Today we celebrate the entrance into Pisces (at 10,35pm GMT), the sign of Salvation and Liberation – by solemnly sounding forth into the living Space, bearer of the Universal Consciousness, the Christic Assertion associated with this Sign (see the introductory article).
BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS, I AM
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This formula is in the pages of the New Testament handed down by the beloved Disciple, John, and is found in the Gospel parable in which the Master, Jesus, attempted to explain to the Jews the path that leads to eternal Life:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.” So the Jews said to him, “Now we are sure that you are possessed. Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? Or the prophets, who died? Who do you make yourself out to be?”
Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing; but it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ You do not know him, but I know him. And if I should say that I do not know him, I would be like you a liar. But I do know him and I keep his word. Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”
So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” [Gospel according to John 8, 51-59]
With these eternal, timeless words, He who “guides our steps in cosmic Space”, in the Infinite, in the sign of the Return to the Father’s Home (Shamballa), clarifies the Mystery of Life, sacred to the First Ray of Will and Power and transmitted by Vulcan and Pluto, the esoteric and hierarchical ruler of Pisces. This is the key to “the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason’. Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath’, which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present Space. […]”. [Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine. Cosmogenesis]
Pluto filters the powerful energies of Pisces, the sign that conveys the Second and Sixth Ray, with its First Ray energy, thus producing in the disciple the Will to Save. Pisces, the sign of death and fulfilment, is the last sign of the disciple’s journey, the one in which he returns to the Father’s Home on the path that he began in the sign of Aries as a simple aspirant and ends in Pisces as the one who knows all, the victorious Saviour of the World, who frees humanity from enslavement to form.
Christ, with the statement: whoever obeys my word will never see death, brings us back precisely to the idea of the disciple’s journey along the path of karma, which through countless lives allows consciousness to evolve and dissolve, at the end of the journey, into the greater Light.
“Not only is it difficult to assimilate the law of karma, it is still more difficult to perceive the elementary law of incarnation. Yet the scriptures of the most ancient times often spoke of such a change of life. Often have the dwellers of the Subtle World communicated to earthly people their tidings. Frequently people remember about their former lives. For whole ages reincarnations have been acknowledged, but later they were again forgotten and it was even forbidden to think about them. It is difficult to comprehend the reason for such a struggle against the evidence. Sometimes it would have seemed that the wise ones wished to turn their attention only to the future, but such wisdom would be one-sided. People should aspire to unlimited knowledge. One should not command a man not to know. A man should not be deprived of his right to self-perfectment. Let it be known and remembered that the Teacher of life draws a line between past and future.
Thus, let us not close our eyes to reality. The law of incarnation is just. The kernel of the spirit is inviolable and eternal. Infinity affirms Eternity, but everyone can visualize Infinity—which means everyone can realize Eternity. One should not deny the statements of children about their past lives. Essentially they know what has taken place around them. Especially nowadays there often will be rapid reincarnations. Many dwellers of the Subtle World are hastening to return, and herein is expressed the growth and acceleration of evolution. And in such quickening may be seen a rapprochement between the worlds.” [Aum § 97]
But how can we follow Christ’s thoughts, then, how to ‘obey his word’?
“It might be stated first of all that meditation is the science which enables us to arrive at direct experience of God. That in which we live and move and have our being is no longer the object of aspiration, or a symbol to us of a divine possibility. We know God as the Eternal Cause and the source of all that is, including ourselves. We recognize the Whole. We become one with God by becoming one with our own immortal soul, and when that tremendous event takes place we find that the consciousness of the individual soul is the consciousness of the whole, and that separativeness and division, distinctions and the concepts of me and thee, of God and a child of God, have faded away in the knowledge and realization of unity. Dualism has given place to unity. This is the Way of Union. The integrated Personality has been transcended through an ordered process of soul unfoldment, and a conscious at-one-ment has been brought about between the lower or personal self and the higher or divine self.
This duality has to be first realized and then transcended before the Real self becomes, in the consciousness of the man, the Supreme Self. It has been said that the two parts of man have had for long ages nothing in common; these two parts are the spiritual soul and the form nature, but they are joined eternally (and here lies the solution of man’s problem) by the mind principle. In an ancient book of the Hindus, The Bhagavad Gita, these significant words are found:
“Self is the friend of self for him in whom the self is conquered by the Self; but to him who is far from the Self his own self is hostile like an enemy”. And St. Paul says practically the same thing in his desperate cry:
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not… For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me (the real Self) from the body of this death?”
This real self is God — God the triumphant, God the Creator, God the Saviour of man. It is, in the words of St. Paul, “Christ in us, the hope of glory”. This becomes a fact in our consciousness and not simply a much hoped for theory.
