WASTES AND BURDENS OF SUPERSTITION. No mental help in errors and illusions! They only lead him perpetually astray. So he slowly discovers that the only real food for the mind is truth, right thoughts about things that make up his world. Let a man go into a great factory and ignorantly meddle with the tremendous forces at work in the machinery about him, and he only succeeds in injusting himself and making mischief at every turn. This physical universe of which our bodies are a part is a vast and complicated play of tremendous and far reaching forces. When ignorance meddles with it, no help, but only hurt, is found at every turn. But, when we know these forces and make them our allies, then “the Lord which made heaven and earth” becomes our almighty helper.

In whom there is no help.”— PSALM CAVi., g. “My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth.”—PSALM cxxi., z.

ONE of the most marked distinctions between inanimate things and those that are alive is that living things need out-side help; and, if they get it, they grow, improve, become something more and better than they were.

A stone, after it has come into existence, is quite independent : it does not need anything. But, just because it does not need any-thing, it never becomes anything more or better than a stone. But the tiniest thing that lives, and just because it is alive, is hungry ; it needs food ; it reaches out for something beyond itself ; it is dependent on outside help; and, if it gets it, it grows.

And, as you come up through the grades of life, the higher you get, the more complex the living form, the more the needs multiply, the more numerous the relationships it must enter into with outside sources of supply.

The higher the life, then, the more dependent, the more it needs help in order to live out its ideal. And, when we come to man, we find a creature who, throughout the whole range. of his being, is one incarnated hunger, and who stands in depend-ent relations to the whole universe. He needs food and help for body, for mind, for heart, and for soul.

The earth and the stars minister to his wants: the past and the future both come to his aid. The entire history of human progress, from the beginning until to-day, is but the story of man’s search for that kind of help by means of which he could take step after step on his upward journey.

But,—and this is the point I wish you to specially notice now,—all the way along, his feeling out after help in this direction and that has been a series of experiments. In his ignorance, which has been the necessary result of his lack of experience, he has been constantly making mistakes, look-ing to wrong sources for help. He has had to keep saying, as the result of disastrous trials, There is “no help” here. And thus he has been perpetually learning the great truth, ” My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth.”

This phrase is only the poetic rendering of the scientific truth that all human help comes from the one life that is in and through all things, and particularly through finding out the methods by which this life works, or, in other words, what we call the laws of the universe ; for these are the conditions of all healthy life and growth.

For example, in the matter of help toward the support and growth of the physical life, the finding of food was the result of trials and failures. Many and many a time, man must have looked for help to things that turned out to be not only not nourishing, but even positively poisonous. No help in this direction ! And, then, he turns to that which is naturally fitted to build up his body. So, at first, he attempts to feed his mind on thoughts about the world, about himself, about God, which turn out to be false.

No mental help in errors and illusions! They only lead him perpetually astray. So he slowly discovers that the only real food for the mind is truth, right thoughts about things that make up his world. Let a man go into a great factory and ignorantly meddle with the tremendous forces at work in the machinery about him, and he only succeeds in injusting himself and making mischief at every turn. This physical universe of which our bodies are a part is a vast and complicated play of tremendous and far reaching forces.

When ignorance meddles with it, no help, but only hurt, is found at every turn. But, when we know these forces and make them our allies, then “the Lord which made heaven and earth” becomes our almighty helper.

The same is true also in the higher ranges of the heart and the soul. These, too, hunger for food on which to grow. Here, also, disastrous and far-reaching mistakes are made. Ignorance reaches out its hands for aid toward a thousand things in which “there is no help.”

At last, as the result of many mistakes, it finds the true source of supply, and cries out exultantly, “My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth.” The true trust, the true worship, prove themselves as being those which really help the onward, upward life of man. But now we are brought face to face with a very strange and yet a perfectly natural phase of human development.

At some comparatively low stage of growth, out of the best knowledge of the time, men construct a theory of the world. It is either wholly false or only partly true. Hut it satisfies them for the time, and they come to rest in it. It becomes instituted: money is invested in it, memories gather about it, and custom sanctifies it.

Now, the very virtues that are associated with it make it all the more an obstruction in the way of human progress. For by as much as men believe in it, are attached to it, and in earnest about it, by just so much does it stand in the way of anything better.

The time spent on it is wasted ; it is a burden on the resources and the life ; and yet the unwise devotion to it remains. It no longer feeds the intellectual life, even if it ever did, but has become only a parasite that exists at the expense of the vitality it ought to serve. A thing precisely parallel to this takes place also in regard t’ those religious theories that ought to feed and help the growing life of the world.

Born of man’s spiritual need, a religion comes into being. Its intellectual theories are largely false, because man is still childish and ignorant. Bat it becomes instituted and established in the reverence. the fear, and the affection of men. Forms of worship are arranged : temples and shrines are built, and untold wealth is lavished upon them; sacred memories gather about them. But now, not being true or only partly true, men do not find in them the help they really need.

They become the victims of their own creations ; and that which ought to be their help turns to a burden which crushes out their noblest life. They dare not advance beyond it, and so it keeps them back.

Two quite opposite positions are held in the modern world concerning the importance of belief. One set of people say that it does not make any difference what you believe. Another set will tell you that to hold the true belief is the one most important thing in all the world. .Now, both of these positions are true and both are false.

So he be sincere and earnest, doing the best he knows, a man may hold almost any theoretical opinions and yet be a good man. There are good men in all religions, and good men who are not in any communion. But a wrong opinion, when carried out in practice, must of necessity produce mischievous results.

Or, if its apparent results are not disastrous, it at least stands in the way of finding out a correct theory of what ought to be done, and so hinders the positive good that might be accomplished. And the more earnestly, the more religiously a man holds to his false opinions, and the more rigorously he follows his false methods, of course the worse will be the practical results.

If a man thinks it is just as well to plant thistles as to plant wheat, and yet is so indifferent about the whole business as to plant little of either, the principal harm in his case will be the negative one of the loss of what he might do, if only he knew better and cared about it. But, if one holds this opinion in dead earnest, and so plants all the thistles he can get hold of, his very sincerity and earnestness become the source of evil. An earnest and devout superstition then will do an amount of harm proportioned to its earnestness and devoutness.

Let us stop here long enough to get clearly in our minds just what it is that superstition means. It is derived from two Latin words,—sktkr, over or beyond ; and sto, to stand. It is that then which stands over or beyond, and which so exceeds the reality or mason of things. It is a false faith in religion. It mistakes the nature of God and of man, and so teaches men to look in the wrong direction for help.

It rears a fabric of misconception, and calls it a palace of truth. It arms itself with all the sanctions, the terrors, the hopes and fears that attach themselves to man’s origin and destiny. and wields them as motive forces to compel men to walk in paths that can never lead them to the goal they seek and need to find.

And, having chosen the wrong path, it does what it can to deter the world from finding the right one. It goes without saying that men need to discover the right things to use for food, the right way to cultivate the soil and navigate the ocean, the right ways for the prevention and cure of disease. the right way to organize the family and the state, the right way to do business. Ignorant and careless people sometimes blunder into this right way; but, somehow, the right way must be found, if anything of value is ever to be accomplished.

Corn never grows and inventions are never made, except as nature’s exact conditions are some-how complied with. And those people make the most rapid progress who hold themselves free to study and find out these right ways of doing things. That ship will be the fastest sailer that is constructed in closest accordance with the forces of water and wind and steam.

And so that people will grow the fastest that knows most clearly and follows most closely the natural divine conditions of life and progress. And superstition, which is a false theory, mistaken for and revered as the true one, will always sap a people’s resources and be a burden on their advance.

It makes me sad and weary to review the history of the past, and see how men have wasted their forces in opening up roads that led nowhere, and building what they supposed to be cities of God, but which proved to be only temples of illusion and disappointment. Enough of money, of time, of heart-felt devotion, of untiring labor, has already been ex-pended to make our old sin-cursed and sorrow-shadowed world a very paradise of life and love and joy, if only they had been used in right ways and toward right ends.

And yet that day still seems so far away ! Let us then glance at a few of the wastes and burdens of superstition, so that we may learn, once and for all, the lesson of the importance of finding and following the truth, as the only divine helper of man. i. It makes my heart ache as I think of the burden of false fears that have crushed out the life of the world’s joy, turned natural tenderness into cruelty, and misdirected the efforts of man in his attempts to escape impending calamities.

As men first waked up to consciousness, they found them-selves engaged in a struggle for life in the face of a thousand perils that threatened them on every hand. Wild beasts, other wild men, poisonous plants and reptiles, cold, lightning, invisible diseases,—all these and more were enemies of which they stood in perpetual fear. They knew not at first that these were only natural forces to be studied, and, by the help of other equally natural but beneficent forces, to be overcome ; and so they fancied them unseen but hostile demons, ever haunting their pathway and seeking their life.

