“SOCRATES: Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power—a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

PHAEDRUS: Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

SOCRATES: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.

PHAEDRUS: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?

SOCRATES: Yes, of course that is what I mean.”

There is indeed a form or speech or thought that is greater than the traditional intellectuality that is so popular today. You can call together a dozen different experts and get a dozen different opinions on an important matter in their field of study. How can it be otherwise when they deal in opinion, not known truth?

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“In those abnormal types of personality to which we give the name of genius, we seem to detect a hint of the relations which may exist between these deep levels of being and the crust of consciousness in the poet, the musician, the great mathematician or inventor, powers lying below the threshold, and hardly controllable by their owner’s conscious will, clearly take a major part in the business of perception and conception. In all creative arts, the larger share of the work is done subconsciously: its emergence is in a sense automatic. This is equally true of mystics, artists, philosophers, discoverers, and rulers of men. The great … always owes its inception to some sudden inrush of intuitions or ideas for which the superficial self cannot account; … this is ‘inspiration’; the opening of the sluices, so that those waters of truth in which all life is bathed may rise to the level of consciousness.” ~Evelyn Underhill

Real genius, creative genius, is more than a simple matter of having a large brain, reading a lot of books, or getting several college degrees. The true genius has opened channels to something deeper, something spiritual, inside himself and outside, that gives him insights into reality that no amount of intellectual studies can match. This is the type of genius we find in Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Albert Einstein. We can, of course, add to that list the great spiritual leaders that are generally not thought of as geniuses. They would include Jesus, Moses, Buddha, St. Francis, Jacob Boehm, Kahlil Gibran and many others.

Naturally, the materialistic powers of the world, especially the universities and trade schools that make a great deal of money selling their rather limited training, oppose this concept. No matter how much they try, however, they never seem to completely suppress such teachings.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

Stairway leading up to bright light

“The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the great Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of the stars, and await a new beginning. Those who are saved by the light of the mystery which I have revealed unto you, … shall return again to the Father who dwelleth in the White Light, and shall deliver themselves up to the Light shall be absorbed into the Light, and in the Light they shall become Powers in God. This is the way of God and is revealed only to them that have wisdom.” ~Hermes

The first sentence of the quote backs up other recent posts so I won’t revisit that subject here. It gets more interesting after that.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

 

“To let oneself go, be quiet, receptive, appears to be the condition under which such contact with the Cosmic Life may be obtained. ‘I have noticed that when one paints one should think of nothing: everything then comes better,’ says the young Raphael to Leonardo da Vinci. The superficial self must here acknowledge its own insufficiency, must become the humble servant of a more profound and vital consciousness. The mystics are of the same opinion. ‘Let the will quietly and wisely understand,’ says St. Teresa, ‘that it is not by dint of labor on our part that we can converse to any good purpose with God.’ ‘The best and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this life,’ says Eckhart, ‘is by keeping silent and letting God work and speak.’” ~Evelyn Underhill

Most experts will tell you that one of the biggest difficulties in communicating with others is that we simply don’t listen. We listen only in a very superficial way when someone else is speaking while our minds are occupied with deciding what we are going to say next, or something else about ourselves. We don’t really want to know what the other person has to say, we want to know how it can benefit us. We always put ourselves at the center of everything.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“Ruysbroeck’s universe, like that of Kabir and certain other great mystics, has three orders: Becoming, Being, God. Parallel with this, he distinguishes three great stages in the soul’s achievement of complete reality: the Active, the Interior, and the Superessential Life, sometimes symbolized by the conditions of servant, friend, and Son of God. These, however, must be regarded rather as divisions made for convenience of description, … The spiritual life has the true character of duration; it is one indivisible tendency and movement towards our source and home, in which the past is never left behind, but incorporated in the larger present.” ~Evelyn Underhill

Ms. Underhill is correct in saying that Ruysbroeck’s method of dividing spiritual growth into three stages is only an approximation. Spiritual growth happens in many small steps much like any other type of growth. But just as it is convenient in our public schools to divide students into various grades depending on how much they have learned or at least how much they have been taught, it is also convenient to divide the path of spiritual growth into stages.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“The golden ornaments used by the priestcraft of the various world religions are again a subtle reference to the solar energy, as are also the crowns of kings. In ancient times, crowns had a number of points extruding outward like the rays of the sun, but modern conventionalism has, in many cases, either removed the points or else bent them inward. … Many of the ancient prophets, philosophers, and dignitaries carried a scepter, the upper end of which bore a representation of the solar globe surrounded by emanating rays. …
“Many deities have been associated with the sun. The Greeks believed that Apollo, Bacchus, Dionysos, Sabazius, Hercules …. partook of either the visible or invisible attributes of the sun. The Norwegians regarded Balder the Beautiful as a solar deity, and Odin is often connected with the celestial orb. … Among the Egyptians, Osiris, Ra, Anubis, Hermes, and even the mysterious Ammon himself had points of resemblance with the solar disk.” ~Manly P. Hall

I have to admit that with all my years of studying the spiritual sun (over twenty), I had never considered the symbolic meaning of the crowns of kings. It does seem obvious, though, when you stop to think about it, that those gold crowns with points or rays around the edge, and often studded with jewels, represented the sun. But why would kings, prophets, high priests, and others wear crowns that represented the sun?

