Case of the Missing Messiah

It is ever the miracle within the human soul that religion, as distinct from secular human physical science, must cultivate and place in living control of life, if human life is to be harmoniously related to the world, to the body, to the orderly course of evolutionary progress.

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Excerpt:

The "present writer" has no wish to be considered an iconoclast, much less an "anti-Christ", nor even an anti-Christian. He has no fell purpose to smash sacred images, either physical or mental, that have dominated, whether for good or evil, the minds and hearts of humans.

But--since many of the readers of this essay will be those who look to the stars in the heavens for the rationale of human actions and character traits--he may state that he was born in the last moments of the sun's occupancy of the sign of Virgo,--September 22--and that the ordinary account of the characteristics of the Virgo native as found in any authentic work on the zodiacal significances, positively reads like a description of his mental traits and qualities. Being a pronounced Virgo, then, he will not shrink from the imputation of being powerfully influenced or motivated by the pronounced flair of the Virgian, the passion to have things as exactly right and true as it is humanly possible to get them. When, of course, this predilection is not exercised with proper intelligence and balance, the Virgo person can become a meddling, nagging, censorious dog-in-the-manger sort of critic and snarler at everything. But--if the general principles of astrology can be relied upon to point to true intimations--even here he has the ground for presumptive defense against the charge of scurrilous and crass criticism that will seem almost sacrilegious to many, in the odd fact that his birth moment fell almost precisely on the cusp between the sign of the critical mind and the sign of Libra, the Balance. So that it may be presumed that he has the natural proclivity to exercise the function of meticulous logical analysis with due and rightful balance of all factors entering into any problem. Virgo is "ruled" by Mercury, god of the swift and nimble mind, and all in all, this brand of intellectual quality is quite likely to discern alike both the massive aberrancies of common thought (and in certain things the mass-ideation is always wrong!) and the subtle fallacies that persist in traditional obsessions of belief.

The statement in the Upanishads of India referring to the great universal mind-principle of the Atman pervading all things, that "by sharp and subtle intellect is He beheld", must allude to the Mercurial mind. It has unfortunately to be said, with only too much historical testimony to corroborate it, that in particular the religious life of mankind, where the forces of even the most consecrated devotion, faith and loyalty are predominantly in play, has been tragically twisted all awry by lack of the balance that should have been supplied by keen functioning of the intellectual faculty. The sapient Sages who laid down the canons of wisdom for the ancient Egyptians called the Christ-mind, which they prefigured as the seed power of our divine nature implanted in the very flesh of humanity, to germinate, grow, blossom and flower to glorious beauty in the course of evolution, the "Lord of the Balance", a configurated representation of one of the twelve radiations of his power. For his advent and eventually full release of power is to bring "peace" to the chaotic turbulence of the lower sensual, emotional and irrational elements that cause the Biblical "tempest" on the sea of human life and which can be subdued to beneficent function by the superior intellectual principle. This is St. Paul's war of the "law which is in my members" against the law of the mind, and only with the coming in every life of the kingly rulership of the diviner reason over the seven "elementary powers" that generate the "seven deadly sins" will "peace" spread its benign mantle over the confused and disorderly human scene.

The tragedy of the debacle which ensued in that fateful third century and laid its palsy upon the mind and soul of Western man ever since, lies in the fact that the splendor of truth and the beauty and glory of illuminated consciousness that inhered potentially in the creeds, doctrines, rituals and the Scriptures of the ancient world only to be perpetuated in frightful distortion in the Christian upsurge, have been lost or turned into inane senselessness for the millions in the ensuing centuries.

The extent of this loss and tragedy is beyond all calculation. The birth of that genius of grace and charity that will well up and set the human heart athrob to the impulses of love and beauty, and which, as old Egypt averred, comes continuously, periodically ever more and more, might have by now been far advanced if stolid ignorance had not held in thrall the surgent forces of the spirit, and turned the brilliant semantic ideographs of divine truth into the absurdities of alleged "history". The transformation, the transfiguration of man can take place only through the marriage of soul and sense within the inner core of the human consciousness. As the Christian creed--an ancient formulary taken over from old Pagan runes and rituals--so well says, speaking of the descent of the son-units of God-soul into the life of the human body, the Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit in heaven, and born of the Virgin Mary, mother-matter, body, on earth. "Begotten, not created" the creed says; i.e. begotten in heaven "before all worlds", but created on earth, as indeed all things are. They are conceived in mind, then created in matter. Where and where only must it be seen that this father-conception and mother-birthing of the Christ can be consummated? The answer sets irrevocably the seal of truth on every word of this essay: it can be consummated only within the heart, mind and body of every human being on earth individually and consciously.

The idea that it could be accomplished by one-only Son of God, a man not of our human order, vicariously for us all--and we needing only to "believe" this theorization to win its full efficacy for ourselves--must be written down as close to the crowning fatuity of all religious maundering. No god was ever sent to earth to transfigure man by saving him the evolutionary work of transfiguring himself. And no man will be rightfully, happily, efficiently oriented to this task unless and until he knows that within his own mind and in his very body of flesh resides that Christ-child who is in fact his own sonship from his Father. Through that realization, and through it only, can and will his entire dynamic of psychic energy be focused, like the sun's rays through a lens, upon the seed-power of Christly consciousness and cause it to burst into flame. How sagely the ancient Egyptians spoke of the soul of Christhood coming to earth "to kindle a fire in the underworld".

The ancient Sages and Seers depicted the Christ-nature as a living flame dampened and often almost extinguished by the water of the fleshly corpus, or as a unit of divine soul shut up here in the body as in a prison, grave or tomb. In the Greek language body (soma) and tomb (sema) are the same word.

These knowing philosophers represented the soul as a bird in a prison or a cage beating its wings ineffectually against its clammy dungeon walls. How is it to be freed, how is the imprisoned splendor to be released? In the Bible allegory it is declared that the soul must convert its gaoler, who with a change of heart will then let it out. This is the task of the outer man, the human, who alone and in the domain of his personal life can liberate the deity whose benignant rays of living love will transfigure him.

The infinite tragedy of the West's religion is that, by directing the eyes and the devotion of its millions of believers to the image of a carnalized dramatic figure of two thousand years ago, he is all too likely to be missing from his place in their lives, in their hearts and minds.

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128 pages - 7 x 8½ softcover

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