Sacred Space and its mindset produces and emanates from a sense of wonder and awe. Whether this belong to the external landscape of the world around us, or the internal landscape of the mind, it is a key to life’s meaningfulness and its pure joy. Through this inner sensibility, the Divine is reached in a direct manner and one stands face to face with God.
The Self or the Ego is the object of so much misunderstanding that it almost seems impossible to get to any clarity on what it is or who “I” am. And indeed, most people go through their entire lives without ever discovering who “I” am; adding to the difficulty overlaying the subject. But through the many archetypes there are for people in our society and the mythologies that so many types generate, we can intuitively come to an understanding of who “I” am, through them.
The Shadow holds all our forgotten memories, trauma and joy, through all the phases and transitions of our lives. With each period of our life, we in a sense, reinvent ourself and cast off all the thoughts, feelings and desires of our previous self; not unlike the teenager who struggles to become an adult and comes to reject childhood toys. These forgotten memories in their repressed state, lurk to reinsert themselves with so many of our knee-jerk reactions and responses to situations in our current life. To get to this strata of our psyche, we can begin by owning and taking responsibility for those reactions and responses, and then tracing them back to their source.
Rumination is the psychic practice of presence. What that means is that we are bringing all the experiences of our lives into the present moment to dwell consciously with them. They make up the character and personage that we project to ourselves and upon others. These are the elements of our soul and by ruminating over and through them, we are offered the oppotunity to recapitulate images of our past that we hold onto and work them into the more mature mythos of our lives, as we carry them today.
Consciousness is a force of being and beingness that inflicts itself on the body and into the world of contending forces. It pervades within and without all of sentient life, and all life is sentient; per the Doctrine of the 4 Yods in our Rosicrucian Mass. It is the Dao and the Force of Star Wars and Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, the Universal Mind, God in its anthropomorphic expression. And it is from this that we create our personality in harmony with those elements that come from the experience of our lives.
The canon of the Holy Books of Thelema provides an entirely new source of Gnosis that more than rivals and contemporizes the ancient Gnostic codices. In particular, the beauty of verse in Liber VII, also called Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli even rivals and overcomes the beauty of verse in the Psalms of David. In this sermon, we provide a brief introduction to this holy book and hope to inspire our congregation to pursue a deeper reading of this marvelously spirited work.
The beginning of one’s aspiration to Gnosis starts with the Hermetic Axiom: Know Thyself. This look within starts with the contemplation of the self in isolation and away from all others. Even one may come to find oneself to be somehow, special with the onrush of spiritual ecstasy; mistaking the beginning for the end. It’s simply an unavoidable step that is worth taking, despite the fact that one can stand so pompous before the world. Note that ‘this too, shall pass’ and accept this blind step for what it is. Soon the grace of Gnosis will be as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and one’s steps will become more rational and more certain.
It can be said that the mind capable of holding cosmic consciousness is a mind as far beyond the human mind, as the human mind is so far beyond the mind of an animal. Animals hold a preceptual level of consciousness, and humans can group those precepts into concepts; holding a conceptual level of consciousness. Now, imaging a mind, able to group concepts together to produce such an awareness that trancends human consciousness by a quantum leap; a quantum-consciousness.
Now is all we have; this moment, that’s it! If you’re living in the past and waxing nostalgic always, you’re not here and your life is a misery you’ve chosen not to look at. If you’re always chasing goals and repeatedly dying for a future that may fail you, you’ve found a way to cheat yourself out of your life. Now, the now, can only be found in a deep concentration for the present moment. And realize your ability to shape this moment in any way that you would have it to be. You simply have to want to do this; to know that this is here for you in this moment and seize it for yourself.
Humor in our view, is intimately entwined with laughter; the most misunderstood and underrated emotion in the human satchel. It builds health and vitality, as much as it enriches the enjoyment of life, and its gusto. How great it is that we can really develop our perception of humor, as a tool to produce all the forms of laughter that are available to us.
