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EIGHTH PHASE: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION
THE NEPTUNE STATION
The Saturn phase of the Illumined Road marks the impregnation, by the universal spirit, of the ego of the individual who has irrevocably reoriented his personality toward the celestial light of the Star. The realization of new values, new goals and new sources of energy has prepared the way for the great moment when the individual comes to recognize the presence within him of the living seed of his divinity. His inner life, now repolarized to become a soul-tabernacle enfolding the growth of the God-seed, gradually becomes attuned to the reality of the all-encompassing spirit filling in all space. His consciousness is being transformed, his mind transfigured, by the focusing of the Uranian electric flow which shatters and burns away all inertia and fear, all reliance upon tribal, social or religious security, all sense of satisfaction with self and achievements of self, even those which appear most "spiritual".
This flow of universal "waters" from the upturned urn of the sky poured upon the soul in gestation of the living God is nevertheless strange and disturbing. It brings to the consciousness nothing that is familiar, nothing that one can become oriented to, according to known values or standards. And the mystics of all lands have recorded for us, travelers on the Illumined Road, the bafflement, the confusion and the fright that comes to one seemingly lost within what seems as a cloud condensing from celestial realms of the spirit, the "Cloud of Unknowing": or is it not rather of Wrong Knowing?
This cloud enveloped the Mount of Transfiguration, as the three disciples faced the apparition of Moses and Elias conversing with the transfigured Jesus; and the disciples were afraid. Peter had uttered these typical words: "Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias" (Mark 9:5). Two of the Evangelists add passingly, as a sort of excuse, that Peter did not know what he said, for he was sorely afraid. This "not knowing what to say" and this fear are factors of profound and decisive significance in the process of spiritual unfoldment, when they manifest at crucial turning points or crises of destiny! They cause the cloud to envelop the consciousness of the aspirant or disciple pitched at the highest point it can reach.
Peter had hardly uttered his words, in response to his spiritual experience of the Transfiguration, when the cloud blotted out the vision. The vision vanished simply because Peter - symbol of man's ego, able to recognize the divinity within his being (the Christ-being, the Son of God), but as yet bound to Saturnian values - had met this transcendent experience with an inadequately oriented mind. His inner ego had been opened; but, confused by what he saw and unable to stand the glory and majesty of it at the level of the spirit, he had to bring the experience to the plane of the religious and tribal custom the only plane with which he was as yet familiar. He felt psychologically compelled to materialize the spiritual experience which meant to organize it.
Through his entire life Peter struggled against his need for psychological or physical security. This need, so hard for him to overcome, caused the Neptunian cloud to hide from his sight the final mystery of the Transfiguration, the final consecration of Jesus as Christ Neptune always turns negative for the consciousness still bound by the Saturnian yearning for security and logic at all cost; for, if this yearning is unsatisfied, fear must develop, and fear makes the supreme vision vanish. Spiritual knowledge is lost in the Cloud of Unknowing; it may even be destroyed utterly by the Neptunian glamour which substitutes intellectual or devotional mirages for the reality of the spirit.
At the Neptune stage of the Illumined Road the one great obstacle for the traveler to overcome is the fear of the unknown. The road-way may seem lost; the Star above may be dimmed by an utterly confusing light-mist; the God-seed within appears to draw all vitality; the soul has become an abyss of total emptiness; there is nothing to be oriented to nothing but some incomprehensible Mystery. Even the Master within is lost in glory; and the world below is dimly sensed disintegrating in the shadow of an exhausted society. This exhaustion rises up from the human plains as well as from every cell of the disciple's body. Weariness summons fear out of dark ancestral memories. The cloud enveloping the once illumined path may last, who knows how long! Will there be sufficient strength to pierce through its perhaps limitless expanse with bleeding feet and harrowed mind? Or will the soul dissolve into the Neptunian mist, drawn in by the God-seed as by a whirlpool?
