3.
The Sabian Orientation

The Invisible Fellowship

In addition to the written record of the occult tradition there is also the oral, or that which cannot take on the character of history or scientific report because on the one hand there is a lack of common and pertinent experience in which to anchor the communication and because on the other there is no possibility of normal verification for the facts involved. Thanks to its special nature the oral tradition has come to be known as occult knowledge. It frequently is unreliable, since there are inescapable accretions or distortions from time to time, but its contribution may be very wonderful in view of its unlimited freedom from censorship at the hands of unimaginative and entrenched prejudice. The resurgence of Spiritualism in the past century has encouraged a flood of psychically derived materials, and has built up a superficial and spurious authority for the mass of unverified detail added to the unwritten account of arcane developments and their spiritual opportunity. The repetition of incidents and ideas of monotonous similarity has created a false sense of confidence in what the single mind obtains by way of psychic outreach through its unaided resources. Existing of their own weight the notions have pyramided themselves and exhibited the phenomenon common in creative fiction when a writer feels that his story actually is writing itself. All real discrimination is destroyed, and it becomes impossible to distinguish a symbolical from a literal significance. Myth comes to be taken very naïvely, or as an actual report of events. This development has hurt the [57] truly valid claims of Western occultism for serious consideration in the modern world.

Under the Solar Mysteries there must be a ramification out into verifiable human experience in direct proportion to every inreaching participation in higher or essentially spiritual realization. Otherwise the consciousness will be quick to lose itself in its own disconnections or in the pyramiding of its illusions of the moment. For any genuine occult work there must be the ecclesia or assembly of the many for the sake of the growth and development of each one among them. It was in the light of this inescapable necessity that the Sabian ideal of the present generation had to become a group rather than an individual effort, once its author approached the limits of his personal outspread in gaining the needed verification of his esoteric insights. And by the same token the Sabian aspirant must work in quadrangles at the proper stage in his seeking, and must have a healing ministry or a task out in the world at the next point in his ultimate self-fulfillment. With this background of understanding it is possible to pick up an important thread of Solar Mystery orientation.

Once upon a time—as a fairy tale begins, and as any story should start if it comes from purely occult sources and in consequence lacks historical verification in any conventional sense—there was a congenial group of young priests who served the Memphite hierarchy in lower Egypt. In their generation an Atlantean occultism was widespread, not only across northern Africa but through the Mesopotamian lands where it was due to have a significant ripening and on over the Indus where it had [58] met the gradual sweep westward of the emerging and vital masses of the new or Aryan root race. And it seems that these neophytes of the great temple had developed a taste for sitting at the river's edge and there discussing philosophical points. They were quite unaware of the fact that they were rushing in where the angels would fear to tread. Metaphysical speculation was a rarity at any point on the globe, possibly because the languages of some four or more millenniums before Christ did not facilitate anything of the sort. But in the fresh enthusiasm of their years they had become sensitive to a difficulty of the greatest psychological import. Indeed and in time they succeeded in making it articulate enough to interest some of their elders in their discussions, and to draw on the oral or nonverbal tradition which even then was far from inconsiderable in its resources.

For today's reader the matter necessarily must be put in words and forms of the late second millennium after Christ. Briefly they had come to realize that man is a generalizing animal perhaps above all else but yet lives his span so quickly, and comes to his end with so complete a cancellation of whatever substance or capacity of generalized realization he has built up within himself, that what should be his real nature has often had no chance to become any part of him at all. Superficially of course, and in every age, it is a commonplace for an individual to find himself facing death at just about the point when he has learned to live. And in the case of those equipped to serve their time and generation to an extent that may happen but once in a century or so it would appear a senseless waste. The younger participants in the talks [59] at Memphis felt the challenge growing on them slowly. They felt a compulsion to do something about this.

