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| Simplified Scientific Christianity |
For about fifty-five years this writer has been practicing spiritual and astrological counseling, with no fee. Practicing is the correct word. He is adept at neither. His station is like a battlefield commission, based more on need than merit. While the reasons for spiritual counseling have remained nearly the same over time, the reasons for astrological counseling have changed. In the early years it was all hearts and flowers. The questions were like “is he (or she) the right one?” or “Are we compatible?” Frequently the counseling was a matter of helping the couple to understand the nature of their relationship. Astrologically speaking, was it a fifth house relationship?, fun, or a seventh house relationship?, commitment. Sometimes one of them, usually the male, thought it was of the fifth house, while the other was thinking seventh house. As the years passed, the emphasis of the questions asked, shifted one house forward to the sixth and eighth houses. Questioners were more interested in health and mortality. This shift seems to be true for everyone, not just astrologers or priests. With the passage of time, one eventually attends more memorial services than weddings.
To try to address both the sixth and eighth houses in one short essay is too much. A little bit about the sixth house is touched upon in an earlier essay. Even the eighth house, alone, is too much. As with all of the houses, there are many sides to the eighth house. The eighth house seems to be especially difficult to interpret for several reasons. One reason is that it is the house of secrets. Sometimes secrets are secret, even to astrologers. One may know there is a secret and what the secret is about, without uncovering the specific secret itself. The beautiful thing about this is that one can be helpful without having to know all of the details. Secrets are intriguing, and they demand experience to be known. The mysteries are grand secrets. They are inevitable secrets. The eighth house is about inevitables—“in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” as Ben Franklin put it, and both are eighth house matters. All of the heroes of mythology, the seekers of apotheosis, had to pass through the world of the dead. Some, like Theseus, got stuck. (Theseus sat in the chair of contentment, when it was offered to him, and got stuck.) Leaving the body to take soul flights is called “the little death.” We cannot know the mysteries of life until we pass through the gateway of death to the invisible truths behind illusory material life.
Another reason the eighth house is so difficult, is the background with which it is imbued. The eighth house is derivative of the eighth sign, Scorpio. Some of the qualities of Scorpio are unpleasant. Scorpio can be the sign of ruthlessness and terror, and eighth house opportunities are often permeated with these attitudes. The second house is the house of personal finances. Its opposite, the eighth house, is the house of shared finances. Shared finances can mean one’s partner’s resources, or the “general fund” of tax revenues. Both are other people’s money. An inheritance estate is another pot of other people’s money. Some look at inheritance as free money, for which one does not have to work. They see inheritance in a manner, similar to the way some politicians see the general fund. In his astrological career, it has been shocking to this writer, to see what people will do for an inheritance. Sometimes even nice people will do nasty things for free money.
There are many forms of balance and compensation in the astrological mandala. Sagittarius and the ninth house follow Scorpio and the eighth house. Where Scorpios can be one of the more unpleasant signs to interact with, Sagittarians are some of the most pleasant and amiable. The vital questions of the eighth house, morph into the universal answers of the ninth house, the house of religion and philosophy. For some, religions have all of the answers, for others there are too many pat answers. Memorial services are on the cusp between the eighth and ninth houses. They bridge the demanding necessity of death, and the questions it raises, with the accepted beliefs about the afterlife, which are usually more elaborate than factual.
Memorial services are occasions when attendees are brought to face death. Death is certain, what happens after death is, for most people, unknown. People tend to treat unknowns with belief, in lieu of knowledge. Beliefs are an expression of character, conscious and unconscious. For worldly people a memorial service is a sober formality. For dour pessimists, it is dark and sad. For Rosicrucian students with faith, spirituality and, sometimes firsthand experience, it is an upbeat and joyous occasion.
