307
PRACTICAL VALUES OF THE OCCULT
Probably the really ideal way to capitalize on an occult background would be to devote a certain period of life to these higher studies and then resist any temptation to further half-hearted participation that since neither hot nor cold would lead to a setback unless there could be additional helpful conditioning. It is with a view to the protection of the slower seekers that the Sabian work is organized in preliminary periods of two, five and three years each, and sends an aspirant back into life at the point where he is no longer sympathetic to further discipline. The work presents an outer facade, or is prepared to give none of the inner work without outer symbolizing that is guarantee of the co-operation of the consciousness with the discipline and so assurance that the seeker is not tricked into anything. But a seeker is never sure that he is prepared to stamp a finis at an end of a page of spiritual progress. He will want life not to be reward for what has gone before but a proving-ground for what yet may be. Hence it is the exceptional case where one turns against the occult.
What are the practical values of the occult? First and above all others must be the present and immediate touch with an eternal reality. Under all the sham and pretense, which increasingly are seen to be the means by which the faint-hearted are protected from the instability of their own seeking, is a reality that cannot be explained away. Then there is the immortal fellowship with many great minds or masters of all ages. There is that participation in knowledge before it is known or a living ahead of the race that is an incentive to live ahead of self. There is the widening sympathy with life resulting from a sense of Source, and a widened living in renewed selfhood.
Having been touched by eternal reality the aspirant becomes pioneer, established settler and architect of new pioneering and new settling in the realms of spirit.
714
THE MATTER OF COMPARISONS
I think the principal reason for any difficulty in realizing the fundamental nature and purpose of Sabian procedure or policy is that the seeker in orienting himself in the vision did not take the rituals seriously enough and thus seldom uses them. These rituals in their entirety represent the continual rehearsal of the work itself in a self-restoring spiral of higher and higher realization, and while it is true that it took more than three decades to bring them to what degree of refinement is represented with their publication in the second manual of 1957 and that future polishing cannot be ruled out yet right from the start and particularly with the Full Moon ceremony we continually re-experienced the magic of our establishment of a modern recovery of the Solar Mysteries through a proper use and expansion of Lunar outreaching ingrained in the racial consciousness. Through reaffirming our objectives we have created a magna carta of Solar initiation.
But in all this comparisons are never in order. It can never be possible actually for any Sabian student or indeed anybody to watch Sabian activities and see that the Sabian work is better than or worse than another group. The Sabian work can never properly be such an activity that it can be seen in any way as other. It is Solar because it is the only existent in any way like itself or to be compared with itself. I have pointed out consistently that we are not another occult group and reminded students that anybody who compares us with a Theosophical lodge or a spiritualistic-type fellowship simply has lost sight of what we are and has seen not us but a hypothetical concept of his own mind. When it is our privilege to co-operate with other work it is to help it be what it is while we remain what we are.
The genius of living for an individual as for a group is a persistence in remaining one's own special self and at the same time assisting every other to be wholly himself.
197
THE REAFFIRMATION OF INITIATION
One student writes, "I'm inclined to think that only now have I reached the stage where I might become a pledged student, and I wonder if it would be advisable to begin all over again," and thus has given articulate voice to a discovery made by every aspirant sooner or later in the course of the ten years of Solar Mysteries initiation and development. This student is in the middle of the second year of the acolyte work, and so presumably has taken three and a half years in an arrival at the point in what is a remarkably quick feat of growth in a process of understanding scheduled for seven years for the average man or woman. The great genius of the method of development that is used in the Sabian scheme is the permitted participation of each student in occult work as yet beyond his powers of real performance, and this not only is seen in the enlistment for consciousness for neophytes and the forming legate quadrangles for acolytes as cases in which the participation-in-advance element is obvious but is a characteristic of everything we do in the work as a whole.
Few students in the first two years of their work can be said to have the faintest conception of invisible fellowship, but they nevertheless are participating in it subconsciously and so growing into an appreciation of it that is far beyond words and formal statement of the process. Our policy to have the students shift for themselves except of course for seeing that they become acquainted with the other students as they wish or for giving what advice is possible in dealing with problems brought into conscious concern by the quickening of real contact with superior forces may seem cruel in many ways, but it is of importance at the threshold of initiation as a help in self-discovery.
The first step in occultism is a process of self-discovery where gains are difficult to assess since participation in invisible fellowship is largely unconscious.
198
A CONSTANTLY NEW SELF-DISCOVERY
If it were possible to go back and again perform the inadequately performed duties associated with occult development the resulting satisfactions would be great, and at first glance it would not seem unreasonable to believe that a greater usefulness for later tasks would be the direct result of a better performance of the prior duties and a greater understanding of the earlier responsibilities. This of course is true enough but the task performed for the sake of the inner satisfaction primarily takes on an atmosphere that is destructive, and it is demanded of each occult student that he press on and on and come to perform the groping task ahead better and better because of his increasing realization of ways in which the tasks behind could have been performed in better fashion. Were a student to return to his initial two years of orientation he would merely bring to the first fellowship the critical attitude that directed mainly at himself would soon bring itself to an unfair judgment of others. This is the danger attending the acceptance of a mere citizen status by students completing the two years, not that they are destructive in their associations but that if they are not careful to continue to set goals ahead to which they fail to measure in their own self-estimation they lose every stretching out or expansion of being that is the basis of all occult achievement.
The strength of life is satisfactions, but the substance of life however is its instabilities in terms of objective accomplishment. This world of everyday has no permanence in divine purposes or cosmic plan. Tasks well done in a lower realm make possible a larger participation in an eternal reality such as is beyond sense-knowing at every point of sense development but they are of transient importance.
Spiritual progress cannot be measured by spiritual reality where expanding goals are forever ahead of present performance.
199
SETTLING DOWN TO DEATH
There is a terminal process in nature by which according to esoteric tradition it takes an individual four times as long to die or to get to the point when a physical death can occur as it takes him to come to full maturity. Of course from this point of view a sudden or accidental death is an exception to the rule, and in such cases the occult tradition explains that this life span is carried out in one or another fashion in other realms of being. But what is here of importance is the idea that when a person has reached the real limit of ordinary stature of understanding in fourteen years he then unconsciously settles down to fifty-six years of disintegration, and this adds up to the traditional three-score-and-ten years of human life expectancy.
We promise to all students in our work the addition of a period of not less than twenty years to the life without employing the least measure of hocus-pocus, and of course as much more than that for all instances needing it for special work to do in the case of legates who really succeed in getting the genius of Lodge service during their three years of special training in subjective functioning. The addition of the twenty years is made possible in the initial four years of the total ordered discipline since toward the end of his comprehension of the racial cycles he is called on to make a very definite committal that as recapitulated over and over again assures him that of his life his working age for maturity has been raised from fourteen to eighteen and his proper span from seventy to ninety. This is in a measure allegorical, but as pointed out in the preceding letter there is a genuine danger in settling down into the limitations of life and indeed it is an acceptance of death to do so. Failing to grow is dying.
Life is growth and growth is expansion. By continuing, as a way of life, to grow and to expand the aspirant adds to his earthly years.
200
HOW SHALL I KNOW IT AT ITS COMING?
Nothing is as important as the moment of illumination of which I have been writing recently in one fashion or another, and what raises a question of special importance is that which now gives us the title for this letter. The false lights that lead seekers for higher understanding on and on are certainly not to be decried, for any light may be said to be better than no light at all, and hence it is true in a quite literal sense that according to the testimony of students getting their illumination and according to my own experience as well as those of others with whom I can check personally or through reading in detailed accounts it is impossible for any seeker irrespective of what other way he may have used to find the light to adopt any system along the lines of this Solar Mysteries fellowship and through its agency or during the time of subjection to its requirement to gain any certainty of inner illumination during the first months or even years of his association with the initiatory consciousness. Sometimes the genius of the acolyte work will be caught almost at once, and this sometimes may be done by those who have been given the acolyte work in advance of an accomplishment in full of pledged-student requirements, but frequently even more than the typical four years of basic orientation is needed.
