Читать книгу The Spirit of the Tarot - Claudine Aegerter - Страница 19

There is no higher manifestation of the divine intention than The High Priestess, the female Pope. Wearing a crown with two rings and a red cloak lined with green, she is seated on a throne in front of a veil. Here she pro tects the access to the great mystery. She is Isis, the metaphysical form of the Goddess and she represents love-wisdom. In one hand she holds the book of life, in the other the silver and gold keys, for she has all knowledge of both the natural and esoteric realms. Her left arm rests on a black sphinx. This Sphinx is the dweller on the threshold, the black Dog of Hell, represent ing our subconscious minds and this is what the initiate faces as he comes before her. Her face is partly obscured and her expression blank, for there is no easy access here. If the initiate is ready and few are, he will receive the higher revelation, will see beyond the veil and be changed forever.

The right use of the Tarot is as a spiritual teaching aid. All systems are only tools; the intention and the energy we invest when using the tools will define the result. Here we are aiming to put drops of gold back into the Tarot cards, for one tiny unit of truth and light changes an ocean of misleading darkness. The work is to go into the subconscious where something is festering in ignorance; to take us in there we need the ancient symbol of the dog, represented here by the black sphinx.

There are two qualities symbolised by the dog; there is the dog who is a server of God and there is the big black dog of Hell, who likes to be fed and the more he is fed the more he grows. The way we feed this black dog of Hell is by not knowing ourselves and being automatons, enacting out all our subconscious reactions without being aware of what is going on. We are all subject to this behaviour; the initiate’s only work is to become completely aware of every single atom of shadow within him and so become aware of the input of his inner relationship with the outer world. This way he won’t be caught by it, play its game and fall back into automatism. It is only when we can be aware of the origin of our reactions that we can start to be of use to the God we live in. This process doesn’t happen in five minutes, which is why there are twenty-two cards in the Arcana. It is a very thorough process, turning around every stone and every little memory cell, because each one of them might still contain a little hologram of a situation where we are ‘playing the game’. We are looking for little pools of hate, pain and regrets, so as to bring the light of love from our Soul into them. Every single corner of our sub conscious that we feed unknowingly creates an entity within our aura, for all thoughts are creative. With every need, want and link we forge with somebody, we create a tie. This is what we have to face with The High Priestess. Are we as pure of intention, as free of needs as we think we are?

The High Priestess symbolises the highest manifestation of the authority of the divine wisdom on the planet. She is removed and silent. She scrutinises us and her presence warns that if we are going to come any nearer, it is not going to be a picnic.

Everything manifested is a symbol for an unseen cause. As we begin to understand life as symbolic, we access our inner wisdom and the material world of form has less effect on us. The High Priest ess is therefore to be seen as a symbol, rather than a woman sitting on a throne. The aim of the journey is to understand that the world is within us and the fact that we see the world in a particular way is because it is already in our brain. This is an essential requirement for going through the veil of Isis, she is the metaphysical form of the Goddess.

The Magician in the first card now stands before her. He is already a potential initiate and he smiles, for he thinks that he has found a pot of honey. She says to him: “You want to come and show me what you have learned so far? You want to go further? Then look at me, look at me long and hard!” If we won’t face her and go forward through her, then the journey is not for us. Going through the veil is the aim of the whole twenty two cards, so in a way at this point we are almost at the end. The High Priestess is the grace/wis dom aspect of the Goddess. She is metaphysical so she can only be perceived by the metaphysical mind in us. On the other side of the veil are the cause of life and the divine knowledge. She has to guard the door so that no imprudent intruder can step through. She holds the secret.

The Magician, the Number 1, is able to have a transforming effect on the manifested world; in fact we can all have an effect on the manifested world, but not in a conscious way. We can bring a cul ture down, we can bring another culture in and we can pollute the planet; we do all this within nature’s unconscious cycle of transfor mation. The great catastrophes or wars are part of this, because they are ‘weather’ effects that needed to happen to the planet within a greater context and they help humanity to wake up to its respon sibility. When we look at all the people and at the beneficent or destructive leaders, what we see is a superficial expression, which occurs when things either need to be manifested in a particular way, or destroyed. At those times some people are used as puppets or tools in major world events, when the time is right for something to happen to shake us. However, these people are different from the great ones, whom we would call the Masters. Those who have the ability to affect things can be stimulated through these events to realise the new vision and new hope. When The Magician comes in he is ready to receive a higher revelation.

In the experience of being truly alive, our senses are so instinc tively pure, that we don’t even know that we are sensing through them. In this state we can read the landscape for miles, like a wild beast. This is what our senses should be used for rather than to be used for the gratification of whether we like chocolate, or the colour red, or a particular piece of music. Whilst we are strongly centred on using the senses for pleasure, we are still quite a way from fully understanding the impact of what it is to be a true ini tiate. The true initiate can appreciate colours and chocolate and it doesn’t mean that we mustn’t like these things, but rather that we do not need any of them. We appreciate these things because our senses are there, but in that pure state of being truly alive we do not need any sensation and if suddenly we lost all our senses, we would not miss anything at all. Have you experienced being alive, without the senses being used for sensations? This state is always approached with a sense of dread, because it is the com plete unknown: it is the divine or what is behind the veil and if we go through without being ready, madness is certain.

The initiate has come back to the world and from day one has a smile on his face. Is he naïve, over confident, or could it be dread, because what he is going to face is an unknown space? It is the space that holds all the wisdom so far and the secret of how God manifested it. This is Number 2, the great Isis or the great space. It has within it all the dust, beauty and brightness, all the life and death experiences for millions of years that have been and are to be, manifested, explored and brought back into the light.

When the initiate is truly alive, he always has that sense of dread and it is not because he doesn’t dare. We have learned to survive physically by the senses telling us what is around so that we can act accordingly; for example, if I am a rabbit and five inches away there is a fox, I run away. The acceleration of picking up the message and having to go is what we call excitement. It is life and death, it is sex and survival. Anything that accelerates the senses to make us move is an over-the-top reaction, except when it is for sur vival and to save our skin. Most of us in the western world should not be ‘in excitement’ because we are not living at a time where we have a hunter behind us about to kill us. However, the rest of the world lives on the edge of survival, so we can hold compassion for them. If mass consciousness is still using excitement in creating its own hysterical shows as part of daily life, it is really only because it has not yet grown up, for modern man is very young on the planet in comparison to the millions of years of biological life. Man is like a two or three year old infant still sucking his thumb; this is not a judgment or condemnation, just a statement of fact.

Using the senses to feel alive comforts us. We can get addicted to the laboratory rather than the research, like an artist who gets addicted to the beauty of the colours, rather than refining his art until he understands that art isn’t necessary. The fact that we need comfort is because we still have the survival aspect in us and so we find other modes besides the natural flight, fight, or rut instincts, to stimulate excitement. The rut in the animal kingdom is not really excitement, though we have described it as such, it is just the mind less push of biologic or organic creativity. This is very relevant in The High Priestess, for we have the two pillars of life that are con stantly mating and that is why they support the temple. When you have the rut in nature, you have the two pillars in action in order to procreate species. We describe it as excitement because mankind has experimented with all the deviations of the sexual act, but in real ity sex is plain and simple and doesn’t have all the bits and pieces, complicating and hiding its true nature. We had to make sensual excitement part of our luggage in order to plunge into the mud of the subconscious and see what is exciting down there, otherwise we would just never have gone for the experience, for who wants to go and get excited on dust? The gift of the senses thus enables us to do the work of purification.

