This
month we begin 2002 with a new bi-monthly
format and a discussion of something that effects us all—the relationship between
humans and God. It has always existed in the realms of art, poetry, painting, sculpture and has been the core concept in every religion,
primitive or modern that has ever been documented in the history of the
planet. Part of our exploration will be to ask the question why, since this
relationship has existed in the collective consciousness of humanity for as
long as we can tell, why has this idea received so little recognition from our
scientific community? Is it a real or imaginary situation? If it is real what
is heaven about? What is the Kingdom of God?
John Singer
Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" - Heaven
What
happens after you die?
Will you ascend into a glorious place called Heaven?
Will you plunge into a raging furnace?
Will you become another living creature?
Will you go and join your ancestors?
Will nothing happen at all?
"The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense
that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting
that you cannot see the mountain." - Colin Wilson
Mary Dudley"Heaven"
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
The men below and saints above;
For love is heaven and heaven is love."
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, by Sir Walter Scott.
...We
are in the habit, based on thousands of years of conditioning, of believing that
God, or Heaven or Hierarchy is "out of this world." It is a "someplace
else" place. I mean, it’s not here. It’s sort of up there in the
sky.
I do not mean to imply that heaven is not up there. Over the past thousands of
years, such an other place has been universally sensed by human beings. And, the
belief that heaven exists is at the core of the countless cultures, and
civilizations, of the too numerous to count religions, and of untold treasures
of art, of song, of poetry. This other place has been and is now a source of the
good, the beautiful and the true. No matter how one refers to it, this other
place is common to the collective psyche of humanity.
However,
this "someplace else" place, was always, literally, out of
reach for incarnated humans. We held it away from ourselves—kept
it distant and unreachable.
Today, this whole thing seems to have been an
incredible, ages long psychological game we played on ourselves. It seems easy
to recognize that if anyone actually opens himself to any of the great art,
ancient or modern, or reads the plays of Sophocles or the poetry of Shakespeare,
the truth of the art, the poetry of the poetry happens within. Our relationship
with Truth, whether it is in our meditations, in art or just in the beauty of
nature or other human beings, our relationship is something that goes on within
ourselves. It does not happen outside of us or away from us in some other place
up there or out there. The rapture of the relationship with Truth no matter how
the door way into it is presented to us, is the rapture of a union. It is the
recognition within that we are that. We come together with it. Separation
disappears. This speaks to us of the God within us, God immanent not
transcendent.
So
friends, I have come to this interesting conclusion. We have, or at least, I
have, been going about the process of trying to reveal the fact of Hierarchy
using outmoded models and methodology. ...The model is that Hierarchy is this
group of guys who hang out in this "someplace else" place, and
they are fixing to appear in this place. The technique is to try to convince
people that these guys actually do exist— albeit in this other place and even
though only specialized people ever see them—that they have always existed, as
the art and culture of the Race proves, and that just as soon as things are
"right", they will show up and save us all.
I
do believe, for at least a couple of reasons, that this scenario is never going
to play. First, as of tonight, it has not been successful. And second, that
which is transcendent must always be and will always be transcendent. There is
no way to bring the transcendent God to earth. I mean, the fact of His
transcendence militates against His appearance.
So,
we need a new model and a new technique. Here is the model. "The key to the
Hierarchy and It’s reappearance on earth in physical form, and the consequent
materialization of the kingdom of God among men, is the simple truth of God
Immanent." Externalization
of the Hierarchy, P 59 Bailey
Earth
is the unfolding of One Idea. The name of this idea is Love, and because we are
a part of this unfolding we all have within ourselves at our very core a
fragment of this idea, a fragment of Love. This is God immanent. This is our
essential divinity, this is the Christ within, the hope of glory. In this model,
Christ is the Hierarchy. I do not mean the being that holds this office, I mean
the sum total of the consciousness we call Christ, the Love in the world, is
Hierarchy. When we touch this reality, we become aware of the fact of Hierarchy,
of the fact of Love, of the next or 5th level of consciousness. As we know,
"Love governs the Way into the life of the Hierarchy and is the foundation
for all approach to, and appreciation and acceptance of truth." A.A.Bailey
- A Treatise on the Seven Rays Vol. VP46
Then,
to the degree that we can implement that consciousness in living forms, in our
daily lives, we reveal the Love that is within the world. We become a member of
the 5th Kingdom or spiritual Hierarchy… thus will the Hierarchy be
externalized. It’s evolution, a gradual but unstoppable juggernaut of Love.
