Purpose

Sometimes meditation doesn't reveal anything new or help me order my thoughts. Sometimes it just shows me how tired I am, how much the practice can take out of me. But that realization alone is valuable, because it reminds me that my purpose is to be and to give.

Seeking Eternity

Wise are those who seek eternity in the moment

This sounds like a typical Zen aphorism, but I think it makes sense hermetically too. According to the principle of correspondence, the eternal character of a higher plane should correspond to the transient nature of life as we know it.

If eternity can be described as timelessness, then it corresponds to a moment of "no time", i.e. the present. Eternity is without past or future. The fullness of time corresponds to the emptiness of Zen.

We cannot directly experience eternity, but we can experience its mirror image. In meditation we can encounter moments of no time, a shadow of permanence that passes as soon as it is realized.

CR+C Membership

Good news. I will soon start receiving monographs from CR+C, so I will be able to remedy some of my ignorance about the Lewis tradition within Rosicrucianism.

A word about why I chose CR+C instead of AMORC. It has nothing to do with AMORC as an organization or its members. I have enjoyed learning about both groups. But to my understanding, CR+C offers monographs that are less altered from the versions as originally proffered by H. Spencer Lewis. It's not that I think AMORC's current monographs have less objective value, but if there's any reinterpretation of the material to be done, I would rather work that out myself from my perspective as a mythicist and as someone pursuing my own personal tradition.

Secondly, having listened to Ralph Lewis giving various talks, I have a good opinion of his earnestness, and I know Gary Stewart was Lewis' choice to be the next custodian of the material.

I look forward to this next phase in my education.

Flower of the Golden Union

Lonnie Edwards, M.D. of AMORC has discussed the notion that we live our corporeal lives because our souls chose to experience the journey of mortal existence. I don't pretend to know anything about souls, but the idea does present an interesting interpretation of the fable of Adam and Eve.

Instead of being a story of paradise lost, it might be seen as a myth of two angelic beings who chose to experience mortal lives.

Flower of the Golden Union

In the above hieratic script, read from right to left, the word for flower is written with the two snake-like letters. The Serpent, instead of being cast as a deceiver who tricks the two lovers into giving up their immortality, can be seen as a symbol of regeneration and renewal.

The snake sheds its skin, and winds through the world like a life-giving river. Here he convinces Adam and Eve to shed their old lives and enter the world of mortals together, not to drive them away from God, but to help them better understand him through experiencing divine creation in new ways.

Every myth can have more than one meaning. And while I may not share all of Dr. Edwards' beliefs, I think Rosicrucianism is more about finding synchrony than similarity.

Microcosmic Awareness

Just me and my universe

Spirituality often has a stated goal of helping to achieve Cosmic Awareness in one form or another, but awareness of self — microcosmic awareness — is at least as important, in my view.

The ego has a tendency to not want to stay within defined limits. It wants to expand and intrude into more space and time than you actually occupy.

Awareness needs to include awareness of your own body, the fact that your mind is situated within you, within the extent of your physical self and the duration of your lifetime.

But the ego doesn't like to be restrained. It will fight back against meditation that tries to compel it to recognize its own rational boundaries. I've experienced this psychical push-back in the form of sudden chills, or feeling like I have a sore throat coming on. It can be a struggle but it's worth the effort.

A spirituality that strengthens the self has to first acknowledge the self, and that the power and importance and longevity the ego would like to believe it has isn't real. The cosmos encompasses you, not the other way around.

Ralph Lewis on Meditation

On youtube you can find recordings of Ralph Lewis discussing a number of AMORC-related subjects, including meditation. While much of what he said has broad, general value, there were a couple of points that struck me as odd. (Of course, a short introductory lecture doesn't reveal everything contained in the Lewis monographs, but I can only react to his commentaries.)

Firstly, I think the practice he described sells people short. Sitting in a comfortable chair and meditating for five minutes is just not rigorous enough. It's not going to train your mind and body to work together in totality the way zazen or yoga would do.

Secondly, the meditation he described sounds like a very vague New Age kind of thing. There's nothing particularly Rosicrucian about it.

I think meditating on Rosicrucian symbolism, specifically, can help you unlock an inner mythology as experienced through the prism of the tradition. For example, my visualization once drifted spontaneously to the image of a sun disk moving slowly across the sky, with Aten-like beams radiating from it. I then saw white and red rose petals fluttering down through the air, and landing in a sort of Egyptian shallow reed lake. A girl wading through the water picked up some of the floating red petals and remade them into a rose blossom, offering it as a gift to the sun god. This was the origin of the golden cross + red rose.

If, as the original manifestos suggest, the book of nature is inscribed within all living things, then you only have let it come to the surface and show itself to you in symbolic ways. But this requires more, I think, than just a short daily routine that you could pick up from any New Age website.

