308
THERE IS A RETURN IN SPIRIT

The difficulty with conventional occultism is that it is foolishly self-conscious or that often it seeks to substantiate itself by stirring up an opposition from the world and by this destroying itself. It is true that religious movements thrive on persecution, but occultism is never properly a religious movement. If it is to have a classification it is primarily a natural philosophy. But it is every aspect of life when the aspect is carried beyond itself. Science was occultism in its medieval roots, but when science was occultism it was not a science in terms of its own day. Religion starts in revelation and wonders, and so does occultism of real sort, but such religion can never be found in the religion of its own day. Occultism remains the transcendent realization of being as an attitude of mind or a power of inner living in an outer world and facilitates living ahead of self.

A return to superficial living, after an elected or even unwilling participation in the occult, is always a pure defeatism when it is analyzed deeply enough and no defeatist moves in life are really necessary. There is a return to the world in spirit. The occult is not taken as something in contrast with the world but rather as a part of self by means of which the self gains orientation in the world. A disturbing process when not understood, it is stimulating when a seeker becomes a true captain of his destiny. It is obvious that as long as the normal man is in bondage to the world, because of his root conditioning, a first step in spiritual orientation must be the uprooting of everything that tends to hold him blind to eternal reality. But a first stage is not necessarily a continuing stage. The seeker swings back to the world in spirit and in realignment to a desired reality.

 

Occultism is an attitude of mind that facilitates the carrying of everyday concerns up and beyond their present limits for clarification in higher reference.

410
OCCULTISM IS PRACTICED

Perhaps the one constant difference between the true and the false occultism is that the one is lived and the other is merely a theory or an interest or hobby or subjective pursuit. Occultism must be practiced in order to be. Thus it is true that the actual form of allegiance is relatively unimportant. In fact the greatest occultist figures of either ancient or modern times are the quiet initiates that have had no outer or tangible affiliations at all. It is the present fashion to take the hidden or immortal threads of relationships of the outstanding giants of occult history and to trace out subjective unity as outer conscious and organized fraternity, such as that of the Rosicrucians, but with rare and scattered exceptions there is in this real allegory and effective imagination but little deeper truth. The tendency of our own age gives an abnormal value to organization, and thus all occult stirrings of our time must have organization. But what is occult is the nonorganizable reality beneath and behind such efforts.

The very nature of initiation is a constancy in the condition or state of beginning. It is a pioneer reality in temperament that is necessarily individual in its roots, however social it must be in its activities, its goals and its interests. Initiation always is a practicing of living that directs experience rather than submits the self to conditioning and molding by experience. Initiation is highly and uncompromisingly original. The student is a genuine occultist or an initiate at least in potentiality when he is actively expressing or testing his own ideas and is doing things rather than agonizing within himself about what he should or shouldn't do. He is alive to eternal possibilities and thereby is free of bondage to mere livingness.

 

The initiate initiates. He is the creator of his own destiny, constantly molding and shaping rather than suffering his outer experience.

1053
REALITY IS PARTICIPATION

The more anything in question is integrated into a world of experience or an identifiable realm of existence, the more it takes on the character of reality. This proposition disturbs the theorists and metaphysicians because it seems to them to make reality other than a self-prior or what essentially is real because ever unimpeachable in any view that may be taken of it. To conventional occult thinking it is impossible to designate reality except as that which lies at bottom in any consideration of anything else, but the difficulty here is that such a bottom is never touched or reached in any individual search for the real and thus it remains elusive and forever a remote hope instead of the immediate actuality it ought to be. The fallacy in the thinking of this sort is that reality is presumed to be an element distinct from the various factors that make it evident. Rather the obvious or simple fact is that reality describes basic continuance in distinction from make-up or constitution and so is inherent in an act of being and not in any supposed thingness of being such as might exist as pure abstraction and be subject to discrete description.

Reality is participation. What a man does wholly aloof from his fellows is dependent on his strictly transient individuality. This may be an interest of moments or days or years but it achieves no great reality because of its limited endurance and the fact that it is easily cancelled out even by sheer caprice. Entirely true when inner rehearsal such as dreams and pure vagaries of the mind, it is a proposition no less true when it comes to most acts and decisions of people when these are not stabilized by group responsibility or experience of one sort or another. Reality is ultimately breadth of ramification.

 

Thinking achieves reality only through a doing and a sharing, that is only when its product becomes actual in the world.

1055
RAMIFICATION IN SPACE IS CHARACTER

What people support in each other is what each may count on in any emergency, and this is reality as such. Any person who has tried to find himself the difficult way, and affirm his birthright and demonstrate a divine uniqueness by quarreling with everything and outraging his fellows at all turns, has known what it is to see his world fall to pieces all around him over and over again because the peculiar conditions on which he has put it together cannot actually ever be met by either other individuals or the social complex at large. Original contributions to life have been made by its deviates, but never except as the given deviation offers a chance for a ramification in space and a broadened self-discovery to others. Meanwhile a nondeviate by contrast may drift along through some sequence of insignificant events in a general milieu of nondescript averages and know only the nonexacting reality that is hardly his own and that he may lose progressively when he narrows the ramification of his living because unable to support an adequately extensive self-expression. If he ends up forgotten or annihilated psychologically it is because he lacked the distinction that his fellows could experience with him at this extreme of things. His conscious existence was little more than interstitial in normal terms.

