THE
AQUARIAN AGE
Notes from tape 229, a talk given to the
Liverpool group meeting by Eugene Halliday.
Question :
What is the true significance and the historical process which the human race
as we know to day, is undergoing? Is the diminishing of the Christmas feeling
an indication of the forthcoming Aquarian phase? The two halves of this question must be
connected together. The true significance of the historical process which the
human race is undergoing today. By today is meant the contemporary mode of
thought. We know that this is scientific which gives meaning to the second part
of the question about the diminishing of the Christmas feeling as an indication
of the forthcoming Aquarian Phase.
Let us take
the Zodiac and go round it rapidly. At the moment we are said to be in the sign
of Pisces, the Fish. The historical process goes round anti-clockwise. In some
diagrams the symbols are reversed so that you can go round clockwise. It does
not matter which way you do it as long as you understand which way the
Precession of the Equinoxes is actually going. If we look at the Ancient
Egyptian period when they were carving the Bull, and the same with the Ancient
Babylonian period, when the Bull was carved as a supreme symbol of
power-bearing authority and responsibility, and we go back 2,160 years per
sign, we come from the position of the Bull into the position of the Ram. For
easy reckoning we will call it 2,000 per sign. We see that bringing us up to
date, in our period now, when Christ was born when the sign of the Fish
displaced the sign of the Ram, we see that it began about 2,000 years ago. In
1962 we have not very far to go to the end of the 2,000 year period whereupon
the Aquarian period will begin.
Tradition says that each of these signs has a
government concept which conditions the whole process of historical
development. When the sign of the Bull was dominant it meant to say that a very
strong person with terrific energy and fertility in him was bearing the
responsibility of the development of the human race, very powerful individuals
bearing all the responsibility of human direction. You may remember that Joseph
was called Apis, which means Bull, by the Egyptians and that he was given
authority by Pharaoh because he interpreted a dream. The dream was based on
cyclic law. The dream was about fat kine and lean kine and fat ears of corn and
lean ears of corn. Joseph interpreted this dream as meaning periods of plenty
followed by periods of dearth. He suggested to Pharaoh that in periods of
plenty the government should tax people a corn tax and because there was a lot
of corn people would not mind much paying up. Then when a period of dearth
came, the corn which had been collected and stored up, could be used to take
from these people who had actually paid the corn in taxes, what cattle they had
got, and if the dearth consisted of a very long period, then they would be able
to take from them, in exchange for corn, not only their cattle but their land.
Not only their land but their labour. So, we find Pharaoh saying Joseph should
be treated as if he were Pharaoh. He is given a chariot of his own and he is
the man, the Bull, the bearer of full responsibility. He has cornered the corn.
Notice the pun on cornering actually refers to
the corn. It is the same word. The Germans have a word, 'harpen', to play the
harp which has a secondary meaning of 'to screen corn'. Imagine a one-roomed
house in the old days you would not put
your store of corn in the middle of the room, you would put it in a corner. The
corner of the room was so called because that was the place where you put the
corn. The Germans used to place a harp across this corner to screen the corn.
If any neighbour came in to borrow the corn, one member of the family sat down
and played the harp. This was said to be covering up the fact that they had
corn by playing the harp so that the neighbour would not see the corn. The verb
harpen, to harp even in modern German has this secondary meaning of screening
the corn. We have it in English, 'singing a song' and canting and so on.
Whenever you do not want to make a direct statement of your position you start
circumlocution, singing a song. People say, sing me another. The Germans say,
play your harp.
Joseph had detected the cycle of events. The
strange thing is, we know, historically, that the knowledge of the cycle of the
Zodiac is something of tremendous antiquity because we have even got stone ones
which goes back as long ago as 12,000 years. Yet we know a peculiar thing, the
ancients knew that it took over two thousand years to shift one house. They had
observed the Precession of the Equinoxes long enough to know the cycle of the
Zodiac. If we imagine 26,000 years for a full cycle, a passage of the sun
apparently through the twelve signs, this taking 26,000 years, we can say, they
must have been observing it an awful long time if they do this empirically.