To many it truly will seem a fairy tale that some six thousand years ago there was not even the slightest notion of any survival of personal consciousness after death, or for that matter the faintest conception whatsoever on any individual's part that he of and in himself actually was an entity in his own right. He was his family or his kind, and he acted in and of them at all points. In the languages then spoken there was no way to think or speak of an inner self as something discrete or as capable of any sort of introspection that people could know today. Concepts of things could not be put together creatively or imaginatively because there was no way of taking them apart in the mental operations to be found in Atlantis and its colonial expansion. There was a high civilization at times, but always as a class-structured edifice of services directed upward by what now would be identified as tyranny because it was in no way interested to share the least of rewards in a downgoing compassion. Many forces of nature and powers of the living organism were known and harnessed, but there was not the faintest flicker of the human ingenuity released when abstractions can be manipulated in their own context. Generalization did not begin with Atlantean experience, according to the occult tradition and its account of the evolution of the mind known to modern psychology. Instead it was a later Aryan light that brought the new realizations, and in the meanwhile made them possible in a sort of spiritual anticipation as the savage hordes of greater potential began to spill out of the Asian highlands.[60]

As the oral tradition goes the young priests, in their free exchange of insights by the river, began to grapple with the vision of an individual survival and with the need of the race as a whole to have a better lot than the satisfaction of its animality or the cultivation of an intensified debauchery. It was beyond these Atlantean minds to realize that destiny must be the conscious creation of man if it is to be something that really can be said to be his, rather than something he merely suffers. But there was the sense of an unrealized and actually immortal potential. Therefore, as a step toward understanding the epochal project inaugurated at that time in the Nile valley, it may be well to bring the consideration back to the twentieth century and to an analysis of the four possible types of immortality.

First is the impersonal immortality carried to its uttermost extreme in popular versions of Oriental philosophy. Everything is of the basic reality from which it has come through the universal emanation, and in time it will return to its origin in a completion of the cycle of its being. In man there is by this conception a divine spark around which his incarnations are formed and dissolved, and in final course the infinite speck of light that has established his existence will have rejoined the eternal flame. Meanwhile all that has participated in his experience has gone back to its own in similar fashion. Anything that can be said to be the individual in particular definition is transient and worthless in ultimate perspective. Hence it detaches itself and slips away quite properly, even as it has been gathered and held in possession in equally casual fashion. Man as taken in contrast with God is nothing, [61] except in terms of what he derives from God, and at the end it is right that he should return it all to God and thereupon be fulfilled in his nothingness. The rewards of life come from an obedience to the negations by which all idea of good is surrendered to that splendid completeness of a total good in which only itself can share.

This point of view is the naïve recognition of self as uncompromisingly part and parcel of an all-self, and the rejection of every contrary notion as an invitation to the pain of not-belonging or to the pyramiding of bitter frustrations. With the individual who does not rationalize it philosophically it is the desire to surrender, or what is dramatized tellingly by Sigmund Freud in his later work under the figure of Thanatos in the Greek myths. In simplest manifestation it is craving for death or at least for exemption from further self-effort. It is the acceptance of end in an assimilation of personal completions to some total climax of reality. In a paradoxical sort of fashion it is the set of mind, relative to its own nature and continuity, that can be said to be the false rationalization of the earlier and mindless root races of man. In its more sophisticated aspect, as it survives into the epochs where mind comes into manifestation, it is that lean on the infinite regression in the thinking process against which a seeker under the Solar Mysteries is cautioned more than any other one fallacy. In everyday or practical life it is the wish of the individual to return to the womb, or to be assured in the possession of an essentially absolute security. In these aspects the conception does man a very great disservice, as should be obvious enough.

When seen as a constructive contribution to effective [62] self-realization the concept of impersonal immortality is the acceptance of a complete integrity for everything that is, thanks to everything's own act of continuity through the total cycle of its existence, and a consequent insistence on the all-important principle of myob or the minding of one's own business along with a rigorous determination to permit all else to mind its own as well. It is the power at the root of the passive resistance employed by Mahatma Gandhi and his followers to win India's independence, or of the sanction that all man-made law must have if it is to be enforceable. In the age and culture to which the young priests of Memphis belonged some six millenniums ago it was the prevailing if wholly subconscious realization of itself by human mentality. In its slow and over-all maturation the mind potential had yet to become individualized for any but the most exceptional person. In the terms of Sabian keywords the first of the four types of illimitable reality can perhaps best be described for today's purposes as the immortality of content or of substance.