De Religione Catharon

Maurice Magre was a French author from Toulouse, a contemporary of H. Spencer Lewis and a fellow student of mysticism. Magre held a romantic view of the history of his native Languedoc and the persecution of medieval Cathars in that region.

He developed a notion that C.R.C. was a scion of a Cathar family, and that he and his earliest Rosicrucian brethren were educated in that religion, but this seems a little far-fetched to me.

The Cathars held a dualistic view of creation, and thought renunciation was essential to escape the hateful material plane once and for all. This is a far cry from elevating nature almost to the status of co-redeemer as the Rosicrucians did.

The Cathars may have interpreted Christian resurrection as a kind of repetitive reincarnation, with final escape from material existence only being possible once the soul has reached a certain level of maturity over multiple lifetimes, and that's not dissimilar per se to some Rosicrucian teachings and those of other spiritual movements. But a vague similarity doesn't establish a plausible link.

For the Cathars, nature was not a divine classroom but an infernal prison, and the Rosicrucian manifestos just don't share that same general outlook.

Movement

I've had the experience of moving through space during meditation, or perhaps having space move through me (connecting the polarities of stillness and movement?)

I'm not sure what else to say about it at the moment, so I'll leave that to be further digested.

Se disserere : unlocking oneself or examining oneself.

Speaking In Tongues

Χριστος (Christos) means the Anointed One, and was the basis for the original Christian symbol, the juxtaposed Chi-Rho. By this sign, early Christians could identify themselves both as followers of a particular Anointed One, and as anointed ones themselves.

Anyone who has been through the sacrament of baptism is an anointed one, an initiate of the Christian Mysteries — which is exactly what they were in the early years of what is called the Common Era. (I actually prefer Anno Domini, because at least that doesn't try to evade the question of where, which is to say from what religion, the western dating system comes from.) Christian initiation came to literally embody the journey from birth to death, and an initiation into Christian mysticism became an enlightened journey starting at a spiritual rebirth, one which took place, at minimum, at the age of majority.

The Chi-Rho symbol may have also been widely recognized in the Roman era as a figurative representation of a person on a cross, if Simcha Jacobovici is correct in his theory that Roman crucifixion was actually done using x-shaped crosses instead of t-shaped ones. Today the Chi-Rho can still be seen in liturgical use even in the shadow of the crucifix which has since been transformed into its more recognizable image.

Though Christianity is still occult in many practices, as anyone who has been to a Tridentine Sacrifice of the Mass can attest, it has also positioned itself as the enemy of occultism the further it has moved away from being a secretive fraternity. Christianity, in effect, has long since become a religion, not a brotherhood. Apart from much ballyhooed examples of masonic messages preserved in stone and stained glass, Christianity's metamorphosis has taken it from hidden meaning to a common faith of uncommon language.

Yet at the crucible point of Lutheranism, Rosicrucianism arose to simultaneously call for universal reformation and to cloak its summons in the language and symbolism of elite learned men. What can be made of this seeming contradiction ?

In the 17th century, Latin — not the languages of Germans, or Huguenots, or the English Reformation, or Muslims or Chinese for that matter — was still the language by which "proper learning" was transmitted. Publishing in Latin was a way of proclaiming "this is legit," and it still is in some cases. If you've ever heard the name of tyrannosaurus rex, you probably see what I mean.

Liberatio per artem et scientiam — liberation through art and knowledge. If I were to start a Rosicrucian Order of my own, this might be its motto. For those of us in the West, "science" is the term we use to describe that which can be known ; "art" is the term by which we describe that which could not otherwise be known.

Another word I like, which could be described as a translation of "Rosicrucian" (though perhaps by no one but me) is 芸者 (geisha) — one whose entire life could be described as an ongoing work of art.

If the term Rosicrucian does not describe someone of continual seeking and learning and absorbing things foreign to them, and expressing those thing in multiple esoteric and exoteric ways, then I don't know what it means.

Bride of Achilles - The Heroine's Journey

I would like to refer back to The Pansophy Secret Behind Western Initiation in which Samuel Robinson discussed the hero's loss of his phallic symbol and its restoration by the goddess. My question is : What if the hero is a heroine instead ? She has no phallus to lose, though she could be (re-)united with one in the form of a god.

To be clear, my purpose here is not to dispute the pansophic view of universal western initiation, which I don't disagree with. Rather, I wish to propose a complementary symbolic scheme which I think also relates back to mythic precedent.