It is a commonplace of everyday language to say that the fact of existence or the details of experience are more real to people by and large as they are able to put more of themselves into what they do. Their participation in things is greater however as this more of themselves is a matter of ramifications out into and through the lives of others in elements or factors integral in the common experience and realization to which more and more others are making contribution.

 

The aspirant confers distinction on the cause he holds dear when his contribution to it encourages a like contribution from others.

1056
SELFHOOD IS PARTICIPATION

An individual must be real to continue to be and therefore he must in some fashion participate in history on the one hand as on the other he must share existence and experience to some self-known extent with others around him. Selfhood is making personal what life continues to be impersonally and without demarcation in time, as it is also making pertinent what is of consequence to other-self in each reiterated or new facet of experience. The ancestor worship found over the whole world from the most ancient times down into present-day form in nationalism and other aspects of group allegiance is man's sense of a necessity to feel the flow of a consequent priority through him as a strengthening of the verity of his being in everything he does. Similarly the struggle for power that all individuals disclose in less if not more manifestation of temperament through all their relationships, or the simple and pleasant competitions as well as the tragic and terrible items, is an expression of the need for reality as this is known through a validation of self when others find or are compelled to find much of their own reality in a stability this selfhood establishes.

Reality is a very concrete matter except in the mind, or there as an abstraction for framing personal ramifications in time and space in aiding some over-all comprehension and never to be sought far afield or in total disconnection from the everyday acts of self. The occult student is able to make the cosmos his own, and to build highly stable structures of convenience whenever he desires, because he knows he is as he makes himself true continuance of all men whose lives have made a contribution to their age in any least fashion and thus endowed anyone picking up their livingness with a genius of its consummation.

 

The aspirant chooses some thread of man's historic progress that he wishes to further, makes its substance his own, and shares it with his fellows.

1030
EXPERIENCE IN FULL POTENTIALITY

Fact is reality as frozen in some given aspect while act is reality as stabilized in a momentary actuality of experience. The occultist develops his know-how by action in larger and larger potency of relationship or indication and increases his certainty of a real by his greater and greater social involvement with the people making up a common complex of given experience and hence contributes his own verifications to the others as he shares in theirs and extends this spread of every sort continually and in ever-changing ramification. Here is that expansion of consciousness that is the simplest definition of the process of initiation. Fact-directed experience is limiting since no fact as such survives a mental realignment in basic perspective. The operation of gravity for example refers to one thing when it is such a proposition as moving a book, and quite something else when the matter is an analysis of probability in statistics. As romance the fact can be identified by the word gravity only most awkwardly, and yet what is concerned basically in all these things is the same know-how as a gift for selective act of the sort that will align the desire with the pull or push of attendant circumstances in the profitable direction.

Occultism is a way of life because it starts and ends in a simple determination to experience all reality in a common matrix of over-all harmony. When the non-occultist demands definition in terms of his fact-bound knowledge, he can be told that it is a philosophy or psychology of functional relativity. This will enable him to pigeonhole it in his mental structure of inflexible facts, but not to get an effective experience of its values. How does one go out to get functionally relative? Only by being utterly self in all that exists.

 

The consciousness of the initiate is expanded as he cooperates ever more potently and more harmoniously with his associates.

931
LIFE IS ADVENTURE AT ROOT

Living is full only as there is a continual sense of the tie to some center of reality on the one hand with genuine outreaching or a thorough distention of the self out from this center on the other in the general phenomenon that here may be discussed in terms of means and extremes or in a particular reference to the ultimate snap back to center when a given dynamic thins or particularity of an immediate relation is static and unreal continuance. Attention has to go next by necessity to the complementary point of view, or concern itself with a compulsion out and away from center, even while preserving the tie and its obligations as the only true exercise of the self or possible base of any self-knowing. Every new spiritual insight in the world's history of great ideas has come from these compulsions to express self in an independence that consummates while recreating a facet of the accumulating race experience. The universal is individually possessed in fleeting moments in a sort of self-transcendence and what continues is a dynamic of self-being at peak in center both in self and in the milieu cradling this fulfillment. Here is consummation in the spirit of adventure and discovery or total self-expansiveness.

Unhealthy extremes in living are merely the abortive efforts of men to gain a real experience in living. They fail to offer any genuine adventure of selfhood because the real end of such a reach out or away from a given center in the self is a surrender of all true focus of reality in man's own act and reaction. Empty in realization of any dynamic pertinency in his own potentials or accomplishments for the moment he sees the remote as the greener pasture and loses all interest in what he has and is until he can regrasp himself at core.

 

The aspirant adventures out toward his periphery for an experience of self-transcendence, but never loses his central focus, the seat of his sure self-knowing.

932
SELF-PROJECTION VS SELF-REJECTION

The central anchorage of every individual is the genuine spirituality as well as everyday effectiveness of which he is capable. This is the mean of his being as its action of existence in a timeless and spaceless assurance of itself here and now without particular lean or dependence on anything other than itself. What is required is the fullest possible co-operation with all other existents and every total phase of universal reality with which it holds relationship, but at no call to a self-cancellation or self-diffusion of any extent since such would simply make the whole process meaningless. There is a story by 0. Henry titled The Gift of the Magi in which a young girl had golden hair but no gold clasp to do it justice and a young man carried a gold watch but had no gold chain to wear with it, and in which she sold her hair to buy the chain for him while he sold his watch to get the clasp for her. The beautiful little tragedy is allegory of the grief ensuing when people surrender reality here for fantasy of reality there.

