Logos Lux - Part II

Our Solar System consists of the Sun and the seven planets orbiting around it. In the recent past, we've discovered two more planets — Pluto and Neptune so we now have nine planets, including our Moon which was counted as a planet by the Ancients. According to the Qabalah, we derive the totality of our cosmological powers as human beings on Planet Earth from the Solar System. These powers include our Higher Selves: each planet emanates a power that governs the different facets of our personalities and characters as well as our destinies.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life

The Moon regulates our Emotions. Our emotions work through the water in the body which make up 60% of our physical Selves. On a spiritual level, it effects the second Chakra, Swadsthihana, which is elementally the Water Chakra. But the action of the Moon includes Air as well as Water since it's the Air that moves the Water. Air is Thought which precedes Emotion. The Moon also regulates the tides of the seas and oceans. The Moon fluctuates in a back and forth action, best described as the movement of the pendulum. This same pendulum movement manifests itself in our emotions as well, since we constantly oscillate between opposites. Love and hate, big and small, up and down. The Moon governs duality which takes place in our minds and affects how we feel.

Mercury governs our Intellect, how we think, as well as our thoughts and the speed of thought. This is why Mercury, or Hermes, is always portrayed with winged shoes, thereby describing metaphorically his speed and movement as he is the actual Thought inside of us. In Egypt, he is given the name Thoth, which is the origin of the word Thought. Our logic as well as our reason is governed by Mercury. Mercury is balanced by the Moon, which metaphorically means that our logic is governed by our emotions and powered by our thoughts. Let those with ears of understanding hear this Ancient mystery. Thought is at the basis of all existence.

Venus governs love and desire. It is a fiery planet, but not the same fire as Mars, which is a raging fire. The fire of Venus is calmer and more of the nature of desires, especially of the sexual kind. It is the fire of emotions. It has an intuitive element to it since desires come from somewhere deep down in our subconscious. Venus is also connected to the Moon in that sense since desire manifests itself through the emotions. The impulse to seek romantic love and find a lifelong mate is an aspect of Venus. A big part of romantic love is sexual desire and while sexuality is more linked to the Moon since it's a more basic emotion that manifests itself as lust, lust can become love over a period of time. Love is an expression of the universal love and is unconditional, while lust is a base emotion relating to the physical body and its satisfaction.

Mars powers drive, ambition and competition in us. Its fire is very masculine and active, as the fire of Venus is feminine and passive. Since Mars is the Willpower, it needs a push from another planet since the Will has to be moved by something. And that something is Jupiter, since Jupiter is Unconditional Love. Love moves Will, but Will is also moved by the Intellect of Mercury since on the Tree of Life there is a path connecting each element. When Willpower is moved by Intellect, it's caused by the Ego or Lower Self. When it's moved by Unconditional Love, the action is pure and of the Higher Self. Too much Mars energy without the moderating influence of intellect or Unconditional Love results in anger, as this energy is just raw force with no guiding element.

Human Being as Center of Solar System

Jupiter is the mercy as Mars is the severity in us. Jupiter is unconditional love and stems from the higher aspect of the higher Water element as Mars is the higher Fire. They balance each other since Mars needs to fight for something as it's his nature to fight, and he fights for love. Venus is the lower Fire element and the the Moon is the lower Water element.

Keep in mind that the Water and Fire elements make up the hexagram or star of David. This is the symbol of the perfected human. When these two elements are in balance. It is our duty as human beings to learn to balance our Fire and Water elements throughout our lives. The Elements manifest through the planets. Lower Fire is the Intellect, higher Fire is the Willpower. Lower Water is the desire while higher Water is Unconditional love.

To break it down further, Fire acting through the Spiritual Self is Willpower which acts in the name of Love. When it manifests in the intellect its the Ego. Since the intellect is based on rationalizing according to what it has seen in the past, it belongs to duality since past acts attempt to calculate future outcomes. Only acts of love are in the present, in the now. This is where we seek to be. In the now. Water is emotion and is passive, it is involuntary. Water in the Spiritual Self is Love, while in the Ego it is lust. These are all aspects of the Self.

All polytheistic religions and philosophies use the planets to describe the different aspects of the Self. They personify the Planets, calling them Gods and Goddesses, in order to help us understand our own makeup and the forces acting on our characters and personalities. Monotheistic religions only refer to the One God and abolish the Many Gods. Yes, there is the One God behind all of existence. But since that One God is incomprehensible and immutable and cannot be known or reached by the humans as presently constituted, the Ancient religions and philosophies didn't bother trying to understand the One God. Yet, they used the Universe around us, and more particularly our Solar System, to better describe "how" the One God manifests inside and outside of us.

