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COMMUNICATION - CONSULTANCY - PERSONAL GROWTH - WISDOM TRADITION AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113   Re-Member NOW! Justice just IS:… "Graciously hear us, Lord, holy Father, almighty eternal G-d, and deign to send your holy Angel from heaven, to guard, cherish, protect, visit and defend all residents in this tiny dwelling-place*...." * i.e., the manifest cosmos. SHALOM * BAALBEK I+N TRUTH * PEACE & RECONCILIATION Publication details given do not always refer either to the first or to the most recent edition of the work mentioned. ALAN F. ALFORD 34 Shire Ridge, Shire Oak, Walsall WS9 9RB, "The Acropolis of Baalbek" in Ancient Skies, vol. 22, no. 3, July-August 1995. Note, in September-October 1996, when this chartered-accountant author is reported to have been 35 years old, his business address was (and perhaps still is?): P.O. Box 107, Walsall WS9 9YR. Doctor W. RAYMOND DRAKE, 2 Peareth Grove, Roker, Sunderland, UK, "Baalbek" in Ancient Skies vol. 13, no. 6, January-February 1987. ERNEST G. McGLAIN, The Myth of Invariance - The Origin of the Gods: Mathematics & Music from The Rig Veda to Plato (Boulder & London: Shambhala 1978). FOSTER BAILEY, The Spirit of Masonry (Lucis Trust 1957) - "The system of allegory and symbol which has been perpetuated for us in modern Masonry, goes further back by far than the Seventeenth century, further than its many expressions during the past two thousand years, further than the Semitic revelation (with the utilisation of the Jews as a distributing agency for the Lodge on High), or the Mysteries which antedated that Jewish dispensation, to that distant time when infant humanity was taught by Teachers, sent by G-d. These gave to men the outer symbols which were the first great landmarks, but they gave them no interpretation for their minds were too underdeveloped to grasp any significances. They saw only the outer crude dramatic forms; they built only huge and shapeless Temples, but built them true to the symbolic design, watching the rites and ceremonies carried on in thos temples by the initiate-priests as those who watch an interesting story which has no relation to them and for them no real meaning. Because of their very simplicity and lack of complex thought, they preserved the 'Ancient Landmarks' for us in their purity and essential form, and a right understanding of the temples and places of initiation, found scattered up and down our planet (such as Stonehenge, certain caves in India and the Pyramids of Egypt and South America), would indicates to us the origin of the phrase the 'Ancient Landmarks'... What is seen on earth has its counterpart and origin in heaven, and does not exist only in the minds of men." (pp.65-67) Please notice that each number, date and quotation here presented is an invitation to the reader to enter into living communion with each and all of the primordial rhythms, time-loom-frames, and individual writers named, whether “living” or “dead” - directly, of course, if at all possible, but at least through the medium of the latter's now to us increasingly so easily accessible written words. Admittedly even the most highly developed human languages are only very imperfect and no more than transitory channels of interpersonal communication, but they are still among the best most of us have currently available. Extracts from THE THIRD DEGREE LECTURES OF FREEMASONRY "Your admission among Masons in a state of helpless indigence was an emblematical representation of the entrance of all men on this, their mortal existence. It inculcated the useful lessons of natural equality and mutual dependence. It instructed you in the active principles of universal beneficence and charity, and taught you to see the solace of your own distress by extending relief and consolation to your fellow-creatures in the hour of their affliction. Above all, it taught you to bend with humility and resignation to the Will of the Great Architect of the Universe; and to dedicate your heart thus purified from every baneful and malignant passion and fitted only for the reception of truth and wisdom, as well to His Glory as to the welfare of your fellow-creatures… Proceeding onwards, and still guiding your steps by the principles of moral truth, you were led in the Second Degree to contemplate the intellectual faculty, and to trace it from its development, through the paths of heavenly science, even to the Throne of God Himself. The secrets of Nature and the principles of intellectual truth were then unveiled to your view… To your mind, thus modelled by virtue and science, Nature, however, presents one great and useful lesson more. She prepares you, by contemplation, for the closing hour of your existence; and when, by means of that contemplation, she has cornducted you through the intricate windings of this mortal state, she finally instructs you how to die. Such, Brother A.B., is the peculiar lesson of the Third Degree in Masonry, the chief object of which is to teach the heart to seek for happiness in the