves in it, if at times we callplants also into our meditation—look at a rose, alily spiritually, and listen for the revelation whichcomes to us in them. If we then go out into nature,it will often be as if a rejoicing over redemptionpassed through the world, as if the world around uswould become such as lives in the spiritual world,as if we ourselves walked in Paradise. Christ is theawakener of the dead. We ought to have thecourage to be this with Him as strongly as we can.

There is one sphere especially in which we mustnot let death have any influence—that of ourdeparted. Now we stand before a question which ismost often put: What can we do for our dead inmeditation?...

Here some introductory remarks only will be

made. One should always draw near to one’s deadin a mood of solemn restfulness, not with restlesswishes or in an egotistical mood, but in thankful-ness that they have existed. This will best comeabout if one remembers the hours when one waswith them in quiet human friendliness. The basicfeeling ought to be: live peacefully there lookingupwards. I shall fight my way through upon earth.From me shall naught come to thee but love, whichbears thee up from below when thou art livingtowards the light above. Only as good shall thislove be around thee. I will tell thee not of my trou-bles, but of the joys which I have experienced, ofthe spiritual good that has come to me. Such loveis like a bridge of light which we build to the dead,upon which we can come to them and they to us.

First of all, a feeling of community with themwill arise. We shall feel ourselves near to them in

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Fresco, Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Museo di San Marco, Florence

Christ in LimboChrist the Awakener, the Overcomer, gives power to the living and the dead.Limbo, depicted as a subterranean rock fortress, suggests the dense phys-ical dimension from which the Christed etheric forces liberate the Spirit.

the night, when the noise of the day within us andaround us is silent. We shall wake in the morningwith the feeling as if we had been united with themand had walked with them in high places. Then weshall sometimes have the feeling of their nearnessduring the day. Perhaps when we turn our attentionto this feeling, it will have already gone away. Butthe feeling that they help us is such a wonderfulenrichment of our life that even a few presenti-ments of this kind change it wholly. We learn toknow a depth, a nearness and beauty of fellowshipof which we had previously been unconscious. Anunheard-of future for humanity arises before oursight, in which life is passed in a working togetherof the living with the dead, and of the dead with theliving.

The opposite of this occurs in spiritualisticseances, sultry, ghostly, and demonic. The medi-ums do not reach our dead, because they them-selves pass into a lower condition of soul life, intoa half-conscious or unconscious twilight condi-tion, while our dead live in brighter fullness of life.Thus the mediums come only into the kingdomwhere are the sheaths which our dead have laidaside. Therefore they bring from thence onlyabsurd phrases which tell us nothing, mixed per-haps with memories of the past life, and vagueimaginings. If we really reached our dead throughthese mediums, these egotistical questions andwishes for the dead would be only a severe distur-bance and injury to them in the tasks they nowhave. There is indeed a way of questioning thedead, but it is to send them our questions in perfectquietude, as we go to sleep in the evening and toseek to feel on awakening in the morning theanswer that is in our souls. All this should be inthat pure sphere we have described above: “ I amthe door.”

If we should succeed in feeling that death isnothing in respect of our friends who have gone,and that we live on with them as with people whohave not gone away, but have gone before us, sothat we bear them in a pure world of life within oursouls, then we shall have the impression that bythis attitude we are helping them. Even when wecan find no special relationship to them in details,yet if we let their form, their look, their voice, their

best selves live and work in our remembrance, weshall have the experience of a higher form of fel-lowship. We make no distinction between livingand dead. We know living who are dead, and deadwho are alive. Since we often feel the existence ofthe dead more purely and strongly than the exis-tence of the living, we give to them actually thepossibility of sharing our life. We awake the dead.Our meditation helps us to this. ❐

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Viewpoints

Man feels his own pain.

God feels everyone’s pain.

Man is selfish.

God is love.

Man sees the body.

God sees the Spirit.

Man sees the mortal.

God sees the immortal.

Man sees effects without cause.

God sees the hidden causes.

Man sees chance.

God sees conscious purpose.

Man sees actions contrary to cosmic law.

God sees souls blind to the cosmic law.

Man sees evil.

God sees ignorance.

Man sees actions which have not yet come

to fruition.

God sees the cosmic records which bind men

to their debts.

Man sees injustice.

God sees justice.

Man remembers the past.

God looks toward the future.

Man sees achievement.

God sees potential.

Man wanders blindly.

God has a purpose.

Man seeks pleasure.

God seeks evolution.

Man sees himself as man.

God sees men as gods.

Man says, “I’m blind.”

God says, “Open your eyes and see.”

—Elsa Glover

“Spirit in manifestation is dual; that which wesee as form is the negative manifestation of Spirit— crystallized and inert. The positive pole of Spiritmanifests as Life, galvanizing the negative Forminto action.”—Cosmo 248-9

“Life gathers Form about itself and gains con-sciousness thereby.”—Cosmo223

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of mate-rial science, form must precede lifebefore the latter can mysteriously, unac-countably manifest. However, the stu-dent of the occult, the scientist of Spirit,

knows that Life ever precedes the Form and is itsimmediate formative cause. Formerly, in time,mineral earth pre-existed the genesis of the plantkingdom. But in the higher world of causes, whereabide creative archetypes, the highest principles ofbeing pre-exist the forms in which they embody.Life as Truth antedates all Life’s externalizedforms. As expressed in John 1: “All things weremade by Him (the Word) and without Him was notanything made that was made. In Him was Lifeand the Life was the Light of men, and the Lightshineth in darkness and the darkness comprehend-ed it not.” To what does “the darkness” refer? It isthe human brain as it is exclusively sense-oriented,binding man to the world of ephemeral forms andblinding him to the reality of invisible causes.

The work of the spiritual aspirant is consciouslyto concentrate and build his energies into expres-sive forms that are more fully revelatory of higherlife impulses. The first step in this process consistsin the cultivation of the two higher ethers of thefour-fold vital body (also called the body of for-

mative forces). His eventual ability to wakefullytransfer his consciousness to this “soul body”(body in which the Ego may enter into the desireworld; i.e. world of the psyche or soul—andworlds above) involves a dissociation of the aspi-rant’s higher vehicles from the cross of the densephysical body, which continues to be interpenetrat-ed and sustained by the two lower (chemical andlife) ethers. The point being that consciousnesswhich identifies life with form per seis dead tolife, for the phenomenon of mineral existence hasno inherent life. Life calls it to itself, inhabits it,

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MYSTIC LIGHT

In this naive conception from a 13th century French bible,God the Creator is separate from His creation. The Cosmosshows the sun, noon and stars at the periphery (difficult tosee in the copy) and inchoate earth in the center. The designbears a striking resemblance to an embryo in the womb.

Life and Form

wears it like a garment. Form (as discrete atoms)does not create life in the Darwinian sense. Lifecreates form. In the high language of Christ Jesus’teaching: It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the fleshprofiteth nothing (John 7:63).

Life may be described as that which is possessedof the power to grow and move (Motion is theThird Person Emanation of the Supreme Being.)and perpetuate its essence. It is ever abiding. Lifeinvents and invests form in order that Spirit mayacquire experience, and experience develops con-sciousness whose consummation is Self-identifica-tion with/as God.

As the indomitable urge to grow residing in thegerm of an awakened seed can break stone andraise boulders, so life is infused with, is itself, adivine impulse. It is light-directed, ever seeking toelaborate and raise the form it inheres in above andbeyond its original confines. It is in the encounterof formal limitations that the investing life,through the pain and suffering incident to thatstricture-structure, grows in awareness of itsimmanent divinity. Form is the midwife, the para-clete in the evolution of consciousness. Havingserved its purpose, the form, the configuration ofatoms, reverts to the dust (Chaos, arche) fromwhence it came, and the Spirit returns to God Whogave it.

Be assured. All is not vanity. But living in formthinking it is the seat and source of life is vanityand efforts founded on this delusion will provevain. Vanity derives from Latin vanus meaning“empty,” and truly form is the empty crucible inwhich the life impulse, through the purging fires ofexperience, undergoes successive heightenings ofitself in degrees of consciousness, is burned intointerior recognitions and learns to detach from allthe forms through which it plays, realizing them,one after another, as mediums, masks, and modesof self-confrontation and self-enlightenment. Thus,not only is the dense physical body not the life(including the physical universe which is its exten-sion); nor is it the vital forces sustaining the body;nor yet is life identical with the wishes, feelings,passions, and emotions expressing through thatbody; nor again are our thoughts our life, the ideaof who or what we think we are.

Life is not dependent upon any of these vital-emotional-mental matrices for its being. On thecontrary, we experience that which persists aboveand beyond mental consciousness (as paradigmedin the Cartesian cogito ergo sum—I think, there-fore I am), and this experience is made possiblethrough the Christ impulse which confirms thereality of I AM, of authentic Spirit consciousnessabove any forms or outpicturings that I AM maytake. It is an embracing realization that defies anyconceptualization (which cannot but demote anddiminish its true nature). The tetragrammaton,(YHVH) the unpronounceable Hebrew name ofDeity (Jehovah, third-Person God), was the safe-guard of this identity and points to the transcen-dence of Spirit-Being above all its outformingsand definings.

The I AM is the Spiritual light-burst, the Love-surge of life-immortal. It is that which persists asSpirit or Ego through any and all formal impress.

Temporal man is inclined to set up home informs. But home is no less than divine conscious-ness, consciousness of being in God as our sourceand true I-dentity. Home is where we came from—not in this earth life, but before the beginning whenGod created Cosmos: There we were in Him asthat which was before the world was. Mortal manis a satellite, a moon circling the spiritual sun ofhis Self, his home. He is a planet, in the originalsense of “wanderer.” As a pilgrim journeyingthrough the wilderness of Form, the Son of Manhath nowhere to lay his head.

Form crucifies consciousness into dyings,rebirthings, enlargings. Again and again the Spiritof man dies to itself and wakes into a space-timebody. The stress and suffering imposed by thiscontraction and eclipse of spirit-consciousnessquickens spirit into a remembrance of its truenature, as distinct from the form in which it findsitself. Spirit Self says, I am none of these things; Idie to this lower life. I find no enduring value inand therefore dispossess myself of the desire toacquire material riches, temporal powers, socialdistinctions, even personal excellences. The evolv-ing Ego is able to say with the Apostle Paul, noneof these things move me.

At this juncture man may align himself with

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purpose and effort beyond the personal reflex, withthe larger Plan affecting his entire life wave. Thededication of what faculties and energies he hasevolved to the unfoldment of planetary conscious-ness constitutes a Self-finding, a fulfillment of hislarger being as that exists in the planetary mind ofChrist. Here we appreciate the virtues of childlikepliancy and receptivity. We nourish and encouragethose impulses that maximize our usefulness tohuman need. We are at once amenable to goodinfluence, wisely impressionable, while we arespined by a will fused in the fires ofinstructive pain and hardship. Thesmoke and sparks generatedbyself-willed living disperse.We become purer, theflame burns quieter, clear-er. Fear engendered bythe anticipated loss oflife is overcome becausewe do not locate our lifeor living truth in theforms through whichthey manifest. Fear iso-lates consciousness andrigidifies our knowing fac-ulty; that is, it formalizesexperience. To a degree thisprocess is healthy and necessary.But forms imprison consciousness aswell as impart truth. When we regardform as primary and determinative, we live in acemetery (whether plotted out for people, feelings,or thoughts) where we reverence the historicityand mere literalness of phenomenon.

Life enters into the forming body of what will bea sinner or a saint and in time it leaves that body.Spiritual impulse playing down through the facul-ty of mind as it works in brain matter through thereflecting ether fashions truths that are a thirdremove from their living source. When the creativeact is accomplished the winged power lifts off todescend again or elsewhere. The form it inspires orengenders retains, for a time, the mark of vital con-tact with living truth and vibrates with authenticforce. But without renewal, the form’s relevanceand potency declines.

Yet the Spirit of Truth is ever ready to beinvoked, to redescend, and may and will illumineall who call upon it and are ready to receive it.

Thus, to venerate the form, rather than the liv-ing, ever-giving spiritual force creative of all form,is to abstract consciousness from the creative, liv-ing present and to deny spiritual impulse access toour immediate awareness.

Identifying exclusively with form always intro-duces an element of division and potential conflict,for form is finite and relative. When then humans

assert the priority of one system of truth orcollectivity of persons over all others

physical and mental mental civilwar ensue.

The only solution to thedilemma posed by formal-ism is to adopt the attitudethat recognizes formsalways as contingent onthe formative (i.e., life)impulse, as therefore sec-ondary and at best partial.

One posits the invisibleliving impulse as primary.

With regard to truth, it is theSpirit of truth that is true, not

the letters carrying the weight ofits overt form. Consciousness is poised

to receivethe living truth from whatev-er quarter it may make its entry into our

field of awareness. Prejudice to human form is buta part of the mechanism of intolerance. The sameprocess works with respect to ideas, when thevalidity of a thought is judged on the basis of itsmode of delivery or the presenter’s character ratherthan on what the truth within speaks as onereceives the outward exposition.

If, as we continually affirm, mankind is a unityin Christ, likewise must truth have its source in thesame One Truth, even as the Holy Spirit (TheSpirit of Truth) gives it manifold expression.

In man, feelings, thoughts and perceptionsfounded on physical realitiesin toto make up thehuman personality, whose nature is to wax andwane from moment to moment. The moon is asymbol for the personality as it gathers light and

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increases in the youth of earthly life, comes intofull ripeness and then decreases in life’s lateryears. But the moon’s light is borrowed, reflected.The word personalityderives from persona (liter-ally, to sound through),which was a face maskworn by Greek actors who would speak throughthat guise or appearance. What sounds through isthe inner being whose life creates and animates ourworldly being. That is the true light, the Sun of ourIndividuality, our eternal life which takes on nowthis, now that human form. This is the Light thatlighteth every man that cometh into the world.

The pathos of the Christ’s ministry on Earth asHe worked out of the Jesus body was that He aslife incarnate walked as a stranger among men. Hewas known only as the Nazarene. It was said ofHim, “Is this not Jesus, the carpenter, son ofJoseph, brother of Simon and Juda and James,whose sisters we know? How can this be which heprofesses—that He is the Son of God?” So it is thata prophet may be without honor in his own coun-try and in his own family. Meaning? That there isthat tendency in each of us to minimize the valueand be blind to the divinity in both ourselves andothers, in part as given by the phrase “familiaritybreeds contempt”; that is, we reduce the being of aperson to what we know about and can readily dis-cern in them, judging by appearances. We forgetand ignore the infinite possibilities of Spirit-beingin each human and restrict awareness to formalconcerns and eye assessments.

Thus it is said of the Pharisees (historical andcontemporary) that having eyes, they see not, andhaving ears, they hear not: And the Light shone inthe darkness of the sense-oriented, form-basedconsciousness, and that darkness comprehended itnot. If Christ lives not in the hearts and minds ofmen, neither exists the Life beyond form. A smugpronouncement, always in vogue with the foolishwise, declares that God is dead, which is absurdsince God cannot die, nor, as we know it, can Hebe born. The assertion projects a state of innerpoverty, exposes a consciousness that is unawareof, or dead to, God. Yet God is there, making thelife and vain negations of the godless possible.

Peter was commended by Christ Jesus for per-ceiving His true identity as the Son of the living

God, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to him.Yet Peter struggled with his literalist tendency: Hewas the dependable rock. But the well-meaningdisciple was at times too solicitous for the outerperson of his Master, so that he would not sufferharm done Him, forgetting the Spirit’s invincibili-ty and that forms may and must be rendered up andsacrificed that the light of the Spirit may growstronger and brighter: “The oftener we die, the bet-ter we live.” Individually, we too, like Peter, maytenaciously hold on to the form through which life,truth, and beauty manifest, equating the formerwith the latter, as if, with a change of form, theessential qualities are diminished or lost; whereasthe contrary is the case: Life is ever recreating,transmuting its outwardness to more closely andcorrectly convey its essential divinity.

It is helpful to recur to Paul’s injunction: Be yenot conformed to the world but be ye transformedby the renewing of your mind. As our thoughts,feelings and words organize themselves alonglines of higher vibrational patterns, we attune ourbeing to the love-wisdom that is the creator ofthese thought-feeling patterns. Always the aim isnot to possess the form, but to so atone and attuneourselves with its formative source that we raiseour spirits to the abode of living Spirit and areinvested with its light and power.

