Easter is not just the end of Lent. It is the beginning of fifty days of special grace, and is a complete season in itself.
After the forty days' penitence of Lent, when we strove to overcome some particular obstacle to our spiritual development, the joyful Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday proclaims fifty days of rejoicing.
Of course, the full effect of that great and amazing joy is best felt if you've actually observed Lent thoughtfully, and taken it as a Work Aim. To do this means that Imaginary I is sacrificed on Good Friday, and Real I arises on Easter Sunday from the tomb where we have buried it by our mechanicalness.
Practiced annually, and consciously, the Passion Drama can lead to Real I directing our life more and more each year until we truly begin to live more consciously.
If - like so many of us - you've drifted in and out of observance during Lent, now is the time to become aware of the cosmic energies that permeate this special period, and to take advantage of them.
These special energies were known to ancient groups, from the time of the Sarmoung Brotherhood. It was their later continuations, in the form of the Essenes and the Therapeutae, who helped to develop the Christian Year based on the rhythms of those energies as they affect us on Earth.
Before that, the Jewish Year also followed a cycle based on esoteric knowledge, and it was from this that the Christian liturgy was later formed.
Incidentally, recent attempts to persuade churches to adopt a fixed date for Easter betray complete ignorance of these energies. The date of Easter, like that of the Jewish Passover, is calculated based on complex, cosmic events. Easter must fall on the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox. Consequently, it varies from year to year, causing businesses some inconvenience. But it is necessary for this cosmic cycle to be maintained, otherwise the special energies available now will be ignored, and Easter - apart from the celebration of the Resurrection, which itself is now being sidelined or banned in many parts of the world - will be no more significant than any other Bank Holiday.
The Jews were not the only people of the ancient world who knew of the cosmic cycles, and in the Hellenic civilization, the other great sphere of knowledge which helped engender the Christian Year, a dying and rising god (or goddess) was celebrated each year in the various Mysteries.
That deity was a vegetation god, and the dying and rising which featured in the annual celebrations represented the grain harvest, on which civilizations depended.
In the Jewish rituals, however, the regular sacrifices which were offered in the Temple at the great annual feasts were of animals. The inclusion of blood was a vital part of that sacrifice, as the Old Testament clearly shows. Some form of blood offering had to be given throughout the year for various personal reasons, such as atonement for individual sins, purification after childbirth, and so on. In the three annual pilgrimage feasts, those blood offerings took on a central role for the entire Jewish people, atonement for the sins of an entire nation, and reparation for offences against God.
We learn from "All and Everything" that the wise, conscious Messengers who were sent from time to time to recall humanity to greater awareness knew that nature itself required some kind of blood sacrifice. Ordinary men and women were also aware of this, to some extent, but in their unenlightened state they offered human sacrifices. From the Druids of the north to the cannibals around the various parts of the inhabited Earth, regular human sacrifices were made, to the great sorrow of Conscious Humanity.
The practice was particularly virulent in the land of Canaan and surrounding areas, where children were sacrificed to Baal and Moloch.
In their distress at seeing these practices, the wise men and women who had been enlightened by those various Messengers to humanity decided that the best alternative was to substitute animal sacrifices instead of destroying children.
Some form of blood was still needed, so the sacrifices could not be completely stopped. Why? Because nature needs the special higher hydrogens produced by a living organism at death, which Gurdjieff calls the sacred Rascooarno. These energies are used to power physical evolution, and cannot be completely eliminated. But clearly, to sacrifice animals, while still repugnant to those who were more conscious, was better than killing children, and the substituion was gradually introduced.
Gurdjieff tells us that the very same energies of the sacred Rascooarno are also produced when we make an offering of our own suffering, when we deliberately act against our mechanicalness and offer the results to Conscious Humanity. Our conscious suffering, when we see ourselves honestly and without self-justifying, gives even more sacred energy to be used for the evolution of organic life in the universe.
If many more people did this, then no blood sacrifice would be needed at all.
But since we do not, and never have, produced sufficient of this energy to eliminate the need for blood sacrifice, nature obtains it through increasing the number of deaths until the required amount is obtained.
More conscious people practicing the Work would mean fewer mass tragedies, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, and fewer acts of mass murder of the type we now see in the terrorism that is sweeping the whole world through the agency of fundamentalist Islam and other violent groups.
The role of Jesus Christ was to provide the entire Earth, and all human beings for the foreseeable future, with the necessary treasury of higher hydrogens through the medium of His purified blood which fell on the Earth at the time of His Crucifixion.
If we in the Work, and those who attempt to follow the Christian religion, all built on this foundation, offering up our individual suffering to Conscious Humanity, there would be a huge reduction in the number of unnecessary deaths we now see. But the number of conscious people must grow to a critical level before we can see any such reduction, and clearly we are from that number at present.
Other religions too have incorporated this teaching, of course, but none to the extent of Christianity, and none have given the world the huge store of higher hydrogens that Jesus Himself created, and which has been increased ever since by the many saints and martyrs, known and unknown, who follow His teaching.
We can now see how the Christian religion brought together the understanding of the need for a blood offering, as carried out by the Jewish priests in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the dying and rising of the various deities in other traditions current at the time of His death.
Atheists and agnostics who try to discount the significance of the Crucifixion, because the Greeks and Syrians, among others, had acted out the harvest god or goddess ritual, and who claim that Christianity simply copied these, are completely missing the point.
The Crucifixion went far, far beyond the acting out of harvest rituals.
It had to be carried out by a conscious person, the most conscious man who ever lived. And He had to be a Jew, because the Jewish religion understood the need for a blood sacrifice. He had to be raised in that tradition and to understand the whole background of, and reason for, His unique sacrifice. He had to be united with God, the Father, the Holy Sun Absolute, as well as being a truly conscious, human being. And this is indeed what happened.
After He had sacrificed Himself in this way there is now no more need for any blood sacrifices. The animal sacrifices at the Temple ceased when the Temple itself was destroyed, as Christ had foretold. But human lives continue to be wasted by the forces of nature and the mechanicalness of mankind, which becomes a channel for nature to bring about the continuing, necessary blood sacrifices.
Our fifty days of joy, which follow from the Cruficixion, should be the occasion for us in the Work to rejoice in the freedom that mankind now has to overcome tragedy. Our own personal death has been shown to be only a transitional state; the deaths of many has now become unnecessary.
If we redouble our efforts to become conscious now, bearing in mind the great cosmic energies that assist us at this time, we can live joyfully, grateful that our own personal efforts are linked to the huge once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, and that we can contribute - in a small but real way - to the evolution of mankind.
What a cause of joy, indeed!
No comments:
Post a Comment