"The Bible has been given to the Western World by the Recording Angels who give to each and all exactly what they need for their development."
—Max Heindel
References: Genesis 11:1-9; Isaiah 14; I Corinthians 15:50; I Thessalonians, 4:17; Revelation 17, 21.
As stated in previous self-study modules, the Lucifers are a class of Beings who attained to a stage of evolution far beyond that of humanity in the Moon Period, but fell short of the development of the Angels. They are demigods, and could not take a dense body like man. But neither could they gather experience as the Angels are doing. They needed a brain and spinal cord, and so, when man had built such an instrument, it was to their advantage to prompt him in the use of it.
At that time the opening consciousness of man was turned inwards, and he saw his inner organs and built them with the same force that he now turns outwards to build houses and ships, etc., and the outside muscles of his body; so the woman, who was most advanced in that direction because of having her Imagination trained, saw the intelligence embodied in her serpentine spinal cord, and at a later stage, when man came to record this experience, the serpent appealed to him as the nearest likeness to that which he wanted to tell about.
This idea is carried out right through the Bible. In Isaiah 14 he called Lucifer (day-star), king of Babel-On (gate of the Sun), a city located upon seven hills, and having dominion over the world. There mankind ceased to act in unison and became separated into warring nations. It is the seed ground of all the ills imaginable, and is called a "harlot" in Revelation, where her fall is described.
In supreme antithesis we hear of another "Light of the World," a "bright and morning star," a true light, who shall arise after the fall of Babylon and reign forever in a city of peace: Jer-u-salem, that is called the "bride." It comes down from heaven, and has twelve gates, but they are never closed, although the precious tree of life is within. There is no outside illumination. The light is within and there is no night.
Truly this is a wonderful city, and the greatest imaginable antithesis to the other, as literal interpretation is out of the question in both cases. What does it mean? Allowing that a city of Babylon has existed, it was not literally as described, and the future "New Jerusalem" is contrary to all laws of nature as we know them. These two cities must therefore be symbols.
In order to unravel the meaning, let us consider that these cities are located upon seven hills or mountains, a position offering special advantages for observation. Moses went "into the mountain" and "saw" and "heard," so did those on "the mount" of transfiguration. Daniel likens Babylon to the head of the image Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream (Daniel 2), and on the human head there are seven places of observation: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and a mouth. Man is also tenfold, having a threefold spirit, a threefold soul, and a threefold body, linked together by the mind. Upon these sits the brain, where the "Light-giver," reason, rules the little world, the microcosm, as the Great Light-giver, God, rules the macrocosm.
Reason is the product of selfishness. It is generated by the mind given by the "Powers of Darkness" (The Lords of Mind), in a brain built by selfishly keeping half the sex force, and prompted by the selfish Lucifers. Hence it is "the seed of the serpent," and although transmuted to wisdom through pain and sorrow, it must give way to something higher: intuition, which means teaching from within. That is a spiritual faculty, equally present in all Spirits, whether functioning for the time being as man or woman, but it expresses itself most prominently in those incarnated in a female organism, for there the counterpart of the Life Spirit—the vital body—is male, positive, and intuition, the faculty of the Life Spirit, may therefore properly be called "the woman's seed," whence all altruistic tendencies spring, and whereby all nations are being slowly but surely drawn together in a Universal Brotherhood of Love, regardless of race, sex, or color.
This brain of ours is not a homogeneous whole, however. It is divided into two halves, and it is a fact well known to physiologists that we use principally but one of these cerebral hemispheres—the left. The right half of our brain is only partially active. The heart also is on the left side of our body, but is beginning to move towards "the right" place. The "right" brain, which is ruled by Mercury, will also become more and more active, and in consequence of these two physiological changes man's whole character will appear different. The left side is under the sway of the Lucifers and is given over to selfishness, but the Ego will gain more and more control as the right side of the brain is invested with power to act upon the body as right judgment.
That there is a change going on in the heart which makes it an anomaly, a puzzle, is not news to physiologists. We have two sets of muscles, one set under the control of the will, as, for instance, the muscles of the arm and hand. They are striped both lengthwise and crosswise. The involuntary muscles which cannot be moved by desire, are striped lengthwise only. The heart is the only exception. It is not under the control of desire, and yet it is beginning to show cross-stripes like a voluntary muscle.
In time those cross-stripes will develop fully and the heart will be under our control.When that time comes we will be able to direct the blood where we will to send it. Then we may refuse to send it to the left brain, and Babylon, the city of Lucifer, will fall.
When the blood is sent into the right brain we shall be building the New Jerusalem, and we are now preparing for that time by building the cross-stripes of the heart by altruistic ideals, or, in the case of the pupil of a Mystery School, by sending the sex current through the right-hand path of the heart.
We remember that the Cherubim awakened the Life Spirit, the seat of divine love, whose shadow is the vital body, the medium of propagation, and when man was exiled from the Etheric Region, the Garden of Eden, with its four streams of ether, for the misuse of the sex force, the Cherubim were placed before it with a flaming sword. The right use of the sex force builds an organ which will give man the key to the inner worlds and help him to create by thought. This organ is the new wine cup, the ideal for the future epoch, the New Galilee, or New Jerusalem, and is built within the head and throat. To the spiritual sight it appears as the stem of a flower ascending from the lower part of the trunk. This calyx, or seed-cup, is truly a creative organ, capable of speaking the word of life and power, to infuse vitality in substances that were hitherto inert. Service is also an important factor in building this organ, and when it is built, sorrow and pain will cease and we will have entered the path to the city of peace, the New Jerusalem.