All this however is beside the point. Until a true and eternal light is gained, the greatest light previously gained actually is as true to all intents and purposes. A student gains the true illumination when he signs the pledge or when he first turns his eyes on reality in life anywhere. What is the point of these letters? What am I talking about? Merely that finesse that a musician gets, or any artist, or the divinity incarnate that somehow dramatizes immortality.
In seeking to incarnate the divine the aspirant uses the light he has already gained, which will inevitably lead him to full touch with the eternal light.
804
THE SABIAN JUSTIFICATION
The justification of the Sabian Assembly is its faithful maintenance of the vision of the common doing in which its members are brought together and given mutual strengthening in an eternal plussage that is to continue prior to anything lesser at all times. The group in a sense has had of necessity to sign its own neophyte pledge and in larger dimension of experience to make the affirmation of will that an aspirant makes on his own personal level. In this, precisely as each aspirant wishing to participate in its fellowship by utilizing the doing-in-common that creates the group to frame or instrument the higher and inarticulate individual aspiration, the group in substantiating or maintaining the ageless vision of the arcane tradition is reaching out to the actual potentiality or the timeless and spaceless act-of-being-whole of the human race itself for the frame and instrumentation of an organic reality such as can constitute itself in its special genius.
Since its highest consciousness cannot be experienced in any possible group dimension or ritualization the group must recognize humanity at large as its reference even as the individual seeker similarly must utilize the group whether Sabian or parallel Solar orientation for the framing or instrumenting of his outreach. Here there is a basis for the elevation of respect for personality and for human society in general above all other practical requirements for participation in the Sabian fellowship. The group as an entity seen in and of itself must of necessity remain intangible in every true sense, and so in his contacts with it the seeker is not making touch with a thing as a building or a corporation or even an association but instead is ever dealing with his own potentials as enacted for him by his fellows.
In the same manner that the individual participates in the group to instrument his higher aspiration, the group participates in the vision of wholeness of the race itself.
717
IS A DIFFERENCE NOT A DIFFERENCE?
It should be obvious that the objection to making a comparison between the Sabian Assembly and other occult groups or organizations of any sort is purely a detail of psychological discipline and not a rejection of intellectual analysis or basic common sense. In a broad way the group both for itself and for the seekers who constitute its substance strives to be an incomparable association, but the ideal is altogether beyond achievement in any literal fashion. There is no one best way but merely a choice of bests throughout human experience. On superficial levels the Sabian Assembly possibly is really unique in its effort to avoid rather than achieve any group perfection. It has an almost solitary place among modern organized efforts to help people to occult initiation, simply because of the unusual steadiness of this putting the individual before the group. The Sabian Assembly does as much as it can for each individual without making any individual cling to the group for support. The students do not work for the group but for themselves through the group, and in that utilization of the group they build and strengthen the group for its further usefulness both to them and others in this same and simple course. The contributions to the group of means and effort are never to the end of perpetuating the physical instrument represented by the Assembly but rather are to help every Sabian instrumentation here and now in the service to individual aspiration and its incomparable achievement of greater or lesser sort.
I could go on and point out the ways in which we distinguish ourselves, but it would be meaningless to do so since we have no existence of a sufficiently static sort to decorate with distinctions. We are distinguished ultimately by making distinctions ever different.
It is implicit in the quest that each aspirant find his own way. To this end the group exists so that students may work, not for the group but for themselves through it.
810
INFECTIOUS PERSONALITY
Occultism from the night of time has placed its hopes in the constructive infectiousness of the personality touched with higher inspiration. This has led to the development of personal religion as explained in the Jeremiah and Luke lessons, and to the concept that is dramatized by Theosophy in advocating a nucleus for universal brotherhood. Here is recognition of the fact that the whole body of mankind tends to accept the general set stimulated by those individuals of the most infectious self-orientation of temperament, and the basic duty of spiritual work is to provide the potential nucleation that can compete with the destructive sets that topple civilizations and carry men into the dark ages of history. The Plan of C is the attempt in the Sabian work to make its enduring contribution to this development of individuals of infectious self-fulfillment who may then serve as a nucleation for the heightened spiritualization of mankind.
Fundamentally the whole group is a nucleus, and probably its greatest service may yet prove to be its success in maintaining an uncompromising Solar integration at core however much it also may have experimented with Lunar and even Profane concomitants to assist aspirants in the childhood and adolescence of their spiritual vision. But the nuclear contribution of the group after all and ultimately must be through the individuals whose self-development collectively is the doing by which the group is what it is. Of itself it is nothing of necessity of its Solar functioning precisely as it is the Christians who make Christianity or the citizens of the country who make a nation for its better or worse. The Plan of C provides an opportunity for trial nucleation for personal realization within the frame of Sabian vision.
The hope of the race is in individuals so well grounded in self-fulfillment that they can be touched by the infectious magic of divine inspiration.
118
SIGNATURES IN THE QUALITY OF BRASS
I have a letter from one of our students afield, and she has caught the inner challenge of the Plan of C. This is the goal of Sabian study groups involving every possible type of human individual, so that each difference of culture or race and the like comes to focal realization and expansion of its potential in some one laya center and we collectively thereupon come to share in and understand all the elements in the make-up of mankind. This student has hoped to establish a group at focus in the sort of potentials she represents, but has not found others to draw to herself and the vision in her community. But apparently she has gained a sure sense of the inner pattern of what is sought or the invisible assurance that comes from the truly dependable signatures that seekers on the Solar Path learn to recognize when current lessons or materials have sudden pertinence of striking sort relative to problems to be solved and outreaching to have consummation or validation. This does not refer to generalities that fit most events of everyday superficialities but to dramatic stimulus to understanding at vital moment. Our student is finding her laya-center potentials.
Signatures in the quality of brass are of the order that compel attention to themselves because of the inward dawning of light, and because they are neither sought nor specially desired. Community of interest alone creates an invisible fellowship, and the first manifestation of this genuine community is a gradual shaping of lesser and transient things to the greater whole. As great world spirits find a growing tendency for their life events to conform to patterns of Solar Myth importance, so in our smaller sphere we increasingly find lessons and group activities and personal problems all converging in harmony.
The aspirant finds signature of his place in the invisible fellowship when his personal affairs converge harmoniously with the larger affairs of the group.
904
THE SATURATION WE OFFER
Those of us who have been attracted to the Sabian organism and have found its fellowship ever steady in our personal outreach toward a conscious immortality have subsequently found ourselves bound together in a framework of regular tasks by which the group has gained its reciprocal or interactive tie with the Lodge. First of all there has been the preservation of a laya center or pool of consciousness or the simple continuum in the esoteric tradition that stood to be broken with every irreparable consequence when as an individual I volunteered in 1913 for the rescue mission now centered in our First Quadrangle in the Sabian divisions of labor, and this core assignment has produced a remarkable contribution by many quiet souls who have thrown themselves into helping this detail of the quadrangle's responsibility whether or not led to assist other objectives of our group being. Since meeting the crisis that led ultimately to the inauguration of the Assembly was successful, with the surety established in 1935, the question naturally arises why there had to be the intellectual overlay on what remains essentially subjective or spiritual. The answer is that reality must have exercise and that an immortal continuum must be rehearsed through its immortal roots as preserved out of time-and-space experiencing.
This means intellectual formulations creating experience through ritual or rehearsal in our time-and-space consciousness of the outreach of human kind through all ages and conditions. We picked up the threads of the arcane tradition most effectively through the medieval insemination of Ibn Gabirol thanks to a hint by Madame Blavatsky, emerging in her yeoman effort to revivify the occult tradition, and we now have the task of providing needed intellectual saturation for it.
Whereas subjective experience is real, its continuance is assured only by constant rehearsal furthered by the general intellectual overlay of the rituals.
