*
FOURTH PHASE: RE-ENERGIZATION - THE MARS STATION
To live means to expend energy. The pilgrim on the Illumined Road must make use of energy, as does the man preoccupied only with the maintenance, aggrandizement or reproduction of his body and his ego on the background of social competition and physical wants. Yet, at the beginning of the Star-ward path, a common experience is the sense of profound weariness of body and soul, as if the entire organism of personality found itself deprived of its customary supply of energy. Indeed, it is so deprived. A great drought comes upon the the land of personality. The ancestral wells run dry. The water that raised the familiar crops and made the fields of earth-conditioned personality green and moist all but vanish. Is the desert to absorb all life within the man whose gaze is now being fixed upon the yet distant Star through clear perhaps, but lonely, midnights?
To the Woman of Samaria who had come to draw water from the ancestral well - the earthly depths of unconscious and biological instinct - Jesus promised the gift of "living water". And she asked, with all of us: "Whence cometh this living water, and with what can it be drawn?" If our biological and psychic life of personality has become arid, if our instincts and our glands have seemingly lost the power to preserve and maintain our organism of body and soul against the pressures and the shattering impacts of the world within and without, what source of power is there on earth or in heaven to fill our need?
The ancient Hindu Sage or spiritual Guide answered these questions by devising yoga disciplines, biopsychic techniques of breathing and of concentration, in an attempt to tap deeper and more secret wellsprings of vitality within the human organism. On the other hand the basic Christian solution stresses the power of faith. It is based upon the mystery-drama of the Incarnation, which in its true spiritual meaning does not refer to a unique act performed once for all by a "one and only" Son of God, but to the always renewable process of focalization of the universal "sea of spirit" into the "drop" which our individualized selfhood constitutes.
To live is not only to expend energy; more significantly, it is to use power; and power is energy released through form. Essentially, all energy is one; yet as the forms (or the "engines") through which energy is released differ greatly, so there are various kinds of power, at several levels of being. There is the power which can be released through (rather than from, as modern science believes) the atom's structure. There is power to be released through human organisms - through the living body (a "generic" factor) and through the "collective" organisms of a society and culture. There is also a type of power which can be released through the integrated and completely formed selfhood of the individual person in whom his spiritual Identity has become "incarnated".
The manifestation of this latter kind of power begins with the display of what is commonly called "personality". This power of personality makes some individuals stand out from the mass in their ability to give magnificent performances - whether these be theatrical, or political, or religious. We say that these individuals have a great amount of personal magnetism or charisma, that they can sway the multitudes. From them emanates a mysterious and indefinable something which compels other men to give attention, respect and allegiance.
In some cases, these compelling personalities project a strong physical vitality; in others, the only evidence available to ordinary perception is that of a frail body, and perhaps of illness and pain. Even where great physical energy is displayed in maturity, in many cases the individual has had a sickly youth, but somehow was able to summon forth an apparently inexhaustible amount of driving power. What is the source of this power? Can every human being draw from it?
Actually, there is no "source" to that power, simply because the energy is everywhere. It is diffused through the whole of space. We live and have our being in an ocean of energy. Yet unless we can focus this diffuse energy and give it direction, it exists for us only in latency, as an un-activated and un-actualized potential of energy. To make it usable energy - that is, power ready to be released according to purpose - we must, first, be aware that it is all around and within us, then, establish a significant relationship to it, and lastly, reconvert our "engines" for the use of power, so that they might operate according to the rhythm and the universal purpose inherent in the character of the spirit.
Awareness here means "realization"; but one can only truly realize that :which one has profoundly and completely desired. In order to realize spirit as power one must have desired spiritual power; and this desire is worthless except it be born out of an absolute and gripping need. The character and reality of the spirit as power can only be experienced in the darkest and most crucial hour of nearly total lack of all other power; for it is only as the organism of personality is hollowed out - even if for an instant - by a sense of dreadful emptiness that spirit may flow into the vacuum thus created.
