ON THE DIVISION OF THE HUMAN BEING
AND THE ADVENT OF THE EGO

Philip Matthews

Despite its provisional appearance, this essay is to be regarded as complete and properly ordered. Some efforts were made to rework these notes into a more conventional essay format, but I came to see that any attempt to rearrange the material into a better sequence would interfere with the power of expression the notes themselves already contain. I would rather the reader discovered these truths for himself or herself; failing that I am obliged to pass on the truths in a form as close to that in which I received them. I do this not out of some principle of authenticity – no more than I resist reworking the notes for fear that some principle of rational clarity might uncover delusion or error – but solely in the knowledge that what I have called above the power of expression contained in the notes will act to stimulate the spiritual capacities in the reader.

The notes then in substance repeat what is in my notebook. But the notes were written hurriedly in order keep pace with the flow of insight, therefore some ellipsis and omissions were unavoidable, as were grammatical and syntactical errors. I am therefore augmenting and correcting the notes here, but I assure you that what you read will be in its entirety what I have to report of my insights. You will notice remaining errors and uncertainties. New knowledge always seeks a home in old knowledge, and existing knowledge greets and enfolds new knowledge as a mother greets her newborn babe. Thus some entanglement, but you will notice that later insights operate to untangle most of these lapses.

24/3/2000:

“incarnating causes truth as a whole to be reduced to a copy, a picture of truth, and it is this picture which is seed for the following incarnations” (Rudolf Steiner, Aspects of Human Evolution, p136). This truth is incomplete: it is only complete in the etheric body, where it is incarnated before birth.

p134: what is at work between death and new birth “ are the will impulses from the previous incarnation”. Thus it is the will that is continuous from incarnation to incarnation. An image of this: An ocean in which fish move. The ripples they create when they approach the surface are our feelings. The Ego (that is, the sun) only knows of the fish in this way or if they leap up out of the water. Below the ocean is the rocky bed – the physical body. The Ego knows nothing of this directly. It will take the Ego 2000 years to penetrate this ocean. Only its light does so at present, by means of the fish life in the ocean.

But see the will more like a serpent and consciousness a kind of halo around its head.

6/4/2000:

The Indian Chakras are a memory of the spiritual organs, handed down unchanged for generations. New developments become noticeable in the Middle Ages: Master Eckhart taught the advent of the ‘I’ consciousness – but with the consciousness of the plant-being only in man. In Boehme and Swedenborg there is the advent of direct experience of the plant-being in man – but now there is a sense of inadequacy, that the being experienced is not the entire human being. This explains the pages of quite useless exegesis and ranting found in their works.

Rudolf Steiner explained the entire human being and he was content to lay out all the details of that being, leaving it for others to demonstrate the entire being through direct experience.

In The Spiritual Organs there is direct idea-experience of the spiritual organs/chakras. But only the first five organs (to the Larynx organ) are directly experienced in this way. The Brow and Crown organs appear in their traditional form. But what is significant is that the important nexus at the Brow – the Arch of Heaven – has been encountered directly, as detailed in The Spiritual Body.

What of direct experience of the spiritual organs?

7/4/2000:

Evil: we keep evil alive by passing it on. The essence of forgiveness is that we keep the evil in ourselves – we suffer it then, until we overcome it in ourselves. But the benefit of this overcoming goes primarily to aid the evil doer – that he or she can thus be helped to overcome the evil in themselves. For us, we are strengthened by our struggle with the evil, which permits us to better bear the next evil done to us, thus reducing the chance (temptation) that we might pass this evil on.

28/5/2000:

Women will not be made full priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches because they have, as it were, breasts. The Sacrifice of the Mass is possible because a power can arise in the ordained priest – seen like two internalised wings (as though the priest is an angel turned inside out) rising up his flanks. This is an etheric power that parallels the milk-producing power in the physical body of the woman. So if a woman exercises the power of the Sacrament of the Mass, the etheric impulse would ground/earth in her breasts. Then one would have the erotic fascination with the woman’s breasts that is encountered in the practice of magic.

Christ’s injunction to “feed my flock” refers to an etheric activity, not a physical one.

12/6/2000:Whit Sunday

When a woman speaks or sings (especially the latter) she performs a function similar to that of the priest performing the Sacrifice. A spiritual power flows into all: in men it tends to exit through his sexual organ, as sperm; in women it tends to exit through gestation and birth. The priest is celibate so as to divert this power, by reflection against his sexual organ, so that it rises again in him, exiting in the course of the Sacrifice, as though his arms were splayed on the Cross.

In women this power cannot be deflected by her sexual organ (it is ‘open’), but only against her diaphragm. A power does rise from her sexual organ, but only up to her breasts in order to provide milk. Hence the woman expresses the spiritual power in speech and singing, where the priest does so in the Sacrifice.

Man can of course deflect the power at the diaphragm too, this gives him speech and song too, but his expression does not carry the analogous-sacramental power that a woman’s does.