So The High Priestess puts fear and dread into us. When we real ise that all is mind moving into space, as witnesses we are being used as we have abused; this is what the veil is going to reveal. Biological life has been used from the beginning of time for the purpose of birth ing awareness. We are learning to give our material life in service, as a way through for the higher consciousness. Form is only yesterday’s intent and understanding that needed manifesting, so that through it the great life can recognise itself by us being aware of our reactions. We understand that service is the only thing that we are here to do, so this is our use. Service should not be a means to achieve sainthood or mastery, for in the real energetic life there is nothing else we can be used for. The reality is that we are being used, so we are servants and it is the complete non emotional acceptance of that fait accompli that is the truth. We have to fall in love with the great life beyond the emotional to reach this stage of acceptance. We play lots of games to find out what the experience of being alive feels like from every angle and now we have to put the games away. The High Priestess or Isis knows that she serves the servants of God, who are full of love and compassion and all manner of beautiful things. She serves them because she knows that they can’t pass through that doorway with emotional luggage, so she is there to help them look into their sub conscious emotional needs. The world of God is a world of energy, where love is magnetic and truth is light. In this world of energy, matter is only a way to recognise what the space is made of and to see how beautiful the dance of the energy is. The High Priestess causes dread, because we have to drop all the dreams of childhood; we even have to drop the dreams of the initiate who thinks he is going to help some great God in the sky to save the planet. We really have to die to all that, so that the mind can soar and realise that it is just a spark of light. The message is ‘Just die to everything you aspired to achieve and become, so as to be truly alive’. This is what is meant by the veil tearing, when Jesus was dying on the cross. At this point, Jesus the Soul was pierced by the incoming divine mind, removing any hope of personal glory. The higher mind in the Soul has no other agenda than service to the great life.

If we have come in front of The High Priestess here, it is because we have surpassed and risen above the little mysteries of life such as science and psychology, which help make us into individuals who can manage life a little bit better. We would have to take several more leaps in consciousness to be in the presence of The High Priest ess. These leaps will reveal the existence of the Soul principle, until eventually we learn to associate with the concept of Soul. Higher intelligence has to be reached though Soul, so aspiration has to be strong enough and high enough, for Soul to come down and mani fest the star of Bethlehem. The star is that part in us where the Soul has reached the higher self and associates with that point of light.

Figure 1. The Star of Bethlehem. Aligning with the point of light within the Soul.

When we are in the depth of our despair, we think that no human being has ever suffered as much as us, or ever gone so low. We are very good at holding onto self-pity, but once we finish with self-pity we slowly come up. As we come up we don’t stop at self, because having gone a bit higher, we feel as though we are as Jesus – then we realise we have to come and serve. We come down again quickly because we are happy and eager to serve; beware of the excitement of that!

The idea is to bring the light down into the subconscious and even if we do it out of pride or weakness, it doesn’t matter, because we are bringing the light in. It is always our own experience and hopefully every time we plunge a little deeper we are gathering a bit more of the mystery.

Figure 2. ‘As above so below’.

The movement of the light into the sphere of work. Bringing the wisdom back into the consciousness of humanity, so that it can rise proportionately to its descent, to meet the higher mind of the Soul.

Figure 3. The star comes down increasingly bringing light into the darkness. Then the light of the star directs and works with the pure instinct of nature.

The light has met, cleansed, understood and loved whatever it meets with, so it has sublimated the whole of the space. If we come back to a life of crises which sends us into despair and we identify with the despair, then we haven’t stopped getting excited about the experience of the situation, so we are not going to be able to subli mate all the knowledge that we have. To increase our contribution to the realisation of the plan, we must stop focussing on self and stop imprinting through the emotional and intellectual senses. We are useful when we meet the situation and are able to look at it from above with the viewpoint of the star. The star is with us always.

An intense feeling of despair or joy, would give us the opportu nity to travel with our star (higher mind) to its source in the cellular memory where it is held. Then the light of reality can transmute the personal guilt/victim perception that we have of this specific recur ring emotional/mind-set, into the acceptance of having been used by the light for a rescue job on the subconscious Soul of nature. That is how we ‘redeem’, although actually nothing needs redeeming in the sense of sin. The world was created or ‘deemed’ and all we are doing is revisiting every single little pebble of that creation to name it. We don’t have to own it or carry it on our shoulders, because we can revisit it and be in there completely with truth, to leave it in peace.

With awareness, we know when we have put ourselves in a dreadful situation, so we don’t make any fuss because we know it will be gone tomorrow; we don’t hold onto it unless we feel self-pity and guilt.

Any pain that we feel is added onto the original pain. We have to go beyond pain and see from the humble point of view of the fallen Star that there is nothing to it, it is not done to us, it is life happen ing and from there we can see that a big crisis is just a bruise. There can be a bruise on our body, or on the body of the planet which could manifest as a catastrophe, such as an earthquake or a famine. A bruise is just a lot of damaged cells and when we visit our own personal life crises, the crystallised scars can be seen for what they are, the past, experienced, named and depersonalised by the light of the Soul and the love of service.

We have to face the guardian on the seat, The High Priestess. She is holding two keys in her left hand, which is resting on the head of the sphinx. In her right hand she holds the book of life, which symbolises truth, so she’s putting us in front of the psychic trial of getting real. She tells us that we don’t get real through intellectual knowledge or emotional visualisation workshops, for anything that has to do with the personality’s experience is not real. We can only get real through using the psychic realm, or the realm of the Soul; this is the only way our work can be done. The realm of the Soul is one with the higher mind and the Soul of nature, the work is aligning the mind of man with the higher mind of the Soul and the love/wisdom of the Soul of nature. This is truly going to happen on the psychic level through the Soul, so is the beginning of the true death of the illusion of the personality; this is why there is a feeling of dread. We are talking about the Soul wanting to be active and really having to fish out all these pains and problems, so that once and for all we don’t take matter, intellect or the big emotional body, as the Queen of the heavens, which they are not. The personality is only a puppet, a vehi cle for the mind to follow, to find more fuel to transmute into light.

The work of the Soul starts in a psychic trial. If we start it too soon, mental disorder comes in, which always happens to a few and is a necessity in every group. For the normal Soul group it is natural to have a few individuals going beyond reason, to allow the whole group to align to psychic understanding and the use of true, non-intellectual intelligence. The warning is, be careful, don’t undergo the trial too soon out of personal aggrandisement, because that can destabilise the fragile instrument and so necessitate a lot of heal ing work. If we use too many physical ways to reach God, such as overuse of exoteric or mechanical rituals, or chemical substances, we can be derailed. The way through is a natural process that must be witnessed, so the true spiritual path is humble and has nothing to do with pride, or wanting to save the world. Looking back at our childhoods, we may have been already somewhere in front of the veil but didn’t recognise it until somebody described the landscape; that is the natural way.

When we see that the testing ground is everyday life and that nobody is holding our hand, true initiation can happen. Then if we can have the courage to dive in where our emotional/mental reac tion takes us, the Soul perception can disperse the shadows. Though we are all important in the scheme of things, as individuals we do not matter, so we must remove our personal selves from the vision. As we remove the personality from a happening, whether bad or good, we can be grateful that we can mine from it more coal to burn.

We are talking about alchemy, hidden knowledge, or transmuta tion. The Magician is master of the secrets and this has allowed him to come in front of The High Priestess with her keys, which hold the unlocking of the secrets. He is wary, for if the veil is lifted just in one corner, he will have the realisation that it is all energy and that we really are of no consequence. Then even if the veil is quickly put back he cannot draw back, for he’s had a glimpse of the world as an energetic entity. If we have seen that and yet still live strongly in the sensory, intellectual way, we will be deeply troubled by our ways and will perceive them as weakness and failures, until we accept being used by a greater power. We tend to forget the whole picture as we get taken in by everyday life, maybe because the monkey in us is a bit too proud, or maybe because we haven’t fully recognised its tricks yet.

