"And He said unto him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang the law and the prophets."

   These two Commandments summarize the Old and New Testaments, the entire Bible. The Old Testament Commandments remind us of Saturn, the teacher, while those of the New call to mind Uranus, the comforter. These two planets represent order and exalted love respectively.

   As though in recapitulation, Saturn is once again repeated in the astrological rulership of the Bible's eleventh Commandment, in Aquarius, where both Saturn and Uranus find expression. Thus, we live this Commandment through our positions and aspects of Saturn and Uranus, our aspects in Aquarius, and our eleventh house affairs.

   There is a gulf between the ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the two of the New. The ten were given us when we were yet Israelites. Later, Christ stood in our temples and said: "Show me what you have done with the ten Commandments. The time of the Aryan Age is up." Then the Aryan door closed, and behind the closed door were virgins without oil for their lamps!

   Now another Age has almost passed — the Piscean — and once again a door is about to close. Again we are to be tested, in the lessons of the Piscean Age — the two commandments of love. Once again we have waited until the eleventh hour and many of us still do not think it is time to awake.

   The number eleven is the number of confusion. The confusion of tongues at Babel occurs in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. The first Commandment of the New Testament is the eleventh in the Bible. The pre-dawn of the Aquarian Age is a time of confusion.

   It is testing time for our ability to love. Our love has many phases: love for parents when we were small, love for brothers and sisters, love for a sweetheart, love for our children, love of friends, love of nature, love of beauty, love of home, and much more. Now, suppose that all these different phases of love were to become as gems in our hands, and we were bidden to take them to be judged by the Master jeweler. Would He appreciate them? What would be their value? Would they total the required: Thou didst love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, and mind, in every one of thy expressions of love?

   Perhaps we don't know clearly what is expected of us under the heading of love. We are taught that Christ came to purify the desire body of our Earth by permeating it with His own. He thereby conquered the downward pull of the lower desire world which was fast destroying the human race. He gave the heart of our world a sudden wrench, a wrench upward. What He did for us cosmically is expected of us individually before the close of this Age. The cleansing of our desires, the wrench of our hearts, must be accomplished soon.

   The Desire World is divided into two portions, the low and the high. The low is dense, like a fog. It permeates the Earth a short distance and extends out into the atmosphere. It is especially dense at and near sea level and in big cities. The high is bright and glorious, interpenetrates the entire Earth to the very core, and extends out into interplanetary space for some millions of miles. All of us live and move within both of these desire bodies. The vast wonderful storehouse of the higher Desire World to which we have to aspire with all our hearts, souls, and minds, cannot be attained without a wrench of the heart. The task of the Christ dispensation is to transmute the coarse desire into the virtue of love; this cannot be done without a wrench to the heart.

   As the lower desire world awaits cleansing by man's awakening, so also that portion of our own desire nature which is still of low and coarse texture must be cleansed, or become our destruction. We have made our hearts the seat of feelings rather than the seat of divinity. If they were the seat of divinity, they would be the abode of immaculate love; instead, however, we call our feelings "love." Feelings, because they are rooted in the Desire World, are devoid of thought, intelligence, control, and have no reason or judgment. Desire substance lacks all discrimination; all it wishes to impart is emotion, thrill, excitement.

   The most powerful function of the desire world is the power of generation. The desire world is generative power. Water is the symbol of emotions, desire, and generation. The Old Testament Commandments instructed us in the power to float and swim in the calm waters of feeling, in the strong currents of desire, and in the turbulent sea of generation. Suddenly, then, we find ourselves in the Piscean Age and there is Christ, reaching out His hand to us. Before the Aquarian Age begins, it is expected of us to take that proffered hand and rise from generation to regeneration, from immorality to morality, from impurity to purity.

   Purification of love is the personal requirement for entry into the promised land of Aquarius. In the Aquarian vineyard of Christ we gather the vintage of achievement in love which, being of the nature of yeast, doubles, triples, and multiplies 100-fold, becomes altruistic and philanthropic.

   Because the lesson of the Aquarian Age is one of the awakening of the heart and not the mind, the test is that of impersonal love and not of learning. It is a response to the Christ impulse that is sought individually. The call to membership in the Aquarian race does not go out to groups, societies, churches, or other organizations. It goes to individuals everywhere who have responded to the call of impersonal love in their hearts.

   May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you and give you a touch of that joy and peace which comes when love is exalted toward God.
—Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, April, 1977, page 167-168.