In the light of our understanding, what may wesay about death? From a higher plane it is the con-fining of life energy in a form: Incarnation isincarceration. Seen from below (from the physicalplane),death is a release of spirit-being from mate-rial captivity resulting in the experience of libera-tion, birth into finer spheres, ex-stasis.

As spiritual aspirants we move from outer-directedness to inner-directedness, from Pharisaicalformalism (which heeds the letter and kills thespirit) to true Christian openness and compassion(the “soft heart” suffers with). We ever more clear-ly understand the separative tendencies inherent ina purely formal consciousness and we urge our-selves to live out of the living impulse of spirit-consciousness, out of love, which integrates par-ticulars into their original unitary context, whichheals and makes whole. ❐

—C.W.

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HERE and there inhis wr i t ingsMax Heindelgives us someinformation about

nature spirits, the little beingswith whom he had such inter-esting experiences.

Nature spirits include ethericbeings related to the four ele-ments. Gnomes and elves, orFairies, are earth spirits.Undines, which inhabit streams,rivers, lakes and oceans, are waterspirits. Sylphs, which dwell in the mists abovemoat and moor and generally in the atmosphere,are air spirits. Not much is said of salamanders,fire spirits, largely because they are least easilyseen by people who have “second sight.” At thebottom of some fireplaces in Europe one can see asalamander carved on an iron plate.

Most people now regard folk stories as supersti-tions, but, as a matter of fact, one endowed withetheric vision may see gnomes building greenchlorophyll into the leaves of plants and giving toflowers the multiplicity of delicate tints whichdelight our eyes. Gnomes also cut the crystals inminerals and make the priceless gems that gleamfrom necklaces and golden diadems. Without theselapidaries and metallurgists there would be no ironfor our machinery nor gold for finery and art work.

Gnomes are everywhere and the proverbial beeis not busier. To the bee, however, is given creditfor the work it does, while the little nature spirits

that play such an immenselyimportant part in the world'swork are unknown save, to a

few so-called dreamers. At the summer solstice the

physical activities of natureare at their zenith. Therefore"Midsummer Night" is thegreat festival of the Fairieswho have wrought the mater-ial universe, nourished the

cattle, nurtured the grain andare hailing with joy and thanks-

giving the crest wave of forcewhich is their tool in shaping the

flowers into the astonishing variety ofdelicate shapes called for by their archetypes andin tinting them in unnumbered hues, which are theartist's delight and despair. On this greatest of allnights of the glad summer season they flock fromfen and forest, from glen and dale, to the Festivalof the Fairies. They really bake and brew theiretheric foods and afterwards dance in ecstasies ofjoy, the joy of having brought forth and servedtheir important purpose in the economy of nature.

At the time of the Winter solstice, the ChristSpirit is born into the earth and commences to fer-tilize the millions of seeds which the Fairies nur-ture that we may have physical food. But man shallnot live by bread alone. The work of the Fairies isimportant, but it fades into insignificance com-pared with the mission of Christ who annually pro-vides the spiritual food needed to advance us uponthe path of progress. Nature has work to do and

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requires work of all who would justify their exis-tence and continue as part of her. This applies toplant and planet, man and beast, and to the Fairiesas well. They are busy folk and their activities arethe solution to many of nature's multifarious mys-teries.

Some people who can see Fairies say that theyare about a foot tall. They look like beautifulyoung people (about 15 years old) and they areevidently sweethearts. There are usually severaltogether. When they are not painting flowers andbeautifying everything possible, they can be seenlaughing and talking happily, their arms aroundeach other's necks. They like to slide along leavesor tree branches much as children do in play. Theycan appear as both boy and girl. They seem to bedressed in shining drapery that clothes them mostattractively. Their bodies look delicate, graceful,and almost transparent. The Fairies work under thedirection of Great Intelligences. Some people referto nature spirits as Devas but Max Heindel gener-ally eschews Eastern terminology.

Fairies stay in warm countries in the winterbecause plant growth is slow or arrested in coldclimates at this time so they have no work.

A few years ago, a lady asked Elizabeth KublerRoss to come and see her garden. Elizabeth Rosscommented on the beautiful roses. The lady asked,"Is that all you see?" Whereupon she took a pictureof a flower chosen by her visitor who was startledto see on it a graceful lady Fairy.

Corinne Heline, in conversation with a Fairy,has this to say about angel wings:

“The pictures of Fairies that I have seen showFairies with wings, and you have none.”

“There is no one in our Kingdom who haswings,” the Fairy replied.

“What gives artists the impression that Fairieshave wings,” asked the writer.

“It is our duty to help purify the air for man aswe go about our work," replied the Fairy, "and aswe move and breathe, we send out sweet-smellingair that leaves our backs at the shoulders and thisforce coming from us has the appearance of wings."

Some people have seen Fairies with sick chil-dren. As many as twenty Fairies of all sizes gatheraround the bed. They might climb over the child,

or sit on his shoulders knowing he has delight inwatching them.

A friend of mine told me he was half asleepwhen he saw a little gnome on his book shelf inToulouse, France. The gnome wore sandals. Hisbright eyes shone like diamonds. He had rosycheeks, a small mouth and well-built little body.Then he stood up and slid down the shelves.

One day another friend of mine was returningfrom work. She was very tired. She left the free-way and was driving on a narrow road in the coun-tryside. After having passed over a small bridge,she felt like stopping and taking a rest. She sat onthe grass near the bridge and, to her surprise, shesaw a Lady Gnome. The creature seemed abouttwo feet high. She had large features, including along nose. She looked very old and serious. Sheclosely resembled the many illustrations ofgnomes that artists have painted to illustrate chil-dren’s books.

My friend said, “I decided not to move and tostay as long as she remained.” But the LadyGnome answered her as if she could read herthoughts: "Don't worry, come back tomorrow afterwork. I will be here again.”

The next day my friend saw the Lady Gnome atthe same place and felt very happy to think that theLady Gnome liked her.

How can we make friends with the Fairies?First, one must develop his finer vehicles, for

Fairies live and can only be seen in the etheric partof the physical world. One must be unprejudiced.There must be no hatred, malice, or envy in theheart. One must be willing to treat everyone as hewishes to be treated himself. This is the mostimportant requisite.

Max Heindel has a wonderful story about a verysick little girl who came to Mount Ecclesia withher mother. During the night he took the little girlto the World of the Fairies where she saw theQueen of the Fairies.

We know that there are invisible agents behind allmanifestations of nature—intelligences of varyingdegrees of consciousness, builders and destroyers—who play important roles in the economy ofnature. Until these agencies are recognized andtheir functions are studied, we can never have an

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adequate conception of the way nature forceswork, whose outward effects we call heat, electric-ity, gravity, chemical action, etc.

SYLPHS AND UNDINESWe learnedly explain how heat from the sun

evaporates the water of the rivers and oceans,causing it to ascend to the cooler regions of the airwhere it condenses to form clouds which finallybecome so saturated with moisture that they grav-itate to earth as rain to replenish land and sea andbegin the cycle again. It is all perfectly simple,a neat automaticperpetual motionprocess. But is thatall? Are there not anumber of gapsin this theory? Afuller explanationrequires knowingabout the semi-intelligent actionof the sylphs whol i f t the f ine lydivided vaporizedparticles of waterprepared by theundines from the surface of the sea and carry themas high as they may before partial condensationtakes place and clouds are formed. They keepthese particles of water until forced by the undinesto release them. When we say it storms, battles arebeing fought on the surface of the sea and in theair, sometimes with the aid of salamanders to lightthe lightning torch of separated hydrogen and oxy-gen and send its awe-inspiring shaft crashingzigzag through the inky darkness, followed byponderous peals of thunder that reverberate in theclearing atmosphere, while the undines triumphant-ly hurl the rescued raindrops to earth that they maybe again restored to union with their mother ele-ment.

Some people call the undines the sea Fairies andthe sylphs the air Fairies.

It is stated in the Rosicrucian literaturethat thefaculty of space perception is connected with thedelicate adjustment of the three semi-circular

canals in the ear, pointing in the three dimensionsof space (2Q&A, p 207). In the Cosmo-ConceptionMax Heindel explains the relationship between thearrangement of these semi-circular canals and theprocess that leads to fourth dimensional conscious-ness. While height, width, and depth are the dimen-sionsof space in the physical world, there is in theethers what we may be called "thoroughness." Itwould seem that nature spirits and elementals havethis fourth dimensional consciousness.

With etheric sight we may look into and througha mountain. With an etheric body such as pos-

sessed by naturespirits we may walkthrough the hardestgrani te rock. I toffers even lessresistance than doesair to our progresshere.

Nature spir i tshave d i ffe ren tgrades of con-sciousness, corre-sponding to thetype of ether theyspecial ize. The

bodies of gnomes are made principally of thechemical ether and therefore they are of the earthearthy; that is, one never sees them fly about as dothe sylphs. They can be burned in fire. They alsogrow old in a manner not so greatly different fromhuman beings.

The watery undines and airy sylphs are also sub-ject to mortality, but their bodies, being composedof the life ether and light ether, respectively, makethem much more enduring, so that while gnomesdo not live more than a few hundred years, undinesand sylphs may live a thousand or more years.Salamanders, whose bodies are principally com-posed of the fourth or reflecting ether, are said tolive many thousands of years.

THE WAR OF ELEMENTSThe consciousness which builds and ensouls

these elemental bodies belongs to a number ofdivine hierarchs who are thereby gaining additional

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experience. The forms which are built of matterand thus ensouled have attained a degree of self-consciousness. During their life they have a senseof their own transitory existence and it is to theirrebellion against this state of things that the war ofthe elements, notably, fire, air, and water, is due.Fancying that they are being held in bondage, theyseek liberation from the leash by force, and havingno sense to guide themselves, run amuck in adestructive manner, which at times brings aboutgreat catastrophes. The consciousness of thegnomes is too dull to take the initiative, but theynot infrequently become accomplices of the othernature spirits by opening passages, which favorexplosions in the rock.

Bacon remarked that nature and God differ onlyas the print and the seal. Nature is the visible sym-bol of God, though today we are too apt to think ofnature as self-generating and self-existing. Back ofevery force (electricity, magnetism, and expansionin steam) and form (mineral, plant, and animal) rec-ognized by the physical sciences is the activity ofIntelligences. Nature spirits build the plants, formthe crystals of the rock, and with numerous otherhierarchies, create and maintain what we call nature.

THE EARTH SPIRITAND EARTH FORCESWhat does the Cosmo-Conception tell us about

the constitution of the Earth? To the occultist theworld is far from being "dead". On the contrary, itsevery nook and crevice is permeated by spirit,which is the leaven that causes changes in andupon the planet. To the trained clairvoyant sight ofan advanced Initiate, the earth appears to be builtin strata, somewhat as an onion, one layer or stra-tum outside another, as illustrated by the Cosmo’sDiagram 18. The properties of the 6th and 7th stra-tums, as described by Max Heindel, are relevant toour subject.

The sixth or fiery stratum is possessed of sensa-tion. Pleasure and pain, sympathy and antipathyhave here their effect on the earth. The occult sci-entist, as he watches the harvesting of the ripegrain and the gathering of fruit from the trees in theautumn, or the plucking of flowers, knows thepleasure experienced by the earth itself. It is simi-lar to the pleasure felt by the cow when its burst-

ing udders are being relieved by the sucking calf.The earth feels the delight of having yielded nour-ishment for its progeny of forms, this delightreaching its culmination at the harvest time.

On the other hand, when plants are torn out bythe roots, it is patent to the occult scientist that theearth senses a sting of pain. For that reason he doesnot eat the plant foods which grow under the earth.In the first place they are full of the earth force anddeficient in sun force, and are additionally poi-soned by being pulled up by the roots. The onlyexception to this rule is that he may partake spar-ingly of the potato, which originally grew on thesurface of the earth, and has only in comparativelyrecent times grown beneath the soil. Occultistsendeavor to nourish their bodies on fruits whichgrow toward the sun, because they contain more ofthe higher sun force, and have not caused the earthpain.

It might be supposed that mining operationswould be very painful to the earth, but the reverseis the case. Every disintegration of the hard crustcauses a sensation of relief and every solidificationis a source of pain. Where a mountain torrentwashes away the soil and carries it toward theplains, the earth feels freer. Where the disintegrat-ed matter is again deposited, as in a bar outside the

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Diagram 18

mouth of a great river, there is a correspond-ing sense of uneasiness.

As sensation in animals and men is due totheir separate vital bodies, so the feeling ofthe earth is particularly active in this sixthstratum, which corresponds to the World ofLife Spirit. To understand the pleasure feltwhen mining operations are disintegrating thehard rock, and the pain when deposits gather,we must remember that the earth is the densebody of a Great Spirit, and to furnish us withan environment in which we could live andgather experience, it had to crystallize thisbody into its present solid condition.

As evolution proceeds, however, and manlearns the lessons pertaining to this acme ofconcretion, then earth will become softer andits Spirit more and more liberated. This is whatPaul meant when he spoke of the whole creationgroaning and travailing, waiting for the day of lib-eration.

The seventh or refracting stratum of the earthcorresponds to the World of Divine Spirit. Thereare in occult science what are known as The SevenUnspeakable Secrets. For those who are notacquainted with these secrets, or have not at leastan inkling of their import, the properties of thisstratum must seem particularly absurd andgrotesque. In it all the forces, which are known tous as the Laws of Nature, exist as moral, or ratherimmoral forces. In the beginning of the consciouscareer of man they were much worse than at pre-sent. As humanity strives toward higher ideals andimproves morally, these forces become corre-spondingly less inimical to man, while any lapse inmorals has a tendency to unleash these Nature Forcesand cause them to wreak havoc upon the earth.

The forces in this stratum are thus, at any time,an exact reflection of the existing moral status ofmankind. From the occult point of view, the "handof God" which smites a Sodom or a Gomorrah isnot a foolish superstition, for as surely as there isindividual responsibility to the Law of Consequence,which brings to each person the just results of hisdeeds, whether for good or evil, so is there alsocommunity and national responsibility, whichbrings upon groups of men corresponding results

for their collective acts. Nature Forces are the gen-eral agents of such retributive justice, causing floods,or earthquakes, or the beneficent formation of oil orcoal for various groups, according to their deserts.

The Manichees, an Order of still higher spiritu-ality than the Rosicrucians, are at present studyingthe problem of good and evil. An idea of the con-dition anticipated when humanity is in the JupiterPeriod may be gained from a short resume of thelegend of the Manichees: There are two kingdoms,that of the Light Elves and that of the Night Elves.The latter attack the former, are defeated and mustbe punished. But, as the Light Elves are as thor-oughly good as the Night Elves are bad, they can-not inflict evil upon their foes, so they must bepunished with good. Therefore a part of the king-dom of the Light Elves is incorporated with that ofthe Night Elves and in this way the evil is in timeovercome. Hate, which will not submit to hate,must succumb to Love!

We are now approaching the Autumn Equinoxand the Christ light is beginning anew to permeatethe Earth. Moreover, we are at the crest of a newmillennial wave of spiritual light and life. Weknow that those who wish to walk in the light ofChrist must also learn to generate that light. Thiswe may do thanks to the the One who is ourEarth’s indwelling Spirit, Whose life as a humanwas given that all humans and their planet mighthave abundant life. ❐

—Danielle Chavalarias

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THE GLORY of petitionary prayer isits demonstration of man’s free will.Its shame is its domination by thebaser emotions of fear and greed. Itstragedy lies in its irresponsible use.

Man does not live in isolation but in a particularenvironment, similar to a child in a school. Thereare always some aspects of the environment whichappear to resist or impede each man’s progress andhappiness. Each difficulty matches a weakness inthe individual and has been chosen before thisincarnation to serve as an impetus to improvement.However, this is the point at which a person usual-ly blindly resorts to petitionary prayer, like a childappealing to his teachers, parents, or friends.

As in the case of the school child, the effort toovercome environmental resistance can not onlybe along legitimate channels similar to an appealfor extra tuition but can take unpleasant forms,such as domination of others, similar to a childcheating in his work. The great test for legitimacyin both cases is the reaction of the environment. Ifthe environment turns helpful, the method waslegitimate but if the environment increases its hos-tility the method used was illegitimate. The safe-guard is again on similar lines: All methods usedby the child must be in line with school educationpolicy and all petitionary prayers should bealigned to the law “Thy Will be done.”

