Taken from The Way Down and Out by John Senior.
Occultists tend to believe and act upon the following related notions:
- The universe is one, single, eternal, ineffable substance.
- This substance manifests itself as spirit, fire or light.
- It further manifests itself Demiurge of Logos which orders the created light into the visible world by means of numerous intermediaries likewise emanations from the One.
- All things progress be dialectical oppositions. The created universe is composed of paired ‘opposites’ – male-female, light-dark – which generated their own equilibrium or harmony. The creative triad thus formed is then considered as contained in the One, uncreated, ineffable, and thus the universe is seen as a four-fold unity.
- Things above are as they are below because, since mind and matter are one, the imagination is real, and any analogy it conceives is as good as ‘scientific’ proof of correspondence.
- Since all things are one, a ‘science’ of interference can be established whereby knowledge of the spiritual can be gained by study of the material, and vice versa, as in contemplation of the created universe in mysticism, manipulation of the created universe in alchemy.
- The human body is especially taken to be the image of creation. The universe is taken to be, in fact, a living man.
- Since men are created by sexual means, sex is an attribute of the divine. The original source is said to separate into male and female parts and, by cohabiting with itself, creates.
- Since man is the prototype, man is capable of realising in himself all things. He is capable of becoming God because he is God without ‘realising’ it. In the sex act, man realises his own female nature and becomes symbolically androgynous – becomes one flesh – and therefore whole.
- The task of man is therefore self-realisation. To know thyself is everything.
- Self-realisation is the progressive discovery of the layers of the psyche which is not mere ego but at least seven separate things including the universal substance.
- Certain supermen, having achieved self-realisation, turn back to their unrealised fellows. These are the bodhisattvas, the masters, the guardians, the founders of religions who veil the ultimate in terms suitable to time and place.
- Thus all religions are variations on a single transcendent unity.
- Ordinary men can become supermen by arduous practice, by grace and/or by virtue of their past experience.
- The superman is appraised of his possibilities for illumination, accidental or induces state in which heat, fire or a light surround him and he sees ineffable and profoundly moving truth of the oneness of the universe.
- The supermen, according to principal nine, is often sexually androgynous as symbolised by tonsure, circumcision, peculiar dress.
- Since the self-realised bodhisattva wants to communicate something of the higher truths to those not able to understand it, he uses symbols in his teaching and in this way affects the less-developed mind on its unconscious levels. He thus not only turns the ego inward so that it may explore as much of the self as possible, but fosters the growth of the soul itself. Symbols are efficacious even when you do not understand them. Ot rather, in the discursive sense, the symbol can never be understood. The symbol is the meeting ground between the ego and the ineffable.
- Ziggurats, pyramids, mysteries, myths, alchemical processes, astrological creams – these are symbolic systems of yantras.
- To facilitate the work of self-realisation, adepts have often organised brotherhoods, such as Rosicrucians, Pythagoreans and so on. Initiation into these orders is often considered a prerequisite of the necessary extraconsciousness and is usually a ceremony in itself efficacious in producing such states of mind.
- All things live according to pulse, or breath, or rhythm, which expresses itself in time as cycles of birth, growth, and decay, as Magnus Annas in the life of worlds, as birth, death and resurrection in men.
- In the cycles, both collectively and in history and individually in men, all souls must eventually be all things. The task of the individual man as we know him, of the times as we live them, is to leave things as they seem in order to discover the unknown, which is often symbolised as a descent into hell.
IMAGE SOURCE – ‘WITCH BURNING” – Wikimedia Commons
Ecclesiastical Freemasonry 