7. Netzach

Our title is Spiritual Victory in Qabalah.

And the entire aspect of victory, of course, and just what is meant by victory in our terms is against what we might think of as being victory, as will be discussed at least in part. The portion on the Tree of Life which it involves is the green sephirah, which means, remember, emanation and sphere of activity of the Most High, a specialized expression of the Most High, that sphere of color green is called victory, as you can see.

And it is the seventh emanation, therefore, in the order of expressing outward. But I always like to remind you, when we're discussing this Qabalistic tree of life, that in the consciousness of the universal mind the entire tree jumps into activity at once like a lightning flash in other words it is an all at onceness just like an eternal now you see spiritual victory involves the greater ability to understand victory on the qabalistic tree of life which I now remind you, is assigned to the function of the emotions and the function of the desire nature. Indeed, desire as such in you, in me, in what we might call a god or a master of wisdom or a fool. It is the same substance, it is the same essence. Desire is a burning, but the burning has to do with what? Now man controls fire, something that burns, and he does fantastic and glorious things things with it, fantastic things. So we have this whole process or concept of burning and this involves what? It involves the desire nature so that we could say in essence that it is the desire nature that actually is at the heart of whatever is meant Kabbalistically by victory and we will show it in several ways and then we'll understand better what the emotions and the desire nature have to do with spiritual victory because surely all of us have come to recognize by now that every bit of our capacity to aspire to something better or greater comes from desire.

We do not move from here to there unless there's desire.

We do not move one iota without desire. The whole movement of anything and everything has as its base or as its root the emotions of which desire is the heart.

We think too often of desire as being tied up only with things negative, forgetting consistently that aspiration is desire. It is a refined desire, but it is a burning desire. When it is a burning aspiration.

We forget that the outreach, the upreach, the desire to love God or the actual ability or capacity to love God are rooted in the same thing, basically, because to desire to love God actually has to do with having an emotion that wants to be aware of its security, that wants to overcome, overcome, please notice that word, it wants to overcome whatever it feels is a limitation. So overcoming is what? Isn't that victory?

Therefore, aspiration has to do with the desire to become victorious over something that is being considered as limiting or that is bringing us unhappiness, something we don't like or something that we decide we don't want or something that we decide we've had our fill of that although we may have wanted it, we want it now about as much as a hole in the head. And indeed certain desires fulfilled become just that and this is one of the best ways ways to be cured of desiring, shall we say, the erroneous things. In fact, I don't know of anyone who ever got cured of desiring nonsense except through victoriously getting the nonsense. Have you? Think about it for a moment. Look back in your own lives, each one. Think back.

Now there have been certain things we've desired when we've been younger. The younger the more intensely we've desired certain things that today we call nonsense, but in those days we didn't think of it as nonsense then.

And just think for a moment, did we ever get over it unless we had it? Unless we got it?

We certainly did not. We really didn't. Sometimes we disguise it, and then we go and want it all over again because we haven't recognized that we really got what we wanted and all the headaches that went with it.

And more than the headaches, very much more. And please bear in mind this entire Qabalistic tree of life, with its paths, it is your map of consciousness. Without a map, we get lost.

And believe me, most of us have been lost souls, or so it has appeared. And we have to be lost souls for a while in order to decide to develop enough desire to develop enough drive to find how to get back home now the point is my beloved ones I want you to realize this there's never a time not since you were shall we say created created, although you always have been, not since you were begotten of God, but you existed even before that idea is there, because you were before Abraham, before, as they said, before Abraham was, I am. Still, in the consecutive development of an idea, there's something different than in the actual existence and the instantaneousness of the Tree of Life we might put it this way when an architect is going to build a house and say he's going to do the whole thing or even even even if he's going to get helpers first but this when the plans have been made you sit down you have the plans all drawn up now that the entire plan for the house or the plan for the the machine or the article that one's going to manufacture, that entire plan is there.

It is an accomplished thing in the mental substance because it had to be worked out in the mind and of course there had to be the drive to bring it into being, that's the desire, nature, the emotions. It already exists in that fine mental substance within which all of us live and move and have our being. The mental substance, remember, being the cosmic mind stuff within which all things are. That subtle something which also in its condensation becomes something we experience via senses in a different specialized way. So even though before Abraham was, I am, the The outworking is something other, just in the same way that though a whole house is complete in a mental substance, it still has not yet been built, nor has anyone lived in it yet.

In other words, it has not yet been experienced in the specialized way that the person or persons who are going to live in that particular kind of a house are going to experience it. And we are the created being evolved I mean portions of us are in order to consciously live which we are doing really in the house of god after all our physical bodies are the houses of god whether we know it or not our personality bodies these are the houses the vehicle of god whether we know it or not all vehicles are the vehicles of god whether we know it or not but what we're being, what is happening, we are being evolved to know it, because not until we know it consciously has the divine plan come into its fulfillment, because the conscious knowing then makes us a conscious godlet, as I like to call it, consciously experiencing experiencing what the divine plan has in mind, which has to be done with our conscious cooperation, or conscious will, only then is evolution complete or perfected in any one area.

