[Through May 2025 a chapter of A Tour Through the Zodiac will be published at the middle of each month and an astrological profile of a native of each sign– most found in the Brotherhood of Light Lessons– will be published at the beginning of the following month; next up is Herbert Hoover for August.]
LESSON III.
THE FIERY TRIPLICITY.
♈ ♌ ♐
♌, OR SACRIFICING.
Fire is the great purifier. So action is that form of the Fiery Triplicity (yellow-ray side) which is the great purifier. According to the former analysis, all action is sacrifice, passion and oblation, and it is through this trial by fire, and the sacrifice and suffering implied in it, that I gain my spiritual sight (insight) . And it is a delusion that my eyes can ever be opened to the nature of fire, except by experiencing it; for how can I ever know that illusion is illusion unless I experience its nothingness?
I may stand up before the enemy and repeat the words: “There is only one Mind; there is no illusion of finite personality,” but, as far as vain repetition goes, I would better take some other creed, for herein is a great mystery. This awful law of contradictories works (when actually evoked) in spite of my unbelief, and even when I, in my blindness, do not see the results. This is the true creed of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of the Tree of Life; and to partake of the fruit of this tree, tempted by the serpent of the lower nature, or self-mask, is to surely die.
If the lower self stumbles upon this true creed, or is entrusted with it unpurified by the trial of fire and suffering, the lie of personality is only accentuated. The mask thinks it has become as the Gods, and its fall is inevitable. It has taken exactly the opposite road for truth, and instead of realizing its oneness with the Divine Spirit it will fall to the very depths of the shadows of nothingness, even while mumbling the true creed. Yet this seeming and so-called fall is but the first form of action, without which there could be no reaction, and inaction is as fatal to insight as personality, accentuated to nothingness.
Since, in order to rise, there must be a seeming fall, so, in order to realize there is no such thing as illusion, I accept it as an hypothesis to get rid of it, just as it is necessary to demonstrate certain propositions in geometry to be untrue by assuming them to be true, for thus only can their untruth become self-evident; and in order to realize the Infinite One I am forced to postulate the finite personalities.
And yet I also know that to even momentarily accept illusion chains me to it (for the time being); for I am where I locate myself, as One with the All, or as seemingly projected outside the All, where, like a soap-bubble, I shall speedily realize the lie of self-mask; the harder I blow this bubble the quicker it bursts into nothingness. Like a child, I can keep on blowing personality bubbles, only to see these finite Egos burst, one after another; or I can put away the childish things, resolving to be no longer deceived by them, and blow them only to understand the law according to which they come and go. Therefore I accept finite personalities solely to demonstrate their utter impossibility, and when I know that time is also an illusion, I rise to the plane where even the Sun itself will stand silent upon Gibeon, and the Moon stay in the valley of Ajalon until I avenge myself upon all my enemies.
Hereafter let me act, or refrain from acting, simply to know truth, and no longer conform to finite and worldly codes of morality or mere social traditions and usages.
Just as in a former lesson I accepted the visible Universe in its unity and in its infinity as a grand universal language, its sentences, letters and punctuation marks all symbols for thought and traced with the finger of God, so now I accept all terrestrial action as purely symbolic action, possessing no moral quality in itself, but simply descriptive of spiritual acts, which I cannot possibly comprehend until I have faithfully performed all the symbolic acts. To refrain from these symbolic acts before I grasp the real acts is to deliberately bar and bolt the only door by which I can enter the temple, expecting thus to gain admittance. To refrain from flesh eating, from wine drinking and from social and family life, simply for the sake of abstinence, is to play the part of a stupid tyrant and not of the King. On the other hand, to debauch myself in all these acts, simply because they satisfy my senses, is to become the slave of suffering and death. The mob must not rule, yet the tyrant who devastates his kingdom and puts all the inhabitants to death by fire, torture, or slow starvation, ends by having no kingdom to rule. If I destroy the mob because I fear it, I do not overcome fear by the process nor obtain wisdom.
I therefore sacrifice to idols, or shadowy images, simply to eliminate melody out of discord, to realize the “Octave of Purification,” whereby the fire, which on the lower plane is destructive to life, is raised from the key-note C to the chemical, life-giving C of the scale.
From out this fiery furnace of trial this right action, knowledge and wisdom are born. The Christ-Truth must be born of this Tribe of the Lion (si). It can only come from this Royal Action, and is itself the highest and supreme sacrifice, whereby the Son of Man becomes the Son of God.
But I can never comprehend this last sacrifice until I have learned the meaning of all the other sacrifices, and how to make them. I must learn the meaning of eating, whereby the plant life and animal life are sacrificed, before I can comprehend the awful mystery of the sacrifice of human life, called death, even up to that sublime death on the Cross. But sacrificing is not destroying, and to comprehend the meaning of eating, or sacrificing, or action, is to realize the absolute unthinkability of the illusion called death. Therefore, let me never take a morsel of food into my mouth without reflecting that I am performing the ceremonials of sacrifice within the temple of my body, just as the rites of public temple worship were formerly observed.
And let me study the meanings of all the correspondences of these temple rites.
And, also, let me engage in all the acts of finite life; of trade, politics and social life, etc., until I learn the reality which makes the shadow, and thus burn every idol upon the altar of truth.