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In the fairy tale, The Two Caskets, the heroine is a beautiful little girl who sleeps in a chicken coop and works very hard serving her evil, widowed, stepmother, whom she serves with an always pleasant disposition. Her stepmother hates her because she is more beautiful, talented and industrious than her blood daughter. Eventually, the stepmother trumps up a flimsy reason to be rid of her, and throws her down a well. She alights in another world where she serves a wise old woman. At the end of her period of service, she is told she can win a special reward and return to her home by performing three tasks. The tasks are impossibly difficult, for example, one is to fetch water with a sieve.
Psychologists tell us that heroes and heroines represent individuating Egos. The tasks and trials are adjusting to psychological health, and adapting to the greater psychic world. Mystics have no argument with that interpretation, except to say that it is incomplete. To mystics, a hero or heroine is not just a Self, but a Self who is seeking initiation. The trials represent objectives in the evolutionary creation, in which we are extremely fortunate to participate. Those objectives are also initiatory objectives, because the mysteries are based on the scheme of the evolutionary creation. The ultimate objective in the evolutionary creation is godhood, whether by the normal evolutionary process, or by the accelerated and demanding path of initiation. This is borne out by mythology itself, in what is the most famous of all hero myths, the twelve labors of Heracles. The ancient Greek mythographers called those labors the twelve steps of the apotheosis of Heracles. Each of them is almost impossibly difficult.
We too are aspirants to the Christian Mystical initiations of the Rosicrucian Order. As candidates we must also face trials through which we grow and advance. We can be sure they will be as trying as the tasks of Heracles. More than that, they will be more difficult than they were in times preceding ours. In several places in the Rosicrucian literature it is stated that it becomes more difficult to enter the path of initiation as time goes on. This is partly so because as time goes on, the pace of evolution accelerates. It is like hitching a ride on a freight train. When the train is inching out of the train yard almost anyone can hop on it. As the engine builds up momentum its velocity slowly increases. Eventually, it’s going so fast that running at full speed, one cannot keep up, much less vault onto it.
The mysteries of yesterday are not the mysteries of today. At one time candidates were initiated into the mysteries of the outer, material world, just as we aspire to be initiated into the mysteries of the inner worlds in the modern mysteries. The trials of Heracles were symbolic, but even in that, they seem more physical than spiritual. Much has changed over the last several thousand years. Cultures have risen and fallen, and each culture had its own trials, its own strengths, and weaknesses; but there is one thing that has constantly increased, consciousness. The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches that consciousness is one of the chief goals of the evolutionary creation. Thus, it is obvious that our initiatory trials will be trials of consciousness. We may not have to hold lions over our heads, and choke them to death as Heracles did, but we will surely have to develop a soul body as dense and impenetrable as the lion’s pelt that Heracles wore to be invulnerable. Some of our trials will be unique to ourselves, according to what we have and have not done. Some of our trials will be to bring us to evolutionary objectives, and some will be to help us to develop our tools of consciousness, such as being in control of every thought we think. That is as difficult fetching water with a sieve. One aspirant described it as being as difficult as greasing one’s hands, and trying to catch fish bare-handedly.
Many trials are trials of attitude and are before us constantly. One quality of an initiate is a positive attitude. An initiate is undaunted by anything. Some think Heracles was cocky in his positivity. It is a valid question to ask ourselves, “…how does one develop positivity?” As tradition would have it, positivity is born of the courage of conviction. Webster’s defines it as the courage to do what one believes is right. But it is more than belief. It is knowing and living according to true principles, the principles within and behind, the evolutionary creation. Before we can know and live these principles, we must find them. The path of initiation is called the mysteries, things to be sought out and solved. Seeking is looking for something. In this case we are seeking the principle behind positivity, behind the courage of conviction. In Christian Mysticism we are taught that the principle behind positivity is found by looking for the good.
Often one of the trials of looking for the good, is having to go against the tide of prevailing societal attitudes. It has always been that way; our ways are not the ways of the world. In many ways society is negative. The news media scream the evils of the world. Many religions teach a doctrine of original sin, which says we are basically bad from birth, and are born from sin into sin. In our salons of higher education many savants pride themselves in seeing how bad it all is, often with sardonic cynicism. The path to positivity can be a lonely path. When we do set out on the path of positivity, we encounter another kind of problem, the problem of our own negativity. We may not be doomed by the doctrine of original sin, but we do harbor a lot of negativity—we do contribute to societal darkness. We have a lot of base metal to transmute. Before it can be transmuted, it has to be seen and acknowledged, not an easy task. Max Heindel tells us that, in our desire nature, we have a worthy adversary, perhaps more so even than an evil stepmother. As truth seekers it is imperative that we be honest with ourselves, or we cannot be successful in looking for the good or developing any other virtue. When looking for the good, we cannot be superficial or artificial. One cannot fake goodness. It has to be real goodness that gives the courage of conviction. Perhaps a difficult example might help.
Let’s take one of those almost impossible examples for contemporary aspirants, cattle. Our humanity owes an enormous debt to cattle for the way we treat them. We drink milk intended for their offspring in such excess that cows are kept in constant breeding, often in inhumane conditions. Calves get little, if any, of the milk, and most are slaughtered for veal. Beef cattle are raised for slaughter with concrete as part of their diet, and dairy cattle eventually suffer the same lethal fate. Every bit of the animal is used in some way -- from wetting solution for contact lenses, to leather, to gelatin, and many other things. How can we possibly see a real good coming out of this? The answer is in hand-medowns.
This writer has a friend who had an unhappy childhood. Alcohol. She promised herself that when she had children, she would never say some of the things her mother said to her. Then she had a daughter of her own. One day, in one of those moments that come up between parents and children, that try one’s patience, she blurted out one of the very things, she promised herself she would never say. She was in shocked silence. It was a hand-me-down reaction that had been planted in the unconscious part of her being by her childhood experience. Some hand-me-downs are benign, like family traditions, but even then, they are not as good as waking conscious intention. Some hand-me-downs are deep and sinister. Child abusers were often individuals abused in their own childhood. Some hand-me-downs are long term. The rebellion and fall of our humanity, that brought us into discord, and too deep into matter, is a hand-me-down from the Lucifer Spirits. Just as this writer’s friend did not want to continue the chain of a hand-me-downs that may have gone back several generations, we do not want to visit the effects of our fall onto the animals. How that can be accomplished is part of the Christ-Jesus mystery.
It is the mystery of the “cleansing blood.” Like all mysteries the “cleansing blood” has several meanings and levels of meaning. One meaning is that the “cleansing blood” is the desire body of Christ given to the earth to purify and raise it. It is a marvelous vehicle filled with love and purified emotions, that we admitted into our world in a most untoward way. It is sufficiently strong to have significantly changed the desire aura of the earth giving all beings on earth a better chance to improve. Grace.
As beautiful as that meaning is, it is not the meaning of the “cleansing blood” we are seeking to solve our dilemma. In one part of the Rosicrucian philosophy we learn that when creatures, including humans, die of disease, or what are called “natural causes,” they form an attachment to the earth. After many such deaths the attachment is quite strong. However, if one dies by the letting of the blood, the spirit can leave the body directly from the ethers released in the flow of the blood. This is why Christ had to leave the body of Jesus from the blood, lest Christ be attached to the earth until the dissolution of the earth, which would have been a tragedy of colossal, cosmic proportion. In this meaning the “cleansing blood” was cleansing for Christ, not from Christ. This is why cattle and other animals that have been slaughtered many times are much less likely to be attached and too deeply immersed in their earth, when they reach the human stage of evolution, as we are. As heinous as our slaughter of animals is, there is some real good in it; real good based in cosmic principle. This does not mean that we should condone the heartless slaughter of animals, or even look the other way. It is a nasty practice and we must continue to help humanity realize what it is doing, and persuade it to give up its bloody ways. But as we do this, we can do it without being completely negative (which is a big thing), because we know there is something truly good in even this merciless activity. A grain of unmitigated positivity.
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Contemporary Mystic Christianity |
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