The cruelty of these (lemons they sought to pro. pitiate with gifts, with sacrifices, with self-tortures. So the first worship of the world was fear trembling in the presence of cruelty. Every jungle was the lurking place of a demon.

The storm’clouds and the rushing tempests were horrible demons. In all the air about them, concealed in the very brightness of the sunshine, were invisible hosts of demons. The earth was haunted, and scowling faces of hate looked down at them out of the sky. So men crouched and trem-bled at every step, in constant fear that even their simplest action might give offence to some wrathful and mighty foe. But not only has this been true of the ignorance and childhood of the past.

Since the world has leaned better, and since this better knowledge has been within reach of all intelligent people, bigoted and selfish and crafty men have taken advantage of the ignorance and fear of women and children to fight against and keep back the advancing knowledge for the sake of maintaining their magnificent endowments, their perquisites, their prestige, and their power.

There have not been wanting men here in Amer-ica, and in this generation, who have piled on their ‘maginary fuel to keep alive the fires of hell, not because they knew the doctrine was true, but because —they have con-fessed it —the mainspring of their power would be gone if hell were taken away. And while this horrible fear has tortured the conscientious, delicate, and sensitive souls, the conceited, coarse, and sensual natures have been very comfortable in considering themselves of the number of the elect, or have rested in some scheme by which they and their friends were to escape.

How this horrible shadow has hung over and shrouded with gloom what else might have been the happy homes of the world ! Man is the only animal that laughs. And nothing in all the world is sweeter or more musical than the rippling, sunny laughter of childhood. And have I not a right to hate this falsehood about man and this libel on God, when I remember my own childhood ? Hell was a haunting fiend that dogged my footsteps, hushed my mirth, shadowed my playgrounds, and frightened even my dreams.

Many and many a night have I, in my boyhood, wept in fear till I fell asleep on a pillow wet with tears, and waked up to cry out for deliverance to a God that did not seem to hear. I have known of a little girl to whom a house on fire was an unspeakable horror, because of the vivid fancy that pictured herself as in the midst of such an “everlasting burning.” And who shall portray the fears and anguish of ten thousand mothers’ hearts, as they have mourned over their dead children that their most sacred faith had consigned to everlasting doom!

Fear is not only an overhanging horror that shadows life, that quenches joy. that blanches with fear the lips that try to smile ; but it also stands in the way of knowledge. Men ought to fear: but their fear ought to be directed toward the proper object. Then how has this fear, in all the ages, turned natural

The evil here has been twofold. In the first place, accu-mulated wealth is an essential condition of all civilization. People must get beyond the point of mere living, of only getting food and clothes, before they can feed the higher life. But the superstition of the world has taught poverty as one of the cardinal virtues. ” Do not trouble about this world or its treasures. Wealth is a snare.

But not only this. The wealth that has been produced has been diverted from its best uses for the real service of man, and wasted in ways that have been no real help.

If all the wealth that has been diverted to the useless worship of unreal gods and the support of idle and filthy saints, along with that which superstitious idleness might have earned, had only been applied to solving the great questions of making human life divine here on earth, long ere this poverty and disease and suffering might have been so diminished as to turn the Old World into a realization of the dream of Eden.

Once more, consider the waste of brain that has been due to superstition. The whole force of natural evolution has, for thousands of years, been turned, in the case of man, to the building up of the brain. And brain, above all things, has been needed to study and solve the problems of human life. But superstition has constantly opposed itself to this process of brain development. It has tried and still tries to keep the people ignorant, so that they can be easily led. It has discouraged all natural study, and it still treats science and criticism as though they were sins. If it could not divert a great brain from natural study and engage it in its own speculations, it has always sought to destroy it.

As we look over the world, we see the men and women who are really anxious to help on human progress divided into many hostile camps. The power, the thought. the money, the enthusiasm that might be organized into one common attack on the common enemies of human welfare are wasted. and worse than wasted. in mutual quarrels.

Science and religion, instead of working together for man, are fighting each other. It is superstition that instigates the warfare and augments the misunderstandings. In any matter of practical reform, the hosts of superstition stand aside; and, if the work cannot he done in their way, they will hinder its being done at all.

Christendom itself is split into a hundred sectarian frog-mcnts. This might be all very well, if they were only regi-ments in one army, banded together to fight the common foe. Hut, instead of that, they keep their hottest shot for each other. Go into almost any country town, and you will find there half a dozen half-empty churches all begging for support, and so draining the resources of the people, just keeping themselves alive, without force enough to do much beyond merely existing, and sometimes hating each other a little worse than they hate the sin they profess to be trying to annihilate.

What is it but the jealous bigotry of super-stition that is the cause of all these things? There is money enough, there is power enough, there is earnestness enough, there is enthusiasm enough to renovate the world. But superstition diverts it toward false and useless issues foments discord, prevents union, and frightens people away from that knowledge which alone can teach them how the work of human deliverance can be accomplished.

All the good and earnest people of the earth could but join hands, there is no task they might not accom-plish. But so long as, looking through the mists and dark-ness of superstition. they mistake each other for enemies, so long the hope of the world will be deferred. Prejudiced Ignorance and her daughter Fear,— these are the two great enemies of man. Knowledge of what to do and courage to do it,—these are the two great helpers of the race. All effort is vain, unless rightly directed.

And knowledge itself is useless in the hands of a coward. “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” A clear brain and an earnest heart, then, will surely lead us to the dis-covery of his paths. What we call the natural laws of the world are only his footsteps. By walking in these, we come to share his control of the forces of the earth. And, when we have mastered these, the burdens of the past will fall off our shoulders, the wasted streams of human effort will be turned into useful channels, and the long battle will end in a joyous and universal peace.

The New World of the Fifth Kingdom. First of all, we must understand that the Fifth Kingdom of God is a Finished Kingdom already existing in the invisible, and that it comes forth into manifestation as a radiation of individual consciousness.

As we move into the Fourth Dimension we are lifted into omnipresence, the spiritual vibration beyond the limitations of time and space. Here we find the energy of cause, the realm of Divine Mind, Ideas and Creative Force. It is the plane of spiritual consciousness that corresponds to the Fifth Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.

Think of it this way: The fourth kingdom of the human is centered in the third dimension of effects. while the Fifth Kingdom of God operates through the Fourth Dimension of Cause. We must also define the word “human” before we can understand what “non-human” means.

First of all, “human” is a name given to something that does not exist. it is a label applied to that which Is perceived to be a part of the fourth kingdom—the human kingdom—yet there is nothing written in the Akashic Records by Supreme Intelligence that says this kingdom ever existed.

There is. however, an impression in the Records caused by the conscious vibrations of entities identified as those who came/ram the soil, i.e. Earthlings. what does this mean? The significance Is that the crowning gloty of Creation was not a race of human beings but Beings of Light—Spiritual Beings, Divine Individuals fully ordained as Holy Ones of the Most High. Then where did humans come from?

The Ancient Ones tell us that Beings of Light descended into the third-dimensional plane to experience physical matter, and they subsequently became so identified with the form side of life that spiritual consciousness was replaced by material perception. This happened over millions of years and the end result was an imprisonment of the entities in the dream state on the Earth plane.

Death and birth were two of the effects of this entrapment.

Talk about a fall! Former Cosmic Conscious Beings who had full access to all dimensions were now reduced to finding release from the Earth vibration through “death”—then reentry through a physical body involving the fusion of cells by means of sexual reproduction with birth following the gestation period. This was the first instance of what we now call evolution—the evolving of cells into a physical form, all initiated and tarried to fruition on the Earth plane.

Thus the designation of “beings of the soil”—which is related to the Latin word humus, from which came humans, which led to the word human. It is interesting that the word humiliate comes from the same root word as human, and when you think about It, it Is a little humiliating for Beings of the Light Realm to have to sit around and wait for the development of some fertilized egg and then to be sucked into an energy vortex to begin the process of physical growth.

Anyway, as time went on an entire body of third-dimensional knowledge was created, which became the “human domain” and later glorified as the human kingdom, the fourth one up from the bottom. And what does “non-human” mean? Simply to have a vibration in consciousness that is predominately spiritual.

It means moving into the Fourth Dimension, into Omnipresence, the spiritual vibration beyond the limitation of time and space. Here you find the Energy of Cause and the Realm of Consciousness that corresponds to the Fifth Kingdom, the Kingdom of God. To the phenomenal world you appear as any other human being, but your consciousness is dramatically different.

Gone are fear, reactive emotions and other undesirable aspects of personality, and in their place are the qualities of Divine Individualism. As a Being of Light you have dominion over the outer world because you are capable of expressing Fourth-Dimensional Reality into the third dimension and actually molding it according to your highest Vision—the Vision of Truth. All is progressive, and you will find yourself moving from one level of spiritual consciousness to another, and then another, and in the process you will find greater happiness than you’ve ever dreamed possible.

The Promises for Those who walk in the Light.