Conformity to Divine Law still leaves plenty ofroom for free will. Just as the extent of the child’schoice of subjects increases as he progresses inschool, so also the free will of man increases as heprogresses spiritually, mainly because his will

becomes increasingly attuned to God’s Will. The assistance or obstruction of the environment

is indicative of each man’s good and bad actions inthe past. The consequences of bad acts have vari-ous levels of resolution. The most negative is to“suffer” the consequences, that is, passively under-go the process of adjustment. Other levels of reso-lution vary with mental attitudes and the ability tolearn needed lessons, while the most positivemethod is adjustment through service to othersusing the cleansing power inherent in the applica-tion of the Great Commandment “Love thy neigh-bor.” Using this principle, many legal court sys-tems have introduced community service as anexpiation for minor offenses instead of fines orimprisonment.

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MYSTIC LIGHT

Watercolor (c. 18160-20), William Blake, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The Third Temptation of Christ“All these things will I give to you.”—Matthew 4:9

God always gives what we need; the devil gives what we want,or are tempted to want—for a dire price, which we pay later.

Petitionary Prayer

The consequences of good acts can be channeledin a host of ways, thereby giving the best opportu-nities for man to develop and express his free will.Unfortunately, there is a craving for material ben-efits, shown most clearly in every form of gam-bling, including the purchase of lottery tickets andthe playing of slot machines, all of which areforms petitionary prayers.

Under karmic law, sometimes expressed in theform “nothing can came to you that is not yourown,” these petitioners ignorantly and wastefullydraw off their own assets. They should seriouslythink about Solomon’s choice of wisdom whenasked in what form he would like his assets (asrelated in 1 Kings 3:5-14 and also in 2 Chron. 1: 7-12). The scriptures specifically mention thatSolomon could have chosen long life, riches, fame,honor, or the removal of enemies as channels forthe same assets he used to get “an understandingheart.” The bible story goes on to state thatSolomon’s choice of a higher channel broughtabout an overflow into lower channels so that hewas also given the riches, honor, and long lifewhich he had not asked for. Even today it happensthat a Mother Teresa, whose assets have made her-an example and a symbol of spiritual benevolenceat its functional best, is also given a Nobel prizerepresenting honor and riches.

The emotional atmosphere in which a peti-tionary prayer is made is of the utmost importance.It is the focussing of strong feelings which createthe channel to higher, spiritual realms and bringdown an answer. Formal, mechanical prayers haveno effect simply because there are no links formedto spiritual forces. Petitions should correctly bemade with positive feelings of optimism, gratitudefor the opportunity, a determined courage to over-come obstacles, and a readiness to take the initia-tive and forge new pathways within the pattern ofGod’s will.

Unfortunately, any positive attitude in prayer isexceptional, the dominating attitudes being nega-tive, especially those of fear or greed. Many peo-ple make their most fervent petitions only when ina state of abject fear, an attitude not conducive tospiritual progress because it increases the feelingof helpless dependency. Negative attitudes must

gradually be supplanted by positive attributes tothe point where petitionary prayer is not needed atall, and one no longer cries in the dark but walks inthe light.

The simplest and most common problem arisingfrom irresponsible petitions is the postponement ofneeded lessons in life. The difficulties return againand again until resolved and usually each time the

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The prayer for the desire body is, "Lead usnot into temptation." Desire is the great tempterof mankind. It is the great incentive to allaction, and in so far as the actions subserve thepurposes of the spirit, it is good; but where thedesire is for something degrading, somethingthat debases the nature, it is indeed meet thatwe pray not to be led into temptation.

Love, Wealth, Power, and Fame—These arethe four great motives of human action. Desirefor one or more of these is the motive for allthat man does or leaves undone. The greatLeaders of humanity have wisely given them asincentives to action, that man may gain experi-ence and learn thereby. They are necessary,and the aspirant may safely continue to usethem as motives for action, but he must trans-mute them into something higher. He mustovercome with nobler aspirations the selfishlove which seeks the ownership of anotherbody, and all desires for wealth, power andfame for narrow and personal reasons.

The Love for which he must long is that onlywhich is of the soul and embraces all beings,high and low, increasing in proportion to theneeds of the recipient.

The Wealth, that which consists solely ofabundance of opportunities to serve his fellowmen.

The Power, that alone which makes for theupliftment of humanity.

The Fame, none save that which increaseshis ability to spread the good news, that all whosuffer may thus quickly find solace for theheart's grief.

—Max HeindelThe Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception

confrontation is more painful. It is similar to anunpaid debt coming back for settlement, with fur-ther interest added each time, or like postponedmedical treatment, needing progressively moredrastic measures to effect a cure. In most cases,difficulties are best resolved as and when theyarise so that petitionary prayer should always aimat direct resolution or alternative actions to settlethe problems once and for all.

A somewhat amusing per-sonal effect on the habitualpetitioner (whether in robes ornot) is his disposition to createan admiring circle of depen-dents among whom he func-tions as the authoritative chan-nel to God. He gets more orless brainwashed by his con-tinual demands to God toassert Himself in His own uni-verse and arbitrarily interferewith its workings. The result isthat, in turn, the petitionerfeels fully justified in interfer-ing with the lives of thosearound him and sees it as asacred duty to rearrange otherpeople’s affairs to his own sat-isfaction. Of course he doesthis by petitioning God toattend to the details and verygenerously gives God full credit for the entire oper-ation. However, he seldom fails to remind therecipients of these favors of the key role played byhim and the need to be grateful for his arduous, pro-tracted, self-sacrificing labors on their behalf.There are various grades in this category, rangingfrom the endearingly simple “I’ll pray for you”crooners to the fulminating, conversion-bent, hotgospelers who stride about in an authoritarian fash-ion figuratively jingling the keys of heaven and hellcarried in their pockets.

A more dangerous situation arises when illegiti-mate means are used, deliberately or ignorantly, toobtain benefit. The most reprehensible method isthe use of spiritual force to dominate others, evenif this is done with good intentions. The immediate

results are sometimes dramatic, giving a sense notonly of relief but also of personal power (a tell-talesign of danger). Sooner or later, however, theinevitable environmental reaction causes such aflood of troubles and difficulties that the person isoverwhelmed and often seeks more of the wrongmeans to obtain another period of temporary relief.The problems will continue until the bitter lesson

is learned that wrong meansdistort even good ends andthat the environment (embody-ing karmic law or God’s Will)is the judge of what should orshould not be none.

All petitionary prayer repre-sents the first stage of man’sapproach to God. There is anintense need to contact higherspiritual levels for reassuranceand confidence. Without thisorientation to higher goals,man realizes he will be lostamidst the distractions, temp-tations, difficulties, and prob-lems of the material world. Sohe begins being highly vocal,making petitions which intheir nature create and main-tain a distance between manand God. His praise and thanks-giving are also vocal, often

made with the vague hope that his grateful appre-ciation will bring the response of further favors.

Gradually he transcends this self-created barrierand becomes aware of the nearness of God. Whenhe begins to “practice the presence,’’ as the mysticsput it, non-verbal contact prayer replaces verbal-ized petitions, praises, and thanksgivings. Thetransition is not sudden, it takes place by gradual-ly increasing communication by “contact” andgradually decreasing communication by “peti-tion,” until the time comes when no more petitionsneed be made and praise and thanksgiving blendinto a state of silent awareness which sponta-neously radiates its natural characteristics of spiri-tual joy and fellowship. ❐

—C.E.S. Gunasekera

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Under conditions of the greatest personal extrem-ity, Christ Jesus gives what appears to be thehighestform of petitionary prayer: “Not my willbut thine be done.” In fact, His words are not anappeal but a resolution and an affirmation.

Created by A

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recious Blood

THIS EVENING we will takethe magnetic needle as oursubject of meditation, for it hasa lesson of supreme impor-tance in our spiritual career, a

lesson which it behooves every faithful fol-lower of the Mystic Light to take earnestlyand prayerfully to heart.

The magnetic needle is made of metalwhich has an inherent affinity for the lode-stone, namely, steel. Other metals are butindifferently affected, if at all, but whensteel has once been touched with the lode-stone, its whole nature is changed. It hasbecome alive, as it were, imbued with anew force, which we might describe as aconstant yearning after the lodestonewhich once kissed it. Needles made ofother metals, and unmagnetized steel maybe put upon a pivot and they will stand inany balanced position wherever they areplaced, they are passive to whatever forceis applied to them from without. But the needlewhich has been touched by the lodestone resists,and no matter how often or how severely we pushit away from the magnetic position, as soon as theforce exerted against it is removed, it will instant-ly revert and point toward the magnetic pole.

A similar phenomenon is seen in the life of theChristian. Once he has felt, thoroughly felt, in hisbeing the love of the Father, he is a changed man.

The worldly forces from without may be exertedin various ways to divert his interest and attention,but every particle of his being yearns for God andis always turning in that direction, unaffected bythe world of drifting listless men. Whatever else hemay do in the world (because it is absolutely nec-essary to take the proper part in the world’s work)will be done because it is right and dutiful to do so,but with his whole being he yearns towards theFather, whose Love, whose Being, and whoseForce has drawn his soul. To him “But one thing isneedful”—his Father’s love, and his every effort is

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But One Thing Is Needful

FROM MAX HEINDEL’S WRITINGS

This article is the text of a talk originally given by MaxHeindel in the Rosicrucian Fellowship Chapel (Pro-Ecclesia) in early 1915. It is not contained in book form.

directed to win His approval.When we turn from the earth to heaven, we find

almost identical conditions there. Everywherethrough the great firmament millions and billionsof miles, yea, infinite apace, is filled with march-ing orbs that move with a velocity which beggarscomprehension by the human mind. At the timewhen we entered the Pro-Ecclesia the stars were ina certain position, but during every moment sincewe have been here they have changed and they arenow changing with every tick of the clock—all butone. Among all these countless stars moving atsuch an enormous speed, there is one that ischangeless, one that always occupies the sameposition—the North Star. No matter what time dur-ing the day or night, during summer or winter,from birth to death, when we look up into theheavens, that star will be found always in the sameplace. Whenever it is visible to our eyes or by thehelp of a telescope at any time, it will always befound to occupy the position which we speak of as“North.”

Now mark the phenomenon of the changelessneedle, always pointing towards the changelessstar, and consider the connection between themand the lesson there is for us in this phenomenon.The magnetic needle is not a fair-weather follow-er. It does not matter whether it rains or shines,whether it is calm or stormy, whether there arefogs or clouds. Under all circumstances the mag-netic needle points with unvarying fidelity towardsthe North star. Upon this great fact the marinerstakes the property and life of himself, his crew,and his passengers. Though the sleet and the rain,snow or hail may beat in his face, almost blindinghim and making it impossible for him to see thefront of his ship, yet so long as he can see thatfaithful needle he knows that he is on the rightcourse, he knows that it will never swerve, thateven though the ship should founder and find awatery grave at the bottom of the sea, that faithfulneedle will still remain in the same position, point-ing to the changeless star until the very last atomof its being has been disintegrated by corrosion.

Therefore he trusts implicitly to this faithfulguide as he “lays him down in peace to sleeprocked in the cradle of the deep.”

There is in the unswerving devotion symbolizedby this magnetic needle one of the greatest andmost wonderful lessons for those who have seenthe mystic light and who aspire to the privilege ofguiding others who have not yet found the path.Let us realize that to do this, the first, foremost,and the greatest prerequisite is that we shall our-selves have become firmly grounded and rooted sothat we are not disturbed by worldly changes goingon about us—whether the clouds of doubt, skepti-cism, or persecution be cast about us by others, orwhether they seek to ensnare us in blinding fogs ofother doctrines.

It behooves us to hold fast to that which is good,yea, even though life were the price we have topay, we must imitate that faithful needle, as theship founders and settles to its watery grave; wemust continue to point to the one goal of all, “OurFather in Heaven,” never swerving to the right orto the left, no matter what may come. As the nee-dle that has once been touched by the lodestone isimpregnated with a yearning after that changelessstar, a yearning which does not cease, even thoughit finds a watery grave, a yearning which lasts untilthe last atom of its being has been dissolved by theaction of the elements, so also must we, if we arereally and truly yearning to be competent guides toothers, continue with unswerving devotion on thepath which we have chosen, looking neither to theright or the left but fastening our eyes upon thatchangeless star ahead “Our Father in Heaven,” inWhom there is no change neither turning. For asthe slightest deviation upon the part of the magnet-ic needle in the compass would be sufficient todash the mariner upon the shoals or rocks of a dan-gerous shore, wrecking both ship and lives, soalso, if we swerve from the path we have once cho-sen we become stumbling blocks to others who arelooking to us for guidance and example, and theirlives are on our heads. “To whom much has beengiven, from him much will be required.” We havereceived much from the teachings of the ElderBrothers, the mystic light has beckoned us on.May we realize the great responsibility that wehave by our example and our lives to faithfullyguide those seekers with whom we come in contactto the haven of rest and refuge. ❐

30 RAYS 02

“PEARLS ARE NOT WHITER ”

Question: I have searched my Bible quitediligently but nowhere have I been ableto find the quotation relative to thewhiteness of the dead dog’s teeth men-tioned in the Cosmo-Conceptionby

Max Heindel. Will you please tell me where I canfind it?

Answer: Max Heindel was not quoting from theBible when he related the incident to which yourefer. In a second edition of some of the earlypoems of Jacob Balde (a Jesuit priest and professorof eloquence in Ingolstadt, Germany, whomHeindel describes in the Cosmoas writing acrosticmessages in Latin lyric verse under Rosicrucianinspiration), printed in 1646, you will find the fol-lowing extract, which is a part of one poem:

One evening Jesus lingered in the market place

Teaching the people parables of truth and grace,

When in the square remote a crowd was seento rise

And stop with loathing gestures and abhorring cries.

The Master and His meek disciples went to seeWhat cause for this commotion and disgust

could be:And found a poor dead dog beside the gutter

laid,Revolting sight! at which each face its hate

betrayed.

One held his nose, one shut his eyes, one turned away,

And all among themselves began aloud to say:“Detested creature! he pollutes the earth and

air!”“His eyes are blear!” “His ears are foul!”“His ribs are bare!”“In his torn hide there’s not a decent

shoestring left!”“No doubt the execrable cur was hung for

theft!”Then Jesus spoke and dropped on him this

saving wreath:“Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of

his teeth!”

This poem is based on a tradition preserved by theMohammedan poet Nizami. The tradition may befound in Zwemer’s The Muslim Christ, page 148.

Max Heindel made an extensive study of ancientreligions and during his research he doubtless con-tacted the poem extract quoted or else the originaltradition.

ROSICRUCIAN VIEWPOINT ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Question: Do the Rosicrucians believe in capi-tal punishment and if so, please state the reasonswhy, and when a man has been executed does hecome under the law of infant mortality in his nextlife and die as a child the same as victims of acci-dents?

Answer: The Rosicrucian teachings are never inconflict with the Christian religion and we knowthat according to the doctrine of Christ the princi-

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Pearls Are Not Whiter; Capital Punishment;Alchemy and the Garden of Eden

READER’S QUESTIONS

ple of retaliation, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for atooth,” is absolutely wrong. Moreover, from theoccult standpoint, there are other good and suffi -cient reasons why capital punishment is emphati-cally the worst possible manner of dealing with adangerous man.

So long as such a man is in the physical body itis easy to restrain him and put him in a place wherehe cannot do society any harm, but when we hangor electrocute him we actually set him at liberty inthe Desire World where it is possible for him toinfluence others to a much greater extent than hereand such people who are a menace to society arenot slow in finding out their possibilities and tak-ing advantage of them. They enlist others whohave a grievance against the community to do theirwork by inciting them to wreck buildings, commitmurder and rape on a large scale, or perhaps grati-fy personal grievance against some enemy by tak-ing his life. Thus one murder will affect a numberof other crimes if the offender receives capital pun-ishment.

On the other hand, if the murderer is imprisonedto insure the safety to the community, it is possiblethat during the years of his life in such an institu-tion he will change his views. A great many pris-oners do repent of their crimes. Then, when theyare released from the physical body and enter theDesire World at death, they are no longer a menaceto society and will not have an evil influence uponothers.

For these reasons capital punishment is reallysubversive of the purpose for which it is meted out.It does not act as a deterrent to others but actuallyfosters crime, so that even apart from the fact thatthe practice of retaliation is absolutely wrong andthat we have no right to take a life which we can-not give, and apart from the consideration of thefact that at times the wrong man is found guiltyand executed for a crime he never committed whilethe real murderer goes free, capital punishmentshould be abolished to reduce crime.

