For the Star Above the Christmas Tree

A total eclipse took place on 14 December – not visible from where I live – just a week before the Solstice and Great Conjunction due on 21 December. These fall in the same week as Christmas, so there are many people around the world looking forward to a period of brightness and joy, however brief, as respite during what has otherwise been a time of gloom and disappointment.

For those observing the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky with their naked eye, it might appear as one bright star, reminiscent of the one that was said to have appeared as a guiding sign in the heavens at the birth of Christ. German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, wrote in 1614 that he believed the ‘star of Bethlehem’ in the Nativity story could have been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.

A number of commentators who are respected in the ‘new age’ community believe that there will be a division of people, as the planetary Schumann resonance rises. That used to be pegged at 7.83 but has been rising and expected by some to settle permanently at over 110hz, separating humanity into two different vibrational frequencies. This sounds a bit like the “rapture” expected by some Christians, where two men will be in a field, one is left behind while the other is “taken” as if to move into a different dimension.

My personal view has always been that everyone needs to work on their own spiritual wellbeing, rather than wait on an external source to deliver ascension to them. Today, just like every other day, at least 150,000 people have died around the globe. For them, that is their personal “end time.” Whatever your beliefs are, you need to put them into practice in the morning, because there is no guarantee you’ll still be here in the evening.

Read the full article on Paul’s blog at his web site southernsunlightcom.wordpress.com.

“IN H. P. Blavatsky’s ‘The Voice of the Silence,’ the secret fire of the Alchemists is described as ‘Kundalini,’ the ‘serpentine,’ or annular working power in the body of the ascetic. ‘It is an electric fiery occult or Fohatic power, the greatest pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter’; and in another place the author says: ‘it is an electro-spiritual force, a creative power which, when aroused into action, can as easily kill as it can create.’

“This point is the reason why the secrets of Alchemy are not divulged to the curious, and why only those who have gained the power to control their own self will be told how that power can be aroused in man.

“In regard to this ‘secret fire,’ the Rosicrucians say:’The potentialities in nature are aroused by the action of the secret fire, assisted by the elementary fire. The secret fire is invisible, and is contained within all things. It is the most potential and powerful fire, with which the external visible fire cannot be compared. It is the fire with which Moses burned the golden calf, and that which Jeremiah hid away, and which seventy years after was found by the knowing ones, but which by that time had become a thick water.’

“Without the possession of this magic fire, no alchemical process can be accomplished.” ~Franz Hartmann

Secret Fire of the Alchemists

As has been explained in several previous articles on this blog, the real purpose of alchemy was not to change one type of metal into another but to change the lead man of materialism into the gold man of spirit. So when Hartmann speaks of the secret fire of Alchemists, it could as easily be called the secret fire of spiritual awakening and spiritual development, or the secret fire of the mystics.

This secret fire is not a fire in the material sense, and most modern spiritual schools prefer to call it Light or Spiritual Light rather than fire. Because it is a spiritual thing, it is impossible to accurately describe in languages created to describe the physical world. So fire, light, energy, force, and others are all reasonable accurate, but not exact. And the secret fire is secret in two ways. One, it is invisible, unnoticed, by materialistic people. Two, when you look at others, unless you are very advanced in your spiritual studies, you cannot tell how much spiritual fire, if any, a particular individual may have.

Occult Fohatic Power

Blavatsky adds that the secret fire is an occult or fohatic power. Fohat, according to Blavatsky, is an old Tibetan term for this force or energy. The importance of that word being used is that Fohat is defined as being active. It isn’t just a secret fire that doesn’t do anything. It is an active force that is working all the time. The work it is doing is to awaken and develop souls and converting (or transforming) matter back into its original state as spirit. This is all happening under the direction of God, of course, but we have a part in it also.

God made us to be co-creators with Him. That doesn’t mean we are free to puff up our egos and arrogantly create whatever we feel like creating, as in the manifesting practices that have become so popular in recent years. It means that we are to create and transform with God’s Great Plan in mind at all times. And we create with the energy of the secret fire that is around us at all times.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on November 6, 2020