Happy the soul whose gates do not shut tight in dismay and fear under the irruption of the universal energy that is of God. Happy is he who can hold himself open to the vivifying influx that renews utterly - if it only can be received long enough - the substance of individual Selfhood. Happy is he also who does not merely "take it for granted", and whose heart fills with gratitude in a transfigured sense of relatedness to the "Father" whence comes this Holy Spirit and the power to be in truth what one essentially is, and to love in understanding all that lives and breathes. And thrice blessed is he who with courage and conviction, in utter reliance upon the spirit, goes forth to perform the works of the spirit as a consecrated agent of divinity.
At this station on the Illumined Road, the essential need is to become clearly aware of the substantiality and concreteness of the spirit. To think of the spirit as an abstract or completely transcendent something will not allow its entrance into the concrete organism of personality. To picture it as an ideal and a dream is to emasculate its transfiguring power, its reality. Spirit may be conceived in many and varied ways, but always it is power; power, however, indissolubly blended with purpose - and this purpose utterly determined by the ultimate achievement of the greatest possible state of inclusiveness and creative or radiant harmony.
Impotency, at any level, can never be considered "spiritual"; nor is the lack of desire for power ever in itself a manifestation of the spirit. It is not the desire for power that condemns a man, but that which in him desires power, and the purpose for which power is desired. Not to desire power is simply a mark of inner fatigue and/or of the unwillingness to undertake a work and to assume responsibility for it; but we should not confuse a willingness to assume responsibility with the personal concern over the fruits of action against which the Bhagavat Gita warns the aspirant. Responsibility refers to the use which an individual makes of the power entrusted to him, whether it be by society or by the spirit. Responsibility does not imply a personal concern over the results of this use, provided the power has been used in truth and in understanding, and in complete consecration to the divinity within.
Spirit has substantiality, in as much as it is the substratum of all energy everywhere. There can be no energy without the substance, no substance without energy; any more than there can be a universe in which time is without space or space without time. But energy and substance can be of two polarities and answer two essentially different purposes - as different as the energy and substance of the "seed" are different from those of the "soil". What we call soil is always the remains of a previous cycle of life-manifestation. Sand is composed of a multitude of shells that once held life; the rich humus of the forest is the result of the decomposition of myriads of leaves that were. But the substance of the seed, whether it be that of the seed's nucleus or of its cotyledons, is substance polarized future-ward. Within it the creative energy of life and the purpose of rebirth operate - rebirth in answer to the summons of the universal power of the sun, as spring opens the gates of a new cycle.
In man also we can distinguish at the spiritual level, a symbolical seed and soil. Individual selfhood is man's spiritual seed; the substance and energies of his bio-psychic organism are the soil in which this seed may be sown, yet which often, alas, contains only the bacteria and lower lives which, while they do serve the growth of seeds, of themselves can never reach skyward to the Star.
The process of re-energization of the Illumined Road is one in which the seed-powers of the spirit, locked in man's individual self, begin to operate, and operating compel gradually the reawakened energies of the ancestral soil of personality to serve the purpose of the self. At first the Illumined Road seems to be a road leading away from the vitality of the physical sun, and toward a remote and cold Star. Yet, as the purpose of the process of the transvolutionary journey to the Star becomes firmly established, the antiphony of sun and Star resounds through the vast spaces of the spiritual life. New powers are released. The vital forces of the "soil" feed the growth of the "seed" under the universal solvent that is "water" - the compassion and love of universal Beings pouring of themselves upon those who tread the Illumined Road.
The positive act of rebirth and growth must nevertheless originate in the seed. All else contributes to the growth, but the seed must germinate of itself. Man finds the universe of spirit on his side as he steps on the Illumined road, yet he must do the stepping on. It must be a decided step, and it is only to make certain that the "seed" within man is ready and vital with faith that tests and trials meet whomsoever passes the gates Starward.
The seed of man's individual selfhood must germinate when time and climate strike the tone of the new spring. Germination is self-denial, and the apparent death of the seed as a seed. Yet this death, this breaking asunder of the protective shell of egoism, this irruption of dark energies of the soil, this seeming pollution of virgin seed-substance by the manure of past cycles - all these can be seen, by him who has faith and courage, as heralds of new powers, behind which can be glimpsed the brilliance of the Star.
