The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel (best books to read for knowledge txt) 📕

product and the purpose it will serve depends upon the arrangement of the raw materials, which is subject to the constructor's design. Building materials may be formed to prison or palace; notes may be arranged as fanfare or funeral dirge; words may be indited to inspire passion or peace, all according to the will of the designer. So also the majestic rhythm of the Word of God has wrought the primal substance: arche, into the multitudinous forms which comprise the phenomenal world, according to His will.

Did the reader ever stop to consider the wonderful power of a human word. Coming to us in the sweet accents of love, it may lure us from paths of rectitude to shameful ignominy and wreck our life with sorrow and remorse, or it may spur us on in noblest efforts to acquire glory and honor, here or hereafter. According to the inflection of the voice a word may strike terror into the bravest heart or lull a timid child to peaceful slumber. The word of an agitator may rouse the passions of a mob and impel it to awful bloodshed, as in the French Revolution, where dictatorial [pg 111] mandates of mob-rule killed and exiled at pleasure, or, the strain of “Home, Sweet Home” may cement the setting of a family-circle beyond possibility of rupture.

Right words are true and therefore free, they are never bound or fettered by time or space, they go to the farthest corners of the earth, and when the lips that spoke them first have long since mouldered in the grave, other voices take up with unwearying enthusiasm their message of life and love, as for instance the mystical “Come unto me” which has sounded from unnumbered tongues and brought oceans of balm to troubled hearts.

Words of Peace have been victorious, where war would have meant defeat, and no talent is more to be desired than ability to always say the right word at the auspicious time.

Considering thus the immense power and potency of the human word, we may perhaps dimly apprehend the potential magnitude of the Word of God, the Creative Fiat, when as a mighty dynamic force it first reverberated through space and commenced to form primordial matter into worlds, as sound from a violin bow moulds sand into geometrical figures. Moreover, the Word of God still sounds [pg 112] to sustain the marching orbs and impel them onwards in their circle paths, the Creative Word continues to produce forms of gradually increasing efficiency, as media expressing life and consciousness. The harmonious enunciation of consecutive syllables in the Divine Creative Word mark successive stages in evolution of the world and man. When the last syllable has been spoken and the complete word has sounded, we shall have reached perfection as human beings. Then Time will be at an end, and with the last vibration of the Word of God, the worlds will be resolved into their original elements. Our life will then be “hid with Christ in God,” till the Cosmic Night:—Chaos,—is over, and we wake to do “greater things” in a “new heaven and a new earth.”

According to the general idea Chaos and Cosmos are superlative antitheses of each other. Chaos being regarded as a past condition of confusion and disorder which has long since been entirely superseded by cosmic order which now prevails.

As a matter of fact, Chaos is the seed-ground of Cosmos, the basis of all progress, for thence come all IDEAS which later materialize [pg 113] as Railways, Steamboats, Telephones, etc.

We speak of “thoughts as being conceived by the mind,” but as both father and mother are necessary in the generation of a child, so also there must be both idea and mind before a thought can be conceived. As semen germinated in the positive male organ is projected into the negative uterus at conception, so ideas are generated by a positive Human Ego in the spirit-substance of the Region of abstract Thought. This idea is projected upon the receptive mind, and a conception takes place. Then, as the spermatozoic nucleus draws upon the maternal body for material to shape a body appropriate to its individual expression, so does each idea clothe itself in a peculiar form of mindstuff. It is then a thought, as visible to the inner vision of composite man, as a child is to its parent.

Thus we see that ideas are embryonic thoughts, nuclei of spirit-substance from the Region of abstract Thought. Improperly conceived in a diseased mind they become vagaries and delusions, but when gestated in a sound mind and formed into rational thoughts they are the basis of all material, moral and [pg 114] mental progress, and the closer our touch with Chaos, the better will be our Cosmos, for in that realm of abstract realities truth is not obscured by matter, it is self-evident.

Pilate was asked “what is Truth,” but no answer is recorded. We are incapable of cognizing truth in the abstract while we live in the phenomenal world, for the inherent nature of matter is illusion and delusion, and we are constantly making allowances and corrections whether we are conscious of the fact or not. The sunbeam which proceeds for 90 millions of miles in a straight line, is refracted or bent as soon as it strikes our dense atmosphere, and according to the angle of its refraction, it appears to have one color or another. The straightest stick appears crooked when partly immersed in water, and the truths which are so self-evident in the Higher worlds are likewise obscured, refracted or twisted out of all semblance under the illusory conditions of this material world.

“The truth shall set you free,” said Christ, and the more we turn our aspirations from material acquisitiveness and seek to lay up treasure above, the more we aim to rise, the oftener we “get in the spirit,” the more readily we “shall know truth” and reach liberation [pg 115] from the fetter of flesh which binds us to a limited environment, and attain to a sphere of greater usefulness.

Study of philosophy and science has a tendency to further perception of truth, and as science has progressed it has gradually receded from its erstwhile crude materialism. The day is not far off when it will be more reverently religious than the church itself. Mathematics is said to be “dry,” for it doesn't stir the emotions. When it is taught that “the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees,” the dictum is at once accepted, because its truth is self-evident and no feeling is involved in the matter. But when a doctrine such as the Immaculate Conception is promulgated and our emotions are stirred, bloody war, or heated argument, may result, and still leave the matter in doubt. Pythagoras demanded that his pupils study mathematics, because he knew the elevating effect of raising their minds above the sphere of feeling, where it is subject to delusion, and elevating it towards the Region of abstract Thought which is the prime reality.

In this place we are dealing with worlds in particular, and will therefore defer comment [pg 116] upon the remainder of the first 5 verses of St. John's gospel: