The Occult… a little more
Life is not a fairground but a school
Franz Bardon
The esoteric/occult philosophy claims that our animal body is a temporary home to our incoming Lower Self, which reincarnates (‘becomes flesh again’) after a spell in the higher vibe of the astral or mental. The body is a mechanical device to be carefully used by the incoming being, for the purposes of learning to become selfless and finding his/her own personal power by coping with problems and conquering adversity.
Among the qualities of the Lower (animal) Self we find selfishness, greed, excess, instinct, competitiveness, envy, carelessness, fearfulness, body obsession, short-termism, skittishness, savagery, gratification, materialism, anger, unhappiness, irritability, blame, thoughtlessness, lust, and ‘iddishness’.
Qualities of the Higher (human) Self include sharing, cooperation, humanity, persistence, mercy, caring, balance, good humour, intuitiveness, consistency, joyfulness, self-reliance, trust, spirituality, calm, creativity, love, and altruism.
§ One can have fun relating these qualities to political parties and movements, and to the traditional seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount of the New.** The seven deadlies are, by Church tradition: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.
Originally, in the Book of Proverbs, they were: haughty eyes; a lying tongue; hands that shed innocent blood; a heart that devises wicked plots; feet that are swift to run into mischief; a deceitful witness that uttereth lies; him that soweth discord among brethren. I can honestly say I’ve never had haughty eyes.
We will all recognise our daily opportunities for doing the Higher thing or the Lower: to be ‘high-minded’ or a ‘base character’. We might act as a ‘superior being’ or as a ‘low-life’: to be saintly or beastly, in fact. Our language seems to know all about this Higher/Lower business.
§ One symbolic representation of the Higher and Lower worlds is the ‘mandorla’ or ‘vesica piscis’: a curious double-curved shape often used to frame a picture of Christ.
The Freudian interpretation of this is of a vagina. Well it would be, wouldn’t it? What it really represents is Christ linking the Two Worlds. Imagine two identical circles side by side, then brought ever closer until they overlap a little. The ‘Star of David’ is similar in meaning.
In this case the Two Worlds are represented by two triangles, one (the Lower World) pointing upwards (striving?), and the other (the Higher World) pointing downwards (offering?). The Star shows how they eventually integrate, as in the Christian notion of ‘Heaven on Earth’, for example. Note how the two triangles interlace in an ‘impossible’ manner, indicating absolute unity. I guess this device neatly proposes a solution to the Christian concern over whether human ‘Effort’ or heavenly ‘Grace’ is the key to finding ‘salvation’. The Star suggests both, as in ‘knock ▲ and the door shall be opened ▼’. The Star was adopted by Judaism in the Middle Ages. It seems to have originally been a Kabbalistic/magical and then an early Judaeo-Christian symbol.
See http://zeevgoldmann.blogspot.com/).
The photo above (Thanks to?) is of a late Roman silver dish, found in the UK. The Hindu yantra in Chapter 13 shows some similarity to this star. The Chinese version of the two worlds and their relationship to ‘the whole’ shows up well in the subtle symbol of chi/qi (the life force) often called the yin-yang symbol: (Picture thanks to Klem.)
The Higher World (of Intuitive Wisdom) communicates with the Lower World of samsara via a system of ‘transformers’ called ‘chakras’, which step down the higher vibes to be usable in the denser lower strata. Life Mind and Consciousness are piped into our brute physical bodies via the other three bodies, and their respective transformers. The Higher World is beyond our comprehension until we earn the right to join it by shaking off all our selfish beastly ways and becoming fully responsible and altruistic beings: ‘fully human’. We do this by building character: by resisting selfish temptation.
§ Interestingly ‘Satan’ means ‘adversary’ or ‘tempter’, as in ‘get thee behind me, Satan’. Thus there’s nothing actually evil in Satan (assuming he is a real being, rather than a personification of temptation): he’s just a challenger, and thus a sort of guide.
§ As we progress, we must resist the temptation to backslide, or ‘look back’. A number of Greek myths can be seen as parables of this Esoteric view of Lower and Higher worlds, and Man’s quest to reach the Higher. Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, or Theseus, who was sent to slay the Minotaur animal-monster, rather like Saints Michael and George slaying the dragon, and Apollo slaying Pythia. I guess the symbolism of the Higher Self overcoming the Lower self is obvious. The myths and religions of the world are full of such things.
When we ‘die’, the Yogis say, we go to the level of the astral world that our dominant vibe is in tune with. We don’t automatically become angels or devils, or privy to all the secrets of the universe; we don’t get judged and flung into pits; we remain precisely as we were on the Physical, as witnessed by the Law of Karma. In other words ‘we get what we deserve’ in the ‘afterlife’. A relief for some and a threat for others no doubt. If you have been a kindly soul, keen on music in This World, you will (almost literally) gravitate to a plane in the astral which you can chime with, filled with people of a similar vibe. If on the other hand you have been a ruthless drug dealer or a greed-obsessed banker, or lying politician, you will end up on a plane filled with people of your own moral level. Thus, say the Yogis, we each make our own heaven and our own hell, via our use of our free will to make superior or inferior choices, every day of our lives.