The second of the four types is the biological immortality that alone had any actuality in human experience at the threshold of the present or Aryan root race. The conception has long been dramatized for all men through the ancestor worship found in the earliest roots of practically every religion. The veneration of the blood line is the first possible form of loyalty to the clan, and for ages the patriarchal society was the only successful form of organization for the human community. Sometimes the development was matriarchal, but whether with masculine or feminine dominance both privilege and [63] obligation were seated in the inheritance. Selfhood was the genetic integrity that not only could demonstrate itself from infancy to senility but that also could offer a broader satisfaction for the instincts and passions demanding their expression without benefit of more than very rudimentary reasoning capacity. The fulfillment of the individual through the body's ability to reproduce itself was brought to particular historical emphasis in the Hebrew faith, in which the need for male issue to perpetuate the line led to such an idea as the levirate requirement that a man give a deceased brother a son by the proxy impregnation of the widow. Important to Christianity is the fact that out of the sense of a necessity for this continuity in the more personal elements of being, such as have created and preserved the family solidarity or tribal cohesiveness for so long, has come the identification of deity as a father in the over-all or ideal dimension of human well-being.

Nature worship, or the acceptance of the continuousness of life in the figure of a corresponding divine motherhood, has presented the same insight of the necessity that existence be cradled in continuity if there is to be any actuality of selfhood. On this side of the coin, however, the realization has turned to the extension of experience in spatial rather than temporal terms. As man could feel himself a participant in some pattern of relationship with the entities and objects surrounding him, even at a relatively mindless stage of evolution, he could act confidently in the business of being himself. The phenomenon is illustrated by children in parallel play, where rapprochement can be seen to develop through the operation of the imitative instinct. And yet it has not been until most [64] recently that a Mary Baker Eddy could see with remarkable intuitive perception what Plato certainly had not been able to make clear more than two millenniums before, namely, that the mother principle is of the essence of God in an important fashion of its own. The idea involved at this point is simple, but none the less a difficulty because completely unfamiliar. Enunciated as a stark denial of reality to matter, it not only has outraged common sense but has made a false statement of itself.

A start toward understanding here is possible if it can be said that it is the embryo that establishes the womb in which it will be made manifest, as a literal fact no less true than the reverse relationship. Then perhaps the material world can be conceived as the handiwork of the Creator, not as He stands on the outside in a sense and commands it to come into being through a successiveness of cause and effect, but rather as a miracle of timeless cooperation with His creatures. The world's actual reality takes shape in an illimitable potentiality of itself as each of these creatures in its own absolute independence at core proceeds to dictate the nature of a personal milieu for its own particular outreaching. The general concordance so often mistaken for a cosmic order superimposed on the whole of creation from without thereupon is revealed as the godhead made manifest from within through the living or ever-adjusting matrix of the creativity available to all. It is Mother-God or nature as responsive to man beyond his fondest expectation, if he will but have it so. Deity thus becomes fulfillment as well as authority, and the distinction has little parallel to the division of labor represented by gender and seen in the superficial emphasis of [64] matriarchal as in contrast with patriarchal. Man has long learned to know God through source and succession, and for long ages and through his ramification of experience in everyday vicissitudes he has learned also to recognize the powers of nature and perhaps indeed to worship them. But while he has grown to some achievement of spiritual liberation on the one side he has tended to cling to his bondage on the other.