The humble character of the Soul will love those people who help to cut the emotional ties. It is important to remember that it is those ties that hold us back, not the people. When we see behind the veil, we can look at our environment with a new appreciation of where we are and we are able to recognise all the personal emo tional ties that are holding us back. The love aspect becomes purer and stronger if we dissolve the ties of need. We may go through several groups of friends or loved ones in a life-time; they help us to do that energetic work of severing our links to the lower emotional. We have to bring our immediate emotional response back to pure instinct, to recognise our natural survival needs rather than emo tional attachment.

With groups and couples we have interaction rather than lead ers, for there is no above or below and no one is more evolved than another. It is the power of the love of the work that is important, for it measures evolution and without that there is no group. The same applies in ‘use and being used’ and ‘abuse and being abused’; the abuser is also the abused. If the victim can look at the fact that he is also the perpetrator, because he or she had to experience the abuse, then eventually we see that they both undertook the experience and both have to stop playing the game. There is nothing to abuse, there is only spiritual energy floating through a space bringing up shapes and forms, so that it can recognise its evolution at the time. Once that level of understanding is reached, we won’t put ourselves into those situations as abused or abuser. The initiate won’t engage in it mentally or emotionally, because matter is of no importance. The body is only a manifestation at the time, a tool being used by energies and the world is an energetic world. We cannot take seri ously what happens to our personalities in that sense, but Soul can inform them so that the instrument can translate what needs to be understood through it. Being able to gather the emotion from that type of experience is more than important and worthy, though the experience itself is not important. The emotions have to be named and purified by the higher mind, so that we understand which feel ings are personal. The feelings are there because the personality thinks it is important and doesn’t understand its link to divinity. The way through to this understanding is through the Soul work, when we start activating the star of Bethlehem. The three-fold personality has to give up all its needs to be the instrument of the Soul, which in turn has to give all its love to be at the service of the karmic spiritual energy that moulds the Universe - so who is using who?

Figure 4. The final alignment of the personality/Soul/Spirit connection.

The unveiling has to be realised all the way down, so the star has to drop down into the great sea of the subconscious, restoring wisdom to everyday life.

The work is done only through taking the conscious mind into the unconscious, which is the Soul of nature and was there before us. Nature had to find a unit in herself that could be a little star, a torch, or a light and so she gave birth to awareness in the human kingdom. We go in and feel everything, eventually realising it is not ours! We should not personalise what we feel; we are only lit tle light-bearers going into the experience to feel and name it. The initiate has understood that the content of his subconscious is part of the previous experience in the unconscious of nature, that is why he can walk up and down with his torch and nothing bothers him. The feelings of ‘It is unfair’ and ‘I am being used’ are not there; he is not afraid of anything he finds there, because he is cleansing and bringing in more and more light. Once the big star is at the bot tom in the full light, we have redemption or re-creation and every thing is seen for what it is. The Star comes down increasingly, for the Soul knows it has come back for service and is full of enthusiasm. The amnesia that the Soul had when it first comes back can only be dissipated through the one that experiences (Soul), when the experi ment and experience make one. We go in and dig deep and look at everything from that very deeply felt, emotional hurt that the world carries. As we become more and more aware, we vaguely remember having been there before, so the work that needs doing becomes clearer and clearer. We have the star and the light, so we need not be overwhelmed by emotions, because we realise they are not per sonal. We are in a big sea of emotion and have to ride it to see where it takes us. The waves take us to a point of rest at the top, when we think we are the saviour. Then when we are at the bottom, we drop the self-pity and feel the black velvety rest of the overshadowing of the wisdom of the world. Suddenly peace is there and the Soul brings comfort in the subconscious amongst the monsters, except there are no monsters! So we keep on doing the work, deeper and quicker. What a privilege it is to look, understand and be aware, so that we can translate the process. We can thank God we are doing the work! It is all about knowing that the personality is of no conse quence. We can liken it to screaming at a horror film; even though we know it is not real, we can still be afraid, but we know the differ ence between the drama and the real thing. We scream because we know we can go into drama and it is okay, it is not really happening, the real alchemy is in silence.

The High Priestess is herself a veil in a way because all that she is going to confer to us, with her keys and her book, is what we truly have to absorb. We are talking about Soul work, for Soul absorbs and retains. Soul is a sea of memory, or a memory bank and she is showing us that. We don’t see the other side of her throne, just as with The Magician we only saw three of the four legs of his table, the other one being hidden. Her right side is not seen, but we can imagine the white sphinx there hidden by her cloak.

Whether or not we are facing The High Priestess, the human ity of our nature needs to be completely honoured, loved and cel ebrated. There used to be an official near the Pope whose job it was to remind him ‘you are only a man’, just in case he was losing a bit of humility in thinking he was God on the planet. It is a tradi tion that should be kept. Do we want to become a God and escape being a man? Why would we want to escape? It is the same with the work we are doing, if we don’t completely own one hundred percent what we are at the time with love, compassion and humil ity, whether we are the abused or the abuser, then we cannot fuse with the higher understanding of the Soul that is infused with the light of the Star.

Through the wisdom of The High Priestess and the secret of knowing that we are not this, that, or the other, we can actually fuse with the divine through the mind, the Soul and the higher intel ligence. When this is happening we may not be able to describe or sense what is going on. We must go through the intense purification of sulphur, for that is what is expected. Ancient Wisdom says that until the sixth initiation we are still in illusion, so there’s still a lot of burning and dissolving to be done.

The Silver Key that The High Priestess holds gives knowledge of the natural things; being in her left hand it shows receptivity and intuition. Silver is the beauti ful energy that wants to rise up with hope and ‘esperance’, travelling right up to the higher mind to meet the lover. We have to start where we stand and we stand in nature, so we must have all the knowledge of the natural world. The silver will take us to the flower of what the intellect can do, which is phi losophy. Philosophy is a wonderful supreme science and a natural tool, which enables the intellect to uplift itself. The intellect works through philosophy in a beautiful and refined way, but it is still a human science. Religion is one of the flowers of human science.

The leaves on the silver key represent the three virtues of religion, which are the beginning of the work of faith, hope and charity. They are still of the personality and require that the personality thinks and aligns to goodwill. Then, once the intellect is dropped, they are not needed. Faith is unnecessary because we know; we don’t need hope because we are in the now; we don’t need charity because we have compassion. We don’t matter and yet we are priceless! On the way there is always an exoteric lane and an esoteric path. A lane leads to a path and when we are going towards the esoteric path there will always have been an intellectual lane beforehand, such as a teaching, a guru, or something else exterior. The esoteric is hidden inside and the minute we go there we work with Soul.

The intellect is the intermediary principle and the way through, for it is only through the intellect that we are able to translate the knowledge and vision of the Soul. Whichever form of expression we use; words, arts or sciences, we still have to use mind. To have rendered the intellect into a very well ordered, obedient servant to some higher quest is something quite beautiful. To be seen as intel lectually clever can bring difficulties, because even if we have been touched by the Soul, this does not obviate the fierce battle between the intellect and Soul. The seat of the Soul is in the heart and there fore in the emotional body, but the first contact with Soul is through the intellect. Active Intelligence is the divine side of intellect. A rise in consciousness has to come from a contact with the higher mind and the will. It manifests as a change of perception; it is the percep tion of everything from the point of view of the Soul that enables the rise to happen. We don’t have to get rid of problems, but rather transmute them by seeing them as teaching aids.