§ This would seem to offer a rational response to the Materialist challenges of:
*Q1: ‘If God is Good, why does he let His children suffer?’, and
*Q2: ‘If Man has free will, where does that put God’s omnipotence?’
Thus:
*A1: The suffering in the world is mainly caused by Man’s own actions of war/greed etc.
*A2: What if ‘God’ chooses to let His ‘children’ use their free will to make mistakes and learn by experience, so they can grow, as ‘children’ must, into self-reliant and responsible ‘adults’?
This may be unexpected, but I don’t think there’s anything irrational here. As a matter of interest, the ‘children’ parallel might be more than a metaphor. There’s an ancient saying in the occult word: ‘As above, so below’.
The ‘progression of worlds’ (in ascending order) is of the animated Body, the reactive Emotions, and the considering Mind; ie, of an increasing scale of engagement with the world outside: first ignorant; then reactive; then (potentially) proactive. One might add to these the creativity of Intuition. An undeveloped person lives in his astral/animal/emotional body; a very primitive, or damaged, person may live only in his animated/vegetable/etheric body. It’s only when we are properly using our Mind, firstly by learning to think straight, and then by using it to access the Intuition of Higher Mind via meditation, for example, that we become fully human. And then what? ‘Largely unknown,’ the seers say, ‘so don’t worry about it. Just get on with becoming fully human’. This attitude would seem to be the key to understanding why the Dalai Lama says ‘My religion is kindness’.
§ A Sufi perspective:
‘I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear?
When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man,
To soar with angels blest;
But even from angelhood I must pass on …’
(excerpt from Masnawi, by Hazrat)
‘Onwards and ever upwards’ is the consistent message.
I confess that I do not remember any previous life as a pebble or a daffodil or kangaroo. I don’t remember any previous human life, or come to that, anything before the age of four, or even the day before yesterday. Some people do claim they can remember previous lives however, and much work has been done on ‘past-life regression’, a hypnotic process which claims to enable people to remember past lives in some detail. The statistical spread of class/occupation reported by regressees fits well with the normal sociological spread: ie, contrary to the Skeptics’ scornful declaration, not everyone claims to have been Napoleon and/or Cleopatra. On the contrary, almost everyone claims to have been a peasant or of some other lowly background. (See Life before Life by Dr Helen Wambach or Many Lives, Many Masters by the erstwhile sceptical psychiatrist Dr Brian Weiss). Why don’t we remember old lives? It would be too much of a burden to have to remember all our ancient wickedness, they say. But when we die, we do re-remember, and integrate our pearls of progress in our recent life into the matrix of our previous efforts. Thus, slowly, we progress.
Speaking of pearls, one common decorative Chinese symbol is of a dragon pursuing a pearl. Again, the symbolism is obvious, isn’t it? Yes, it’s the pearl of wisdom and enlightenment.
***
All very interesting, but what relevance does all this have to ghosts? Well, it seems to me that given the notion of samsara (‘many worlds/lives’) plus the Law of Karma, plus the purpose of life, we now have a pretty full scenario for what at least some sorts of ghost might be. Might they not be people who were so animalistic or materialistic in This World that their lowly vibes have caused them to be stuck here, but in an (invisible) astral body? Very few ghosts seem to be of a cheery nature. Mostly they are morose or angry, and even malicious and violent. That would suggest either great confusion or ‘low character’. Add to this the fact that a number of mediums regularly ‘clear’ ghosts out of houses by going into a trance (altering their vibe to tune with the ghost’s) and then literally telling the wretch ‘Look… you’ve died. The reason you’re so unhappy is that you’ve become too attached to some aspect of this physical place and have not been paying attention to your options. Now… relax… look about you… and you will see a bright light… Go to it.’ And the house is henceforth free of the ominous presence it used to have. Householders consistently report this.
In the Yogic/Esoteric world, ‘light’, as in ‘electromagnetic (EM) vibration-radiation’, appears to be the very stuff the ‘worlds’ are physically made of.
EM vibration-radiation is a continuum. That means it is an endless snake of trillions of trillions of wavelengths, from the enormous to the minuscule. This includes long waves like radio, through the visible light range (red waves longer; blue waves shorter) to x-rays, gamma rays and beyond. This continuum seems to be limitless. We can actually see an infinitesimal fraction of all the possible wavelengths. With technology we have become aware of another minute fraction (radio etc). To a Yogi, all the rest of this apparently infinite spectrum is as meaningful as those fractions we can normally relate to. Indeed the entire spectrum is related to the very reality of everything. Not just related, but close to the cause, (and all of this continuum is vibratory: vibes). In this we perhaps find a relationship to the Big Bang, except that for a Materialist the Bang was merely a purposeless random event, but for a Yogi it would be the means of, or the medium for, purposeful physical creation.