The youthful Memphite priests of long ago would be fundamentally in sympathy with the biological immortality as a necessity for the health of a human society. They were close to the hieratic succession in the temple, and the authority of a superior who held office until death and ordained his successor with a laying on of hands. None the less their discussions at the river's edge had strengthened a realization that the transmission of a carefully preserved knowledge or wisdom individually from mind to mind as a spiritual birthright was an invitation to sterility of insight, and here again was a problem to be faced. Today an idle or pointless worship of the past has become a very obvious betrayal of the future. There are few who cannot realize that too great a dependence on established values and venerable symbols can cancel every quickening of life or actual realization of the present in its limitless opportunity and promise. Each man has a heritage that is ever the key to his character, and ever also a very rich endowment if only he brings it to account. This means a utilization of background, rather than any surrender to its compulsions. In consequence a fundamental requirement of the Solar Mysteries is the very genuine respect for personality, or an acceptance of the unimpeachable integrity [66] of all personal roots in experience. The blood is the life, as the Hebrew scriptures explain with probably a very much more literal reference, and the line of life meanings and involvements the aspirant comes to treasure will be the measure of his illumination. In terms of the Sabian keywords there is here the immortality of the culture or of form.

The third of the four types is the social immortality that can be identified most usefully for the moment as the biological continuity of mind in the aspects of self-orientation and self-direction. According to a secular or materialistic point of view it is the ideal or rational ordering of things. It has its most effective nonoccult dramatization in the idea popularized by Isaac Newton through his statement that whatever he achieved was a result of standing on the shoulders of giants who had gone before him. In giving a further instrumentation to the living power or actual continuance of previous and exceptional contributions to human knowledge and culture he was providing an example of the occult doctrine of reincarnation as this has its general acceptance in essence if not in terminology, that is, he was demonstrating the continuity of individual achievement within the matrix of society. Of importance to the aspirant at this point is not the possible cyclic rebirth of a given personality from time to time, but rather the continuance of any or every type of particular activity or accomplishment through which any conscious entity must express its existence to have any recognizable or discrete manifestation.

Obligation and opportunity become the twin facets of conscious existence, with personal survival a relatively [67] minor issue for the moment. Here is the basis for the psychological insights of the occult tradition. Its complementary doctrines of karma and dharma are its promulgation of the principles involved, with the one defining man's social involvement and the other his fidelity to selfhood. They emphasize the fact that man must establish and adjust his relationships with his fellows continually and with unlimited modification, whether he is pleased to do this or not. The aspirant comes to know the necessities of his initiations-to-be through a continual perfecting of skills and understanding for the sake of those with whom he may have his everyday contacts. As he achieves the constancy or certainty of self-realization, such as in its ultimate manifestation is his eternal character or universal being, he is both creating the shoulders on which others may stand and learning to hold them erect and steady. Meanwhile there are evils in this emphasis on the interdependencies among men from the delusions of importance that come from a premature or incompetent assimilation to self of the achievements and merits of others on to the insensate lust for power by which an individual will seek to assimilate even more of other reputation or capacity to the structure of his own immediate being. Out of unlimited frustrations likely to develop will come needlessly antisocial and perhaps even criminal acts with which every human society has to deal.

In the case of the young priests at Memphis toward the end of the Atlantean period it is probable that the experience with the compatibility of temple life was responsible very largely for the development of their insights and for the remarkable depth of their thoughts. While with [68] all the warmth of their companionship in priestly dedication they had found no answer to the problem of a continuity in any personal consciousness beyond death they yet, through their exchange of ideas, had become very sensitive to the efficacy of a group awareness or of a continual sharing of realization. They had discovered that the communication of the arcane knowledge need not be all of one mind to another but instead could be of many thinkers in close association. They also must have seen that by working collectively to maintain the conscious insights they actually were creating a greater wisdom far beyond the powers of formulation or comprehension possessed by any single individual. Here could have been the seeds of modern scientific method, and very possibly the historical beginning of what occultists usually term the Great White Lodge. In any case there was a recognition of procedures followed to this day by the Brothers in the course of each of their incarnations. In terms of the Sabian keywords what here is brought to spiritual significance is the immortality of the potential or of activity.

