along the path of initiation, as you begin to understand processes other people don't understand, there can be the temptation to use that knowledge to manipulate other people or to manipulate all types of things. Let's say you understand psychology, and somebody else doesn't. You can manipulate them with all types of things in neuro-linguistic programming and things of that kind. What words do you use? What tonality do you use? How do you present the information? You can manipulate them all over the place. And so, in Rosicrucianism, there's a very strong rule that all the powers and understandings gained on the path will be put to the service of other people. And so, that's like the first rule in Rosicrucianism. Otherwise, if you develop the abilities, you will get that temptation of, Well, I could get what I want right now because they don't understand this process, but I do. [Music] There are many different spiritual systems in the world that have different types of initiation programs that a person goes through.

and the Rosicrucian system is one that's been very influential in the West, but actually, it's sometimes hard to get information about what their actual system of development is. What do we actually mean by initiation or an initiate? Because the terms are used very generally in modern metaphysical circles, but if you look at people that are being presented as initiates, they are often extremely different. One technical part of this is actually the structure of their consciousness and the structure of their subtle bodies can be quite different from one to another, although they're being presented as initiates within different systems. There are three different aspects of initiation or becoming an initiate in one of these. What is actually being illuminated begins with the thinking process, with actually knowing about non-physical realities, knowing about the greater spiritual realities that we come from, and the spiritual depths of oneself. This is linked to the spiritual centers inside the head, and this is also linked to the illumination of the thinking process so that with this process, we actually know.

consciously the structure of the spiritual world, how we interact with them, how they influence us on a daily basis, and within this rule secretion system that would technically be known as an initiate, someone that actually understands the systems in this path of illumination. We find that everything is a thought form from the mind of God, and all those thought forms have a pattern to them. And the current term that we use for understanding those patterns is sacred geometry. So, sacred geometry is a universal science for understanding the patterns of creation at every level. And so, no matter what tradition you study with, they will work with sacred geometry because the sacred geometry of the highest level is a pure packed thought form from the mind of God that shows you the pure pattern of everything that's manifested from it. Now, the next level is that of the clairvoyant, and from one perspective, we could say this is linked to the illumination of the heart and the feeling life. The Rosicrucians talk about a process within an initiation in which, at a certain point, when the

heart becomes open and unarmored, and we cultivate this feeling of unconditional love. There's an ignition of a kind of spiritual spark within the heart, and what happens then is that they describe it as an etheric rose light arising from the heart and moving up to what's commonly called the third eye center. And with that rose etheric stream, it enters into the centers in the head, that area that is technically at the third ventricle of the brain and was known as the cave of Brahma in the Indian teachings. This is a particular area that's open in the head that has a space between the pineal and pituitary glands, and as this space becomes illuminated, it leads to direct spiritual vision. So, the third aspect here is that there's also the cultivation of action or of the will, and this is linked to the belly or what in Japan they call the hara, or in Chinese alchemy they call the lower dantian, the lower will centers here. And through the action or willing

form of illumination. One is able to take action esoterically. You're able to actually use non-physical realities to change things on the physical plane. Now, at the most extreme form of this, we have things like actual physical alchemy and the transmutation of one physical substance to another. This is usually attained after going through multiple steps of being able to transform something that is less dense, and that is normally etheric energy fields. So, the actual vibrational transformation of energy fields, energy healing, things of that kind, is something that you find very strongly on this path. So, the person that can actually transform things using spiritual forces is referred to as the adept. That gives us a bit of an overview for how this fits together within the Rosicrucian work. You find at a certain point that the consciousness body of the human being has three centers that can be worked on and awakened, and those three centers are around the head, the heart, and the... and this is really a universal teaching. If you study with the Buddhist, they'll

talk about the thought, speech, and action. If you study with Sufis, they'll talk about the head, the heart, and the hands. All these different traditions are working with the same concept. If you studied Chinese medicine or Chinese internal alchemy like Chi Kung, you'll know that they have the upper, middle, and lower Dantian. They refer to these as elixir fields because when we understand what these actually are energetically, they are a kind of spiritual elixir field that we can work in and illuminate the forces of so depending on where we focus on primarily. We can first begin to develop the capacity of understanding things in a conscious manner, the patterns behind them, become the initiate, or directly perceive spiritual realities, the clairvoyant, or directly manipulate the spiritual forces, hopefully for a good outcome, and that's the adept. Initiation is really a process of becoming aware of who am I, why am I here, where do I come from, and how do I develop a process by which I can become more self-aware and accelerate my process of development.