I wonder whether science might one day come round to the idea of Einstein’s equation of E=mc2 (which shows that energy and matter are different phases of the same thing, rather like ice and steam) being perhaps the essential in the formation of matter right from the start. Genesis says that Light (ie vibratory electromagnetism) was the first creation, and Yogis have been saying something similar for millennia.
There is another theory of Big Bang called the ‘cyclic’ theory. This suggests that our BB was just one of a recurring cycle of Bang and Collapse, with possibly a trillion years between Bangs. Yogis call this Bang and Collapse The Breath of Brahman, and time the cycle at some 8.64 billions of years.
***
Assuming what Yogis say is true, how do they know so much? Easy, they say. The outer world (the Lower) is the world of the physical senses. But the Higher worlds, (the ‘realer’ worlds) are accessible by facing the other way, and turning within, via the path of meditation. If you can subdue all sensory inputs, including that mental chunterer, you can contact the Higher ▲, or rather, allow it to contact you ▼. If you persist, you too will come to Know the truth (rather than ‘Believe’ or ‘Understand’) of what they claim.
§ The Esoteric view that this world is a place to learn to behave makes sense of the word ‘Islam’ (‘submission’) to me. It’s not submission to bullying, as the word would imply to English ears, but an acceptance of the fact that ‘problems’ will arise in our life which we must face up to. For Islam, these opportunities are sent by God in person; hence your need to ‘submit’ to them in the sense of positively dealing with them and not trying to avoid them; in the Esoteric view, the problems come to you automatically, following the Law of Cause and Effect that has defined your own karmic path. Either way, it is silly to duck ‘problems’ when they arrive into your life, Muslims and Yogis say. They are challenges for you to overcome and opportunities to do the right thing. Duck them and they will surely return. You may have noticed this in your own life.
The thing about ‘problems’ is not that they occur, but how you deal with them. Thus, your ‘problems’ are your friends. They are means to growth and personal development in terms of patience, kindness, judgement and courage. To look at it from another perspective: if you don’t give yourself enough new challenges, Nature will do it for you. There is an apparently flippant middle eastern proverb, which has a deeper meaning around this theme: ‘If you have no problems in your life, get a goat’.
‘Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.’ James Allen in As a Man Thinketh.
A propos… I recently saw this issue stated as ‘Things don’t happen to you. They happen for you.’
***
I was intrigued to discover that the word ‘yoga’ means ‘union (with the Higher World)’ that Buddhists call ‘Nirvana’. Our own word ‘religion’ derives from the Latin ‘re-ligare’, meaning ‘to re-tie’ (something which has become separated: ie the Lower World from the Higher).
§ The biblical parable of the Prodigal Son is concerned with this theme: conquering (or tiring of) the lower nature, and finally returning home.
§ ‘Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world.’ Sufi Hakim Sanai, 12th century.
I now felt that I’d come a long way from discovering that science has been invaded by heavily dogmatised Materialism, and that I had somehow now stumbled across a plausible ‘explanation’ for at least a habitat for ghosts, and had come across a couple of coincidences that might link science and religion and the Yogic/Esoteric world as well.
Yogis say that the four worlds that make up samsara (physical, etheric, astral and mental) are really just four consecutive vibratory states, and are thus not four separate worlds at all; also, and this took me by surprise, they say that it thus follows that all four of these ‘worlds’ are ultimately physical in their nature. This means, if true, that scientists (eg physicists: students of the physical) are thus ‘free’ to investigate them without worrying that they are wandering away from their ‘physical’ brief.
§ This would seem to me to imply that the while vibratory world is a samsaric reality only, and that the Nirvanic/post-material world is of a totally different, non-vibratory order. What do you think?
As the Yogic view speaks of sliding scales of just about everything, and an individual karmic path for everyone, would it be too fanciful to think of a sliding scale of animality-humanity which even crosses species? The Sufi poet quoted above would not have a problem with this, and Darwin/Wallace showed that there is essentially only one Life.
Freemasonry claims that its understandings derive from ancient Egypt, and regards the ‘astral world’ as being the home of Plato’s ‘ideal forms’. The ‘astral body’ would also seem to equate with the ‘subtle body’ of the Greek Orphic ‘mystery’.
Finally: Einstein’s discovery that matter and energy are interchangeable, according to the formula of E=mc2 has so far proved to be only a one-way ticket. Hiroshima showed how m becomes E, and atomic power stations have backed this up. However, nobody has yet showed how E ever became m. Something is missing from the formula…. design/pattern, or, in Plato’s term: ‘form’.**
The Occult: finally…
(and not at all scary…)
No one can get anything unless he earns it. This is an eternal law
Swami Vivekananda
The good news after braving The Dreaded Occult is that our future seems to lie in our own hands, not in those of some mad god, or some abiotic but super-intelligent and malignant chemical.
If you’re enjoying the ideas in this book, please tell other people. Let’s not keep it to ourselves! CG.