The fourth of the four types is the personal immortality that has remained a highly esoteric conception despite all the efforts to explain it in everyday terms to long generations of spiritually-minded people. In consequence it has been recognized principally in the form of widespread and popular distortions. In Eastern religions and in much superficial Western occultism a literalistic notion of reincarnation brings an individual back to earth in endless life after life in a psychologically unchanging substance of himself, putting on and taking off a vehicle of flesh as a suit of clothes and ever suffering and causing others to [69] suffer as he somehow is transformed from something he is into perhaps a better something he is not. The unrealized fallacy is in failing to remember that what a person is will always be a continuance of his characteristic actions and reactions, and that for these there must be the essentially unbroken experience of acting and reacting in that particular continuity. The seductive analogy of sleep is not pertinent, any more than of a lacuna in attention, since in those cases no destruction of the organism is involved. A new body is not the same and obviously never could be the same as a sustainment for an experience to be picked up just where it was dropped on this most literal of levels. And of course and by the same token there is not even the remotest possibility of an equally necessary reproduction of the context of personal expression that has conditioned it and been conditioned by it in turn. Any actuality of ordinary memory surviving from a past life requires the successive circumstances to be exceptionally repetitive as in the case of a child's early return. For this phenomenon, however, there is some evidence of convincing order.

Christianity in general has escaped the difficulties arising with the acceptance of a literalistic chain of rebirths for the everyday personality by refusing to admit that anything of the kind is possible. Unhappily problems of an equal or greater sort have been raised with the conception of a soul not only created out of nothing at the threshold of embodiment but yet endowed most illogically at death with an on-going in the hypothetical reality of a nonphysical world. The line usually drawn between a first existence in a tangible organic form and a later one of [70] wholly transcendental nature is an overemphasis of the Cartesian dualism of flesh and spirit, and similarly the common belief that existence framed in matter or in everyday time-and-space relationships is fundamentally evil is a survival of Gnostic ideas. Here of course is the old notion that whatever is remote or different is better. The farther pastures are the greener. And despite whatever anything may be, it should be something else. In consequence it often is assumed that man need not take too much responsibility for the inadequacies of daily life.

Personal immortality is acceptance rather than surrender, however, or is the phenomenon of selection by conscious choice as a transcendence of what otherwise would be either inevitable act under compulsion or uncontrolled reaction through conditioning. It is in no way a product of birth. Rather it involves a continuousness of rebirth or a constant choosing of the facets of reality from which to be born again and again in a growing complex of opportunity. Death has no sting because by the same token, and as a result of equally free choice, the individual is dying out of this and that whenever usefulness comes to an end or whenever fulfillment no longer has its signature in worthy works. The beginning in the body and the departure from the flesh, in a given span of focus among men on a physical level, progressively seem a minor punctuation in what has been coming to be of the major import. The person is less and less himself in the commonplace perspective as he becomes supremely what he is in the undying view of the initiate. Everyday life defines him in his own terms, and finds him blessed or not in the years of his incarnation, but to himself as he is quickened within [71] himself the definition is through that which endures far more in other lives than his own. This is the implication of the Servant Songs in Isaiah, and the heart of Solar Mysteries discipline through all the generations.