Throughout the Scriptures and sacred writings we read of trials and tribulations coming to this world, and in each passage there is always a condition, which If met. will provide refuge and safety. Look at the 91st Psalm as an example. It says …”He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty: Notice that It says dwelleth. which means to live. inhabit, abide—and not to sun in when things look tough and run out when everything seem rosy.

The result of this staying in one place? He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence.._he shall cover thee with his feathers…his truth shall be thy shield and buckler…a thousand shall fall at thy side and ton thousand at thy right hand. but It shall not come nigh thee…there shall no evil befall thee. neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling; Now there’s a significance to all those bodies being piled up at your feet. It is a graphic way of saying that people simply cannot be protected if they are not in the spiritual vibration.

In ‘mortal consciousness- one plays the law of averages and partakes of the game of chance. In spiritual consciousness “the dice of God are always loaded” in favor of those dwelling in the Secret Place. And the 46th Psalm promises the same thing—”God Is our refuge.– In other words, when we abide in the consciousness of Spirit we find shelter.

By finding our refuge within. in the one Presence and Power of our bring we are protected even though “the earth be removed and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea…though the waters roar and be troubled. though the mountains shake with swelling; The promises are there for those who walk in the Light. and we could not ask for more because we cannot violate spiritual law—the Law of Consciousness. It shall, be done unto you according to the state our, consciousness.

The bottom line is that each one of us must seek and find and know our Holy Self and let Spirit do the rest through our meditations and uplifted consciousness. We must become detached from appearance, knowing that whatever happens in the phenomenal world is simply consciousness in expression—providing safety and protection for those in the Light and learning experiences for those who remain in the darkness.

Your thinking mind is not your consciousness; your thoughts feed your consciousness and it is the trend of your thoughts and emotions that shapes your consciousness. Consciousness is your awareness, understanding and knowledge about everything that has been a part of your individual experience.

And until you pursue the level of Christ or Cosmic Consciousness, this particular energy vibration that you are remains a part of the collective consciousness, which is the sum total of the mental-emotional experience of humanity. for the “human” being, consciousness Is the pattern through which the Light-SubsUncetnergy of God flows to create in the physical world that which corresponds to the individual’s dominant vibration. The Ancients described this as consciousness “not in control.”

The effect produced in the outer world matches not only the person’s belief system. but also the race mind beliefs that have been unconsciously accepted under the hypnotic spell of mortality. Does consciousness have power? For the un-awakened, It functions as the outlet through which creative energy flows into form and experience, i.e. it works as an effect to produce a like effect. Yet, we can say that consciousness has power. under law, to express itself.

As we move up into higher levels of consciousness, a sense of mastery (control) dawns in us and we begin to consciously cooperate with the Source within. we move from religious fallen man/woman Into experimental metaphysics and on up to practical mysticism where the spiritual faculties are opened and we, as Consciousness, become Cause to our world. This is Consciousness in control, the Consciousness of Dominion.

To summarize, we know that if consciousness is focused exclusively on the outer world of form, the creative energy released will be totally conditioned by human consciousness which Includes the universal belief that “if anything can go wrong it will? It is a belief system that says that good is subservient to evil; that light can be overcome by darkness; that accidents, sickness, lack, failure and conflict are the natural order of things. However, we also know that if consciousness is predominantly spiritual, the energy expressed will be from the Mind of God within, which manifests as harmlessness, wholeness, abundance, fulfillment and harmony. So we have a choice—to live as a human being, or as a spiritual being.

Do you see now why we all must give up our sense of humanhood? Do you understand why we must accept the truth that in a state of human consciousness we can do nothing? Have you realized that only by giving up the material sense of existence, by surrendering all attachments on the third-dimensional plane, can we ever manifest the Kingdom on Earth? The Kingdom Defined. The four kingdoms on the third dimensional plane are the mineral, plant, animal and human.

The Fifth Kingdom is the realm of Harmony, or Heaven. It is the Spiritual Consciousness of the Fourth Dimension. To live in the Fifth Kingdom means to experience, right here in physical form on a physical planet, all of the attributes of the spiritual plane. It means that the Circle of Life that you call your individual world will be a manifestation of Love.

Now imagine what a world—your world—created out of the Energy of Love would be like. Could there possibly be any lack, limitation or insufficiency? No. Could there possibly be harmfulness in any area? No. Capture the vision of what this means. A world reflecting a spiritual consciousness would be awesomely beautiful.

Nature would have a different look as the lower kingdoms sing together in joyful harmony—and your immediate environment would reflect divine order, peace and goodwill. Your body would feel youthful, strong, and cooperative. Your feeling nature would be lifted to new heights of love, joy, gratitude and contentment, and your mind would dwell in the currents of constructive power and creative action for the greatest good of all.

In no time you would realize that you have an all-sufficiency of visible supply to meet every need and live life more abundantly. You would also notice that the people attracted into your immediate world are gentle, loving, and helpful in every way. And soon, if you are not already in your true place, you would find yourself moved into the perfect opportunity to experience joyful fulfillment in your work.

Even with all of this glorious good surrounding you, you would know that you as a thinking, reasoning personality had nothing to do with it. You were simply a witness to a rather hellish kind of existence being replaced with a heavenly environment—without you even taking thought except to be AWARE of the Truth of your being. How do you find and move into that Kingdom which is your true estate? Let’s find the answer.

The New World of the Fifth Kingdom. First of all, we must understand that the Fifth Kingdom of God is a Finished Kingdom already existing in the invisible, and that it comes forth into manifestation as a radiation of individual consciousness.

This Kingdom of Harmony is the Real World, the New World—”new” to our human experience. In truth, it has always existed as the Will, Plan and Purpose of That Which we call Supreme Being, or God. This “other world” in which most of us presently live is the collective consciousness made manifest, and it has been called an illusion because it is temporary, not permanent, thus not real. Yet both the Real World and the world of shadows are an outpicturing of consciousness.

One is our human concept of reality projected on the third dimensional screen of life, and the other is the Truth of Reality projected on the same screen. Everything on the “screen” is an effect, from the physical body to the physical universe, and the cause of these effects is consciousness. The effect can be a humanly-conceived appearance or a God-conceived

Reality—depending on the state. level, vibration of consciousness. When Jesus said, “My Kingdom is not of this world,” he was explaining that Spiritual Reality must not be confused with appearances—that “this world” was not created or outpictured by Spiritual Consciousness which he represented, but by the mortal consciousness of the race mind, universal or individualized. Now we see one signpost on the path leading to the Kingdom.

It reads: “Attempt not to change that which has been created by man, but let Consciousness reveal that which has been created by Cod. “We could also say that you cannot change the motion picture from the audience. You must go to the projector, which is consciousness, and change the film.

The point here is that if you attempt to fix, change or heal a thirddimenslonal effect with a third-dimensional consciousness, all you are doing is repairing a fake wall with fake plaster. It might look good for a time but sooner or later it is going to fall apart again. Now let’s look at more signposts on the path.

“You of yourself can do nothing, and God’s work is already completed, so when does that leave you it leaves you with a priceless gift on which the future of humanity rests: Consciousness. “We must all reach the point where we understand that humans, using the mortal mind as power, can only continue to build the scenery, paint the drops, arrange the props and play the role in the amateur playhouse productions on earth.

And we must also realize that God’s Kingdom is finished and was pronounced “Very Good.” But the Almighty didn’t just say “ft is done” and leave it at that. The next step was to give the Kingdom and “all that the Father has” to the Holy High Self, the I AM of each individual being.

Thus the Will Plan and Purpose of God—for the individual and the world—was planted in consciousness under the care and supervision of the Christ within, the spirit of Individuality, with these instructions: “Let the Kingdom radiate like the rays of the sun; let it flow like a mighty river, to be manifest in the visible world in accordance with the unfoldment of consciousness.” What does this mean? Let’s And the answer in this meditation: Spirit of the Living God within, my precious Reality, I have given up everything. surrendered all to you, and now I come be fore you as a spiritual child seeking only the Kingdom. I know now that you are the keeper of the Kingdom and that you love me so much that it is your good pleasure to give me, your joint heir, the fullness of this sacred Gift. I now open my entire awareness of being to receive the radiant rays and the mighty flow.

I feel the infilling. Oh God I feel it! Throughout my being I am experiencing the pouring in of Divine Substance, Light, Love, the radiant Essence of Mind, the infinite Supply of the whole Kingdom of God. I am being filled, filled, filled…my cup runneth over. My mind and heart are saturated and permeated and overflowing with the creative Thought-Energy of God, the Divine Thoughtforms of the Fifth Kingdom. The invisible Kingdom has come. The Lord’s Prayer has been fulfilled. I am now the Kingdom Consciousness, and I know that I now possess all that I could ever need or desire for all eternity.

I am now ready for the Invisible Kingdom to be manifest in the visible world of form.I now consent to the expression on Earth of the Will, Plan and Purpose of God. It is happening now. Look! The Kingdom is radiating from my Consciousness like the rays of the sun, flowing like a mighty river. The Divine Thoughtforms are being projected into visibility. I see this … I feel it.