Tradition has it that sages knew about this cycle and its length by yogic
methods, by contemplating certain principles. We know that the Chinese and the
Babylonian and the Chaldean astronomers and the Egyptians knew a terrific lot
about astronomy and the cycle of events and could predict an eclipse long
before science was supposed to be born. We know that priestcraft, kingship and
science were vested originally in the same being. The man was a
priest-king-scientist if he was ruling the country. Later on, with the division
of labour, the priest, king and scientist separate out. Just like you separate
out the parts of a pair of shoes in a factory during the industrial revolution.
Originally the three aspects are the three aspects of any single human being
developed to the nth degree. You can say the religious aspect of it is in your
heart, the scientific part of it, the empirical digging in the earth is in the
belly and the philosophical aspect of it is in the head, the canny, kingish
part. The priest-king-scientist is really the three-part man raised to the nth
degree.
After spending
a couple of thousand years with a strong man determining the development of
evolution, it then passed into another phase ruled by the Ram. Ram is Hebrew
for high. During this period of the Ram, the statement is made that there is a
high principle and this is the ruling principle of transcendence. Moses is
represented by Michaelangelo with a pair of ram's horns on him to signify the
transition from the earlier Taurian phase into the Arian phase where Moses is
talking about this Ram. This is the same ram referred to in the sacrifice of
Abraham where a ram in a thicket is made a substitute for the sacrifice of
Isaac. Some of the anthropologists would say that the period referred to in the
Abrahamic sacrifice disappeared when human sacrifice was displaced by animal
sacrifice. Although that is historically true, that is only the lowest level of
interpretation.
When Christ is
born he is born on the transition point from the sign of the Ram into the sign
of the Fish so we find the early Christians are representing Christ as a fish.
The first letters of his name spell out the Greek 'fish' and it refers to a
sign of emotional prolific. Where we have a had a very, very strong man in the
Taurian period and then we have this concept of the transcendent, very high
influences from above in the Ram period, from the strong man, through transcendence
into everyman. We find that with the birth of Christ we enter a new phase where
individual human beings now begin to assume that they, too, have a centre, they
too are individuals. The tribal consciousness which dominated the human race
prior to Christ is now overthrown and individuals begin to get a sense of
values. We know that Christianity is marked by a very strong sense of
individual value. At the beginning it had a very hard fight to stand up as an
individual with a right to believe individually over against the
state. The Roman empire persecuted the Christians because they were rejecting
external temporal rule and having a right of individual belief. We can say that
the period of the Fish is the period when power passes into the hands of people.
It is a democratic period and all individuals have a voice in what is going on.
Whether that voice is effective or not is a matter of little moment.
The fact is,
that for the first time, historically, the tribal consciousness, prior to this
Fish period is displaced by the growth of individual awareness which rolls on
and on. During this period of individual awareness, we find a sort of general
scepticism about authority and dogma and anything said from high places is
under suspicion. We find out that all the old statements about the powers that
be and are appointed by God from above, are vigorously attacked by Christ just
as in India they have been attacked by Gautama, and the individual centre of
awareness becomes important in its own right. Gradually the sceptical side of
this breeds empirical science. This empirical science then begins to form
concepts in the minds of individuals so that gradually their individuality
threatens to become swamped by conceptualised science. Once the movement from
authority is diminished and the stress has gone into the individual, the
individuals start making their own minds up about everything and this means to
say that chaos is come at the individual level unless they can find some
unifying principle. If they don't get a unifying principle they have no
security.
When they move into the field of individual
scepticism, they find, carried to its logical conclusion that they cannot
believe anything except the immediate pressure of events upon them. Even these
are suspect in pure sceptic philosophy. The individuals who become sceptical in
this way are reducing man from the spiritual level represented by the Ram down
to the material individual level. This has a purpose, namely the creation of
individual centres of reflect- ion. In the process of making these individual
centres, man is forced to depend on his own centre as an individual and he
feels himself individually centred and therefore, dialectically deprived of
relation with other beings. So, at the very moment that he is gaining
individuality and reflection he is also feeling cut off from other human
beings. He therefore seeks some common ground where he can relate himself to
other people and he cannot go back to the old belief and the Ram Spirit of The
Almighty and he can't go back to the period of Taurus, of the mighty man who
will save him, because the mighty men of old who have saved him have also
robbed him violently and therefore he must go on to another phase. This phase
is through the scepticism into the empirical research technique and the birth
of science.