The spiritual power can be deflected by both sexes at the throat, which reserves the power for ‘head-work’ – thought and visualisation. The disposition of the spiritual organs in this scheme can be seen thus:

Note that the spiritual organs do not themselves reflect the spiritual power – they create or control the means to do so. Note also that the powers described here are not those active in the spiritual organs themselves. The descending power here is an astral formative power and the rising power is an etheric one of growth. They are influenced by the spiritual organs but do not exert any reciprocal influence on the organs; instead they flow on either into the physical realm of human sexuality or else are reflected into the astral body as instruments for the creation of spiritual bodies.

It is the ‘heart-crown’ in the Throat organ that reflects the power back to the Brow organ, thus permitting thought-reflections and consciousness. However, it is the fact that we created both the Sacral Plexus and Solar Plexus organs that permits the Solar Plexus organ to reflect the power into the Heart organ. Before this the power ran freely through to the Root organ, not as a sexual energy but as a creative power building up the essential body-form of the human being, that is, constructing itself as an etheric model for the physical human body to come.

Remember that at this point the Heart organ had a different structure – a dormant one (Ego-less) –like a seed. The role then of the other organs, the Brow, Larynx and Heart organs, was to beam themselves down by means of astral power onto the forming Root organ, each forming a copy of its own nature in the Root organ, the etheric, the astral, and the spirit (Ego-seed). Thus the Brow organ was the sun, the Larynx organ was the moon and the Heart organ was the ‘initial’ earth – thus creating the Sun-Moon-Earth being, in effect the Cosmic Being itself.

(Remember that the Cosmic Being exists for us as a multi-layered phenomenon, thus -)))))))))) = the Spiritual Hierarchies.)

The entry of the Ego into man was both the cause and effect of the setting of the Heart organ into motion. In a sense the Ego meets itself in the Heart – as though it has reached right round the Cosmos to encounter itself. (Of course, the Ego is in a way the Cosmos itself.)

The Solar Plexus organ resulted from the etheric spirit’s attempt to find itself on earth. In the same way the Sacral Plexus organ formed as the astral spirit tried to find itself in a more dense earth bereft of the Sun and Moon. It could only do so by drawing up the solar and lunar energies from the earth and setting them in an opposition-combination to each other, wherein the astral spirit finds a place.

The etheric spirit had only the Sun’s absence to contend with. Hence only one energy flows there, but divided ten-fold in order to create a habitation for the astral spirit. This replicates the actual spiritual form of that being but vulgarised to the earthly level: the astral spirit has ten faces (countenances) but can only express itself here in a polarity the sources of which cannot be specified within the form of the ten-fold Solar Plexus organ, that is, which ‘nipples’ are positive, which are negative.

The etheric spirit on the other hand expresses itself [in the Sacral Plexus organ] as a kind of self-grinding, a constant in-turning against an in-turning activity, differentiated only by the different earth-cosmic energy drawn in – solar or lunar. A polarity here is only incipient because the Earth element is also present, as a kind of ground (always giving way) for the in-grinding solar and lunar energies. And yet it is not a trinity, because the elements cannot be separated within this activity – and yet it is not a unity either.

Death arises in what this etheric spirit forms here on earth because the lunar power is not drawn off by the astral spirit in the Solar Plexus organ. Only the Heart organ (the Ego-being) can do this, but drawing it through the Solar Plexus organ nonetheless. Death occurs because the Solar Plexus organ draws the solar energy away more quickly than the Heart organ draws the lunar energy away. Death will be overcome when the Ego better understands its earth-cosmic tasks and makes proper use of the lunar power.

The Ego does not yet understand that it, too, must be born into the earth-life – that it must acquire a mother. The lunar power is the hidden mother of the Ego – hidden because the Ego cannot perceive it: the analogy is the infant suckling the mother’s breast, the milk then the lunar power.

The Ego will then overcome the impasses confronting its extensions, the astral and etheric spirits. It will begin this by drawing up the lunar power at a proper rate. The Ego in a sense thus ‘hollows out’ the Solar Plexus organ – in time the solar power in the Solar Plexus organ internalises and unites within the lunar channel. Now the solar power flows in the Heart organ – where previously it had washed across its ‘surface’, creating a gleaming aspect. Then the Ego acquires also a father, who rises above the ego like a shining star. This is the crowning of the Ego. Whereas the mother feeds the Ego, the father sun dresses the Ego – as the physical body dresses spiritual man. Thus the Solar Plexus organ is transformed, appearing now in the Throat organ – that is, in its spiritual form – thus the Ego finds its home in the earth-cosmos.

Now it must find its limitation proper to the earth cosmos. To do this, the Ego will have to understand the terrible burdens before it. It must understand that it is no longer 1. universal, 2. equivalent, and 3. all-knowing.

1. The etheric spirit Earth base must be seen in its restricted facticity: that this earth of this Ego is only part of the earth-cosmos.

2. The etheric spirit lunar activity of this Ego is isolated from other Egos: that the light of the sun only shows this more clearly.