Where there was loneliness and emptiness there is now love and fullness of companionship. I see this…I feel it.

Where there was lack and limitation there is now abundance. I see this…1 feel it.

Where there was illness there is now wellness. I see this…I feel it.

Where there was conflict there is now peace. I see this…I feel it.

Where there was sorrow there is now joy. I see this…I feel it.

Where there was a human sense of being there is now the spiritual livingness in the Kingdom of God—my Kingdom on Earth. I see this…) feel it…and it is so!

We are told that we must step out of the kingdom of men (controlled by the world, the flesh and the devil) into another kingdom which … and mineral— are found in man; and their synthesis, plus another factor, the divine intellect, we call the human kingdom. … He founded the kingdom of God on earth, and produced a synthesis of all the kingdoms in nature, thus causing the appearance of a fifth kingdom.

Jung shows that only the strong can break the anchor-holds of the collective unconscious. When this is done, a condition is produced in the Promethean, in which he is receptive to new ideas. He is, as it were, brainwashed of old concepts, old patterns of activity and old idols. He is not an iconoclast, for he is ready for new ideas, and new idols. It is then that the Soul gains its real opportunity to take hold and direct its lower triad, the personality. New anchors are now established by the man with the Fifth kingdom, the hierarchy of Masters. This new realm is complementary to the lower primordial archetypes described in Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the higher counterpart of those lower anchors which bound the man to primordial images hitherto. Tavitsock Institute. Part 147

All the four kingdoms have been entered by an initiation, or through an expansion of consciousness. Ahead of the human family lies now the fifth, or spiritual kingdom, and it is likewise entered through a certain initiation, as an be seen by those who intelligently read their New Testament. We need to remember that every great unfoldment of consciousness is an Initiation. The indwelling electric “Will” who is consciously experiencing through these material bodies hold these dense material sheaths together, till it consciously decides that it is no more interested to dwell any more in them.

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity. Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.

When a man has made his contact through meditation with the group to which he belongs. and becomes, therefore, ever more and more group conscious, he is then in a position to take what are called a series of initiations.

These initiations are simply expansions of consciousness, brought about with the help of Those who have already achieved the goal. Who have already identified Themselves with the group, and Who are a conscious part of the body of the Heavenly Man. With Their assistance, and through Their aid, a man will gradually awaken to the realisation that is Theirs. There is great interest everywhere today in this subject of Initiation- and an over-emphasis has been laid upon Its ceremonial aspect.

We need to remember that every great unfoldment of consciousness is an Initiation.

Every step forward along the path of awareness is an initiation. When an atom of substance was built into the form, it was for that atom an initiation. It became aware of another type of force. and its range of contact became wider. when the consciousness of the vegetable and animal kingdom merged, and the life passed from the lower kingdom into the higher, that was an initiation.

When the consciousness of the animal expanded into that of the human being, still another great initiation took place. All the four kingdoms have been entered by an initiation, or through an expansion of consciousness.

Ahead of the human family lies now the fifth, or spiritual kingdom, and it is likewise entered through a certain initiation, as an be seen by those who intelligently read their New Testament. And in all these cases these initiations have been brought about by the help of Those who already know.

Thus we have within the evolutionary scheme not great gaps between one kingdom and another, and between one state of awareness and another, but a gradual development of consciousness, and one in which we, each one of us, have had and will have our share. if we can remember this universality of initiation we shall have a better proportioned point of view in connection with it.

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity.

Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.” It means simply that an initiate is one who has taken the first steps into the spiritual kingdom, and has had the first series of spiritual revelations, each one of which is a key to a still greater revelation.

The indwelling electric “Will” who is consciously experiencing through these material bodies hold these dense material sheaths together, till it consciously decides that it is no more interested to dwell any more in them.

The same process of materialization, and then subsequent liberation after gained material experience is followed also by a Prajapati [planetary scheme logos], as well as a Solar logos.

We speak much of the at-one-ment which Christ made within Himself and for man. We recognise the unity He felt with the Father, and that He has called us to a similar divine unity. But is it not possible that He established a synthesis broader than that of the individual and God—the synthesis of the kingdom of God?

What do these words mean? We have talked of the kingdom of Heaven in terms of separation. We are either in that kingdom or out of it. We are told that we must step out of the kingdom of men (controlled by the world, the flesh and the devil) into another kingdom which is pictured as utterly different. Yet is this so? All aspects of the three sub-human kingdoms—animal, vegetable and mineral—are found In man; and their synthesis, plus another factor, the divine Intellect, we call the human kingdom. Man unifies in himself the so-called lesser manifestations of deity. In the sub-human kingdoms of nature we find three major types of consciousness: the mineral kingdom, with its subjective discriminating power, its capacity to grow, and its ultimate radio-activity; the vegetable kingdom, with its sensitivity or sentiency, and its developing response apparatus which is sensitive to sunlight, to warmth and cold, and to other environing climatic conditions; the animal kingdom with its greatly increased awareness, its capacity for free movement and for wider contacts through its instinctive nature. The human kingdom embodies all these types of awareness—consciousness, sentiency, instinct—plus that mysterious human faculty which we call “the mind,” and we sum up all these inherited qualities in the word “self-conscious.”

There comes, however, in the experience of the intelligent human being, a slowly dawning recognition that there is something still greater and of deeper value outside himself. He is sensitised to a subtler range of contacts and to impressions which he calls spiritual or ideal or mystical.

Another type of consciousness begins to germinate in him, and at the birth at Bethlehem this awareness becomes manifested and recognisable. Just as the human being synthesises in himself all that has been, plus his own peculiar constitution and qualities, so in him can also begin to emerge and demonstrate qualities which are not human. Members of the kingdom of God will surely embody the heritage of four kingdoms, as man embodies the heritage of three.

This higher citizenship involves the expression of the Christ consciousness, which is the consciousness of the group, of the relation of the part to the whole (something which Christ continuously emphasised) and of the human to the divine.

The result of this realisation must surely be, under the evolutionary scheme, the appearance of another kingdom in nature. This constitutes the great task of Christ. Through the power of His realised divinity He produced the man who blended in Himself the best of all that had been, and revealed also what could be.

He brought together into a functioning unity the higher and the lower, and made out of them “one new man.” He founded the kingdom of God on earth, and produced a synthesis of all the kingdoms in nature, thus causing the appearance of a fifth kingdom. We might sum up the at-one-ments which He brought about as follows:

1. He unified in Himself to perfection the physical, emotional and mental aspects of man, and demonstrated therefore the perfect Individual.
2. He unified in Himself soul and body, the higher and the lower aspects, and therefore produced a divine incarnation.
3. lie unified in Himself the best of the kingdoms in nature. mineral. vegetable. animal, which means in their synthesis, the human with the totellect functioning.
4. Then lie blended this synthesis with a higher spititual factor and brought to the birth another kingdom in nature, the fifth.

Christ, having produced in Himself one unification or at-one-ment after another, for the benefit of humanity, appears before John the Baptist, and passes through the second initiation, that of purification In the waters of Jordan.

Through 1961 the process of baptism, and through the temptations which followed, He evidenced His maturity. faced His mission, and demonstrated to the world His purity and His power.

The third Initiation, that of the Transfiguration. testified to the fact of the at one-mem which Christ made between soul and body. Integration was complete. and the consequent illumination was made apparent to His disciples. He appeared before them as Son of Man and Son of God, and basing proved to them Who lie was. He faced the death which lay ahead of Him, and the Intervening service.

In the fourth initiation. He demonstrated this Integration not only as God.Man. but as the One Who enfolded In His consciousness the entire world of men. Ile unified Himself with humanity. and portrayed the effectiveness of that divine energy which enabled Him to say In troth, -I. If I be lifted up from the Earth, will draw all men unto Me? (Sr. John. XII. 32.) lie was lifted up between Earth and Heaven, and for two thousand yeas these words of His have stood unchallenged.

“Then coined, Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John. to be baptised of him. But John forbade him. saying. I have need to be baptised of Thee and earnest Thou to me? ‘

And Jews answering said unto him. Suffer It to be so now, for it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered Him.

‘And Jesus, when lie was baptised, went up straightaway out of the wales: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove. and lighting upon Him. –

And lo a voice from heaven. saying. This is my beloved Son. In Whom I am well pleased?

In these simple words we ate told the story of this Initiation. The keynote Is purification. and it closed a period of proparation. of quiet service and inaugurated a cycle of strenuous ( 97) activity. The pudficadon of the lower nature is a requirement which the Christian Church has ever emphasised as has also the Hindu faith. Christ held this ideal before His disciples and all men when He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (St. Matt., V, 8.)

Christ in this great initiation, entered into the stream, and the waters passed over Him. In India this initiation is called that of “entering the stream,” and he who undergoes it is regarded as having demonstrated both physical and psychic purity. In considering this initiation we must remember that two kinds of baptism are referred to in the story.