831
THE ASSIMILATION OF FAILURE
I am asked whether or not the seeker who breaks away and destroys the continuity of his discipline under the Solar Mysteries in some particular group has thereby cancelled his chance as far as working under that special discipline may be concerned. The answer is no since spiritual reality is never under bondage to time and space. It always is possible to pick up anything at the point where it is thrown down the moment an initial consciousness is recovered. Where routine has set up superficial cycles a break in the course of one requires an obviously necessary return to the point of superficial origin, as when an acolyte misses a Full Moon meeting in the course of the sixty-three that give him his measure of himself in a certain phase of realization of self-steadiness, but as long as anything is what it does the condition of isness prevails when the doing persists and any return to this doing re-establishes the isness quickly in its own reality. Thus the condition of active participation in the Sabian Assembly is a doing in a definite continuousness of the things that constitute its existence.
Where difficulty occurs is when a student as unconscious or conscious of this process but not satisfied with his progress along the Path begins to feel a sense of failure. Under spiritual guidance it is virtually impossible for him to feel his own inner self as other than perfect in its own immortal constitution and this is as it should be, but until he achieves the positive balance that is developed under the Solar Mysteries he has this out-of-balance intuition of failure to focus somewhere and a quite normal recourse is to assimilate it to the work or to individuals in the work with whom he shares activity. Any genuine occult group must accept this assimilation and refine it.
Participation in the Assembly consists of a continuous doing of what its constituents do. After a break in participation the doing may be resumed at any time.
481
ENDURING WORK, TEMPORARY STRUCTURE
Consistency is a jewel, as the common proverb of unknown authorship puts it, but Emerson tells us in his Essay on Self-Reliance that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and guides us possibly to wonder sometimes just when to strive for consistency of an outer and superficial sort at least and when to run the risk of any appearance of incomplete understanding by allowing people to reconcile clashing statements for themselves. In any case, there seems to be a flat contradiction that requires a special explanation.
It is perfectly true that I have stated over and over on the public platform that I had trusted we might build an enduring work and that I thought it would be interesting at least to make an attempt to equal the record of Plato, on whose concepts we lean fundamentally, by establishing a method or school of thought that would remain in existence for more than the six centuries served consistently by Plato's Academy. It is equally a fact that I have stated many times that the structure I am building is temporary in nature, to serve present needs and aid some achievement of the philosophical goal that is personal by its very nature, and at the same time of course to support all who are associated with me in like measure and to an equal degree in their own quite personal aspirations. Between these two statements there is no real contradiction because the reference in the first place is to that reshaping of philosophy that is the duty or privilege of different men at nearly every stage of human progress and so is never the possession although it may partly be the contribution of any given individual, as in the second place the reference is to our absence of organization of the sort that sooner or later leads to petty squabbling over position.
The immortal task every aspirant hopes to achieve has a spiritual structure that will endure as it serves the race whereas a formal outer structure tends to crystallize.
840
THE ACCEPTANCE OF KARMA
If anything seems to be the major task of the Sabian Assembly, and the philosophical and scientific criticism that the Sabian work remains on the outer and objective side of things, it is a clarification and a reformulation of the dialectic or principle of analysis that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle established. Their dialectical resolution of opposing elements in a common potential of effort or the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Fichte and the German idealists has its important ascendancy in the world of today through the materialism accepted as their official philosophy by the communists, and Hegel's influence remains effective in encouraging a naive identification of the dichotomy of thought and material substance as distinct realities. A general belief in an underlying static or absolute real beneath experience or behind all measurable manifestation is commonplace. Indeed, our uncompromising challenge to all acceptance of absolutes or utopias as well as to esoteric escape notions in general has brought criticism down on us in curious and often very personal form.
The dialectic is something far more than its explanation in most metaphysical systems, as seeing a drift to one extreme setting the opposing extreme in motion to produce conflict that precipitates a similar process all over again in a new extreme-and-its-opposite. An infinitely regressive series simply reveals inadequate thinking and is encouragement to metaphysical diffusion of reality as in absolutes for escape from real experience. The equally superficial and literal use of Aristotle's mean of course is no better thinking. An embracing of karma as requiring a static surrender to the play of extremes by seeking a nondistinctive balance for self is even a greater escapism.
The tendency of phenomena to swing from one extreme to another may be used as a basis for freedom of choice rather than inevitable karma.
1177
SOLVENCY, THE APEX OF SPIRITUALITY
In a study and analysis of spiritual effort and of group spirituality as such, in terms of everyday business and materiality, a fundamental principle can be put down to the effect that solvency or a requisite availability of consciousness is the apex of reality in this higher and transcendental dimension of man's experience and that it is necessary therefore not only that he maintain sufficient consciousness and function in a constant of basic self-control in material realms or ordinary and practical relationships but that he have at all times the parallel adequate consciousness of the higher sort and thus possess in a true sense a realization of himself as fulfilled in the immediacy of all his experience from moment to moment. This is what religion will identify as an ever-present faith and a sense of the companionship and personal concern of God through all sleeping and waking hours of human existence, and what academic psychology recognizes as freedom from all frustration or neurotic and psychotic dysfunction. In occultism this \s initiation whether of slight or exalted sort that makes it possible for the seeker to develop his special potentials and gradually take an enduring place in the eternal company of the immortal ones.
In a spiritual group there is a need for the same degree of solvency in its special group bank of consciousness, and all effort of an occult work in consequence is directed primarily to the building of the consciousness reserve in the banking parallel and to the use of these reserves in spiritual enterprise so that they may increase themselves and give greater strength to the group. The group strength is of course to the end that the individual's services may be enhanced in every way so that his contribution to his fellows may be the greater.
As the individual maintains his life through a higher consciousness of self-fulfillment as well as by a practical efficiency, so in the same manner does the group.
1178
THE WORK IN PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
The strength of the work is its solvency in terms of the consciousness in the bank and the advantage taken of this bank reserve at all times, and so nothing is as vital as the basic activity that in one way or another strengthens this core consciousness. Fundamentally the group functioning has two main divisions in this connection and students often see the outer or more overt one as more important since there is tangible contribution to the race and times in developing the transcendental realizations and establishing laboratory conditions for promoting the process and making the insights more available in either preliminary or more formal published form. Quite clearly this effort expended in the practical or everyday world is the effective buttressing of any immortal achievement since the self-giving has actuality of the sort gaining verification from other selves in common endeavor and this is justification in the eyes of a world at large. Results are a consequence of act that can be identified, however evaluated, and this is a necessity of conscious existence superficially but different from the precious heart of our group functioning or work in consciousness.
Work in pure consciousness is the healing ministry where mind operates in an over-all perspective of eternal potentiality. It is not possible to build anything in purely subjective terms, and ever the outer is the signature and certification of the inner, but the inner and not the outer is the immortally experienced reality. Thus we cannot begin with our concern over pure consciousness, nor can we give the seeker anything but a stone rather than bread if we talk wholly of inner and spiritual things, but we can welcome and utilize his suffering and build him inwardly into our group through his agony of soul.
The overt function of the group, or giving the Sabian insights to the world, is sustained by work in pure consciousness or the inner ministry of healing.
1179
THE SUBLIMATION OF LIVING
The development of consciousness of that extra and added sort that an individual must achieve for any actual participation in a discipline under the Solar Mysteries is entirely a matter of increased fullness of self-giving to everyday living. Ultimately the initiate, and even the aspirant to a very real measure from the beginning, has a double dimension in all his experience. He does precisely what every individual around him does in the course of the general social actions characteristic of the average decent person and also enhances this doing by attitude within himself and by what he is able to make his acts and feelings mean to his fellows with a magic of transcendence that to striking if subtle degree establishes him as a practical channel for a group aspiration in which they share, even if for no reason other than his presence with them in the time and space focus of events. In the proposition of this initiate living, without which directly or by less obvious parallel with exactly the same operational effect there cannot be any initiation as such at all, there are the two necessary factors. The initiate must be fully a part of everyday living as this is normal for the typical run of people of his day and race whether in immediate or later view, and must achieve this means for giving his fellow man a full and natural flow into the actuality of himself through the easily recognized excellence and generosity of his day-by-day acts. Then it is possible, and then only, to proceed to the other phase of awakening into the higher initiate consciousness or the sublimation of living.