Today we stand in a peculiar psychological
phase because people are very individuated and yet they have a peculiar slavery
to the concept of science. If a thing is scientific people tend to believe it.
It is really quite surprising that if a sputnik is put in the air and a man is
sent into the air or half way to the moon or onto the moon, the attainment of a
simple material objective predisposes people to think that science can do
anything that scientists claim for it. The mass inertia of the empirical mode
which expressed itself very, very darkly in the middle ages and then burst out
in the Renaissance and then gradually evolved itself into empirical science in
the nineteenth century, has got so much inertia behind it today that most
people will tend to accept any proposition whatever if it is stated that this
proposition is based on scientific research. So, the slavery that there had
been to the Great Man in the days of the Taurean dispensation or the days of the
spiritual superiority in the Ram has been displaced through the experience in
the sign of the Fish and is gradually going into its Aquarian phase.
In Aquarius,
which means the water carrier or the carrier of substance and is the sign of a
Man, the Gospel of Matthew is about this, the scientific spirit will develop to
the nth degree so that science will have so many devices that can prove certain
things to exist that people will tend to accept the scientist as the supreme
arbiter of human destiny in the same way that the Egyptians once accepted that
Joseph was a nice fellow in letting them have a little bit of corn back which
he had taken from them in their off-guarded moments. We find this in the
tremendous faith people have in hospitals when they just assume that the man
attending to them is an expert in his own field. If they were to hear the
opinions of some of these men about each other as one-time fellow students they
would feel a little shakier. The tendency is, once a person is individuated, to
feel isolated and to feel he wants to lean on something other than himself.
But, this is a back-sliding movement. We are trying to find out the true
significance of the historical process, today. This historical process is a
movement from the Absolute, through the relative back to the Absolute. It is
precipitating centres of reference, these are individual beings, so that the
force of the Absolute comes in, individuates and then it is going back to the
Absolute again. This creates reflexively self-conscious individuals. But,
during the phase where the individual is discovering this power within himself
and has not yet secured it, he feels tremendous responsibility descending on
him and he doubts whether he has the power to support this responsibility on
his own shoulders, therefore he looks out towards other beings. This means to
say, that at the moment he starts leaning on anything external to himself, that
is the body of opinion or knowledge, he has already stopped the process that
the Absolute is trying to push forward. The Absolute is determined to lift the
human race up to the level where they are aware of their own essential value in
relation to the Absolute and to themselves as individuals. Individuals
discovering their individual freedom, discover also their individual
responsibility and the necessity for individual power, strength of initiative
and decision, to justify having the responsibility. It is when they are
dictated to by previous failures in their memory that they feel shaky about the
assumption of responsibility and at this point they extrovert their attention
onto other beings.
In the symbols
of the Tarot there is a wheel of fortune driven by apes and wolves, so that
when a person externalises his intention and fastens it on another person, if he
is not careful, he will fasten it either on an ape or a wolf. A wolf, meaning a
man of tremendous appetite who has a jolly good idea where he is going, he is
going to gobble everything up and an ape who is a man who has not got this
appetite so well developed, but he can see that the man who has it well
developed goes a long way, he would like to get that far, he has not the energy
to get that far, therefore he apes the behaviour of the man who has got that
far, without actually getting that far. So, when a man externalises his
attention onto other men because he does not like the feeling of individual
responsibility himself, he exposes himself to the possible danger of placing
himself under either a wolf or an ape.
If we examine
the scientists today throughout the world we find that a spirit that was once
said to be the scientific spirit has practically disappeared. The scientific
spirit of the nineteenth century, and we must always remember that individual
human beings are making these statements, that spirit was stated to be
absolutely impartial. It was an objective pursuit of truth, knowing no
boundaries whatever of religion, race, creeds, $"nations and so on,
scientific information should be swapped, because truth is every man's. This
was stated to be their position. We know this was a leg-pull on the part of men
who wanted power because as soon as they got the power they began to shelter
that knowledge, they did not indulge in free exchange of scientific knowledge
when they had discovered the nuclear weapon. Suddenly science is hush hush.