“John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptise you with water: but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose:

He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (St. Luke., III, 16.)

There are therefore two kinds of baptism:

1. That of John the Baptist, which is the baptism by water.
2. The baptism of Jesus Christ, which is that of the Holy Ghost and of fire.

In these two symbols much of the story of human development is summed up, and the joint work of John the Baptist and of Jesus produced a synthesis which is indicative of the immediate objective of our racial endeavour.

The symbolism is exact according to the ancient mystery teaching. A dose study of this symbolic rendering of a basic truth would greatly profit the seeker in all countries, and an understanding of the significance of the symbols employed would throw much light upon reality. In the evolution of the race the sentient feeling nature is [99] first developed, and water has ever been the symbol of that nature.

The fluid nature of the emotions, the constant shifting between sentient pleasure and pain, the storms which arise in the world of feeling, and the peace and calm which can descend upon a man, make of water a most apposite symbol of this interior subtle world of the lower nature in which most of us live, and wherein our consciousness is predominantly focussed.

The average man or woman is predominantly a blend of the physical and emotional natures; all early races have this characteristic and the probability is that, in old Atlantis, civilisation was entirely centred in the feelings and the desires, in the emotions, and—among its most advanced types—in the heart life. John the Baptist therefore gave the baptism of water which testified to the purification of the emotional nature, which must always be a preliminary step to the purification by fire.

A new factor now enters in, the discriminating faculty of the mind. By means of it. the disciple can Wog the mental life under control and dedicate it to the life of the kingdom of God, which Is consummated at the Third Initiation.

Through the correct use of the mind, the disciple is led to make right choice, and to balance (with wisdom) the endless pairs of opposites. We pass through the Binh initiation some what unconsciously.

The full significance of what we have undergone does not appear to us; we are “Infants In Christ,” and as infants we just live and submit to discipline, gradually growing toward maturity. But there comes a time in the life of every initiate when choice must be made, and Christ was faced with this.

A clear, clean Interior break Is to be made with the past before we can face towards a future of service, consciously undertaken, and know that from that rime on nothing will be the same. This initiation marked a tremendous change in the life of Jesus of Narareth.

Up to that time, for thirty years, lie had simply been the carpenter of the little town, and the son of His parents. He was a personality doing much good in a small sphere. But after the purification in Jordan, having “fulfilled all righteousness,” (Sr. Man., ill, 15.)

Ile became the Christ, and went about His country, serving the race and speaking those words which have moulded for centuries our Western civilisation. For each of us there must come the same great expansion, and it occurs when we me fitted to take the second initiation. Our desire-life is then confronted with essential choices which only the mind can enable us properly to handle.

We are told in Cruden’s Concordance that the name John means “which God gave,” and In the three names which appear together in this episode—John, Jesus and Christ—the whole story of the consecrated aspirant is summed up: John, symbolising the divine aspect deeply hidden in man. which prompts a man towards the needed purity; Jesus, in this case symbolising the consecrated, pledged disciple or initiate, ready for that process which will be the seal of his purification; Christ, the divine indwelling Son of God, able now to manifest In Jesus, because Jesus has submitted to the baptism of John. That submission and completed purification brought its reward.

It was at this initiation that God Himself proclaimed His Son to be the One in Whom He was well pleased.” Every initiation is simply a recognition. It is a false Idea, current In many schools of the mysteries and of esoteddsm, that initiation connotes a mysterious ceremony wherein, through the medium of the initiator and the rod of initiation, conditions are definitely changed in the aspirant, so that forever after he is altered and different. An Initiation takes place whenever a man becomes, through his own self-effort, an initiate. Then having taken “the kingdom of Heaven by violence? (St Mart., XI. a.) and having “worked out” his “own salvation through fear and trembling,” (Philippians. It Li) his spiritual status is immediately recognised by his peers, and he is admitted to initiation.

At Initiation two things happen: the initiate discovers his fellow initiates, those with whom he can associate, and he finds out also the mission to which he is called. He becomes aware of his divinity in a new and factual sense, not just as a deeply spiritual hope, an inniguing hypothetical possibility and his heart’s desire. He knows himself to be a son of Gad, therefore recognition is accorded to him. This was strikingly the case with Jesus Christ. His task emerged in its dread Implications before His eyes, and this must surely have been the reason why He was driven into the wilderness. The urge to solitude, the search for that quiet where reflection and determination can strengthen each other, was the natural outcome of this recognition. He saw what He had to do—to serve, to suffer and to found the kingdom of God. The expansion of consciousness was immediate and deep. Dr. Schweitzer says in this connection:

About Jesus’ earlier development we know nothing. All Iles in the dark. Only this is sure: at his baptism the secret of his existence was disclosed to him—namely, that he was the One whom God had destined to be the Messiah. With this revelation he was complete, and underwent no further development. For now he is assured that, until the near coming of the messianic age which was to reveal his glorious dignity, he was to labour for the Kingdom as the unrecognised and hidden Messiah, and must prove and purify himself together with his friends in the final Affliction?

Instincts suffice only for a nature which, on the whole, remains on one level. An individual who is more guided by unconscious choice than by the conscious one, tends therefore toward outspoken psychic conservatism.

This is the reason the primitive does not change in the course of thousands of years, and it is also the cause of his fearing everything strange and unusual. Were he less conservative, it might lead to maladaptation, and thus to the greatest of psychic dangers, namely a kind of neurosis.

A higher and wider consciousness which only comes by means of assimilating the unfamiliar, tends towards autonomy, towards revolution against the old gods who are nothing other than those powerful, unconscious, primordial images which, up to this time, have held consciousness in thrall.

“The more powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it the conscious will, the more is the unconscious forced into the background. When this happens, it becomes easily possible for the conscious structures to be detached from the unconscious images. Gaining thus in freedom, they break the chains of mere instinctiveness, and finally arrive at a state that is deprived of, or contrary to instinct. Consciousness thus torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of primordial images, possesses a Promethean freedom, it is true, but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hubris. It soars above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of capsizing is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak members of such a society, who again Promethean-like, are bound by the unconscious to the Caucasus. The wise Chinese would say in the words of the I Ching: When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths; night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin. —C.C. Jung

Jung shows that only the strong can break the anchor-holds of the collective unconscious. When this is done, a condition is produced in the Promethean, in which he is receptive to new ideas. He is, as it were, brainwashed of old concepts, old patterns of activity and old idols. He is not an iconoclast, for he is ready for new ideas, and new idols. It is then that the Soul gains its real opportunity to take hold and direct its lower triad, the personality. New anchors are now established by the man with the Fifth kingdom, the hierarchy of Masters. This new realm is complementary to the lower primordial archetypes described in Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the higher counterpart of those lower anchors which bound the man to primordial images hitherto.

All the four kingdoms have been entered by an initiation, or through an expansion of consciousness. Ahead of the human family lies now the fifth, or spiritual kingdom, and it is likewise entered through a certain initiation, as an be seen by those who intelligently read their New Testament. We need to remember that every great unfoldment of consciousness is an Initiation. The indwelling electric “Will” who is consciously experiencing through these material bodies hold these dense material sheaths together, till it consciously decides that it is no more interested to dwell any more in them. Tavistock Institute. Part 145

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity. Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.

When a man has made his contact through meditation with the group to which he belongs. and becomes, therefore, ever more and more group conscious, he is then in a position to take what are called a series of initiations.

These initiations are simply expansions of consciousness, brought about with the help of Those who have already achieved the goal. Who have already identified Themselves with the group, and Who are a conscious part of the body of the Heavenly Man. With Their assistance, and through Their aid, a man will gradually awaken to the realisation that is Theirs. There is great interest everywhere today in this subject of Initiation- and an over-emphasis has been laid upon Its ceremonial aspect.

We need to remember that every great unfoldment of consciousness is an Initiation.

Every step forward along the path of awareness is an initiation. When an atom of substance was built into the form, it was for that atom an initiation. It became aware of another type of force. and its range of contact became wider. when the consciousness of the vegetable and animal kingdom merged, and the life passed from the lower kingdom into the higher, that was an initiation.

When the consciousness of the animal expanded into that of the human being, still another great initiation took place. All the four kingdoms have been entered by an initiation, or through an expansion of consciousness.

Ahead of the human family lies now the fifth, or spiritual kingdom, and it is likewise entered through a certain initiation, as an be seen by those who intelligently read their New Testament. And in all these cases these initiations have been brought about by the help of Those who already know.

Thus we have within the evolutionary scheme not great gaps between one kingdom and another, and between one state of awareness and another, but a gradual development of consciousness, and one in which we, each one of us, have had and will have our share. if we can remember this universality of initiation we shall have a better proportioned point of view in connection with it.

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity.

Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.” It means simply that an initiate is one who has taken the first steps into the spiritual kingdom, and has had the first series of spiritual revelations, each one of which is a key to a still greater revelation.