There can be no real giving of self to life by trying to accentuate a separation of self from life as life actually is found in the shared experiences of man and his fellows as social animals.
The initiate maintains his normal day-by-day life among his associates but with the added dimension of excellence that permits a mutual flow.
1180
SUBLIMATION AS ADVENTURE
To share life with a plussage it is necessary to add the extra factor to the giving and this means putting more of self into an action or reaction where the self that is shared in the milieu wherein the sharing takes place is more than the self can be said to be in any terms of what the self is in the lesser or basic and normal relations. The process is illustrated in simple fashion by the interchange of two hearts and souls in the experience of love. There is a division that allocates ordinary functions to one or the other, whether in the basic and biological procedures of sex or the economic and social needs that establish marriage as an institution, but this dividing up of tasks or capacities of itself is no contribution to what could ever be known as love or romance. Rather each somehow uses the convenience of what is to be done for the other, or by either for both together, as the means for a stirring to a greater reality within the self than could ever be stirred by mere sex indulgence or preparation of a meal or the earning of a living or the care of children and so on endlessly. There is an inner process usually identified as idealization but it actually is an enhancement of consciousness that is made possible by the grasping and joyous continuance of a task or responsibility as a self-quickening or not the overlay of an idea or action but a fulfillment of self through a living that has the double dimension of practical excellence and inner and precious self-realization by a full assimilation into another.
The sublimation of life is an adventure of living, as in sharp contrast with normal selfhood as no more than going through such motions as the bare superficiality of the living may dictate, and thus it is not as much an acquisition as a veritable creation of pure idea.
The extra factor in association with others constitutes the aspirant's transcendence, assimilation into the other constitutes his self-realization.
1183
CULMINATIONS AS A DYNAMIC
A living creature acts only in fulfillment of itself and the basis of any possible psychology is a differentiation of action as serving or attempting to serve this and in the various ways available. This means that the fundamental characteristic of life as against mere existence is a capacity for act or an expression of self as the action brought about by the difference that constitutes selfhood and that, as more than static response to external manipulation, becomes consistent in a given situation or pattern of relations. Inanimate things, that can be identified discretely or in a specific unchanging manifestation that exists separately from other things, are characterized through an inability either to take advantage of their associations in reality or to execute adjustments within themselves by which these outer associations are changed in respect to their immediate potentials. Quite on the contrary life is marked by choice however primitive it may be, and the taking advantage of external immediacies that choice ultimately is only possibly to be said to be is the most simple of all acts of selfhood. The underlying drives of hunger and the rest are all examples. Consummations of any sort are prefigured in this elementary adjustment within the fact of living rather than static being, and they are really best seen as the actual fact of living existence per se because unless a person is consummating himself continually he does not exist.
Being does not act in order to continue to be but rather continues to be because it continues to act. Its existence is in its acting and not in some definite decision to act in order to be, and so the psychological realization is that the basic act-to-consummation of selfhood is not something that self does but is what self actually is.
One is what he is because of the way he continues to act, and as he makes his choices toward his spiritual consummation he gains a spiritual dimension.
1184
MAN HAS HIS DYNAMICS WILLY-NILLY
If the self must ever act by constant choices that serve itself in facilitating its being in its immediate situation in a total or over-all matrix in order to be at all then this sort of acting will continue willy-nilly with a constancy of which the individual will not be conscious except as some particular one of the myriad acts converging in the perpetuated and experientially oriented ground of self will come at any given instant of the complex of conscious existence to the foreground of attention or concern or necessity to quicken the phenomenon of mind and in such transcendental as against physical continuing that thereupon it begins to create that living factor in consciousness that makes possible the reality of a control of experience. And here that higher life of conscious being as differentiated from mere living becomes a struggle against suffering or another unpleasant ill because through accepting impacts, in comparison with initiating the true personal types of experience identified as spiritual, these self-acts become no more than reaction in a conditioned response or continual acting of a willy-nilly sort that establishes what is identified commonly as the subconscious and given a power it does not possess. Often the actual dynamics seen stemming from subconsciousness and resulting in a psychological neurosis or even psychosis are the negative evidences of inadequate choice or lack of sufficient impulsion from self at core.
In the Sabian psychology we approach the problem at this point by drilling each neophyte in the fact that where he fails to get or hold the initiative in his life, by outer choice or inner determination in attitude and to do this persistently in waking or sleeping or relaxation, he contributes to the utter defeat of all higher promise.
By directing his choices toward the transcendental until such choices become habitual, the aspirant is able to keep the initiative and so gain control of his life.
1185
DISSIPATION AND CONSUMMATION
The principal problem faced by the average person is not the necessity for developing a capacity to act, and thus escape rising impulsions out of the subconscious that only bring him trouble for the major part, but rather a greater discrimination in his free choices or fundamental acts in continuing to be what he is. The reason for such a situation, as it turns up in almost any psychological analysis, is a heritage from an inadequately sympathetic childhood. All too many of the individuals encountered in everyday life have had their expression of their truer selves from babyhood on into adolescence transformed to destructive sensitiveness simply because its importance was overlooked in the species of adult superiority that seeks an applause for its own consummations or a recapitulation of the self-acts it practiced in the outward replica of the proud parent selfhood. The senior personality with depreciation of spontaneity as a result of its own subordinations over the years and its diminishing physical acuities is rejoicing in a renewal of sorts in the proxy-youth of offspring and demands basic expression of its own lessened dynamism without thought of the damage to the junior personality with its lesser resource in conscious outreach.
The average child thus has to fight for its very life in a psychological sense since the principal and unrealized block to continuance of itself as itself is an acceptance of choices and acts that however subtly have been forced on it because they had consummated for well-meaning parents self as itself. Only misbehavior in any crucial case is a possible defense against the conditioning, and as mostly instinctive in the child and normally without reiterative force it often in the adult is dissipation as a tragic necessity of consummation.
When one's free expression is blocked and he consequently lacks discrimination, he creates a new dynamic and averts self-consummation by dissipation.
1186
SPIRITUAL CRITERIA ARE INWARD
What is always so hard for the neophyte to understand is the fact that dissipation itself is not an evil, for what helps a soul continue to remain in existence on a level of consciousness is not exactly a destructive reality. At core it is no different from any act of a more admirable character that achieves the same purpose, and thus there is the puzzling phenomenon of great figures in the occult tradition whose personal habits and weaknesses have been anything but exemplary. Spiritual criteria are inward in the sense that it is what an individual creates and gives to life that counts, and not the particular compulsions that enable him to organize the economy of himself and reach the self-consummations that add up to his spiritual contribution to life. The easiest way to see the point here is to realize that an individual may suffer from a loathsome disease and yet bring beauty of highest sort to all. The objection to dissipation is not that it may be evil but that it is an inferior stimulus and that no better way has opened up before many a greatly talented and highly dedicated selfhood failing in personal consummations of more edification for others. It can be quite too bad that some sick individual must let others see his unpleasant symptoms, especially since it can be supposed he might make a better contribution if he were well, but it also can be supposed and with equal likelihood that health might preclude all stimulus to self-expenditure of true significance. What counts is what life produces.
Where the occultist becomes a menace to his fellows in a very tangible fashion is when he assimilates his case to them, and begins to justify and even advocate his own dissipations and claim these as a preferred or actually spiritual means for high self-consummation.
Dissipation indicates an inferior stimulus to self-certification. A more constructive stimulus would ensure a more creative self-certification.