So the silver key of science that The High Priestess holds in her hand symbolises all the qualities that have lifted us right up to a refined level of concrete knowledge. Though it is refined the knowl edge is still dogma; for example, we have a fixed idea that a plant is a plant and it grows like this or that, according to its species and its chemistry with the soil and the light. While a thing is seen sci-entifically it is a dogma, whether it is religion or science. Because of this we know that the next initiation has to happen from within, for there is no deeper truth than the one that comes from our inner chemistry, just as there is no possible plant unless the seed is taken from the heart of the plant so it can unfold into the flower and the fruit. When we have used all these beautiful social, initiatic paths at the level of matter, we have to kill the perception of ourselves as we are at that time, so as to be reborn into a different awareness; this is what we mean by the initiate killing his initiator. The plant in our example is then seen or perceived as a specific symbol of sacrifice; a gift, rather than what it is seen as purely biologically.

On the top of the Gold Key is the symbol for sul phur, which in alchemy represents the burning and dis solving of matter and of anything that is impure. The Gold key holds wisdom and to be an effective channel for wisdom we need reason. Reason, which is another side of the intellect, has to be regarded as important, as long as it doesn’t become an end in itself. If it does, then all we keep doing is reasoning and so stay in the closed circle of the intellect. Having the light coming in with reason to express it, is the only right use of reason and intellect. Gold is the esoteric knowledge, which gives life, reality and gnosis and will only deliver all that after purifica tion with sulphur. Sulphur symbolises total purification and there is no realisation if we are not purified. If we are truly to be a tool, we must be completely clear so that what comes through us when the star comes up can be seen for what it is. Sulphur eliminates anything that is not eternal. It instigates a painful purification, because in the silence of our minds it destroys anything that has no value and is a lie. What it destroys are all the easy convictions of a lazy faith, which puts its trust into exteriorised affirmations and mantras that are recited from the lips but have no uplift, because they have not been experienced or understood. We think that if we keep on saying the same thing time and time again, we will go to Heaven! The natural way is in silence and it is only truly when man is in the silence of his own solitude that he can find his own God. Remember Moses, the prophet or the intellect at the service of the higher mind, when he told God “Oh Lord, you made me powerful and alone”.

The initiate, having found his inner truth, has to take it beyond the God of religion, or the God that took him to where he is. He must rise above all dogma, wherever it comes from, in order to have a vision beyond his own preoccupation. This is initiation – to merge with a higher vibration of perception. Science is fantastic, because it is the job of the intellect to name everything, so that we know the body of the God we live in at the physical and chemical level. In the same way, religion is wonderful because there are tens of mil lions of people on the planet who need to be carried and protected by a structure. A religious service is wonderful, although if we rely on it to feel comforted and protected we have to recognise this as a need. We have to learn to participate humbly in its symbolism, rather than participating because it is beautiful and makes us feel better. It doesn’t matter which faith it is, all religious services are touching, because it is about the Soul of mankind moving towards God through a structure, which is as old as the beginning of the rise of consciousness in nature and it is beautiful. However, the true transformation can only happen inside, in silence. ‘The word is sil ver and the silence is golden’ – the word is the translation through the intellect and then silence is golden, because the understanding is complete and undiluted by the poverty of the intellect.

‘The Word’ is a teaching, given by a teacher or master. Silence is a re-thinking of the word, so that it can be assimilated by the pupil for his own understanding. It is a harmonious value that he vibrates with and can in turn pass on. We have all read books that have moved us, because we recognised truth in them and realised that we are made of that truth and can appropriate it. It doesn’t matter who has written or said these truths, we feel the duty to pass them on because they changed us.

If we repeat what is read in a book in our own words as we feel it and know it, it will have a hundred times more value than read ing directly from the book, because it will be Soul given, rather than intellectually sent. That is the power of transmutation. An exam ple is a great and beautiful sentence sounded by a poet or master; we take it in and resonate with it in the cave of the heart, so bringing another facet to it and making it more beautiful. Then when it comes through us it is able to touch somebody else. If we find something that resonates in us, it is our duty to bring a specific sound out of that inner resonance. Only when we are ready to see the great truths, will they come and vibrate in us. The will is there in the heart of every atom of life and for a while nobody resonates with its sound, then suddenly some of us do and start sounding, so that somebody else picks it up. This is how more and more sound is created; it is truly bringing the word of God right into every breath of everyday life. Some people might hear us and say; “Yes, that is it, I’m going to start a business at the corner of the street and feed the poor”. They are interpreting that particular sounding in their own way and yet the original great sentence was, ‘I am the bread and I am the life’. They have translated it into something practical and that translation has come from within them, which is why it is important to only follow the esoteric way from within. Silence is golden, but silence without the silver of the intellect doesn’t communicate its peace to the ones who need the vibration of the teaching and the word.

When we have completely exhausted the experiences of life through seeking and nothing has worked, then we are at the begin ning of the threshold and realise that ‘life is going to do it for us’. If all the exoteric ways weren’t there, we wouldn’t get to the end of that lane, for once we have tried everything and it hasn’t satis-fied us, we can scratch our heads and realise there is something else. When that is done, we can become our own teacher. One of the great beauties of experiencing as much as we can is that event ually we realise that there is no satisfaction and nothing has come out of all the experience. We can go and learn from another book of knowledge and it will just be the same, so eventually we realise that all these things are superficial and that knowledge, pleasure, dogma and using the physical, the form and the intellect, ulti mately gets us nowhere. People, who make the biggest mistakes in an experiential way, can often cut the link with the superficial form more quickly.

Once all this is seen and it is understood that the value of it is only superficial, we should ask ourselves; “Which law drives life that make us so subservient to what holds the material in place?” Whenever that question is asked, we are then starting on the occult path. The question might not be asked again for another 40 years, or 40 lives, but there is hope because it has been felt and sounded. From that first question the man will not stop searching, even if he takes a lot of holidays in between. He is very much in the dark to start with and just going with his feelings like a blind man, trying to convince himself that what he has done in the past isn’t futile or worthless, so he will say that maybe the past is real life. He has to recognise all his weaknesses, temptations and hates, so he has to start to hate everything that his life has been, as he contrasts it with where he wants to go. He has been in the profane world, the world of the superficiality of matter, form and greed and then he begins to think that there has got to be something else, so he starts looking. He goes deeper and deeper; he starts to hate what is in his mind, seeing it as mediocre and manipulative. All his past and the way he has always lead his life, suddenly looks very gross and ugly and he starts hating what he had previously loved, to the point of losing his Spirit. If we don’t do it like that, we don’t do it properly and we are not good searchers. He will keep on until he gets to the inner door of the temple of Solomon, the Holy of Holies, where only the high priests go. The higher mind reaches the depth of all the experiences of the human heart, where the love/wisdom princess awaits her knights in shining light. This is the wisdom of the initiate who can gaze, look and understand the enigma that is put in front of him.

The keys cannot be separate, for they work toge ther. The golden key symbolises the life giving esoteric energy and its handle is shaped like an Ankh. This tells us that it is only the inner knowledge of the Soul that gives life. We’re alive if we are in nature and it is there fore the Soul of nature in the world, that sustains biological life, but we are only truly alive as a human being if we are fed by the light of the Soul, which is the inner life. When this is realised, we can knock on the door of the inner temple. We must exhaust the knowl edge of the material world if we do not want to fall back under its influence.

