unity of will

Unity of Will for Spiritual Success

Posted on by Harold Boulette

“Use only one vessel, one fire, one instrument.

“The door to success lies in the unity of will and purpose and the proper adaptation of the means to the end. There are many roads leading to the celestial center. He who follows the chosen path may succeed, while he who attempts to walk on many paths will be delayed.

“If the molten metals are allowed to cool off before they are transformed into higher ones, they will become hard again, and the whole process will have to be recommenced from the beginning. Use the inextinguishable lamp. Its light will not go out unless it is driven away by force.

“Recognize the true Prima Materia. It is to be found everywhere, but if you do not find it in your own house, you will find it nowhere. It is a living substance that can be discovered only in places inhabited by man. It is the only substance from which the Philosopher’s Stone can be prepared, and without that substance no genuine silver or gold can be made. In thirty pounds of ordinary mercury, there is usually not more than one pound of the true substance, and a hundred pounds of ordinary sulfur usually contains not more than one pound of that which is useful. It can only be found above he earth, not below it. It is before everybody’s eyes; no one can live without it; everybody uses it; the poor usually possess more of it than the rich; … it can be perceived by the sense of feeling, but it cannot be seen with the material eye.” ~Franz Hartmann

One Vessel, One Fire

Hartmann is saying that if you are seeking true spiritual growth rather than just studying the teachings out of curiosity, you must choose a particular school or discipline and follow it completely and regularly. If you find at some point that you made a bad choice, move on to a different school, but don’t just jump willy-nilly from one school to another, one method to another. Let’s consider the issue with an analogy.

A man who is by profession a home construction engineer wants to build himself a house. He starts by laying out a few boards and making a partial frame. But then decides a brick house would be better. So he starts laying bricks but does only a few dozen before he decides stone would be better than brick, so he tears down the brick and starts again with stone. If he continues on like this, not only will he not get the best home possible, he won’t get one at all! He has to make a firm decision and stick with it. The same for choosing a spiritual school or spiritual discipline to follow. Continue reading “Unity of Will for Spiritual Success” →

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eye of God

Eye of God in the Spiritual Sun

Posted on by Harold Boulette

Eye of God

“‘Let me hear whatever any one may have told you’. ‘Barku, the son of Vrsna, has told me that the eye (sun) is Brahman’. ‘As one who has a mother, a father and a teacher should say, so has the son of Vrsna said this—that the eye is Brahman. For what can a person have who cannot see? But did he tell you about its abode (body) and support?’ ‘No, he did not’. ‘This Brahman is only one-footed, O Emperor’. ‘Then you tell us, Yajnavalkya’. ‘The eye is its abode, and the ether (the Undifferentiated) its support. It should be meditated upon as truth’. ‘What is truth, Yajnavalkya?’ ‘’The eye itself, O Emperor’, said Yajnavalkya; if a person, O Emperor, says to one who has seen with his eyes, “Have you seen?” and the latter answers, “Yes, I have”, then it is true. The eye, O Emperor, is the Supreme Brahman. The eye never leaves him who, knowing thus, meditates upon it; all beings eagerly come to him; and being a god, he attains the gods’. ‘I give you a thousand cows with a bull like an elephant’, said Emperor Janaka.” ~Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The Sun As the Eye of God

This Upanishad says that the “eye (sun) is Brahman,” or as I would say it, the sun is the eye of God. That should not be taken in a very literal sense, since God has no physical body and no eye in the normal sense of what we think of as an eye. Yet it is true because the sun is a link, a portal, between Heaven and Earth, between the physical and the spiritual. So God doesn’t “see” us through the sun, but he does sense us with spiritual senses. Likewise, we can sense God and communicate with Angels and other high-level beings by using the sun as if it is the Eye of God. Of course, this won’t work if you are dealing only with the physical sun. You need to go beyond ordinary sun-gazing with the physical sun to spiritual sun-gazing with the spiritual sun. The sun, of course, has a spiritual self, as do all beings and things. It is because of that duel nature that it can act as a portal between the realms, a window between heaven and earth, the Eye of God. Continue reading “Eye of God in the Spiritual Sun” →

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levels of humans

Levels of Humans: Physical, Mental, and Spiritual

Posted on by Harold Boulette

Three Levels of Humans

“All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the intellectual. Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them elect to abide by that order and, their life through it, make its concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if they live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other. …

“Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest, and so .. they fall back upon the actions and options of the lower.

“But there is a third order—those godlike men who, in their mightier power. In the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of the splendor above and rise to it from among the cloud and for of earth and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own country.” ~Plotinus

Levels of Humans

It isn’t clear from what Plotinus says, but I believe he is saying that humanity exists at three levels: material, mental or intellectual, and spiritual. None of these levels are completely separate from the others, and we all have some of each within us. It is just a matter of what we choose to develop and emphasize and what we choose to ignore.

Realm of Sense

The world of matter is what Plotinus calls the “realm of Sense”. In other words, it is the realm where the physical senses are used. People who live almost exclusively at this level, using their mind only to negotiate around the realm of matter, are the lowest of the three levels of humanity described (somewhat) by Plotinus. He points out that when we are first born into the realm of matter, it is only natural that we must first attend to the material. We must eat, find shelter and clothing, etc. In most cases, our parents will be helping with much of that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the mind of a newborn is all about satisfying its material needs. Continue reading “Levels of Humans: Physical, Mental, and Spiritual” →

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spiritual influence

Spiritual Influence in a Materialistic World

Posted on by Harold Boulette

Spiritual Influence on Man

“It is difficult to express in the language of today the effects on Man, in that far-off time of the spiritual beings referred to. They must not be thought of as analogous to natural influences of the present time, nor yet as similar to the influences of one human being on another, when the first awakens in the second inner powers of consciousness by words which help the second person to understand something, or which stimulate him to virtue or vice. The effect referred to as operative in that primeval age was not a force of nature but a spiritual influence, conveyed in a spiritual way, which descended upon man as a spiritual influx from higher spirits, conformable with Man’s state of consciousness at that time. If we think of this influence as a force of nature we altogether miss its essential reality. If we say that the spirits with the old moon nature tempted Man in order to lead him astray for their own ends, we are using a symbolical expression, which is good as long as we remember that it is but a symbol and are at the same time clear in our minds that a spiritual fact underlies the symbol.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Spiritual Influence

Steiner is correct in saying that Man was under spiritual influence in the distant past and that spiritual influence is not the same as a natural influence or natural forces. Of course, spirits are natural, but when Steiner says “Natural” here, he means part of the physical or material universe rather than the spiritual realms.

Ancient scripture such as the Upanishads and the Bible makes it clear that thousands of years ago it was common for Man, or al least some men, to talk to spirits, most often in the form of angels or demons. That still happens but is very rare. It isn’t that the spirits or spiritual worlds have moved away from us, but that as we sink deeper and deeper into matter, we move away from them. The more material we become, the more difficult it is to see or communicate with spiritual beings.

Perhaps because we have become so densely material, both physically and mentally, many have difficulty grasping the concept of spirits and spiritual influence. Many think that it is just something mental, that the soul is just a part of the mind. Some believe that so-called spirits are just physical beings from other planets. Why it is so easy to believe in beings from another planet but not from another dimension, specifically a spiritual dimension, is beyond me. If you can believe in aliens influencing us with no proof whatsoever, how can you reject the written evidence of many going back thousands of years of spiritual influence? Continue reading “Spiritual Influence in a Materialistic World” →

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