>>13277066

Dubs Chekk'd!

TYB!

o7

(YOU) CAIN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT (YOU) WANT, BUT IF YOU TRY SOMETIME, )YOU( JUST MIGHT FIND, YOU GET WHAT YOU NEED.

TRUE FREEDOM IS FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE OPENS UNTO YOU.

Told by God to hide in the wilderness and to drink from a brook, he was fed by ravens.‘Raven’indicates that Elijah was being initiated in the ways of the wisdom of Zarathustra. ‘Raven’ was one of the grades of initiation in his mysteries.

The king of Israel, Ahab, married Jezebel and began to erect altars to Baal (the Canaanite name for Saturn/Satan). Elijah fought and won a battle with the prophets of Baal, calling fire down from heaven. On later occasions he called fire down from heaven to kill squads of soldiers sent by Jezebel to capture him.

You can’t take it with you, goes the popular saying, but according to the secret doctrine you can. The great twentieth-century initiate G.I. Gurdjieff said that exactly what is needed truly to become master of oneself in this life is what is needed to survive as a conscious being in the afterlife. Initiation is concerned at least as much with life after death as this life. In the seventh book of The Republic Plato said, ‘Those who are unable in the present life to apprehend the idea of the good, will descend to Hades after death and fall asleep in its dark abode.’

At the end of his life Elijah was carried up into the heavens in a fiery chariot. So like Enoch and Noah before him, he did not die in the ordinary way. He joined the college of ascended masters, who are for the most part invisible but return to earth at times of great change and crisis.

>>13277604

The concept of Grace grew out of this prophetic sense of history. The kings of the two kingdoms and their peoples failed to do what was asked of them. They degenerated and the land was laid waste. But then, because of the Grace of God, a living root emerged from the wasteland. The prophets saw Grace operating in this way in their own lifetimes on a military and political level, in the rise and fall and rise again of their own little kingdoms. They also prophesied its repetition in the greater cosmic cycles of history.

For the followers of Baal, on the other hand, life was about the exercise of power. They believed that if they performed the correct religious practices - sacrifices and magical ceremonies - they could compel their gods to do their bidding.

Isaiah repudiated this view. He told his people that Yahweh had shown them Grace by choosing them, by empowering them to obey, by purging them of their sins, by saving them when they had been stiff-necked and disobeyed, and by the promise of restoring them to former glory even though they did not deserve it. Yahweh’s gracious love could never be demanded, bought or earned, he said. It is a love given in complete freedom.

Once this kind of divine love had been understood, it would only be a matter of time before this understanding opened a new dimension in the love of one human for another.

Isaiah had a great sense of both the history and the future fortunes of Israel - ‘there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse’. He also has a great vision of the end of history which we will return to later - ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid’.

The prophetic tradition would die out by about 450 BC. As the Cabalist Rabbi Hayyim Vital would write, at the end of the sixteenth century, after Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, prophets were only able to see into the lowest levels of the heavens and then only in a heavily shrouded way.

The last words in the Old Testament are the ringing words of Malachi, prophesying Elijah’s return, and today this is still looked forward to every year at Passover, when a place is laid for him at dinner, with a cup of wine and the door left open.

The Eightfold Path may seem impossibly high-minded moralizing to modern Western sensibility. It may also seem a bit abstract, even impractical. But the teachings of the Buddha have an esoteric side, and like all esoteric teachings they have a layer of meaning which is eminently practical. Esoteric philosophy teaches its initiates how to achieve psychological transformation using practical techniques to manipulate human physiology. In the case of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, these eight practices are exercises for enlivening eight of the sixteen petals of the throat chakra.

This represents a historic change in initiatic practice. In the initiation rituals practiced in the Great Pyramid, for example, the candidate had been sent into a deep, death-like trance, then a circle of - five - initiates had raised his vegetable body out of his physical body. They had worked on it, moulding it, coaxing it into forms capable of perceiving higher worlds, so that when the vegetable body sank again into the physical body and the candidate reawoke, he was born into a new, higher form of life. The point is that the candidate was unconscious throughout this process.

Now the followers of Buddha consciously participated in their own initiation, consciously working on their own chakras. Part of this work was living a new, more moral way of life, based on compassion for all living things.

>>13277777

Evening B!

o7

>>13277777

>>13277790