5. Seven Stages to Spiritual Unfolment Through Tarot

This evening we're taking up stage five of the stages of unfoldment in spiritual development. And here, as you now know, it is the last Tarot key that represents the actual stage, which we can also think of as the result or the effect of what has gone before. Four. We also now know that the first tarot key in the series of three represents the principle.

The middle tarot key, or the second tarot key, represents the agency or law or activity through which the principle works in order to bring about the result, the effect, the stage of spiritual unfoldment, whatever that may be. So now we have arrived at stage five, Isn't that nice? We haven't far to go and then we can flap our wings and enter into the Never Neverland.

Remember in our previous series of three that we took up the Tarot keys four, which represented the rulership the king the emperor remember we took up as the law or agency through which that principle worked tarot key number 11 which was the action and therefore the karma the activity which equal vibrates whatever principle it is we are holding and and therefore that which level, which brings our rulership into our particular environment.

And that as the stage of unfoldment or the effect, we took up key 18, which represents the past organization called the corporeal intelligence. And we pointed out to you that the very atoms and cells in our body are affected by every thought, by the principles we hold, the activities that have been involved, and therefore the continuous change, interchange you might say, of our atomic structure with the rest of life, which incidentally is scientifically proven. You don't even have to think maybe that's one of those unproven occult ideas or theories. It's proven. So we have taught it, as you know, through untold numbers of millennia that we emanate our atoms at such a rate that in 10 months not a single atom is the same which means that not a single cell is really composed of the same atom since the cells keep forgetting cells after their own kind and they get the cells after their own kind in terms of our whole basic mental emotional response to life.

So the kind of body we have determines what kind of spiritual perception we've got.

This is why in the Western occult school of thought we hammer on the idea that we've got to transmute our personality which inevitably and automatically brings about a you might call it an a serialization of the physical vehicle which so it may not look any different to the eye which looks on surfaces will be different and it will have a different effect just like a person in love glows when a person who is not in love does not glow. Where a person in a state of mystical or joyous or loving emotions shines with certain expressiveness, a person who's bored does not. And who would not rather be in the presence of someone who's glowing and emanating than someone who's in the presence, who is like a zombie-ish dead, like a lead weight upon our souls, whether we've become consciously aware of this or not. This is one of the many reasons we avoid the depressed type of personality, the pessimist, the materialist.

And those of us on the path avoid it even more assiduously than others because we are more sensitive to the kind of emanations that are taking place. And it has to do with the physical body. The need in certain schools of thought to wave away the physical universe or the physical body and to keep working on the idea that we are immaterial beings and therefore the important thing is to become indifferent.

They call it detachment.

Well, detachment is something we develop, but not the way it's usually interpreted.

It's not indifference. As a matter of fact, it's the very reverse.

And so the whole idea of trying to withdraw attention or heart or mind from the physical environment from the physical life is erroneous because remember we will tell you continuously it is in and through the physical so-called physical life that we expand our consciousness into the spiritual awareness it's in and through the experiences the impact of these concentrations concentrations of the life force which we call the experience of the physical universe which brings about a perception and a development and a rulership of the mental substance and only when we develop full rulership of this mental substance which incidentally is one of the things which our physical body happens to be. It's a condensation of mental substance from the most high, or of the most high. It is not what it seems to be. It is the proving ground and it is the developmental areas for the evolving consciousness, the evolving soul. That's why we need to keep reincarnating until until we become the true rulers, as we brought out last week through Tarot Key Number 4, the emperor, assigned, remember, to what?

To reason, reasoning faculties. And how often have we seen occult aspirants want to drop, I mean, it's so nice and easy to drop the reasoning faculties, to drop the analytical abilities, to drop the testing, thing and just to say uh fold their hands and say well god is love and god is immaterial let us have faith you know with the uh sickly smile and believe you me the lives of these people are a myth as surely we come to realize and they do not take control of the organization which is what the one of the Qabalistic attributions of the previous result.

Tarot key number 18, which we took up last week. So now, since we've been seeing this in terms of a revolution of a spiral, each three keys representing one circle and have been seeing that, though, on the whole, we get stuck in a groove, eventually we move out of the groove to the next circle and keep circling up through this series of three to higher and higher states of development and evolution. Now here is where we need to gain an understanding of the real magic of tarot. And I mean real magic. You have been learning about the tarot and the lessons you receive at home in terms of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, up to 21. I can count up to 21 on it.

Just take it on faith.

But the point is, this is not... Play canasta?

Well, there's nothing against that.

