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| Simplified Scientific Christianity |
In the faddish world of fashion, a garment which is chic today may be passé next week and remains that way until it becomes retro in its due time. Change.
In nature life progresses day after day, season follows season, epoch succeeds epoch and so on, in incessant change, as far as human consciousness can currently comprehend. Change of a less shallow sort.
An almost endless stream of metaphors and examples could be given to call attention to the reality of change but probably none is better than that of the great, Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who also gave us the term “logos,” as in “…in the beginning was the logos.”:
Since nature is the stamp of divinity and the creation is an expression of the Creator, one pauses to ponder why so many religions seek a changeless God, unless that deity is change itself.
It is not so with Christian mysticism where the Human Spirit is focused in the principle of action; the Life Spirit, or Logos, is the essence of life itself, and Divine Spirit is known in Life Spirit. Truth may be eternal but it is expressed in incessant life. Change.
The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches an evolutionary creation. It is, indeed, a creation with a Creator—the Universal Spirit—a creation with divine intent and living organization within it.
That living organization is called evolution. The prefix “e” in evolution means “out” as in eject or evict, both of which mean to throw out - but in different senses. Volution means to turn. So, evolution means to turn out from within the Creator.
The great seers who founded the Rosicrucian Order study the evolutionary creation in great detail. They do this to help all participating in the creation to do so more efficiently, more in tune with divine intent. They find almost innumerable foci, sparks of God, at various states of spiritual unfoldment participating in the grand, creative opus. We are not alone nor are we, or any of the creatures we see around us, anywhere near the most highly evolved. All creations great and small pass from potential in unconsciousness to divine, waking, creative consciousness in emulation of the Creator—from clod to God, as some have said. All pass through various states of being or worlds of spirit and matter, which are poles of the same ineffable reality.
This is done through revolutions of consciousness, revolutions of experience. These revolutions of consciousness pass through states of form in space called globes and states of life in time expressed in periods of evolution—time and space meaning something more than we currently consider them to be.
In this creative activity, very few qualitative principles are employed, principles which are applied to the periods, the globes and revolutions of consciousness. These principles have planetary names, but they are not much about either astronomy or astrology. They are about basic qualities of spiritual character and contain simple principles which are woven together again and again using the all-important principle of analogy, sometimes called the Hermetic Axiom: “…as above, so below, what has gone before in heaven will follow after on earth, know this and rejoice.” Through the principle of analogy, the unity of divinity is carried through the diversity of creation. Thus, in the spiral revolutions of consciousness there are sub-revolutions and sub-sub-revolutions and so on to such an extent that only the creative consciousness of God can sustain such a complex creation. From a few principles an enormous complexity is created.
This essay is intended to convey useful concepts to improve our lives of spiritual aspiration. The germane fact in all of the complexity is change. The number of stars one beholds on a clear night is as nothing compared to the numbers of changes we pass through in spiritual becoming.
Max Heindel wisely averred that adaption is the chief quality of evolution. Those who adapt evolve and those who don’t, don’t. This is all very fine for those who intuitively accept this philosophy and apply it to their lives but there are others for whom it does notcome so easily. These are the ones who want to know not only how things are, but also why they are that way. The Rosicrucian philosophy is for those individuals and it has an answer to those questions also.
Change is not the only attribute of the Universal Spirit. In the Universal Spirit there are endless possibilities. Each change brings out a new glory. The evolutionary creation is methodical but it is not some kind of clockwork grinding out new beings of various flavors. It is a creation in which the Universal Spirit is inspired within itself to offer something more wonderful than has ever been before, just like any other artist or creator. The Bible tells us we are made in the image of God. It also tells us God is a spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth, while St. Paul tells us we will be like him, meaning Christ. This implies that we should live lives with the same attitude toward change as the Divine, i.e., to celebrate change.
There are those who wish this to be their final rebirth as if to be done with it all. When asked what happens then, their reply is at best some kind of unchanging bliss with no responsibilities and no challenges - which means no spiritual growth. What’s wrong with finding joy in an ever-changing life where the changes are sometimes unexpected? Each change in our little lives and in the evolutionary creation brings out a new facet in the spirit. The clairvoyant poet William Blake said “To be a star, you must shine where you are.”
The evolutionary creation as it relates to our humanity is in two major phases, involution and evolution. The work of involution is the materialization of spirit and the work of evolution is the spiritualization of matter. During involution the becoming beings are creatures. They are worked on by divine hierarchies serving their creative apprenticeship in giving us exactly what we need for our development. We were brought progressively deeper into matter to awaken us. The primary virtue during involution is responsiveness to the creative hierarchies and to the ever new and more demanding conditions. Adaption.
As new states are experienced repeatedly, the becoming beings appropriate matter from the worlds and develop bodies corresponding to those states. This work is done in states of awareness from deep unconsciousness to modest external awareness. Simultaneously with these material experiences and accomplishments, but with a slight delay, a threefold spirit is differentiated and united in reflection to the material conditions. This threefold spirit is analogous to, or in the image of, the threefold godhead of the Universal Spirit. When completed it is a Self, a Spiritual Ego. As this self draws into its vehicles during the human stage, it awakens and it is no longer a creature. It is a creator, a divine being. This commences the evolutionary phase of the evolutionary creation.
The work of evolution is to awaken and use the divine capabilities built into us during involution and to make them our own. This is done by spiritualizing the stuff of the various material worlds using the vehicles corresponding to those worlds in a process of soul growth. We are helpers and participants in the work of bringing clod to God. This is creation in reality. This is our work in the present and in the future. In this work we awaken the divinity within in what is called epigenesis Though this sounds glorious and glamorous, it is done in the little things by creative living.