along the path of initiation, as you begin to understand processes other people don't understand, there can be the temptation to use that knowledge to manipulate other people or to manipulate all types of things. Let's say you understand psychology and somebody else doesn't. You can manipulate them with all types of things in neuro-linguistic programming and things of that kind. What words do you use? What tonality do you use? How do you present the information? You can manipulate them all over the place. And so, in Rosicrucianism, there's a very strong rule that all the powers and understandings gained on the path will be put to the service of other people. So, that's like the first rule in Rosicrucianism. Otherwise, if you develop the abilities, you will get that temptation of, Well, I could get what I want right now because they don't understand this process, but I do. So, initiation and inner alchemy. Alchemy has to do with the transformation of something from a base state to a higher state.

there's an important thing that's hidden in that, which is that the bay state has to exist first. You're turning lead into gold, but they had to be the lead there first to create the gold. So, this means that hidden within all types of lower structures are the seed of its full fruition, very much like the classical illustration of the caterpillar and the butterfly. You know, you don't know looking at the caterpillar that over time its entire structure has laid within it the ability to become a winged butterfly, but it's the exact same thing in the human being. So, we developed the physical body, we develop the body of life force, we develop our consciousness, but then we come to the point of developing our self-awareness, the I am presence, and that's where we are today. Human beings have developed this, and now we're at this critical point of developing the I am self-awareness. Now, the inner alchemy of this is that once we have developed that fire, and this is represented in the esoteric

Christian tradition as the flame above the head of the disciples of Pentecost. It's a literal flame that ignites a spiritual structure that moves in a vertical axis through the human body. And at this energy center above the human head, it illuminates to be the center of the Holy Spirit within Christian depictions. But I've worked with people from many other religions that know all about this first center above the head and its ignition into higher consciousness. So, as we develop that aspect of ourselves, it can now illuminate with light and transform with the fire the lower bodies. That means that then we can train our I AM spiritual self-awareness to actually transform our consciousness to a higher level. It's an alchemical transformation of the consciousness to become something different of a higher nature. And it can then transform our entire body of life force, the entire etheric body, chi, ki, prana, to a higher level. And then it can actually transform the physical body. So, that then leads to the question of, Okay, from this really big picture of how

things fit together. What does one actually do as a system of initiation practices? So, one of the most fundamental practices for the Rosicrucians is what they call the six basic exercises. Now, the six basic exercises were talked about by Rudolf Steiner as something that, if you did nothing else, do these because some types of occult practices that you do could actually end up being harmful to you. But any of those harmful effects could actually be neutralized if you practice the six basic exercises. The first three parts of them are, again, working with the basic idea that we have three basic soul faculties. That's the same thing as saying that our astral body has three different aspects: the thinking, the feeling, and the willing; thought, speech, and action; for the Buddhist, head, heart, and hands; for the Sufis, upper and middle lower dantian; for Chinese Taoist, etc. We have these three primary centers: thinking, feeling, and willing. So, the first thing we have to do is, like what Gurdjieff talked about, we have to

begin to self-observe. We have to observe ourselves through the course of the day. We have to observe what am I thinking, what am I feeling, what am I doing. That act in itself, something always also described by the Buddhist in great detail, will actually begin to use the light of our consciousness to illuminate the thinking process, to illuminate our feeling process, and our willing process. What this allows us to do is we can then begin to see how much of what we go through every day internally is completely unconscious. It's just one reactive state after another. You get a particular external trigger, and you have a particular reaction to it. And so, this is the foundation. If you did this, you would end up reaching the goal. If you did nothing else, if you don't do this, nothing else you do will matter. You have to do the self-observation, and it's much harder to do than it sounds. Another practice was called the backward review. The backward review is very important to do at the end of every day in Steiner's.