The indwelling electric “Will” who is consciously experiencing through these material bodies hold these dense material sheaths together, till it consciously decides that it is no more interested to dwell any more in them.

The same process of materialization, and then subsequent liberation after gained material experience is followed also by a Prajapati [planetary scheme logos], as well as a Solar logos.

We speak much of the at-one-ment which Christ made within Himself and for man. We recognise the unity He felt with the Father, and that He has called us to a similar divine unity. But is it not possible that He established a synthesis broader than that of the individual and God—the synthesis of the kingdom of God?

What do these words mean? We have talked of the kingdom of Heaven in terms of separation. We are either in that kingdom or out of it. We are told that we must step out of the kingdom of men (controlled by the world, the flesh and the devil) into another kingdom which is pictured as utterly different. Yet is this so? All aspects of the three sub-human kingdoms—animal, vegetable and mineral—are found In man; and their synthesis, plus another factor, the divine Intellect, we call the human kingdom. Man unifies in himself the so-called lesser manifestations of deity. In the sub-human kingdoms of nature we find three major types of consciousness: the mineral kingdom, with its subjective discriminating power, its capacity to grow, and its ultimate radio-activity; the vegetable kingdom, with its sensitivity or sentiency, and its developing response apparatus which is sensitive to sunlight, to warmth and cold, and to other environing climatic conditions; the animal kingdom with its greatly increased awareness, its capacity for free movement and for wider contacts through its instinctive nature. The human kingdom embodies all these types of awareness—consciousness, sentiency, instinct—plus that mysterious human faculty which we call “the mind,” and we sum up all these inherited qualities in the word “self-conscious.”

There comes, however, in the experience of the intelligent human being, a slowly dawning recognition that there is something still greater and of deeper value outside himself. He is sensitised to a subtler range of contacts and to impressions which he calls spiritual or ideal or mystical.

Another type of consciousness begins to germinate in him, and at the 05] birth at Bethlehem this awareness becomes manifested and recognisable. Just as the human being synthesises in himself all that has been, plus his own peculiar constitution and qualities, so in him can also begin to emerge and demonstrate qualities which are not human. Members of the kingdom of God will surely embody the heritage of four kingdoms, as man embodies the heritage of three.

This higher citizenship involves the expression of the Christ consciousness, which is the consciousness of the group, of the relation of the part to the whole (something which Christ continuously emphasised) and of the human to the divine.

The result of this realisation must surely be, under the evolutionary scheme, the appearance of another kingdom in nature. This constitutes the great task of Christ. Through the power of His realised divinity He produced the man who blended in Himself the best of all that had been, and revealed also what could be.

He brought together into a functioning unity the higher and the lower, and made out of them “one new man.” He founded the kingdom of God on earth, and produced a synthesis of all the kingdoms in nature, thus causing the appearance of a fifth kingdom. We might sum up the at-one-ments which He brought about as follows:

1. He unified in Himself to perfection the physical, emotional and mental aspects of man, and demonstrated therefore the perfect Individual.
2. He unified in Himself soul and body, the higher and the lower aspects, and therefore produced a divine incarnation.
3. lie unified in Himself the best of the kingdoms in nature. mineral. vegetable. animal, which means in their synthesis, the human with the totellect functioning.
4. Then lie blended this synthesis with a higher spititual factor and brought to the birth another kingdom in nature, the fifth.

Christ, having produced in Himself one unification or at-one-ment after another, for the benefit of humanity, appears before John the Baptist, and passes through the second initiation, that of purification In the waters of Jordan.

Through 1961 the process of baptism, and through the temptations which followed, He evidenced His maturity. faced His mission, and demonstrated to the world His purity and His power.

The third Initiation, that of the Tronsfiguratiort. testified to the fact of the at one-mem which Christ made between soul and body. Integration was complete. and the consequent illumination was made apparent to His disciples. He appeared before them as Son of Man and Son of God, and basing proved to them Who lie was. He faced the death which lay ahead of Him, and the Intervening service.

In the fourth initiation. He demonstrated this Integration not only as God.Man. but as the One Who enfolded In His consciousness the entire world of men. Ile unified Himself with humanity. and portrayed the effectiveness of that divine energy which enabled Him to say In troth, -I. If I be lifted up from the Earth, will draw all men unto Me? (Sr. John. XII. 32.) lie was lifted up between Earth and Heaven, and for two thousand yeas these words of His have stood unchallenged.

“Then coined, Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John. to be baptised of him. But John forbade him. saying. I have need to be baptised of Thee and earnest Thou to me? ‘

And Jews answering said unto him. Suffer It to be so now, for it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered Him.

‘And Jesus, when lie was baptised, went up straightaway out of the wales: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove. and lighting upon Him. –

And lo a voice from heaven. saying. This is my beloved Son. In Whom I am well pleased?

In these simple words we ate told the story of this Initiation. The keynote Is purification. and it closed a period of proparation. of quiet service and inaugurated a cycle of strenuous ( 97) activity. The pudficadon of the lower nature is a requirement which the Christian Church has ever emphasised as has also the Hindu faith. Christ held this ideal before His disciples and all men when He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (St. Matt., V, 8.)

Christ in this great initiation, entered into the stream, and the waters passed over Him. In India this initiation is called that of “entering the stream,” and he who undergoes it is regarded as having demonstrated both physical and psychic purity. In considering this initiation we must remember that two kinds of baptism are referred to in the story.

“John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptise you with water: but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose:

He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (St. Luke., III, 16.)

There are therefore two kinds of baptism:

1. That of John the Baptist, which is the baptism by water.
2. The baptism of Jesus Christ, which is that of the Holy Ghost and of fire.

In these two symbols much of the story of human development is summed up, and the joint work of John the Baptist and of Jesus produced a synthesis which is indicative of the immediate objective of our racial endeavour.

The symbolism is exact according to the ancient mystery teaching. A dose study of this symbolic rendering of a basic truth would greatly profit the seeker in all countries, and an understanding of the significance of the symbols employed would throw much light upon reality. In the evolution of the race the sentient feeling nature is [99] first developed, and water has ever been the symbol of that nature.

The fluid nature of the emotions, the constant shifting between sentient pleasure and pain, the storms which arise in the world of feeling, and the peace and calm which can descend upon a man, make of water a most apposite symbol of this interior subtle world of the lower nature in which most of us live, and wherein our consciousness is predominantly focussed.

The average man or woman is predominantly a blend of the physical and emotional natures; all early races have this characteristic and the probability is that, in old Atlantis, civilisation was entirely centred in the feelings and the desires, in the emotions, and—among its most advanced types—in the heart life. John the Baptist therefore gave the baptism of water which testified to the purification of the emotional nature, which must always be a preliminary step to the purification by fire.

A new factor now enters in, the discriminating faculty of the mind. By means of it. the disciple can Wog the mental life under control and dedicate it to the life of the kingdom of God, which Is consummated at the Third Initiation.

Through the correct use of the mind, the disciple is led to make right choice, and to balance (with wisdom) the endless pairs of opposites. We pass through the Binh initiation some what unconsciously.

The full significance of what we have undergone does not appear to us; we are “Infants In Christ,” and as infants we just live and submit to discipline, gradually growing toward maturity. But there comes a time in the life of every initiate when choice must be made, and Christ was faced with this.

A clear, clean Interior break Is to be made with the past before we can face towards a future of service, consciously undertaken, and know that from that rime on nothing will be the same. This initiation marked a tremendous change in the life of Jesus of Narareth.

Up to that time, for thirty years, lie had simply been the carpenter of the little town, and the son of His parents. He was a personality doing much good in a small sphere. But after the purification in Jordan, having “fulfilled all righteousness,” (Sr. Man., ill, 15.)

Ile became the Christ, and went about His country, serving the race and speaking those words which have moulded for centuries our Western civilisation. For each of us there must come the same great expansion, and it occurs when we me fitted to take the second initiation. Our desire-life is then confronted with essential choices which only the mind can enable us properly to handle.

We are told in Cruden’s Concordance that the name John means “which God gave,” and In the three names which appear together in this episode—John, Jesus and Christ—the whole story of the consecrated aspirant is summed up: John, symbolising the divine aspect deeply hidden in man. which prompts a man towards the needed purity; Jesus, in this case symbolising the consecrated, pledged disciple or initiate, ready for that process which will be the seal of his purification; Christ, the divine indwelling Son of God, able now to manifest In Jesus, because Jesus has submitted to the baptism of John. That submission and completed purification brought its reward.

It was at this initiation that God Himself proclaimed His Son to be the One in Whom He was well pleased.” Every initiation is simply a recognition. It is a false Idea, current In many schools of the mysteries and of esoteddsm, that initiation connotes a mysterious ceremony wherein, through the medium of the initiator and the rod of initiation, conditions are definitely changed in the aspirant, so that forever after he is altered and different. An Initiation takes place whenever a man becomes, through his own self-effort, an initiate. Then having taken “the kingdom of Heaven by violence? (St Mart., XI. a.) and having “worked out” his “own salvation through fear and trembling,” (Philippians. It Li) his spiritual status is immediately recognised by his peers, and he is admitted to initiation.