Occultism performs its greatest service to the seeker in making it dramatically clear to him that he never need give up reality in any direct or indirect relinquishment whatsoever in order to gain a supposedly more worthwhile manifestation of the truth. Life is never suppressed or rejected in lower manifestation as a basis of initiation or spiritual unfoldment but rather the whole of the here and now is to be seen as merely one facet of the genuine foundation that can be used with equal facility in any other aspect. The reaching out to greater adventure in living is a broader self-projection that remains centered in the self of any here and now and hence at no point is ever any sort of rejection or discarding or thinning or dissipation of the selfhood.

 

The reality of the world and the reality of the spirit are equally necessary to unfoldment of the individual as each serves as foundation for the other.

961
THE WAY IS WONDERFUL

Life for the occultist is a magnificent adventure, and a seeker who does not feel himself caught up in a species of magical and wonderful living during most of his waking hours is merely wasting his time in an almost tragic way. The dividing line between superstition on the one hand and this theophany of self-fulfillment on the other is a fine one that ultimately is drawn by the conception of reality dominating the individual consciousness. If he places the real as fundamentally exterior to himself and sustaining but perhaps controlling or dictating every major direction of his effort, a pursuit of the occult means a strengthening of every sense of limitation. Experience gives indication of fate or the desire and will of alien powers to which the mind ought to conform if not compelled to do so. Thus knowledge of a future dictated by anything but the self is an acceptance of externals as more real or potent than the self and so is a contribution to self-depreciation that like any other form of sin against inner divinity is the sure basis of self-degeneration outwardly. Every thought gains a destructive slant. The world is found inherently evil rather than if not good at least tending to be more co-operative with the best or the most constructive elements of existence and living actuality.

Superstition is a sensitiveness to indications of limiting rather than stimulating potentialities in the milieu of experience and leads to a shrinking from reality rather than a quickening to what new horizons of self-realization it offers. The superstitious person develops a slinking psychology and sinks more and more into the groove of inaction in a vain hope to get a better deal for himself from fate. The obsequiousness of self-confessed inadequacy never gains anything.

 

As the aspirant's reality becomes strong in inner anchorage he gains new confidence in his own choice of directions and decisions.

792
MAN AND HIS WORLD

The very hardest thing for a modern occultist to realize is that he and his world are absolutely identical in any practical way of looking at the matter. The distinction between them is entirely a division of labor in the functioning of reality. Man himself is subjective or the operation of the real in its discovery and continuation of itself, and the outer world is the complementary aspect of the same real in its objective substantiation of itself more generally or in an appropriate stabilization of contributory elements as in the dismissal of lesser things to automaticity in order that greater things may have a more central attention and that reality may be experienced in an expansiveness or a sense of self-actuality through self-realization in a context permitting change and growth or perspective and continuance of more than a theoretical and static unknowableness.

What the world does as reality is to make possible a cooperation between individualities on the even basis where what each is enabled to dismiss to automaticity is shared by others wishing to make the same outer ordering, so that a total economy of reality is not upset in any fashion. From an abstract point of view the world is more than what it is to single individuals as a fact that is true in a very real way, but no one individual can know it except in his own relation to it and so it is quite academic if not purposeless to consider it in the general view. What is known in common or in the only fashion the knowing can apply to absolute wholes or totalities must be mediated or brought to any specific or personal realization through the individual application ultimately. While philosophically an oversimplification, in practical fact man and his world are an indissoluble unity.

 

The aspirant can truly know the world only where he touches it, and only at this point can subjective reality be translated into objective reality.

793
THE WORLD IS A CONSTRUCT

Everything in general reality becomes what it is through the circumstances of what it is taken to be, or as a result of its use in practical experience. Waste products of one process become a very important substance for another and everything that has existence when seen from exterior perspective has a being in the terms of the usefulness by which it is knowable. Generalization or abstraction is a way of seeing things in a relative degree of separation from the existence of self, but only as the things in question share a common usefulness. Thus food can be generalized or seen in abstract terms because one man by and large eats what all men do. It is hardly a separate existence of food as something apart from body that gives it reality but instead it is the consistent convenience of its elements in the form they take that establishes all basic food as such. Chemical components are not overlooked of course but it must be recognized that they are pertinent because of the useful part they play in one world of experience if not another. Many factors of ordinary life will seem to be quite removed from individual and physical existence, but this is only appearance.

Any great city has tremendous ramifications of buildings and arteries of stone and steel but it all adds up to the gathering in the organic form of a culture and civilization of group convenience or an integration in which an individual co-operates directly with others in dismissing certain functions to automaticity in order to be free in concentrating on others. Everything a man does must be convenient to the reality in which he substantiates himself, and this process of interchange is specialized in a lesser potential to become the world and is centralized in higher potentiality as it remains the self of man.

 

Every aspect of the cosmos is related to every other aspect, any one of them becoming knowable to an individual when it becomes useful to him and he to it.

794
INTEGRATION IS HIGHER POTENTIALITY

By the simple economy in which a reality exists, man has a task of reconstruction on his own account of whatever other men already have made the basis of existence as man. Certain factors of this may be discarded and others added but the net result is an even continuity such as each new person makes his own in part in his experience and so gives his existence personal validation. There have been bodies long before he was born, but he makes every reality of body his own by what he puts into his own flesh and blood. He acts similarly in reference to all life detail. Generalities or abstractions are true only in as relative a sense as this since they refer to what may become individualized and gain a reality in actual experience. Body as an idea does not exist when there is no actualization of itself to which it refers, since even in hypothetical last times a sole surviving possessor of it will retain it only because he employs it in the constant construction of his world of experience. What goes unused must disappear, but the memory of it as such a use that can hold it in reality and tangibility is by no means a necessity of the real. An immortality is possible.

