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Ancient Chinese people had curved walkways to their houses to protect themselves. They believed devils could only walk straight lines. In our times, when a person is dishonest, we say that person is crooked. We want to deal with “straight shooters.” We look down on lines of thought that go in circles. These differences are not quaint, cultural quirks that happened in the course of history.
Ancient societies tended to be more rural and agricultural than ours. Agricultural life demands that one be attuned to nature. Nature is cyclical. Day follows night, which follows day, and one must “make hay while the sun shines.” Season follows season and, if one doesn’t anticipate and heed that fact, one starves. On the other hand, if cities are laid out with curving streets, land parceling and measurement becomes prohibitively complicated. Plumbing and electrical lines are easier to fabricate, install, and maintain when straight.
There are also psycho-spiritual benefits to both the rectilinear and curvilinear ways of life.
Repetition is essential to education. It takes many iterations to learn some things. It takes many more to perfect them. A concert soloist will readily confirm this. Organizing our soul bodies is accomplished by repetition. The entire evolutionary creation, in which we are blessed to participate, is founded in repetition. Regular, rhythmic cycles abound in our creative scheme and repetition is integral to them.
Keeping to the straight and narrow avoids many problems. When problems are unavoidable, approaching them straight on and immediately, before unnecessary complications can set in, usually makes dealing with them much easier. It is easier and safer to drive on a straight highway. Linear simplicity is clear and communicative.
There are potential psycho-spiritual drawbacks to both ways of life.
It is easy to be lulled into a passive, unassertive attitude toward life with a cyclical outlook. One thinks another opportunity will always come around, when that very attitude lessens the likelihood of taking the next opportunity, or even seeing it, when it does arise. The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches that awareness of the cycle of rebirth had to be removed from cultural consciousness, because humanity was developing lackadaisical attitudes about spiritual progress, i.e., “I can do that in my next life.” In western societies the doctrine of one lifetime with an end goal of salvation, a linear view of life, was inculcated. The result has been vigorous progress in learning to master the lessons of the world. In a cyclical outlook on life, one develops familiarity with things, but when familiarity becomes too much of a factor in one’s consciousness, one misses new things, or doesn’t even look for them.
A linear outlook has its own blindness. If one has a single objective, one can miss sidelong or new things. It is called tunnel vision. A straight highway may be safer and faster, but one misses all the things one sees on a winding country road conformed to the contour of the landscape. In our society we are willing to sacrifice scenery for speed. In the linear society we now have, we are willing to sacrifice many things to attain our objectives, or even for our convenience. We don’t call these things sacrifices, we say they are disposables. Our western, linear society is a society of disposability, and too many of the disposables are for the sake of convenience. We are choking land and sea with disposable garbage and trash. Our most serious transgression of disposability for convenience is most likely abortion. It is a serious matter to deny a highly evolved being the opportunity to express in a new form, when steps have already been taken through nature and destiny, to do so. It indicates a selfish desire to be free from inconvenience, as well as a disbelief in providence and progress, which linearity is supposed to be about.
Rectilinearity and curvilinearity are not mutually incompatible. They are complementary. Together they form spirals. The expression of life in form is spiral, throughout the cosmos. Everything in the evolutionary creation advances in spirals. There may be many spirals within spirals with barely noticeable differences from their predecessors, but things do advance with thorough surety and perfection. There is progress. Evolution is just a way of saying things are getting better in new ways.
In evolutionary work, many forces are in play. Some are adversarial but, “all things work for the good.” Even seemingly dark forces contribute to the good. Max Heindel used to love to cite from Goethe’s Faust:
“The Spirit of Negation, the power that still
works for the good through scheming ill.”
As aspiring mystics, we know there are divine, occult forces within and behind all of the activities we see around us. Some of them are not currently apparent to us, in our materialistic consciousness, which is blind to many inner realities. In the progress of material science, we learn the physical world is complicated. The inner worlds might even be more-so. Some inner workings are not obvious, but their consequences are. One of the inner, adversarial activities in our lives is the struggle between the etheric vital body and the desire body, for use and control of the dense physical body. It is so important that we are told many times in the Rosicrucian philosophy, that this struggle is responsible for all consciousness. The dense physical body is the prize. It is the most completed and perfected vehicle we have. At present, in the Earth Period, it is ripe for full use. Our life here on earth is the only time in the life cycle when we can awaken to new consciousness. This is true because it is only in the dense physical body that we can compound Conscious Soul. Everything from the gentle touch of light on the retina, to the body striking the earth in a fall, has an impact. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception points out to us that impact produces Conscious Soul, out of the chemical matter in our dense physical bodies.
