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The Rainbow represents the alternating cycles in which the present Fifth Root Race is gaining its manifold experiences through joy and sorrow, poverty and plenty, youth and age, life and death. Through every phase and aspect of living the play of opposites prevails. It has been so since the Fall. The two natures "housed within our breast" have long struggled for "undivided reign." In nature the opposition is reflected in alternating cycles of day and night, winter and summer, the alternating times and seasons being due to planetary motions having their origin in corresponding alternating activities in the spiritual life of the planet's inhabitants. Before man knew evil he lived in a land of perpetual sunshine and summer. Human wrongs had neither chilled nor darkened the atmosphere. That was the Golden Age.
This condition will one day be regained. But so long as this Fifth Epoch remains, the Lord has declared that seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
The primary building principles in the universe, Fire and Water, have not been fused by humanity into a unified harmonious force. As a consequence, fire destroyed early Lemuria and water inundated Atlantis. Unbridled passions and unleashed emotions lay back of these vast upheavals. Other cataclysms there will be until humanity has blended the contending forces within itself and in nature. However, in accordance with the alternating cyclic action under which man lives, the present planet will not be destroyed by water, but by fire. The "bow in the cloud" is a token of the Lord's covenant that "the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh."
During the Atlantean Epoch the atmosphere was heavily laden with moisture. In the present post-Atlantean, Fifth Epoch the air is clear, light and dry. In biological development, as presented in Genesis and as taught in both physical and spiritual science, the amphibian stage precedes the mammalian. In terms of physiological development, therefore, only those Atlanteans survived the change from water to air who had kept abreast of evolutionary requirements and developed lungs necessary to functioning in the new element. It will be so in the transition which humanity will make from the present Epoch to the next. A new element of a fiery nature will then interpenetrate the air, and only those will escape "destruction by fire" who, like Noah, representative of the Atlantean remnant, have made physical progress enabling them to adjust themselves to the new conditions. This is not a momentary achievement. It is the result of obedience to nature's progressive demands from day to day and life to life and age to age. To miss a step is to fall behind the vanguard of the race, and the lot of the laggard is hard. If his backward state persists, the laggard ends by meeting, on his form side, violence and destruction — to the end that his spirit may exert itself to make the advance necessary for its own "salvation;" that is, a realization of its inherent divinity.
In this passage we have another allegorical presentation of humanity's descent into materiality. This is the significance of the planted vineyard and Noah's drunkenness.
When humanity gradually lost direct contact with the spiritual world, it experienced a lack which it sought to satisfy by means of stimulation available in the physical world. In wine it discovered something that gratified in part this desire for intensified sensation. But since wine is a false spirit, being the product of fermentation and decay, it militates against the powers of the spirit, leaving man a victim to the unbridled play of his emotional nature.
Indulgence in the counterfeit spirit benumbed the higher sensibilities of Noah. He lay naked in his tent. Thus unprotected, his son Ham, representative of a darkened consciousness and the base desire nature, caused him to be put to shame.
The penalty which Hain suffered for his trespass was servitude to his brothers, Shem (higher nature ) and Japheth (mind). A state of debasement is inevitable when the sacred fires of spirit are made to burn upon the altar of self-indulgence. This is true for an individual, for a civilization, for the race. The powers of the spirit cannot be perverted to ignoble ends without painful consequence. Such is the Law.
Wine first appeared with the Fifth Root Race. Its spiritual perception veiled by general consumption of the intoxicant, this race has focused its attention primarily on material objectives. Alcoholic beverages have, moreover, served the Lucifer spirits as an effective channel through which to fan man's emotional nature to such a heightened state that it greatly favored and furthered the development of their own fiery natures. Intoxicating liquors offer an effective medium whereby unregenerated Lucifers can control the desire nature of man.
The effect of alcohol on the body of man is to reverse its polarity. As it quickens the lower principles it stupefies the higher. Emotions run riot while the mind abdicates. Self-mastery lies not in its path. As the race moves toward mastership alcoholic beverages must be left behind. They can have no place in the new race and the civilization it will build. This civilization will rest on a foundation of inner knowing and a restoration of the long lost contact with the divine light within. Before this can be, the false light must be removed. Those who persist in doing homage to the god Bacchus will not be numbered among worshipers in the Temple of the New Age. They will not be excluded by an arbitrary decree. It will be because of their failure to adjust and refine their physical and psychical constitution in accordance with the demands of evolutionary progress so that they can function in altered conditions that will then exist in the world. They will be stragglers because of their neglect or their willful choice of the lesser state in preference to the greater.
— Corinne Heline
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