What men find or make necessary as the bottom or foundational factor of life is the outer world of experience in general, and the mind plays with words when it erects the complex of things into an independent reality or conceives a substance of being devoid of an act of remaining in existence. Obviously other people and things do stay in an existence but only in co-operation and so not apart from the cooperative relationship. With ultimate reality recognized as dynamic, worldly things can be seen as no different from otherworldly ones in a continuing necessity to be social or a direct product of integration.

 

The ideal is the dynamic, society the proving-ground. In weaving them together in the pattern of his aspiration, the individual is integrated.

795
THE CHOICE IN WORLD RELATIONSHIP

Every individual is continually dismissing functions and grasping others. Much of this is the trial-and-error process leading to his growth and constituting the foundation of consciousness. Thus the four letters of which this is the last are not concerned with such generally tentative activity. Life consists more importantly of what has been described as the dismissal of some things to automaticity and the selection of others as the basis for individual personality on the human and conscious level. As it happens all too many people have an increasing interest in the former over the latter although it is actually the psychological phenomenon of decay or death. Children become eager to remove the details of life from the automatic status or to be busy about grasping such details as they can. They want to attend to their own dressing and washing and the like until able to direct themselves with equal individuality to more important things. It is here that the insidious danger of utopianism is seen, with its dismissal of all possible self-responsibility to an ultimate social automaticity.

The world exists because men continually make it over in a very real sense, and it would be tragic if there were no longer need for the process. When outer reality becomes too fixed there is decay and a regression to lower and lower levels of reality until man can be brought again to the point of stirring within himself and knowing that his world must be integrated and given a higher potential. It is his world and the better as he feels stirred to do something for it, or by the same token quite the worse as he tries rather to fix it so that he can dismiss it to automaticity whether by social tyranny or by the rejection of it as far as possible in mind and lack of active concern.

 

When his life becomes static the individual has need to rouse himself to discover a higher potential implicit in his stalled affairs and move toward it.

1044
THE ACCIDENTAL ABSOLUTE

The primary reason the average individual is irrevocably bound to the particular limitations of his own conditioning is his own unquestioning acceptance of the accident of his particular case as the necessary working out of things from a total or cosmic point of realization. Here is where New Thought has a justification in saying that each individual's thinking is the root of his difficulties and that it can as easily become the source of rich self-fulfillment in health and often actually in prosperity, happiness and understanding. The point of psychological pertinence here is quite misunderstood. Either what is claimed is subjective or solipsistic and considers man as not truly a part of the visible or everyday world and so only needing to release his true nature and escape such complications or else it is magical in setting up a sovereignty of the invisible over the tangible or of consciousness and thought over substance and the body and senses and thus requiring no more than an appeal to the spiritual against the material side of a reality that has been divided into two disparate parts. In explanation of this sort the fallacy supposedly avoided is embraced in new guise and a shallow New Thought is defeated by the same difficulty in self-conception that created a need for therapy in the first place.

The fallacy is the idea that what is accidental in given cases or may come to pass in the lives of certain people while not occurring in the lives of others is a manifestation of living that comes from a cosmic ramification needing resolution to uniformity or requiring individual surrender to the potential of an ultimate leveling out, but what is individual is individual or the word has no meaning. The absolute a mind requires is not static unity but illimitable flux.

 

The absolute, limitless and in constant flux, offers every individual the scope for shaking off limitations and choosing a new role.

1047
THOUGHT ATTAINS TO THE ABSOLUTE

When New Thought emphasizes the powers of thought it can hardly be said to be stressing a cancellation of thought by itself, if such a thing actually were possible. Indeed, the psychologist's fallacy is ignorance of the fact that thinking never can extricate itself to any absolute extent from any particular consideration. The vacuum achieved by a vacuum pump in the laboratory is not complete, since the remaining air or other gaseous substance merely distributes itself and becomes thinner and thinner but never absent in the given area. Thus the effort to become selfless by meditation or abstract thinking merely thins self progressively but never eliminates it and so the residue that speaks for self and remains self in any true sense is simply less and less of itself until it is nothing at all of any value or worth or effectiveness and not any more any phase of the eternal absolute since it is not sharing or achieving divinity through an enhancement of what it has made its own or raised to a degree of true spirituality. True New Thought demands health, prosperity, happiness and understanding as evidence of the self sharing and achieving the absolute by very actual expression of increasing individual realization.

Thinking is experience in the individual absoluteness of a selfhood that shares itself with the cosmos in all respects and thus reaches out through more and more alert potentiality in relations that afford activity or work for every part of self and that tend to use or establish in individual aspect whatever is encountered in universal or truly general fashion. Then the individual is no longer bound by the irrevocable pattern of limitations but instead is continually expanded by the world around him through his broadened assimilation into it.

 

Thinking is individual rehearsal of expanded potentiality in shared relations, and truth is known only as it is established in the world.