The power of the initiate is not so much what he can do; it is an inner power and so doesn’t have to manifest in any specific way. Like The High Priestess, the initiate is somebody very dangerous to come near to. This is not because he would harm anybody, but because there is something in his clarity that will bring people in front of themselves. The black sphinx of The High Priestess is doing exactly this, mirroring what the initiate has in him and if he has something to face, that is his enigma. This is ‘Man know thyself’ and if the man doesn’t know himself, the black sphinx is there to show him exactly what it is that he doesn’t know. Knowing ourselves is only being aware of our behaviour, which is driven by our subconscious. It is having a little light down there in the subconscious and always being honest and strong enough to say “I vibrate to that, I react to this and I react to that, so I understand why this happened and why someone might commit a crime, because I have already recognised that in myself”. When we can do that we automatically defuse it and there is no blame, because there is only an act that occurred, which doesn’t need to be repeated. An act is only a movement in time and isn’t permanent. We have all been violators, because we are only repeating the step that nature took to survive, so we need to recognise that and be strong, as it is our work to go through the inner purifying flame. Self-development can cause distress; we can see the word differently, as ‘de-stress’ and stop stressing about it, let the tension go and relax.

The steel of the sword of truth has to be purified. When we really come in front of our own truth we must have the courage to take the sword, put it into the fire again to be purified and then dip it straight into the water. Things need to be destroyed quite quickly, so that all the impurities in the metal can be burnt out. The more we put the blade into the fire to be beaten into alignment, the stronger the steel becomes. The steel symbolises the spiritual will and the stronger and purer it is, the more the intuition and light can come through it. It is therefore dangerous in everyday life, because when we are going for self-purification, we can get obsessed by it and that can destabilise the instrument mentally, as we bring the shadows up to the surface. We may be too self-obsessed and so fall back into think ing that the world is there for us.

The work will bring pain, but also elevation and uplift, or rebel lion and fall. Rebellion is the important and necessary first step towards listening to the higher mind, as in its extremes it ignores anything from the outside. We can see an example of this in the rebel lious adolescent who wants to be seen to be the best and the most obnoxious, yet at the same time wants to be loved; that is personal ity. With the rebellious adolescent, we must wait until the silliness has stopped and then help them to comply if they want to be good in society. If the person sees the possibility of rising and yet refuses to work on the inner plane, as they carry on in their rebellion, then they are not at ease in the world. The opportunity for change is there but they do not want to hear the inner call, so they keep on being socially dysfunctional; it is a disorder, or un-ease. Rebellion is a state which makes us hate any outer authority that restricts us, because the Soul is after its own inner guidance and once we have got hold of that, we naturally comply with the laws of the land to show that the work has been done. These two states have the same aim and one comes after the other, so remember not to judge for we all have to fall.

When the initiate comes in front of The High Priestess her face is blank and unreadable. He will misread her if he thinks she is a brick wall, because that is not the case. She completely ignores him because if she had any expression on her face that said “Come on, I know how you feel”, or “Don’t be an idiot”, it could stop the man in front of her from accomplishing his mission. The mission is to unfold his destiny and to follow his own star, which is the true seed of divinity. As he faces her he is aware that he could get lost, for he doesn’t know if it is life eternal on the other side of the veil or not and he’s aware of the dread of not knowing. She completely ignores all that and so appears to be stern and impartial. He has to decide from within himself to stay and knock at the door. His persistence is a true sign of courage, which says that the steel of his inner truth has been sufficiently tempered.

Whenever we are very close to the truth, discrimination through the intellect must be used; otherwise the initiate at the door hasn’t really rendered his intellect useful. The only job the intellect has, after he has gone through that door, is to serve. Right up to the door he has had to see whether he is taking his intellect seriously or not, but after going through it discrimination becomes a spiritual quality. We still have to weigh everything up carefully, because we remem ber that mistakes are always likely. Even Jesus (the Soul) on the cross was weighing up and asking; “Is this really happening?”

He could go on living the double life, for on the one hand the ini tiate or disciple is driven towards the goal of illumination or fusion with the highest; on the other hand he knows that he is weakened with temptation and can be charmed. In taking the next step and going through the door, he will have to let go of that double life and then it is really a single life, with the focus on the highest, but stay ing with the behaviour of the profane. There are no more excuses of “I am only human and I am not completely aware”, which allowed him to go back and play the game. Jesus (the Soul) said; “When you are in a foreign land you eat and behave as a foreigner” so the initi ate does not say, “I am special and I am different”, but rather obeys the social laws of the country he is in and the laws of the Earth, even if he knows these laws are temporary. The laws are temporary in the sense that they will carry on until the Earth herself is divine and then we will be under divine laws, rather than the laws of life and death. If he pleads ignorance that is covering up the fact that he still wants to enjoy the sensual life.

The real word for The High Priestess is gnossos, or connaissance, which is what we are born with. The wisdom is not that we are in the world, but that the world is in us. At this stage we know that, because we have learned to understand what incredible instruments we are. We are a memory-bank for the God we live in and we each have the capability of entering every single room in that great vault of knowledge. Each cell in our bodies is a room that we can enter into and decipher the knowledge therein; this is the kind of instru ment we are. The world is actually not out there, except when we need to check the little black dogs we have within us, which are our reactions as we play the game. Once we truly know the world is within us, then everything is accepted and loved and there is no problem. We can go and visit any room with as much courage, hon esty and love as we can fathom within us, for we are custodians of our house; that is what makes us true co-creators. Creation isn’t to do with planting trees; it is to do with truly understanding that the world is the way it is because of an idea or a mental process. Each word or thought creates a true entity. Self work is necessary, also witnessing and service are a by-product of the greater plan, which is to make planet Earth sacred. In this work we are essential but not most important, for we ourselves are just by-products by which the planet can move on.

The whole of the planet’s psyche is polluted by a murky, lust ful, wishful, wanting, needy atmosphere. Cleansing our thoughts, desires and needs is necessary, so that our instruments can exteriorise the good will and pure intent of the Soul into the highest attainment, by the work of service; this doesn’t mean being a ‘goody-goody’. If we can hold that intent, then even when we are living for biological survival, we can recreate the world with the power of our thoughts; for example the more people think peace, the more peace will hap pen. If we see the possibility of that, we can see how it is going to replace the lower needs. All of us are breathing an atmosphere that is full of this polluted mind stuff. If we put together all the wishes and lust that occur between men and women in just one day on the planet, it isn’t surprising that there is rape and abuse. In a time of war it happens through the de-humanised men who are used for these wars. That violent energy has to manifest through an instru ment, so let’s not put the entire fault on the rapist or the killer, they just happen to be the weakest instrument at the time; it is the sum of all our thoughts that makes it happen. In knowing this, our ini tiate must always focus on the highest vision, for we are forever recreating the world with our thoughts. Originally the world was a manifestation in form of the highest possibilities of biological perfection, but now it has given birth to consciousness through mankind. We have recognised that we are in the world to observe it, so it has become the laboratory for the consciousness to unfold into its full potential. We go in and are driven by lust and greed, and then we have to become aware of our behaviour in order to stop playing the game. Once we liked it, but now we must hate it; eventually we go beyond love or hate by dropping it and focussing elsewhere. At that point we are not in the body or in the personal ity anymore, but are guided by the Masters of Wisdom.

We really do create everything with our thoughts all the time, so mass consciousness is constantly creating the world we see now. Changing this takes courage and honesty and it doesn’t hurt us, but we don’t do it at all if we are afraid of losing the game. We have to be in the market place, waiting for someone to wake up. This knowledge cannot be taught in books, because it has to be an inner process. It is the same type of thing in family relationships, for the whole human family is working towards the complete acceptance that our sole purpose is to be used in service. It can seem violent that we have to be killed and have to suffer earthquakes and war in the name of God, but it is the same as having millions of cells in our bodies dying every day; that death is an unfolding of new life.