3. The etheric spirit solar activity is limited in what it knows: the darkness of the moon indicates this – that it cannot be lit without the sun’s effort, it will not otherwise stay bright (be known).

The Ego must first learn these bitter facts, then it will begin the task of overcoming them. Thus the Ego will draw the etheric spirit to itself also. The secret of the overcoming lies in the fact that earth existence of all kinds (including earth cosmic existence) allows for learning. While the Ego cannot in the earth-cosmos be everywhere or be every other Ego, it can learn (gain knowledge) about them. In time the Ego will come to shed light on all things and each Ego will illuminate each other Ego, and through learning each Ego will remain illuminated by other Egos.

Thus finally the Ego attains the state of the Crown organ, shedding light on everything and everyone everywhere.

22/6/2000:

With reference to the last note. The production of semen requires a direct intervention/injection of life by the etheric power. It is this capacity to inject life-ness which is diverted into the Eucharist. The equivalent power in the woman is a power of maintenance not of origination. It enters the infant at birth and supports the child until its own etheric body can take over in the period from the fifth until the eighth year. This power is, or can be, augmented by means of the mother’s milk, that is, through the breasts.

The semen of the priest. The sexual nature is entirely a life/etheric matter: that is why plants can have sexuality. But sexuality in its bipolar form arose through an intervention at the astral level, associated with the separation of the Moon from the Earth (Rudolf Steiner). Originally, the human seed – that is, primordial semen – was enwombed in the Earth but cared for by the Moon. The latter served to ‘draw’ the semen-being out, by a process of elongation, like pulling at dough, except that this drawing-out allowed a lunar water enter the space created in the semen-being. Thus the semen-being became a semen-plant, with roots, stem, branches, and leaves like fingers. However, it did not flower; instead, it rose up into the astral level (plants cannot enter the astral plane – they flower when they make contact with that level, like impressions they make on the ‘surface’ of the astral plane), rotated and then began to accrete a physical body from the mist-air that surrounded it. The nearest equivalent in nature now is the sea-horse, except that originally the semen-plant swam in a mist-air.

The effects of the separation of the Moon and Earth meant that some other means were needed to incubate the semen-seed. This was done by splitting the human being into two sexes, one which continued to produce the semen-seed, the other to incubate it. Now, because the latter sex, the woman, would need to hold large amounts of the lunar power, she was compensated for this by an extra infusion of the solar power. It is this surfeit that makes the woman more graceful and aspirational than the man. Even so, the presence of the excess of lunar power made her simultaneously a being attached to appearances and the concrete. The man, on the other hand, was depleted in solar power but augmented in a complex indirect way by the earth-crystal power, which made him more physical – less outrightly materialistic (that is, less prone to mistake the appearances imposed of necessity on matter for the matter itself). Nonetheless, the man felt a powerful attraction to the earthly crystalline element itself, and his suffering (isolation) here made him potentially a self-pitying and violent being. The aggression arose from the man’s weakened sense of identity, which in turn has its origin in the fact that man is pointed towards the earth-crystal element, which always gives way, so that he experiences earthly reality as something that constantly undermines him. But he remained less prone to delusion than the woman, who retains in rudimentary form the original human ability, provided by the lunar power, to enter the astral world, which is however usually restricted by the increased solar power within her to a capacity to reflect herself on the ‘surface’ of the astral plane; a power similar to that in plants but much much weaker. Put otherwise, man experiences the world as though it was still in the fluid Moon-epoch, while the woman looks to heaven – the astral plane – as though she was still in the Moon-epoch.

A point will come when this situation will need to be overcome, when the sexes will reunite into one, but at a higher level. This will be done, firstly, by drawing the lunar power back to the man by means of a technical abstraction from the earth, that is, the male physical-crystal element will be replaced a direct physical element – the technology. On the other hand, the excess lunar power in the woman will be weakened by means of a redirection of this power to the man. This interchange will be difficult for most to achieve, because they will not know (even then) what is happening. This will be witnessed by a fall in female fertility, a growing desire to abort foetuses, and because of the concentration of power in the man, solar and lunar (the solar power in man will be increased relatively due to the increased abstraction of man from the earth-crystal force), most children born will be male. Women will die out in a kind of despair – a dreadful experience for both sexes.

Now, the role of Christ in the etheric body is as follows. The clue is sin and the overcoming of sin. Sin arose from the division of the sexes and the incompleteness evidenced in each sex. Sin is thus the transgression of the new order in an attempt to restore the old order – the man to recapture his lost solar power, the woman to regain the lost power to engender semen and to surrender the burden of the lunar power. Christ first corrects the imbalance (actually, the consequences thereof) on the spirit plane. Then, as is beginning now, to correct the imbalance in this world. Christ is a solar power in man and a depletion of lunar power in the woman. Thus the priest creates a spiritual semen and engenders this semen in a spiritual earth, in a kind of rehearsal of the future of human generation. The woman becomes a ‘nun’, the only way she will have of counteracting her despair. Ordinary secular man, however, is put in a bind. Any increase in solar power at present makes him, not simply materialistic, but tempted to try to rule the earthly physicality. Thus the abstraction by means of technology becomes, not an escape from the burden of physicality, but a kind of revenge of the physical, in which man is tempted to rule the physical earth-crystal – the equivalent to preferring cinders to live coals. Thus the man in Christ can become sterile in a physical sense rather than fecund in a spiritual sense, unless he understands the priestly role – that period of renunciation and spiritual engendering.