Referring to your question as to whether a mur-derer who has been executed will have to die as achild in the next life we may answer yes. For,according to the law of infant mortality, anyonewho dies under violent circumstances—so that he

does not attend to the panorama of his life which isreviewed just after death—does not reap the fruitsof his past life.

When a person is executed, the shock, anger, andresentment he feels and the horrors of the wholeproceeding deprive him of the peace and quiet nec-essary to the postmortem review so that he will notobtain a record of the life just ended. Therefore thislack will have to be provided by educational workin First Heaven (higher Desire World) after he hasdied as a child in the next life, as described in ourliterature where the law of infant mortality isexplained.

ALCHEMY AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Question: Is there any connection between theBiblical Garden of Eden and the laboratory of thealchemists, namely, the spinal cord? Did theGarden of Eden have any actual physical existencein any particular part of the world?

Answer: The Garden of Eden actually existed. Itwas and is the Etheric Region of our physicalearth, and mankind consciously dwelt there. Thiswas in the time known as the Lemurian Epoch,when man was not fully aware of his dense bodyand his consciousness was focused almost entirelyin the spiritual world, particularly in the EthericRegion.

He was banished from this region on account ofhis contact with the Lucifer spirits, who taught himhow to exercise the creative function independent-ly of the angels, and in that way provide bodieswhen they had been lost, and lest he also learn thesecret of vitalizing his vital body at will and thusfrustrate evolution.

The work of the alchemist in the spinal cord isentirely different. This work consists of thealchemical process of kindling and lifting upthrough the spinal cord to the head that part of thecreative force now being used for the generation ofbodies. When this force reaches the head it willunite with the other half of the creative force,which in the past was lifted up to build a brain andlarynx. When this is accomplished man will beable to speak the creative word, imbued with lifeand vibrant with vital energy. ❐

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BOTH THE PSALMS and the Proverbsof the Old Testament were used in anumber of ways in the magnificentTemple ceremonials. However, theywere neither read nor spoken, but were

sung or chanted, and were usually accompanied bythe graceful rhythms of the sacred dance. The aspi-rants were taught that sound, or intonation, was theemanation or blessing from God, the Father; thatharmony was the emanation or blessing of theCosmic Christ; and that rhythm and rhythmic motionwere the emanation or blessing of the Holy Spirit.Thus it was that the threefold power of the HolyTrinity was expressed in all Temple ceremonials.

The Psalms express various degrees of spiritualattainment. The Ninety-first Psalm is a song of pro-tection. By its use the disciple was taught how to floodhis body with pure white light of such power that noharm could touch it, by repeating again and againthe powerful affirmation of protective security: “Athousand shall fall at thy right side and ten thousandat thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.”

The Twenty-third Psalm is one of promise. “Thoupreparest a table before me in the presence of mineenemies.” These enemies are not merely personalenemies who wish us ill; they are also the more dan-gerous enemies that exist within oneself—wrongthinking, false appetites, and uncontrolled emotions,especially the destructive emotions of fear, hatred,malice and the coarser desires of the unregeneratedpersonality.

“Thou anointest my head with oil” (the awaken-ing of the spiritual organs in the head). “My cuprunneth over. Surely, goodness and mercy shall fol-low me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell inthe house of the Lord [spiritual Law] forever.”

The Twenty-fourth Psalm is a Song of Jubilation:“Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and the King of

Glory shall come in. Who is this King of Glory?”The answer to the question is that the Lord is theKing of Glory; but the aspirant understands that thisalso refers to the “Christ Within,” for every man isspiritually made in the image and likeness of God.

In our writings we have referred many times tothe glorious processionals which take place withinthe inner realms and which are led by the ChristHimself. Those who are worthy are permitted towitness these processionals and sometimes to takepart in them. This, however, can never be until theChrist is awakened within the aspirant’s own nature.And so it is that this psalm of jubilation carries twomeanings: the joy that is known when the ChristSpirit has entered into the heart of the disciple, andthe recognition that by this event he has becomeworthy to stand in the Presence of our supreme LordChrist Himself, while he hears the jubilant chorus-ing of Angels: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, andthe King of Glory shall come in.”

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Songs of Initiation

WESTERN WISDOM BIBLE STUDYC

olored version of Gustave D

oré’s engraving of King S

olomon for his illustrated B

ible

In a dream (1Kings3:1-15) Solomon asks God for a “discern-ing heart,” pleasing his Creator who granted him wisdom.

Proverbs and EcclesiastesThe Proverbs, as used in the ancient Temple, were

powerful healing mantrams. The occult scientistunderstands that the human body is composed ofcertain groups of organs which are known as mas-culine, or positive, and other groups known as fem-inine, or negative. The former are under the ruler-ship of the brain and cerebrospinal nervous system.The latter are under the rulership of the heart and thesympathetic nervous system.

It is the inharmonious interaction of these twosystems that causes most disease. As the discipleprogresses spiritually, these two systems arebrought into ever closer harmony. A perfect rela-tionship between the two systems is known as theattainment of Balance, or Polarity in the spiritualsense, and with it the body becomes impervious todisease. This is the secret of the perfect bodies pos-sessed by the Masters of Wisdom and high Initiateswho have risen in spiritual stature above and beyonddisease and death.

Proverbs say truly, “Wisdom hath builded herhouse, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” And forthe ready and eager disciple the injunction is given:“Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine that Ihave mingled.”

It is because Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are espe-cially the textbooks of illumination that Wisdom,personified as a feminine being, figures so largely intheir pages. Wisdom is the feminine principle ofGod, while Understanding, as used in Proverbs, isthe masculine. Wisdom is the inflow of cosmic rev-elation, but Understanding is achieved through rea-son and initiatory work. Therefore Proverbs openswith the command: “Get wisdom and understand-ing.” This is really the keynote of the entire work.Solomon repeatedly declares that Wisdom is theprincipal object of the quest.

It is significant that the esoteric Temple musicwas both masculine and feminine, and was playedupon instruments attuned to their respectiverhythms. For the Temple aspirant, the cantillationused in Proverbs was designed to play directly uponthe two chief currents which flow within the ethericbody. Thus the musical theme of both Proverbs andEcclesiastes may be termed polarity and equilibrium.

The perfect Balance between the two poles of thehuman spirit can never be effected, however, until

the lower feminine has been lifted up through pureand aspirational living. This term, “lower femi-nine,” refers to the emotional nature as still held insubjection by the sense life, and in bondage to self-ish aims and purposes. In most ancient writings thehuman “soul” or “spirit” (ego) was called feminine,and thus the lower aspect of the soul nature wastermed the “fallen feminine” which must be liftedup and redeemed.

In the early Church the cantillations of Proverbswere used principally on Sundays between theWinter Solstice (Christmas) and the Spring Equinox(Easter), this being the most favorable transmuta-tion time of the year and the most holy of seasons.

The rhythmic dualism of Proverbs, which playsupon the dual currents of the soul body and the twonerve systems, is clearly discernible in many of itsverses. For example, consider Proverbs 14:1; 15:20;19:26; 6:20-21:

Every wise woman buildeth her house: but thefoolish plucketh it down with her hands.

A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolishman despiseth his mother.

He that wasteth his father, and chaseth awayhis mother, is a son that causeth shame, andbringeth reproach.

My son, keep thy father’s commandment, andforsake not the law of thy mother:

Bind then continually upon thine heart, and tiethem about thy neck.

The Song of Solomon—AMystic Marriage ChantThe word Shebameans seven, and Sheba’s com-

ing to Solomon constitutes the preparation for thesoul delights of the Mystic Marriage, which is thespiritual motif of the Song of Songs.

For those whose eyes are open to the true mean-ing of the Quest, this ancient legend of Sheba andSolomon contains many hints as to its purpose andthe preparation necessary to its successful conclu-sion. Solomon, the Wisdom-Seer, had found theWay and had learned to walk therein, preparing forthe future embodiment of that One who was to comeas a more complete and perfect demonstration of“the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” This sublime“Song of Songs,” attributed to Solomon, sings in itsinspired measures of the preparation and the Way.

In this song the alchemist-author has expressed in

34 RAYS 02

allegory the formula for making the Philosopher’sStone. The story itself is quite simple. It tells ofKing Solomon who, upon visiting his vineyard onMt. Lebanon, comes by surprise upon a fairShulamite maiden. She flees from him. Later he vis-its her disguised as a shepherd and wins her love,after which he comes in state to claim her for hisqueen. The poem opens with a recital of their mar-riage in the royal palace.

The Song of Solomon has two principal charac-ters, one masculine, the other feminine. The firstbears the name Shelomah(peaceable), the secondShulamith(perfect). It is significant that both namesare variations of the same root word, the terminolo-gy varying to indicate the gender. Shulamithis thefeminine form of Solomon. In the English transla-tions the two characters cannot be differentiated asthey are in the Hebrew.

The two poles of spiritual being were recognizedin all ancient Temple teachings, and they were sym-bolized in the two columns or pillars which stoodbefore the Mystery Temples. At the entrance ofSolomon’s Temple stood the two pillars Jachin andBoaz, together symbolizing Strength and Stability,and also Beauty; they are also known as the twoColumns of Victory. Always the candidate mustpass between these two pillars in his search forLight, the Light which is in the East.

Solomon’s mystic Song is a poetic and allegoricaldelineation of the steps or degrees which lead to thedevelopment of Cosmic Consciousness, partly evi-denced in seership. These degrees, sometimestermed “veils” in the early Mystery Schools, areseven in number and are enumerated thus:

First Degree: The QuestSecond Degree: The Awakening of Love

(the Mystic)Third Degree: The Attainment of Knowledge

(the Occult)Fourth Degree: DetachmentFifth Degree: UnificationSixth Degree: AnnihilationSeventh Degree: Consummation

The exultant note which is sounded in KingSolomon’s Song takes form in the lovely wordsrepeated so often throughout: “My beloved is mineand I am His,” while the phrase which completes thechant, “and he feedeth among the lilies,” is descrip-tive of the Path which culminates in the divineConsummation.

This ultimate cosmic blending of the two poles ofSpirit which constitutes the Mystic Marriage is rep-resented in the verses with which St. John opens hisGospel: “The Word was with God”; and its musicaccompanies every verse of Solomon’s beautifulmarriage song.

Veiled, for him who is not yet ready to essay theQuest, under the likeness of a tenderly human lovesong, the Song of Songs is to the illumined a reve-lation from the very Holy of Holies, wherein hestands in the Light Eternal, now no longer seen “asthrough a glass, darkly,” but with transcendentclearness, “Face to Face.” ❐

—Corinne Heline

RAYS 02 35

Sophia (Wisdom), Celsus Library, Ephesus

Divine Wisdom, or Sophia, is depicted as a crowned Angel.The Logos is above Her. Mary and the Child are to Her rightand John the Baptist is to Her left. Sophian iconography isespecially prevalent in the Russian Orthodox tradition.

TIME BRINGS to human beings theblessed experience of age. It is in thislater part of life that we take time tolook back over the years and perceivethe character tablets, or monuments,

that mark the passages our lives have taken. Forsome of us there is even the quickening mirror ofastrology to note these indicators more clearly.

Astrology with its meaning-filled symbols urgesus to pause and carefully examine the materialsincorporated, and the height in structure, of each ofthese symbolical markers. Here, beside a well-trodden highway of one’s life, may be found apyramidal monument noted in astrology by a trine(▲). Here, at the turn of a twisting wilderness trail,may be found only a crude, foundation square (■A).And yet, because we are speaking in symbols oflife itself, it is promised that on this barren, four-cornered base may also rise a four-faced trine, orhuman flowering, on four planes of living physi-cal, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It is in humanstriving, seeking, yearning to build a trine, or pyra-mid of character, from such a beginning base to itscrowning point, that constitutes the mystery andmeaning of life.

A child is born. His astrological chart is drawn.The truly wise and loving parent, peering into thismirrored reflection of the new, young life, mustlearn to look as eagerly to the presence of thesefoundation squares as to the accomplished trines.The trine tells of a rich inheritance built in pastlives and carried forward to the present to bepolished into scintillating clarity by acts of lovingservice. The square relates to a need, a search forsustenance, or materials, with which to markthe growing possession of yet another ray ofmankind’s many-splendored being.

The beating throb of the living force of lovepulses throughout the universe along clearlydefined lines of spiritual law. The strong are to helpthe weak, the parent give to his child, man sharewith his brother, nation interdepend with nation.The trine in astrology denotes the strength of pos-session. The square denotes the weakness of unde-velopment. Even in these shadowy symbols of lifewe find represented this “give and take” of God’sworld. For example: in the aspects of Uranussquareto Neptune and of Jupiter trine to Neptune there is thecommon bond of Neptune. Such dear and preciouscommunication may be likened to the breast of amother bared to the lips of her child, the handclaspof a friend, the round-table discussion of nations.

This is astrology’s deepest use and meaning. Itstrue value is in aiding us to perceive more clearlythe competence, the grace, the offering containedin a trined, or pyramided, trait of character. Thusmay the skilled qualities be consciously and will-fully bent in service to the needy character attrib-utes represented in the square—teaching, nurtur-ing, disciplining.

They are such tiny feetThat have gone such a little way to meetThe years which are required to breakTheir steps to evenness and makeThem goMore sure and slow.

—George Klingle

And again, it is just as necessary to be aware ofthe priceless substance of life incorporated in theunfolding foundation trait represented by a square.Here in this seemingly unrewarding aspect iscontained a quality of questing and learning. In itthere is signified an objectivity, an acceptance, a

36 RAYS 02

On This Firm Basis

ASTROLOGY

childlikeness. In this likeness to a child there lies apower to aid in bringing a clarity and a glint ofglow to the more mature qualities of the trinewhich it touches in a common bond. Without thisexperience, or opportunity to serve, the pyramidalattainments would take on lack-luster rather thanthe touch of gold. It is in such radiance that manreaches toward heaven.

Sometimes there is also mirrored in an astrolog-ical chart the reflection of some childlike founda-tion mark, or square, which seemingly standsalone. Nowhere in quick sight, or common bond, isa helping trine or sextile. This, the bare base of anunfinished trait of character, does indeed mark a

lonelier and seemingly silent road. Along it travelthe sad and muted hearts of the seemingly mother-less, friendless and forgotten ones. However, it isperhaps on this lonely road that we are brought tothe desperation and humility that bends a knee topray “Thy Will be done.” Can it not be a mark ofthe need to search for a more tenuous material offulfillment? In such loneliness human perceptionsmay be sharpened to understand the compassion of

—a patient love which holds each day anew,Faith in Thy children, Lord, through faith

in Thee. ❐—M.B.

RAYS 02 37

To the Heavens above us

O look and behold

The planets that love us

All harnessed in gold!

What chariots, what horses

Against us shall bide

While the Stars in their courses

Do fight on our side?

All thought, all desires

That are under the sun,

Are one with their fires,

As we also are one:

All matter, all spirit,

All fashion, all frame,

Receive and inherit

Their strength from the same.

(Oh, man that deniest

All power save thine own,

Their power in the highest

Is mightily shown.

Not less in the lowest

That power is made clear.

Oh, man, if thou knowest

What treasure is here!)

Though terrors o’ertake us

We’ll not be afraid.

No Power can unmake us

Save that which has made.

Nor yet beyond reason

Or hope shall we fall.

All things have their season,

And Mercy crowns all!

Then, doubt not, ye fearful—

The Eternal is King—

Up, heart, and be cheerful,

And lustily sing:

What chariots, what horses,

Against us shall bide

While the Stars in their courses

Do fight on our side?

—Rudyard Kipling

Earth quakes in her throes,

And we wonder for why!

But the blind planet knows

When her ruler is nigh;

And, attuned since Creation

To perfect accord,

She thrills in her station

And yearns to her Lord.

The waters have risen,

The springs are unbound—

The floods break their prison,

And ravin around.

No rampart withstands ‘em,

Their fury will last

Till the Sign that commands ‘em

Sinks low or swings past.

Through abysses unproven,

O’er gulfs beyond thought,

Our portion is woven,

Our burden is brought.

Yet they that prepare it,

Whose Nature we share,

Make us who must bear it

Well able to bear.