There are more and more of us who have greater awareness now, so the mass consciousness can’t dominate in such a malevolent way any more. It is a tiny opening, but it has more power than anything we can imagine, because we are plugged into the enormous power point of Spirit. Power, in the sense of force or light, is not without danger. When we hear “Let us not fall into temptation”, this is a reality that we have vaguely understood as “Don’t let me go for one more bar of chocolate”. Temptations are only a measure of the power we have, so if all we are worried about is the temptation of the bar of chocolate, then our powers are quite gentle. There are no absolute sins to do with temptation. Absolute sin is only when we have lifted ourselves up to the higher level of consciousness and want to use the power gained to manipulate the energy for our own purposes; this is serious black art. Sin can only be against Spirit, so we cannot sin through lack of awareness or ignorance of nature, we can only sin in the light of Spirit, which is to use the force knowingly for our own benefit. This is why we have to be so vigilant in the cleansing of the instrument. All so-called sins are there to teach us to align and to be aware. If we think we are afraid to fall into tempta tion, we have had it, because it is the power of thought that does it. Temptation only comes through self-interest. Dread is okay because we are in front of something incredible, but we need to go bravely forward with no intention of falling back, for that would feed that power into the personality. So falling back is a sin which stems from fear of falling and is about wanting to be more powerful than the other one. We have to be consciously aware of all our thoughts. It is important to choose a focus that is completely detached from self and to dare to lose any interest or intent towards self. The dread is normal, but let’s not turn it into excitement, fear, or whatever it was that we carried on our backs, otherwise we will fall back into our mindsets and carry on playing the game.

We are being asked not to live a double life, for in the process of lifting the veil we have to be honest and true all the time. If we can do that there is no sin, because we can see it as it happens. As an instrument we are covered with dust; as we see the dust we can transmute it into pure energy. This becomes easier in time and eventually, when we are focussed on the truth rather than on our selves, it just happens without having to try. It is the truth that is important and we cannot plead ignorance any more once the veil is lifted. There can be a heavy disturbance about having to go further, because, when we are in front of the sphinx we are faced with how much we have fed the black dog of hell. For lives and lives we trod that beautiful path, we had visions, we even taught people. Then suddenly we are truly looking at ourselves and we see the pitiless reality of the system we live in. It is truly awe-ful when we are put in front of the formidable divine; it is a consuming process.

The Tiara of The High Priestess has two crowns, tiers, or circles. They represent the senses and the intellect and the crescent moon on top shows the psy chic aspect. The Pope at Number 5 wears the purple pontifical tiara, which has three tiers, representing the physical, emotional and mental worlds, of which he is completely in charge. The High Priestess has a white veil coming down from the crown and over her shoulders, to show that she is about mystery, being half-hidden. The Veil represents purity, knowledge and wis dom. We cannot pass through the veil without meeting the big iron gates of death; they are iron because we are talking of alchemy in the sense of will and we need a strong will to get through them. As with the Devil, in Number 15, where we have chains of iron, these gates, symbolising the senses have to be broken, but it is easier to break chains of iron than break the chains of the senses. We have to go forward and not look back and as long as the veil is not lifted, it is still possible to stop.

The Moon represents the psychic sense, or the ability to go into Soul to get the esoteric or hidden knowledge. The Moon has many symbols and from the esoteric point of view of the Ancient Wis dom, it represents the subconscious aspect. The physical moon is dead and getting smaller, because as we go more and more into the subconscious and bring more and more light in, it is going to disap pear. It represents the dark side of our past and it holds, just as our cells hold, all the memory of the things that are of the instinctual pure planet. It is actually in the process of decay and it consists of all the bits and pieces we are visiting when we visit our deviations, our misunderstandings and our self-pity. Planet Earth herself has no self-pity, for she is tough and survives. The Moon represents the subconscious, self-pitying Soul of nature and is the shadow of the Earth from deep in the past. Earth has had to put the past aside and carry on and do the work of God and use the light reflecting on its past for its unfolding. So when we go into our subconscious, we are revisiting the decaying body of the past, in order to clean the psy chic atmosphere that we inhabit; we have to do that because if we didn’t go there and see it, we wouldn’t redeem it and stop the game of seeing ourselves as victims.

Seen from the highest point of view, this is the great hermaph rodite Moon, which enables us to do the work. She is both recep tive and giving, for she receives the light and gives it out. It is not the grandmother moon, who says how much better it was in her time when everything was right, it is the eternal Goddess Moon, the one that can receive the light from the lover and give it to the chil dren. She is the priestess, the wisdom of both male and female and is the purest aspect of the intellect transmuted into a receptive vessel for the light of Spirit. So this is another appreciation of the Moon, which has to do with transmutation. She will receive the light in the cup of the crescent moon, translate it and give it out, for it is the crescent moon that is detached from the world and says “I am one with my Lord”.

Those who are influenced by the lower moon don’t want to hear the call of their Soul, so the needs and pain of being a human being are given priority and the self-pitying whingeing moon takes over, decomposition takes place and the opportunity to rise is not taken. When we truly go into Soul, time and space disappear into the great egg of infinity.

The black and white chequerboard floor is a link to the Ancient Wisdom and is often depicted in masonic rituals. It makes us aware that the world we live in is made of contrasts and opposites; in this awareness we start understanding that we are walking on the path of initiation. Black and white will always come in to show us that we are starting to evaluate, recognise, think and discriminate, so this can be the beginning of the path. This is the world of appearance and we have to be clear that we are going to see it all uniquely, this is why we have to truly understand that we are an instrument and not an ‘individual’ in the personal sense. The totality of everyone’s vision of objects or ideas is the complete vision that the God we live in will have of the world. We can look at one thing, but we will all see it differently; if one of us doesn’t look, then the God we live in has to look again, because what is being looked at hasn’t been seen in its entirety. God has to know himself from every single one of his cells.

We can’t be important as individuals, but we are important as small units of awareness. Until we completely own our reactions to life for what they are, we are not really serving the God we live in. We really have to be at ease with where we are at, whatever that is, with no judgment. God needs all the little pairs of eyes for the vision to be complete, according to his life and truth. The vulgar is fine, so go and get it! By hiding it, all we are doing is feeding a little monster that will grow, until eventually we dislike the people in that vulgar house. In the end this leads to political war against those people in that vulgar house; this is how it works. This is where we know we only exist as a comparison, opposition, or an association with others, because personality gets its worth by comparing. Blessed and lucky are the animals when they are not tainted by our auras, because they do not compare, associ ate, or oppose with their mind. It is about comparing one world of appearance with another and, from where we stand, we think we are the only right one. The fact that we compare and associ ate re-enforces separateness, so when we find a group or religion to associate with, that will keep us in the world of appearance. This is a tricky one because people can have opposite views on the same subject and all come from the best possible intent. Nobody is wrong or right and it is a world of complete harmony and bal ance, so we have to see the world as it is with all its different fac ets, balancing within ourselves all the time and still hold true to ourselves. The yin and yang symbol is a sphere rather than just flat and is forever doing that dance, until it comes back completely clear. The only way to get there is by recognising that we are Soul and therefore the witness.

There cannot be any absolute positions, for if people take their thoughts for absolute we would be stuck in an impasse, with no more movement. The yin and yang is going round and coming back, like the spiralling expression of the 1 to 9 seen from the top and bottom. We know it is a world of impermanence, of movement and contrasts. It is a world that has to know itself, therefore every single thing has to be experienced and seen. We know as well that by itself it has no value; this is very important when we do the work of look ing in. The initiate knows he has no value in himself, but it is his duty to try to wake things up, because they will only have a value when they are filled with spiritual truth.