Instead of a man being free to publish his findings in international magazines,
he was suddenly silenced. His government required him not to speak about
essentials. The scientist who believed in the old-fashioned idea of science, as
for universal distribution found himself very seriously hindered. Many
scientists actually allowed themselves to be bought over by governments and
worked for a government in the pursuit of power instead of for the human race.
Consequently,
if any individual, not liking the feeling of individual responsibility placed
upon him, turns to one of these scientists, or technical experts or an
authority in any field, he is exposing himself to the possibility or
probability that he will either waste his time as an ape or he will be
swallowed by a wolf. If we ask ourselves what the alternative is to this
danger, the alternative is we must return to our centre as individuals and we
must be prepared to assume the responsibility of the knowledge we have. This
responsibility is felt in quite a heavy way. The Absolute is determined to
break every idol that the individual erects. We have seen the worship of the
great man in the Taurean period and that people rested on that great man's
capacity. What ever he said was marvellous and they didn't need to think or
feel or will. He would tell them what to do. After a time these great men had
made a sufficient accumulation of errors for people seriously to doubt whether
these men were as great as they claimed to be.
Therefore another method was presented,
"Let us go back to the most high Spirit of God. Don't let us have these
foolish top men any more, let us go back to God, to the Source." This was
a nice thought, but unfortunately, the words about God had to come to
individuals. So, we have a period where the priestcraft grows and individuals
claim to be non-individuals, they claim to be divinely inspired and they claim
that if people listen to them they are listening to the voice of God. Again,
this is another trick of the Absolute, the individual is let down if he has a
bad concept. Each time masses of individuals lean on a great man or on the
Absolute as coming through other men's mouths called priests or saviours, the
Absolute has to teach them a lesson. If they realise and accept this they need
no further lesson. What we know about the human race is this that although it
likes power, it hates responsibility. So once the priests, like the great men,
have let people down, people are thrown on to their own resources as
individuals and this builds up to the great reformation, the Lutheran mentality
comes up and the individual is stated to be *(really valuable over against any
authorities and suddenly men find they are being taught not the religious
catechism but reading, writing and arithmetic and they are plunged into the
middle of an industrial revolution. At the very moment when they are at the
point of individual awareness of their own creative centres they are thrown
under the dominion of mammon disguised as the Industrial Revolution. They go on
then looking for another saviour. They go into the dark, satanic mills and look
forward to another time and gradually they begin to believe that this other
time, this new messiah, is going to be the march of empirical science. The
scientific spirit is the new messiah for the Aquarian Age. In so far as the
scientific Spirit tells people that they do not need to refer to their own
centres because there are electronic brains computing with a bi-nomial system
data from all over the world and telling everybody exactly how to think, and
therefore there is no need for an individual to have a centre. As long as
people accept this proposition, they are factually trying to stop the evolution
that the Absolute is determined to effect.
Science is
going to present a case for what they call scientific truth. But, science can
present nothing. It is always individuals who act in the name of the concept of
science and who impose on other individuals where the other individuals fail to
realise their own centres and become responsible individuals. No matter what
the external divinity they worship, whether it is the Great Man or the priest's
information about God or the people as a mass, the democratic spirit or the
scientific spirit, no matter what it is they worship, if it is external to the
individual centre of man, then it is automatically false and the Absolute must
proceed to smash that concept by smashing the idol.
You remember
how God was said to harden Pharaoh's heart so that the Jews, when they finally
left Egypt, didn't want to go back. They were too scared. If Pharaoh had let
them go first easily, and with his blessing, as soon as they had gone into the
desert, they would have gone back to Egypt because it was hard. They would
never have landed in Israel. Therefore God hardened Pharaoh's heart to make
sure that they didn't run back. Since those days, exactly the same thing has
happened every time individual men have erected an idol for themselves which
would make unnecessary for themselves their own individual responsibility and
their own individual initiative.