1187
SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS, SELF-CREATED
Let us summarize the propositions I have been presenting in these neophyte letters of which this is the last and declaring that there is no dynamism in life for any conscious entity except in a particular succession of typical acts by which it manages to exist as itself and as itself gain constant consummation and reassurance. It is most necessary that its acts be spontaneous, originating wholly within itself, or be more than mere reaction of its static nature of response to an external stimulus of physical or psychological sort. When this spontaneous action is true choice or the conscious decision among various possibilities of better or worse the consciousness gains a needed strengthening of itself, and this is the normal course of the development of a genuine and rewarding personality. If contrariwise it is a welling-up of something out of subconscious concomitants of existence and thus is choice only in the subordinate sense of conditioned act in instinctive sustainment of individuality, consciousness is depreciated and the person becomes more physical in livingness or more actuated by passion and habits than by an outreach for consummations manifest fundamentally in values and in creative relationships with others and love of adventure in acquiring significance in human society or virtually an exaltation of selfhood in spiritual or immortal continuity.
Being wrong is not of itself any demerit for personality since it is in the correction and validation of conduct that man grows and learns or becomes spiritually adult. Dissipation as positive act or as more than simple lack of control over lesser functioning has the merit of spontaneous choice at first, and is objectionable not because evil and habit-indulging as it is but because it is inferior dynamism.
When choices are a conscious decision, free from outer compulsion, the strengthening of consciousness sustains the development of an immortal personality.
700
WHY THE FORM OF THE LESSONS?
What actual benefit is derived from the Sabian method of lessons that are commentaries on older material rather than any direct exposition of the eternal principles? The assumption usually is that in this way criticism is largely answered in advance since the critics of the points made can go back at once to the sources of the ideas and check them for themselves. While this is true to some extent it completely misses the important point. True occult principles cannot be put into words or taught directly because of the limitation of word or language in itself. This is the real meaning of esoteric. There is no substitute for the ancient method of transmitting higher experience by providing it in one form or another. The Sabian lessons are first of all an experience. The deeper they plumb the more difficult it is to merely read them, or to understand their meaning in the first perusal. Every student must explore for himself the spirit of the original material and then direct his interest toward some use of it in his own affairs or in some ramification of his own interest.
Wisdom always has its roots in vicarious experience, and the great advantage in using ancient parallels is the avoidance of any current prejudices in the self-orientation. Thus the analysis of Job makes available the four different and concurrent modes of approach to the understanding of experience by ancient man's best thinking and today the unusual double perspective or stereoscopic insight there shown is of striking value in a present world where men increasingly are unable to think through to any appreciable solution for their pyramiding problems. The long preparation for the Job analysis of course demonstrates the psychological nature of maturation even in group progress.
A study of ancient wisdom provides the seeker with vicarious spiritual experience, and the world of his own affairs supplies the context in which he applies it.
737
THE OBSERVATIONAL FALLACY
What we must keep in mind always when it comes to Sabian lessons and materials is that there is not primarily any communication of facts such as remain valid in isolation or abstraction, but instead what is provided is fundamentally an experience in thinking. The material most like the familiar everyday use or exposition of facts that are valid and important in historical actuality is found in the Biblical series, so that these in consequence seem the easiest studies, but the Bible interpretations are a direct rehearsal of man's transcendent experience as this has become a matter of record and broad acceptance. Thinking of proved value is helped to profitable rethought in contexts requiring little or no change of set of mind. By contrast the appeal in most of the other materials is to experience yet to be had or is an employment of the unfamiliar for directing the thinking so that escape from entrenched and unsuspected prejudices or serious mental quirks is facilitated without the difficulty arising when the mind is brought to direct contemplation of its own processes.
Intellectual growth leads to intellectual maturity, and hence the technique is the tentative approach to Sabian subject matter in what initially is a window-shopping stimulus or trial of the nascent or root interest of self quite behind or apart from the conditioning that has built the personal limitation. Here then is not rehearsal but the uninhibited self-act. There still remains a necessary basis in experience, but as it may be projected to expansion rather than repetition or to genuine creativity instead of a receptivity in which there is no enduring self-discovery. Man fundamentally is what he does and his thinking is tentative doing. Therefore observational doing must end up as actuality of the experience of the tentative shaping in thought or the accepted reality is a fallacy, and does not lead to self-discovery.
Wisdom is never an amassing of facts but a discipline in thinking, and intellectual maturity frees the self for self-discovery and true creativity.
704
THE LESSONS ARE A DRILL IN CHOICE
It is difficult to bring intelligence to the choice made of immediate or emergency concern because of lack of perspective. It almost always is necessary to have a choice in reserve as already made in advance of the contingency. This is what is meant by training and culture in general. When it comes to the complete extrication from a series of events of distinct limitation such a choice in advance is of necessity a matter of imaginative application of a generalized experience, and it is here that the real worth of spiritual growth is shown. The Sabian Mimeographed Library of Lessons is a wide coverage of truly universal materials. In the symbolism the student carries through in a vicarious experience of high imaginative sort, and subconsciously is able to know what he would do on his own account in completely general fashion. In the Bible lessons he encounters actual situations in the exalted company of the prophetic souls through the ages and knows deep within himself how he will act and react in a miscellaneous assortment of situations. In the philosophy lessons he trains his mind to realize the nature of things in abstraction, and this equips him to take a dispassionate view of the most personal involvements.
The group work in its discussions and interchange is the common meeting place of ideas in the light of possible choices, and in its activities every alert student is drilled continually in making or considering the choices by which he always is exactly what he is. In the long run of the scheduled years of discipline, each ordered by the requirements of a stage in initiation, the seeker discovers his own or inner creative talents in a conscious fashion and hence is able to use them consciously and under his own direct and full control.
Vicarious experience with symbolism and the aspirations of great souls leads to sound judgment in making imaginative choices applicable to daily living.
108
THE QUALITY OF IRON
An interesting means of classifying our successive goals in the Sabian work is suggested by Plato in his Republic, when he uses the familiar ages of Hesiod, but omits the heroic as does Ovid following him, to represent not stages of racial but degrees of personal development. So we can say an aspirant who has pledged himself for two years or who within two years of faithfulness without pledge has had a place in this group is supposed to manifest the importance of the iron quality, and that the acolyte is expected to show the power of a brass consciousness for the five years of his discipline, that the legate in the three final years of the ten of Solar Mysteries training must show the value of silver before all men, and that an initiate released from all tie of obligation to any visible or objective agency must make the eternal demonstration of the virtue of spiritual gold.
Of these four iron is possessed of the greatest interest to most of you at least and a relevant question might be, "What is the value of iron?" Of its weakness it may be said that iron is too susceptible to oxygen as it rusts at the least provocation, and the great weakness of aspirants who are confronted perhaps for the first time in their lives by the real oxidizing power of the holy and eternal spirit is a roughening up on the outside of self and a brushing away of disagreeable phases of the being. Of its strength note that iron in contact with fire and water potentially is steel, like an aspirant who is capable of being inspired and lifted up to the vault of heaven and who then survives the plunge into the cold depths of the return to the everyday struggle. This is the type of character the aspirant must get before all else.
The first task of the aspirant is to develop a character that can be lifted up to the heights of inspiration and yet return with equanimity to the struggles of everyday.
109
IRON AND PERSONAL TIES
A student writes to ask again if the tie between herself and myself is not a personal one, and naturally the answer again is an affirmative. There are several kinds of personal ties, such as those on the one hand that are inclusive in co-operation toward a great goal and on the other those that are exclusive in their worry over personal resources. Of the first sort are the clear-seeing associations among men and women, irrespective of age or sex or religion or anything else that can bring friction in human contact, or an association that holds strong despite or indeed is strong because of differences and is relationship that has no justification except in a mutuality of objectives that makes it as happy as the chance acquaintanceships in voyaging and as unexacting as fellow-seeking where distinctions provide exchange of experience impartially in the common frame of the quest. Ties of the second sort are of the earth earthy with the bond made not for its own sake but rather to cover up an inner deficiency so that a place of importance may be sought as an excuse to neglect lesser things really of greater import to self than the superficial gratification. These are ties that are little more than apron strings in a tagging of reality.