Nothing against that. You know one of you here has been very kind very wonderful sweet to me and has brought me a beautiful beautiful juice sometimes pomegranate sometimes grape sometimes other it's very red and a great big jug and the first time it was brought was right after the sunday services and I was in the white row white ministerial robe and I pointed out that but some of our congregation may decide that the pastor is quite a tippler to have to handle this, I think, it looked like a five-gallon jug. I don't know, maybe it's a gallon, but it looked quite large to me. So these very adorable members started to secretly go around and stick it in my car. I mean, we're so surreptitious, you'd think it was really the intoxication of the grapes instead of the intoxication of the other, though we're not against the slight intoxication of the grape if Jesus wasn't, as we pointed out to you. And that's another thing, dealing with T19 here in the Sun and these children. What is the basic essence here that's involved with the stage of spiritual unfoldment? The basic essence is purity. I think you should see it very clearly. Why Why is it purity?

These children are nude. It's a boy and a girl, and they're holding hands with this essence of purity. And they're dancing in the fairy ring, and the sun shines on them.

And if it was nighttime, so would the moon. I'm sure the moon wouldn't object either.

And the drops from heaven fall on them. You see those little orange yodes? And remember those yodes are assigned to Tarot Key 9 which is the sense of touch which is assigned to the pairs to the union of opposites and remember what we told you about touch in a sense you can call it the closest kind of unity from the deepest levels when soul touches soul when heart touches heart this is the deepest part of the sense of touch and union with god is through this particular sense of touch that's why it's called the hand of god that is the yote you know the open hand of the hermit therefore we have the idea here of purity and these are what these aren't little children they're adolescent children and what is there that's real interesting about adolescent children here's where I told you I was going to bring up at least for just a little bit the whole idea of the reproductive energy the adolescent child is is being stirred into the first surges of the reproductive life the glands are just waking up with those surges as we all know and here we have these two adolescent children holding hands in their magic fairy ring with the hand of God falling on them in love in unity with the Sun permeating them purity only the pure in heart shall know God, shall see God, shall truly experience God, my darling. Please be sure of that.

And I don't care how many accounts you may have read of saints or mystics who went into tremendous eloquence about having experienced God. If these particular individuals were not pure of heart they may have had a very mystical experience they may have had a very high order even of psychic experience that stirred them but they still had not attained to that level of the higher intuitional faculties that comes only to those who are pure in heart and who are those who are pure in heart anyone who has to feel either joyously lewd or disgustedly lewd in relation to the ideas of sex neither of these that's doing not you see you go to either direction either the orgiastic elements who as an excuse for lewdness you know an attitude towards the reproductive energy keeps screeching or announcing that they're free from repression by going in for all this tragic nonsense these are not pure though they will tell you they are because many people call themselves by many names that aren't so and those who keep waggling a finger at you either through books or in any other way to tell you this is an evil that you must spiritualize yourself against and through and over and above these also are not pure in heart or they would not be calling that method which God uses to reproduce the vehicle of life for self as something evil, would they now?

If we just stand to reason.

So it takes a purity, a real purity of heart to see God, to know God, to know yourself to be a child of the Son in and through these different expressions. And this purity of heart shown here by the nude figures, by the very attitudes, is involved also, therefore, with the Qabalistic attributes, for instance, we mentioned collecting intelligence. Number one, think about that, meditate for a moment. And do you know what the pair of opposites are assigned to this? Fertility and sterility.

And the function is regeneration.

Regeneration. This is the stage that follows then from a true intuition, a development of a capacity for true intuition, of being willing to put down, to kneel down in terms of the personality, lower desires and knowledge of all the things that were in store for the teacher. Of being willing to reverse one's attitudes, of being able to suspend one's judgments only in terms of the condemnation of the things that aren't so, in order to take up again a newer, a better, a higher attitude, and therefore to develop a type of reverence. That we will discuss with a future tarot key and some of its ramifications. So this is just one aspect of this key which is very little seen or understood usually, the purity of heart that deals so specifically with that energy and the falling yodes really give you the greatest hint, as they did incidentally in the last tarot key, though I didn't bring it up.

Because remember that had to do with corporeal intelligence the intelligence that both creates and sustains bodies and so there again you have that same energy but you see regeneration we regenerate ourselves truly with the reproductive energy which is also the kundalini energy but we have no way of utilizing it positively unless we wash out of our souls the responses of the mass mind in which we're immersed and this is why we need to learn there's the agency of dem p12 to stabilize our mind to arrest it in suspension it's just like in that water which our subconsciousness is remember it's the great seas the great mother we have to be able to do something to hold our own little whirlpool Cool.