244
THE ENHANCEMENT OF VALUES IN SELF

What a seeker seldom keeps in mind is that, before every intimacy, it is necessary for him to live with himself. Human nature reveals itself in the tendency of each individual to implant the worst and most superficial side of his being in his associates and then make some sort of a conflict out of it, so that an evanescent feel of self-righteousness will attach itself to his own being in contrast with the thing set up as persecutor or impediment in forward-going. Then even when the censor in self refuses as usual to empower the deeper self to come to the surface, there are yet the moments if only in dreams or in the dark periods off guard in privacy or in the solitary times of unusual exhaustion when man has to meet himself and then learn whether he is pleasing to himself or not.

The enhancement of values in self is the greatest of all tasks on the path, not only for the sake of all the normal adjustments of life in the social sphere as suggested frequently, but in unceasing preparation for taking the various steps in initiation. What are the values in question? How may they be enhanced? A spiritual work exists for this purpose more than for any other. Not all students will be carried forward to illumination, but all will be better equipped as citizens in a social world, even if by the process that psychologically was labeled transfer the hidden animosities of the person who would not face himself came to be directed against occultism as the aspirant for illumination turned on the agency that quickened him. The values of self are those of enduring and permanent orientations at the center of all selfhood, and their first characteristic ought to be their sure touch in common with all spiritual potentialities.

 

The felicity of shared relations depends on the heightening at the core of selfhood of the values that are enduring and have spiritual potential.

969
THE NATURE OF SPIRITUAL UNITY

One of the meaningless statements often made by students of the occult is that on higher planes there is a complete unity as if implying that all esoteric groups are streams from the same source and that basically they present the same teaching. This is quite true in a philosophical sense since any outreach to spirit is just that in all forms it may take. But the reality of the outreach is in the variety of forms and not in an outreach as such that is nothing at all when it is not taking form and is only a verbal abstraction. The form of its manifestation is manifold by necessity because the outreach is of differentiation seeking coalescence, and expresses the difference that is of the acting rather than the common or social factor created by sharing or spiritual co-operation in ideal realization. Distinguishing a Solar from a Lunar approach is the recognition of spiritual unity as a phenomenon of genuine transcendental self-projection out of a free act of individuals in social or common aspiration instead of an imposition of some premium on human lives for their hypothetical benefit but with little or no account of the creative initiative that is the validation of human estate. The spiritual outreach has inherent assimilation to itself and so any form of it has inherent respect for any other. The great fallacy of Lunar perspective is seeing the transcendent as man's release from his everyday manifestations rather than as a consummation of his total experience and thereupon assuming that life's normal values may be ignored when actually all lower obligation is intensified.

No genuine agent of the Lodge ever calls on anyone to go outside or beyond the normal course of life and opinion that has proof of value in experience, however the seeker is challenged to expand it.

 

Every individual reaches toward the spirit in his own way in a free, self-created and eminently normal act of expansion and consummation.

883
CO-OPERATION IN DIFFERENCE

One of the most destructive of all ideas in occult study because principally of the widespread extent to which its truth is assumed is that it would be excellent for all people to agree in mind on all things of importance. The foundation for the notion is the ideal of the absolute or invariable truth that is everywhere the same and so to be accepted as encountered and compelled on others so that they may adopt it similarly. The fallacy in this should be evident enough for recognition whether on the social or rational level of experience, and even without any specialized analysis. In the latter case the act of securing the truth ends all activity toward truth and means that truth is static or exterior and ultimately unreal since an experience of its gaining ends itself and is nihilistic or nirvana taken literally. On the level of rationalism an end of reason is taken to be an arrival at a stage and state where it is no longer necessary to reason. Reality by this view is self-cancellation and that is quite ridiculous. When men struggle to get to the point where nothing of their own can retain its value and where effort achieves its own impotence the mind is lost in the metaphysical and false reality it has given its inept escapism.

It is on the social level however that the unhappy fruit of a belief in an invariant truth is most evident. Human history has many a chapter reporting the tragic endeavors of those who believe the sole truth to lie in their hands and thus feel themselves called on to force others to embrace this by torture or sword. Nothing will build to as great a lack of respect for personality as this smug assumption. The closed mind shows its weakness rather than any strength when it is willing to accept itself as competent to judge the truth for others.

 

Just as fidelity to one's own truth is essential, so is refraining from meddling with the truths of others, for no truth is crystallized or final.

1167
THE WILLINGNESS TO REMAIN STABLE

Occult instruction has long made a great to-do over continued faithfulness or special unbroken conformity to concepts of some individual or organization, and so many seekers have run out the years of life in the illusion that steadfast staticality was a merit. They have assumed that by making themselves nothing, in terms of refraining from any possible expression of a creative individuality or functional difference and divergence of their own, they are adding to their value in the eternal scheme of things. This is a superficial thinking that follows from conceiving reality to be a complex of separates, and separation emphasized as the ill result of individual difference, so that cosmic unity requires elimination of the personal variations. Physical science dealing with aggregated particles in knowable and material existence is able to deduce and employ so-called natural laws since it has no contact with reality save through components like atoms or elements providing the substance of atoms and encountered in such tremendous quantities that all individual differences are averaged out. In the superficial reasoning a parallel to this phenomenon is assumed and the cosmic unity taken to be the result of an averaging out so that an individual who denies his individuality furthers his ultimacy as if it were possible to be what all selves are in universal totality by being nothing of the self that is the reality of the individuality.

There is a vast difference between the denial of self in what psychologically is an attempted retreat back to the womb, and the willingness to remain stable in a given aspect of self as contribution to a larger reality in which the self is a creative participant. The staticality here is a dynamic or unbroken sustainment of cosmic unity.