The basic Rose-Croix image can be seen as symbolic of the union between masculine and feminine, and we have in Christianity, for example, St. Teresa of Avila and her desire to be pierced by the arrow of God's love. But what of older civilizations that have informed the western tradition ? I believe the concept does ultimately derive from them, though it was often the case that such stories were told from the point of view of masculine desire (and abduction/rape of the object of that desire) rather than from the perspective of the feminine desire to be taken.

First we have the myth of Persephone, apparently a key figure in the Eleusian mysteries. She is abducted by Hades (or runs off with him to become the queen of the underworld?) thus passing into death and being reborn in new life, both in the form of the Earth's fertility and, in some versions, giving birth to divine offspring. There is also the example of Helen of Troy, abducted by or running off with Paris, suffering "death" at the hands of Orestes and Elektra, but in fact taken up by Apollo to dwell in the heavens. Then we have the story of Iphigenia, who goes to her supposed wedding only to face immolation at the hands of her father (Elektra complex, anyone?) but who is miraculously saved from death to be transformed into a goddess or into the bride of alpha male Achilles in the afterlife.

For me, these stories illustrate the concept of a Heroine's Journey, of a seeker who doesn't start her path missing a link to the feminine and needing to be made whole by it, but rather the opposite.

The examples are not limited to ancient Greece, either. In Egyptian lore we can look at a goddess like Sekhmet, a destructive "lost soul" who's knocked out for three days, after which she achieves reintegration with the divine realm when she wakes and falls in love with a creator god. It's known that Sekhmet's journey was celebrated with temple rites and associated with healing magic.

In ancient times, women had their own mystery schools, presumably designed for and according to their own inner journeys. The Bacchae would go up into the hills and do whatever it is they did, with a strict "no boys allowed" policy. In the Christian era, self-initiation became virtually the only path open to female esoterics, buoyed on the back of a convent education or simply by local folklore.

In the modern age, some women have gravitated back toward a segregated paradigm centered on communing with their own femininity, while others have embraced a more gender-inclusive mysticism, but one originally engineered by men for the purpose of reaffirming goddess-knowledge as part of the path to salvation. The pursuit of reintegration through a Christ figure who has not been desexed has not, to my knowledge, been a focus of widespread attention, but it's one I've long felt an attraction to, and I hope this post has shed some light on it.

Internalization

When you internalize something while meditating on mystic symbols, what you receive is often hard to put into words, and impossible to teach from a technical, results-oriented standpoint. A spontaneous experience of beauty can't really be known or held onto.

That's one reason I remain skeptical of structured initiation and experimentation, though I'm willing to try it. In my personal practice, I'm not trying to achieve anything. I'm trying to be anything, and nothing. Perhaps the eternal is paradoxically transient, and the only way to connect with it is to let it pass through you and then let it go.

How much esotericism is too much ?

We're all "initiated" into a general cultural knowledge base, and then into progressively more narrow knowledge bases as determined by education level and group affiliations. So we all have some degree of esoteric knowledge, i.e. knowledge that not everyone else possesses.

Some esoteric symbols (for example, the AMORC Rose-Croix-Ankh-Pyramid design on the left) are vague enough to be appreciated for aesthetic reasons, and for individuals to project their own personal meanings onto them. You don't have to be a high-degree initiate of AMORC in order to make something out of that symbol, even if you don't know precisely what the initiated have learned about it.

On the other, consider the Rose-Croix design on the right. It's esoteric symbolism is more detailed, and thus more impenetrable to outsiders. It's less likely to be adopted by someone who just came across it on the internet and liked how it looks. You'd want to know what all the stuff on there actually means.

That might serve as an enticement to join a fraternal organization that promises to reveal its mysteries to you, but it might also make that organization's membership suspect. Putting yourself out there as part of a secretive, select group can make you a target for conspiracy theories and charges of elitism.

Wearing a shirt with E=mc² on it says one thing about you ; wearing a shirt with string theory equations on it says something else.

Both the esoteric cross and the esoteric equation communicate specific information, but only to the elite who have been inducted into the Great Mysteries. Who knows what they're really up to behind closed doors ?

That's the question the uninitiated will always ask themselves, and the answer usually isn't anything good for the initiates. Mystery schools still have to walk a fine line between exciting interest and inciting envy.

The Utopian Spirit

In reading this post on the Pansophers.com Rosicrucian Tradition blog, which references the utopian vision of the movement, I was reminded of this line from Utopia itself :

           Libenter impartio mea, non gravatim accipio meliora
           Freely do I impart my best, and not unwillingly do I receive better.

For me, this quote encapsulates the harmonious mind, an openness to sharing that which is good and improving oneself through the generosity of others' contributions.

The world is full of things to nitpick, and I am a notorious nitpicker. My natural state is too close to that polarity, in hermetic terms, so I have to make an effort to balance that out.