This chemical subdivision of the physical world is most ripe for change and spiritualization and it is here that we are most capable of making changes. Thus, our evolutionary challenge at present is to transform the world around us. We are doing that. When we look on our work, we can see that we have brought change to the world but we cannot, like the Elohim in the book of Genesis, look back and say, “…it is good.” There is a spiritual reason for our often-ugly devastation of nature, and understanding that reason can help us to improve in our creative efforts.
We have had the potential of divinity within us since the very beginning of our participation in the evolutionary creation. Divinity is not an add-on or an after-thought. It is something essential in our becoming being and it can be expressed more or less effectively every step along the way. Some have expressed it long before becoming waking, self-conscious beings. Some expressed it by not adapting to change. This brought them to be out of sync with creative intent and timing. And it is only because of divine generosity and flexibility of the creative hierarchies that they could continue to struggle forward with even the hope of coming back into pace with evolutionary flow.
Some transgressions of asserting divinity are more serious than others. The most serious with regard to our human, creative wave involve using the creative force in ignorance of the necessity to use it in harmony with the whole. Selfishness. The same selfishness that separates the whole from its internal harmony.
One of the consequences of this transgression was to inject discord into divine harmony, the very discord we see in our human activities in the world around us. A more serious consequence is that we have plunged ourselves more deeply into matter than intended, perhaps too deeply. In fact, we are told in the Rosicrucian philosophy we have, in this, hardened matter itself. As a result, we have closed ourselves off from divine guidance and most of our divine nature. St. Paul tells us we used to be able to see the godhead itself before our fall into darkness and blindness. Thus we find ourselves thrashing about in relative ignorance. We create, but our creations are often out of harmony with the whole. Some creations are even destructive to divine intent expressed in nature, viz. nuclear weapons. Despite our sometimes-catastrophic failures we cannot cease seeking progress, this would defy the flow of the divine plan. To do so would be a denial of our own divine nature. We have to proceed forward because there is no standing still in evolution, either we progress or we fall back. When we do seek to progress, we do so with the caution born of humility, the humility of realizing that we may be wrong, the humility that opens us to intuition.
Most innovation, especially during involution and the transition to evolution, is top down. It begins with intuition or an inspiration from the hierarchies. The intuition is wrapped in thought stuff to form an archetype in the concrete subdivision in the world of thought. The thought provokes motivation and feeling in the desire world, vital life and action in the ethers, and finally change in chemical matter. Top down.
This usually takes place in the human life cycle of rebirth. Studies have found that most significant discoveries and creative ideas are complete by age 24 or 25. There is an occult reason for this age but it is much of a departure for this essay. Everything after that age is usually elaboration on the initial ideas. This kind of top down creation is slow because the life cycle takes so long. Eventually, creation should be in the moment and continuous. Fortunately, top down creation is not the only kind of creation.
As the sprit draws increasingly more into its vehicles, more of our creative work will be in the moment, right here in chemical matter where there is evolutionary ripeness. Hence, bottom up creation will be added to top down creation. Intuition will still come from the spirit but the impetus to creation will be found in the conditions of matter. Bottom up creation is the means for the spiritualization of matter, the work of the evolutionary phase of our work in the creation. It is also something we can apply in our day to day living; which is what this essay has intended to explore.
One of the most important parts of the principle of analogy is beautifully stated by Max Heindel when he says, “…anything that happens in any world effects every other world.” It is in this principle that bottom up creativity is founded. It is the principle we want to examine for applying bottom up creativity in our lives, for better or worse. We want, especially, to be aware of our errors made in selfish ignorance, lest we wreak further havoc in the creation. Eventually even egregious errors will be recovered and transformed into blessings, but it is so much better if we can be what Max Heindel called spiritually efficient servants.
Max Heindel gives many examples of what is being discussed here. For instance, he describes how war being waged here in the chemical subdivision produces even more horrible conditions in the desire world. That may be enough to start us on a better way of living, or at least thinking about the consequences of how we do things now. He also provided positive examples of the effects of bottom up actions on higher worlds. For example, he said finding and eating personally harmonious food strengthens the archetype which, in turn, strengthens the dense physical body. Inversely, consuming drugs or other intoxicants stimulates the desire body in its destructive ways and weakens the archetype. Another example of bottom up causation is using extreme emotional fervor and excitement in the desire body to reverberate activity in the Human Spirit, (its transcendent reflective source), as occurs in some revival meetings. It is a real but not necessarily a positive spiritual experience. Rhythmic living and repetitive prayer strengthen the vital body and tends to quell the onslaughts of the desire body.
Those are obvious examples; but the things we encounter and initiate in life are not always so obvious and simple. In our ignorance we don’t always know the right course in life. For example, organ donation and acceptance of such donations, while they may lengthen the life, but may not improve its quality, obviously counter the archetype and incur other responsibilities. But what about a pacemaker? What is its effect on the archetype and the course of one’s evolution? With clairvoyance one may be able to investigate such phenomena, but few have developed that capability and decisions have to be made every day, with or without clairvoyance. Intuition and prayer are great when facing these kinds of situations but because we are what we are, those too are not always available.
When we are in ignorance, we have the scientific method to aid us. If we take action according to the best positive hypothesis available to us, and then judge both the hypothesis and its consequences after the fact, we have done our best and have given ourselves the best chance learn intelligently.
It would seem that for us, as Christian mystical aspirants, the best hypotheses would have to be as much as possible in the direction of the opposite of selfishness, in altruism. What is the most unselfish thing I can do in this situation? What is most likely to produce positive change? Questions like these become the vessels for intuition and soul growth.
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