Philosophical Speculations

As part of an attempt to create an appropriate Easter mood, I am reading a small book by Dennis, called “Alchemy of the Holy Week”. It is in fact a workshop transcription, and it’s equally available online. As it seems to me, Dennis does a great job at bringing to life the meaning of the Holy Week, and I’d like to report some of his insights. The focus is on the Holy Week’s cardinal value for our life here and now, so that it doesn’t risk being experienced only as a compassionate commemoration of the events that took place 1993 years ago.

The book illustrates how each day of the Holy Week is about the future: Christ had to come back to Jerusalem to open the possibility for us to leave behind the old mysteries’ consciousness. He paved the way for the new mysteries. Yet, two millennia later, the old clairvoyance consciousness of moral unfreedom, in which human conduct is strictly ruled from without the human being, is still dominant, well beyond its window of evolutionary legitimacy. This situation manifests in the world state we produce today. In this light, it becomes clear that the stages of transformation incorporated in the events of the Holy Week are all about the awakening human being’s ideal agenda to transform the future according to the Good. Moreover, in the book the story of these events is put in parallel with specific alchemical processes - yet another way to build a bridge and bring together self knowledge, world knowledge, and knowledge of the sacred records (then endeavors such as PleromaUnderground’s and similar are once and for all clarified in all their senselessness). As Ashvin writes in his latest essay,

To truly become more sensitive to the flow, we should periodically ‘release’ the content of these concepts by making a similar inner gesture as we make when releasing the breath and facial tension (or when relaxing into a stretch), trying to more intimately feel the meaningful inner process that they are pointing attention to. It is as if we are entrusting the content to the unfamiliar forces of distillation and clarification that weave in our intuitive periphery, similar to how we entrust our daily experiences to a period of sleep and sometimes awaken with fresh insights.

As described, that distillation is an inner process. At the same time, it is a symbol of a divine process, and an alchemical process experienceable in nature as well. As He enters Jerusalem, Christ begins by taking apart the old mysteries. Correspondingly, we can begin to dismantle in ourselves the old mysteries consciousness here and now, by distilling symbolic meaning out of our concepts, separating and putting aside their notional content - their corpse. Similarly, in unprejudiced chemistry (alchemy) the physical-spiritual process of distillation takes apart substances so that they can be purified of their static components - lifted out of their corpse - and then reconstituted at a higher level of integration. Hence, with Christ as our example, if we are free (and only because we are free) we can begin to remedy our separate state from two sides, and do our part on the way back, and up. When we are not yet free, we just take the separation literally and only worry about making our freefall through the tunnels of mental pictures as comfortable as possible.

This momentous process of returning to the Divine has to reverse the consequences of the fact that the creation of man included the potential for separation from the intents of the Creator. That potential became reality when the Archai - the Spirits of Personality - added their contribution to the creation of man. That’s where the inner experience of separation took shape, the Fall happened, and the sensory world appeared for humanity. From this sensory creation too we feel separated. But we have the potential to change that, and the only way to realize our union with the world - and through it with the Divine - is by deciding to transform our life, develop the new clairvoyance, and separate out our personal corpse, the static component in our human nature. As Dennis puts it, “I have to take images from the world and transform them into metaphors for my inner development”. In the same way, with alchemy “I take what is in the world and transform it into a symbol of my path back to the divine”. This entire process is encoded and encapsulated in the events of the Holy Week.

I hope I will be able to report in due time some of the metaphors presented in the book, but please anyone feel free to add any other thoughts related to this theme.

As said, I would like to elaborate on the characterization of the Easter events contained in “The Alchemy of the Holy Week”. Paying attention to the alchemical quality of this mystery is not only an act of exploration on the path to self knowledge and self fructification (liberation of the higher self in us) but also, I guess, a possible remedy for the common ailment of instinctive antipathy to Christianity. An alchemical approach, even if shallow and vague at first, may help to see what the incarnated Christ lived through, in meaningful connection with what the incarnated Earth lives through, and what our incarnated self lives through. If we only want it enough, for the sake of truth, these apparently distinct flows of becoming can be progressively brought into the focus of clear consciousness (clairvoyance) in their fundamental quality of unity. Then, in the truth of disincarnated consciousness (Spirit), these three experiential flows begin to lose their separateness in space-time and in participation, to converge towards a wedded condition.

Approaching this more fundamental state of consciousness through alchemy (alchemical meditation) keeps the manifestations of the incarnated Earth in the loop, for the convenience of the ambitious but uninitiated ordinary self. All those pictures of matter and forces can be utilized and made active. We literally make them into keys that we can begin to operate and see through. In this way, our consciousness progressively becomes more overarching, without leaps into the completely unfamiliar. We move through approachable stages that don’t forgo our physical environment.

First of all, alchemy should not be pictured as the practice of mysterious chemical experiments in pre-scientific times. Rather, in initial approximation, it's the endeavor of retracing the deeper meaning of our world of interconnected manifestations, which includes not only the Earth, but its universal environment as well, most proximately the Sun, the Moon, and their dynamics. Easter is strongly connected with the New Sun, that is, the Sun that has just passed the vernal point (spring equinox). At the vernal point, the sun is born again. It grows towards the summer solstice, as epitomized in the observable cycle of the annual plants. Through the alchemical view, we are led to recognize that the New Sun is not only an astronomical phenomenon. It is also the higher self we are called to fructify, evolve, and progressively manifest within ourselves through the course of evolution. This is not a metaphor. The human I is the aspiration, the movement of convergence toward the inner Sun which, in the world of manifestations, reverberates in the form of the celestial body that fills the Earth’s senses and our senses with life, light and warmth.

