The Way Of The Cross

[QUOTING]

The new Soul element has two poles. One is directed to the Fatherland, to the Father, to the Spirit, to the approaching Pymander. The second must direct itself to the nature-born personality to allow the Immortal, the new power of salvation, to flow into the mortal. This is the reason for the inner struggle you must experience from the very moment you celebrate your true pupilship. Consider the following:

Two absolutely heterogeneous states of being combine. In the Gnosis, one undertakes to link the Heavenly with the dualistic and nature-born, in accordance with the example given by all the Great Ones who said: "Be my followers". If you link these two heterogeneous states in your system, great pain will result. One pole of the new Soul element will flee to the Spirit, to Pymander. The second pole will have to encounter the nature-of-death. While the new Soul element makes every effort to strive after The Good, after the essence of the Spirit, it must at the same time suffer the conflict with the two essential powers of nature: passion and desire. What grief will be the result! On the one hand there will be intense longing for Liberation, with every heartbeat; on the other, there will be contact with the powers of defilement and slavery.

In this way the Cross is erected. The vertical and the horizontal are joined together, solidly planted in the earth; what is Heavenly bends down towards the earth and goes its Way of the Cross on earth; it must do so. The top of the Cross is directed towards what is Heavenly and at the heart of the Cross is nailed the Rose of the Soul.

Do you feel the inescapable grief of such a nailing? The vertical is continually scourged and tortured through this voluntary surrender; the Spirit cannot bear it, cannot stand it. And if the horizontally-active soul-power is drawn upwards for a while, this is again an impossibility. The result will be a scorching pain, the scorching of burning. The horizontal cannot abandon its nature-being and the vertical cannot become established in the nature-of-death, although that is exactly what it is supposed to do on a voluntary basis. This process, this Way of the Cross, as the hermetic philosophy summarizes, is the guide to freedom: "You must give up the body before it dies and overcome the life of conflict; then, if you have won that victory, you will return to the Highest".

This guide is the Cross with the blood-red Rose, the Cross of voluntary self-sacrifice, the Cross of Purification. Nailed to this Cross, the young Soul must wrestle and fulfill its task.

Therefore, if you walk the Path of Piety, you should not be surprised that you have conflict in your life and still so much in yourself with which to struggle. What is taking place is the necessary encounter between two antagonists that are completely irreconcilable and that, by their encounter, cause a great inner fire, the fire of the Cross. This fire cannot fail to appear, it must rage. The new Soul-state must first have overcome by mortal life. This, stated Hermes, is what you should very well understand and struggle through with your inner being.

There are people who take on the struggle caused by the Path with their "I", with their ego of self-mortification. Such people make this inner struggle into a conflict of a highly personal nature. They proceed from the mistaken idea that all this pain, trouble and grief strikes them because of the fact that they still have an "I"; because their lower nature plays a trick on them in one way or another; because they are still that bad or that sinful. But this has nothing to do with what we have been discussing. Please, see your situation very clearly:

As pupils, you have opened your heart sanctuaries to the new power of the Sixth Cosmic Domain, the power of the Living Soul-state. It penetrates your blood, your nerve-fluid and advances to the head sanctuary; it fills your whole being and causes Soul Birth. However, there is also the other power which is absorbed by the root system of the serpent-fire system; this power also finds its way into your being. These two entirely incompatible powers cause the burning fire. In this way your Soul suffers and so does your "I". You should not think that the "I' is the cause or that the Soul is the cause. No, it is the encounter of two incompatible forces, two different tensions, two antipathetic electromagnetic powers.

What should you do now? Live the endura! Do not allow the "I" to meddle in this process. If you feel grief and tensions, do not work them off on other people, but experience your own grief as the necessary purification of the holy RosyCross. If you experience this grief to the depths of your being, the Gnostic Light-power will be active in you in a most mighty and dynamic way. As we said before, there have always been those who consider the struggle caused by The Path as a struggle of a personal nature. They become, as it were, completely bound up in the "I", and so they put all their efforts into self-mortification. However, it is precisely the "I" that should stand aside! The "I" should not step in anywhere; it should become quiet. Just let this struggle, this purifying fire, rage!

Just think of the ancient monastic habit of self-chastisement and voluntary mutilation in the struggle against the flesh. However, the struggle of the Way of the Cross is not a struggle against the flesh. It is a struggle between the Sixth and Seventh Cosmic Domains that takes place within you. It is impossible to be victorious if these things are tackled with the "I". Such self-mortification is suicide. A human being cannot bear it and death will be the result. Therefore, we emphatically repeat, you must not fight against yourself like a desperate person. Then you will only invoke all sorts of forces which are active in you. You will then place your "I" in the service of one of the two parties. The results will be a speedy consumption of energy, until death follows.

What should you do then? You should exercise devotion until piety has been found. Give this the first priority in your life. For the "I" it will mean the endura. Withdraw from the inner conflict of the two natures, do not be a party to the conflict and let the New Soul perform its voluntary work, its sacrifice within you. This is what the initiate mystics had in mind when they said: "Let the Christ do the work within you'.

*endura - the path of I-demolition, of the Last Death through self-surrender of the "I" to the Other One, the Immortal Man, the Christ within us. It is the path of John, who "makes straight the paths for the Lord". It is to put into practice these words: "He - the heavenly Other One - must grow and I must diminish. I must perish so that the Other One may live in me". The path of the endura is the Way which has existed throughout all times and by which fallen man ascends, by means of the purifying fire of a total reversal of life, to his true, Immortal being and returns to the Father. Man's path through this nature-order is a life of dying. The endura is a voluntary dying in order to be able to Live: "He who is willing to lose his life for My sake, will find It".

Do not force yourself to withdraw, as if in a corner of your being, from which you can peer at what is going on. No, you must desire the endura with all your heart, now, in the present. It must be your deepest longing, for which you yearn in self-forgetfulness and serving love. If you do that, the new Soul element will be born in you and you will begin your Way of the Cross, your way of the Rose and the Cross -- the meeting between the two irreconcilable elements. So the Soul will not seek to fight, because the Soul is only Love; and the "I" will not fight for it then desires only the endura. What will take place is an unavoidable encounter between the two irreconcilable electromagnetic forces. Through this meeting, a circulation will develop in your life, a grief, a struggle of that which hastens upwards and must experience and endure the fire of its sacrifice.

No one knows how long this fire, this struggle, this grief, will last. No one knows for how long all the results of the Way of the Cross will make themselves felt in your being; entirely in accordance with your karma and the merciful radiations active in your microcosm. But at a time when you don't expect it, perhaps right in the midst of the fire of some trial, it can suddenly appear that the mortal has been overcome, and that the "Consummatum Est" can be spoken.

Therefore, accept in perfect objectivity your Path of the Rose and the Cross and do not meddle in it with your "I". Then the Hour of Liberation will certainly come. Your Soul will arise and celebrate its morning of Resurrection. This will be the first New Day, the awakening in the Golden Head, the beginning of the New Morning, the Morning of Eternity.

From "The Path from Bethlehem to Golgotha" - The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis, Vol. 2 - Jan van Rijckenborgh

[END QUOTING]

In unity,

~ g
.