At Initiation two things happen: the initiate discovers his fellow initiates, those with whom he can associate, and he finds out also the mission to which he is called. He becomes aware of his divinity in a new and factual sense, not just as a deeply spiritual hope, an inniguing hypothetical possibility and his heart’s desire. He knows himself to be a son of Gad, therefore recognition is accorded to him. This was strikingly the case with Jesus Christ. His task emerged in its dread Implications before His eyes, and this must surely have been the reason why He was driven into the wilderness. The urge to solitude, the search for that quiet where reflection and determination can strengthen each other, was the natural outcome of this recognition. He saw what He had to do—to serve, to suffer and to found the kingdom of God. The expansion of consciousness was immediate and deep. Dr. Schweitzer says in this connection:

About Jesus’ earlier development we know nothing. All Iles in the dark. Only this is sure: at his baptism the secret of his existence was disclosed to him—namely, that he was the One whom God had destined to be the Messiah. With this revelation he was complete, and underwent no further development. For now he is assured that, until the near coming of the messianic age which was to reveal his glorious dignity, he was to labour for the Kingdom as the unrecognised and hidden Messiah, and must prove and purify himself together with his friends in the final Affliction?

Instincts suffice only for a nature which, on the whole, remains on one level. An individual who is more guided by unconscious choice than by the conscious one, tends therefore toward outspoken psychic conservatism.

This is the reason the primitive does not change in the course of thousands of years, and it is also the cause of his fearing everything strange and unusual. Were he less conservative, it might lead to maladaptation, and thus to the greatest of psychic dangers, namely a kind of neurosis.

A higher and wider consciousness which only comes by means of assimilating the unfamiliar, tends towards autonomy, towards revolution against the old gods who are nothing other than those powerful, unconscious, primordial images which, up to this time, have held consciousness in thrall.

“The more powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it the conscious will, the more is the unconscious forced into the background. When this happens, it becomes easily possible for the conscious structures to be detached from the unconscious images. Gaining thus in freedom, they break the chains of mere instinctiveness, and finally arrive at a state that is deprived of, or contrary to instinct. Consciousness thus torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of primordial images, possesses a Promethean freedom, it is true, but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hubris. It soars above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of capsizing is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak members of such a society, who again Promethean-like, are bound by the unconscious to the Caucasus. The wise Chinese would say in the words of the I Ching: When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths; night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin. —C.C. Jung

Jung shows that only the strong can break the anchor-holds of the collective unconscious. When this is done, a condition is produced in the Promethean, in which he is receptive to new ideas. He is, as it were, brainwashed of old concepts, old patterns of activity and old idols. He is not an iconoclast, for he is ready for new ideas, and new idols. It is then that the Soul gains its real opportunity to take hold and direct its lower triad, the personality. New anchors are now established by the man with the Fifth kingdom, the hierarchy of Masters. This new realm is complementary to the lower primordial archetypes described in Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the higher counterpart of those lower anchors which bound the man to primordial images hitherto.

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity. Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.

When a man has made his contact through meditation with the group to which he belongs. and becomes, therefore, ever more and more group conscious, he is then in a position to take what are called a series of initiations.

These initiations are simply expansions of consciousness, brought about with the help of Those who have already achieved the goal. Who have already identified Themselves with the group, and Who are a conscious part of the body of the Heavenly Man. With Their assistance, and through Their aid, a man will gradually awaken to the realisation that is Theirs. There is great interest everywhere today in this subject of Initiation- and an over-emphasis has been laid upon Its ceremonial aspect.

We need to remember that every great unfoldment of consciousness is an Initiation.

Every step forward along the path of awareness is an initiation. When an atom of substance was built into the form, it was for that atom an initiation. It became aware of another type of force. and its range of contact became wider. when the consciousness of the vegetable and animal kingdom merged, and the life passed from the lower kingdom into the higher, that was an initiation.

When theconsciousness of the animal expanded into that of the human being, still another great initiation took place. All the four kingdoms have been entered by an initiation, or through an expansion of consciousness.

Ahead of the human family lies now the fifth, or spiritual kingdom, and it is likewise entered through a certain initiation, as an be seen by those who intelligently read their New Testament. And in all these cases these initiations have been brought about by the help of Those who already know.

Thus we have within the evolutionary scheme not great gaps between one kingdom and another, and between one state of awareness and another, but a gradual development of consciousness, and one in which we, each one of us, have had and will have our share. if we can remember this universality of initiation we shall have a better proportioned point of view in connection with it.

Every time that we become more aware of our environment, and our mental content is Increased. it Is an initiation on a tiny sale. Every time our horizon widens, and we think and sec more broadly, it is an initiation, and herein to us lies the value of life itself, and the greatness of our opportunity.

Every initiation has to be self-initiated. That final stage when definite help is brought to us from outside sources is not achieved because there are great Beings anxious to help us, Who come to us where we are and seek to lift us. It comes to us because we have done the necessary work, and nothing can stop it coming. It is our right. Those who have achieved can and will and do aid and assist us, but Their hands are tied until we have done our share of the undertaking. Nothing therefore that we do to increase our usefulness in the world, no steps that we take to build better bodies, no effort that we make to gain selfcontrol and to equip our mental body, is ever lost; it is all something which we are adding to the total we are piling up, which will some day bring us to a great revelation, and every hourly, daily effort that we make, swells the tide of energy which will sweep us to the portal of initiation. The meaning of the word “initiation” is to “to go into.” It means simply that an initiate is one who has taken the first steps into the spiritual kingdom, and has had the first series of spiritual revelations, each one of which is a key to a still greater revelation.

The indwelling electric “Will” who is consciously experiencing through these material bodies hold these dense material sheaths together, till it consciously decides that it is no more interested to dwell any more in them.

The same process of materialization, and then subsequent liberation after gained material experience is followed also by a Prajapati [planetary scheme logos], as well as a Solar logos.

We speak much of the at-one-ment which Christ made within Himself and for man. We recognise the unity He felt with the Father, and that He has called us to a similar divine unity. But is it not possible that He established a synthesis broader than that of the individual and God—the synthesis of the kingdom of God?

What do these words mean? We have talked of the kingdom of Heaven in terms of separation. We are either in that kingdom or out of it. We are told that we must step out of the kingdom of men (controlled by the world, the flesh and the devil) into another kingdom which is pictured as utterly different. Yet is this so? All aspects of the three sub-human kingdoms—animal, vegetable and mineral—are found In man; and their synthesis, plus another factor, the divine Intellect, we call the human kingdom. Man unifies in himself the so-called lesser manifestations of deity. In the sub-human kingdoms of nature we find three major types of consciousness: the mineral kingdom, with its subjective discriminating power, its capacity to grow, and its ultimate radio-activity; the vegetable kingdom, with its sensitivity or sentiency, and its developing response apparatus which is sensitive to sunlight, to warmth and cold, and to other environing climatic conditions; the animal kingdom with its greatly increased awareness, its capacity for free movement and for wider contacts through its instinctive nature. The human kingdom embodies all these types of awareness—consciousness, sentiency, instinct—plus that mysterious human faculty which we call “the mind,” and we sum up all these inherited qualities in the word “self-conscious.”

There comes, however, in the experience of the intelligent human being, a slowly dawning recognition that there is something still greater and of deeper value outside himself. He is sensitised to a subtler range of contacts and to impressions which he calls spiritual or ideal or mystical.

Another type of consciousness begins to germinate in him, and at the 05] birth at Bethlehem this awareness becomes manifested and recognisable. Just as the human being synthesises in himself all that has been, plus his own peculiar constitution and qualities, so in him can also begin to emerge and demonstrate qualities which are not human. Members of the kingdom of God will surely embody the heritage of four kingdoms, as man embodies the heritage of three.

This higher citizenship involves the expression of the Christ consciousness, which is the consciousness of the group, of the relation of the part to the whole (something which Christ continuously emphasised) and of the human to the divine.

The result of this realisation must surely be, under the evolutionary scheme, the appearance of another kingdom in nature. This constitutes the great task of Christ. Through the power of His realised divinity He produced the man who blended in Himself the best of all that had been, and revealed also what could be.

He brought together into a functioning unity the higher and the lower, and made out of them “one new man.” He founded the kingdom of God on earth, and produced a synthesis of all the kingdoms in nature, thus causing the appearance of a fifth kingdom. We might sum up the at-one-ments which He brought about as follows:

1. He unified in Himself to perfection the physical, emotional and mental aspects of man, and demonstrated therefore the perfect Individual.
2. He unified in Himself soul and body, the higher and the lower aspects, and therefore produced a divine incarnation.
3. lie unified in Himself the best of 41 the kingdoms in nature. mineral. vegetable. animal, which means in their synthesis, the human with the totellect functioning.
4. Then lie blended this synthesis with a higher spititual factor and brought to the birth another kingdom in nature, the fifth.

