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“Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which hath been spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Luke 12:3. When these words were spoken, the Gospel Christ was alluding to the mysteries and initiation. In those times, our consciousness and customs were different from what they are now. Then, the mysteries, and initiations into them, were secret. An open statement, such as The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception was not possible, even though fragments from the mysteries were commonly accepted.
The mysteries are a special kind of secret. The psychology of secrets is engaging. There is something compelling about secrets. If something is meant to be unknown, why impart it to anyone? It is as if the person imparting the secret is so filled by its content that he/she cannot keep from sharing it. When it is imparted, the fullness to bursting, accompanies it. Keeping a secret is not easy. Often, love is the only emotion strong enough to contain a secret.
There are various reasons for secrets. One seems to be, that when some things are given general currency, they lose their special, delicate qualities that define them. Something intimate and poetic, cannot rightly be blared from loudspeakers, without being made profane and common. The essence of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a delicate flower of this nature. The holy experience of the mysteries is certainly part of the secrecy surrounding the mysteries.
Because we love, we want others to have the full joy of an experience. We don’t disclose “who dunnit” when a friend is on chapter one of a detective novel. The secrets of contemporary freemasonry are of this type. The secret dramas of masonry contain echos of ancient mysteries. They no longer initiate one into a higher state of consciousness in the spiritual worlds, but they often do change one’s outlook on life, and lead to moral betterment. The brotherhood of sharing a secret can bolster one’s humanity. Writing this is done in mildly painful irony, because this writer is the only person in his family to not become a mason, or a member of an organization affiliated with masonry. He did not want to learn secrets of this type, that he could not share freely.
We keep some things from others because, without sufficient knowledge, they might harm themselves with them. We do this especially with children. As they develop, more is given to them.
In the process of education, secrecy is an excellent tool. A good teacher piques the curiosity of a student to want to learn more, to solve a mystery. This is true at all levels of inquiry. A mathematician may spend a lifetime working on an unsolved conjecture.
Then there are selfish secrets. There are things kept to one’s self, so others cannot benefit from them. Trade secrets are of this ilk. Some are even institutionalized. We have laws that protect pharmaceutical companies from having their discoveries made publicly accessible, even when the research for the discoveries was publicly funded. Enormous profits are made off of the suffering of others, by these types of institutionalized secrets. The excuse that is given is, that without the profit incentive, discoveries would dry up. This argument ignores the innate curiosity of scientific investigators, who love to discover things, and also their compassion for those who suffer.
Masons, and other groups, have means for communication without disclosing their secret connections. There are code words, signals, handshakes and other devices. For accomplished mystics, secret communications are no problem. Communication can be accomplished through the ethers. Some etheric communication is called telepathy. Whoever is facile in the ethers, has access to these transmissions. It is said that the Teacher transmits lessons in living picture language into the auras of Probationers, and other dedicated aspirants, under propitious astrological conditions. Those who are capable, receive these lessons consciously. Those who are not as sensitive, benefit from the lessons anyway, but not in waking consciousness—they are in for some surprises during their post mortem panorama. When a still higher level of secrecy is desirable, the desire world can be used in an analogous manner. There are few who can work with objective consciousness in the subtlety of the desire world. Whenever the need for a deeper level of secrecy arrises, one can always elevate to the next higher world, to keep something secret. This holds true until one reaches the world of Life Spirit. In Life Spirit there are no secrets. Everything is open in the light, everything is housetop.
The compulsion of a secret is bidirectional. One filled with the essence of a secret feels compelled to share it. For a seeker, an unsolved mystery holds a compelling attraction.
Many years ago this writer would occasionally walk through the large study hall of the central library of the local university. It was an interesting experience, especially at the time of final examinations. Most students at the tables were intent on learning, or at least getting good grades. As one walked down the aisle between the large study tables, one could easily tell who was studying and who wasn’t. One could tell, even if one was blindfolded. One was drawn to some tables as though by an invisible magnetism. Those were the tables where the students were deeply concentrated in study. There are spiritual reasons for this phenomenon. One is that when one is deeply interested in something, the interest initiates an attractive force in the desire world proportionate to the degree of interest. Another reason is that concrete thoughts are vacuums. When one is deeply concentrated, the resulting thought form is a vacuum, whose strength is proportionate to the depth and intensity of the concentration. This vacuum is attractive to transcendental truth, … ,and to other thinkers. Great minds are often drawn to the same problems.
The evolutionary creation is also composed of vacuous, and attractive, thought forms. One feature of the creative scheme is that most of the thought forms are are divine rather than human, and divinities are much deeper and more perfect creative thinkers than humans. In the creation there are a myriad evolutionary conditions, each with its own lessons. Some are more important than others, just as some of the many conditions and events in our lives, are more important than others. In the great creation there are certain lessons we must learn, certain states of consciousness we must reach, and there are definite creative powers to be developed in reaching them. They are called evolutionary goals. This state of affairs is true in the macrocosm, just as it is true in the microcosm of the human life cycle.
From the human point of view, the cosmic thought forms of mandatory importance and magnum interest, are called the mysteries. The vacuum of a thought form has the quality of a question, thus a mystery is a question that must be answered. An answer, or a solution, of a mystery is an initiation. Once one has been touched with divine discontent, and the need to banish unnecessary suffering, the draw of the mysteries, as an answer to both, is irresistible. It is like a nagging question, or the engaging riddle that brought Oedipus to cure the plague of his country. It was when Max Heindel desperately wanted answers to life’s problems, that he was initiated. One will endure anything to reduce seffering, or solve a mystery. It is a question that demands answering.
There are archetypes for everything in concrete manifestation, including the evolutionary creation itself. Archetypes are complex creative thought forms. Archetypes are frequently composed of other thought forms. Some constituent thought forms are more important than others. These thoughts are more deeply concentrated than others. They are archetypal.
The archetype of a given human rebirth provides an excellent example. There are epitomical, or archetypal, lives which serve as ideals to others, especially spiritual aspirants. Myths of heroes used to fill that function. For us, it is the life of Christ given in the Gospels. Each Gospel provides a standard for a specific type of aspirant. For Rosicrucian aspirants, it is the Gospel of St. John. The archetype of a specific rebirth of an aspirant, is a deviation from that standard. The degree of deviation is due to the different kinds of experience the aspirant has passed through in previous rebirths. Our lives are only vague imitations of the life of the Gospel Christ. We have all wandered ,or strayed, from the ideal path (the express path of initiation) to some extent.
Our horoscopes are symbolic representations of the archetypes of our lives. They are localized deviations of the solar system, which is a dynamic delineation, in time, of the creative archetype of the evolutionary creation in the Earth Period. There are general and specific events in our lives. The births of our various bodies, such as puberty marking the birth of the desire body, are examples of general events which we all experience. There is some specificity in these general lives, in that each of us passes through these general events under different astrological conditions. Some people have more trying rites of passage than others. Then there are specific events. These are events for some people but not others. One individual might need to experience an automobile accident, another, a serendipitous blessing. As we grow in freedom and creativity, rebirth by rebirth, we gain more control of our lives. We determine the directions they take, but even advanced individuals need some specific events. As we grow in freedom and creativity, we bring our lives into harmony with the epitomical life, the life of Christ. We then see the truths of the creation and we work with them.
The archetype of the epitomical life is based on the archetype of the evolutionary creation. There are cosmic rites of passage which are mandatory to all. As in the little life, some things in the creation are more important to others. The things which are the most important are critical, in the sense of the word “critical”, whereby at a critical temperature a liquid becomes a gas. The most important things in the creative, cosmic archetype are deeply concentrated by divine beings. Since thought forms are vacuums to truth, deeply concentrated archetypes have extreme drawing power, with the quality of inevitable destiny. To us, the quality of the vacuum, has the character of a question. It is the “why”, or any other interrogative, that captivates the attention of the truth seeker. These centers of cosmic concentration are the cores of the mysteries. A truth seeker is drawn to them, in the same way this writer was drawn to the study tables in the library, where there was actual study. Paradoxically, the truth and freedom seeker, is captivated by a mystery, and it is a sweet captivation. It is like St. Paul saying “I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ.” The compulsion to discover a personal secret, is paled in comparison with the compulsion to solve a mystery. However, the solutions of the Mercurial Mysteries, are not mere mental activity. One can only solve a mystery by living out the truth of it. There is no substitute for living the life.
