Hālau 'Aha Hui Lānākila

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH – III

All who take advantage of this matchless means of true self-renewal can inaugurate a fundamental change in the polluted Manas through Agniyoga, the sacred science of baptism through the fires of self-purgation. Kama manas, the inverted reflection of Manas, becomes constricted through the cohesion of the delusive image of personal identity bound up with intellectual autoeroticism, physical sensations, sights and sounds, deceptive externalities, and the knots of perversion tightening the myriad cords of foreshortened conceptions of space-time. Kama manas is the externalizing and rationalizing mind that needlessly negates others as well as oneself. It is the mediocre mis-educated insecure mind that cuts up everything and dismisses the divine with faint praise and the sneer of guilty derision! Kama manas is discontinuous and it creates a monotonous movement from one extreme to the opposite so that it cannot come to rest, but is constantly enslaved by restless caution and is constitutionally incapable of transcending its own meanness and spiritual sterility. All of this is the unnatural legacy of the Fourth Race of graceless giants. Whilst, in the economy of Nature, even such tendencies to grossness represent the tortured descent of the light of consciousness to the lesser hierarchies and lower emanations, the excess of humbug with which this self-assassination is perpetrated through cowardly speech is indeed abnormal. This is the origin of obsessive guilt and compulsive fear, arising from the degradation of the Holy of Holies, the desecration of the sacred tabernacle, the massacre of innocents, the endlessly evasive abdication of responsibility through pride in hypocrisy, self-torment, and the dressing up of moral blindness in the cloak of false modesty. On the other hand, all human beings of every race and tribe, every creed and nihilistic sect, innately enjoy a residual sense of decency, a feeling for tenderness, forgiveness and magnanimity towards the unloved. This is innate in all human beings because it was the great gift of the gods to the Third Race of Innocents. Without a spark of empathy there would be no conatus, no basis for a rational self-preservation except in the case of those soulless beings who behave like machines and robots. Knowing all this at some level, one can invoke the blessing of the Avatars to fan the faint spark of Buddhi buried within the burnt-out charcoal of a self-throttled Manas. Krishna hinted in the Uttara Gita that even the elongated shadow of self-betrayal could be slowly shrunk by self-attenuation through sacred speech and abstention from harm to the helpless life-atoms.

Each and all must restore what is natural to the whole of humanity and was exemplified par excellence by the authentically initiated Brahmins of antiquity who had little to do with the India of recent millennia, but were true transmitters of the oral traditions of theurgic utterance until the time of betrayal of the Buddha except in cloistered sanctuaries ofyogins and sannyasins.

When, moved by the law of Evolution, the Lords of Wisdom infused into him the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators. As the child’s first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet were outside, and independent of him. DEVOTION arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us. . . .
It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Aryan heart from the Third Race direct through its first ‘mind-born’ sons – the fruits of Kriyasakti. As time rolled on the holy caste of Initiates produced but rarely, and from age to age, such perfect creatures: beings apart, inwardly, though the same as those who produced them, outwardly.

The Secret Doctrine, i 210-211

The Initiates of the deathless Race scattered the seeds of primordial wisdom among all the races of men and the Mystery Schools in cloistered gardens, caves and sanctuaries around the globe. The innate feeling of devotion throbbed in the sacred chamber of every human heart, but to be able to exemplify it naturally and instantly has become the lost art of magnanimity in the age of Varna Shankar or the Tower of Babel. The gift of graciousness cannot be bequeathed by external structures or physical heredity in Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. The class of souls which delayed incarnation – owing to pride in purity, cowardly caution, fear of involvement in the mire of human fallibility, and a stubbornly selfish refusal to move into more differentiated realms – paradoxically became those very beings who, once they had incarnated, were captive to carnality, weakness of will, and fear-ridden worship of the printed word. The iron of self-contempt and false toughness, image-crippling and spiritual circumcision, entered into their souls, their blood and brain-cells. In the legends and myths of antiquity, the original fear of incarnation, owing to deficiency in active meditation upon the entire scale of ascent and descent, resulted in the perverse or compulsive pollution of the powers of thought, imagination and reverence for life. The resulting corruption of consciousness and simian imitativeness became the karmic burden of the Pratyeka Buddhas of spiritual selfishness. The atoms of matter were tainted by the double sin of the mindless and miscegenation. As a result, many gluttonous men and women are constantly caught up in those material particles, or become mediumistic through foul thoughts and fear of invasion. Among the sorcerers, traducers and traitors the power of the Aum was lost. The Third Eye closed, with a consequent suffocation of spiritual intuitions in the moral dwarfs of humanity.