So we find
that today, individual scientists are making claims for themselves which they
cannot substantiate, that logic doesn't justify, on the grounds of a few
material successes, whether it is the creation of a mini electronic circuit for
a radio or a brain or refrigerators and air-conditioning. It is just things of
this order that pleases people who don't think deeply, to believe that because
scientists have put a motor car on the road and an aeroplane in the air,
therefore they are equipped to determine the direction of human evolution.
The reply of
the Absolute to this is to do on them what he did when he hardened Pharaoh's
heart. Pharaoh made a terrible mistake. There had to be an awful lot of
destruction done in Egypt before the Jews were convinced that it was not a
place for them to go back to. In the same way there will have to be an awful
lot of destruction with scientists in control of it before people will give up
leaning on science. Individuals have got to learn to rely on their own centres
and dare to say so and to be themselves. If they do not, then science will have
its heart hardened by God, in the same way that Pharaoh did and we know already
this process is well started because we actually find that many scientists have
already decided that the human race is expendable for scientific research. Some
horrible things have been publicised about the kind of experimental operations
that have gone on in hospitals without permission from parents, on children and
on adults. We find a peculiar hardness coming to the scientific mind. The man
who commits himself merely to truth, becomes hard. Truth is only the form of
events. Truth is a form of experience perceived by the intellect so that if a
man commits himself to knowing the form of events then he will take the stress
off the affective process, the feeling process and place it on the
intellectual. A man who is deeply determined to know the truth about the living
human brain will not hesitate to saw the top off a skull while the person is
still alive and to examine it with electrodes all over and he will consider
that he is doing humanity a service while he is so doing. There is a prophecy
about this, "And in those days men will believe that they are doing God a
favour," when they are doing these things because they are ascertaining a
certain amount of truth and the fact that what they are doing is truth will be
a sufficient justification for what they do. So, we find the same kind of
hardening the heart process going in scientists that went on in the mind of
Pharaoh long ago. The significance of it is simply this, that human beings must
individually become responsible from their own centres. A man who can be
intimidated by a court of law, a man who will abandon his belief simply because
a body of ritually dressed men require him to do so has not yet learned his
lesson. He has not yet gone as far as the Absolute requires him to go.
If we look
back in history, to the time of Bruno, before he was burned to death, they
asked him not to teach the kind of things he was teaching and he could have got
away with it, he could have gone on living if he had shut up. But he was such a
fellow that he could not shut up, he had to tell the truth and so he was burned
to death. At least, in telling the truth because he believed it, he was better
off than a man who75 believing it would bend the knee. When Galileo when he
confessed something that he knew was not true, he could not have felt very nice.
When he kneeled down before the Pope and said that the earth does not move, it
is the centre of the universe and, factually he knew that it did move, he must
have felt really awful. If he had thought for a moment that he would have to go
to purgatory, if such a place existed, to purge himself of that thing, he must
have felt worse. If he thought that death was the end of his being he might
settle for comforts in this life by subscribing to something he knew to be
untrue. We find that Spinoza, when he propounded his philosophy with the
equation, God equals substance, was required by the rabbis, not to say such
things, because he was saying them very well, very clearly. They offered him
money if he would shut up. He didn't take the money. They then said they would
excommunicate him if he didn't shut up. He replied by excommunicating himself.
After that he was beaten up in the street, he still went on writing and saying
the things that he felt he must do.
We see
examples, Christ was the supreme example of this when he keeps on talking and
won't shut up until he gets crucified. They asked him to be quiet and he
doesn't. He goes on and on and he finishes up on the cross when he could have
avoided it. He is the type of man who clearly and consciously opposes himself
to any doctrine whatever that comes from outside and throws a man back on his
centre and says this centre and God are not different. "I and my Father
are one," he says and he claims that anybody who understands what he is
talking about and affirms the same for himself will be his brother. He will be
the first-born of many brothers in this respect.