There must also be faith and gratitude. Spirit is always a gift. Water is a gift. It is - as the old Upanishads said significantly - the product of sacrifice. There can be no spirit-energized growth without the cooperation of the universe of light. Light is a bestowal - God, the bestower. Spirit is everywhere. It is the universal seed-substance of divinity. It is the Living Bread, as well as the Living Water. One should partake of it with gratitude and love.
The energies of the body and of life are to be "managed" wisely and efficiently, without waste or undue haste. But the power of spirit, being a gift and the result of sacrifice, should be met in an entirely different attitude. Without this attitude being held, there can be no deep re-energization, and the individual insulated against God is left stranded on the Illumined Road, unable to move, frozen by the fear of incommensurable space. But if man's heart is warmed by faith and by gratitude, if he has realized that spirit is food and drink to him who is fully aware of its concrete reality throughout space, and who meets it as a gift of God, then man can begin his new task. He learns to use these new powers of the spirit, and not to waste them. He learns that he is to use them as a sacred trust - to use them in answer to a need, so that an ever fuller state of harmony and inclusiveness be achieved wherever he passes - to use them according to the rhythm of the spirit and for the purpose of God.
At this stage of the Illumined Road the individual is to act; but he must act in terms of new purposes, new values, and a new realization of the power of universal spirit. He must act in a new way, because the energy that enables him to act is a new kind of energy. He has left behind the unconscious or semi-conscious condition of instinctual activity in which he could draw from the generic energy of body and cells, or from the collective source of ancestral and cultural sustainment. He has known weariness, the inability to act under the surge of biological and social desires. Now, the individual, having emerged, from a crisis of seeming sterility and utter lack of personal initiative or ambition, finds a new eagerness to act. But it is a much sobered eagerness. It should be a relaxed eagerness, freed from self-will, tenseness, haste; freed from the slightest shade of fear or inferiority.
The individual who has fully realized with the whole of his integrated self that the energy which now sustains him and from which he is to draw the power of ubiquitous and all-enveloping spirit, cannot feel the lack of energy as a personal handicap. And yet . . . how is it that he finds himself, time and again unable to accomplish the miracles of creativeness or healing which he feels required of him?
The answer is that his realization of the spirit may still not be total enough, his faith may still be colored by doubts and fears, his ego desirous of acclaim and of a following. Energy, in order to become usable power must be focused and adjusted to the recipient of the release of power. It must pass through a transformer or engine: the engine of the true self, dynamic core of the integrated personality. Is this engine adequate for the work it is called upon to perform?
The total personality of the individual treading the Illumined Road must indeed become an engine for the release of spirit. The steps of reorientation, repolarization and revaluation have prepared the consciousness and transfigured the ego, its ruler. Yet, much remains to be done. Under the symbol of Mars, a new relationship to energy has been established, a new sense of creativeness and a new approach to action have been experienced. The individual has yet to learn how to use effectively this energy, how to manage it as a trust in the name of that universal Harmony which is the substance of divinity - thus, in terms of the needs which arise on the road and which it is his task and his responsibility to satisfy.
So many needs, alas, he encounters! And the first lesson he must learn is that of discrimination. He who is to manage the energy of spirit for God must come to know the limits of his function in the spirit. He must know his "place" in God - the place the Star occupies within the Constellation in which It operates as a center of giving, as a lens through which God acts eternally. To know this is not only to know the limits of one's ability to act spiritually and to heal, the limits to one's effective and harmonic use of the unlimited energy of spirit; it is to know that one is not alone in this use. It is to experience, as a Star, one's companion Stars. It is to realize fully that each Star fulfills a function and a place in the spirit; and, knowing it, to perform that which it is one's spiritual destiny to perform - serenely, joyful, calmly, undismayed by those needs one is not called upon to fill, secure in that all needs are always met by God in the way they can be met.