Even in happy memorial services there is a tinge of sadness. We miss someone who has been a positive presence in our life, so we feel sad at the loss. Sometimes there is outright grieving. There seem to be differences between grieving and mourning. Grieving is more severe and intense, sometimes with extreme expressions. The essential differences between mourning and grieving are not merely a matter of intensity, or even the flavor of the feelings. The differences lie in the object of the feelings. We mourn the fact that there will no longer be sharing directly with the beloved. We mourn for the departed, who may have to suffer the consequences of an unregenerate life, or who may not have sown many seeds of spiritual fruitfulness. We mourn for the departed because they never took all of the opportunities for a better life that they could have. We grieve for ourselves, …, and we do so, because we realize that in the finality of death, we have lost our opportunities to do right by the deceased, as we ought to have done. The more egregious our unredeemed trespasses, the deeper our grieving. We can no longer procrastinate facing something unpleasant, though necessary, and we have missed the opportunity to overcome our own self-resistance. We must now live with our negligence and intransigence with no recourse, and that grieves us deeply. There is as much finality in death for the living as for the deceased, and it is more painful for the living in many cases.
Grieving is not the only easily misunderstood emotion at death. There are illusory sentiments at the other end of the emotional spectrum, the positive end. In the memorial services he has attended, this writer has never heard a negative eulogy, or remembrance, even if the deceased had been a scoundrel from time to time. It is as if death had sanctified the deceased, and purged all negative memories. That is not realistic, or representative, of reality.
It is also not healthy. As Rosicrucian aspirants, we are urged to exercise good judgment, and see things as they are. When we retrospect, we are admonished to review all of our deeds, not only the good, and not only the bad. Being the petty egoists that we are, we sometimes overlook our less than perfect actions, or inactions. Sometimes the inner adversary distracts our attention from recalling things which, if remembered, would lessen its influence over our lives. It is called psychological resistance. When we do this, we skew character development, and we don’t make the changes which should be made. True though this is, it does not seem to be the reason for unbalanced positivity at memorial services.
Superstition might be part of the reason for this phenomenon. Some people think it is unlucky to speak ill of the deceased. In societies where involuntary clairvoyance is part of the culture, it is savvy to be prudent when one speaks of the deceased. Doing so might win psychic retaliation from the other side. Fortunately, societies of this type are marginal and fading, though the superstition might persist.
There is another reason in most societies. It is social pressure in saving the appearances, and avoiding social embarrassment. People will say things in private, that they would never dare to say in public.This kind of hypocrisy is a consequence of materialism. In our evolutionary past, when our consciousness was focussed inward, we knew the soul quality of another, in the way a pet will know if a new acquaintance is a friend or foe to its owner. We were what we were, and our true feelings could not be hidden. As we have become increasingly focussed on the without, through sense perception, we have ignored inward consciousness. Outer appearances are important with this outlook. The lie that precipitated our too deep fall into matter, has become materialistic illusion. We want to appear as nice and positive people, even when we are not.
It doesn’t help to condemn people for their faults, to “rub their nose” in them. It might even move them to entrench themselves in response to humiliation. On the other hand, bringing one’s errors to one’s attention proportionately, is beneficial. That is actually what purgatory does. In having a complete understanding of an action, through cause and consequence, one can understand the principle which was applied in error. There is a principle at the heart of every action. It is with this truth in mind, that we have wise old sayings such as “don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.” Perhaps there is an element of truth behind the practice of never saying anything bad about the deceased at a memorial. If so, it behooves us to dig it out, as we would dig out buried treasure.
Memorial services are for the living, not the dead. The dead are getting all the feedback they need, in the past life panorama, purgatory and first heaven. Memorial services are for closure. Closure, in this sense, means finalization. To this outer world, death is certainly final, but only for the physical form. We, in our lives, are more than our forms. Our lives are intimately shared with others. There is no such thing as an isolated life. Even the thoughts of a hermit affect the world. A monk in his cell may be more intimately in touch, and in effect, with society than a socialite. We share a collective consciousness, for better or worse. A church congregation is also a Christian community, a collective. Collective consciousness requires confirmation as much as individual consciousness. Memorial services, like weddings, christenings and other rites, are collective confirmations. In them, the community witnesses an event, and confirms it. Confirmations are positive actions. Thus, there is in its existence, a positive confirmation, in a memorial service. Positive, though this realization is, it doesn’t get us to a reason for exclusively positive proclamations in a memorial service.