own initiation school. He made it a basic practice for everybody. What the backward review is, is that at the end of your day, as you're about to go to bed, the meditation to do is to intensively from that moment when you're about to go to bed, go backward through your day in reverse order. Now I'm at the moment just before I went to bed. Now I'm at the point where I went to the bathroom. Now I'm at the point where I watched TV, and I'm at the point that I had dinner. Now the point that I'm driving home from work, etc. You go back through the day all the way back to the point when you were last asleep. It might have been a nap. It might have been early that morning. And there's very deep spiritual processes behind this that we're not going to get in all the details of now, but it relates to some very important energetic processes in a human being. So one of the things is that by going backward, thinking backwards, we're actually developing a new strength like

we're flexing a muscle within our etheric life body. The etheric life body is our body of memory, and the etheric body held all of our life forces. When we begin to exercise the capacity to think backwards instead of forage the way we normally do, we're actually exercising something in the life body of memory that will become a force that can be used for higher initiation and alchemical purposes later on. Next, we have the observation of life forces of growth and decay. Today, we have this fantastic tool where we can use film equipment to literally see these like Walt Disney films of a seed sprouting and then becoming a plant and blossoming and fruiting and withering away. And we can see in a moment what the Rosicrucians classically did through a process of observation that would like take an entire year. They would like watch every part of a growth process. Now, the observation of the life forces to something very significant, very important, and that is that it develops a particular type of clairvoyant faculty.

inside of us to see how things move through life processes from one stage to another, and so this is a real divine mystery. Every human being holds this divine mystery, and to see what's held within it. Then, of course, the study of spiritual science we talked about before is fundamental because we have to put down those concepts that allow us to logically understand how things fit together. Now, as we're studying things, we have a particular practice that we do. It's called the dissolving practice. The dissolving practice is an alchemical way to read spiritual text so that if you're reading a text from any spiritual tradition, what you're actually reading is words on the page, was the attempt of someone to crystallize into written language and direct spiritual experience that they had. The only way to get to the core of what they're trying to tell you without getting caught up in a fundamentalist literalist trap is to actually regain the experience they had. They're trying to communicate through the words. That means the words have to be dissolved.

into a direct inner spiritual experience, and so it's a type of meditative reading. So, once we can dissolve the spiritual text into the original experience, it opens up a great world for us and is absolutely vital for going to deeper parts of spiritual teachings that have been preserved. Now, this is also connected to the next stage, which is something called the Michaelic yoga. What we have is that in the ancient schools, they taught a particular type of breathing, and the way they breathed at that time was to actually make themselves more conscious by being conscious of the breath in and out. So, there's a particular yoga of the inhale of the breath and of the exhale of the breath. And what Steiner is basically saying with the Michaelic yoga is that for the Rosicrucian, we have the same inhale and exhale, but now it's done in pure consciousness. It's not done with the breath per se. So, when we inhale, in a sense, the observation of the physical world, then that's what we would call a

perception. I perceive something in the physical world, whatever I see, observing nature or human beings, whatever it is. I'm breathing in that perception, and that's a completely receptive activity. If I don't have a receptive soul, I can't do it. But we breathe that in, and we hold the perception inside of us. It might be the movement of a child, it might be the growth of a flower, it might be whatever it is. And then we breathe out the concept. A concept is where now I can see inside what I have perceived, the spirit inside of it. And so instead of breathing in and breathing out, we're breathing in the perception of the world receptively, and then we're actively breathing out the concept where now I have perceived the spirit in the world. [Music] You

Rosicrucian Hidden Practices for Attaining Psychic Illumination (use them with caution)

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