About this
period, it says in the Revelation, in those days there will be so many mighty
works done that if it were possible they would deceive even the elect, which
means to say that they will have inventions, compared with which tape recorders
and T.V. sets and so on will be crude, as crude as the mechanical gramophone
was to your stereo hi fi. So will be the present television screens compared
with the television which has no screen and projects 3-D in three dimensional
space and no screen so that you will have the illusion of real people being in
the room with you. It says that it will be so marvellous that it would deceive,
if it were possible, even the elect. If it were possible. It is not possible
because the elect have a rule and the rule is a very, very simple one. If you
can see or touch it or hear it or smell it, it is not you. The observer is not
the observed and the observer is alone important. The rest is phenomenal, it is
nothing, it is formal play, it is just sport, illusion, formal trickery. The
only essential, the only really important is the self of the human being. This
self can never become an object. In this respect, all philosophy agrees in that
all philosophy has failed to define consciousness. They have tried valiantly
but they have come to a conclusion that consciousness is not a definable.
Because it is not a definable, the scientific spirit, aiming to define things,
has to pretend that consciousness doesn't exist and so they say it is an
epiphenomenon. It is some kind of process upon the wheels of mechanical
behaviour which is quite meaningless and there is no point in it, it appears.
This is a deliberate example of the stupidity that only a blind individual can
indulge in because the scientist who says that consciousness is merely the
sparks from the wheels of the mechanical processes of the body is referring to
his own mental process when he says it. How can a scientist write a book to say
that consciousness is meaningless if he cannot actually write his book without
this very thing he is decrying?
So, we see
that the elect, in any given system, standing inside there, in the centre of
being, and round them there is a zone, the action zone, phenomenal world. If
they go into that zone they fall into identification with form and they become
trapped and brought into contingent relation with material levels of being. In
so doing they are dragged off the centre of initiation, the centre of their own
will and intelligence. If they do allow themselves to be thrown into the
material world and become dependent on external bodies for their information
then they are in line for the next stage of their development, namely a jolly
good bashing by the forces upon which they are relying. There has never been an
historical period when the human race has leaned on anything whatever, external
to themselves, for salvation, that they have not been let down. Whether they
have leaned on the great man of the Taurean period or on a collectivity of men
called priests talking in the name of God or in the mass of people, that is, in
democracy or if they are in process of transition now, into the Aquarian or
scientific period, which ever one they have believed in, they have always been
let down. The inertia of success in the scientific field in certain quite
elementary facts predisposes millions of people to believe that science is god.
In fact, the scientists have assumed that they are God and if you read what they
have to say about their own positions you will find that they are claiming to
be God without actually daring to say that it is a theological proposition.
They are claiming that there is an infallible process called science and that
they are its voices. In other words they have assumed the position of the
priests only whereas the priests insisted that there was God. That God is the
Absolute intelligence, the scientists now say there is no God other than
scientists on earth and that they have penetrated the mystery of the creation
of the world and that this mystery is, somehow, a mechanical process and that
they themselves are not mechanical and that they have authority to propound the
method whereby the universe has evolved and will conduct itself in the future.
To see what is
going to happen as we travel round in this way and we go from the great man
period of Taurus, we go into the priestly period of the Ram, we go into the
democratic period that we are running towards the end of now, we see the
foreshadowing of the scientific period and we know that science is going to
harden its heart against the human race in its pursuit of truth and then we
come into another period after this, and we find in this period, the period of
Sagittarius, that a supreme disgust with the scientific hypothesis about the
world will force men to get hold of their own individuated centres of energy
and their own initiative. They must learn how to shoot for centre. Although we
are just entering into the Aquarian position now we can see the aura of this
position in the tremendous arrogance of the scientists who are actually
conducting these research programmes. We can see that in every phase an idea is
born and develops itself to its optimum and then fades away, having been a
false trail. Then the next idea comes and does the same, then the next idea
comes.
We have only
just seen the end of the belief that democracy is the solution of the world's
problems. We have seen things like Nietzsche could see coming up, that this
period of the democrats was a false period of pretence that people in the mass
could get together and solve their problems and the result - the sudden
appearance of the dictator. Hitler is a product of the fallacy of democracy.