consciousness of a life well spent, so that when the shadows gather around, an unseen arm may sustain the sinking head, and Death create not a captive but a conqueror; it invites you to reflect on this awful subject, and teaches you to feel that, to the just and virtuous man, Death has no terrors equal to the stain of falsehood and dishonour… Let me now beg you to observe that the light of a Master Mason is darkness visible, serving only to express that gloom which rests on the prospect of futurity. It is that mysterious veil of darkness which the eye of human reason cannot penetrate, unless assisted by the light which is from above… Let the emblems of mortality whrch lie before you lead you to contemplate your inevitable destiny, and guide your reflections into that most interesting of all human studies, the knowledge of yourself. Be careful to perform your alloted task while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work. Continue to listen to the voice of Nature, which bears witness that even in this perishable frame resides a vital and immortal principle, which inspires a holy confidence that the Lord of Life will enable us to trample the king of terrors beneath our feet, and lift our eyes to that bright Morning Star whose rising brings peace and salvation to the faithful and obedient of the human race… And may the blessing of the Most High rest upon us, and upon all true and faithful Brethren throughout the world; may brotherly love prevail, and every moral and social good cement us." Although today's libraries and bookshops are full of faithful reproductions of the world's greatest books, they are crammed even more so with dubious translations, distorted paraphrases, misleading summaries and even deliberate perversions of the inspired writings of the Masters & Mistresses of Wisdom. Clearly, therefore, if a majority of our human family is ever to succeed in escaping from the prevailing muddle and confusion, meticulously accurate copying right needs to be more widely acknowledged as far more important than economically motivated legal attempts to inhibit freedom of communication via the Internet or profit-inspired efforts to achieve world-wide agreement about “copyright” in the third millennium… "Spot on!" or "Off the wall" ? Sergei O. Prokofieff The Spiritual Origins of Eastern Europe and the Future Mysteries of The Holy Grail First English edition 1993 Temple Lodge Publishing - 51 Queen Caroline Street, London W6 9QL (ISBN 0 904693 55 4) This book is a prayerful historical and metahistorical anti-Jesuit and anti-Vatican anthroposophically based meditation, the original text of which is dedicated to the thousandth anniversary (988-1988) of the coming of Christianity to Russia and the English translation of which is dedicated to Owen Barfield, but I don't know whether to think of it as beginning where my predecessor, the anonymous and posthumous author of Meditations on The Tarot - a journey into Christian Hermeticism (Amity House/Element Books, New York 1985)'s book leaves off, or vice-versa. James Webb's The Flight from Reason (London, Macdonald, 1971), later reissued as The Occult Underground with a companion volume The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1974 and 1976) explores the background to much of H.P. Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and their contemporaries' approach to this and related matters. Extract from Prokofieff's Chapter 19: The Future of the East-Slavic People and the Spiritual Tasks of Central Europe "… However, in order that this might actually be accomplished amongst the East-Slavic people, that spiritual life of Central Europe for which Rudolf Steiner fought throughout his life's work will have to nourish it not only in the course of the coming centuries but for one and a half millennia, that is until the end of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For this is what Rudolf Steiner calls the 'will of world wisdom': 'Adding two thousand years to 1400 we get the approximate time [around 3500] when something will emerge in the evolution of the Earth that has had its seeds in the German life of the spirit, ever since there has been such a life of the spirit… The 'will of world wisdom', the wisdom of the historical Sophia, is that the East-Slavic people be given as their guide until the beginning of the sixth epoch the light of the true spiritual life of Central Europe, which can lead them to an individual, and not a national, group-knowledge-and-experience of Christianity, to a fully conscious, and not instinctive, relationship to the Christ-impulse. And what Central Europe is able to give Eastern Europe in this respect, the Orthodox Church - which has remained at the stage of a group spirituality - will never be able to give it… 'In the Greek Orthodox Church there was a good spirit until the 6th or 7th century, but what at one time is a good spirit changes into a luciferic spirit if it is kept on beyond its time. To hold on to the Orthodox religion is to be in the claws of Lucifer.' For the true path of world evolution, and the