 

Faithfulness is stability of self-contribution, never a sterile conformity in which individual creativity is cancelled out.

1191
THE COMPULSION NEUROSIS

Occultism has long taught that it is exceedingly dangerous to enter on the Path or begin the deeper study of occult technique for the purpose of achieving initiation unless thoroughly caught up in a desire to continue. The reason for this is the certain development of distortive frustrations that usually shape the entire course of the life after such a pursuit has been abandoned. What happens is that a withdrawal of continuing choice fulfillment in the matrix where associations have been buttressed with so much fascination means regression to other compulsions in the subconsciousness, and the seeker often may be helpless in dealing with these because he has put their focus quite out of normal consciousness. The results psychologically are bondage to what is known as the compulsion neurosis. Its usual manifestation is in everyday superstitions taking a most usual form in the inability to avoid increasing habit patterns of fixed necessity in daily routine as the urge to bathe or dress or walk or speak of certain subjects and indeed sleep or eat or perform various duties except in rigid fashion, and all this justified by set statement to self or others. Ultimately and increasingly the buttressing is through attracting attention or gaining a certification of difference, but thus has social penalty and may lead to withdrawal from life itself with a persecution complex.

These are momentums of the psyche on the destructive and unpleasant side, and a true occultism demands momentums or disciplines that release rather than debase the self's greater creativity. It is for this reason that such an emphasis is given regularity in serving a spiritual ideal or in building a living and visible fellowship such as establishes its invisible counterpart in its steadiness of integrity.

 

As the aspirant continues in a higher steadiness his creative powers, constantly gaining momentum, are increasingly released.

716
THE INCOMPARABLE ACHIEVEMENT

What might seem criticism on my part of the broad alertness to the work of occult groups that I encourage is actually never a protest against intelligent investigation but rather is a flat refusal to be a party to any seeker's willingness to accept exterior confirmation as the substitute for inner or self-sufficient conviction. Life in an exterior and social world demands the use of comparisons and the validation or confirmation by the consensus of opinion, but this is in connection with practical relations. Initiation is a man's work with his own nascent or conscious immortality, and to let this be judged by a mortal point of view is to deny its own basic nature. There can be excellent certification of Solar initiation by an acknowledgment those who possess it in any degree gain from their fellows, but it always is an oblique testimony. The initiate is never seen for what he is down deep within the core of himself, but for some excellence in the detail of surface competence in life that his inner wholeness makes possible.

Any incomparable achievement is something that cannot be compared or measured as such since what it is transcends every measure that can be applied. The true initiate has the unselfishness that is a real mystery in its own terms to his fellows who seldom if ever rise to its peculiar exaltedness, but all alike understand that here is one who has transcendent plussage of this incomparable order. Herein has been my consistent effort or to emphasize the idea that nothing counts in spiritual work if it has to be compared with something else to gain any value in the mind, and also that nothing helps ultimately in solving problems if it has to be something bequeathed from outside instead of resulting from a definitely unique and inside choice of one's own.

 

The integrity of selfhood in an initiate can never be assessed by others except as they catch an intimation of it through some tangible evidence.

824
IDEALS ARE MOMENTS IN PLUSSAGE

It is essential to remember that experience is fundamentally commonplace or centered in the core of ordinary existence. The exaltation of the human soul under spiritual inspiration is a plussage and no escape from something into something else. Flight from a real of one sort is definitely a subtraction from any other real that might be gained, and this is well illustrated in the fantasy through which a seeker often will instrument an otherworldliness and cancel out nearly all his birthright as a healthy and normal human being. Saints still have bodies. They may conquer their bondage to grosser appetites and be quite unmoved by impulses that drive less sensitive men into experience of an unhappily overobjective sort, but only if they satisfy the need of organic existence as a continuous doing by pouring energy into enterprises of a larger sort that still must have their roots within a consistently objective world. Occultists talk glibly of contact with disembodied Masters and Elder Brothers functioning in spiritual bodies and through transcendental faculties, and forget that each such entity must have a basic focus in a physical body whether his own or one that he can utilize through an overshadowing or similar phenomenon.

Any attempt to maintain existence in an exalted state of consciousness means that no matter how real the transcendental service might have been in its focus of plussage, that given focus can persist only as entirely artificial or unreal because what remains is merely a shadow of a doing and no longer an act. The proposition should be as clear as simple logic when it is seen that ideals are moments in plussage. Great moments lose their plussage when held fixed in mere contemplation rather than as challenge to living that brings them again.

 

Ecstatic moments are product of ordinary events endowed with transcendental implications, for only as they occur in actual experience are they real.

411
TRANSCENDENTALLY ALIVE

The practice of occultism is an aliveness in higher form or an existence on transcendental levels and this is consciousness, to which as many names have been given as there are occult schemes of expression. But whether cosmic consciousness, divine exaltation or any sense of an immortal certainty, the immediate evidence of it in normal living is the consistent refusal of its possessor to submit to limitations that somehow exalt the immediateness over the eternal. Here is an absolute test of initiation. To the true occultist everything becomes opportunity or challenge and never calamity or a test or payment of ripe karma and the like. It is true that cause and effect operate in the world of time and space, but a genuine occultism is a living of the sort that frees the seeker from all necessity in the effect and is instead a practicing of the necessity in eternal cause.