Though we might dream of effortlessly zooming through the spiritual worlds, we are always brought back to our daily lives. Some aspirants believe our lives are all we really have. What in our personal lives, relates us to secrets and mysteries? To answer that, we need to examine our daily lives vis-a-vis the higher life, the life of Christ. When we try to do that, the one thing that immediately comes to mind, is personalization. “God is no respecter of persons.” Subjectivity is inevitable in our lives but personalization is not. We have subjective circumstances in our lives, but that does not mean that we must take them personally. To live the life of Christ is to live and love impersonally.
Obviously, a general study of personalization is too long for this short essay. A smaller bit, about personal secrecy, is more manageable. Privacy is one word for personal secrecy. Privacy is also a topic too large for this essay, so we must limit ourselves to a few words about it, in the context of self-improvement and spiritual aspiration.
When it comes to specific matters of self-improvement, this writer finds it helpful to take an inventory of performance, with regard to specific behaviors. It can be done as a prelude to retrospection. Asking one’s self a few pointed questions, often produces results. With regard to privacy, those questions might include: “How much of my life do I want to keep private?” or “What things in my life do I want to keep private?” When this writer asks himself the latter question, the inner answer is almost always “things that he is ashamed of.” It is as if, the world is the validator of his sins, that the world is his confessor; that Christ (the Self of all selves) sees through him, through the eyes of the all. It is difficult to sustain unregenerate behavior, when it is open for all to see, and if one can sustain it, there is a deeper problem. There are beneficial things, that others do not need to know, but they usually aren’t a matter of privacy, but more a matter of modest discretion. To ballyhoo benign behavior, is to gainsay it. The great Madam Blavatsky believed in hiding one’s virtues and displaying one’s faults.That view is still a bit too personal for this writer. Perhaps the wisest stance toward privacy is to be selfless, i.e., to do as one does, and live as one lives, without regard to whether our lives and deeds are private or public. Transparency is not exhibitionism, nor are open secrets clandestine. For aspirants to clairvoyance, transparency has an additional benefit. In clairvoyance, which is inner vision of the inner worlds, one is always looking through one’s own aura, through one’s own psychology. One cannot see and understand others without distortion, if one is looking through the lens of one’s own secrets and prejudices. One of the greatest values of retrospection is clarification, leading to transparency.
An age of transparency is coming whether we are ready for it or not. Science and technology, as in data mining and analysis, are disclosing secrets about us which we, ourselves, might not be aware of. More and more people are on the verge of etheric clairvoyance, or some type of psychic awareness. Soon there will be no privacy, or no secrets, unless we can transfer them to a higher level of consciousness. Hiding things is often counter-evolutionary. When we love people, we do not keep things from them, because secrets become barriers to love and intimacy. As Christian Mystical aspirants, we aspire to altruism, a love of everyone. Secrecy and privacy, thence become barriers to our ideal. In this we can see there is an evolutionary concurrency between personal moral behavior, transparency, and the new faculty of clairvoyance.
There is an ethical incumbency in the converse, of being viewed clairvoyantly, i.e., viewing others clairvoyantly. Because we can do something, does not mean we should do it. We are not compelled to examine someone clairvoyantly, or to pry into their personal business. Neophytes are urged to practice their new vision but, in the literature of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, we are urged to not do so, with those with whom we interact regularly. Prentice Tucker was advised by the Teacher to travel to distant cities to practice with people he did not know, and was not likely to meet. Max Heindel was very strict about practicing clairvoyance. It was to be used only in service. Living within this restriction is one of those things, which are easier said than done. As we have seen, secrets have drawing power. The power can often be compelling, especially to the curiosity of seekers. It requires a great forbearance to keep from delving into the secrets of others, just as it does to keep from divulging a secret. Such forbearance, can be founded in a patient faith in evolutionary process. What must be done, will be done, and it will be done in its own time. When it is ready, a plant will blossom and, when it is ready, the flower will produce fruit. “That which hath been spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”
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Contemporary Mystic Christianity |
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