3/7/2000:

The Holy Family is a model of serial generation: Father to Son to Father to Son and so on. But where does the generative power lie? Usually the Mother as the Eternal Female is assumed to be the source of this generation. But it actually lies in the man. That which nurtures life can be conceived of an ‘eternal’ so far as the continuity of generation is concerned. But what generates and is generated of necessity is not eternal but mortal. The life impulse is like a spark from a fire dying in the cool air, a piece of molten iron solidifying in a cold sea.

But it is not this life impulse, soon extinguished, that is of importance – the life impulse is a vehicle, bearing a higher power. This power – Soul – has the task of preparing an environment for an even higher power. It, as it were, creates a particular environment for the spirit.

11/7/2000:

This is how the sexes divide. The female genitals are an involution of those of the male. The breasts of the woman are a kind of development of the original single-sex being’s sense-organ. The nipples had been its ‘hearing-sight’ organ – more like radar than eyes or ears – responding to the position of the radiation it sensed. In the woman, the breasts still have a vestige of this sense-organ, much more so than in men. There is a sense in which women ‘know where they are’ by means of their breasts in a way unknown to the male.

The sexes do not divide.

The earlier single-sex being resembled the modern sea-horse, and lived in the thick fluid of the Old Moon epoch. It had two sense organs, one ‘hot’, the other ‘cold’. The latter was a kind of voice/vibration instrument – by means of which the being transmitted its experiences to others like itself using impulse waves through the thick fluid it was immersed in. The ‘hot’ organ was a kind of experience receptor, like a tongue, which picked up the vibrations in the fluid. Of course, experience, as such, was extremely limited – so that the vibrations from each being resembled in a general way those of all the others. However, all knowledge available to these beings was communicated in this way all the time, so that the fluid pulsed with the rhythm of this knowledge, which was a total knowledge of all things, spiritual and existential. The nature and experience of this communication survives in our epoch as music.

In most ways this being was in thrall, its existence mirroring that of its spiritual author as closely as would be possible in a material medium. But the single-sex being was not a spiritual being itself, the polarity of reception and expression shows this. One can see in it a stage in the process whereby what is a unity in the spiritual world, a kind of cosmic simultaneity, tends increasingly to polarise in the physical world – first warmth and movement, then light and air, and so on.

The separation of the Moon from the Earth finally collapses the polarity within this being, so that it tended to become fixed on one or other of the foci, to become either male or female. The other focus remains in the being – fully dormant: it is a spiritual collapse, so that the hidden focus is a spiritual element and does not appear directly in the physical incarnation. It only appears in deep memory as a component of sexual attraction and in other kinds of longing.

The course of this event can be illustrated as follows:

The spirit/Ego first appears in physicality as a seed embedded in a ‘star-soul’. Here the spirit/Ego is almost still fully in the spirit world, for though the star-soul is truly its product, it alone was not the agent of this production, but physicality was the result of this production of the star-soul. It was the ground, as it were, that permitted the possibility at all of a star-soul distinct from the whole spiritual realm.

Caught as it were between the spiritual being and an inert ‘ground’, the star-soul was slowly pressed into motion, a kind of circulation about the Ego. This was a hapless condition entailing much suffering on the part of the spiritual beings (not the Ego) which oversaw this process and on the part of the other spiritual being who maintained the ground.

The outcome here is that the star-soul developed (‘grew’) a ROBE of a kind, which reflects the ‘livingness’ in the soul (derived in turn from the being of the Ego). This livingness is the suffering of the soul. It appears in a ‘dissipated’ form in the Robe as a life-energy and leads to the elaboration of the life-impulses that emanate from the soul as living forms.

Now, it is important to be aware that this circulation in the Robe or etheric/life body never ceases. This is significant when considering the complex relations between the sexes.

This is to be asserted: while the star is spherical, the Robe is cubical. The star is spherical because it arises in a pure (simple) polarity of two foci – seed-spirit and ‘physical’ ground. But the Robe is cubical because, as well as the central seed force, eight other spiritual powers work upon it. The eight powers are arrayed according to a geometrical principle – as perceived by us from the point of view of the descended looking back through the layers/levels of extension/emanation into the spiritual. A number of important revelations arise from this understanding – these will be elaborated later.