AN ASTROLOGER’S SONG

Space art by Joe Tuccione, S

pace.com

WHAT IS REVELATION? Thereligionist asserts that revelationis to be found only in the greatScriptures of the world.Thus,the Christian declares that the

New Testament is an unchangeable and unalterablerevelation, given by a Divine Being—“The Son ofGod”—and that other systems are more or less fal-lacious. The Buddhist maintains that the GreatTeacher, the Lord Buddha, was spiritually enlight-ened, and that His teachings were a Divine revela-tion. The Hindu proclaims that Lord Krishna’steachings are a distinct revelation through thatdivine avatar of the will of the Supreme. Others,again, assert that the Vedas alone contain true rev-elation. The Zoroastrian states that his Prophet“Knew the Truth; He was inspired and revealedGod’s purpose to man.” So does every religiondeclare its Teacher to be the best exponent ofDivinity. Thus there are many religions and appar-ently multifarious revelations.

Yet it is possible to sum up religion—if we con-sider it from the life and not the form side—inthese words: The Soul is immortal and an evolvingentity. God is Good. As a man sows so must healso reap.

These basic ideas form the real nucleus aroundwhich all so-called revelation is built up. The rev-elation is one and the same, though to each raceand nation the outer form and presentment differ.

The ideas, precepts, and ethics given by inspiredTeachers differ in order to meet the needs of thenation and race to whom each revelation is givenas a means of directing and guiding its evolution.The scriptures of the world, the bibles of the races,

served the believers in each particular revelation asa certain foundation of morality. Each Teacher laysdown for the younger souls committed to Hischarge a certain code of ethics and morals applica-ble to their particular state of development, thiscode being regarded by its adherents, more or less,as direct and binding, its force depending not onintellectual thought and reason, but on the author-ity of the Teacher, who was presumably Divineand therefore knew (as first-hand knowledge) thatwhich He taught.

Thus it must be apparent that so-called “revela-tion” was a body of ethics and philosophy giventhrough different “Divine Men” or Elder Brothers,in order to mark out as it were a path for a human-ity not yet sufficiently evolved to rely safely forguidance on its own reason or intuition. And the

38 RAYS 02

Revelation

ASTROLOGY

Oil on canvas, Guido Reni (1575-1642), The Vatican

Saint Matthew and the AngelThe artist gives a visually literal rendition of divine revelation.

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object of religion, presumably, is to ren-der progress more rapid than it wouldbe if the race were left to experiencealone in matters of right and wrong,faith and belief in the Divine Teachercausing the man to try to follow Hisprecept.

Authoritative religion with its code ofmorals was a necessity for our earlierhumanity—which was but at its begin-ning, in an infantile stage, and manyblunders would be made and manyblind alleys entered; for in that age ofvague gropings primitive man was onlydriven by the lash of his animal instinctsand passions, and possessed no experi-ence to guide or reason to restrain.Notice the different codes of ethicsinculcated in the Law of Moses and inthe Teachings of the Nazarene—thesustenance needed for the child is val-ueless to the man, and so the religionsuitable for a young race would be practically use-less when that race had by successive incarnationsevolved reason and self-control.

Many an action that would undoubtedly be astep backwards for us today was a step forward forthe earlier races. In fact, our best of today will beour evil of tomorrow, for we are slowly evolvingout of the human nature into the divine, and oursaints and sages of today have been but savages inthe past. We are living in this world, and treadingthe long ascent up the mountain called Experience,in order that the divine may develop. But it is afatal mistake to make any so-called revelation abinding force on the soul. We should not swathethe limbs of a race with the old bands of the past.Many sublime truths give the scriptures of theworld an eternal value, but many of their preceptsand ethics are useless to our present civilization,and we make religion and regulation a clog andhindrance rather than a help if we are so orthodoxthat we cling to a form which the life has outgrown.

No outer revelation can take the place of theinner, and as the soul draws nearer to its divinesource, it seeks experience from within, knowingthat true revelation is the revealing of the God

within. Conscience is one form of revelation.Some call its voice the voice of God, and if by thatthey intend to convey the idea that it is the inbornexperience of the Ego, striving to guide aright itspresent personal manifestation, they would not befar from the truth. For conscience may be consid-ered as moral intuition, and we are wise when weseek to obey its guidance, for this reason—that,although not an infallible guide, it is the best wehave. And if we act according to its dictates, wegrow, even by our mistakes; for the mistake itselfsupplies the needed experience, and thus we gainboth strength and wisdom.

At our present stage of evolution a horoscopemay be said to be a revelation; though there arefew Daniels today who can read “the handwritingupon the wall.” Some astrologers believe Daniel’sinterpretation of those hieroglyphics to have beena reading of a nation’s destiny in the national horo-scope. If a Daniel came to judgment today uponthe national horoscopes, some strange revelationswould be given to the world....Christ came to revealthe doctrine of Universal Love, and His secondcoming is thought to bring a revelation of UniversalWisdom, so that both wings of the true interpreter

Die Bibel in Bildern, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1789-1853)

The Prophet DanielDaniel read the divine writing on the wall. An astrologer reads stellar char-acters inscribed on the sphere of the heavens, as reflected in a horoscope.

or revealer, Mercury, may be given to the aspirantwho is ready to receive the new revelation.

To many there is no such thing as revelation, butsimply an evolution of matter devoid of spirit, andby those at present no revelation can be received,other than the slow process of the unveiling oftheir inner deeps through experience. All Teacherswho come forth from time to time must echo thewords of the Teacher of Christianity, who said,“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

However, apart from any religious revelation,what kind of revelation can we find in the divinescience of Astrology? Enough to give rise to deepand prolonged reflection. I have said that everyhoroscope is a revelation, and a few moments’thought will convince my readers that this must beso, and that all that is necessary is the Danielwhose inner vision is sufficiently opened to inter-pret the Divine message it brings to every soulborn into the world. For a horoscope is not only arevelation of the possibilities of the Ego, but also aguide and milestone which marks off the progressthe Ego has made in its evolution.

To some students, a nativity reveals much; toothers, very little, and sooner or later we shall haveto realize that astrologers are born, not made.Indeed, no one can be a competent astrologer whodoes not take into account the evolution of the Egoand the development of the soul. One astrologermay look at the nativity and from the rising signalone reveal more than another who studies thewhole nativity. Every planetary position and aspectis indeed a revelation, though few competentastrologers will reveal all that a horoscope disclos-es. In some horoscopes, the destructive force is aprominent feature, in others the possibility of asaint, humanitarian, or genius is suggested. But awise astrologer is discreet in his judgment, for inhim lies the germ of prophecy; and if he can raisehimself towards that higher part of his nature andsubdue his lower and personal self, he may fit him-self to become a helper and servant of humanity.

Perhaps some readers will be anxious to knowhow this is accomplished, and also willing, I hope,to make the sacrifice which is necessary to fitthemselves to become one of the world’s realhelpers. Should they therefore ask for the key that

will admit them to the portal of wisdom on thisline, I would recommend them first to discoverwhat their own nativity has to reveal. When theyhave sought self-knowledge, with a view to elimi-nating their own special weaknesses, and by sodoing have developed their own character andstriven to evoke tolerance for the failings of others,they will then awaken to a true recognition of thelaw of Karma, which will enable them to findmany a revelation in the horoscopes of others bywhich they can give that help and advice which willforward the evolution of these people to an extentthat could scarcely be reached by any other means.

Astrology is a revelation of God’s law. Each soulis born at the right moment to bring it under thelaw and harmony of the heavens, and the revela-tion of God’s will regarding each soul is to befound in each individual horoscope. This may be abold statement to those who are still held by ortho-doxy within the narrow limits of convention andbigotry, but, nevertheless, it is true that “Eachman’s life the outcome of his former living is,” andonly those who earnestly and unselfishly seek toknow the Will of our Father in heaven can in anyway understand what a wonderful revelation everyhoroscope becomes.

“Ye are not bound, the soul of things is sweet.”Every soul is making for perfection. And thereforehe who would truly find his guiding star must seekby the light of revelation in his nativity the coursein life he should pursue; for in every natus is sure-ly seen the line of least resistance and the quickestway of progress. Thus man may know himself andhow he may best unfold his divine powers; for inreality there is one divine life given as a seed forthe life of man, that seed growing in matter byreincarnation, the infolded power becoming intime and space the unfolded power—Man madeGod. Revelation is ever being given in one form oranother, but progress, after all, comes from “livingthe life” rather than by study. If we seek to over-come separateness and strive for unity, we shallbecome as those who try to “do the will of theFather in Heaven,” and we are assured that theyshall “know of the doctrine”—that is, they shallexperience the Divine Revelation. ❐

—Bessie Leo

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EDIT OR’S* NOTE : A. M.Davidson, one of our Englishstudents, sends us the follow-ing account of the miraculouscure of Miss Dorothy Kerin of

London who had been bedridden for manyyears suffering from advanced tuberculosisand kidney disease. She became blind,deaf, and dumb, and was at the point ofdeath, when suddenly, through a visionwith warm healing hands, she was curedand has been well ever since.

As our friend has sent us her figure, wethink it may interest our readers to knowwhat the stars have to say.

In this nativity Sagittarius 13 isAscending, with Sun, Mercury, Venus and theDragons Tail.

Jupiter, the ruling planet, is Sextile to Mercuryand the Sun, and Mars is Sextile to Venus. Thus wesee that this is a very gentle, idealistic and lovablecharacter, but Venus is in conjunction with theDragons Tail which has a Saturnine influence, andboth Mercury and Venus are square to Saturn; henceit is inevitable that much sorrow and suffering willcome in to this life and cloud it with gloom.Wherever Mercury, the significator of the mind, isafflicted by Saturn, the planet of Obstruction, thereis naturally a gloomy condition and a tendency tolook upon the dark side of life. But we can neverjudge any thing in a horoscope from one configura-tion; all aspects must be considered in their bearingupon any subject and thus a synthesis, or balance, of

influence will be obtained. The sextile of Mars to Venus and Mercury gives

fortitude to the mind, thus helping to offset the sin-ister influence of Saturn. The Moon, which is theother significator of mind, is in the Mercurial signGemini, trine to Uranus. This accounts for the evo-lution of the super-normal faculties of which we hearin the history of this case, and the conversion ofthese latent faculties to dynamic powers are also pre-saged by the trine of Jupiter, the planet ofBenevolence and Idealism, to Neptune the planet ofSpirituality; and by balancing these testimonies, wesee in this young woman a soul of a gentle, kindlyand idealistic nature whose latent spiritual facultiesare nearly ripe, and almost ready to be convertedinto usable powers under the proper stellar impact.

With respect to the health, it is recorded that shebecame afflicted with tuberculosis, also that she losther sight, hearing, and speech. The Sun and Mercury

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Cured by AngelicVisitation

ASTROLOGY

*This article appeared in the October 1915Rayswhen MaxHeindel was the editor. He analyzes the patient’s horoscope.

are in the sign Sagittarius close to the nebular spotcalled Antares, and the Sun is in opposition toNeptune. This is the cause of the weak sight. Thetwelfth house indicates the restrictive influences inlife, and when Mercury, the significator of sense, isthere in conjunction with the Sun, as is the case inthe present horoscope, we have a limiting influencewhich affects the hearing.

It is curious to note that Neptune, the octave ofMercury, is in the sign Gemini, ruled by Mercuryand in opposition to the Sun and therefore it helps toawaken the spiritual hearing which is also recordedin connection with this case. This configurationwould not have been able to do this alone, and thehearing obtained would have been of an undesirablenature, but it helps the configuration of the Moontrine to Uranus, which opens up the super-normalfaculties as already stated.

Taurus rules the throat and larynx, but Mercurygoverns the air which stirs the vocal chords. Here wefind that Taurus is on the cusp of the sixth housedenoting sickness, and Venus the ruler is on theAscendant in conjunction with the Saturnine influ-ence of the Dragon’s Tail, which also afflicts Mercuryby its conjunction, hence the weakness of the vocalorgans, and the consequent loss of speech is indicat-ed by their square to Saturn. Neptune in the signGemini, which governs the lungs, in opposition to theSun, is responsible for the affliction of tuberculosis.

It would seem almost impossible that one so sore-ly afflicted could ever be healed, but on Sunday,February 18th, 1912, the clock of Destiny struck thehour of her relief. At that time the progressed Sunwas 28 degrees of Sagittarius; it had thereforepassed the opposition to the radical Moon and wassextile to Uranus at birth. This is an influence underwhich a sudden turn of a beneficial nature might beexpected, but the planets alone cannot bring thisabout.

The Moon, or lunation, is the minute hand on theclock of Destiny and on that very day the New Moonoccurred in 28 degrees of Aquarius, trine to theMoon and Uranus at birth, and sextile to the pro-gressed Sun; this was a very powerful occult influ-ence. On that very day Jupiter, the ruler of the figurealso transited the Ascendant; thus there were a num-ber of most extraordinary influences to account forthe miracle which then took place in her recovery.

Following is the history of the case, as given byour friend in England.

Many there are who refuse to believe there is anysuch thing as a “miracle.” They are probably right, amiracle is not supernatural; it is merely, usually, anactivity of super-physical forces which are not yetunderstood by the world in general. Such “miracles”occur constantly in connection with the patients ofthe Rosicrucian Fellowship— probably every day, ifthe truth were known. But of the many extraordinaryhappenings which have thrust themselves upon askeptical world of late years, probably none is sowell authenticated or has received so much attentionas that known on this side of the “herring pond” [theAtlantic Ocean] as the “Kerin miracle case.” OnSunday 18th, February, 1912, Miss Dorothy Kerin,who had lain for some years bed-ridden, sufferingfrom advanced tuberculosis, kidney disease, and,latterly, from blindness and loss of speech, with atemperature sometimes rising to 105, was suddenlyand completely cured by an angelic visitation.

The following particulars were supplied by hermother:

“A strange fact in the recovery is that for a fewdays immediately before it, Miss Kerin appeared tobecome rapidly worse than ever she had been in thepreceding five years of her illness. A few days beforeshe had lost both hearing and sight. We did not thinkshe could live through the day. My husband and I,with some other friends and relations, were gatheredround her bed about 8 p.m. on Sunday, expecting itto be her deathbed. She suddenly gave a great sigh,and we thought she was gone. But with a wonderfulsmile which none of us can ever forget, she stretchedout her arms and held them out for a few moments.Then she lay still for awhile.

“Presently her lips moved, she stretched out herarms again, and then drew her hands over her eyes,always smiling in that wonderful, unearthly way.Her terrible weakness, due to tuberculosis and dia-betes, had made her almost a skeleton. And then wesaw a miracle before our eyes. She looked at us, hereyes at first squinting and then becoming quite nat-ural in expression. I asked her: ‘Dolly, do you knowme?’

“‘Of course I do mummy.’ We were all amazed.She then sat up and cried, ‘I am to get up.’Sheseemed to be under some mysterious influence.

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“‘Y ou can’t get up my darling,’said I, ‘you are tooweak.’But when we brought a wrapper she swungher legs from the bed and walked about. She was muchcalmer than we were. One man present was a pro-fessed atheist. He fell on his knees and sobbed aloud.”

Miss Dorothy Kerin, interviewed in her mother’spresence, said concerning the healing “Vision”: “Itseemed like great golden flame above me, with twohands stretched out, warm hands, and a voice spoke,saying: ‘Dorothy, your sufferings are over; get up,you can walk.’And then I could see and walk andam well. I am sure it is a miracle.” Her doctor wouldnot believe it when he was informed but had toadmit, upon examining her next day, that she wasentirely free from organic disease!

The case is so thoroughly well authenticated as tobe absolutely indisputable. Miss Kerin’s pathologi-cal condition was vouched for not only by her regu-lar medical attendant, Dr. Norman, but also by theSt. Bartholomew’s Hospital, St. Peter’s Home forIncurables at Kilburn, and other institutions, shehaving been sent home two years ago as a hopelesscase. Scores of doctors have since seen her, and hercase is well known in the profession. Her brothersaid that during the later stages of her illness, whenher normal faculties declined, that Dorothy devel-oped super-normal faculties and could, for instance,give an account of what was happening to her broth-er at a distance from home.

Care had to be exercised in speaking of her inother rooms as she could then hear, although deaf tothose who spoke to her at the bedside.

An independent statement of the case, for thosewho are further interested, may be found in Dr. E. L.Ash’s Faith and Suggestion. Miss Kerin, to thewriter’s knowledge, is apparently quite well andstrong today She spoke at a great religious confer-ence in the North of England recently and last monthdelivered a lecture before a London Occult Society,“What I know of the effect of prayer as a healingfactor. How I was cured.” It need scarcely be addedthat Miss Kerin is of a very religious disposition, andeven during her illness she was so patient and gentleand suffered all things gladly as to quickly endearher to all with whom she came in contact. MissKerin was offered quite large sums to appear on themusic-hall stage, but, regarding this as a prostitutionof the evidence of divine grace, she refused. ❐

An AllegoryI leaned from the low-hung crescent moon and

grasping the west pointing horn of it, looked down.Against the other horn reclined, motionless, aShining One and looked at me, but I was unafraid.Below me the hills and valleys were thick withhumans, and the moon swung low that I might seewhat they did.