But the point is, every step of the process is a step that's necessary. Therefore, everything that has ever happened has been a step in the process of that, which is, in the final analysis, going to be the victorious goal, the fulfillment. So in that sense, we can say there's never been a time that you have not been victorious. What do you think of that? Never. In other words, you are living the victorious life. And what do you think of that? You say, oh, I am? Then why am I lonely, miserable, full of hate, full of jealousy, or else being the recipient of hate and or jealousy. Why then am I without this thing or that thing, whether it be the house or the TV or that special job, or why am I without this very special prestige position where people look up at me and say, oh, you're marvelous, you know, etc. If I'm living the victorious life, what's victorious about that?

I mean, you see, and that's where we fail to understand, and this is what we must come to understand, and that is that everything we experience, everything, is the result of how we have been using this fantastic power, the emotional nature, the desire factor of our being, everything. Everything. In the very heart of misery lies the secret of our true understanding, in the very heart of that misery. In fact, in the very heart of that misery lies the secret of how we're going to come to become more conscious of how we're utilizing the desire our nature so that our victories will be more wisely chosen victories because the entire Qabalistic tree of life, the entire Western mystery training system says to us, not until we are conscious agents for the primal will to good, which eternally creates and sustains the universe? Are we even remotely fulfilling what we have been created to be and to become?

So that when we say all desires are fulfilled, they are fulfilled in this manner. The moment we are desiring, we are charging an image. It is a meditation. Everything that we experience as the result of meditation. Learning how to meditate, we make some fantastically gross things, in other words we create very, very poorly. And how else could we create? How do you expect a child to draw or paint when he's first being taught to be an artist?

What kind of music do you hear from a child first being taught how to become a musician? And yet, isn't it a necessary preliminary for the beautiful, exquisite music that finally develops when a person keeps working and perfecting themselves in order to become more and more of a master of that particular method of expression? Well, in the same way, this is how evolution works. And of course human beings who are still tied to the idea desiring material things, not that there's anything wrong with material things, mind you, they're fine if we know how to understand them and how to use them instead of letting them use us. We're talking about learning how to understand and control and direct. Correct. But it is in recognizing the different levels of desire, it is in learning how to train our desire nature to desire more and more of that which is worthwhile. It is through the experiences we have had through many incarnations indeed. It is through all the fulfillments, in other words, it is through all the victories desire has attained, which it has, through many incarnations, that we develop the discrimination, that we develop the spirituality, that we develop the recognition of the fact that we have to learn how to, what you might call, sensitize our desire nature.

Purifying the desire nature then has to do not with killing it out, not with damping it down but learning how to redirect the desire because of what changes in us what we desire actually changes once we have come to see that sorrow is the twin bedfellows of desires that are of the lower levels or that hold the coarser aspects of substance.

So finally, out of these experiences, we come to the point where because of our victories, because the soul deep inside of us, even when the conscious mind does not yet know it, the soul deep inside of us recognizes the fantastic power of its desire and has had all of the repercussions of the warped kind of desiring. It starts reaching, reaching to the upper, to the higher.

It starts desiring God.

And in desiring God, in our Western occult training system, them. We have to know and realize that this does not mean we are also at the same time saying, well, I desire God, so I have no use anymore for relationships with people. I have no use anymore for anything like, shall we say, comfort. If you have no use for comfort and only want God, whatever you have, you lose. To him who hath shall be given, to him who hath not even that which he behalf shall be taken away. If you start despising having a roof over your head, because that's just being focused on material things, if you despise it, you'll lose it, and so you should. It's a good experience until you learn how to let the emotions appreciate. If you If you start, which we all do, working yourself up against a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, a wife, etc., and you, why does so-and-so do such-and-such?

We let ourselves work ourselves up with antagonistic emotions. How do we expect anything but antagonistic developments out of our relationships? If we permit our emotions to go in for irritations in relation to be irritated with another, How do we expect anything but having a very irritated life, that is, becoming an irritation unto others so that that which we really want will run away from us naturally? Who wants irritation? Only somebody who holds irritability in their consciousness, because this is how we're creating it. In other words, we have to come to see that the proper use of the desire nature has as much to do with appreciating and loving those desires that are bringing us towards the beautiful and the fulfilled as anything else. Because if we knock down anything, we invariably are going to have to recognize its value or lack of value, and that's why I want you to notice that the tower, the principle of Mars is involved here.