So,
the transcendent can not be externalized. We can externalize only that which is
immanent. As far as I can tell, this is the only way the Hierarchy will ever be
revealed or externalized. This is the point, to be able to implement
consciousness of the 5th Kingdom on the dense physical plane, one must be able
to recognize that reality within ones self. We need to be hooked up with the
Inner Net.
For
the remainder of this article in printable form click
here.
by Tom Carney - from a talk given November 2001
"The
important aspect, at this time, of the basic oneness underlying all forms, and
which the workers of today must immediately emphasize, is the fact of the
kingdom of God, of the planetary Hierarchy." A.A.Bailey
- A Treatise on the Seven Rays Vol. V, P 300
Dr. Werner von Braun, well-known for his part in pioneering
the U.S. space program, said that he had "essentially scientific"
reasons for believing in life after death. He explained: "Science has found
that nothing can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All
it knows is transformation. If God applies the fundamental principle to the most
minute and insignificant parts of the universe, doesn't it make sense to assume
that He applies it to the masterpiece of His creation -- the human soul? I think
it does."
Consider a company which employs a hundred thousand people. Now assume that all
these people report to the company president. Wouldn't that be a rather wierd
organizational structure? So is the notion that there's God at the topmost level
and then there are humans at the next level. Aum
Magazine
Certain beliefs
are...of such ancient origin that they are generally accepted, either as
recognized truths, as basic premises or as interesting hypotheses. This attitude
or approach to truth we ask the student to hold because we feel that he should
regard these presented truths as providing a fair field for honest
investigation. This holds true as regards the belief in the factual nature of
the Spiritual Hierarchy; this truth is approached...from the angle of
evolutionary development; the graded order of Beings Who constitute the
Hierarchy are regarded by us as constituting the fifth kingdom in nature, a
necessary product of the experience of life in the fourth kingdom, the human. It
is the Spiritual Hierarchy to which the Christian teaching of the Kingdom of God
surely refers. If this premise is true, then the existence of this kingdom can
be scientifically considered as an integral part of the great evolutionary
process with its order of living beings, moving onward in ordered progression
from the tiniest atom up to God Himself.
Autobiography
of Alice A. Bailey
The Principles of the Arcane School
Cartoonist Arthur Brisbane once pictured a crowd of grieving caterpillars
carrying the corpse of a cocoon to its final resting place. The poor, distressed
caterpillars, clad in black raiment, were weeping, and all the while the
beautiful butterfly fluttered happily above, freed from its earthly shell.
I venture to say that everyone...will have
been taught as a matter of basic education that humanity is the 4th Kingdom. We
have the mineral, vegetable, animal and human. Humanity is the name of the
Fourth Kingdom.
...However, if one were to speak publicly in
almost any venue other than a religious or "spiritual" one, about a 5th
kingdom, about the gentlest thing that would happen would be that one would be
ignored.
Why is this? Why is it not considered
intelligent or sane even to speak of a 5th Kingdom outside of the churches or
classrooms in religion or philosophy. A fifth Kingdom is a scientific concept,
supported by reason, logic, commonsense and intuition. The existence of a fifth
or spiritual or non-material kingdom has played a major role in all recorded
Human history. Although it has been transmitted to us very largely through the
medium of paint or ink or stone, the Spiritual Kingdom has never been anything
that you could put a coat of paint on or weigh. But that is its reality. It is
formless. It was reported on by the artists, the poets, the thinkers, the
intuitives, the foremost visionaries or scientists of the times through the
mediums they could manage. They did not know quantum Mechanics.
The remainder of this article may be
read in a printable form here...
"To fear death is nothing
other than to think oneself wise when one is
not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether
death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing of human beings. And yet
people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil." --Socrates
Much
abstract art created in the opening decades of the 20th century emanated
from artists’ personal, passionate belief in the expression of spiritual
issues via a nonobjective language. In Germany, beginning around
1910–11, Vasily
Kandinsky gradually abandoned recognizable forms, replacing them with
obscured motifs dictated by what he called “inner aspiration.” The
writings of Helena P. Blavatsky and others in the Theosophical movement,
which encouraged a deeper understanding of the relationship between nature
and the spirit, profoundly influenced Kandinsky, as did the teachings of
Anthroposophy’s founder, Rudolf Steiner, who identified specific paths
by which people could perceive spiritual worlds. Kandinsky in turn was
inspired to write his 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art.