The impersonal illimitability of the first type of immortality may now perhaps be seen to be no more than a dramatization of the basic integrity of existence. This cosmic integrity instruments the necessary degree of infinite regression through which all things may retract into their undifferentiated potentials whenever they are dismissed from conscious experience, and through which also everything needful for any experiencing entity from least to highest evolvement is ever at hand for its use when it is incarnate in a knowable reality. Meanwhile man as a creative manifestation of consciousness forever finds himself always at a center of evolution or self-emanation in the complex of embodiment serving him, and this is his biological immortality in terms of his character. And no less does he discover himself at the point of convergence in his interests and affairs that similarly marks his social immortality, or brings the total of his skills and functional capacities to significance in his relationships with his fellows. It is this many-faceted orientation of himself in selfhood that is cradled at a focus of convenience in time and space, and that is framed in the cosmic totality made understandable in the occult tradition through the mathematical interrelations charted so brilliantly by the periods and worlds, the races and vehicles and the related insights. As the aspirant makes the esoteric realizations his own he loses every inhibition that might hold him unnecessarily to the passions and impulses of an earlier or mindless [72] humanity. His personality is immortal because through the proper management of himself and his world he can be what he wants to be, do what he wants to do, go where he wants to go and have what he wants to have. This is the popular affirmation of self-potential in the Sabian presentation of the Solar Mysteries. In terms of the Sabian keywords the bringing of all divine potentialities so uncompromisingly to a core in self is an immortality of consciousness or of the absolute.

Where then is ultimate reality in the occult tradition? It is where it always has been, right at hand ready either (1) to use with profit to self and everybody else or (2) to be permitted to administer limitation and frustration.

What then has the occult tradition done to truth? Nothing, except to show that the mind's expectation may embrace all experience in a greater understanding.

And is God still given His proper place in the consideration by the occultist? Certainly, since His works are seen only as they are in full accord with His nature, and since His nature after all is known by men only as the knowing eliminates every possible separation or destructive self-centeredness among them.

As the story of the Memphite priests goes, it was in their old age when the great insight came to them. With the dawning of the new light in their reasoning they quickened to what would be so very obvious in afterview. If men in actuality are what they do, as must be true of everything ultimately, were not their actions and reactions really of their inner consciousness rather than of their outer flesh and its mechanisms of sense and surface reasoning? And if an immortal inwardness could be made [73] possible in some fashion without the time-and-space embodiment and consequent fixities of orientation, would that not be the answer to the inescapable waste of thought and reflection that followed from the early cancellation of outer personality or essentially sensual awareness through physical death?

They had made the problem articulate through their agony of speculation. Now they could ask if the association together in the exercise of a common and higher realization could not somehow offer a species of substitute embodiment. In a sense they had been experiencing this very miracle of organic or creative communion in their unbroken meetings, and at times it had seemed to them that they were experiencing an aliveness of an initiate sort or something singularly independent of the bodies in which they held their individual focus of being. Within the periphery of their unified aspiration they were strangely at one, and this at-oneness might well become a new sort of physical vehicle. It could be perpetuated if a dedicated group of men such as themselves could undertake the task. It then could serve any personality of high or illuminated potentiality as a bridge from one incarnation to another.

With the recognition of the powers of a projective consciousness, whether in this or some other fashion, man achieved the idea of vicarious atonement and so of vicarious attainment as well. Abraham would give perhaps the first historical dramatization of the principle in its one aspect when he discovered he could offer up the lamb in lieu of his own son Isaac. Fifteen centuries or more later the whole world would be taught that any person permitting an unembodied and consciously immortal Jesus to [74] dwell within him would partake of the magic of God's ever-single or necessarily-of-one and so only begetting. Today the conventional and ecclesiastical emphasis still remains on the one side of the coin, and stresses salvation or affirms the gain to the individual who enters into the consciousness of the Saviour. The avatar himself, however, pointed out that the gathering together of two or three in his name, that is, in recognition of his act of living immortally as the archetypal divine offspring, was a condition of his presence and so by implication and as a matter of necessity the means through which his conscious or personal continuance was instrumented. In this and perhaps most simply can be seen the nature and function of the invisible fellowship described in the light of the oral tradition of certain of its origins long millenniums ago. In modern occultism it preserves a historical continuity of the great Lodge of initiates, and under the Sabian administration of the Solar Mysteries and thus in more immediate compass it is shared with the seeker. But he first of all must be willing to dedicate himself to facilitating the vicarious embodiment of the Great Ones in this manner, as need and opportunity arise, and also and in doing so he must aspire to an ultimate and enduring contribution for which he may require such a service in turn.