We might well ask ourselves at this point just precisely how now and in everyday terms we are to practice a necessity in cause. The answer is simple enough. Superficially it is living a jump ahead of the immediate compulsion or being ready for the eventuality by ever knowing what further eventuality of choice may be developed. The occultist who has grown beyond the theoretical and agonizing stage has a keen sense of the drifts or momentums of life and so sees whatever may be transpiring around him as the indication of a broader and ultimately more enduring process in which he has been able to anchor his inner or own enduring interest. The practical ramifications of life remain limited no matter how viewed, and to submit to them is to accept limit whereas to know them in real perspective is to be able to utilize them for the continual expansion or total unlimitation of selfhood.

 

Every limitation in life is an opportunity for the clarification of one's direction in a wider perspective, never a set-back or an obstacle.

1027
LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE

It never seems possible to get the average person to understand that occult philosophy is methodological and not metaphysical in form. In other words it is a way of life and never the revelation of especially wonderful facts and mysteries. There are those who are caught up in the awe and worship stage of their questing and contented to stay starry-eyed in a never-never land of rounds and races or great periods and globes or worlds and planes or vehicles and centers and so on through all the jargon of superficiality without ever quickening to the higher understanding. What they are doing supposedly is exalting knowledge as such, but they do not realize that the goal of wisdom remains beyond reach with no increasing dimensions of knowing. If they acquire esoteric conceptions, as far as the words for these may go, it yet is impossible without actual experience with what the words represent to possess anything but a verbal mishmash. They assume that the rounds and races are actual sequence in time instead of the measure of temporal syncopation, since they lack living experience in concurrency as such or are transcendentally naive. Similarly they think that the worlds or planes are places in space, all because of failure to understand that they are dimensions of experience as basic flux in reality.

The language of the occult is like that of anything else in life or a means of experience by proxy. Thus the idiom of science enables scientists to share their special functions and proceed in the task at hand from the forefront of scientific know-how instead of from some starting point of complete nonscience. The language of art provides the artist with the co-operative creativeness of fellow artists. The language of everyday living makes it possible to build a society.

 

The dimensions of wisdom are widened, not by storing it but by living it. Study and discussion serve best as they indicate a more rewarding method of acting.

1028
KNOWLEDGE AND KNOW-HOW

A much better general understanding of the occult wisdom would prevail if it were designated know-how rather than knowledge and if more occultists would strive more earnestly to demonstrate a way of life and be less anxious to exhibit some prideful possession of facts. A fact is a potential of experience in fixation and quite useful as it makes possible a dismissal of subsidiaries to automaticity but dangerous when leaned on by anyone not capable of creating it either in literal fashion or else by adaptive establishment in the given case. An extraordinarily large percentage of all people are defeated in life by their disinclination to realize that facts need not be accepted except as it is convenient to do this. Gravity is a fact in a sense but any man can pick up or lift a book against earth's gravitation in whatever way he wishes, and put it for the gravity to hold in place. Time and space have important factual aspect in man's experience but the possibility of continuing in act may exist in any act precisely as location or relationship may be changed by essentially a nonfact process.

Knowledge of facts except as the know-how framed in some over-all orientation adequate for every specific case is the source of every mistake and ill of man in one way or another. Thus there is an interesting case that came to attention when this was first written or the results of the investigation of a young chemist with knowledge but inadequate know-how. He was sure he had found a great secret for the electroplating process by employing perchloric acid, the explosive nature of which had been reported in scientific articles for years. As an innocent in areas where his responsibility was greatest he produced the bomblike blast in which the premises dissolved in fine dust.

 

Facts are only relatively or sometimes only momentarily true, and useful only as they add to one's skill of performance in a given instance.

1048
IMMORTAL FLUIDITY

Immortality is a continuance in a living universe rather than in some cosmic inertia, and in consequence everything that is immortal is not so because of its unchanging character but because it is a continuum in its constancy of self-fidelity in its adjustment to the potentialities of itself and all things other than itself in their unceasing interplay in and with each other. There are some interesting points in this connection in the writing and ideas of the American who perhaps as much as any other individual has been responsible for a revival of true creative thought in any way comparable to the ferment of the ancient Greeks, namely, Charles Sanders Peirce. Speaking of Henry James he said, "He isn't as fond of turning over questions as I am, but likes to settle them and have done with them," and added, "A manly trait too, but not a philosophical one." There is no reality that if put outside the risks of experience and set up in lonely isolation can be approached however reverently to worship for its detachment. What a concept of immortality involves, no matter how much a given mind may be inclined to ignore the fact, is a continuing of the living individual in the terms of what he is rather than what he is not.

To visualize a spirituality that lies outside the nature of man as such in the sense that he can have existence without it, and remain nonspiritual as well as spiritual if he is that unfortunate and misguided, is to make spirituality something like a suit of clothes to be worn by whim or employed by entities separate from itself. If immortality is so taken it becomes a sort of ecstatic strait jacket into which to climb as a shield for all eternity against all responsibility for physical embodiment or normally conscious acts and reactions.

 

To live the life of an immortal, one constantly chooses or alters or pursues but always in complete fidelity to his inner integrity.

873
PATIENCE IS ANTICIPATING A FUTURE

What many never seem to get clearly in mind is that what is stagnation and drifting degeneration when there is no plussage will become dynamic creativity and genuine regeneration just as soon as the individual brings some measure of a divine and inner actuation to what he does. In everyday life this is the simple gift of industry or the ability to rise above procrastination and uncertainty and general lack of eagerness in responsibility. The flame within comes into function as a person holds himself in such high respect that any realities of a generally inferior or disruptive frame just have no relation with him. The purpose of the discipline is to create importance of a larger sort or wider ramification in what without plussage would be petty or quite trivial details. The student who is careless in connection with them is deficient in the creative vision that kindles the spark. If he is late with something it might not be important but it might be. If he forgets a moment of meditation, which is part of his responsibility as a spiritual and sustaining rhythm, it is a different matter because it is the betrayal of the discipline that inconsequential lapses develop.