“In many temperaments of the unstable or artistic type, the intuitional consciousness of the Absolute becomes ungovernable: it constantly breaks through, obtaining forcible possession of the mental field and expressing itself in the ‘psychic’ phenomena of ecstasy and rapture. In others, less mobile, it wells up into an impassioned apprehension, a ‘flame of love’ in which the self seems to ‘meet God in the ground of the soul.’ This is ‘pure contemplation’: that state of deep orison in which the subject seems to be seeing, feeling, and thinking alll at once. By this spontaneous exercise of all his powers under the dominion of love, the mystic attains that ‘vision of the heart’ which, ‘more interior perhaps than the visions of dreams or ecstasy,’ stretches to the full those very faculties which it seems to be holding in suspense; as a top ‘sleeps’ when it is in a fast spin. … This act of contemplation, this glad surrender to an overwhelming consciousness of the Presence of God, leaves no sharp image on the mind: only a knowledge that we have all been lifted up, to a veritable gazing upon that which eye hath not seen.” ~Evelyn Underhill

Artistic Types

I would first like to disagree with Ms. Underhill in lumping together the artistic and unstable types. While it is true that some great artists have been mentally unstable, I think they are a minority. Most artistic types are perfectly sane. But they do tend to be more sensitive than the average person, and they may well be what makes them artists. Maybe she meant autistic types and the book has a typo. In any case, she is correct in saying that the intuitive power generally comes to people in one of two ways, and affects each type differently.

Ungoverned Intuitive Consciousness

When intuitive consciousness breaks through to one without being sought, or without being understood, it may do it in a forceful and undesirable way. It may cause unexplained joy and ecstasy, or it may cause fear of something for no known reason. In more extreme cases, it may cause such psychic phenomena as a type of speaking in tongues where the person suddenly starts speaking in a language they do not know. Or it may cause a person to levitate, or glow with an inner light. Many think such phenomena is desirable, but it is rarely useful when uncontrolled.

In the case of unexplained fears, it may be useful but isn’t always. We have all heard the stories of people who suddenly felt that they should skip a flight they were scheduled to take, or a cruise they were supposed to go on, and later the plane crashed or the ship had an emergency at sea. That is all great. It is a good thing those people get that warning. But what you never hear of is the people who suddenly became fearful and canceled their flight or their cruise, and nothing happened. While I haven’t done a scientific study on it, I bet such people outnumber those who got a reap premonition by at least ten to one. So this type of intuitive consciousness is unreliable when not developed with discipline.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on November 21, 2020

“Both Herodotus and Pliny noted the general resemblance in shape between the phoenix and the eagle, a point which the reader should carefully consider, for it is reasonably certain that the modern Masonic eagle was originally a phoenix. The body of the phoenix is described as being covered with glossy purple feathers, while its long tain feathers were alternately blue and red. Its head was light in color and about its neck was a circlet of golden plumage. …

“The phoenix was regarded as sacred to the sun, and the length of its life (500 to 1000 years) was taken as a standard for measuring the motion of the heavenly bodies and also the cycles of time used in the Mysteries to designate the periods of existence. …

“The phoenix (which is the mythological Persian Roc) is also the name of a southern constellation, and therefore it has both an astronomical and an astrological significance. In all probability, the phoenix was the swan of the Greeks, the eagle of the Romans, and the peacock of the Far East. To the ancient mystics the phoenix was a most appropriate symbol of the immortality of the human soul.” ~Manly P. Hall

Phoenix, Eagle, and More

Hall notes that the phoenix is probably the source of the Greek swan, the Roman eagle, and the Persian Roc. He doesn’t mention the Native American firebird, which resembles the phoenix more closely than and of the others mentioned. I think the idea in most, if not all of these sacred birds, is that they represent the human soul. When the phoenix rises and flies toward the sun, it is a hint from the ancient mystery schools on the process for awakening and developing the spirit and soul. The immortality of the phoenix comes from the part of the legend that says that when the phoenix does die after 500 years, it is reborn from the ashes. That is a simplification of the original story, but it is the most important part. The phoenix never truly dies, just like the divine-human soul.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on October 30 , 2020

“If we are made, as we are, in the image of God, let us become the image both of ourselves and of God, or rather let us all become the image of the One whole God, bearing nothing earthly in ourselves, so that we may consort with God, and become gods, receiving from God our existence as gods. For in this way the divine gifts and the presence of divine peace are honored.

“Love is a great blessing and of all blessings the first and supreme, since it joins God and men together around him who has love, and it makes the creator of men manifest Himself as man through the exact likeness of the deified man to God, in so far as this is possible for man. This is what I take to be the actualization of the commandments, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, and your neighbors as yourself (cf. Lev. 19:18; Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37-39).” ~The Philokalia

In the Image of God

I have covered this before, but I will repeat it. Being made in the image of God refers to our spirit and soul, not our physical bodies. It should be obvious that the physical bodies are not in the image of God, otherwise, we would all look the same. It would also mean that God has a physical body, which He doesn’t. It would also mean that the physical body couldn’t die because God cannot die, yet we all know that the physical body does die unless we are living in a fantasy.

