Illumination

[QUOTING]

The occultist has many strings in his bow, such as astrology, the tarot, the cabala, and hand-reading. We have found that the way to self-knowledge is quite different.

It would be wonderful if you could realize this, for then you could be spared a long road of experience, accompanied by much trouble and sorrow. At the heart of all this is the need for you to uncover a mystery, which consists of the following steps:

- the first is knowing oneself, through which one attains illumination;

- the second is overcoming oneself, through which one becomes omnipotent;

- the third is unlocking a new form of energy, through which the magic faculty  of the will is generated,

- and the fourth is entry into the everlasting new life, which happens when the end of the journey through matter has been reached.

You would do well to study this formula, and try to put it into practice so that you can taste the fruits of it. It is a formula that comes to you from the primordial past, bringing with it the glory of infallibility. The question is, how does one attain self-knowledge, and so become illumined? And what does it mean to be illumined?

To find real answers to these questions, one needs to have had a certain measure of experience; one needs to have drunk from the bitter cup of suffering. For it is experience that makes such questions well up in the human heart, questions like: 'What is the purpose of my life? What does it really mean to be human? What is the destiny of humankind?'.

If you do not ask these questions in an intellectual way, but because you are driven by an inner need, because these issues are really a problem for you; if these questions well up from the deepest depths of your being, then the urge to seek will emerge in you of its own accord. It is an urge that will be felt as a vital need, as a 'to be or not to be'. Then, the whole of the Universal Doctrine will open for you, the whole of the Divine Plan for the world and humankind.

This process of seeking is made very much easier for pupils, for all the literature of the School of the Rosycross is available to them, and they study it, driven by an inner need. And because this urge to know is founded on an inner need, the process of study is quite different from what is ordinarily understood by the term.

This study leads to the discovery that the I-consciousness is only a motoric activity whose function is to keep the personality alive and well, and that the personality is only a part of the whole Creation, intended to serve as the basis for the development of the True Human Being. Furthermore, one learns that the life of the personality, as one knows it, is not life in the ultimate sense of the word, which has to do with the True Human Being, but is a purely animal existence.

When the student understands that -- and it will be understood if he or she is motivated by an inner need -- a point of contact latent in the personality will awaken and begin to bloom: a point known as the 'rose of the heart'. From within the rose, a voice will begin to speak, the voice of the monadic flame, which is the part of the higher human being that must be connected with the lower human being via the soul, as a result of which the composition of the lower human being will be changed and transfigured.

When the pupil begins to be inwardly aware of that plan, when it opens up for him and is no longer understood merely as an intellectual concept, he will begin to live and grow in the direction intended for him by the Divine Plan. That is what it means to be illumined. Only then will there be knowledge of the self, and knowledge of God. Then one really knows that 'the Kingdom of God is within you'.

So that is what illumination means. In the light of that knowledge, the Path of Victory, the Path of Self-conquest, can be walked.

From "He Who Knows Himself Is Illumined" - The Chinese Gnosis - Jan van Rijckenborgh, Catharose de Pietri

[END QUOTING]

"...the higher human being that must be connected with the lower human being via the soul, as a result of which the composition of the lower human being will be changed and transfigured".

That is what this is about in a nutshell. The linkage of the divine Spirit with material Body via the re-born Soul, or Microcosm. The result, a transfigured material body surrounded by a purified microcosm, eternally linked to the Power of the All and dedicated to carrying out Its Mighty Will. 

Illuminated. Liberated.

~ g
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