For now, what is of importance is this: the total of nine powers are arrayed in a 3 x 3 formation. One of these triplicities is a polar array that traverses the cube from, say, the top right to the bottom left. Initially, it was a service by two senior powers to the central seed-spirit in order to regulate the circulatory motion coming into being in the Robe/Soul. The other two triplicities then came to absorb and oversee the two elements in the circulation, that derived from the spirit seed, and that induced in the physical ground: one that is ‘hot’, the other ‘cold’. (The ‘physical’ here can be regarded in the Kabalistic sense as the ‘face of God’ – i.e. God ‘looks’ so that something is ‘seen’. If the spirit-seed reaches out from the spirit world then something must be there to receive it – part of the spirit world, to be sure, but now made different by the event of reaching out – or being reached out.)

There is a plan in all this. In time the Robe comes to contain two elements: the ‘hot’ circulation and its attendant power and the ‘cold’ circulation and its attendant powers. And a form of communication is established, as must occur where difference comes into being. The hot ‘speaks’, the cold ‘hears’; the cold experiences and the hot ‘learns’. But that which hears can experience also, one fitting to the other by and large – with a slight and all important lack of fit. Experience contains something new, but that which speaks cannot also learn with ease. Thus in one case a lack of fit: but the processes go ahead even so. In the other a conflict grows: learning undermines speech. What is a secondary gap in the cold, between experience and what it hears, is a primary fault in the hot, between what is already known (assumed to be the case) and what is newly learned. This latter is the grit that will eventually produce the pearl (of wisdom).

The first result of this is that the soul begins to act as a reflector. The disparity growing is such that the wisdom of the Gods must shine back from the soul in order to maintain the total-ness of the spirit world in the soul. The Ego finds itself reflected back in the soul. That which is not represented here – that which is learned from the soul’s experience of the physical – now tends to separate off. This becomes the life body: the great reservoir of human experience as memory. And the polarity between the hot and the cold circulations intensifies, until the soul splits in two.

This is the myth of the Cosmic Egg and the creation of the Cosmos/World. But this split re-occurs again and again down the great Chain of Being, down, down until the Moon is separated from the Earth (already separated from the Sun). Then the human being, at once author, as Adam Kadmon, of the universe and an actor within it, now is also split, into two sexes.

The split can be presented schematically in this form:

that is, like a square cut diagonally. The division of the senses has already been detailed: to the female sex was apportioned the organ of expression, to the male, the organ of reception. A number of further insights can be added here. The soul is split in two: thus in any incarnation the human being lives on earth with only half of his soul. But the life-body, the Robe, is also split in two, thus he or she also lives with only half of the life-body too, the hot part if he is male, the cold part if she is female. It is no accident that the original organs are taken over for specific purposes. The organ of expression/speech serves the purpose of nurture, so that the mother’s milk can be seen as a kind of wisdom passed to the child, and the breasts themselves having a residual function as an organ of communication, seen in the obscure impulse to lay one’s head on a woman’s breast. The organ of experience/listening becomes the sexual organ, involuted in the woman, evoluted in the man. This is a sublime mystery. The organ responsible in a sense for the rupture in the spiritual endeavour that leads to the establishment of life is itself the source of the living seed on earth - that what is now heard is the flow of true life from the soul. Thus the man now listens to the woman and hears there spiritual truth (that most cannot recognise), while the man can talk to the woman, telling her things she does not wish to know. Thus the man is the conduit for the living seed on earth, how the Ego will finally establish itself here, while the woman is as though the spirit seed itself, cloistered in the hall of mirrors called the Soul. Yet, the woman is the earth – the cold – the nurturer, bending down in suffering to draw up the new life – turned away from the Heaven that is her inner contemplation.

Thus the woman has speech in her soul, and in her circulation she raises the physical to life, a process of conversion essential to the spirit’s purpose here. The man for his part is priest in his soul, the midwife of the Gods, and in his circulation is the living seed, a pure astral force cutting into his own life processes: an uneasy being, heaven in his soul, pain in his life, back to the spirit, face to the flat unyielding plane of the physical-crystal. The woman to the man is a moon reflecting heaven, and the man to the woman is like a sun lit red.

But above all this, there is one key fact: in splitting the soul, the Ego-seed is released. The mirror is broken. This is why there are two sexes. Physical man cannot be immortal – the physical is incapable of this: but a free Ego could not relate directly to the earth, as Adam Kadmon once did, in order to generate. So the earth in enwrapped in each woman, enclosed in her involuted genitalia, and the man – part of him surrendered to the earth – must now impregnate the woman, not the earth. So the Ego is released from the soul, but nonetheless maintains its relation (downwards) to the soul. But now it begins, once it perceives (is brought to perceive) its destiny here, to convert the soul from mirror into window.

Then the excluded experience/memory in the life body/Robe will be revealed to it and a new stage of conversion will begin. Thus what was once split away in bipolarity begins to be reabsorbed.

16/7/01:

Ego = Utopia.

How the Ego sees us:

The Ego does not understand motion/action in the limbs/body.

How the etheric body sees us:

The heart scintillates like the sun (the heart here is the soul or the astral vision of the body as fog).

1. The Ego sees heaven in stones and rock; hence earliest Ego actions were the carving of rock and carving on rocks. But crystal is the grave of the Ego, rendering it inert.