Lemuria perished by fire; terrible cataclysms destroyed the greater part of the Lemurian continent and in its stead rose the Atlantean continent, where the Atlantic Ocean now is. In time that was buried beneath the waves and gave way to the Fifth, post-Atlantean Epoch, the Earth as we see it at present in the current Epoch, but that is soon past. The salamanders are beginning to stir the fires in the forge to make "a new Heaven and a new Earth," which the Western School of Esotericism calls the "New Galilee."
In the New Galilee humanity will be transparent also, and as a result those bodies will be more easily responsive to the spiritual impacts of Intuition. While we lived in ancient Atlantis in the basins of the Earth, pressure of the moisture-laden mist was very heavy. This hardened the dense body, and as a further result the vibrations of the interpenetrating finer vehicles were considerably slowed down. This was especially true of the vital body, which is made of ether, a grade of matter belonging to the physical world and subject to some of the physical laws. The solar force did not penetrate the dense mist in the same abundance as is present in the clear atmosphere of today. Add to this the fact that the vital bodies of that day were almost entirely composed of the two lower ethers, which further assimilation and reproduction, and we shall understand that progress was very slow. Man led mainly a vegetative existence, and his main exertions were devoted to the purpose of obtaining food and reproducing his kind.
Had such a man been removed to our atmospheric conditions, the lack of exterior pressure would have resulted in the outflowing of the vital body which means death. Gradually the physical body grew less dense and the amount of the two higher ethers increased, so that man became fitted to live in a clear atmosphere under a decreased pressure such as we have enjoyed since the historical event known as the "Flood" when the mist condensed—when the Sun by precession entered the watery sign of Cancer about ten thousand years ago, as told Plato by the Egyptian Priests. Since that time we have also been able to specialize more of the solar life force. The larger proportion of the two higher ethers now found in our vital bodies enables us to express the higher human attributes appropriate to the development of this age.
Let it now be remembered that the qualifications necessary for our emancipation from the conditions prevailing in Atlantis were partly physiological; we had to evolve lungs to breathe the pure air in which we are now immersed and which allows the vital body to vibrate at a more rapid rate than did the heavy moisture. With this in mind we shall readily see that further advancement lies in freeing the vital body from the trammels of the dense body and letting it vibrate in pure air.
Such bodies will not get tired either, hence there is no night, and the twelve cranial nerves which are the gates to the seat of consciousness, then as now, are consequently never closed. Besides, New Galilee will be formed of luminous ether and transmit sunlight. It will be like unto "clear glass." Everywhere the pure and beautiful symbol of transparency has been given to designate the power of purity. We remember the Temple of Solomon that was "built without sound of hammer." The most beautiful ornament there was the molten sea. Hiram Abiff, the master workman, as his final achievement, succeeded in smelting all the metals of the Earth into an alloy as transparent as glass. This is of course the luminous soul body which we have already described, and which everyone will have to possess to function in the New Jerusalem.
The present Christianity is not even a shadow of the true religion of Christ. That will remain in abeyance until all race feeling shall have been overcome. In the Sixth Epoch, or new Galilee, there will be but one Universal Brotherhood, under the leadership of the Returned Christ. Love will be unselfish and Reason will approve its dictates. Each will work for the good of all, because self-seeking will be a thing of the past. Universal Brotherhood will bind all beings of all the Earth together in Love. There can be no death, for the tree of life, the faculty of generating vital force, is made possible by means of the ethereal organ in the head already mentioned, which will be evolved in those who are even now being taken out as forebears for the humanity of that coming epoch. "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom" (I Cor. 15:50) for it would interfere with the spiritual progress of that day; so when Christ appears we must be prepared with a soul body and thus be ready to part from our dense body to be "caught up and meet Him in the air." (I Thess. 4:17.)
"When shall these things be?" asked the disciples. If we believe Christ's words: "My kingdom is not of this world" (kosmos, the Greek word used for "world," meaning "order of things," rather than our planet, the Earth, which is called gee) we shall know better than to look for Christ today. When the heavenly time marker came into Aries by precession, a new cycle commenced, and the "glad tidings" were preached by Christ. He said by implication that the new Heaven and Earth were not ready then, when He told His disciples: "Whither I go you cannot now follow, but you shall follow afterwards. I go to prepare a place for you and will come again and receive you." It is perhaps presumptuous to even guess at the approximate time of the Second Advent, but as the precessional cycles, so far as they are connected with the evolution of man, seem to commence with the Sun's entrance into Capricorn, there may be a development at that time.
It is said that the Lord will appear with a mighty sound like the voice of an Archangel. We read of thunders and the blasts of trumpets in connection with the event. A sound is an atmospheric disturbance, and since the passage of a projectile made by man can lift the vital bodies of soldiers out of their dense bodies (as was observed in World War I), it needs no argument to prove that the shout of a superhuman voice could accomplish similar results more efficiently—"in the twinkling of an eye."
In the Day of Christ when His voice sounds the Call, as the Atlanteans whose lungs were undeveloped in the flood, so will also the new age find some without the "wedding garment" and therefore not fit to enter until they shall have qualified at a later time; others will find themselves with a properly organized soul body, able to ascend above the discarded dense bodies, to meet Him and be with Him for the age. Paul speaks of this advent as the "Christ being formed in you," and until Christ has been formed in us we are not yet ready for the Second Coming. As Angelus Silesius tells us:
(You are welcome to e-mail your answers and/or comments to us. Please be sure to include the Independent Study Course name and Module number in your e-mail to us. Or, you are also welcome to use the answer form below.)
1. What does the city of Babylon symbolize?
2. What are the seven mountains upon which "the woman sitteth"?
3. To what do the ten horns of the beast refer?
4. State the symbology of the New Jerusalem.
5. Of what are the twelve gates the symbol?
6. What is to cause the fall of "Babylon" and the establishment of the New Jerusalem?
7. Describe the "City of Peace."