The therapeutic restoration of the porosity of the brain-mind to the light of Atma-Buddhi is possible. It depends upon the progressive exemplification of five criteria of what is natural to human self-consciousness. First is the irrepressible feeling of reverence for the unbroken line of descent of the Great Sacrifice of the Hierophantic Host under the eternal Initiator of Initiates, the Evergreen Trees of Knowledge, Enlightenment and Immortality. Honouring others is innate to the human heart: it would show as a true reverence for Nature, for the Spiritual Sun and its myriad rays among all humanity, for all the constellations and the seven kingdoms and the Illustrious Predecessors, Light-Bringers and Pathfinders, reverence that is natural. Anything less is unnatural and abnormal, a moral monstrosity. Second, there is a longing for the ideal forms and archetypes, a great joy in withdrawing from the pressure of concern with the concrete to the empyrean of invisible potentials, a pure love of Truth, Beauty and Goodness in all forms, selfless ideation on metaphysical paradigms, parapolitical ideals and Universal Good – the Agathon. Third, and this is certainly a very decisive test, an innate, instructive and ineradicable conviction (regardless of culture) that the sexual act is sacred, that the Lesser Mysteries of Eros must mirror the pristine Light of the Logos invoked through Sound and Silence in the Greater Mysteries. Anything else runs the risk of ever-increasing desecration of the dignity of human beings, the sanctity of the Holy of Holies, as well as the fecundity of human potentials. Fourth, there is devotion, the only feeling natural to the hearts of men and women of all races, common to the human babe and the young of animals. Devotion, understood rightly, shows in the Rishis and Sages as well as in a child’s simplicity which co-exists with authentic solemnity and inner depth. Inherent in the human heart is the ever-present sense of the sacred and the feeling that everything in human worship of the Divine is worthy of minimal respect. This is magically shown in that which corresponds to Manas among all the senses, the synthesizing sense of touch. The fifth criterion of culture is a recognition of the human body as a temple, not a tomb, of the pilgrim-soul in every person.   There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form. . . . We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! . . . If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression . . . of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles – the great inscrutable Mystery.

The Secret Doctrine, i 212

The pervasive sense of the sacred and universal respect for freedom of thought and choice have become obscured in many victims of modernity owing to a hypnotic fascination with corruption and evil, forgetfulness of the divine mission of the immortal Soul, alienation from others and oneself, especially through fear of failure, estrangement through loneliness, distrust of oneself, and possible misuse in former lives due to cowardice and false ideas connected with evasion of the laws of Nature. Corruption of consciousness must be healed, and what is natural must be restored through the Golden Rule of reciprocity. Already, since 1963, many souls have taken birth in diverse cultures who have a recognition of the need to restore the ethical foundation of human society. This transcends the claims of all cultures to pre-eminence. Such souls will increase in number until a time comes when there will be so many for whom this is so natural that any encouragement given them will help the regeneration of the human race. This will be a distinctly different class of souls from those who came mauled and tormented by the degradation of two world wars, which helped to make popular the works of the corrupt. The attempt to make normal what was abnormal has failed, so far. It was tried in every way, but once the alternatives are known, then what is abnormal had to become more and more desperate and self-destructive because it could not any more pretend to be normal.

The twilight hour of sadists and masochists has now struck, and myriads of pilgrim-souls seek the Midnight Sun and the sacred constellation of the Aquarian Age, which began soon after the fin de siecle. The invisible dawn of the cosmopolis is summoned by the flute of the divine cowherd, beckoning home the matured innocents that dared to dream of a Golden Age. Meanwhile, Nataraja of Kailas and Kala-Hamsa enacts the Tandava Dance over the heads of epicurean giants, stoical dwarfs and cynical eunuchs. The age of sectarian religions, technocratic politics and cultural envy is dead. Kama manas has been dethroned by Buddhi-Taijasi, the Light of the Logos. The age of humanistic science, authentic spirituality and mini-communes has just begun, foreshadowing the end of the twentieth century and the emergence of the City of Man. The inevitable return of initiative to the scattered supporters of what is innate, universal and spiritual, merely suggests that no special pleading is needed for true gratitude and an authentic sense of the sacred. Despite the failures of so many, the philosophy of perfectibility, the religion of responsibility and the science of spirituality will spread far and wide, like the myriad branches of the Ashwatha tree, with its roots in heaven.

The collective self-consciousness that has been perverted must be released through love and wit. If one sees clearly the sacredness of the indestructible teaching of antiquity, one can recognize the Kama Manasic self-interest of Arjuna as a necessary tool in the service of Krishna in the Great War between psuche and nous, the Tower of Babel and the New Jerusalem, the head and the heart of every human being on earth. The true spark of universal brotherhood, reverence for teachers, gratitude to the good earth, and reticent sanctity may, even from a spark, be fanned into the fires of creativity in the service of the civilization of the future. This is the great hope which hides the golden promise. If even a few theophilanthropists would now serve the Bodhi-Tree and the City of Man, the Isle of the Blessed would be grateful beyond measure. Every such sincere effort is assuredly of help in relieving the pain of the human heart, which is widespread today, and also in laying down the universal cornerstones of the academies and ashramsof the future. All cultures need to rediscover what it means to be truly humane. Builders of bridges between Heaven and Earth are few and far between, and always have been; they may be readily recognized by their unswerving fidelity to pledges on behalf of mankind. Citizens of the cosmopolis will unite when they have nothing to lose but their masks of misanthropy – or their fugitive souls, on earth as in heaven.

Hermes, December 1980
Raghavan Iyer