2. The Ego can enter metals. Enters most strongly into iron – hence the Iron Age as the first age of the newly liberated Ego. But care here: metal is a kind of Ego-head and makes the Ego hunger for a body. Modernly, this is consumerism. The relation of the Ego to gold is a mystery even Isaac Newton could not fathom. To spiritual vision, the Ego disappears into gold: this indicates error - gold was intended as an earthly habitation for the gods, the human Ego already dwells in the Soul and therefore has no need of gold, for it makes the Ego stupid.

3. The Ego is mesmerised by water. One should take care, for the Ego sees everything in nothing here.

4. The Ego sees itself almost completely in plant-life, especially in deciduous trees in the summer. The Ego can hardly believe the colours of flowers – they are so utterly of the spirit.

There is a danger of confusing the ‘soul-ego’ with the ‘earth-ego’ (physicality). You will know you are in contact with your Ego when you feel loneliness, isolation, coldness, abandonment. The soul remains the Ego’s comfort, where it looks at itself in a mirror. This why water is such a danger: the Ego is inclined to confuse water with the soul – though water has none of the soul’s power of reflection – spiritual ‘form-reflection’. When you feel joy and a strong interest when looking at a tree in sunlight in June, then you know that you are looking at your Ego, at your self.

*

There are three features regarding the cubical array of the spiritual powers in the Robe to be noted in relation to the physical-crystal.

One:

The eight powers are arrayed around the centre, containing the spirit-seed of man and the ninth power – the companion of man.

The 3 x 3 arrays are best seen as follows:

And schemed as follows:

The cube has a diagonal along which the polarity within, of hot and cold, is organised. Thus the cube splits into two triangular sections:

And the spiritual powers are distributed thus:

This organisation shows which powers are shared between the sexes and which are not. The lowest order, here numbered 7, 8, 9 are shared in their entirety, while each sex lacks one member of the two other groups. Notice also that each sex now has seven spiritual powers in attendance, a number corresponding to the number of spiritual organs.

Two. The cubical organisation of the spiritual powers, the Celestial Hierarchy, has significance in other areas of human destiny.

For instance, the cube can be rotated until this layout is arrived at:

The layout is somewhat exaggerated, but the relations between the cubical array of spiritual powers in nonetheless accurate. This plan helps to explain the nature of the otherwise elusive second spiritual organ – the Sacral Plexus organ. The spiritual powers numbered 7 and 9 are situated in the organs above and below, that is the Solar Plexus and Root organs. This substantially the visions of 18^th and 22^nd August 1998.

Three. There is an operation among the Zodiacal Twelve involving a 3 + 1 order that can be explicated also by the cubical array. As discussed in The Spiritual Body, it is a curiosity of the Zodiac that if it is organised on a four-fold triplicity basis, the elements of each successive triplicity acquire the fourth element in the Mutable sign directly opposite the Mutable sign of the given triplicity, thus:

It is a reciprocating arrangement involving a kind of transfer between opposite mutable signs. Now isolate one axis of such an exchange:

And you have the ‘embedded’ array:

Thus the Zodiacal is in effect an organisation of two intersecting cubes:

This explains the significance of the first information I received regarding the Heart organ on 13^th February 1996, where it is described as 4 x 3, then 3 x 4.

Four. It is obvious from One above that two of the spiritual organs have both male and female aspects. As disclosed in The Spiritual Organs and further expanded in Activating the Spiritual Organs, there are two organs that have dual natures: the Throat and the Sacral Plexus organs. Moreover, the crisis that occurs in the Sacral Plexus organ has a strongly sexual quality, and the overcoming of the barrier here aids in the transformation of the Throat organ. It is clear that the process of activating the spiritual organs, which leads to the spiritual birth within us, requires that the sexual duality be overcome. It is to be expected that the two organs that by inference can be said to have dual male/female aspects should be involved in this crisis.

3/11/2000:

1. Heat and cold. Our bodies heat up in order to balance outside temperature – they are not heated by outside influences. Our limited tolerance of heat and cold is due to the limitations of the physical body. Spiritual ‘warmth’ becomes a ‘state’ – there is no measurable element in the spirit realm – becomes definable only by reference to the physical world. Cold is a positive condition: if you could understand cold, you would understand materiality. It is condensation, crystallisation, densification; it is not merely the absence of heat.

2. The Sexes. Presexual man had only one sense – a soul-based organ, which was a kind of receptor at one point and an expressor at the other. The spiritual world requires no senses; the soul-world required this polarised sense organ because the soul-world contains only a simple thing, fluid-like, that varied only slightly. This sense organ was orientated along the soul body of man . With the division into two sexes, one or other pole became ‘exposed’, one pole transformed by the etheric power into the bosom in the woman or the other becoming the sexual organ in the man. But the original sense activity continues in these transformed sense-points, though it is far too delicate for modern human consciousness to register. It is the source of the unique sensations experienced in physical love relations. This organ did not interfere with man’s communication with the spirit world, as our ether-based senses do. During love relations, men and woman catch snatches of this primeval spirit communication. It is this experience that defines the value of human physical love. But it can also induce a profound frustration in some, who realise, if only vaguely, just what has been lost to us.