Christ, having produced in Himself one unification or at-one-ment after another, for the benefit of humanity, appears before John the Baptist, and passes through the second initiation, that of purification In the waters of Jordan.

Through 1961 the process of baptism, and through the temptations which followed, He evidenced His maturity. faced His mission, and demonstrated to the world His purity and His power.

The third Initiation, that of the Tronsfiguratiort. testified to the fact of the at one-mem which Christ made between soul and body. Integration was complete. and the consequent illumination was made apparent to His disciples. He appeared before them as Son of Man and Son of God, and basing proved to them Who lie was. He faced the death which lay ahead of Him, and the Intervening service.

In the fourth initiation. He demonstrated this Integration not only as God.Man. but as the One Who enfolded In His consciousness the entire world of men. Ile unified Himself with humanity. and portrayed the effectiveness of that divine energy which enabled Him to say In troth, -I. If I be lifted up from the Earth, will draw all men unto Me? (Sr. John. XII. 32.) lie was lifted up between Earth and Heaven, and for two thousand yeas these words of His have stood unchallenged.

“Then coined, Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John. to be baptised of him. But John forbade him. saying. I have need to be baptised of Thee and earnest Thou to me? ‘

And Jews answering said unto him. Suffer It to be so now, for it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered Him.

‘And Jesus, when lie was baptised, went up straightaway out of the wales: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove. and lighting upon Him. –

And lo a voice from heaven. saying. This is my beloved Son. In Whom I am well pleased?

In these simple words we ate told the story of this Initiation. The keynote Is purification. and it closed a period of proparation. of quiet service and inaugurated a cycle of strenuous ( 97) activity. The pudficadon of the lower nature is a requirement which the Christian Church has ever emphasised as has also the Hindu faith. Christ held this ideal before His disciples and all men when He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (St. Matt., V, 8.)

Christ in this great initiation, entered into the stream, and the waters passed over Him. In India this initiation is called that of “entering the stream,” and he who undergoes it is regarded as having demonstrated both physical and psychic purity. In considering this initiation we must remember that two kinds of baptism are referred to in the story.

“John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptise you with water: but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose:

He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (St. Luke., III, 16.)

There are therefore two kinds of baptism:

1. That of John the Baptist, which is the baptism by water.
2. The baptism of Jesus Christ, which is that of the Holy Ghost and of fire.

In these two symbols much of the story of human development is summed up, and the joint work of John the Baptist and of Jesus produced a synthesis which is indicative of the immediate objective of our racial endeavour.

The symbolism is exact according to the ancient mystery teaching. A dose study of this symbolic rendering of a basic truth would greatly profit the seeker in all countries, and an understanding of the significance of the symbols employed would throw much light upon reality. In the evolution of the race the sentient feeling nature is [99] first developed, and water has ever been the symbol of that nature.

The fluid nature of the emotions, the constant shifting between sentient pleasure and pain, the storms which arise in the world of feeling, and the peace and calm which can descend upon a man, make of water a most apposite symbol of this interior subtle world of the lower nature in which most of us live, and wherein our consciousness is predominantly focussed.

The average man or woman is predominantly a blend of the physical and emotional natures; all early races have this characteristic and the probability is that, in old Atlantis, civilisation was entirely centred in the feelings and the desires, in the emotions, and—among its most advanced types—in the heart life. John the Baptist therefore gave the baptism of water which testified to the purification of the emotional nature, which must always be a preliminary step to the purification by fire.

A new factor now enters in, the discriminating faculty of the mind. By means of it. the disciple can Wog the mental life under control and dedicate it to the life of the kingdom of God, which Is consummated at the Third Initiation.

Through the correct use of the mind, the disciple is led to make right choice, and to balance (with wisdom) the endless pairs of opposites. We pass through the Binh initiation some what unconsciously.

The full significance of what we have undergone does not appear to us; we are “Infants In Christ,” and as infants we just live and submit to discipline, gradually growing toward maturity. But there comes a time in the life of every initiate when choice must be made, and Christ was faced with this.

A clear, clean Interior break Is to be made with the past before we can face towards a future of service, consciously undertaken, and know that from that rime on nothing will be the same. This initiation marked a tremendous change in the life of Jesus of Narareth.

Up to that time, for thirty years, lie had simply been the carpenter of the little town, and the son of His parents. He was a personality doing much good in a small sphere. But after the purification in Jordan, having “fulfilled all righteousness,” (Sr. Man., ill, 15.)

Ile became the Christ, and went about His country, serving the race and speaking those words which have moulded for centuries our Western civilisation. For each of us there must come the same great expansion, and it occurs when we me fitted to take the second initiation. Our desire-life is then confronted with essential choices which only the mind can enable us properly to handle.

We are told in Cruden’s Concordance that the name John means “which God gave,” and In the three names which appear together in this episode—John, Jesus and Christ—the whole story of the consecrated aspirant is summed up: John, symbolising the divine aspect deeply hidden in man. which prompts a man towards the needed purity; Jesus, in this case symbolising the consecrated, pledged disciple or initiate, ready for that process which will be the seal of his purification; Christ, the divine indwelling Son of God, able now to manifest In Jesus, because Jesus has submitted to the baptism of John. That submission and completed purification brought its reward.

It was at this initiation that God Himself proclaimed His Son to be the One in Whom He was well pleased.” Every initiation is simply a recognition. It is a false Idea, current In many schools of the mysteries and of esoteddsm, that initiation connotes a mysterious ceremony wherein, through the medium of the initiator and the rod of initiation, conditions are definitely changed in the aspirant, so that forever after he is altered and different. An Initiation takes place whenever a man becomes, through his own self-effort, an initiate. Then having taken “the kingdom of Heaven by violence? (St Mart., XI. a.) and having “worked out” his “own salvation through fear and trembling,” (Philippians. It Li) his spiritual status is immediately recognised by his peers, and he is admitted to initiation.

At Initiation two things happen: the initiate discovers his fellow initiates, those with whom he can associate, and he finds out also the mission to which he is called. He becomes aware of his divinity in a new and factual sense, not just as a deeply spiritual hope, an inniguing hypothetical possibility and his heart’s desire. He knows himself to be a son of Gad, therefore recognition is accorded to him. This was strikingly the case with Jesus Christ. His task emerged in its dread Implications before His eyes, and this must surely have been the reason why He was driven into the wilderness. The urge to solitude, the search for that quiet where reflection and determination can strengthen each other, was the natural outcome of this recognition. He saw what He had to do—to serve, to suffer and to found the kingdom of God. The expansion of consciousness was immediate and deep. Dr. Schweitzer says in this connection:

About Jesus’ earlier development we know nothing. All Iles in the dark. Only this is sure: at his baptism the secret of his existence was disclosed to him—namely, that he was the One whom God had destined to be the Messiah. With this revelation he was complete, and underwent no further development. For now he is assured that, until the near coming of the messianic age which was to reveal his glorious dignity, he was to labour for the Kingdom as the unrecognised and hidden Messiah, and must prove and purify himself together with his friends in the final Affliction?

Instincts suffice only for a nature which, on the whole, remains on one level. An individual who is more guided by unconscious choice than by the conscious one, tends therefore toward outspoken psychic conservatism.

This is the reason the primitive does not change in the course of thousands of years, and it is also the cause of his fearing everything strange and unusual. Were he less conservative, it might lead to maladaptation, and thus to the greatest of psychic dangers, namely a kind of neurosis.

A higher and wider consciousness which only comes by means of assimilating the unfamiliar, tends towards autonomy, towards revolution against the old gods who are nothing other than those powerful, unconscious, primordial images which, up to this time, have held consciousness in thrall.

“The more powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it the conscious will, the more is the unconscious forced into the background. When this happens, it becomes easily possible for the conscious structures to be detached from the unconscious images. Gaining thus in freedom, they break the chains of mere instinctiveness, and finally arrive at a state that is deprived of, or contrary to instinct. Consciousness thus torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of primordial images, possesses a Promethean freedom, it is true, but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hubris. It soars above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of capsizing is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak members of such a society, who again Promethean-like, are bound by the unconscious to the Caucasus. The wise Chinese would say in the words of the I Ching: When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths; night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin. —C.C. Jung

Jung shows that only the strong can break the anchor-holds of the collective unconscious. When this is done, a condition is produced in the Promethean, in which he is receptive to new ideas. He is, as it were, brainwashed of old concepts, old patterns of activity and old idols. He is not an iconoclast, for he is ready for new ideas, and new idols. It is then that the Soul gains its real opportunity to take hold and direct its lower triad, the personality. New anchors are now established by the man with the Fifth kingdom, the hierarchy of Masters. This new realm is complementary to the lower primordial archetypes described in Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the higher counterpart of those lower anchors which bound the man to primordial images hitherto.