In other words, the New Sun, as an event, continually renews the opportunity to live up to the new mysteries (they could be equally called modern initiation, occult education, or the next stage in the evolution of consciousness) arising from freedom, rather than from law. Law and precept are the way of the old consciousness, the way of the old mysteries. Instead, the way of the new consciousness and new mysteries begins with freedom - freedom to actively seek the light of knowledge that leads to wisdom, love and truth, in an uncompelled movement of the soul.

And so, Easter is the new Sun-day (the first spring Sunday able to receive full 'Moon integration', with the full astral forces of the Moon) because the Christ being - the Cosmic being of Christ - is the Sun being, the spiritual Sun. Therefore, walking the path of the new mysteries is identical with growing the impulse of the newborn Sun in our inmost being.

The Easter events are not only events of the past to commemorate, but also rhythmically recurring opportunities - encapsulated in the presence and guidance offered by the Christ being - to unite our life flow with the virtuous evolutionary flow that brings into constructive unity the incarnated universe (comprising the Sun planet), our inner world (comprising the inner Sun we feel called to conceive and give birth to) and the spiritual world at large, within which the Sun being is our most encompassing and true transformer. If there is a point of luminous intersection of all worlds that we can work toward, and hope to evolve toward, it is only because the Sun being is holding it in focus for us, across all spectra of reality. In this sense, the Easter mystery is a highly condensed path of experience that holds a key to meaningful inner progress in feeling, thinking, and will.

Now, the proposition in Dennis’ workshop is to approach each day of the Holy Week through a unique symbol. In the evening prior, each symbol is worked with, then brought into sleep. In the morning, the task is then to let questions take shape - using this image of the Tree of Knowledge as an attractor - without adding any comments, opinions, or possible answers.






The challenge of the exercise is to produce the patient enthusiasm and courageous humility required to be able to live with an open question without trying to anxiously ‘fix it’ with some tentative reasoning and answer. Honing this capacity is fully in the mood of the new mysteries, in which truth does not come from the forming of sides and the construction of opinions, but from the sacrifice of the old attitudes first, which allows an opening to a different quality of consciousness.


Palm Sunday

This process of sacrificing the corpse of the old mysteries to make room for the new is expressed in the symbol corresponding to Palm Sunday: the crucible. In the crucible, things get incinerated. Everything is burned down to the earth element, to dry ashes - a corpse. To allow the possibility to live through this experience of sacrifice beyond its conceptual screen, the suggestion is to inhabit the symbol (not the concept) by inwardly drawing the crucible, on the night before Palm Sunday. This activity enacts the wish of attunement to the meaning encoded in the symbol. That meaning is living, it consists of the life of spiritual beings, before it is funneled into a concept encoded in words.







This crucible meditation sets the meaning of sacrifice and crucifixion for the entire Week. Palm Sunday marks the entry into it. Christ enters Jerusalem, and we can follow His guiding gesture by entering the squared, cross-like, earthly geometry of the crucible, trying to feel the larger feelings of the Earth soul, as it approaches a specific geometric configuration in relation to the Sun-Moon upcoming 'power integration' - as the Earth becomes almost ready to receive the sacrifice to come. So we can begin to relate to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ by preparing to burn down in the crucible our soul attitudes that reflect the old consciousness. Once we feel settled and almost comfortable in the repeated drawing of the symbol, as in an environment that has become somewhat familiar, we can erase the crucible in reverse motion, to lift its pictorial form back into unmanifested condition and conclude the meditation.







On Sunday morning, we then put the crucible image into practice, by considering the top part of the Tree of Knowledge (the cloud, the hand and the split trunk), observing what questions arise. Have we been able to extinguish our anxious urge to provide fixing answers? If the exercise is done in a group, the questions can be shared, and everyone can observe what field of consciousness emerges when all refrain from 'answer fixes', letting their soul weave along the flow of someone else’s question instead. This new type of field of consciousness is probably not dissimilar from the one we begin to weave in when, in the evening, we turn our attention to the dead, attuning to our intersection with them, possibly asking a question, as Steiner describes. Later, the dead soul may begin to speak through our own morning thoughts. As those thoughts take shape as ours, but inspired by the dead person, we feel inwardly quiet.

The consciousness that grows from such activities of attunement to others and their flow has the qualities of freedom, participation, and tolerance. In Jerusalem - likewise in our world environment today - things were happening under very different conditions. Both the Romans and the Pharisees wanted to command, dictate, legislate. The donkey on which Jesus Christ enters the town symbolizes the old mysteries, the old consciousness to be overcome. Thus Christ is sitting on it. A similar meaning of the donkey exists in many other myths and tales as well, like King Midas’. He then goes to the temple and puts an end to the commerce taking place there. This disrupts the existing habits and laws. It challenges the powers in place, that were ruling by the force of laws and strict precepts. In ourselves, we are called to bring about the same disruption. We transform our soul, burning down the rule of both instinctive trading of desires and external law. In so doing, we progressively transform ourselves into an organ of perception of the Spirit, within the fabric of the new consciousness arising.


PS: Interestingly, in his illustration of the days of the Holy Week, Max Leyf highlights other aspects of the Palm Sunday symbology, seeing in the donkey (which is not a horse) a sign of meekness and peaceful arrival. Naturally, more than one encoding may coexist, to offer a rich perspective on these cardinal events.