Sexual difference created by splitting the human being leaves one half - the female in the man, the male in the woman – hidden in a fold in the soul, which is sited in the Root spiritual organ. This fold has an important role in human life…

3. The Ego will make use of the primeval soul-organ. The image of this is the eagle bearing the snake in its claws. The present intellect and its etheric sense organs will die away once they have completed their task of ‘recording’ material reality.

5/11/2000:

Reference note 2 above. The function of the ‘fold’. Three elements are related here: the fold itself, the Root spiritual organ, and the hidden half of the human being – like a seed in the spiritual organ. The fold is the foundation upon which the spiritual organs can be constructed. It has this shape:

The Root organ nestles in the centre. From the ‘earth’ – the Kundalini Garden – flows the sun and moon powers, rising through their respective channels and crossing at the Root organ. They then continue in this way up to the Brow organ:

This column is anchored by successive ‘rotations’ of the soul over the long period of man’s earthly existence. It is a circulatory system, with the sun rising in its own channel and then descending by means of the lunar channel, and vice versa for the moon power. There is a pain in this that we are all inured to.

In opening the organs, the moon and sun forces rise up to the Brow organ and there create an environment into which the star force of the Crown organ can descend – this arrangement being the Arch of Heaven – . The star-force is channelled by the soul also, but here the channel is created by the stellar power itself. In time it becomes possible for the star force to penetrate down to the other spiritual organs, each in turn, until it reaches the Root organ. Here there is a blossoming in a real sense as the star force enters the Root organ.

Note that the sun/moon circulation is suspended at this point. They return only as far as the Root organ, where they accumulate. This is a dangerous situation at first. These forces should be earthed every three days.

27/11/2000:

The Ego/spirit witnesses to the lower world (Earth) in the Soul, where it appears in forms transmitted by the senses. The impact of these forms has increased as the Ego descends until they awaken or draw the attention of the Ego.

We, in turn, also increasingly pay attention to these soul forms, but seeing them from the other side, as it were, by means of our intellect – which has come into existence outside (on this side of) the Soul. It exists in a state of ‘attraction’, kept in being by sense-activity.

We see, in this situation, our individual Ego as the Sun, and fascinated by the glamour of this vision, we love everything bathed in the yellow light of this apparent-Sun. Thus we love this world with this false devotion, mistaking reflections and images for a reality.

Thus we do not see a real world, only reflections in a hall-of-mirrors Soul, and our sense experiences are only reflections in this Soul-world.

30/12/2000:

The sexual ‘remainder’ in each human being resides in astral form in the Root spiritual organ. It is this remainder which is active in the spiritual organs. The two sexual elements in each human being are orientated on the same polarity – male to the front, female to the back. As the remainder in each sex is in effect the opposite sex, this means that each human being is orientated differently to his or her remainder, behind in the man and in front in the woman. Thus the man experiences the activation of the spiritual organs as occurring behind him, near his spine, while the woman will sense it occurs to the front, as though rising through her womb.

Clairvoyantly, the respective spiritual organ ‘plants’ are also different in appearance. The female organ-plant is seen to grow straight up, with leaves unfolding at each organ and the as yet unopened organs folded in a the top of the plant, so as to seem like the sections of a pineapple or pine cone.

The male plant, however, is more complex: the leaves are crinkled or gathered along their edges, and the whole plant appears as though twisted by a rising circulating force.

The reason for this difference lies in the relation of the sexes to the lunar forces. The moon force is active in the woman before the spiritual organs are activated, it accounts both for her menstrual periods and her ability to produce milk for her offspring. This means then that the spiritual organs rise in an already present moon stream, up until the sun forces are encountered at the Brow organ.

In the man, on the other hand, the sun forces reach right down to the root organ – and it is by their power that the moon forces are raised in the male spiritual organs.

*

This points to a cosmic fact of some significance. Cain’s murder of his brother stunned and frightened the Gods. They thought that they alone could administer death, but Cain showed by his action that man also has this power. Part of Christ’s mission (integral to his entire mission) was to experience human death first hand, in order that the Gods could understand the quite traumatic effect death has had on the human race – like a dam that stops the flow of a river.

Now, Jahve gave Solomon the freedom to understand man, but he was deeply angered when Solomon elected to worship the god of his wives. There is a Mystery of sex here that the Gods still do not understand. The Gods made man in their own image, but Solomon elected to worship the God-image the women chose to worship. Why? The God-image of the woman is the man himself as she sees him. Solomon saw himself in his wives, and considered this a more true experience than worshipping the Gods who had ‘made’ man by splitting the original human being – Adam Kadmon – into two sexual elements.