Rome was not built in a day but the seminal idea of Rome was created in the flash of an instant when the first of the key individuals of the old Etruscan branch of the Lodge or the very mysterious group of pre-Grecian times made the concept vital within himself. It began at the very moment of visualization to fulfill its potentiality. Genius is the capacity for infinite pains or for a patience that never is mere willingness to wait but rather always is real capacity to live the fullness of some future in a now or to uphold a Rome before events actualize the city. Such is true presence of the indwelling spark.

 

The aspirant holds himself aloof from all disrupting influences that threaten his inspiration, and a steady responsibility to his obligations keeps the flame burning.

469
THE BONDAGE TO CHOICE

Men are never freed from a necessity for relationship in choice, and this in the most obvious aspect means merely that when men will not choose for themselves the choice is made for them by heredity and environment or by the momentum of their habit of prior choices and surrenders. New Thought and occultism are based totally on the principle that man is the author of his destiny ultimately. If he is not able to exert his will efficiently his very character is a determinant and his life is shaped by a natural response of all exterior trends to what he is in ultimate fact. Choice is the privilege of the enduring and eternal inner being, and when it is not expressed as such the self is left to the indirect and automatic choosing of its general being.

We consequently appeal to the individual to live so that his choices may be the direct expression of his basic selfhood or that it is impossible for his life to be shaped by the chance influences of either half-chosen or surrendered relations or disheartened choices of the half-awakened appreciation of selfhood and its potentialities. A real man is alive in a very genuine sense, and his aliveness is a constancy of choice and decision. He goes where he goes because it is a true expression of his will and desire. His acts are pleasing to him because he has chosen to so act freely and wholeheartedly. He is always ahead of himself in every interest and expectation because he has no handicap such as is known by the man fearful in his choices and always hesitating in the half-certainty of his being. He therefore can project himself or be progressive in his personality. He is accepted by life as he accepts himself since his attitudes are certain. He is in bondage to choice but he has made his bondage his freedom.

 

In order to avoid being subject to the vagrant bufferings of life the initiate makes his own choices out of the certainty of who he is and where he is going.

767
IMMATURE SPIRITUAL SKILLS

The fundamental difference between things of a spiritual and of a material nature is that the former are entirely a matter of a group activity and relationship or of shared possession or mutual use. A cardinal insight was enunciated by Jesus when he said that it was an invariable condition for any presence of the Christ spirit that two or three be gathered together in the name of that reality or in the doing or realizing in common of whatever the presence can mean in actual experience. An occult work is at all times a practice in living in and with such a presence to the end that each individual in his own scheme of things may be an adult in the spiritual sense or forever sharing or revealing values he knows with his fellows on a higher level than mere animal existence and physical objectivity.

In many ways we are the nursery school in respect to the one task of learning together how to share spiritual goals that differ with each of us. We must have opportunity to grow in the use of what we each have to offer to the whole by making it of value to all others in some real particular, and at the same time we must help every other to accomplish his own purposes in this reciprocity. At the beginning the call is for the simple skills of competition or the instinct to be aggressive and to compel recognition by self-exhibition. Spiritually we push and hit and grab in a way that may distress the idealists, but it is all a refinement of appreciation and a strengthening of the gift of creative self-expression. If we become exercised over the actions of fellow-seekers and want things in continual adjustment in fear that the spiritual goals may be endangered we often are thinking in a frame of our own individuality and seeking only to achieve its supremacy.

 

Every member of a spiritual group shares his individual goal in some manner that enriches the on-going of all the group in whose spirit his progress is nurtured.

872
THE COSMIC PROCESS OF AS-THOUGH

Everything possessed is first borrowed, and nothing ever comes into experience or into being except through the paralleling and approximating activity. What so many seekers do not grasp, and as an inevitable result actually defeat themselves before they start, is the impossibility of immediate approach to any final goal. The self in a stage prior to regeneration cannot recognize or establish what the immortal self becomes. The quality of seeking is of value in the light of the imperfect or preliminary approach to the later achievement, but there is nothing an aspirant can do that is worthy in any light except the practical advance view. For this reason everybody in a group under the Solar Mysteries is cautioned against anything ulterior such as doing this or that for the sake of the illumination to be furthered or grasped at a later time. What does not have primary or highest worth now in a very literal sense is of lesser worth later because this then means that what has been accepted as lesser has been made the basis of the greater or is approaching the latter with unclean hands.

The inner spark is quickened when man discovers how true plussage in his being operates in parallel with a cosmic plus, so that his own divine flame in fact is at work before he can ever suspect its coming. It is created in a sense by the rigors of the discipline but in actuality the appearance of cause and effect is merely the increase of self-perspective cradled by the expanded self-giving of everyday or essentially quite normal participation in the living of men generally, or in the sharing of existence in heightened consciousness. The duty of occult nature is never to be subordinated to superficiality, but an occult obligation curiously serves every petty obligation in passing.

 

Illumination can never be approached directly. The spark flames when the seeker lives his everyday life as though the spark were flaming.



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