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.