“Who are they?” I asked the Shining One. For Iwas unafraid.

And the Shining One made answer: “They are theSons of God and the Daughters of God.”

I looked again, and saw that they beat and tram-pled each other. Sometimes they seemed not to knowthat the fellow-creature they pushed from their pathfell under their feet. But sometimes they looked ashe fell and kicked him brutally.

And I said to the Shining One: “Are they all theSons and Daughters of God?”

And the Shining One said: “All.”As I leaned and watched them, it grew clear to me

that each was frantically seeking something, and thatit was because they sought what they sought withsuch singleness of purpose that they were so inhu-man to all who hindered them.

And I said to the Shining One: “What do theyseek?”

And the Shining One made answer: “Happiness.”“Are they all seeking Happiness?”“All.”“Have any of them found it?”“None of those have found it?”“Do they ever think they have found it?”“Sometimes they think they have found it?”My eyes filled, for at that moment I caught a

glimpse of a woman with a babe at her breast. I sawthe babe torn from her and the woman cast into adeep pit by a man with his eyes fixed on a shininglump that he believed to be (or perchance to contain,I know not) Happiness.

And I turned to the Shining One, my eyes blinded:“Will they ever find it?”

And He said: “They will find it.”“All of them?”“All of them.”“Those who are trampled?”“Those who are trampled?”

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“And those who trample?”“And those who trample.”I looked again, a long time, at what they were

doing on the hills and in the valleys, and again myeyes went blind with tears, and I sobbed out to theShining One: “Is it God’s will, or the work of theDevil, that men seek Happiness?”

“It is God’s will.”“And it looks so like the work of the Devil!”The Shining One smiled inscrutably. “It does look

like the work of the Devil.”When I had looked a little longer, I cried out,

protesting: “Why has he put them down there to seekHappiness and to cause each other such immeasur-able misery?”

Again the Shining One smiled inscrutably: “Theyare learning.”

“What are they learning?”“They are learning Life. And they are learning

Love.”I said nothing. One man in the herd below held me

breathless, fascinated. He walked proudly, and oth-ers ran and laid the bound, struggling bodies of liv-ing men before him that he might tread upon themand never touch foot to earth.

But suddenly a whirlwind seized him and tore hispurple from him and set him down, naked amongstrangers. And they fell upon him and maltreatedhim sorely.

I clapped my hands.“Good! Good!” I cried, exultantly. “He got what

he deserved.”Then I looked up suddenly, and saw again the

inscrutable smile of the Shining One.And the Shining One spoke quietly. “They all get

what they deserve.”“And no worse?”“And no worse.”“And no better?”“How can there be any better? They each deserve

whatever shall teach them the true way toHappiness:”

I was silenced.And still the people went on seeking, and tram-

pling each other in their eagerness to find. And I per-ceived what I had not fully grasped before, that theWhirlwind caught them up from time to time and setthem down elsewhere to continue the Search.

And I said to the Shining One: “Does theWhirlwind always set them down again on thesehills and in these valleys?”

And the Shining One made answer: “Not alwayson these hills or in these valleys.”

“Where then?”“Look above you.”And I looked up. Above me stretched the Milky

Way and gleamed the stars.And I breathed “Oh” and fell silent, awed by what

was given to me to comprehend.Below me they still trampled each other.And I asked the Shining One. “But no matter

where the Whirlwind sets them down, they go onseeking Happiness?”

“They go on seeking happiness.”“And the Whirlwind makes no mistakes?”“The Whirlwind makes no mistakes.”“It puts them sooner or later, where they will get

what they deserve?”“It puts them sooner or later where they will get

what they deserve.”Then the load crushing my heart lightened, and I

found I could look at the brutal cruelties that went onbelow me with pity for the cruel. And the longer Ilooked the stronger the compassion grew.

And I said to the Shining One: “They act like mengoaded.”

“They are goaded.”“What goads them?”“The name of the goad is Desire.”Then, when I had looked a little longer, I cried out

passionately: “Desire is an evil thing.”But the face of the Shining One grew stern and his

voice rang out, dismaying me. “Desire is not an evilthing.”

I trembled and thought withdrew herself into theinnermost chamber of my heart. Till at last I said: “Itis Desire that nerves men on to learn the lessons Godhas set.”

“It is Desire that nerves them.”“The lessons of Life and Love?”“The lessons of Life and Love!”Then I could no longer see that they were cruel. I

could only see that they were learning. I watchedthem with deep love and compassion, as one by onethe Whirlwind carried them out of sight. ❐

—Anonymous

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THE ESSENCE of spiritual service ofany kind is performed by the personwho transmutes the negative areas ofhis own subconscious, strengthens anddisciplines his mental faculties, keeps

his heart consciousness alive with love power andseeks always to be perceptive of the best in others.The perception of the actual or potential good inothers is an ignition which sooner or later makespossible the expression of that good. The essenceof evolutionary progress is the ever-unfoldingawareness of Good. We as individuals make a con-tribution to the progress of humanity as a wholewhen, by regenerate consciousness, we are able toalert others to a recognition of their higher poten-tials for the fulfillment of talents and abilities,health, love, and success in any field of endeavor.

The term “white light” is a symbolized expres-sion of this consciousness. White is the compositeof all color refractions. In its purest form it standsas a symbol of the vibration of consciousnesswhich is centered in God. The refractions of whitelight may be referred to, or thought of, as soulqualities corresponding spiritually to the variationsfound in the color spectrum. Each of these colorsmanifests the principle of diversity as an expres-sion of unity, in that each quality has its vibratoryranges from the most primitive, unregenerateaspects to its most regenerate and highly spiritual-ized aspects.Pure white symbolizes perfected con-sciousness.

The astrologer, in his study of horoscopes ofhuman beings, is actually studying, analyzing, syn-thesizing, and interpreting vibratory patterns ofsoul qualities representing all possible ranges of

development and their reflection in the world offorms as experience patterns. The artistic con-sciousness of the painter, for example, is reflectedby what is found on his canvases; that of the musi-cian is manifested by that which comes out of hisinstrument.

The astrologer, also an interpretative artist,expresses his consciousness by the way he inter-prets the horoscopes of others. The horoscopes arehis instruments—corresponding to the brush, col-ors, and canvas of the painter, and to the violin ofthe musician. The astrologer’s consciousness ofgood corresponds to the composite of the artisticperceptions of the esthetic interpreter. Inspirationis the ignition of all consciousnesses that arealigned to truth and beauty. For the astrologer, thisignition is made possible when he charges his con-sciousness to interpret a horoscope according tothe best of all its potentials. His goal is to alert theclient to a recognition of his best soul colors andsoul tones.

The impersonality of the astrologer’s servicemakes it imperative that when he is at his work, helift his consciousness from down-pulling patternsof personal feeling and emotion. As a preparatorytechnique for developing this faculty, we suggestmeditation on the following mandala: a circle,blank except for a dot in the exact center. Thismandala is the most perfectly impersonal repre-sentation of a horoscope that it is possible to make.It conveys no experience pattern, emotion pattern,nor friction, sorrow, or difficulty. The dot in thecenter can stand as the purpose of the astrologer’stask. It is one-pointed, condensed, and undifferen-tiated. That purpose is to be a source of spiritual

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White Light Astrology

ASTROLOGY

enlightenment to the client and when meditationon that purpose is itself focused and concentrated,personal down-pullings vanish from the astrologer’sconsciousness. In this way he “white lights” him-self.

His next step is to “white light” the client. Hedoes so by adding to the above mandala the verti-cal and horizontal diameters. The result is the mostabstract and impersonal portrait of a human beingthat can be made. This mandala is a picture of thespiritual consciousness—the central dot. The stateof physical incarnation is shown by the cross,formed by bisecting straight lines. The envelopingcircle indicates divine power, divine love, anddivine wisdom. The mandala pictures a humanbeing who is conscious of his spiritual origin andthe spirituality of incarnation. By meditating onthis portrait, the white light awareness of theastrologer toward the client is unfolded.

In the next step for developing white lightawareness the astrologer adds the other diametersto the above mandala, completing the twelvefoldhoroscopical wheel. The mandala now shows thatthe client is subject to the same general patterns ofexperience and relationship that are common to allother human beings. These twelve “houses” are the“rooms” of the world-house in which the compos-ite entity, Humanity, lives during incarnation. Eachis as necessary as all the others, each has its par-ticularized significance in experience, and each isa workshop for the creation of greater good on allplanes of human expression and realization.

The mandala as it now stands gives the essentialpattern of all horoscopes. Astrologers can dailymeditate on it to more clearly and deeply conceiveevolutionary purpose in human life. As a “varia-tion-expression” of this mandala, each horoscopestands a much better chance of being sensitivelyand intuitively interpreted. Without this prepara-tion of “White Lighting, the basic pattern” theastrologer risks mental entanglement among all thecomplex factors of a natal horoscope. Moreover,since horoscopes represent people, the astrologerdevelops the response of “white lighting” peopleautomatically when be contacts them in his dailyliving. This is a natural development from his dailywhite light meditation on the astrological mandala

because he projects to people an awareness whichis more and more focused on perfections.

From the abstract design we now begin to applythe white light technique to personal variations.We leave the universal pattern to consider particu-lar patterns.

The old admonition, “Charity begins at home,”can be restated in this form: The development ofthe white light technique begins with theastrologer’s meditation on his own chart, whichhas the same essential pattern as any other per-son’s. It is in the particulars that there is differenceand uniqueness.

His being an astrologer does not automaticallyexempt him from patterns of personal feelings inthe form of prejudice, resentment, false pride,envy, etc. However, as an astrologer he has theresponsibility of transcending these negatives assoon and as completely as possible. This isaxiomatic: to the degree that an astrologer remainsfixated in negative reaction patterns, so does helimit his interpretative abilities. In that unregener-ate state he transposes his own negatives into sim-ilar patterns which he may find in another’s chart.

For example, a male astrologer has become fix-ated on a pattern of aversion to a specific feminineexpression of human life, the result of a past expe-rience. He has never released that frictional feelingfrom his subconscious. How then can he adequate-ly interpret and psychologically or spiritually solvea similar condition which he finds in the chart ofanother male? There are astrologers who, motivat-ed by deep urges toward self-defense and self-jus-tification, fail to correctly interpret certain patternsin their charts which others can see at a glance. Alittle white light is urgently needed at that point.

Generally, we astrologers have no difficulty in“white-lighting” the twelve houses of the chart.The houses stand as picturings of basic experiencepatterns and, as such, convey a more direct imper-sonal meaning. But some of us seem to have it infor certain planets and/or planetary aspects. Why?Because each planet is a focus for a type of con-sciousness, some interplanetary relationships pic-ture the friction and testing of consciousness. Wetend to regard as bad, evil, or unfortunate anyexperience pattern which ignites our unregenerate

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consciousness levels, thus causing us to experiencereactions of pain. Those which ignite our regener-ate levels of consciousness we interpret as benefic,fortunate, and happy. The symbolic composite wecall black—evil, painful, or bad—is to be workedon through the alchemicalizations of regeneratingexperience and transmuted into white or beneficpatterns. Why not, then, learn to perceive thewhiteness inherent in all planetary qualities andrelationships? This comprises the interpretativephase of white light astrology.

The whiteness of any planet is the life principlewhich is symbolized by that planet. The diversityof expression of any planet is just another way ofdescribing the diversity of expression of humanconsciousness. According to your developmentyou are aware of these principles; according toyour non-development you are unaware of theirmeaning and significance. The purpose of white-lighting anything is to become more aware of itsessential spiritual meaning.

However clearly you, as an astrologer; maydelineate and understand the chart of another per-son, it is suggested that a plan be adopted by whichyou may become more perceptive of your ownwhiteness. This plan involves meditation on sever-al mandalas abstracted from your own chart; onemandala for each of your planets. These mandalaswill not involve the use of numbers in any formsince number implies limitation, and whiteness isunlimited. Do not permit a single negative, down-pulling keyword to be used in these interpretations.Use only words which convey levels of spiritual-ized consciousness.

The mandala for your Sun position will be a cir-cle with the twelve houses: the symbol for Leo onyour Leo cusp; the symbol of the Sun placed in thehouse and sign where you have it; the symbol foryour Sun sign is placed on its appropriate cusp.This is the concentrated picture of your Sun seenwith white light. Synthesize by spiritual keywordsevery factor of this picture—it is the spiritualizedessence of your Sun consciousness: will-powerand purpose, the radiation of creative love.

Your Venus mandala: a wheel like the abovewith the symbols for Taurus and Libra on the cuspsappropriate to your chart; the symbol for Venus—

the abstract symbol of the fulfilled feminine con-sciousness, the refinements of the soul, the esthet-ic awareness, the capacity for co-operation, etc.—to be placed in the house and sign where you haveit, the symbol of the sign containing Venus placedon the cusp appropriate to your chart. And so on—one mandala for each of the other planets.

The impression that is conveyed by each of yourplanetary mandalas is that of a pure color, a lightblazing without hindrance. There are no impliedcomplications or limitations to the ability of theplanet to radiate at its fullest.

Your white light horoscope is the composite ofall your planetary mandalas—a Wheel with yoursigns on the cusps, your planets placed accordingto the houses and signs in which you have them.Utilizing the most spiritual principles as keywords,you now interpret your chart as a picture of thehighest and best that you are capable of experienc-ing and realizing in this incarnation. Your chart, inthis form, is an astrological portrait of your idealself.

The next step is to abstract a white light man-dala, in the same way as is described above, foreach of your square and/or opposition aspects. Wewill call these patterns aspect mandalas. Do notplace the planetary degrees in the aspect mandalabut meditate with spiritual keywords on the twoplanets involved. Since each planet in an aspectmandala blazes with the same pure essential lightthat it does in its own mandala, you are now exer-cising the faculty of synthesis to white light a two-fold pattern. Follow out the same plan in applica-tion to your compound (involving three planets ormore) aspects.

After the white light preparation has been made,the squares and oppositions in your natal chart willbe clearly and truthfully seen to be the process ofexperience and reactions to experience by whichyou regenerate your life on all planes. In conclu-sion, this statement is offered for your spiritualconsideration: Regeneration of consciousness is notfor the purpose of making trines for the future; it isfor the purpose of unfolding God-consciousnessthrough the expression of your planets according totheir spiritualized white light principles. ❐

—Elman Bacher

RAYS 02 47

NEAR THE BEGINNING of thetwenty-fourth and last Book ofHomer’s Iliad, called by SimoneWeil “the only true epic” the Westpossesses, even the gods—detached

as they are in their bliss from all suffering—haveseen enough. Achilles has become inhuman.Ignoring our animal nature, our kinship with thebeasts, he neither eats nor sleeps. Indeed, since thedeath of his friend and comrade Patroclus the onlyfood he wants is slaughter of the Trojans. “You talkof food?” he says to Agamemnon, who has arguedthat the Greek warriors must eat before they returnto battle,

I have no taste for food—what I really crave

is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!

He has vowed, indeed, to throw twelve youngTrojan warriors on the funeral pyre he will buildfor Patroclus—a human sacrifice to the memory ofhis friend. And, of course, he continues to tie thecorpse of Hector to his chariot and drag it threetimes daily round dead Patroclus.

Achilles is inhuman. He cannot acknowledgethe limits of bodily life—in particular, our mortal-ity. He cannot acknowledge that we are less thanimmortal gods—and that, therefore, our actionsmust have limits and our lives must recognize

bonds of human community across the genera-tions. Another human being, a fellow humanbeing, does not impose upon Achilles what Weilcalled “that interval of hesitation” before one whois our equal in dignity. Brilliant, proud, godlikeAchilles...is not a man. Acknowledging no limits,acting as if he were himself more than human, hebecomes in Homer’s characterizations less thanhuman—“like some lion, going his own barbaricway,” “like inhuman fire raging on through themountain gorges / splinter-dry.”

Apollo makes the case for putting an end to whatis happening. “Achilles has lost all pity! No shamein the man.” With the help of Zeus, Priam, the agedTrojan King, comes to Achilles’ tent to plead forthe return of the body of his son, Hector. In one ofthe most famous scenes in the history of our cul-ture, Priam puts to his lips “the hands of the manwho killed my son” and reminds Achilles of thebond between the generations. “Remember yourown father, great godlike Achilles.”