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“The would-be initiate must come into contact with certain things and facts belonging to the higher worlds, but he can only see and hear them if his feeling is ripe for the perception of the spiritual forms, colors and tones. …The first trial consists in obtaining a truer vision than the average man has of the corporeal attributes of lifeless things, and later of plants, animals, and human beings. This does not mean what at present is called scientific knowledge, for it is a question not of science but of vision. …
“For many people, ordinary life is itself a more or less unconscious process of initiation through the Fire-Trial. … Thus they are often initiates without knowing it, and it then needs but little to unseal their spiritual hearing and sight.” ~Rudolf Steiner

While Steiner and others of his time may have called this ordinary spiritual growth process “Fire-Trial”, today a fire trial, or trial by fire, is something different. Otherwise, what he says in the quoted text still applies and always has.

The spiritual initiate does begin to see things differently than his materialistic friends. He may think that he is the one who is seeing something false, a kind of hallucination, but he isn’t. It is those who see only the small part of reality called matter who are seeing falsehood and illusion. But don’t think that this happens overnight. The quick awakening of St. Francis is an exception, not the rule, so don’t rely on being another one-in-ten-million exception. Most of us only see subtle hints of the spiritual worlds hidden by the denser material one, but even those hints are enough to let us know that we are much more than just animated balls of dirt.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“The sacrifice which men of genius—mystics, artists, inventors—make of their whole lives to this one object, this one vision of truth, is not self-denial, but rather self-fulfillment. They gather themselves up from the unreal, in order to concentrate on the real. The whole personality then absorbs or enters into communion with certain rhythms or harmonies existent in the universe, which the receiving apparatus of other selves cannot take up. … ‘The numbers came!’ says the poet. He knows not how, certainly not by deliberate intellection.
“So it is with the mystic. Madam Guyon states in her autobiography, that when she was composing her works she would experience a sudden and irresistible inclination to take up her pen. … Similar statements are made of St. Teresa, who declared that in writing her books she was powerless to set down anything but that which her master put into her mind. … The subliminal mind of the great mystic, however, is not disorderly.” ~Evelyn Underhill

When people read of mystics and adepts giving up certain things like popular foods and sporting events they think of this as self-denial and see it as a lifestyle they are not interested in. But as Ms. Underhill points out, that is not the correct way to interpret it. What the mystic is giving up is something of very little value in exchange for which he gains something of much greater value. It is really not much different than the athlete who skips going to a movie with his friends so that he can go practice is swimming or jumping or whatever activity is involved in his sport. Generally speaking, people don’t see that athlete as being in self-denial, but they often think that way when they see the spiritual person or the mystic giving up some of the fun materialistic activities that so many find enjoyable.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“The initiate is he who possesses the lamp of Trismegistus, the mantle of Apollonius, and the staff of the patriarchs. The lamp of Trismegistus is reason illuminated by science; the mantle of Apollonius is full and complete self-possession, which isolates the sage from blind tendencies; and the staff of the patriarchs is the help of the secret and everlasting forces of nature. The lamp of Trismegistus enlightens present, past and future, lays bare the conscience of men and manifests the inmost recesses of the female heart. The lamp burns with a triple flame, the mantle is thrice-folded and the staff is divided into three parts.” ~Eliphas Levi

I think it is safe to say that when Levi refers to the lamp of Trismegistus (Hermes) as representing “reason illuminated by science,” the science he is referring to is not chemistry or biology, but the spiritual sciences that awaken the spirit and soul and reveal spiritual truth (Gnosis) to us. Materialists, of course, laugh at the idea that anything spiritual could be considered a science, but those same materialistic scientists also tend to refute quantum physics as pseudo-science while the high-tech corporations continue to use it to make the technological wonders we all love to play with.

Levi aids us with understanding what is meant by the “mantle of Apollonius” which is “full and complete self-possession,” when he adds that it isolates the sage from blind tendencies.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

Has any of us ever experienced a suspension, or cessation, of breath while performing solar eye techniques?

The above diagram is the basic sequence of postures known as Surya namaskara, or Sun salutation.         

Traditionally, this was practiced by vedic seers just before greeting the morning sun. It is also a component of nadi shodhan pranayama,  which is a yoga centered around alternate nostril breathing and  holding one’s breath.

Practicing nadi shodhan pranayama can produce kundalinic effects and propagate prana, or chi, distribution, yet the crown jewel of this breathing yoga is kevala kumbhaka. Kevala kumbhaka is breath suspension that is separate from inhalation,  exhalation,  or intentional pauses;  it is an unforced removal and cessation of breathing that occurs without discomfort. Once attained, it can crop up naturally and normally now and then. It seems interesting that the Sun salutation postures are integrated in a pranayama practice that can produce natural breath cessation.

As a side note: Clinical studies (see links below) suggest that alternate nostril pranayama promotes:  greater cognitive ability, sustained attention, and a balancing effect on hemispheric brain functioning:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1938166

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23721252

by Michael McIntyre