The Dutch
artist Piety
Mondrian’s association with Theosophy encouraged him to develop
nonobjective imagery. His early works of 1908 to 1911 incorporate
references to Theosophical notions about man’s place in a spiritual
hierarchy and progression toward higher insight. His grid paintings reduce
this spiritual hierarchy to horizontal and vertical elements, primary
colors, and black and white. In Russia Kazimir
Malevich and his followers sought in their Suprematist paintings to
capture visual equivalents for his notion of zaum, a state
“beyond reason.”
Dada and
Surrealist artists were attracted to spiritual, occult, and mystical
issues as well, although such elements make intermittent, rather than
programmatic, appearances in their work. Many of these artists were
profoundly affected by Freudian and/or Jungian analysis and alchemical and
biomorphic studies, interests that were shared by postwar artists. Jackson
Pollock’s involvement with psychoanalysis and his fascination with
Native American rituals were both manifested in his mythic paintings of
the 1940s. Barnett Newman and Mark
Rothko shared Pollock’s fascination with “primitive” cultures,
and their most abstract paintings may be linked, via their symbol-laden
early works, to their psychoanalytical and tribal studies.
The painter Frank
Stella prefers an abstraction characterized by what the audience
perceives. Indeed the viewer’s personal response becomes the spiritual
arena addressed by much recent art, including Robert
Ryman’s gridded voids, the glowing environments generated by Dan
Flavin’s works, or Walter
De Maria’s symbolic configurations.
Like many pioneers of abstraction, Mondrian’s
impetus was largely spiritual. He aimed to distill the real world to its pure
essence, to represent the dichotomies of the universe in eternal tension. To
achieve this, he privileged certain principles—stability, universality, and
spirituality—through the yin/yang balancing of horizontal and vertical
strokes. His philosophical framework was grounded in the Neoplatonic and Tantric-inspired
texts of authors connected to the Theosophical Society, the Dutch branch of
which had counted Mondrian as a member since 1909.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the
source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein
What is our eventual condition after we die? Do we
eventually land up in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory.
Do we simply disappear and cease to exist in any form? Do we sleep for a long
time after death before waking up for a final judgment? Are we reincarnated into
new bodies? And what steps do we go
through after death to end up in our final destination?
Here we have listed a
few very generalized statements on the beliefs of the major religions of the
world. This
would be a vast study in itself...
Beliefs
of a few Present-day Religious Groups:
Conservative
Protestants. Those who are "saved" will go to heaven;
vast majority of humans will go to Hell for extreme torture. Whether Hell
is eternal is a matter of debate.
Roman Catholics:
A very few will go directly to heaven. Most of those whose sins have
been forgiven through church ritual will go to Purgatory
for a process of cleansing after death; later, they will be allowed
into Heaven. The rest will go directly to Hell, which is considered a
place and a state of existence.
Liberal Christians:
Hell does not exist as a place of punishment. All will go to Heaven,
if such a place exists.
Christian
Science: Hell is mental anguish, not a place of separation from
God. Heaven is harmony and bliss, not a place of reward.
Jehovah's Witnesses:
Hell does not exist; the unsaved simply die and are no more. Heaven
will be located on earth.
Mormons: There are
3 levels to Heaven. Hell exists, but very few go there.
Seventh Day Adventists:
Heaven exists. Hell is not a place of eternal torment; it is a place
where annihilation occurs; people who go there cease to exist.
Unity School of
Christianity: Heaven and hell do not exist as places, but as
states of consciousness while we are alive on earth.
Islam
- "Every soul shall have a taste of death; and only on the
Day of Judgment shall you be paid your full recompense..." (Qur'an
3:185). One who excels in goodness will, by the Mercy of Allah,
receive a goodly reward; one whose wrongs overweigh his good deeds
will be punished.
Hindu -
"…The
heaven is well provided with excellent paths…There are many
celestial gardens. For
the good there is neither hunger nor
thirst, nor heat, nor cold, neither grief nor fatigue, neither labour
nor repentance, nor fear, nor anything that is disgusting and
inauspicious; none of these is to be found in heaven. There is no old
age either…
Judaism
- From Judaism's perspective, our eternal soul is as real as our
thumb. This is the world of doing, and the "world to come"
is where we experience the eternal reality of whatever we've become.
Taoist
- Taoists do not believe in the Wheel of Life of the Buddhists nor in
the Heaven or Hell of Christianity. Man does not die; he merely
extends into new fields. Taoists teach that the end of a person is the
return to the Ultimate Reality."