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire

to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand

he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory

both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely

for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching

before Achilles’feet as Achilles wept himself,

now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

The gods may live free of such sorrows, Achillestells Priam, but “we wretched men/ live on to bearsuch torments.” The fact of human mortality

48 RAYS 02

Between Beasts and God

RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC REALM

This article is reprinted with permission from the January2002 issue of First Things. Without drawing on the twin lawsof Rebirth and Consequence, the author gives compellingreasons for rejecting the proliferating technologies that seekto make conditions of birth and death subject to human will.

undergirds the bond of human community.One generation dies that another may suc-ceed it, though not without a sense of lossand sorrow. To be human is to be born ofhuman parents, to have a place in the affec-tive tie that binds together the generations ofhumankind.

“So come,” Achilles says to Priam, “wetoo, old king, must think of food.”Acknowledging once again his own placewithin society and the limits of his mortalflesh, he eats, sleeps, and takes Briseis, nowrestored to him, to his bed. Commenting onthe poem, Bernard Knox notes that now atlast Achilles occupies “man’s central posi-tion between beast and god.” He is no longer“godlike” Achilles, nor “some lion, goinghis own barbaric way.” And precisely in being nei-ther, his true humanity—in all its nobility, dignity,and pathos—is displayed.

Likewise, at the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel,Jesus, as the representative Israelite, and thereforerepresentative man, is depicted precisely as onewho in his humanity stands between the beasts andGod. Having been baptized by John and declaredthe beloved Son of God, Jesus is driven by theSpirit out into the wilderness to be tempted bySatan—the beginning of his great battle with Satanrecorded in the Gospel. And, St. Mark writes, “hewas with the wild beasts; and the angels ministeredto him.” The beasts may be mentioned simply toaccentuate the loneliness of the desert as a place oftesting and struggle, but more probably, as D. E.Nineham suggests, “they are thought of as subjectand friendly to” Jesus, and, hence, “the passageshould be under stood against the background ofthe common Jewish idea that the beasts are subjectto the righteous man.” Cared for by the angelic ser-vants of God, Jesus simultaneously exercisesAdam’s dominion over the animals. He standswhere one who is truly human ought to stand—between the beasts and God. He occupies an “in-between.”

The story of this true man culminates in a resur-rection of the body—that is, in a vindication of thecreation. It teaches us to honor the trajectory ofhuman bodily life from birth to death—from the

dependence that marks our birth to the dependencethat marks our aging and dying. We are mortals,not immortals. But we are mortals whose specialplace in creation—and whose longing for some-thing more than this life alone can give—has beenvindicated by the triumph of Christ. We must learnto honor this bodily life without asking of it morethan it can be or offer....

More than thirty years ago Paul Ramsey wrotechapter three of his Patient as Person. That chap-ter, titled “On (Only) Caring for the Dying,”remains one of the classic essays in bioethics.Thinking self-consciously from within a Christianperspective, Ramsey noted how our desire to mas-ter death can turn in two, seemingly quite opposite,directions. We may strive to extend life as long aspossible, or we may decide to aim at death whenthe game no longer seems worth the candle.Seemingly opposite, these two tendencies withinour culture both have their root in that samefundamental desire to be master of death. We willhold it at bay as long as we can, and we willembrace it when that seems to be the only way leftto assert our mastery. Neither way acknowledgesthe peculiarly “in-between” place that humanbeings occupy in the creation.

“A living dog is better than a dead lion,” saysKoheleth, as if the nobility of human life were tolie only in its duration. When our goal is simply toward off death, to stay alive as long as possible, we

RAYS 02 49

The Peaceable KingdomThe ancient Jews held that “beasts are subject to the righteous man.”

Fritz E

ichenberg, © by the E

state of Fritz E

ichenberg

miss an essential element in our humanity—thetrajectory of bodily life that begins in dependenceand moves, at the end, once again toward depen-dence and death. We miss our mortality. Perhapsmore important still, we misdirect the longingburied at the heart of human existence.

Our hearts are restless, St. Augustine wrote, untilthey rest in God. That is, what the human heartdesires is not, simply, more years. That offersquantity and continuance—which is more of thesame—when what we desire is something qualita-tively different. “Whatever has undergone nochange certainly has continuance,” Kierkegaardwrites, “but it does not have continuity; insofar as

it has continuance, it exists, but insofar as it has notwon enduring continuity amid change, it can notbecome contemporaneous with itself and is eitherhappily unconscious of this misalignment or is dis-posed to sorrow. Only the eternal can be andbecome and remain contemporaneous with everyage.” Even were we to master aging and dying, wewould not have achieved the heart’s desire; for thelonging for God is not a longing for more of thesame, more of this life. Were we simply anotheranimal, our good might lie in warding off deathand preserving bodily life. But we are not and itdoes not. Standing between the beasts and God,our being opens us to God. The deepest chasm inour being is our need, not for more years, but forGod.

Neither, however, should we embrace death—aim at it for ourselves or others—as if it were anunqualified good. “Whose life is it anyway?” Imay ask. “Have I not been making decisions aboutthis life of mine for years now? Should I not befree to end it if I wish?” Such questions come quitenaturally to us, but to give them moral standing is

to live a lie. We are earthly, mortal creatures whosebeing is, nonetheless, open to God. We are not justanimals—for we are open to God. We are notgods—for we are open to God. Indeed, we arenever quite the independent individuals we like tothink we are, as the umbilical cord ought to remindus, and we deceive ourselves if we suppose thatfreedom is the sole truth of human existence. If webegin with the story of our creation, we have to saythat the author of our being has authority over us.If we begin with the story of our reconciliation andsay “Jesus is Lord,” we have to say with St. Paul:“You are not your own; you were bought with aprice. So glorify God in your body.” In either case,the project of mastering death—of aiming at it forourselves or others—is a delusion, embracing as agood what should be, simply, undergone. Edgar, inShakespeare’s King Lear, gets the attitude aboutright:

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither;Ripeness is all.

Here again, the temptation to be more thanhuman may leave us less than human. Taking con-trol of dying, taking aim at life, through practicessuch as euthanasia or assisted suicide, invites us toignore our shared humanity. Not all born of humanparents, not all who share in the bond of humangenerations over time, will seem equal in digni-ty—if and when those practices become acceptedamong us.

To be equal in dignity it will then not suffice tobe a member of the human community; it will benecessary to exercise those capacities of reasonand will that make mastery possible. What seemsat first like an expansion of our compassion —forthose who lack these capacities—very quicklybecomes a restriction of the scope of human com-munity as they become candidates for elimination.From within the human community, the full num-ber of those who occupy that “in-between” place,a great divide erupts. Some exercise godlike mas-tery, others (like the beasts) are put out of theirmisery.

To be human, then, is to learn to live and love

50 RAYS 02

The project of masteringdeath—of aiming at it

for ourselves or others—is a delusion, embracing

as a good what should be,simply , undergone.

within limits—the limits of our embodied, mortallife, the limits of those whose being opens to God.It is to acknowledge, honor, and esteem the partic-ular place between the beasts and God—that weoccupy in the creation. One need not, however,contemplate for long the vision of humanity I havebeen developing before a certain probleminescapably arises. To accept—even affirm andhonor—such limits in our coming hither and ourgoing hence is to accept suffering we might possi-bly relieve. It is to admit that there is good wemight in our freedom accomplish which we shouldnot attempt, because what we do counts for evenmore than what we accomplish. ‘The Fates havegiven mortals hearts that can endure,” Apollo says,addressing the gods to argue that Achilles’ inhu-manity must be stopped. Achilles must somehowcome to accept the meaning of mortal life, the lim-its that must be endured—not because we areunable to transcend them, but because we oughtnot. Can it be right to accept limits even on thegood we might accomplish?

One response, of course, and it is a perfectlylegitimate one, is to note that we may find other,morally acceptable ways to relieve suffering anddo good. To the degree this is possible in any giveninstance, we have every reason to be glad and noreason to oppose it. But simply to take refuge insuch hopes and possibilities is to make our life fartoo easy. We have to reckon with the fact that hon-oring the limits of our “in-between” condition maymean there is good which, in our freedom, wemight accomplish but which we neverthelessdecline to do. Can that possibly be reasonable?

Discussing some sermons of St. Augustine (firstpreached probably in the year 397 but newly dis-covered in only 1990), Peter Brown notes thatAugustine was often required to preach at festivalsof the martyrs. This was a time when the cult of themartyrs was of profound importance to the averageChristian, for persecution was still a very recentmemory. The martyrs were the great heroes, the“muscular athletes” and “triumphant stars” of thefaith. But, Brown suggests, one can see Augustinequite deliberately making the feasts of the martyrs“less dramatic, so as to stress the daily drama ofGod’s workings in the heart of the average

Christian.” For that average believer did not doubtthat God’s grace had been spectacularly displayedin the courage of the martyrs. What he was likelyto doubt, however, was whether such heroismcould possibly be displayed in his own less dra-matic and more humdrum day-to-day existence.And so, Augustine points “away from the currentpopular ideology of the triumph of the martyrs tothe smaller pains and triumphs of daily life.”

An example of how he does this is quite instruc-tive for our purposes. “God has many martyrs insecret,” Augustine tells his hearers. “Some times youshiver with fever: you are fighting. You are in bed:it is you who are the athlete.” Brown comments:

Exquisite pain accompanied much late-Roman medical treatment. Furthermore,everyone, Augustine included, believed that

RAYS 02 51

Oil on tinned copper, c. 1603-04, Adam Elsheimer, National Galleries of Scotland

The Stoning of Saint StephenAs the first Christian martyr, Stephen died for his belief. But,as Max Heindel observes, “if martyrdom can unlock a heav-en with eternal bliss, that is a most easy method of obtain-ing the reward. It may take courage to die, but after all ittakes infinitely more courage to live.” Thus does Paul, partyto Stephen’s martyrdom, learn of Christ to die daily.

amulets provided by skilled magicians...didindeed protect the sufferer—but at the cost ofrelying on supernatural powers other thanChrist alone. They worked. To neglect themwas like neglecting any other form of medi-cine. But the Christian must not use them.Thus, for Augustine to liken a Christiansickbed to a scene of martyrdom was not astrained comparison.

Here is a vision of life—and a rather noble oneat that—for which “minimize suffering” is not theonly or the primary imperative. It directs our atten-tion not just to what we do or accomplish, but alsoto the kind of people we are.

A number of years ago, the philosopher J. B.Schneewind wrote an article with the seeminglypuzzling title, ‘The Divine Corporation and theHistory of Ethics.” In it he sketched a way ofunderstanding an ethic—the traditional, receivedChristian ethic—in which one’s moral responsibil-ities are always limited. To be sure, Schneewinddid this in part for the sake of explaining how mod-ern moral philosophy had developed by turningaway from that received ethic. But to understand itis to comprehend something of the vision of ourhumanity I have been unfolding.

Think of our world as a cooperative endeavorcreated, ordered, and governed by God. In it, as inany cooperative endeavor, participants play theirroles, carry out the tasks assigned them, and in sodoing join together to produce a good which noneof them could have produced alone. No one partic-ipant is responsible for achieving the good of thewhole or the best overall good possible; yet, thework of each is ordered toward that good. Sometimesindividual agents will see more or less clearly howtheir tasks are related to the overall good, and insuch cases they will need to take that into countand could perhaps be criticized if they simplyignored the general good while noting that theyhad fulfilled their assigned task. At such momentsthey need to act creatively in ways that are not sim-ply given in any role.

There may be other times, however, when anindividual cannot really see the larger good hisassigned duty serves. In such cases, he cannot be

criticized for ignoring the larger good while“minding his own business,” for he simply doesn’tknow that larger good. We can imagine a world inwhich the overall good is very important but alsovery complex, far too complex for any individualagent always to be sure of how his work con-tributes to achieving it. And we can also imaginethat the supervisor in charge of this supremelyimportant but very complex project is able to fore-see problems and deal with emergencies, is fair inhis supervision, and is good—“too good ever toassign any duties that would be improper from anypoint of view.” That world, imagined as a cooper-ative endeavor with God as that uniquely qualifiedsupervisor, is the Divine Corporation.

Changing from a workplace metaphor to a moreliterary one, we might think of these agents ascharacters in a play. They know the part giventhem, and each must play it in his own way. Butnone of them is the dramatist or director, and noneof them knows how the plot of the play is to be sat-isfactorily worked out. This is our situation. We arenot the author but characters in the story—underauthority. C. S. Lewis put the metaphor this way:

We do not know the play. We do not even knowwhether we are in Act I or Act V. We do notknow who are the major and who the minorcharacters. The Author knows....That it has ameaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it.When it is over, we may be told. We are led toexpect that the Author will have something tosay to each of us on the part that each of ushas played. The playing it well is what mattersinfinitely.

Whichever metaphor we prefer, it is clear that ifGod recedes as a governing, directing, authorialpresence whose responsibility it is to see to thegood of the whole or work out the plot of theplay, then human responsibility correspondinglyincreases and intensifies. That, as Schneewind sug-gests, is the story of modern moral philosophy. It iscommon, and for certain purposes quite helpful, tocontrast the approaches of Bentham and Kant, tosee in them the two quite different normative paths—consequentialist and deontological—modern

52 RAYS 02

moral philosophy has taken. But in another way,seen against the background of the DivineCorporation, they are quite similar. Lacking eitherNature or Nature’s God to supervise and direct thatDivine Corporation, our moral responsibilityincreases. It becomes our task to determine andachieve the overall good or to find principles ofaction that can be willed universally.

Suppose a child is born with severe physical ormental defects. Suppose someone suffers greatlywhile dying. Who bears responsibility for that?Who must somehow make it good? In somethinglike the Divine Corporation, model God is finallyresponsible. Hence, we have centuries of reflectionon theodicy. But if God, that uniquely qualifiedsupervisor, is eliminated from the picture, either noone is to blame or we are. Either no author is atwork bringing the plot of this story to a satisfacto-ry conclusion, or we will have to sit down at theword processor and assume that divine authorialresponsibility. There is no need for theodicy anylonger, as if we needed assurance that God wouldwork things out. The need, rather, is that we shouldsee ourselves as responsible for making thingswork out. And so, we are tempted to step out of our“in-between” place, to forget that as we seek to bemore than human we may become less than human.

We can see a practical illustration of this if weconsider the widespread—indeed, now almost rou-tine—practice of prenatal screening of infants inthe womb. Suppose we decline to screen and achild is born with defects. And suppose we nolonger can say with the psalmist, “Return, O Lord!How long?/ Have pity on thy servants!” If we arenot simply cooperators in and with a power greaterthan our own, we are the life-givers, who bearresponsibility for the quality of the life we give. Ifwe merely cooperate with a power greater than ourown, our task is to benefit as best we can the lifethis child has. When we become the life-givers, wemay be asked to decide whether it is a benefit tohave such a life.

Reaching that high, we may fall into a state lessthan human. For in accepting such responsibilityfor the next generation, in allowing ourselves evento suppose that it could be a fitting role for humanbeings, we lose the fundamental human capacity to

love—to say to our children, to the next genera-tion, “It’s good that you exist.” And once again,instead of equal human dignity for all born ofhuman parents, we will see a fundamental divideerupt among us: some will bear a quasi-divineresponsibility. Others, whose lives do not meet ourstandards, will be put out of their misery. Betterperhaps to learn to affirm and honor our peculiarplace between the beasts and God.

In accepting our limits, we accept the fact thatthere may be suffering which could be relieved butought not. Ought not because there is no right way,no fittingly human way, to do so. This does notmean, however, that those who suffer do so alone.Quite the contrary. Oliver O’Donovan, noting howsuffering has become almost unintelligible for us,

RAYS 02 53

Created by Ariel Agemian exclusively for the Confraternity of the Precious Blood

Christians are called to “glory in tribulation” (Rom. 5:3), tosuffer with Christ that we may be glorified with Him (Rom.8). Therefore, in Thomas à Kempis’Imitation of Christ, doesChrist speak to His disciple: “Son, suffer me to do with theewhat I will; I know what is best for thee.” To suffer is to endure,not to run, to allow what is to be, to be obedient unto death,even the death upon the cross—or its modern-day equivalent.

has helpfully distinguished between compassionand sympathy. “Sympathy is the readiness to suf-fer with others and enter into the dark world oftheir griefs. Compassion is the determination tooppose suffering; it functions at arm’s length, bas-ing itself on the rejection of suffering rather thanthe acceptance of it.” Since we cannot imagine suf-fering as our own willed project, and since wehave come to suppose that all moral order has itsground in our will, suffering must, by definition, bemorally unintelligible. We can interpret it only as adefeat, though we may live to fight another day.