I think the current state of our culture is actively opposed to harmonious sharing, but in truth the times have been few and far between when it wasn't. Movements that try to change that en masse have had little long-term success, degenerating into schisms and battles of ego.

The small act of opening oneself to another's current of consciousness may be the best way, or the only way, to really change the universe.

Seven Principles of Hermeticism

The Seven Principles of Hermeticism as found in The Kybalion feature prominently in some modern Rosicrucian material. These are my own brief observations concerning them.

Principle of Menalism

Although this is philosophically debatable, I will treat it as axiomatic in order to explore the succeeding principles.

Principle of Correspondence

Here I must point out the elephant in the room : any notions concerning souls which can exist outside our bodies, or higher planes of existence, are speculation. They may be true ; but without any way of objectively falsifying them, we can't possitively assert them. We can, however, focus on this principle as a symbolic idea which can help us in our meditative practice.

Principle of Vibration

Here we find at least a degree of objective truth, in that we know that nothing in the observable universe is ever completely at rest, but that does not necessarily imply that everything that is in motion has consciousness or is connected to broader consciousness. Under the Principle of Mentality, let us allow the possibility.

Principle of Polarity

As with the Principle of Correspondence, what we are dealing with here is an unfalsifiable philosophical concept. I think it would possibly be better expressed as the Principle of Spectrum, given that theoretical opposites usually exist at any given moment on closer points that than those of infinite extremes.

Principle of Rhythm

This is perhaps the most self-evident of the hermetic principles, almost to the point of not needing to be specified.

Principle of Cause and Effect

Here I find myself most at odds with the principles of hermeticism, given what we now know about randomness at the quantum scale, de novo genetic mutations, and so on. I admit that, in my case, I have not achieved any satisfactory understanding of how to view or incorporate this principle, except perhaps to say that is the most unknowable. It may be that I simply find too much scientific evidence pointing to an unguided universe for me to work with this in any meaningful way. Even if God exists, it appears that he is completely incognito, and therefore our practice can proceed unimpeded under the assumption that he may not.

Principle of Gender

I don't really agree with the way in which "masculine" and "feminine" qualities are defined in hermeticism, which I find culturally antiquated. I'm by no means opposed to the principle itself, but I think it could also be linked closely to my proposed Principle of Spectrum, and at the same time separate from it. For me, this is the most mysterious and personal of the hermectic principles, almost impossible to define for anyone else, but unlikely to remain unexperienced in some form by individual seekers.

In summary, while I find the principles of hermeticism to be interesting, I consider them peripheral rather than central to my practice.

Spirandum ante sententiam gnoscite

Egyptian Hieratic Aum

Know the breath before the thought. This is a concept which I think is agreeable to traditional Rosicrucians, the Om often being incorporated into their cosmo-conception.

Let your thoughts explore the object of your meditation, but don't cling to them. Be aware of your thoughts as they surface, then let them go and return to the breath.

This may be at odds with the proceduralism of Egyptian magic and European alchemy, but I think it's at least a good place to start.

Welcome

Welcome to the blog of the Zen Rosicrucian. What is that, you may ask ? In short, it is the practice of zazen in contemplation of Rosicrucian symbolism.

The original Rosicrucian manuscripts of the 17th century combined anti-authoritarian Reformist Christianity with esotericism, syncretism and spiritual alchemy, whereas the prominent Rosicrucian fraternal organizations of today, such as AMORC, CR+C and SRIA incorporate a broad focus of structured study and practice largely revolving around concepts that were trendy in the Edwardian era (Egyptology, Atlantis, examination of psychic phenomena).

As a Zen Rosicrucian, I practice a more minimalist approach, according the maxim Calix iam plenus replevit non potest, or "you can't refill a cup that's already full". Through simple meditation on Rosicrucian imagery, I try to empty myself and allow my conscious and unconscious minds to explore the symbolism as they will, treating that symbolism, after a fashion, as a form of Zen koan.

If this concept intrigues you, I invite you to read further.

How do I practice ?

Typically, I set up my small Rosicrucian altar, fill the brass bowl with water, light candles and incense and, seated before the altar in typical zazen fashion, I mediate quietly, allowing my thoughts to flow freely. Afterwards, I take the bowl to the sink and use the water for a post-meditative ablution.

This ablution was added at the suggestion of my Neopagan sister-in-law, who says it improves my aura. I don't know whether this is true, but I like it as a calming and cleansing way to conclude my practice.

What I hope to experience generally during meditation is a sense of inner joy, as Buddhists might put it, but this doesn't always come to me. However, it's important not to have too much attachment to any particular goal. In sese ire est ire extra tempus — to go into yourself is to go outside of time, to escape your own drives and thus meet yourself in a state of renewal.

I hope you've enjoyed this introductory post, and hopefully more will accrue.