All religions teach that
man is an inhabitant of two worlds. Besides the visible world open to
our physical senses, there exists a spiritual realm. This
non-terrestrial world can be felt and perceived, which means that it is
as real and important as the realm of ordinary sensory experience. As numerous objective studies have demonstrated, the existence of this
spiritual dimension can be shown from parapsychological evidence, which
seems to indicate a regular interaction between the physical and
extrasensory worlds. For this reason Divine Principle compares
their relationship to the polarity of mind and body. If
the mind is designed to direct and control the body, the spiritual world
is supposed to use the physical world to achieve its higher goals. As
man cannot realize his full potentialities without uniting with God, the
visible world cannot actualize its true value unless it forms a positive
continuing relationship with the spirit world.
...We do not
simply continue to exist after death. From the beginning and throughout
our lives, we live in both worlds. Even when we are not aware of the
fact, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Although they are
discarnate spirits, they exist all around us, influencing and guiding
our everyday affairs...
...But isn't belief in good
and evil spirits unscientific? Must not modern Christians demythologize
the outmoded world picture of the Gospels, as Bultmann maintains?
William James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, had something
very pertinent to say about those who claim that belief in psychic
phenomena is unscientific. He pointed out that scientists often treat
mystical phenomena with contemptuous disregard. Nevertheless, he added
that the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of
history. ... Why then are
scientists so hostile to psychic phenomena? According to James, because
these facts cannot be easily explained by a mechanistic and
materialistic theory of science. And because such facts threaten to
break up the accepted scientific world view...
To read the rest of this article in a printable
form - click here...
If our reach does not exceed our grasp,
then what is Heaven for?
For centuries, death has drawn
the scrutiny of philosophers and poets. For the less reflective and
literary among us there has always been a distinct turning away. Too close
was the fearful darkness; too unnerving was the thought that not only our
bodies but our very personalities, our selves, might disappear into
nothingness. Better to shut the darkness out by keeping the door slammed
on death. Something happened, though, at the start of the 1970s . . .
The 1970s marked the beginning of the end
of the age of denial. In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross asked
the question: What happens to us as we die? Her landmark book, On Death
and Dying, invited readers to reflect, open-eyed, on the dying
process. A second pioneer in this dark, unexplored landscape took the next
step by describing the threshold of the afterdeath experience. Raymond
Moody has documented the near-death experience, reported by 15 percent of
Americans–people who have clinically died but in a variety of
circumstances have returned to life. Like Kübler-Ross, Raymond Moody
created a language for perceiving what had previously been invisible.
Nineteen-ninety-four brought a
fascinating variation on our hide-and-seek with death. "I have
written this book to demythologize the process of dying," wrote
Sherwin B. Nuland in his book How We Die. The question Nuland took
on was: What happens to us physically when we die? "It is by knowing
the truth and being prepared for it that we rid ourselves of that fear of
the terra incognita of death that leads to self-deception and
disillusions."
I am interested in asking what seems to
me the next question following Ross’, Moody’s, and Nuland’s: What
happens to us after we die?
From a talk given at the
Institute of Noetic Sciences conference "The Sacred Source:
Life, Death, and the Survival of Consciousness", Chicago,
Illinois, July 15-17, 1994.
Editor’s Note: In
Western societies, the dominant paradigm presents a cosmology in
which humans, as biological matter, live and die in a universe
governed by the laws of physics. In this worldview, there is no
room for the possibility of life after death, and different
states of consciousness have significance only as pathological
deviations from that worldview.
In sharp contrast, the
cosmologies of other cultures—ancient and contemporary
pre-industrial—have taken for granted the existence of an
afterlife. For them, dying is a meaningful part of life, and
death is a journey for which the individual can and should
prepare. To aid in this, many cultures throughout history have
developed experiential "technologies"—techniques and
practices intended to train initiates in the art and science of
dying and postmortem survival. These experiential
"technologies" invariably involve training in altered
or non-ordinary states of consciousness throughout the
individual’s lifetime.
This fundamental difference
between Western and pre-industrial cosmologies and their
respective end-of-life technologies has profound consequences
for how societies view living, dying, death, and non-ordinary
states of consciousness. In this article, psychiatrist Stanislav
Grof explores some of the key elements in pre-industrial
cosmologies and their emphasis on transformative
"technologies" for training in altered states
throughout the individual’s lifetime.
In general, the conditions of
life existing in modern technologized countries do not offer
much ideological or psychological support for people who are
facing death. This contrasts very sharply with the situation
encountered by those dying in one of the ancient and
pre-industrial societies. Their cosmologies, philosophies,
mythologies, as well as spiritual and ritual life, contain a
clear message that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end
of everything, that life or existence continues in some form
after biological demise.