Iron is the virtue of the seeker as the pledged student, characterizing his initial progress, and iron is a necessary factor in every life process. Hence without the neophyte group and new seekers coming in to replace those who become acolytes the work would stop and the inner structure would dissolve. All groups unable to function in their continuing origins begin to break up. Iron serves the organism of man by carrying oxygen to the cells of its substance, and of course and also in this acts to police the whole economy of self at core.
The friction generated by his swift ascent and precipitous descent sloughs off unwanted characteristics that prevent the self from living impersonally.
898
REFINEMENT IN THE ACOLYTE DISCIPLINE
The core of the Sabian initiation is the acolyte work or five years of special study and exercises offered each six months to a student who has met the requirement of the two-year orientation in the group or who can demonstrate a satisfactory substitute. There are no exceptions whatsoever to the requirements in this five-year discipline of the acolyte, grade. A fully qualified initiate desiring to operate or possibly perform some specific task in and through the invisible or immortal fellowship that has an outer format in the Sabian Assembly at this present moment in history would have to go through the regimen in the same precise way as others as far as tangible things become tokens of the invisible reality behind all life. The lay-brother fellowship differs from this in the fact that it is completely interchangeable in all outer and inner experience, but nobody ever achieves such until he first has ordered himself immortally by some procedure akin to our own acolyte work as wholly necessary and momentarily integral or exclusive in the time-and-space focalization of the minimal five-year refining.
The Solar Mysteries emphasis on self-reliance may in all likelihood never before have been carried to the rigorous extent characterizing our acolyte pattern and establishing the balance between an intemperate exaltation of personal master-pupil tie and a cold-blooded or legalistic disregard of individual differences. Each acolyte sets the level of his achievement since he may proceed perfunctorily to win his goal without penalty in the form of outer distinction against him. The 1945 challenge at the acolyte level was pointed at exacting objectives for the Sabian seeker, so that he would find himself in more effective dimension and help the Sabian vision in turn to enlargement.
The development of the qualities of initiative and self-sustainment prepare the aspirant for the achievement of larger and larger dimensions of spiritual unfoldment.
110
THE QUALITY OF BRASS
Probably the greatest demand made on the acolyte in this work is for a willingness to sustain himself or carry on faithfully in all ways that rest in his power without the slightest supervision from those who are his superiors. This is not a backward way of saying or implying that those who fail to meet this demand are penalized, or are of lesser value in what we are doing, since it normally will be a very small group out of the whole who are temperamentally equipped for this highly specialized inner service to the Brotherhood. The others will supply the weight and standing of the group as a whole, and before the world it will be the outer body and not the inner nucleus by which our Assembly will be recognized. Moreover it is hardly distressing to me or to the Brothers when a seeker fails in outreach to his higher goal, because he can always attempt this again without prejudice and because such attempts supply excellent material for these letters and also are vital check on the value of the spiritual principles for differing individuals. It is to be hoped however that none among us are upset if problems arising in the discipline are made the subject of discussion.
Brass is the metal of self-sustainment, as is well known in the destructive sense when speaking of an individual's brass or undue forwardness. Initiative is a highly valuable quality in a seeker because, as stated in the initial Sabian pledge, commissions of a real or enduring sort under the Solar Mysteries must be self-bestowed and a matter of pure initiative. But there are two kinds of brass, and the forced claim to a place of pre-eminence is of its destructive extreme. Here is a test. When initiative is displayed in spiritual work it is constructive when all other associates of the given grade are pleased.
The second task of the aspirant is to initiate his own spiritual commission. The test of its worth will be the quiet approval of his spiritual associates.
111
SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE WORTH THE CANDLE?
The witticism for which Montaigne is responsible, giving us a title for a further consideration of the quality of brass with an intimation that the game of spiritual living may not be worth weary or drooping eyelids and sluggish thoughts in some unambitious morrow, may well demand sharp attention to the proposition of values. There will be those among us who have not had and may not have any desire for unusual spiritual effort. If we stand in this class we are merely asking a chance to share in the pleasures of association with the few who are life-committed to the major spiritual task. We are like those in the university who for many and quite legitimate reasons are unable to try out for athletics, and engage in the day-by-day gruelling practice between games, but we yet can take a seat in the cheering section once a week and in many similar ways contribute support to the greater task and thus sustain the whole in less personal but no less vital fashion. Giving substance to the morale of a group is very real service to it.
But for those of us who wish to contribute a life in the whole of its future as well as its present content, and who are caught up in the vision of those known to us as the Brothers and thus seek to carry on in the struggle for an establishment of a spiritual democracy year after year and life after life and age after age it is immediately and eternally necessary that the game and the candle be seen clearly and a decision be made in full awareness of necessities. At regular intervals in the discipline the seekers who have completed initial requirements of the neophyte grade will enter the acolyte work and begin the development of their quality of spiritual brass, and it may be well for each one of these to be sure he desires the soul-tempering.
The maintenance of a spiritual commission requires a development of self-sustainment that proceeds steadily and quietly without guidance or applause.
112
ACOLYTES AND ECONOMIC FLUCTUATION
In what respect might the quality of brass be said to be wholly absent in a seeker? Perhaps what unerringly suggests personal unfitness for real service in the higher realms of being is the almost universal tendency to feel that the making of an excuse for failing to do something is as spiritually satisfactory as the doing, with the result that since it is easier to find excuses than to put forth the effort the average seeker looks for an excuse first and uses real effort only when he fails to find one and feels he has to exert himself as an inner sort of punishment for lack of cleverness in escaping the issue. Nobody lacking broad contact with people at large can have any idea of the grudging attitude with which most things in life are done. It is so unusual when a genuinely willing response is shown in giving up the immediate for a more intangible convenience that this inner leaping to a greater challenge might be called the primal mark of brass in soul.
The financial debacle in Wall Street in 1929 provided an important example of panic consciousness, and it also made clear to no less an extent the manner in which genuine upset may be blocked by any individual or group of individuals refusing to be involved in it. No one can blind himself to the fact that personal wealth evaporated even if in theory the collapse was of purely speculative increment, but the phenomenon of lucky or cautious individuals who took their profits and so escaped the penalties of overextended mass greed shows the presence of the free will factor however obliquely. The Great Depression precipitated a complete reshaping of economic world development, and also it cradled remarkable and unanticipated individual accomplishment such as sprang from that quality of brass in adjustment rather than excuse.
The aspirant holds steadily to center constantly while adjusting quickly to outer necessities, always eager to exchange present benefits for delayed but greater ones.
115
LIFE PATTERNS AND THEIR DOMAINS
When we come to a consideration of the quality of silver and to the genius of the legate work, together with some comparison of this third metal with the brass of which much more remains to be said, the first and all-important point is that the legates or students taking their final three-year discipline are concerned almost wholly with the healing phase of our work. The reasons involved are twofold. A student of legate rank is pledged to the world of everyday rather than to the group because it may be believed that in seven years he has reshaped the pattern of his life to the highest ideal he has found within himself and that now the time has come to subject it to the genuine proof of its dedication to his age and time whether in a small personal circle or in a realm of racial dimensions. But this dedication is of itself insufficient even to bring itself into tangible being unless the group and the world are especially linked through his person. It is as though through seven years the student made spiritual deposit of himself with the group, and then in three years relied on this for the outer spiritual establishment of his being. Both for the sake of his use of this outflowing essence of self, and that he may not unwittingly develop a supercilious and superior attitude toward his fellow man, he is called to serve humanity by healing the ills of humanity through a ministry possible only by a sympathetic entering into these ills.
But what is healing? Here are multiplied my letters on the quality of silver. Has not every man a pattern of living that is fixed and remains the basic essence of his being? Surely, and yet we assume that the domain in which this functions is likewise never to be changed or that sickness and poverty alone will make it manifest.
The third task of the aspirant is to act as a link between the group and the world and to prove his dedication to race progress by his healing presence.
116
PHYSICAL EXTERNALIZATION NECESSARY?