It is under such elusive yet frightening pressures that the "Peter" in every traveler on the Illumined Road comes not to know what he says. It is the Shadow in him that speaks the Shadow of Peter and also of the Church built upon his failings as well as upon his virtues. And more and more tabernacles are built, stone-monuments to the Neptunian cloud that forever hides or distorts the final rite of Transfiguration. The Shadow speaks words of unknowing; words which do not fit the majestic occurrence; words that suddenly render the situation small and meaningless; words that seek to salvage a past spiritually obsolete and disintegrating; words unleavened by the new spirit which is always substantiated by courage, daring and fearless faith; words that betray self-satisfaction and lack of creative imagination.
"It is good for us to be here", says Peter. But there is no "good", but God. Where great spiritual experiences confront the consciousness, God only matters not "good". God and spirit are the facts to experience; not traditional goodness and what men call morality, fulfilling which they "feel good" and build more tabernacles to stifle the divine seed with piety and unknowing. What is to be faced, understood, assimilated are the creative electrical waters of Ouranos, the Sky the abode of God the Father: Our Father. If we assimilate these creative energies, the Living Bread of Christhood or divine Sonship, we are able to build our "body of immortality", the Christ-Body, the fully grown plant risen from the God-seed. If we do not, the Wine (the Blood of Christ) becomes a power of self-destroying inebriatedness which evokes lurid shapes and evil phantasmagories, and the Living Bread of the divine Grace (the very substance of the Love of Christ,) sours in the soul ulcerated by doubt and anguish.
Uranus is the creative power of the universal spirit. If it is met with faith and spiritual vitality by the Saturnian ego of the traveler on the Illumined Road, this power becomes food for the soul and for the growth of the God-seed within it; and the result is the Neptune-built Christ-Body, vehicle of man's immortal Essence. If the Uranus downflow is received with fear and weariness, it becomes atomicized and it dissipates into the Neptunian cloud, in which spiritual value become lost and the God-seed disintegrates. The issue therefore is clear. Neptune can either be positive or negative. It can feed the concrete and organic growth of man's divinity; or it can dissolve it utterly, as a strong acid. The determining factor is the individual's inner attitude toward Uranian creativity. If he accepts the mystery and the spiritual responsibility of creative acts performed in the name of the spirit, he will find Neptune a source of divine abundance; if he reject or falters in his approach to creativity, Neptune will envelop him into a deleterious or intoxicating cloud, and eventually lead him to Plutonian death.
What this means to the individual is illustrated today by the way in which a similar type of collective all-human confrontation is making history for modern society. At this collective social-cultural level the Uranus influx has expressed itself as the intellectual and technological Revolution of the last two hundred years. New forms of combustion, the release of electrical and now atomic energy, and all kind of social stimulations have compelled humanity to face a tremendous potential of creative action. There is almost nothing that global man could not build or transform on earth, no general obstacle of hindrance that a concerted all-human creative effort could not remove or utilize constructively. The potentiality of Uranian transformation of human society has been immense and glorious to consider.
What has mankind done with it? Its ruling class has become drunk with power; its Saturnian nationalism and imperialism have made of the globe a field of carnage and starvation; the fanatic subservience to old religions or new ideologies have created emotional hatred and mental confusion everywhere; mankind is lost in a Neptunian cloud and what it breathes in it is poisoned by smog or drugged by an immense variety of chemicals which all carry the signature of Neptune, the glamor of Neptune.
Why? Because modern society, as a collective entity, has lacked the imagination and the courage to create a new world; because the obsolete Saturnian structures of the past have choked nearly every new spiritual growth; because the Uranus power released during the Revolutionary Era of nearly two hundred years ago at once became deviated by minds that, fearing the glory of a radically reconstructed society, transferred feudalism and privilege from the Courts to the Market Place; because the Uranian bestowal of the power to create and to imagine the "more abundant life" once promised by Christ was stopped by the men of the Age of (false) Enlightenment (18th century) at the level of the intellect and of an uncreative and verbal equalitarianism.
