The Golden Star

VISION 10

The Great Light

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“Milton’s ‘Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,’ is both spirit and matter to the Occultist. It is the Spirit of Light, the first-born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy, or emanation, is stored in the Sun, the great Life-Giver of the Physical World, as the hidden, concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light and Life-Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms. It is the Light in Darkness and the Darkness in Light: the ‘Breath which is eternal.’ It is that Darkness which radiates Light, and the Light is the source from which dropped that shining Ray into Chaos, producing another awakening of the Eternal but hidden Sun of our Kosmos, as you beheld it: the Root remains, the Light remains; an everlasting mystery of the One God. In one sense the rootless Root of all; in another sense the manifested One Life, the eternal Living Unity.

“It is the source of all Wisdom, which is Light, and the opposite to Intellect, which is a groping in the twilight, and even in darkness at times. All this groping leads nowhere, and although men, in their ignorance of intellectual pride, think that all Truth can be discovered by earthly reasoning, they but hide it by the use of meaningless phrases, theories, doctrines and dogmas, and quarrel one with another about the meaning of words; the letter killing the spirit time and again.

“This is especially manifest in modern philosophy, and such men as Spinoza, Malebranche, Descartes and Leibnitz, the so-called metaphysicians, have added nothing to Truth; although the last-named one had glimpses of it. When I say they have added nothing to Truth, I speak figuratively of course, for Truth is always the same, and nothing can be added to or taken away from it. But they have thickened the fog of materialism by using their erring sensual reasonings in order to describe that which is above all earthly reason and can be only discovered by the Spirit, and not by the senses. Therefore, they should not be called meta-physicians, for although they think to deal with that which is beyond physics, they are all the time ensnared by the web of physical thinking—which is not, and never can be, Spiritual Wisdom, or the Light of the Occultists.

“In the case of Descartes, his intellectual fame rests in the creation of analytical mathematics. His contributions to physics were of little value, as what was new in them was not true, and what was true in them was not new. Descartes himself refused the truths of religion, for, says he, they are super-natural revelations, and not the natural knowledge that he required. But his fundamental rules of simplicity, complexity and truth are neither illustrated nor defined in his writings. He takes no pains to discriminate judgements from concepts, and his new system, as manipulated by him, led to nothing else but hopeless fallacies.

“One of them was that he seemingly identified Being with Thought; and as both being and thought in the light of human perception are illusions, we have the key to his failures. But actually he meant that whatever else is not, he, the thinker, certainly was, for the act of thinking assured him of his existence, and therefore he was a substance the whole essence of which consisted in thought; independent of place and material objects. This would have been very good indeed if he had realized at the same time that these same senses which produce thought were material senses, and reflections of actuality, and not actualities themselves. He confused thoughts about reality—or realizations of the senses—with the Actualities of God’s Mind in the Light of His Wisdom.

“That this was so is proved by Descartes’ further argument, in which he states that as the certainty of his own existence has no other guarantee than the clearness with which it is inferred from the fact of his thinking, it must therefore be a safe rule to conclude that whatever things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true!!

“Although this great thinker affirmed the general conclusions of Greek Philosophy in the superiority of mind to matter, Soul to Body, and Spirit to Sense, he had not the advantage of the Greek Adepts, who learned the real meaning of these Truths in the ancient Mystery Schools; but only to a small extent.

“But he anticipated modern psychology in his doctrine of intellectual assent as an act of the will.

“It is the same with the speculations of Occasionalism as promulgated by Geulincx and Malebranche, although in the case of the latter we find the interesting statement that the divine archetypal ideas alone exist, and that we apprehend them by a mystical communion with the Divine Consciousness; which idea has misled other thinkers into believing that it leads to the Pantheism of Spinoza. Nothing is farther from the truth, for that statement of Malebranche is absolutely correct, and, following Plotinus, he calls it intelligible extension [of consciousness]. This consciousness is reflected in the material worlds and Man, and Man can extend his material consciousness back to God and the Archetypal Worlds and further regions.

“It must not be supposed that the Logos is but a single centre of energy, such as the Sun, for instance, who stands as the central Essence synthetically, and as a diffused essence of radiated Entities, different in substance, but not in essence. There are innumerable Logoi and their number is almost infinite. The Spirits of those who descend and ascend during the course of cyclic evolution shall cross the threshold of the spiritual world only on the day of their approach to the second field of manifestation of the Central Logos. In that Realm the Past, Present and even the Future humanities will be one and the same; everything will be merged in the Divine Unity. When they reach it, the Unknown Darkness shall then become for all of them Light during the whole period of the Great Night, namely, 311,040,000,000,000 years. This is the period of rest; the Day ‘Be with us.’ The Darkness of ignorance has then been absorbed in its own Realm of Eternal Light, and as the Objective emanated from the Subjective, so it will have reassumed its Spiritual Form and returned to its Divine Heritage in the eternal Absolute.

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