As we continue with this description of the character of the silver quality in our work, and the requirement that the legate or student under final three-year discipline give major attention to some phase of healing, we must understand that this last period of training is essentially one of preparation for probationary Mastership. So an additional reason for the required interest in healing may be given as supplementary to the two presented in the preceding letter. But just what is probationary Mastership, a seeker is sure to ask. The justification for the ten years of training, under the various restorations or re-establishments of the Solar Mysteries, is the graduation of some few workers at least who are competent to maintain functional tie with the Brothers. That there may be no silly distinction between persons among those who aspire to this status, provision must be made for full employment of everybody who holds firm in ten years of seeking even if he gives his obligations only perfunctory attention. Probationary or threshold Mastership is therefore the condition under which the seeker first stands on his own feet by himself and then exercises an adequate responsibility to keep him going on ahead in higher realms even though ineptly until he finds his own true place in the cosmic totality.
Probationary Mastership of the sort that finds its place at once is of the quality of gold. But what, in the realm of silver, will serve both laggard and alert aspirants and create no feckless and personal distinctions that destroy spiritual work and yet neither discourage the slow-unfolding soul nor penalize the quicker one. If all spiritual realities must have objective sustainment, a higher selfhood needs externalization and this necessity is the basic fact of healing.
In the way that a pattern is a chart that must be applied for any practical usefulness, ideals are externalized so that the self may flow out in similar usefulness.
899
REFINEMENT ON THE LEGATE LEVEL
The seekers who have passed through their seven years of discipline of an initial two grades with the second entirely under our auspices may enter a further three-year period of spiritual refinement that in its outer aspect becomes an indefinitely continuing status before the world as well as before all students of this or lower grades. The legates provide the basic pool of soul power in the group and comprise both the alumni aspirants who relinquish objective functions but continue subjective responsibility and the active Sabian Assembly members who constitute the ultimate and symbolically numbered hundred and forty-four workers providing the substantial frame of our physical being as a collective entity. All responsible operations center in the legates but the acolytes may share in the group responsibility in what preliminary fashion they wish, as a practice in advance of an enlargement of their spiritual dimension, and by the same token the neophytes may engage in the vital rhythm sustainments established by the acolyte drills in equally optional or preliminary fashion. The legates meanwhile and as individuals renew their acolyte quickening as this proves needful, and return to neophyte outreaching with deeper understanding.
With every increase in spiritual status the aspirant has an absolute obligation that at lesser levels is an option, and this in its essence from the least to the most exalted of initiatory stages of self-immortalization is the development and administration of some responsibility such as is contribution to the eternal vision inherent in man's nature and manifest as it may be shared by all men however without appreciation or any awareness. Some years ago the opportunity at focus on the legate level was for a revivifying of the quadrangles.
As he proceeds the aspirant accepts more and more responsibility for the outworking of the facet of human aspiration he has chosen to develop and share.
900
LAY BROTHER REFINEMENT
Since the lay brother in a sense has universal communion through the inner or esoteric side of every possible sort of occult or spiritual enterprise, it is impossible for this status of personal development to have any sort of outer or conventional definition such as could classify the individuality only in the divisions and separations that emphasize the limitations rather than potentialities of conscious being. Even self-awareness of this status as in distinction from the less-refined initiatory accomplishment on lower levels would be an indication of a lesser spiritual achievement than supposed. But in the way that a neophyte can practice at being an acolyte in advance, and a preliminary assumption of legate responsibility by an acolyte is quite possible and even encouraged, so the quickening of his lay brother potentials by the legate is not only desirable but in fact is an obligation placed on him if he is to follow the law of growth as essentially the characteristic of conscious existence in time-and-space actualization of reality or in terms of experience as a personalized existence. And so in the Assembly we challenged ourselves to expanding total communion or leavening the world by excess plussage in group activity.
Thus while hewing close to our own line in our effort to make whatever we do more significant in the Sabian context in addition to enhancing it as a personal experience we yet also should attempt to express ourselves in a more universal frame in which we understand divergent striving as ultimately co-operative and through our cognizance of that are able to contribute creatively to any effort concerning us. Actually evil is redirected more advantageously than opposed, precisely as differences can be the basis of growth rather than conflict.
When the aspirant has established his own touch with divinity he is ready to stand on his own spiritual feet and contribute creatively to the world.
744
THE MEANING OF MEDITATION
No question turns up more regularly in elementary occult work than just how one is to meditate. Much of the trouble here lies in the attempts that have been made to put down fixed rules for everyone and for all occasions. More trouble comes from the effort to see meditation as a magical practice with every achievement resulting from the employment of a correct occult formula. Therefore it is vital to realize what meditation is fundamentally and how it operates. Then a procedure can be worked out for each seeker by himself, and thereafter applied by him easily to each shift in the immediate situation. Here again is the essential difference between the Solar Mysteries in which each seeker ultimately directs his own progress and the older Lunar or paternalistic Mysteries or spiritual totalitarianism in which he is by contrast told just what to do and when to do it in great detail.
It must be realized fundamentally that meditation always is a form of experience, and in that respect is just like other experience and is rewarding or useless depending on the degree to which any fulfillment of self is achieved. In a quite narrow definition it may be said that meditation is a form of thinking and thinking you may remember is a vicarious as opposed to actual experience or is undergoing experience without penalty or tentatively as a means for prejudging an outcome or discovering whether the given experience is desirable or is worth actualizing. Thinking is explorative and problem-solving since in this manner it sips at experience primarily, but meditation is different and is the employment of imagination and anticipation not for a prejudging of action but as a way of enhancing action or supporting an outer and desired phase of experience by a conscious plussage.
In the same manner that thinking is used to evaluate and solve problems, meditation is used to rehearse spiritual attitudes that will enhance action.
745
THE GOAL OF MEDITATION
If meditation is experience in the form of a plussage to enhance the more desirable actuality of experience in general, then in what way does it become an occult exercise? The answer applies actually to all occult procedure. Meditation is not an occult discipline because it otherwise has no existence, which would mean that all meditation is occult whether or no, but life rather exhibits meditation as a quite common phenomenon and when the seeker has reached such a point that his own life is thoroughly spiritualized it then becomes wholly a meditation in a very actual sense. Thus we can look at the prominent statesman or the successful business man and observe that his greatest characteristic is his subtle capacity to be on the job so persistently that on the negative side he can only discuss shop even while his very positive gift is the deep psychic rapport with his affairs and his understanding sensitiveness to their every need and potentiality.
Experience cuts two ways. Man finds himself in what he does and by the same token he gives what he does a significance of the sort that will call out a greater doing on his part. Thus the man of affairs in his great rapport with events has a sensitive plussage that means not only that affairs exalt him but that he lifts them and hence enables them to be more than they are in any normal sense. This is a goal to be achieved in all walks of life by the seeker, but with meaning far deeper and potentiality far greater than in mere everyday success. Position and breadth in life are to be developed but more as a signature than something worthy on its own account. Man is to become immortal by uplifting the race or his fellows in totality, and what he is able to achieve in private affairs is self-given special training.
Meditation is an experience in plussage that prepares the aspirant to infuse all his affairs with high meaning, which in turn permits him to be exalted by his affairs.
746
WHAT IS OCCULT MEDITATION?
Occult meditation is a way to experience the life of the race personally, or to take a step toward initiation by functioning in anticipation or transient aspiration as a group spirit. Seen from an essentially selfish or very personal point of view it is a way to have a fresh and better ordering of the self through larger service as when some young man will help his country by enlisting in the armed service and thereupon gain at the same time the vocational training beyond him as far as being able to pay for it himself. More precisely what each aspirant gains through meditation is a chance to be a part of developments in a cosmic rather than an individual dimension and to give what he can to the larger whole as a step to becoming a conscious custodian of the greater racial responsibilities. Then he will be exactly like the statesman or business executive of consequence who exalts the life of the race in the plussage of everyday involvement. In his activity he may become an instrument of racial orientation. This has its many repercussions into the personal life, but its power comes from greater than personal considerations. Seen in this way meditation achieves a monitor function on which the inner Sabian discipline is founded.