Until men stop clinging together as external aids and until each man returns to
his own centre then the human race will always be in danger from dictators.
Whilst, in our period we have seen the political dictator we are seeing already
the shadow of another dictator, the scientific dictator. We see lots of
scientists who are claiming that they know how to run the human race. On one
occasion Julian Huxley walked out of a very important conference because they
didn't accept his plan of how to conduct human evolution. He was profoundly
upset because he had spoken and he was speaking with the authority of science
as once upon a time the priests would have talked with the authority of the
church or the synagogue.
We know that
this process of hardening must occur because people will lean on an external
object unless it lets them down, and we know that the Absolute is determined to
make sure that the people do not remain extroverted and that they must be
thrown back on their own centres and therefore the Absolute is in process of
leading all these external supports to their nth degree of development and then
allowing them to collapse which throws the individual back on his own
individual initiative.
We can say
that we have got just over 2,000 years of the scientific spirit to clean the
place up and everything will be under control, apparently. Out of this imposed
"good order" will arise a new revolutionary spirit in which, it will
become obvious to all individuals that they can never place their destiny in
the hands of any external group no matter how declared well-intentioned.
After
Sagittarius we have entered the period of Scorpio. Scorpio means devotion.
After science has let man down and thrown man back onto his own individual
centre, he discovers that he is a will, that he is initiative, that he is an individuated
intelligence. He discovers that his evolution is in his own hands but now he
has to target not for individual things but he must do it from his individual
centre. So he passes into Scorpio, which means devotion, and here he does a
thing that the priests were doing for him in the time of Aries. They were
telling him about God. In Scorpio he is saying, "I must become God, as an
individual". Then the quotation Christ makes, "Is it not written, ye
are Gods?" After that comes the period of Libra, the equilibration, which
corresponds with the Hindu system of the pralaya, the equilibrating process
which follows the completion of the evolutionary cycle. After that the whole
thing has to develop itself round to another cycle of manifestation. There are
great cycles of manifestation and cycles of rest but until the individual has
centred himself, he cannot as an individual, devote himself to a return to
source. Therefore until he has been let down by all the idols he will never
return to himself, so that the idols must behave in a very, very bad way to
force him onto his own centre.
Here an
enquiry was made about the Age of Capricorn
I left out
Capricorn because it is a period of great scape-goating. It would take a lot of
time to go round the lot. I wanted to show a rapid transition. In the period
when the revolt occurs against the Scientific Spirit there will be a great
number of scapegoats made by the scientists and just as there was wholesale
slaughter of believers in the early religions when the old formulation and its
representatives killed large numbers of people. So, scientists in those days
will actually be prepared to say that anybody who does not accept the
principles of science, shall be painlessly be put to death because it is
against the principle of evolution. You might not have had to listen to that.
It is a very, very horrible period. There are quite a lot of unpleasant
statements about it in Revelation. Whereas, in the old days, the priests
excommunicated you by symbolic gesture and the psychological use of suggestion
from which an individual might conceivably escape, the mass weight of
scientific opinion acting upon masses of
people who are not educated in the process will, with supreme authority, condemn
to death any man who dares to say that science is wrong. They have the power.
They can disintegrate beings with an electronic device. As soon as a voice
speaks up in a certain place, they just check his wavelength, press a button
and he is gone. There will be a lot of those and no sweeping up. But you asked
for it.
A question is
asked which appears to be about why what happened in the past and what is to
happen should matter.
The 'me' you
are talking about came out of two other mes, mother and father and they came
out of other mes and so on backwards. You are a portion of the protoplasm of
your mother and father. Consciousness in the act of focusing on a vehicle, like
the body of a human being, in order to function through it, stresses itself as
if it were cut off. In fact, there is a continuous line of protoplasm from you
through your mother and father through all your ancestors. At no point has this
protoplasm actually got a break. There isn't your mother and father and then a
break and then you. You are a bit of the protoplasm of your mother and father
fused together, so that the life in your mother and father exists in you but
through your focus on you now, you can't see why it should bother you whatever
happens in the future or the past.