Each of our bodies has a character of its own. Each of our bodies has a degree of autonomy to express its character (at least until the spirit becomes completely indwelling). The vital body, unchecked, would have the dense physical body grow and metabolize without surcease. It would be like a plant that grows as long as it lives. It would live longer without an adversary spending its energy. When the desire body is activated at puberty, it checks growth. Then, desire motivation spends vital energy in its ambitions, and the vital body barely has the capacity to maintain the physical body before the onslaughts of desire. This continues until around twenty-one when the mind begins to awaken and, through it, the spirit can begin to enter and take hold of its vehicles from within. The entrance and control of its vehicles, by the spirit, continues throughout life, and success in this activity, depends on the application of the spirit. The character of the desire body is given in its name, desire. Left to its own, it would ravage both the physical and vital bodies by constant demand for satisfaction. The more intense the thrills, and the more exiting the experience, the better it is for the desire body.
The struggle between the desire and vital bodies is back and forth. Sometimes one is in ascendancy, and sometimes the other. One of the effects of the expression of desire on the physical body is hardening. The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches that in one period of desire ascendancy, the skeleton was hardened. The skeleton, itself, was precipitated in the Lemurian epoch which was a recapitulation of the Moon Period, when the desire body was incipient. The vital body is expressed in the softer tissue, like the lungs. The vital body thrives in rhythmic repetition such as breathing and the heartbeat. The ethers of the vital body are an expression, a reflective projection, of Life Spirit. The Life Spirit has its home in the heart and circulatory system. From this it can be seen that the physical body, in its development and evolution, has been a battleground in the struggle between the vital body and the desire body for eons. There is also a vigorous interaction between the Life Spirit, reflectively projected in the vital body, and the Human Spirit, reflectively projected in the desire body.
Even the simple things of our lives and bodies have spiritual and cosmic significance. The outlooks of linearity and cyclicity are included.
The character of the vital body is more in harmony with cyclicity than linearity. It thrives in regularity. The character of the desire body is more in harmony with linearity. Desires have objectives. Once a desire is attached to an object, that objective becomes all important. Nothing else matters. When a cat sees a mouse, it sees nothing else. Linearity. From ancient China to the present, human activity has become increasingly linear. We even have attitudes about it. Among intellectuals, it is an insult to be called “nonlinear.” From ancient times to the present, desire gratification has waxed. In contemporary United States gratification is a mania. It is almost considered a divine right by many. Concurrent with the rise in linearity, with the rise in desire, is an increase of psychological hardening. Desire hardens more than the skeleton. Abortion requires a certain amount of soul hardness.
At this point, it is mandatory to mention that desire expression is only one factor in evolution, one factor of variable importance. Extremism is not the divine intention. There are other factors. For example, the word altruism didn’t even exist in ancient times, so new factors are coming into being. But even though the dominance of desire is only one factor in our evolution, it is an important factor for aspiring Christian Mystics to keep in mind.
The loop from ancient China to the present is part of an epicycle, not a trend. From the Lemurian epoch to the present is also part of a loop, a much larger loop, but in terms of desire hardening, it seems more like a trend – a trend sufficient enough to harden the earth more than intended in the divine plan. It is serious. A continent of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean is more than a metaphor for our times, it is a serious and deadly reality. When many of our most brilliant scientists and scholars cannot sense purpose behind nature and history, it is serious. A straight line, in what is a cyclical reality, is a tangent that soon loses touch with that reality never to return. We need to turn the corner. How do we do it? Recycling!
Recycling wet garbage and plastic containers is a good beginning, but it is only a beginning. By looking at the bottom of a plastic container one can determine what kind of plastic it is, and its recyclability. Some things are not recycled. It is not that recycling is impossible, it is that it would be too expensive to do so. Even nuclear waste can be recycled, but it is extremely costly to do so, and humanity thinks in terms of personal cost, not long term, general good. In our desire nature we want things that we don’t have to recycle. We want disposability. We want to be able to bury and forget things we no longer want. The spiritual reality is that nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing. In the panoramic remembrance of our life just finished, which we view at the moment of the transition called death, everything is remembered right down to individual thoughts. It can all be remembered if we have the endurance, skill and willingness to do so. We can remember things we forgot or wanted to forget. We can see things that we were not cognizant of, when they occurred. We can see the workings of things we do not yet consciously know, things we developed in the world from divine principles, when we were elementary nature forces in second heaven between lives. Even if our vital bodies are destroyed by fire, we have the imperishable memory of nature in the world of thought. Nothing is lost. Everything must be processed.
Trained clairvoyants, like Max Heindel, tell us that “thoughts are things.” They are dynamic things that effect change. To us they are nearly immortal things, lasting millions of years. Every time we think, we are creating thoughts that have elemental being. Thoughts are our basic service and responsibility at this stage of the creation. The basic service of minerals is to provide stable forms, plants serve by giving vital life to the kingdoms that have sacrificed the ability to do so, i.e., animals and humans, so those kingdoms can do higher things. Animals, through the spectrum of species qualities, which are reflection of the principles of the zodiacal signs, contribute rudimentary desire types to the world. Humans serve by creating living thoughts. We are responsible for what we create. In the act of creation, we generate an unbreakable bond with our thoughts.
