The Way

The Way: an East Indian fable of the goddess Kundalini who, being of an inquisitive mind and seeing a rope hanging from the heaven with its lower end concealed in impenetrable gloom, decided to climb down this rope and investigate the incalculable period, Kundalini discovered that its lower end rested upon an island that seemed to float in the midst of a great sea of darkness.

While exploring this strange island the rope was cut from above, and Kundalini was left floating in the midst of a vast ocean. In terror the goddess ran and hid herself in a cave and refused to come out.

In the secret teachings it is revealed that she could be induced to come forth from her asylum only by an aggregation of wise men who with offerings, supplications, and grave discoursings finally persuaded her to leave her gloomy retreat.

The goddess Kundalini is the spirit fire that descends the mysterious ladder which is here emblematic of the umbilical cord. When this cord is cut the goddess is left stranded in the underworld.

Alarmed, she hides in the great cavern of the sacral plexus, there to remain coiled up as a serpent (as her name implies) until the sage can lure her forth again by holy observances.

Never should we lost sight of the relationship between the processes physical body and the universal orders. The umbilical cord is not only the divine ladder in the case of the goddess Kundalini, but is symbolic also of that spiritual cord by which man is ever suspended from his divine parent.

While man’s outer nature is nourished by physical food and drink, his inner nature receives life from the Universal Parent transmitted by means of ethereal cords analogous to the umbilicus. – Manly P. Hall

“Kundalini is the biological psychological – spiritual mechanism driving human evolution, transforming humanity’s consciousness, and making it possible for us to attain the tremendously expanded states of awareness, higher consciousness” – Gopi Krishna

The goddess is left stranded in the underworld represents Hades (Hell in Christianity). Suppose by classical students to be the region or estate of departed souls, it will have been noticed, is regarded by Thomas Taylor and other Platonists, as the human body, which they consider to be the grave and place of punishment of the soul.

In The Eleusinian & Bacchic Mysteries Thomas Taylor stated, and thus far Olympiodorus; in which passages it is necessary to observe, that as the Titans are the artificers of things, and stand next in order to their creations, men are said to be composed from their fragments, because the human soul has a partial life capable of proceeding to the most extreme division united with its proper nature.

And while the soul is in a state of servitude to the body, she lives confined, as it were, in bonds, through the dominion of this Titanical life.

We may observe farther concerning these dramatic shows of the Lesser Mysteries, that as they were intended to represent the condition of the soul while subservient to the body, we shall find that a liberation from this servitude, through the purifying disciplines, potencies that separate from evil,

was what the wisdom of the ancients intended to signify by the descent of Hercules, Ulysses, etc., into Hades, and their speedy return from its dark abodes.

“Hence,” says Proclus, “Hercules being purified by sacred initiations, obtained at length a perfect establishment among the gods:” that is, well knowing the dreadful condition of his soul while in captivity to a corporeal nature, and purifying himself by practice of the cleansing virtues,

of which certain purifications in the mystic ceremonies were symbolical, he at length was freed from the bondage of matter, and ascended beyond her reach.

On this account, it is said of him, that by temperance, continence, and other virtues, he drew upwards the intuitional, rational and opinionative part of the soul.

“The soul,” says Plato, “descends Corically [ or after the manner of Proserpine] into generation (that is to say, as if dying), and she is bound in body Prometheiacally (chained fast) and Titanically: she frees herself therefore from its bonds by exercising the strength of Hercules;

but she is collected into one through the assistance of Apollo and the savior Minerva, by philosophical discipline of mind and heart purifying the nature.”

Now, from all this, it may be inferred, that the most sublime part of the epopteia or final revealing, consisted in beholding the gods themselves, invested with a resplendent light (Apuleius: The Golden Ass. The candidate was instructed by the hierophant, and permitted to look within the cista or chest, which contained the mystic serpent, the phallus, egg, and grains sacred to Demeter. As the epopt was reverent, or otherwise, he now “knew himself” by the sentiments aroused.);

and that this was symbolical of those transporting visions, which the virtuous soul will constantly enjoy in a future state; and of which it is able to gain some ravishing glimpses, even while connected with the cumbrous vestment of the body. (Plotinus, speaking of this enosis or oneness, lays down a spiritual discipline analogous to that of the Mystic Orgies: “Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things; mortify the body, deny self – affections as well as appetites – and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.”)

Plato asserts, that the ultimate design of the Mysteries was to lead us back to the principles from which we originally fell.

For if the Mysteries were symbolical, as is universally acknowledged, this most likewise by true of the purifications as a part of the Mysteries; and as inward purity, of which the external is symbolical, can only be obtained by the exercise of the virtues, it evidently follows, that the purifications were symbols of the purifying moral virtues. – Thomas Taylor

“Kundalini cures you, she improves you, she bestows all the blissful things upon you. She takes away from the worries of grosser levels” – Nirmala Srivastava

Gold exist in every element of the universe; even the sunlight and the atmosphere contain minute quantities of this precious metal. The base substances surrounding this universal or spiritual gold, are referred to as the lesser metals.

The purpose of alchemical experimentation was to germinate that seed of universal gold, which when properly nurtured would take unto itself and tincture the base metals, absorbing them all into its own glory.

Ultimately self, the only enduring state, thus absorbs into its own being all the phases of the not-self. Touching them with its transmuting power it causes them to become one with its own effulgence.