Saturn, the biggest planet of them all, regulates and governs time, old age, restriction, and society. It is closely connected to the Moon since its revolution is 28 years while the Moon's is 28 days. Saturn is therefore Karma on a grand scale as well as Materialism. It is of the Air element. The Air element encompasses Saturn and most importantly the Sun. But as stated above, Air is also found in the Moon since Thoughts precede and move emotions. Once again, Air is thought.

Obviously, the Sun is most important since it regulates Light and it brings forth Light into our Solar System. The Moon is the reflector of this Light, and it acts on us during the night when the Sun is illuminating the other side of the planet. The Moon is therefore the reflection of the Light, but not the Light itself. The Sun is Truth while the Moon is Illusion. Humans are influenced by both and it is our job to walk in Truth and discern Illusion as best we can.

What is Soul is a central question of all religions. The answer can be found by probing the cosmological role of the Sun and its relation to human ontology. Qabalistically, the Sun is called Sol, pronounced like the word Soul | sōl |,which again is related to the Soles of our feet which we use to walk on Planet Earth — a connection between Sol and the Soul which, upon closer inspection, we realize that one is basically the other.

The Soul is a Fire, it is Light, a spark within us, our center, our core. It resides in the Solar Plexus and has a direct connection to the Heart Chakra above it, between the breasts. It is Light and Fire and is said to be eternal and everliving. Hence we conclude that the Soul originates directly from the Sun. Better yet, using the Qabalistic and Hermetic framework, we understand that the Soul is the Sun itself. Maybe not in its totality, but in quality. It is a part of it and belongs to it. They are one and the same.

Jesus Christ as the Light of the World

Jesus Christ, the so-called Light of the World, preached Unconditional Love and gave his life for all of humanity because he loved us. Jesus was called the World Sun, he was the World Soul, and following him were the 12 disciples. The 12 disciples are synonymous with the 12 Zodiac entities. This mythos was present also in other religions and spiritual philosophies that centered on the Sun and the 12 Zodiac entities. In essence, it is very Hermetic. The Sun gives forth the Son, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Notice that the word Son, the offspring, carries the same pronunciation as the word Sun.

This philosophy proposes that each of us is the Sun itself and that orbiting around us are the nine planets and the fixed 12 zodiac entities representing the totality of the Milky Way galaxy and the energies contained therein.

To be continued in Part III...
Read Part I

Higher Consciousness And Kundalini

This is a complicated issue, both the consciousness and the kundalini parts, separate and indivisible.

Pyramid of Consciousness

Just thinking about it got my head spinning, which led to more questions than answers:

• If there's such a state as higher consciousness, does lower consciousness also exist?
• How do higher and lower consciousness relate to each other?
• Is consciousness — higher or lower and all states in-between — relative or absolute?
• Are the various levels of consciousness definable by various manifestations?
• Is Enlightenment the highest state of  consciousness?
• Is Enlightenment an absolute state or is it relative?
• Relative to what?
• How does kundalini affect consciousness?
• What if both relative consciousness and absolute consciousness exist?

So I started a list (don't we in the West always resort to a list?) of what attributes and qualities might constitute higher consciousness.

Manifestations Of Higher Consciousness
1) talents/powers/gifts

sudden acquisition of:

• language
• musical ability
• art/photography abilities
• writing ability
• math ability
• healing ability (oneself or others)
• prescience
• clairvoyance

2) realizations

• oneness
• no death
• a purposeful life
• all violence is self-hate
• part of an energy continuum
• there is a pre-conception design for the body
• renunciation of material objects

3) sensitivities, aversions to

• diet – meat, etc.
• alcohol, cigarettes
• drugs
• electro-magnetic energy
• noise
• harsh sunlight
• prescription medicines

4) states and conditions

• visions
• out of body experiences
• revelations (as opposed to realizations: more micro than macro, for example, the imminent death of a friend)
• invisibility, astral travel

It's a long laundry list of superhuman attributes and abilities. Whether one individual can manifest all of them, I don't know, but I would imagine it's more like a smorgasbord, not one YOU choose from, but one that confers the requisite assortment on you, according to your personality, character, karma, and level of attainment.

So if higher consciousness annointees manifest an assortment of the above, you can imagine the opposite end of the spectrum and the types of attributes the members of the lower consciousness group manifest. I won't elaborate; news blogs and journals are full of examples of the lowest common denominator behavior some human beings are capable of.

Can a person be more or less enlightened or is there nothing in between the state of complete enlightenment and the state of being completely unenlightened, i.e., an individual that spiritual teachers describe as being under the control of dualistic mind/emotion paradigm?