Thinking is a good place to begin soul recycling, for several reasons. One is to stop the bleeding. Every day we think many new thoughts. Some of them are negative, and potently so, if one is angry. If one can stop creating new negative thoughts—not an easy thing to do—it can change our general attitude greatly. Another reason is that thoughts are at the beginning of a creative stream. Many thoughts become clothed with desire, and desire stimulates actions in the ethers, and actions eventually precipitate forms into the chemicals in the chemical world. With regard to this there is a magnificent old saying – “we reap from the seeds that we sow.” Starting streams of good thoughts changes our future. Another reason to begin with the concrete mind is that it is in its infancy. The dense physical body is our oldest and most complete vehicle. The physical body contains several intertwining, interdependent systems. Significant change of the physical body requires a major overhaul that must take into account these complexities. Often physical change requires a fresh restart, like those at the beginnings of the great periods when new systems are brought into the physical body to accommodate new higher vehicles. With determination and almost constant application, the mind can be changed in a few weeks, as was done by Max Heindel.
Changing the mind to stem the flow of negative thoughts by redirecting it is fine, but what about all those old thoughts that have not died? The number of thoughts we have created is staggering. In our fallen, deathly consciousness, our first impulse is to destroy them. It can’t be done. To attempt to do so only creates new thoughts, new destructively negative thoughts. They must be recycled.
Thoughts do not come from nothing. Concrete thoughts are precipitated out of ideas and principles in the abstract subdivision of the world of thought. Thinking is done by the Thinker, the Self, which has its home in that abstract region. The recycling, or regeneration, of thoughts is done by transforming them using their parent principles in a regenerate way. The transformation is not arbitrary or capricious. It is done according to the divine intent inherent in those principles. To be successful, our reference must shift from the petty, personal ego to the Self and its purposes, as well as those of the greater Creator. At first this sounds impossibly distant and difficult. It doesn’t have to be. For example, in some conventional Christian circles there is the WWJD practice. When one is confronted with a moral dilemma, such as having one’s bad thoughts and their consequences return in a very ugly situation, one asks “What would Jesus do?” It is an appeal to intuition. If one is sincere and spiritually obedient, the appeal is heard and answered in regenerate thoughts. “I am with you always even unto the end of the world.”
When we think about recycling thoughts, we are likely to panic or lose heart, considering the enormous numbers of thoughts we form. Such attitudes are illusory and unnecessary. There is a principle such that, the deeper one proceeds into the spiritual worlds, the more unity one finds. Unity is expressed in spiritual coalescence. In the desire world it is called the principle of attraction. In the world of thought, individual thoughts coalesce and become compound thought forms. The archetype of our earthly lives, and the bodies we use to live them out, is a complex thought form. In the world of thought, archetypes are compounded of other archetypes. If one tries to transform individual thoughts one by one, one would be at it almost forever. If one transforms archetypes, which are actual living thought elementals, much as individual thoughts are, one transforms individual thoughts within them. Attempting to transform every individual thought is not only tedious, it is petty , and likely vain. Some petty things do have to be confronted and changed, but that is best done by appealing to greater things.
Appealing to greater things brings us back to principles and ideas, back to the abstract subdivision of the world of thought. Ideas and principles are lofty but, after millennia of living and falling into materialism, we do not always see them as they really are. We tend to see them as strict laws. After all, mathematics is from the deepest region of the abstract subdivision, and mathematics is absolutely strict. Then, there is the spiritual fact that the abstract subdivision is the home of Jehovah, the Holy Ghost, the giver and keeper of law. From the Old Testament we have the legacy of Jehovah as a strict and demanding task master, almost without mercy. For example, when a man is caught gathering wood on the Sabbath, Moses asks Jehovah what to do and is told to cast him out and stone him. It is not surprising that principled people often become rigid people. It is much healthier in spiritual aspiration to see the abstract subdivision as a realm of ideals rather than strict laws. Unlike the law, ideals are open-ended. Ideals foster enthusiasm. Ideals transcend concrete existence.
Students of the Rosicrucian philosophy do not lack sources for ideals. For one, astrology is an amazingly rich source. Each of the signs of the zodiac contains numerous ideals. If one wants more definite demonstrations of ideals, planets represent personifications of ideals. If one wants still more character in ideals, one can commune with archangelic messengers for astrological guidance. Beyond horoscopy, one of the highest functions of astrology is as a gateway to idealism and angelology.
For us, there is one ideal that transcends all others. As Christian mystical aspirants, we know that Christ is the ultimate ideal. The home of Christ is Life Spirit, the world that transcends abstract ideation. It is the home of the highest ideal, Love. Christ, during the incarnation, describes Life Spirit in all of the “I ams” in St. John’s Gospel. For example, Christ-Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” all attributes of Life Spirit. Christ gives his word, the creative Word, that his Life is the way that raises us to the Father. Whether we call it salvation, or redemption, or being saved, that upliftment is the ultimate in recycling. Christ even tells us what we must do: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as is your Father which in heaven is perfect.” St. Paul tells us how to do it: “And be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that the good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Recycling.
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