The purpose of
focusing down onto you is in order to individuate and gain a reflexive centre
because in the transitional phase from the Absolute down to the individual you
go into a state where you can't see any connection between you and the rest of
life preceding you and to come. 'Me' is an objective form and 'I' is the
subject. What does it matter to me that this amount of protoplasm? Well it
never did matter to the me, it always matters to the I. The me is the objective
side of the I. The objective world is simply a function of the subject. The supreme
subject is the Absolute and the manifest physical world that we see is simply
the objective modalisation of that. You are focused down to your body. If you
focus slightly wider you will become aware that a lot of the thoughts and
feelings that you think are yours, are not, in the sense that they are not that
body. In the sense, that if you think about it that these thoughts have
developed through generations so that vested as they are, in youR now, they are
merely the result of generations of striving to produce the form that you have
now arrived at. But they are aiming beyond you at this reflexive being. If you
cut out your bit, supposing you destroy yourself completely, the protoplasm
that has evolved to your level does not exist. So it cannot transmit. If you
were negative when you got out of that protoplasm, you won’t want to get into
it again. So that amount of intelligence invested will not try to get back into
the body again because it was negative when it left. Which means, all the gains
which have been made by your ancestors striving, and vested in you, have been
lost to the evolutionary process. This is why it says the Almighty has set his
cannon against self-slaughter. This is because if you kill yourself, you are
not only killing this finite physical vehicle that is annoying you, you are
killing a heritage that was working towards an end. All the best parts of you,
you owe to the future.
Either you
have children or you have spiritual children, that is ideas, you develop the
idea and vest that idea in other protoplasms. If you see that the intelligence
running through this protoplasm, in its reflexive mode, can see the whole
process, then you can see that you are doing a very necessary part of the work.
You stand on a certain step and you have to pass from that step and it is a
marathon race so you move a bit forward than you did before, apparently to
another being. What you are moving to is yourself so that you actually persist
through all these protoplasmic changes. Your participation in your psychic life
is happy when you are positive in the evolutionary process. When you posit
there is value worth working for then you are happy. But, if you posit there is
no value worth working for, and that you are entirely on your own and you are
severed from your ancestors and from your descendants then you are miserable.
So even in the merely practical sense to the individual, it is better to
believe in the fact of the continuity of the protoplasm and the continuity of
life running through protoplasm, rather than to believe that you are an
isolated finite bit of what was a biological process that started once upon a
time a few years ago and lasts a few more years and then it will be gone for
ever. If you believe that you came into existence at birth, new, you go out at
death into non-existence your life is meaningless. It is also untrue. If you
see the fact of the continuity of life through the continuity of protoplasm and
the transmission of idea from centres as developed centres of protoplasm to
other centres and the continuous movement of development of reflexive centres,
then whatever you represent as an individual consciousness, will be reinvested
again in the same line of protoplasm. Whether you have children or not is not
important, because other members of the same protoplasm, namely the human race,
are having children, and whatever work you do, if you die childless, the work
that you have done, will invest itself in an organism that has worked and is in
resonance with the direction of the work that you were doing. So that you are
always assured of the fruits of your labours and therefore you can be
absolutely positive about it.
It is said of
Christ that he was called Jesus, he was given the most excellent of all names.
There is none more excellent name than this and Paul says about this name,
"His name is wholly yes, there is no 'no' in him." This means you can
affirm, absolutely that what you are doing is experiencing, about this you
cannot be wrong and that you are meditating on your experience, you are being
one of the holy animals in the Bible, you are a ruminant. You ruminate on what
happens to you, it informs your protoplasm, informs your psyche, your subtle
body, your causal body and this itself is carrying you on to reflexive
awareness. At some point, you will invest yourself in protoplasm of sufficient
fineness to receive the work you have done. So the fruit trees that were
planted long ago by the rabbis, are being eaten by the linear descendants of
those rabbis. It is really the same protoplasm that is gaining the fruit of the
work done long ago by apparently, other beings. If you have this sense, you
have a very positive and happy life. If you don't have this sense of continuity
your life is meaningless and insecure and you become depressed and you function
very badly