Perhaps the reason is as simple as life, and everything in it, being not only positive but also good. This would mean that sadness, sorrow, and even loss, are good and positive. This is not a new thought. Perhaps no one has said it better than Tennyson: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” This has profound implications. For instance, being vis-a-vis with non being, or potential, is intrinsically good. It doesn’t have to be academic. Being in nature on a bright, sunny day, one feels life is good. This truth is also positive and affirmative, but it is not so lofty as to approach aloofness. We want reasons and explanations at hand, and usable.
Perhaps the reason is not only that life, and what is in it, is good that brings closure. It might be the knowing that it is good, that does it. Knowing something is satisfying. One can rest assured in one’s knowledge. Knowing that one knows, is even more satisfying. In this, one is more secure, and founded in one’s own being—spiritual security. Still, knowledge, though satisfying, does not seem sufficient to bring closure. If it were, scholars would be established in closure, and that is certainly not true. Faust had vast knowledge and little closure in life. He was restless for something spiritual beyond mere worldly knowledge. Then there is the fact, that when we know something, we are also aware that there is much we do not know. There is something more than knowledge to closure.
Eventually, Faust did find closure. He found it in a most improbable place. It came in draining and redeeming a rotten swamp. His joy and acceptance in closure were not for himself alone. It included the multitude of free humans who would work together fruitfully. He is filled with gratitude, and is ready to die, even though Mephistopheles may claim his soul at death. Closure. Mephistopheles scoffs in cynicism at what he sees as a delusion.
It is gratitude that brought closure to Faust. Gratitude brings closure. In gratitude one has experienced something thoroughly, and knows it is good, through and through, and appreciates it fully. Follow-through and completion are necessary for psychological health. Without completing things, or living them out, one is suspended in uncertainty and doubt. Freud thought that coitus interruptus produced neurosis. Perhaps, stressing only the positive things in a life brings, at least partial closure; the rest can pend until another life expression.
There is closure in even simple gestures when there is gratitude in their reception. “Thank you” and “your’e welcome” are powerful and satisfying words, when they are true. They are also liberating, as they were for Faust.
Closure in gratitude is not only found in little or prosaic things. It is found in the grand creation. In the first creation story in Genesis, as the Elohim look at their work at the end of each day of creation, they utter “and saw it was good.” Appreciation and closure.
Gratitude and closure are a greater and more important factor during the second half of our evolutionary creation. The second half is all about dissolution, decadence, absorption, assimilation, and spiritualization of experience into creative power. One by one, each of our vehicles of consciousness, on which we will have worked so long to build and evolve, will go into decadence. Beginning with the lowest, the dense physical body. The forces in each vehicle, in succession, will be built into the next highest vehicle, and eventually absorbed into the Spirit to be united there with its parent principles. The second half of the creation is, increasingly, a cosmic retrospection. The work of the final period, the Vulcan period, is almost exclusively retrospection. The cosmic retrospection of the second half of the creation, is neither dark nor begrudging, as our daily, personal retrospections sometimes tend to be. They are glorious and joyful. Jupiter and Venus, the rulers of the late periods, are the two most joyous significators in the spectrum of planetary qualities, and the compounding creative character of Vulcan, is beyond words.
The first of the exclusively evolutionary periods is the Jupiter period. Jupiter is the planet of gratitude. Thus cosmic closure begins with thanksgiving and gratitude. Jupiter, to the ancient Greeks, was Zeus, which name means “all bright.” More than the brightness of sunlight, which we see with our eyes, the light of Jupiter is spiritual brightness. Its brightness is even more than the brightness of intelligence. It is the brightness of positivity and appreciation in spirit.
Jupiter is also the planet of expansion. In the second half of the evolutionary creation, the cosmos expands out of the cramping conditions of chemical matter, into space defined by spirit. This activity is mounting and cumulative. Thus, the individual and the Elohim, look back and see that it has been, and is, good. In this appreciation and gratitude, consciousness is expanded and more good is beheld, which produces still more expansion, and so on to the extent of the creation in every dimension. The thought of it leaves one breathless. The evolutionary half of the creation is like the opening of a flower in both microcosm and macrocosm. Its fragrance of gratitude is soul material absorbed into divinity. Closure.
The final word on the matter belongs to Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “thank you”, it will be enough.”
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Contemporary Mystic Christianity |
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