The Neptunian era that followed during the nineteenth century actually built the substance of our modern society its machines, its industries, its commerce and travel but it built upon the intellectual foundations of scientific materialism. It built upon spiritual scarcity and upon the power vested in the remnants of ancient feudalism to corner the more abundant life under the cloak of rugged individualism. Neptune is the wholesale builder of collective substance. Its power of proliferation is immense; but it builds only according to man's attitude toward Uranian creativeness. If this attitude is one of resistance to the unfamiliar New, of fear before the revealed Glory, of weary withdrawal into the Saturnian shells of social security and privilege, then, Neptune's power of growth leads to the senseless mushrooming forth of hectic cities, tabloid newspapers, glamor-crazy motion pictures, murder-storied radios, hallucinogenic drugs and to generalized cancerous conditions due to unorganic living and unnatural habits of physical or psychological feeding.
Neptune, nevertheless, in its true positive being, is the substantiality of the spirit. Neptune is the substance of creative Space, the "Astral Light", the Ocean of spiritual Sound, the encompassing "Gift-Waves" of divine Grace the all-inclusive charity of the Compassionate Ones. It is the divine Substance which feeds what the Uranian spirit has aroused into creative being. It is the Eucharist, the Bread and the Wine that give everlasting life to those who have experienced within their souls the God-seed, and have not recoiled in fear before the glory and the responsibility. At every level it is the healing and sustaining power of the wholeness of the whole.
In the physical body, this power is the source whence are derived the antibodies, white corpuscles, and special hormones or enzymes which are sent through the blood to heal and purify whatever part of the organism has been injured or exhausted. At the level of the great spiritual organism that may be called "Man", this Neptunian power is "Grace" (Charis) Grace which comes to every soul that has recognized and accepted its participation in the "works of the spirit", and its companionship in the mystic Christ with all that is of the spirit.
To the individual limited and bound within the structures of his ego, the universe as a whole answers as Karma: the Mosaic Law of exact compensation. But to him whose soul has become a hallowed shrine for the Living God, whose circumference of self includes potentially the whole universe, whose mind establishes its formulations in terms of the reconciliation of all opposites, leaving nothing outside of its all-inclusive multi-dimensional logic to him God answers as Grace. Though his path be strewn with collective obstacles and harsh memories of his individual past, he is nevertheless secure with the only security that is of value, the security that comes from being the Whole in active expression at one point; and this point, one's immortal self.
This faith in Grace is the Neptunian consequence of a courageously met and assimilated confrontation with Uranus and its creative transfigurations. The two factors cannot be separated, and both are expressions of an utterly changed conscious relationship to spirit and to God, its cosmic Source. Spirit is the "universal creative" not in the sense of it being the builder of worlds and physical organisms, but because it is that constant harmonic Motion which emanates and releases incessantly whatever is necessary to compensate for and to harmonize any disturbance in the equilibrium of the universal Whole. Spirit "creates" solutions to every need including that vast . solution to the need of chaos which we understand as a (rather than 'the') universe or solar system. Every human birth, considered as the release of an individual logos (or pattern of destiny) through which the past of an immortal self can be harmonized and balanced by the potentiality of a victorious future, is a solution presented by the spirit. Every birth-chart is a plan for regeneration an individual creation of the spirit, a logos sent by the Father to "save" a portion of humanity.
To him who takes such an attitude, not only intellectually but with the whole of his being, the Uranian revelation of his own divine Image on the inner "Mount of Transfiguration" must be the fulfillment of his most intense expectations. In this experience he sees at last with utmost clarity the workings of the creative spirit behind and through the core of his selfhood. He sees his divine Self ("Christ") radiating through, because finally incorporated in, his ego now transformed into soul the "Jesus" within him. He sees, not as a Peter reducing spiritual experiences to a Saturnian level, but as a "son of thunder" a John the Beloved meeting with the power of identification born of exalted love, the downpour of Grace; for the glow that he saw enveloping the entire being of the transfigured Jesus was indeed the substance of Grace.