only right path into the sixth cultural epoch, leads from the old group-experience of Christianity to an individual experience of it, and from the latter again to a group-experience, though now on a completely different level of development, which is attainable only as a result of passing through the individual stage and which can then be fully compatible with the principal of human freedom… 'We seek community above us, the living Christ within us'… sobórnost - a word that cannot be translated into any other language. (This Russian word sobórnost comes from the noun sobór, which means both 'ecclesiastical edifice, cathedral' and also 'large spiritual gathering, council'. Both meanings are also associated with the verb sobirat'sa - to come together, to gather. The word sobórnost refers to a higher, social community of human beings, one that is founded on the spirit. In other words, both "church" and "ecclesia", properly understood, are exact translations!) Its meaning can be conveyed to some extent only with the help of the image or comparison that everyone enters a spiritual temple or town out of an individually apprehended spiritual impulse and that in such a place he can, nevertheless, unite in full freedom with the others who have been guided and fulfilled by the same spirit in a common experience of the mystery of the future universal Whitsun, when the Holy Spirit will descend upon each person as an individual spirit and nevertheless will be the higher, common Spirit of the whole gathering and, in future, of all mankind…" (pp.335-7) If Rudolf Steiner, as Prokofieff presents him throughout this book, is right, Roman Catholic teachings were appropriate during the Middle Ages and Western scientific rationalism has been appropriate since the Renaissance, but it is to the credit of the Eastern Orthodox clergy and faithful that, post-Tridentine and still continuing Vatican and Jesuit ecclesial and political machinations notwithstanding, they have never forgotten that human persons are constituted of body, mind and soul and not merely of a body and a mind-soul, as the Fourth Council of Constantinople dogmatically taught in 869, exactly 1000 years before the First Vatican Council's disastrous confirmation of this blasphemous error as eternally 'true' by adding to it in 1869 an equally blasphemous dogmatic definition of Papal Infallibility. As it happens, what the Fourth Council of Constantinople condemned as heretical on 28 February 870 was any teaching that human persons each have not only one soul but two souls, and when Papal Infallibility was 'defined' on 18 July 1870, that is exactly what happened - the Pope's 'infallibility' was not 'extended' but 'defined', i.e., limited and set within dogmatically clear boundaries. Any other human being is naturally infallible regarding any judgment of truth whatsoever, provided that judgment is properly made upon evidence, which is why Doctor Peter Plichta is entitled to feel Mössbauer badly let him down; the Roman Pontiff, however, when considered not as a potentially universally infallible ordinary human being but precisely as Head of The Church established by Jesus Christ, is - unlike the rest of us - only 'infallible' when his pronouncements satisfy the stringent conditions laid down by the First Vatican Council (cf. DS 3065-75). It is clear, therefore, that Steiner and Prokofieff each exhibit that typically Eastern insouciance in respect of material facts which the latter, indeed, lauds as the great Russian people's saving protection against soulless Western materialistic rationalism (allegedly the quintessence of Jesuitry within both the Vatican and Freemasonry), but this is not to say that the issue they focus is not today our primary challenge. If universal clairvoyance is tomorrow our destiny, are post-Steiner anthroposophists our only salvation? Does the protection of Mary's veil extend only over Russia? For me, these are now rhetorical questions. Maturity of growth not only requires that we disentangle ourselves from the schizoid snares of post-Cartesian life-styles; we also need to learn how best effectively to transcend the limitations of both rival Christian models above mentioned. Both Max Freedom Long's and Robert Masters' elsewhere more in detail mentioned accounts of Ancient Egyptian traditional teaching as regards both the differentation of two souls (the perishable SOKHIM and the practically immortal BA) and the integration of five bodies (AUFU, KHU, KA, HAIDIT & SÂHU) within the sphere of influence of One Life Force (SA) are in this respect especially helpful. Resurrection means freely preferring Life to death, Wakefullness to sleep, Memory to forgetfulness. "Truth does not need people to understand it, but people need truth in order to really live." Peter Plichta, God's Secret Formula, ISBN 1-86204-014-1 hardback, 1-86204-358-2 paperback - Shalom & Welcome! - Home Page© The Neith Network Library 2004 Webmaster: H.B. ExtraReverendDoctorColinJames Hamer, The Rainbow Programme Creativity House, 9 Oxford Street, St. Thomas, EXETER, Devon EX2 9AG, U.K.