All this indicates that in the future the Gods will act in order to gain direct understanding of human sexuality, on analogy with their mission to understand human death. Christ’s mission took place in the Heart spiritual organ, as it were, the mission to understand human sexuality will occur in the Throat organ, one of the two organs with a dual (sexual) nature – symbolised already by the Claddagh ring – two hands embracing a crowned heart.

January 2002:

To the woman, the emerging Sun stream that accompanies the activation of the spiritual organs appears as a pillar of fire. The fact that moon forces already active in her are built on memory – the cosmic memory contained in the female sex element – means that this image of the sun power is extremely potent and could mislead her.

The situation confronting the man is somewhat different. First, the sun power in him has already two aspects. Observed, it is seen to rise from the region of the heart as a series of fire-rings of ever larger diameter until it hangs like a huge radiance at the Brow organ. Looking down, however, from the heart region towards the Root organ, the sun power appears as a series of brilliant pearl-like droplets, each dropping into a sea of light (like a sea of quicksilver) to create a glowing ripple, each of which grows until it merges with the rings of radiance that floats at the Root organ.

For the man raising the lunar power is like liberating his female half, but also like dousing the pool of fire in the Root organ. For the woman, opening the solar element is like embracing her male half – an action that enflames her to a frightening degree.

These experiences frighten both sexes. Initially it is a positive fear, but very quickly both the man and the woman realise that in fact while this spiritual union of their dual sexuality signals the end of many of their habitual pains and discomforts, it exposes them to a new phenomenon: the pain of absence. This pain is like a hunger for the old existential agonies that each is long used to. In time they come to understand that the old pains masked a deeper discomfort – the absence of the spirit. Now they suffer the absence of the spirit and long with renewed pain for Heaven.

But we must try to understand that this is now a longing for a future to come – not for a past that is lost – a longing for union with the Ego.

Note on technology:

The source of the material earth lies in the death of living things, as the source of metals lies in the dead of the ‘living’ on the other planets. Again, the water and air we breathe are known to possess unique properties as liquid and gas forms respectively; they are unique because they derive from the decay of the etheric and astral bodies of earthly beings, including mankind.

What we call nature exists in part as a ‘foregoing’ of mankind, that permitted the human etheric and astral powers to create a place for mankind on earth. That is, plant-life and later animal-life were the means whereby these powers created a habitation for man on earth, first by discovering the best disposition of the powers in relation to the earth – how life and soul are best sustained here – and later by acting as supports for human life and soul existence. If plants provide sustenance for the body then the animals provide sustenance for the soul.

But as mankind comes to create its own place on earth it will depend less and less on the support of the plant and animal life. Instead, it will create more direct relations with the earth, will draw both body and soul sustenance straight from the earth itself. The means used will vary greatly but all of them can be put under the heading of technology.

This development is unavoidable, but it is surrounded by many traps and dangers. Mankind has fallen into delusion on many occasions in its relations with plant and animal life, and still does, for that matter. But these delusions grew in many circumstances from a want of power or knowledge, from a loss of faith or divine support. In the future, mankind will make mistakes in its relations to the earth that will arise, on the contrary, from an excess of faith in itself, an over-valuation of its own knowledge and most of all from an excess of power. Mankind will fall into three kinds of traps, some obvious but others far less so.

Obviously, human megalomania will take the form of believing itself divine in a debased way. Less obvious will be the megalomania that arises from the belief that mankind replaces nature in relation to earth. This can be seen already in the more extreme forms of environmentalism, where people think they can sustain what they believe are ‘natural’ ways of living by artificial means. ‘Organic-ism’ is ultimately a technology, too.

Then there will be delusions derived from the paranoia that result when untutored Egos encounter one another. This will be the basis of the War of All upon All.

The third kind of delusion is more subtle. In the spirit world the Ego is co-incident with everything, while on earth it is restricted to this place and time and to this particular incarnation. There will be philosophies of Everything – developments from contemporary theoretical science – where it will become impossible for anyone to admit to ignorance in any subject whatsoever. People will come to know nothing while believing they have access to all information.

The technological basis of these delusions is obvious. A moment’s reflection will show that human pursuits normally classed as arts and humanities are in fact technologies. Scholasticism was a technology; Renaissance art was a technology. These delusions will come into being because many people will not fully understand the function of technology and will imbue it with etheric, astral and Ego qualities.

The earth of the future will be seen for the cold, dark, dead place it always was. As such, mankind will finally know that it is the ultimate home of the Ego, the place where we will finally come home to ourselves, and the vantage point from which we can turn and look directly into the spirit world as fully realised human beings. At that moment mankind will have completed its spiritual mission – it will have extended the realm of the Spirit, that must be extended in this way for a reason few living now could fathom.

13 January 2002

Note

It may be asked, Where have these disclosures, in this essay and in the one following, come from?

They rose in me, as it were, like water seeping up to the surface, though I had no sense of being communicated with. Only recently have I come to the conclusion that they were imparted to me by my “female” half (this part is only female while incarnated) following the union achieved by the activation of the Spiritual Organs.

It is an unintended benefit of that union, though not unexpected – had I thought about it.

(14 January 2006)