One Whole God

The author of this section of the Philokalia (the book has many authors) advises us to “ become the image of the One whole God.” That is just another way of saying that we must become one with God and share in His Wisdom and Knowledge. It does not mean that we should, with arrogance and excessive egotism, declare that we are God and have no need to develop or change since God is, obviously, perfect.

Become Gods from God

Yes, we can become gods through becoming one with God, but this comes from a great effort of spiritual growth and development. We can no more declare that we are gods simply because we believe we are than we can declare ourselves doctors simply because we buy a used stethoscope. In fact, most spiritual schools and mystery schools frown on us saying that we become gods because it tends to promote egotism in those who are not sufficiently developed on the spiritual side to understand what it means. They generally prefer to say that we become angels, helpers of God, or co-creators with God, rather than saying we become gods. So while what the Philokalia says here is true, it is better to say the same thing with different words to prevent any hubris.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on November 23, 2020

We are clearly living through a time of transition. Many are realizing their authentic selves and claiming their truth. Such quests should go hand-in-hand with the pursuit of happiness. In my last blog I quoted the first line of the Desiderata. The very last line is equally valid: Strive to be happy.

Last week, the Melbourne Institute (University) released its annual report known as HILDA: Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia. It aims to measure the material factors of our lives, such as finances, work, health. The latest survey shows that over the past two decades, Australians’ life satisfaction has been fairly constant at relatively high levels, driven by basic factors such as health, safety and social contact.

Does satisfaction equal happiness? In an attempt to find out, researchers need to know not just what people have and don’t have, but how they feel – what they call subjective well-being (SWB), including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect.

Read the full article on Paul’s blog at his web site southernsunlightcom.wordpress.com.

“‘Let me hear whatever any one may have told you’. ‘Barku, the son of Vrsna, has told me that the eye (sun) is Brahman’. ‘As one who has a mother, a father and a teacher should say, so has the son of Vrsna said this—that the eye is Brahman. For what can a person have who cannot see? But did he tell you about its abode (body) and support?’ ‘No, he did not’. ‘This Brahman is only one-footed, O Emperor’. ‘Then you tell us, Yajnavalkya’. ‘The eye is its abode, and the ether (the Undifferentiated) its support. It should be meditated upon as truth’. ‘What is truth, Yajnavalkya?’ ‘’The eye itself, O Emperor’, said Yajnavalkya; if a person, O Emperor, says to one who has seen with his eyes, “Have you seen?” and the latter answers, “Yes, I have”, then it is true. The eye, O Emperor, is the Supreme Brahman. The eye never leaves him who, knowing thus, meditates upon it; all beings eagerly come to him; and being a god, he attains the gods’. ‘I give you a thousand cows with a bull like an elephant’, said Emperor Janaka.” ~Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The Sun As the Eye of God

This Upanishad says that the “eye (sun) is Brahman,” or as I would say it, the sun is the eye of God. That should not be taken in a very literal sense, since God has no physical body and no eye in the normal sense of what we think of as an eye. Yet it is true because the sun is a link, a portal, between Heaven and Earth, between the physical and the spiritual. So God doesn’t “see” us through the sun, but he does sense us with spiritual senses. Likewise, we can sense God and communicate with Angels and other high-level beings by using the sun as if it is the Eye of God. Of course, this won’t work if you are dealing only with the physical sun. You need to go beyond ordinary sun-gazing with the physical sun to spiritual sun-gazing with the spiritual sun. The sun, of course, has a spiritual self, as do all beings and things. It is because of that duel nature that it can act as a portal between the realms, a window between heaven and earth, the Eye of God.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on September 7, 2020

“The Kingdom of Hell, and of fierce wrath, always gape after the Soul, and set their jaws wide open to devour the captive soul; which is held fettered with two strong chains; the one of the Kingdom of Hell; the other of the Kingdom of this World, and it is continually led by the heavy, lumpish, bestial, and sickly Body, as a thief who is often led to the place of execution, and still by a petition reprieved, and laid in prison again, and the poor soul must lie thus in prison the whole time of the body; where the Devil on the one side very suddenly rushes upon it with his devouring fierceness, wrath, and malice, and would carry it into the abyss. Then instantly the glistening world with pomp, bravery, covetousness, and voluptuousness of Perdition; presenting sickness and fear, and it is continually trembling and quaking; and when Man goes but in the dark, how is it amazed, and continually afraid that the executioner will take it, and do execution upon it!