For Christians, the ills to which this mortalhuman life is subject, the sufferings we bear, are,as William E May has put it, “real, but not ulti-mate.” They are real, sometimes terrible, and wemust oppose them as best we can within the limitsappropriate to creatures such as we are. But wecannot possibly take their measure rightly if, asMay puts it, we “cannot believe that the decisivepowers in the universe could possibly do anythingworthwhile in and through the suffering” we andothers undergo. However deep and profound oursuffering, “the Fates have given mortals hearts thatcan endure.” That is, though suffering and dyingare a great crisis of this bodily life, the very deep-est problem is the isolation and abandonment theyseem to bring.

Hence, if we are to endure, we need from othersnot just compassion but sympathy—that readinessto “enter into the dark world” of the sufferer. Andif we are to make sense of our humanity, of theheavy yet limited responsibility we bear, theDivine Corporation will need more than just auniquely qualified supervisor. That supervisormight be capable of compassion, but we will needsympathy.

When, in that most famous of scenes, Priamcomes to Achilles in his tent and they give way totheir common grief, Achilles says:

Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,

rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning.

What good’s to be won from tears that chill the spirit?

So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men

live on to bear such torments—the gods live free of sorrows.

But perhaps those are not the gods we need if weare to be fully human, for, living free of sorrows,they do not promise true sympathy. This is moststrikingly apparent when Hector confronts Achilles,terrible in his power and anger, and Athena comesto Hector in the guise of his brother Deiphobus,promising to help him in the fight. “Come, let usstand our ground together—beat him back.”

“Deiphobus!”—Hector, his helmet flashing, called out

to her—

“dearest of all my brothers, all these warring years,

of all the sons that Priam and Hecuba produced!

Now I’m determined to praise you all the more,

you who dared—seeing me in these straits—

to venture out from the walls, all for my sake,

while the others stay inside and cling to safety.”

Hector hurls his spear, but it glances offAchilles’ shield.

He stood there, cast down...

he had no spear in reserve. So Hector shouted out

to Deiphobus bearing his white shield—with a ringing

shout

he called for a heavy lance—

but the man was nowhere near him,

vanished—

yes and Hector knew the truth in his heart....

I thought he was at my side, the hero Deiphobus—

he’s safe inside the walls ....

Rather different is the picture we find in Mark’sGospel. In that story, it is not too strong to say thatGod dies outside the walls of the city, sharing themortality that marks human life. It is of the deadman on the cross that the centurion says, in theGospel’s climactic statement: ‘Truly this man wasthe Son of God.” This God does not live free ofsorrows. He accepts the mortality that marks ourown “in-between” place—and is therefore also oneof us.

In a world governed by such a God, we can findand accept our place, we can live out the role givenus in faith and hope. We can, that is, ourselvesbecome fully human. ❐

—Gilbert Meilander

54 RAYS 02

IF YOU WANT to breeze through a book, orhave a relaxing, entertaining read, skip overJosef Pieper’s Happiness and Contemplation(St. Augustine’s Press, Inc., South Bend, In1979, translated from the German in 1998).

Of course, such “fast-fix” requirements would alsocause one to bypass Max Heindel’s RosicrucianCosmo-Conception. Pieper’s slim book makesdemands of the reader, and generously rewards theeffort, for this work is clearly the result of muchcontemplation and glows with the felicity, liberat-ing insight, and quiet authority that result from itsregular practice.

Being deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas,the great rationalizer and apologist of Christiandoctrine and faith, Pieper’s train of thought is rea-sonable, systematically progressing toward itsgoal, much in the way that Max Heindel suggeststhe exercise in concentration should be conducted.His example is to trace the development of a matchstick from its original state as the seed of a tree. Inthe case under discussion, the object of contempla-tion is happiness. And vague as this concept/condi-tion may be, the treatment of it is anything but vague.

And what is happiness? Some say they cannotdefine it, but know it when they experience it. ForPieper, happiness means attaining “the wholegood.” Which is what? God Himself. The humanspirit is, by virtue of its nature, insatiable—until itpartakes of that which is both whole and withoutlimit. Happiness is a result of acting and doing.Threefundamental propositions apply to the attain-ment of happiness: It means perfection; perfectionmeans realization; realization comes by acting.

All human endeavor, even consciousness itself,is based on and actuated by the desire to possess,

to have. The very act of seeing is a form of pos-sessing or having. We begin to know the worldfirst by seeing, by observing. Nature in space isintrospected in human inner “space.” Seeing andloving are closely related. Scripture says, no onehas seen God at any time. Yet Philip asks Christ toshow him the Father and Jesus answers, “he thathath seen me hath seen the Father.” But more tothe point, Jesus says “Have I been so long timewith you and yet hast thou not known me?” Philipsaw Jesus, he did not see Christ. Peter saw Christ.John knew Christ. Knowing is the “noblest form ofpossession.” Knowledge is permanently ours, andin a real sense, we are permanently what we know.

When do we know something completely? Whenwe love it, not with the love blinded by self-inter-est, but with the love that perfectly “sees.” Trueknowledge is conscious co-inherence, even identityof knower and known. Happy is the man who seeswhat he loves. Can one love God and not see God?No. For God is love. To love is to see God. Howdoes contemplation fit into all this? Contemplationgives knowledge of the beloved object. Contemplationis silent perception of reality. It is not thinking butintuition. Intuition is knowledge of what is present.Intuition derives from the word meaning to look at.We look in the heart, from the heart, with heart. St.John is sometimes depicted with his head restingon the heart of Jesus. John knows that I and theFather are one. John knows wherein lies happi-ness. It is in the contemplation, the seeing, thebeing in the presence of, being consciously unitedwith God. Loving means to desire the beloved to behappy. Happiness breathes in intuition, in theworld of life spirit, the home world of Christ. ❐

—C.W.

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Happiness and Contemplation

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Worry” specific in the world. They are made oftwo parts “Faith” and one part “Hope,” wellkneaded in a bowl of “Honest Effort.” No matterhow bad the attack, they will cure it, and repeateddoses will soon prevent recurrences.

Worry never helps, it only hinders by dissipatingenergy. If disaster seems unavoidable, put yourfaith in God, make every honest effort to avoid itand let hope cheer you. The cloud which hides theSun may be black, but on the side, which you donot see, the Sun still shines. God still lives, and thesooner you reach out and rend the veil of worry,the sooner you shall see His face.

An attack of “Blues” is more easily dispelled ifyou take a double dose of Digesto-Sura, that is, eatmore carefully and sparingly, for the state of thedigestive apparatus has an influence on the tem-perament, which is little realized.

Temperitis TabletsThese tablets are made of equal parts of

“Kindness,” “Considerateness,” and “Self-esteem,”well mixed. They are used as a preventativeby dissolving in “Water of Humility” and taking

56 RAYS 02

Digesto-Sura

NUTRITION AND HEALTH

*This unpublished piece of Max Heindel’s writing, outsideits appearance in the November 1916 Rays, shows him inwry form as ironist and humorist. For what ails one, he pre-scribes good behavior, taken as tablets, tonics, or daily food.

frequent hypodermic injections in the region of theheart.

None among us is so perfect that he does not attimes need the forbearance of others. We should beas willing to bear with others as we are to receivetheir forbearance. If we could see ourselves as oth-ers see us when in a fit of temper and realize towhat degree we lose their respect by such an exhi-bition, we would soon refrain.

There is no better way to break a child of temperthan to put it in a corner where it is forced to lookinto a mirror and see itself. If the same treatmentcould be applied to grown-up children it wouldsoon cure them also.

But apart from the ethical side, temper has avery disastrous effect on health and should beavoided by all means. Following a fit of temper,and in addition to the Temperitis Tablets, thepatient should take only the Digesto-Sura TableTonic for the next meal or two, according to theseverity of the attack. The temper poisons the sys-

tem to such a degree that it cannot properly digestthe food, and by abstaining from food for a shortperiod, the body has time to throw off the poison.It is then ready to assimilate food and repair thewaste caused by the temper. But food taken beforethe temper-poison has been eliminated serves onlyto further clog and poison the body.

No food is less healthful than food which wecannot assimilate, and under certain conditions ofmind and body he who values health ought toabstain from food. Fatigue poisons the body onlyto a lesser degree than worry and temper, and foodeaten when the body is tired does not assimilate.

Hurry also interferes seriously with digestion,and anyone who wishes to maintain or regainhealth should not allow circumstances to stand inthe way of leisure at meals. Pleasant conversationof a light, but not frivolous, nature should be the“spice,” and by cultivating congeniality in our-selves we shall bring it out in others, to the mutualbenefit of all concerned. ❐

RAYS 02 57

Some of the most valuable truths about theorigin, functions and proper care of man’s

vehicles to be found on the printed page.

Max Heindel, a trained clairvoyant, dili-gently investigated the real causes of

physical and mental disorders in the super-physical worlds.

Reveals that man is a complex being, pos-sessing a Dense Body, used to fetch and

carry; a Vital Body, specializing energy fromthe Sun; a Desire Body, the emotional nature;and a Mind, the link between the threefoldSpirit and threefold Body.

Postulates that disease is a manifestation ofignorance, and points the way to perma-

nent health by giving fundamental facts nec-essary for intelligent, constructive living.

“A treasure chest of valuableinformation.”

“An indispensable addition to thelibraries of all those who are concernedwith the true art of healing.”

New Eighth Edition. 244 pages. Indexed.Paper. Published by The RosicrucianFellowship.

Occult Principles of Health and Healingby Max Heindel

Please orderon page 64

REALLY OPTIMISTIC, for-ward-looking individuals enjoygood health and radiate cheerand joy constantly, thus produc-ing an invigorating atmosphere

that is pleasant and beneficial to all they con-tact. Such healthy, well-balanced individualsattract good to themselves continually andpass it on to their fellows through the warmth,friendliness, and charm of their own virile person-alities. Their cheery dispositions, force of charac-ter, tolerance of the opinions of others, and readyappreciation of the good qualities and achieve-ments of their fellows, render such individuals anasset to any community and a real inspiration andhelp to those about them.

At the same time, the sane, optimistic outlook ofthese people enables them to discern brightnesseven in the midst of gloom and to visualize ahappy outcome though in difficult and distressingsituations.

Truly wise men and women refuse to allowthemselves to be misled by mere outward appear-ances into a belief in evil. Therefore their mindsremain clear and their thoughts lucid and construc-tive under conditions that would overcome lesspositive souls.

These more fully evolved people are enabled toalter adverse conditions, both for themselves andothers, with surprising ease and rapidity. This isdue to the fact that by establishing faith, hope, andconfidence in their conscious minds, they havereleased latent forces that are immensely produc-tive of good in their lives and affairs.

New knowledge along these lines and a greaterand more widespread understanding, appreciation,and use of the hidden potentialities and powers ofthe human mind will revolutionize life on earth.Out of the increasingly wise handling thereof willeventually emerge more abundant health, happi-ness, and prosperity for the whole human race. ❐

—V. May Cottrel

Visible Helpers are just as necessary as InvisibleHelpers, and our friends and patients may share ina high privilege, as well as add much to the powerof liberated healing force, by joining us in prayerfor the sick. Our Healing Service is held everyevening in the Healing Temple at 6:30 (7:30 whenDaylight time is in effect) and in the Pro-Ecclesiaat 4:15 P.M. when the Moon is in a cardinal sign onthe following dates:

September..................2—8—15—22—29October............................6—12—19—27

Relax, close your eyes, and make a mental pictureof the pure white rose in the center of the RosicrucianEmblem on the west wall of our Pro-Ecclesia, andconcentrate on Divine Love and Healing.

58 RAYS 02

Releasing Our InnerPowers

HEALING

SUCH A STRANGE THING happenedthat I must tell you about it. Deep, verydeep in the earth there are rich coal bedsor mines. You knew that, didn’t you?You didn’t? Really? Well, now you do,

and some day I will tell you all about these coalbeds, but not today, for our story is about some-thing quite different.

Some one who has very sharp ears one day over-heard a conversation, and I am going to tell you

what it was. The gnomes, who work with the coal,were talking with the sunbeams. You see, theyunderstand each other perfectly. This is what theWisest Gnome said:

“Deep down in the earth is a discontented sparkof light, always saying, “Do let me out! I’m tiredof being imprisoned. I want to be let out. I’m socramped in this black, black coal. Do let me out,please! please! I don’t belong here, for I’m a sparkof light. Why should I be shut up in the dark? Oh,

RAYS 02 59

The Discontented Spark

FOR CHILDRENO

riginal artwork for the R

ays by Alan G

regory

do let me out! How much longer do I have to stayhere?”

The sunbeams danced and played about wherethe Wisest Gnome was sitting. “Do stop dancingfor a few minutes, Merry Sunbeam,” said theWisest Gnome to one of the sprightliest of them.“The Spark must be some relation of yours. Let ussee if we can think of some way to help this poorlittle shut-in. How do you suppose a spark of lightever got inside a coal bed anyway? But since it isthere, maybe we can get it out.”

Merry Sunbeam, always so bright, said: “WisestGnome, don’t you know that we are all sparks oflight from the great Sun Spirit, just appearing indifferent shapes and forms and ways? Some of thesparks, like the sunbeams, shine by day, while themoonbeams and starbeams shine by night. Some arehidden away out of sight altogether, in the hearts ofmortals, and in the flowers; some even hide instones and rocks, and yes, even in the black, black,coal. But they all belong to the great Sun Spirit.Always, without fail, when the right time comes,the sparks are all released from their hiding places.

“Now, Wisest Gnome, please, hurry down,” saidMerry Sunbeam, “and comfort the discontentedSpark. Just tell it to be a little patient. It will be hid-den away for only a little time—maybe a hundredyears or so, but that’s not very long. Some day thecoal will be discovered by human beings andbrought up to the light of day, right up out of theearth altogether. Then some crisp cold day the coalwill find itself in a wonderful fire, all red andglowing, and out of it will come the Spark. It willfly straight up to the sun and be gathered backagain with the sunbeams, and it will shine andshine and shine. Then it will dance with the sun-beams on the trees and flowers and be merry andbright.”

Again Merry Sunbeam spoke, whispering verylow: “So please, Wisest Gnome, do tell the Sparknot to be discontented any more, but to be hopeful.Some day it will be released from the black, black,coal and be a beautiful spark of light. And do tell itnever to forget that even though it is hidden deepdown in the earth, it is still a spark of light from thegreat Sun Spirit, the giver of light and life.” ❐

—Grace Swensen

60 RAYS 02

Doctor Know-All

A poor farmer named Crabb was once takinga load of wood in a cart drawn by two oxen. Hesold it to a doctor and, seeing how prosperousthe man was, asked him if it was difficult to joinhis profession.“Not at all,” said the doctor.“justsell your oxen and buy a fine suit of clothes andhave a sign made that says ‘Dr. Know-All’ andhang it outside your door. Also buy an ABCbook with a picture of a rooster in it.”Crabb fol-lowed his advice and his practice prospered.

One day there came to Crabb a duke whosemoney had been stolen. He asked the doctorto come to his castle and help him find thethieves. The doctor consented and went withhis wife. When they arrived, they sat down todinner. A servant came in with a dish, andCrabb said to his wife,“Here is the first,” mean-ing the first course. The servant, however,thought that the doctor was pointing him outas the first thief, which he indeed was.

When a second servant approached bearinga covered platter, the doctor said, “Here is thesecond,” and the servant thought his secretwas known, for he was guilty as well. Then theduke asked the doctor if he could tell him whatwas in the covered platter.“O, wretched Crabb!”moaned the doctor, certain his ignorancewould be discovered.The duke was amazed, forcrabs were indeed the dish being served!

Then the doctor took out his ABC book.“Andnow I will tell you where your stolen money ishidden,”he said as he began to thumb throughthe pages. But he was unable to find the pic-ture of the rooster and, losing his temper, cried,“Come out, come out, I know you’re in there!”Now it happened that a third servant was hid-ing in a closet and, thinking the game was up,came out with the money and confessed all, asdid the other two servants.

The fame of Dr. Know-All soon spreadthroughout the country, and little Crabb, whohad been so poor, lived in comfort for the restof his life. ❐

—Brothers Grimm, adapted by James Spero