The only value that the superficial world of contrast, appear ances and association has is in how much we can take from it or make of it. This is quite a sad statement, but it is so. We give value to the things of the world which we can take; things such as eating, enjoying ourselves, being greedy, playing the martyr, so the value we give to the world is also what we want to take from it. From a positive point of view we know it is a learning process, but on another level it is abuse. The lenses of science, philosophy and reli gion are great, but they are limited as well. The value of the world is not in itself, but in us and it is up to us to make it sacred because in itself it has no value whatsoever. This is why we must remake, rebuild and remodel the world according to our understanding and our thoughts. There are as many worlds as there are thinking indi viduals; to every one his truth; that is how we build the world. We have to impress faith, hope and charity in people’s hearts. So far it is mainly mass-consciousness that builds the world, but this is chang ing rapidly, for as individual consciousness rises we can manifest a higher order of peace and love, to infuse minds and hearts and bring in more tolerance and understanding to religion, science and philosophy. Goodwill is love in action.

The High Priestess rests her feet on a green cushion, green being the colour of life and nature, which allows Earth to breathe through the vegetable kingdom. The plant life can be seen as a beautiful symbol for mankind’s work with the light. After germination the little flowers yield fruit and whether it is a big bush or a tree, it starts with a tiny shoot before it becomes a stem or a trunk. Through exposure to light chlorophyll gives the little plant its green colour, crystallises it and mixes it with minerals so that it can hold the light. This means that when we eat a plant, we eat light. Viridis, the colour green, has the same root as ‘vir’ which is the word for man, so we are the green shoots of God and the hold ers of light, here to materialise and express it. The plant kingdom is as evolved as it can be. We are trying to fuse with the light to make it part of our body, so we feed on the plants. Green is the principle of active life; it is the manifestation of light and its action in matter. It is the colour of life in spring, which brings support and hope to everything. All of this is why her feet rest on a green cushion. She is the Goddess of knowledge (Gnossos) and has the power over every thing alive and over the principle of life.

In the card the two columns are those of the Tem ple of Solomon. They are called Joachim and Boaz and they represent the strong masculine and femi nine aspects, which are the forces that hold the world together in love and strength. They perpetuate mani festation and are just outside the temple so that the Holy of Holies will eventually become the world.

The emblem at the top of each column is the styl ised flower, the fleur-de-lys, which represents purity, the Trinity and man as king. These are protective sym bols and are there to keep away all the malevolent influences that could come and disturb the houses of Yahweh, the God of time. Standing stones were used in the past for this purpose, because man was very sensitive to energies and could hear and feel the life vibrating within big stones, especially if they happen to be on ley-lines. At that time they took these stones to be the dwelling places for the Gods. When the Tarot cards were originally made, the symbols which are depicted were the common language among the initiates and therefore they can be seen as vehi cles for the ancient knowledge, rather than promoting particular religions or philosophies.

The High Priestess’ red cloak is lined with green, for as has been said, green is the colour of life. The coat is red as a sign of spiritual domination. She wears it because she is the side of the manifestation of God that says that knowledge is the wisdom principle. She is the love-wisdom aspect; she holds the life of the second Solar System and is in communication with the divine. We must not see her as an entity, because she is a manifestation of a characteristic of divine wisdom.

In the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, the snake tells Eve “You will be like the Gods”, which meant that if the intellect were devel oped man would know all there is to know about the planet. This was true, because the Gods of that time were the elemental Gods of fire, earth, wind and water and the whole of life on the planet was at their mercy. The snake was just the intellect that was saying, “Come on, these are only elemental Gods, aren’t you going to understand them and become master of them?” We have to rehabilitate the snake, because he has been seen as the villain who put Adam and Eve out of paradise. Man was not chased out of paradise, rather he perceived with clarity what paradise really was, which was animal man in complete ignorance and with no self-awareness whatsoever. The minute that mankind observed and started to think and under stand the environment, he was on the side of the snake. So the intel lect took over and was not baulked by the old Gods, because they are only elementals; however, we have to realise that our bodies are made up of the elementals. The snake was a wake-up call, saying, “Come on nature, we have to rise here”. So we started looking at the opposites of black and white and started playing the game. With The Magician we become capable of rising above the idea that we are God on the planet, so rising above the elemental Gods. Even tually we can let go of the little snake of the intellect, which has served us well by taking us to philosophy, religion and healing; the next step is to learn to communicate with the divine. As the intellect translates the wisdom, the light of the higher mind will shape it as a diamond.

This whole process happens via the occult or the inner life and cannot be found in form. It is a metaphysical pursuit and therefore it escapes the senses; this is why it is secret, because it is in the dark. It can only be passed on to initiates who have had many trials and meditated on them very strongly and profoundly, in silence and solitude. Everybody on the planet would have had a hard life, with a few exceptions, but it is only the ones who have been able to go in, meditate, ‘raise the bread’ and ‘make the wine’ within themselves, who will understand the symbol. They will have gone through the alchemical process of having made something of their hardships through the solitude and silence; this has brought them into wis dom, love and compassion. However, there are those who will pass by all this and not see anything in it.

This is where the Star of Bethlehem translates as the light of the higher mind in the Soul, raising the house of bread, bread being the symbol for the biological life of human-kind. We each have our little Star of Bethlehem to take us to the Soul in the dark. The word Bethlehem means ‘house of Bread’. We are told in the Bible that bread has to be earned by the sweat of the brow, meaning it is hard work to be born into the world. That is what the bread symbolises, complete sacrifice and complete willingness to give of self, by going right down into the collective sub-conscious to do some of the burn ing. Bread is a representation of food as well as representing the body of the God we live in, so it is sacred. Bread has gone through three processes of transmutation; the grain has been ground; the dough has been kneaded, then raised and baked. The disciple undertakes these three processes (symbolically representing the work of the first three initiations) in order at the end to become the complete initiate. Bread is a complete spiritual food that represents the body of Christ, meaning the biological life that we have to sustain, so that eventu ally it is there to be given as sacrifice. In the Bible bread symbolises the body, while the blood/wine represents the Soul.

The book, which The High Priestess holds in her right hand, is the sacred book of beginnings and end ings, of yin and yang, feminine and masculine. It is not knowledge; it is inner connaissance, an inner eternal renewal or renaissance as the two divine energies perpetually fuse their love into life. The High Priestess is a mis tress who will not suffer or accept us having any other teacher. We must not think that the world is going to do it for us; it is in us. Yin and yang is not an opposition, but a complete dance of the world, revealing its dangerous beauty to the slavish mind, or its secret to the initiate.

This is the Number 8, symbol of infinity, the spiral without end. Eventually it becomes a complete sphere and ends when all is light. Each time a star falls, it keeps the memory of the light and the spar kle of where it came from. In the world of yin & yang we know that we are coming back, just like the day knows that it is has been born out of darkness and the darkness knows that it holds the light in itself. That is truly the beginning of great wisdom if we understand it fully. It is the star falling as a sacrifice, knowing that it holds the memory of the light.

If we truly see life as energetic, any limitation is only an appear ance or an illusion. Spirit is not a prisoner in matter and we are not limited by it; we are free to create whatever we want in matter because it is the manifestation of Spirit. As long as we have com pletely accepted the process of manifestation, the only thing that limits Spirit is the lack of the will of its instrument to want to be truly alive. There is actually no limitation by matter, in fact it is the opposite and the possibilities of creating a new world are absolutely limitless. Yes, we have to be patient, but even that concept is a limi tation. We are of course essentially unstable, even when we come back with a bit of understanding in our mind, because we do live in the world of transmutation and instability. Looked at from the inner perspective, we can see that the superficiality of the world is only a cartoon caricature of the level of consciousness prevalent at the time. That idea should spur us never to fall back into the old ways, for who wants to be a Donald Duck!

The initiate keeps in himself the love of everything that is still held in the bitter dark prison of pain; by the time he can do that there cannot be any ‘self’ left. While we are preoccupied by any type of ‘self’, we are going to expect the world to feed us on self love, self respect, or self-worth. The minute we stop focussing on self we hold the whole world in love, because we are in love, but not with self. We are not after any self-worth because the worth we have is the worth and respect of God. We are not lacking anything, because we have put it all into God and therefore made it sacred.