This meditation is occult because it is many-faceted and the wide range of its functioning makes it possible to treat the seeker as a child and direct his meditation to the solution of his own upsets or to consider him an adult and appeal to him to lend a hand to a group dedication through which many working together are instrumenting a conscious immortality and furthering the racial evolution as a means for the uplift of all human kind. We primarily serve ourselves as an expansion of our self-fulfillment into purest cosmic service.
Just as the aspirant uses meditation for the adjustment of his spiritual attitudes, so he uses it in wider scope to assist in furthering the evolution of the race.
747
THE PROCEDURE IN MEDITATION
Everything done in meditation under our auspices is thus a matter of vicarious participation in the racial experience. It can be wholly occult and so germinative by turning to the past or living a glorious chapter of the past in heart and consciousness. The easiest achievement of this is reading sacred scriptures and living again with Jesus or other great teachers in the events of their lives. And also it can be occult not so much by such momentary reconstructions of some actual event but by suffusing the consciousness with the essence taken from experience as in realizing the beautiful thoughts and great ideas that have caught up and held the best of racial values. We help ourselves in doing this when we enter the experience anchored in accepted rituals, or share the group experience rehearsing itself in every Full Moon ceremony and in all details of the healing regimen and the like.
Irrespective of what momentary form it may take what remains the core of effective meditation is that the self is lost for an inspiring moment through an inner or vital activity or experience that concerns the group or the race or the ideals and values held up as the individual goal and inspiration for the given life. Meditation loses all value when it is not an experience in every sense of the word, and this means it must not be any idle rehearsal of what the self fails to make its own as in a mere repetition of words and movements. It cannot be mere passive receptivity in which there is no creative response or eager hurrying to meet the possibilities of things. Meditation is never a self-emptying in order to be empty but is a recharging of self in which useless or destructive content is flushed out in the realization of life's total potential. It experiences self ahead of self.
Meditation is an experience in race realization, whether a reliving of values deep in the race consciousness or a recharging of self with life's highest potential.
952
AVOIDING PSYCHOLOGICAL BLACK MAGIC
Any individual as a social creature must meet the conditions of each particular milieu or special complex in which a phase of his self-act has its manifestation. The character of this adjustment ranges from suffering limitation under a necessity of pure reflex when there is no adequate skill at the pertinent higher level on to a point where every act is novel or self-created and a matter of finding every relation of pertinency convenient instead of limiting and so providing both self-opportunity and a chance to make the self-expression of such orientation a contribution and an invitation to sharing ultimately for all others everywhere whether immediately or vicariously. When there is pure reflex the individual has the basic protection of his own pattern, as with the child cradled in the family consciousness, but if an alien energy effects a compulsion the result can be destructive and so social maturity is total self-direction. The effort to exercise such compulsion and so defeat self-competence is psychological black magic.
There is a subtle enjoyment of tyranny in any attempt to compel the outside world of limitation to conform to idea projected by self. Such idea may be rationalized as effort to make the world better and so altruistic or sincere enough, but it is totalitarian thinking and dangerous if seated in an assumption of self-superiority or an illusion of insights of which the average person is incapable. Sometimes the psychology is abnormal or a lean to criminal exploitation as the crime syndicate or the war consciousness enamored of conquest, but among occultists it is mostly spiritual officiousness. Meditation in the Solar Mysteries is not seen as compulsion over evil or inadequacy. Rather it is invitation to good or to an expansion of real competence.
Meditation is used to entertain goodness and not to coerce evil, for every contingency in experience contains the possibility of a constructive solution.
731
THE VALUE OF THE AFFIRMATIONS
The value of the affirmations is in the basic ritualization of experience they offer, rather than in the particular sentiment they express, and their practical use is to break down the limitations maintained by a student's rationalizing. He may feel that everything is against him or that every drift of circumstances is contrary to his desire in all respects, whereas the whole trouble lies in his inner or deeper set of temperament. The use of the affirmations puts him into immediate rapport with the essence of the work and gives him a steadying anchorage with a better set in reality. The affirmation is not a statement of fact as much as a recitation of possibility, and since it is a group articulation experienced in concert by many students during the fortnight it has the same group power as the basic pledge itself.
The Sabian affirmations are a cycle of experience all by themselves, and as not taken from anything else they are quite free of alien influence in either our work or other spiritual effort. At the start the statements were phrased spontaneously and employed in Hollywood devotional meetings. Later the entire body of them was reviewed and twenty-six sets of those that seemed the most effective became the basis of the first annual cycle preserved in the old Ritual of Living. When the new Sabian Manual was in preparation in 1956 a special attention was given to these, as to all our established rituals during days of enforced isolation high in the Cascade Mountains, and this led to a rearrangement of the cycle and a recasting of many statements and thus to their present form and order. They are rooted in a group insight, and they express the healing power and reordering potential of our inner strengthening as all our company may draw on this in every need.
The aspirant employs affirmations in order to participate in the rhythm of group ritual, thus both tapping and contributing to the power inherent in group act.
732
THE RHYTHM IN AN AFFIRMATION
Because it is a matter of rehearsal of spiritual experience and not of logical statement or of psychological reassurance primarily, the employment of the Sabian affirmation must have an individual application of very definite sort in each ritualistic articulation as suggested in the Sabian Manual on pages 132-3 for group activities. The rhythm set up when there is a repetition in unison with the stress shifted for the three times to different phases of acknowledgment will tend to distribute the general spiritual realization under affirmation so that each participating person will be sensitive to a pertinence of varying but essentially personal sort as he shifts emphasis with those in the immediate higher fellowship, or gives of himself as he contributes rhythm even if not conscious of direct application while yet acting in transcendental context and channeling higher potential into his own syndromes of difficulty to establish them in greater dimension.
The word or phrase that may be selected for stressing in an employment of the affirmation is by the process of selection made a concept of personal significance, no matter how transiently, and it is much more truly so when an individual is resorting to this New Thought technique in the privacy of his own devotions or self-contemplation in any momentary retirement from the exactions and frustrations of everyday activity and obligation to gain spiritual refreshment or a regrasp of self at the core of its potentials and resources. The rhythm in a shifting stress has high therapeutic power because the exercise of the free will in the choice of concept is an outreach into potentials that in the moment's general consciousness are accepted as valid in a sweep of spiritual race history to which self may project and regain itself.
Repetition of affirmations has therapeutic power when used with conscious application to a definite aspect of the aspirant's affairs.
733
THE RHYTHM IN A DAY'S EXISTENCE
The daily use of the affirmations is a matter of putting down a foundation for the self-controlled as against the circumstance-controlled existence. The proper repetitions three times a day as in the New Thought way of illumination can order the self at core so that outer upset or delay to the spiritual growth will be quite impossible. The most effective ritual is on arising and at high noon and on retiring again at night. The health affirmation is taken to start the day because the seeker is at the threshold of his normal cycle of physical experience. His vitality should be at its greatest or sharpest point and he should be most fit for meeting the world of everyday in its own order of expression. His first duty is to his outer responsibilities and this is a proper start for a cycle of morning. With noon the day begins to get its psychological fruits into a pattern and thus this is the moment for the inner establishment of a focus in prosperity.
The identification of high noon bothers many an aspirant but it is primarily a moment of personal peak in the day's routine and need not have even an approximate correspondence with the clock. The moment follows the morning's self-expenditure, in some anticipated relaxation as for lunch and congenial recreation. This is the time for the prosperity realization because it is here that the cycle of accomplishment is most closely in tune with both self and environment. It is necessary only to catch the spirit of the affirmation for a moment, even if the threefold repetition must be under the breath in some rest room in an office or factory. Finally at night comes the realization of the day in its consummatory aspect, and so this is the crucial time for the fortnightly credo of happiness or effective claim of selfhood.
Use of the affirmations for health, wealth and happiness orders the self at center so that the aspirant may gain control of his circumstances.
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