Meditation causes our beliefs to change into ascertained facts, and our theories into proven experience. The statement of St. Paul’s remains only a concept and a possibility until, through meditation, the Christ life is evoked and becomes the dominating factor in daily life.
We speak of ourselves as divine and as sons of God. We know of those who have demonstrated their divinity to the world, and who stand in the forefront of human achievement, testifying to faculties beyond our scope of accomplishment. We are conscious, within ourselves, of strivings which drive us on towards knowledge, and of interior promptings, which have forced humanity up the ladder of evolution to its present status of what we call educated human beings. A divine urge has driven us forward from the stage of the cave dweller to our modern civilized condition. Above all, we are aware of those who possess, or claim to possess, a vision of heavenly things which we long to share, and who testify to a direct way into the centre of divine Reality which they ask us also to follow. We are told that it is possible to have direct experience, and the keynote of our modern times can be summed up in the words “From authority to experience”. How can we know? How have this direct experience, free from the intrusion of any intermediary? The answer comes that there is a method which has been followed by countless thousands and a scientific process which has been formulated and followed by thinkers of all periods, and by means of which they become knowers.” [Alice A. Bailey, From Intellect to Intuition, p. 72]
“For the purpose of realizing the nature of the Self, we have had to come out from our eternal home in God that we might strive and suffer amid the illusions of time and sense. We have to overcome before we can enter into the eternal truth that lies beyond all seeming. In that overcoming we have to master the flesh and magnify the spirit, despise the world to save it, and lose the life to find it.”
“Now let us consider the situation and the processes to which we must subject ourselves if the goal is ever to be attained. The preliminary requirements need only just be noted, for they are universally recognized and are met in part by every beginner, or he would not be entering upon this particular phase in the age-long pursuit of truth. We are conscious within ourselves of duality, and of a state of warfare between the two aspects of which we are constituted. We are conscious of a profound dissatisfaction with physical life as a whole, and with our inability to grasp and understand the divine Reality which we hope exists. But it remains for us a matter for faith, and we want certainty. The life of the senses does not seem to carry us far enough along the path towards our goal. It is a fluid existence which we lead, being sometimes carried by our high desires to a mountain top of wonder on which we stay just long enough to get a vision of beauty, and then are hurled into the abyss of our daily environment, our animal nature and the chaotic world in which our destiny places us. We sense a certainty which ever eludes us; we strive for a goal which seems outside ourselves and which evades our most frantic efforts; we struggle and fight and anguish to achieve a realization to which the saints have testified and to which the Knowers of the race bear continuous witness. If our will is strong enough and our determination rooted in steadfast and undeterred perseverance, and if the ancient rules and formulas are grasped, we can approach our problem from a new angle and utilize our mental equipment in place of emotional application and feverish desire.” [Alice A. Bailey, From Intellect to Intuition, p. 91]
When the disciple’s path reaches Pisces, he comes into contact with the powerful energies of two important luminaries. Pluto as the esoteric and hierarchical ruler and Jupiter as the exoteric ruler. Two major rays manifest through the rulers of this sign, the esoteric (Pluto) and the orthodox (Jupiter): the first Ray, of Will or Power, through Pluto, and the second, of Love-Wisdom, through Jupiter.
Pisces is the sign in which the personality dies, the soul escapes from enslavement to form and the disciple resumes his mission as Saviour of the world; he is therefore at the end of his initiatory journey at the formal level, and is ready to walk the path further and operate on other levels.
“The assimilation of the higher energies, upon the evidence of tension, can give form to new energies. Matter and spirit grow through mutual help. When the tensed current of will flows with accelerated speed, matter is absorbed by the spirit and the functions of a spiritual creator are performed. Then the refining of forms takes place. The power of the fire of spirit is like the power of the fire that melts metals. Only through the process of melting may one form new combinations. That spirit who yearns to bring his energy into incandescence becomes the melter of matter. What forms and dimensions the spirit can melt, from all the spatial matter and from our lives!
From times immemorial the Lords have assumed the task of melting the consciousness. Eternity is the flame wherein new combinations are wrought without end. Verily, the quests have gone on for ages. Where is the beginning? For the present, let us say it is in the eternal desire for new forms. With the same broad vision let us mold our future.” [Infinity I § 42]
Across the deserts, seas, and mountains,
You transport yourselves in one breath.
And there, face to face, we meet.
There is no space. Time exists not.
The power of knowledge is manifested.
[Leaves of Morya’s Garden I § 328]
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See the calendar of all the celebrations online (passages into the 12 Signs and Solar Festivals of the full and new moons 2023 – in UTC hour) – with related links:
The videos of the online ritual Celebrations of the Entries into the 12 Signs with the Christic Assertions are available at the following Playlist:
Ritual·e · Rituel – Zodiac 2023.
OUT–standing… IN–spiralling! Profound gratitude!