According to Osho, enlightenment does exist, but because of the variance among individuals, people not only come at it from different starting points, they also exhibit different states of attainment, a statement that gives credence to the notion that higher consciousness is relative, not absolute.

I see it as a process. Whether the result is full or partial enlightenment — because we inhabit bodies — there is always work to do. And that's why it is not a battle between information on consciousness and consciousness itself. Labels don’t matter; polemics don’t matter. What matters is how you manage the process on a daily basis.

I can see my process in my mind’s eye. When I look back at my life, a stranger stares back at me. This is not uncommon. In this work, life isn’t a straight line progression; it’s a series of leaps and plateaux. Whether you’re a reformed prisoner or a spiritual seeker, you probably identify with having experienced the unbearable feeling of being lost, followed by wondering if change was possible. That’s the first step. Seeing the person you once were in the rearview mirror and wondering how you were ever that way, I not only look back at one instance of my Being, but at several, shaking my head in wonderment at the various ‘me’s — even some that appeared after kundalini rising. At first, I thought I had achieved something. Like the priest who graduates from the seminary, I was unable to resist the propaganda my ego fed me about being spiritually fast-tracked.

Whether or not I am any nearer to enlightenment now than I was forty years ago, I do not know. Before I activated kundalini, I was a tangle of lost perspectives and jumbled thinking. And yet, back then, even as a preteen, I knew an ultimate being existed in me and that I could self-actualize. My childish consciousness envisaged such a transformation.

As a child, I felt capable of doing things without my knowing I was doing them…as an instrument of consciousness. Sadly, as I grew older, I put these notions or insights away and, for a while, I followed the conditioning of my social surroundings. Later, after much discomfort and failure, I came back to my early insights and thus enabled kundalini. It allowed me to step outside the mind and emotional patterns that had so long controlled me. I felt very close to the insights I’d had as a child. I began to see that even under the influence and control of the ego, I’d had moments of clairvoyance all along, spurred on, I suppose, by what Gopi Krishna called the evolutionary impulse. And I was able to learn from a series of life lessons.

Lesson One: In the hospital at age 21, I had an out-of-body experience. This confirmed that I was more than my physical body.

I can see it in my mind’s eye at any moment: a superior being, physically, mentally, and psychically capable of full consciousness. And when I see this being, I am enveloped in a mindfulness that puts everything into the simplest nonverbal terms. I vibrate at a higher frequency, sure in the realization that this state is attainable by me and by anyone else.

So how do you become enlightened? By putting your life on hold and going after it, sampling one method or following one guru after another? Or by letting it come to you? Does thinking about enlightenment in an intuitive dream state mean it exists?

I wasn’t trying to raise kundalini; in fact, I had never even heard of it. I was only trying to improve my breathing to help me play a wind instrument. Kundalini found me. And once it found me, it started to act on me, first physically, then in other ways, completely overhauling my Being. Kundalini changed my metabolism, my anatomy, my soma, my psyche, my morphology, my emotional states, and my psychic condition. And as time went on, I realized it had a evolutionary purpose: It was trying to perfect me.

Lesson Two: Kundalini has taught me is that humans are perfectable. We can be transformed; we can perfect ourselves. Nevertheless, I see this perfectability as a process and therefore it is relative, not absolute. If it was absolute, it wouldn’t be a process; it would happen all at once. And maybe it does for some, but that is a different story.

Lesson Three: Having activated kundalini, I see reincarnation as an actuality. If that's true, there must exist, subsequent to this present mortality, a kind of firefly of essence that carries the accumulated energy of previous lifetimes to the next incarnation — a spark of consciousness that's never extinguished.

My colleague, Corinne Lebrun, uses a wonderful analogy to compare the attributes of average human consciousness to a piano with three octaves. Once kundalini is awakened, the deficient piano becomes an instrument of eight octaves. It's not possible for the initiate to avail himself of all eight octaves immediately, but at least — unlike in his previous limited state — he now knows those extra octaves exist. Over time, he learns to incorporate the now greater range of his instrument into the symphony of his life. Yes, life is like a symphony:

• 1st movement: Allegro
• 2nd movement: Slow
• 3rd movement: Minuet
• 4th movement: Allegro

It ends up as it starts out, unless those additional octaves are awakened.

Hopefully, some manifestations of higher consciousness fall into his lap, like when a pianist creates an improvisation never before attempted; some demand further practice.

And he ends up with a potpourri of talents, powers, gifts, realizations, sensitivities, conditions heretofore unimaginable, allowing him to attain his predestined level on the pyramid of consciousness.