Grace comes to pervade the soul that has left behind the sense of individual lack inherent in the nature of the ego. As an ego, man knows himself apart from the spiritual Whole; as a soul, he experiences himself a part of this spiritual Whole. In and through this experience he becomes actually and consciously suffused with the vitality of the Whole. He partakes of the "Blood" of the Whole, of the creative substance of the spirit the mystic Wine and Bread. He partakes of the divine Eucharist the perfect gift of Grace as the cell of the body partakes of the vital essences and the healing chemicals of the forever flowing blood in which it lives and has its being.
This is the life more abundant, the life in Grace; a life from which has vanished the gnawing sense of frustration and lack, and the regrets or remorse of ego-bondage, ego-unfulfilment and ego- conditioned tragedies; a life now filled with the presence of the unfolding God-seed within the soul and with the downflow of Grace this unfoldment summons because it requires it. It is also the life of charity; for charity is man's only true way of responding to the charismal gift of the spirit, Grace. Faith in the creative power of the spirit; Hope that the Transfiguration shall come and find us fully awake to behold this "marriage of heaven and earth"; and, the greatest of all. Charity to men everywhere in the name of the spirit.
True charity (agape) can only be, at the level of still ego-bound men and women, the pouring out of what the traveler on the Illumined Road has received as Grace. The man flooded with Grace must give charity, which is perfect love, if he is to receive greater spiritual abundance in his soul; but that charity can only be true to the spirit, if it comes indeed from the divine spirit, even though it be
released through the individual man. To give out true charity means, first of all, to experience oneself as an agent of the spirit, as a focusing of the divine Whole. Charity is not of the ego, but of God through the ego transformed into soul. It is as the soul overflows with Grace that the whole organism of the spirit-illumined man or woman is also able to radiate charity. The gifts of a privileged nation filled with earthly goods, egocentricity and collective self-complacency can be bitter to the peoples ravaged by a catastrophe for which the whole of humanity is responsible.Yet, it was as the presence of Neptune became revealed to Western man that society at large began to respond to the call of mercy and humanitarianism; and even the most egocentic "business baron" found it necessary henceforth to bestow the social semblance of charity to the victims of the system that had enthroned him as the Congress of the United States has found it necessary since the last War to bestow many earthly gifts so as to protect its ideological frontiers and the system which places it in power. How could one think of these things, except as Neptunian reflections on the troubled waters of a Western Society that knows actually as little about Grace as it experiences the Transfiguration in its individuals! And from the Neptunian cloud filled with glamour, illusions, and mirages of spiritual reality, how few are the "Peters" able to bear, even in fear, the Voice of God! All that can be heard, among men in palaces or men in neat gadget-filled bungalows, is the sound of splitting atomsthe voice of uranium whistling words of death and terror.
Is this the heralding sound of the Second Coming? Is the Christ-reality to be born in our tortured and mentally distraught world of bigger and better egos? Is true Neptunian compassion to heal these ranting egos, perhaps soon to break down in a global crisis? Is wintry snow thereafter to enmantle with white peace the ravaged earthliness of millions of men, women and children in preparation for a new spring?
The answer is with the seeds that lie in the ground amidst autumnal decay in the decay, yet not of it. The answer is with individuals whose faith has made of them travelers on the Illumined Road and, to ever so little an extent, partakers of divine Grace for the sake of the God-seeds slowly oh, so slowly unfolding within their souls. New social solutions, new religious organizations, new political integrations will no doubt emerge from this present death of the old. Yet these can only be sustained and fed with the vision and the power that individuals, who work them out concretely, can pour into them. Humanity can have an illumined or a very dark future. It will be either in proportion as enough men and women will have had the emotional stability, the courage, the wakefulness, the enduring strength, the clear mind necessary to positively meet in their inner lives the confrontations with Uranus and Neptune.