At this point we will automatically hold the profane world in love, for we have understood that it is within us, so we’re going to hold it until the end. This can only really happen when we have dropped self; that is when the profane world itself will see us as a real danger. If we look at the prophets, most of them were put to death; the same happened to Jesus the Soul. Purity and fearlessness can be taken as an insult by those who, at some stage of their inner work are rebelling against the acceptance of their imperfection. They have so many little points of darkness that they think we are judging and sneering. Even if we give compassion, they will take it as false charity because they cannot read us; we have become an aspect of The High Priestess. They know that there is danger for the personality here and they don’t like it, because it might mean that they have to look at themselves. When they see us, what they are really looking at is themselves, so they are throwing a stone at us, because we come and disturb. The purity of the initiate will stir the profane world.

The profane is known by everybody; it is the social life, the pro fessional life, the personality, the theatre, the position, the drama.

The sacred is not recognised by most people, but will be perceived by the ones who are more advanced on the path. This is because they don’t see the social life; they see the face of the inner life, the true reality of the human being. You are looking for the name of that essence – the true you.

The profane and the sacred will be merged as life.

The intellect has given us everything it can by the time it has achieved the realisation of its powerlessness; this is the greatest gift from the mother to the son. The intellect is the best thing that nature could give to the son of mind and she says, “I can’t do any more for you now, you are by yourself. I can’t protect you, I can’t explain life, I can’t drive you; you must go and do it by yourself”. How many good mothers would be completely silent and stop ‘supporting’ in the sense of feeding with the intellect? How many mothers would truly know not to give any advice to their children unless they are asked for it? This non-interference is the greatest gift we can give our children. When the intellect has understood that it has to give up and that it is completely powerless, then man can start to grow into the ‘angel’ of his own Soul. Then the Soul is a reflection between divinity and man, so is receptive to God. The light fecunds the Soul, so she attracts the light and it feeds her with knowledge and intui tion. In perceiving the light she is feminine, but when she becomes the intellect and translates, she becomes masculine or active.

The Black Sphinx is not really frightening; he’s just doing the job of making certain that anything hidden within us must come to the surface. When we meet him, all the thoughts that most of us can not control and all the needs and wants that we have ever accumulated, are going to rise to be dissolved in the light of the Soul. This continues as we come up, until we come to the point of initiation, which is the point of death of the old patterns. Those under currents and chain reactions within us that we think we have no con trol over, will come in front of us and are actual entities. We are talking about ‘abuse and the abuser’ and the sub-personalities; all of these give us an excuse not to own them. We have to know that these are us, we created them and they are not separate from us. What right have we, when we have created these things in ourselves, to say that they belong to someone else! They are all ours and have to be owned. By meeting them and seeing all the things we have done in their names, we can blow them out like soap bubbles to be dissolved in the light. The problem is that we don’t want to recognise them so we create many subtle cover-ups, but they all have to be visited. The re-visiting is happening in this lifetime, but the entities were created over many lifetimes, not because of particular situations, but because it is our job to put a name on nature’s experience, so we have to create situations to exteriorise the feelings.

We dissolve the problems by completely associating with them; it doesn’t take that long, even if it feels like it. We are not just helping our own individual case, but bursting a huge entity in the world that cries out that it is being used and abused, therefore we are working in the collective. There is a job to be done and it can only be done by the work of completely owning, releasing and transmuting. There can be so much disgust and hate; we must name and see these nega tives, then soothe, love and understand them on behalf of the God we live in. We can’t blame our grandmother for being self-pitying! We can go to her and tell her we love her! The minute we do that she is happy and for five minutes she is free of self-pity; that is a great relief for the world!

Life is clever; it will put us in front of a karmic pattern that needs looking at and which will be very close to one of our shadows. That is why we have to remember it is in us and is not the other per son’s fault. If we refuse the knowledge from within, we refuse our selves and the God in us and start the work of self-destruction. As we self-destruct all aspects of true spirituality within us will stop. The inner life will die within us if we do not accept our work. If we want the world to do it for us, then we are as nature, destroyed and renewed until the light of awareness gives birth in the cave of the heart once more.

The big difference between our initiate and the ordinary man is that the ordinary man is taken in by life and is a puppet of life. The initiate knows that he is a channel for releasing spiritual energy on behalf of something greater than himself, so he is not being taken in by the shadows of life. It is like a great river; either we are buffeted like a puppet, or the river is in us and we can let the waters of life flow when it is needed. It carries us and if we think something needs to be done, we will do it automatically.

‘Man know thyself’, is what we are doing when we have recog nised everything we have been. We must find ourselves in all the events of our existence and understand the situations, attitudes and reactions. We have made strangers of ourselves because we haven’t wanted to see a lot of the things that have happened to us. Some times we didn’t know whether we liked them or not, so we had to hide those experiences just in case we didn’t like them; this game can go on for a long time. Because we were uncertain whether an experience was good or bad we covered it up and kept playing the game, hoping we would get the answer. We call it confronta tion when we look, but the confrontation only comes from the intel lect, which retains all the virtual experiences that we have lived. The dweller on the threshold fights, because the pain and the drama of the previous experiences feel so real; these are the ones that will be burned by the sulphur, because of the resistance. When we as personalities are resisting and causing problems, we cannot blame things on past lives, for our past experiences were opportunities to wake up and witness. The sphinx will keep staring but will not speak, for a dialogue would be too easy and helpful, so it is up to us to get the message.

If we know that life is a state of unfolding and no action is defini-tive, then we can meet the dweller or guardian on the threshold and start doing the work of cleansing. By revisiting past situations with the intense awareness of the perception of the Soul, we see them for what they are. Whether we find a manipulating abuser or a manip ulated victim, it matters not, because it is only a part of the great dance and everything can be harmonised.

An initiation can only happen when the mind comes into the darkness of the flesh of the Soul of nature, to see whether it can receive the star, we don’t get initiation up there in the stars. In the past, every initiation started with a descent underground or a retreat into the desert. It had to be night and it had to be done alone; this is symbolic of the process of the inner work. The mystical star shows the descent of spirit into matter and the ascent back; the deeper it goes down, the higher it will shoot up towards the source, like a firework into the skies.

The keynote to this card is that, through true will and vision the unfolding of the Soul can happen. The work of descending into the cave has been an act of will and the intelligence of man cannot con tent itself with the intellectual life.

The wisdom of The High Priestess is the wisdom of Isis, the high sacred science of the initiate and the sacred world. We are talking of the beginning and the end, the lost and found and above all, grace. We are not doing anything from a personal angle, because we are doing it on behalf of our brothers and sisters. It can only be grace because we are not coming back to judge, but to love. There is no judgment or punishment here, only awareness and that is what grace is, to know that whatever the other human being is doing, you are doing it as well and it is all okay, but ‘Shall we stop doing it now? Let’s go in!” The good news is that there is no punishing God; there is only the book of life and the key of life. We are unfolding into the true, the beautiful and the good and all this comes through the wisdom personified in The High Priestess. She is the true bride of Spirit and truth.

She is the teacher, who translates through her silver key what the golden key has understood in silence. So there is no action and no words. She is silent, she teaches by her presence. We are also reminded that we must not keep silent if a person needs help; we have to speak and use right actions, so the word or the intellect mustn’t be excluded.

The High Priestess is the Queen of the elementals because the pure hermaphrodite cross is upon her chest and each corner is crossed with a black cross, so it is sanctified. This is the card of alchemy; The High Priest ess has made sacred the world of matter by purifica tion. The message is that our higher mind has to intimately meet and make one with the wisdom within us.