Eschatological mythologies are
in general agreement that the soul of the deceased undergoes a
complex series of adventures in consciousness. The posthumous
journey of the soul is sometimes described as a travel through
fantastic landscapes that bear some similarity to those on
Earth, other times it is described as encounters with various
archetypal beings, or as moving through a sequence of
non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). In some cultures
they believe the soul reaches a temporary realm in the Beyond,
such as the Christian purgatory or the lokas of Tibetan
Buddhism, in others, an eternal abode—heaven, hell, paradise,
or the sun realm.
You have been told that this force has–during this
century–made its first direct impact upon humanity;
heretofore, it reached mankind in the three worlds after
being stepped down and modified by transit through the great
planetary centre to which we give the name of the Hierarchy.
This direct impact will again take place in 1975, and
also in the year 2000, but the risks will then not be so
great as in the first impact, owing to the spiritual growth
of mankind. Each time this energy strikes into the human
consciousness some fuller aspect of the divine plan appears.
It is the energy which brings about synthesis, which holds
all things within the circle of the divine love. Since its
impact during the past few years, human thinking has been
more concerned with the production of unity and the
attainment of synthesis in all human relations than ever
before, and one result of this energy has been the forming
of the United Nations.
(The Rays and the Initiations, p.
716 A.A.Bailey)
"May
the Force be with you......." Star
Wars
The only place of complete
"peace" . . . is the "centre where the will of God is
known." The spiritual Hierarchy of our planet . . . is not a centre of
peace but a very vortex of loving activity, the meeting place of energies
coming from the centre of the divine will, and from humanity, the centre of
divine intelligence.
In
every race and nation, in every climate and part of the world, and
throughout the endless reaches of time itself, back into the limitless
past, men have found the Path to God; they have trodden it and accepted
its conditions, endured its disciplines, rested back in confidence upon
its realities, received its rewards and found their goal. Arrived there,
they have "entered into the joy of the Lord," participated in
the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, dwelt in the glory of the divine
Presence, and then returned to the ways of men, to serve. The testimony to
the existence of this Path is the priceless treasure of all the great
religions and its witnesses are those who have transcended all forms and
all theologies, and have penetrated into the world of meaning which all
symbols veil.
These truths are part of all that the past gives to man. They are our
eternal heritage, and connected with them there is no new revelation but
only participation and understanding. These are the facts which the World
Teachers have brought to us, suited to our need and capacity at any given
time. They are the inner structure of the One Truth upon which all the
world theologies have been built, including the Christian doctrines and
dogmas built around the Person of Christ and His teaching...
...Those Who
come as the Revealers of the love of God come from that Spiritual center
to which the Christ gave the name "the Kingdom of God." Here
dwell the "spirits of just men made perfect"; here the
spiritual Guides of the race are to be found and here the spiritual
Executives of God's plans live and work and oversee human and planetary
affairs. It is called by many names by many people. It is spoken of as the
Spiritual Hierarchy, as the Abode of Light, as the center where the
Masters of the Wisdom are to be found, as the Great White Lodge. From it
come those who act as Messengers of the Wisdom of God, Custodians of the
truth as it is in Christ, and Those Whose task it is to save the world, to
impart the next revelation and to demonstrate divinity. All the world
Scriptures bear witness to the existence of this center of spiritual
energy. This spiritual Hierarchy has been steadily drawing nearer to
humanity as men have become more conscious of divinity and more fitted for
contact with the divine.
...the work of all World Saviors and Teachers is to act primarily as
distributors of divine energy and as channels for spiritual force. This
outpouring manifests either as the impulse behind a world religion, the
incentive behind some new political ideology, or the principle of some
scientific discovery of importance to the growth of the human spirit. Thus
do religions, governments and civilizations find their motivation. History
has demonstrated that again and again these developments are the results
of the appearance and the activity of some great man at an advanced stage
of development. Those who come forth as Teachers, Saviors or Founders of a
new religion come forth from the Hierarchy and are of the highest order of
spiritual perfection.
Like many pioneers of abstraction, Mondrian’s
impetus was largely spiritual. He aimed to distill the real world to its pure
essence, to represent the dichotomies of the universe in eternal tension. To
achieve this, he privileged certain principles—stability, universality, and
spirituality—through the yin/yang balancing of horizontal and vertical
strokes. His philosophical framework was grounded in the Neoplatonic and Tantric-inspired
texts of authors connected to the Theosophical Society, the Dutch branch of
which had counted Mondrian as a member since 1909.