According to the Greek terminology the gold is the rational soul, and the transmutation process that of distilling the golden elixir from the base substances of ignorance and perversion.

When you have gathered your proper elements, says the alchemist, you place them in a retort and hermetically seal it.

You then begin the cycles of distillation, causing the chemicals to pass through an orderly sequence of increasing intensity unit finally a point is reached where the elixir thus distilled seeps though the glass without injuring it and passes off lie a hot oil, there being no container in the world sufficiently strong to hold it.

The allegory is evident. The hermetically sealed vessel is the lower world, the way in and out stopped by the mysteries of birth and death. The chemicals are the heterogeneous mass of created things thrown together in a mysterious fashion.

The cycles of distillation are the processes of evolution, so-called, by which life is given fuller expression through regenerated vehicles and gradually released from irrationality.

When the cycles of intensification have reached a certain stage, those beings who have attained to this point can no longer be held within the globe of the inferior creation, and the soul seeps through the wall of the Egg of Existence or, as the Buddhist might say, enter Nirvana.

This is the rebirth out of the Womb of Necessity; this the time when man releases himself from the bonds that bind him to the Wheel of Birth and Death. He who has attained this end it rightly termed no longer a man but the Philosopher’s Stone. – Manly P Hall

Philosophically defined, growth is the struggle of life to control its environment within the area of ifs own self-knowing. Perfect freedom of expression is the goal of life. All things, both animate and inanimate, are striving for that freedom which lies in perfect expression.

It naturally follows that there is but one freedom – perfection.

Every creature is a slave to his own material constitution; he is a prisoner held in by walls of unresponsive substance. Thus the natural expression of the inner life principle is to refine and improve the qualities of its outer vehicles that it may then more easily control and direct them.

It is evident that the more refined the substance, the more easily it is influenced by subtle forces. By certain definite organization, consciousness equips its outer nature with organs of responsiveness, so that the lower self comes ever more nearly en rapport with its own cause. – Manly P Hall

“The real transformation upon the awakening of Kundalini is that you shed your old tendencies and negativity like a snake sheds its old skin. You no longer feel angry or flustered over trivial matters unlike the earlier times. Your emotions and thoughts don’t overpower and trample all over you anymore. You begin to gain control of yourself” – Om Swami

“Therefore to It Gnosis is no beginning; rather is it that Gnosis doth afford to us the first beginning of Its being known”; and compare it with the logos quoted by the Jewish commentator in the Nassene Document (section 25):

“The Beginning of Perfection is Gnosis of Man, but Gnosis of God is Perfect Perfection.”

The claim for the Gnosis is therefore a modest one. The Gnosis is not an end in itself; it is but the beginning of the True Knowledge of God and (Self).

They who receive the Baptism of the Mind are made “perfect men,” not Perfect; not until they have received this touch of the Christ-consciousness have they reached true manhood.

Those who have received this Baptism know why they have come into being, – the purpose of life. They become consciously immortal; they know they are deathless, they do not believe it, their immortality is no longer a belief, it is a fact of knowledge.

They won their freedom from Death and Fate, and now the real constitution of the cosmos up the Threshold of the Good, the Plain of Truth – that is to say, presumably in Buddhist terms, as far as the Nirvanic state of consciousness.

Not yet, however, have they entered Nirvana – that is to say, become one with the Logos. They have seen the Sight or Vision of Nirvana, but not entered into the Promised Land, that “Blessed Space,” which, as Basilides tells us, “can neither be conceived of nor characterized by any word.”

The Vision is an earnest of what they may be. They have become Gods, it is true, already, or, in other words, enjoy the same freedom and consciousness as the Gods or Angels, but there is a still more transcendent state, when they will be at-oned with Deity Himself. – Of Hermes to Tat, The Cup Or Monad

THE ANCIENT PATH

Hard as it is to leave the “things we have grown used to,” the things habitual, it must be done if we are to enter into the Way of the Gnosis.

But no new Path is this, no going forth into new lands (though it may have all the appearance of being so). The entrance on the Path of the Gnosis is a Going-Home, it is a Return – a turning – Back (a True Repentance).

“We must turn ourselves back unto the Old Old Way”. And for the followers of Doctrine of Thrice-greatest Hermes, this Old Old Path could have meant nothing but the Archaic Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. The Wisdom of Egypt was thus the Gnosis. – Of Hermes to Tat, The Cup Or Monad

“When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of it’s mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity” – C.G. Jung

“Exiled from the true home of spirit, imprisoned in the body, disordered by passion and beclouded by sense, the SOUL has yet longings after that state of perfect knowledge, and purity, and bliss, in which it was first created.

Its affinities are still on high. It yearns for a higher and nobler form of life. It essays to rise, but its EYE is darkened by sense, its wings are besmeared by passion and lust; it is ‘borne downward until it falls upon and attaches itself to that which is material and sensual,’ and it flounders and grovels still amid the objects of sense.”

And now, Plato asks: How may the SOUL be delivered from illusions of sense, the distempering influence of the body, and the disturbances of passion, which becloud its vision of the real, the good, and the true?

Plato believed and hoped that this could be accomplished by PHILOSOPHY.

This he regared as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification of the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of sense, and raised into the empyrean of pure thought, ‘where truth and reality shine forth.’

All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is only by reflection and self knowledge, and intellectual discipline, that the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty – that is, to the vision of god