That's a pretty thunderous, it's a fantastically unhappy kind of experience that's going on there. Self-consciousness and subconsciousness are being knocked out of the tower of isolation, You know, by the lightning of heaven, incidentally, which again is telling us that that which seems an unhappy experience is really the love of God, whether we know it or not, because it's knocking us out of the isolation of ignorance. Although we think that hell is breaking loose, and it hasn't really in that same way. Hell is being knocked out of us, you might say, because we build our own inner hells as we know. No. So notice that that is the key, which is the path that connects victory to splendor, the intellectual faculties, incidentally. So they're very closely interacting. They're tied in together. Desiring something that is better than what we have requires the knockdown, the throwing out of whatever condition is. If we would come to see this, we would come to see that certain experiences that come to us which we consider unhappy are really the blessings of the Most High as principles which we ourselves are bringing into being because we are preparing ourselves or being prepared for something better, something lovelier, due to the fact that our desire nature has been working at improving what it desires.

Desires. Can you see? I know sometimes we can run away with some of these ideas. Maybe we have to in order to learn how to work with them in a discriminating manner, because some people then become so determined to see every unhappy experience as being the necessary something for something better, that all they do is keep themselves in unhappy experiences. In other words, they mistakenly then focus all of that fantastic power, the divine power, which is within us, which we project.

They get this focus down. I've seen many aspirants do this, so that every single miserable experience is being seen as a very fine, marvelous lesson.

And so always they're looking for the next experience to be miserable also. And believe me, they get it. Such marvelous ability to concentrate the desire nature into misery deserves its victory and gets it whether it deserves it deserves that are not until it learns the next vital thing about about spiritual victory in Qabalah and that is that only what we learn to hold in our own hearts which means our own emotions only that is what we get and if we are going to hold in our own hearts any of these negative aspects even when we are attempting to interpret something for example if we keep holding in our own hearts the ideas of oh I am so unfinished and I am so so terrible and I am so inferior.

Well, we are going to be expressing more and more inferiority because the patterns in subconsciousness, though they can have fantastic capacity for superiority, are going to project out the inferiorities. The spiritual victory, as I've been trying to point out in subtle ways, and some perhaps not so subtle, has to do with the fact that the focused emotions with the direction of desire always gets what it wants. Some things it takes more than one incarnation, but it always gets what it wants. Until finally, and it's finally, it gets to the point where it says, ye gods, I'm tired of letting my emotions focus in on all of the nonsense of the mass mind. I'm now going to get my desire nature out of being caught up in the mass mind or in the lower levels because we share telepathically with the entire mass mind, with the entire consciousness of humanity. We share telepathically in the power depending on the quality of what we permit ourselves to hold and desire.

Now, when we start working on making the quality of our desire desiring to become an agent for God for love for good desiring to hold in our desires and our emotions only those elements that are the expression of the Most High desiring to become as much as possible that which gives the divine the ability to see see through our eyes so we can share true seeing with God and to hear through our ears the music of the spheres which your voice and my voice are incidentally the music of the spheres we think of it as something just out there it's out there and it's in here and it's everywhere when we come to this point it is then that we're really traveling these paths of return we are really starting to express we are really developing the strength of soul and we have we develop it out of the sorrows we really overcome our enemies because our enemies are our own negative immaturities and to the degree we permit ourselves to hold it we become the pawn of other negative immature mature personalities without recognizing it and to the degree that we become victorious over this level and this is what perfects our individuality remember what is the difference between a mob mind consciousness and an attained master it is the capacity not to respond to that which is is a lie against the truth that I am the offspring of God.

And separative thinking is the lie, thinking that anything that we do to another isn't also being done to ourselves. The true spiritual victory has to do with seeing everything as being an aspect of God and loving it and training ourselves to love it. And training ourselves to love it in the ways that Jesus expressed. True spiritual victory then in Qabalah has to do with becoming victorious over being the pawn of that in us which is less and making ourselves the agent for that which is the higher. And that is what you already are in far greater measure than you have been able to see. You would not be sitting here a spiritual aspirant if you were not already charged with the divine flame you would not be sitting here trying to find out how to more perfectly work in this area of self-transmutation if you had not already become victorious to a fantastic degree because you are now upon that rung of the ladder where you are developing more and more ability and capacity to be victorious over the lower animal nature vital soul to develop the fantastic beauty to become the receivers of the divine love we are but conscious because God everything from the above is imparting itself to us we you every Everyone here has become a wider, deeper cup receiving this divine love, this divine power, this divine essence of knowledge.

In other words, the determination of the goal. And that goal is victorious.

That goal has victory already in it. The house has already been built in the consciousness of God. The end is already absolute. It is only up to you and me to more thoroughly, firmly, completely and consistently work with that goal and we are far more towards it, my beloved ones, than we realize. Remember, you are the higher self basically your true I am is the I am that cannot fail your true center of beingness is rich with the downpourings of God you have the power now to attain the final victory which incidentally is over death itself because you right now are already being prepared to become aware of your eternal immortal and absolutely inexorable perfection let's live it