“If we did well considering the abominations and great sins of man before God, … then we should scarce ever be merry in this world at all, if the spirit of this world did not cast foolish fancies and seeming joys and pleasures before us, in our imprisonment; ; or if the regeneration did not cause us to rejoice, that we shall be delivered out of this prison; for in this life we find nothing but abomination, sin, misery, and death.” ~Jacob Boehme

Devour the Captive Soul

The Kingdom of Hell does want to “devour” every soul. There is no doubt that Jacob Boehme is correct in saying that. It wants to claim as many souls as it can get. It is like a magnet drawing them to it. The good news is that an even more powerful force draws the soul towards heaven. More powerful, and yet, if we choose to embrace the clutches of Hell, hell will win the struggle and claim our captive soul—at least for a time.

The soul is a captive because it does not wish to be here, it did not choose to be here, and it is out of place here. The soul is a spirit and doesn’t do well in a physical world of matter. It is like a fish out of water, if not worse. This is why we enter this world with our spirit and soul in a dormant state something like being in a coma. It is not a healthy place for them. Nonetheless, we must awaken them and develop them while we are still trapped in a physical body. It is the only hope we have of freeing ourselves of the clutches of Hell and the fallen world of matter.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on September 9, 2020

Last week a report appeared in the media with the results of an Oxford University study, proving that periods of silence are good for us and aid in the healing process. This concurs with the philosophy of Pythagoras two and a half thousand years ago who, while teaching the therapeutic benefits of musical harmonics, always insisted that his students first learn the discipline of silence.

The university research program was conducted by Oxford’s department of clinical neurosciences and given the acronym SILENCE (for: Sleep in the ICU Lowering Elements of Noise in the Critical-care Environment). A quote from their principal investigator: “Noise is a distraction and a stressor, and a quiet and calm environment is definitely better for patients and staff in hospitals. It would make sense that complete silence has a calming effect.”

It has been measured by doctors that silence is more relaxing for your body and brain than listening to music, by the lowering of blood pressure and increased blood-flow to the brain.

The SILENCE study obviously had our physical and psychological wellbeing as its primary concern. While thinking about silence, we should not ignore the fact that sound is also an effective remedial agent – recently I co-wrote an article on scientifically-proven healing using acoustics and vibration, which will be published soon. However, medicine for the body is often more effective when the patient is harmonious in mind and spirit – hence Pythagoras’ assertion that we first centre ourselves in silence. And solitude and silence work well as a team.

Read the full article on Paul’s blog at his web site southernsunlightcom.wordpress.com.

“This universe is a living thing capable of including every form of life; but its Being and its modes are derived from elsewhere; that source is traced back to the Intellectual-Principle: it follows that an all-embracing archetype is in the Intellectual-Principle, which therefore must be an intellectual cosmos, that indicated by Plato in the phrase ‘The living existent’.

“Given the reason-principle (the outgoing divine idea) of a certain living thing and the matter to harbor this seed-principle, the living thing must come into being: in the same way that once there exists—an intellectual Nature, all powerful, and with nothing to check it—since nothing intervenes between it and that which is of a nature to receive it—inevitable the higher imprints form and the lower accepts it. The recipient holds the idea in division, here man, there sun, while in the giver all remains in unity.

“All that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the Supreme. But what is not present as Idea, does not. Thus of things conflicting with nature … is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reason-principle or a marring of the achieved form by accident. …

“This suggests the question whether the intellective cosmos contains the forms only of the things of sense or of other existents as well.” ~Plotinus

A Living Universe

Some find it difficult to accept that the entire universe is a living thing. Many can’t even accept that the planet Earth is a living thing and that the sun is a living thing. Their disbelieve doesn’t change the reality of it, but it does hide the truth from them.

When Plotinus writes about the universe, it is often not clear if he means the physical universe of matter, the spiritual universe of energy, or a combination of both. In this case, it doesn’t really matter. The spiritual universe is alive, and so is the physical one. The proof of this is actually simple, though many will not accept it. It is this: the dead cannot generate the living. Yes, life forms can grow from the bodies of the dead, but the dead are not generating those lives. Something living must generate living beings, and it is reasonable to assume a hierarchy of generation is responsible. The Universe generates galaxies, the galaxies generate, stars and planets, the stars and planets generate life forms such as plants and animals. This is not saying that God is not the creator of those beings, but only explaining the process by which that creation takes place. It is a sort of universal assembly line where each level generates one or two levels below it. They may not even be aware that they do it, but it happens nonetheless.

Read the entire article online at spiritsun.net.

Original article posted by HAROLD BOULETTE on September 12, 2020