Good afternoon, friends, and welcome to the Festival of Capricorn. These monthly festivals are called "approaches" by the Tibetan, with all that that suggests of opportunity for contact. The moment of the full moon each month is an opportunity for group fusion, for closer contact with the inner spiritual Sun, which is the soul, which is one. The challenge of the full moon opportunity is to use the creative imagination and to cultivate the power to visualise. This is not easy, particularly because we are asked to visualise not physical forms and events, but energy flow. At the moment of the full moon each month, we seek to make our approach, as a group, to the Kingdom of Souls, the spiritual Hierarchy, and to be the recipients of "certain forces which you must learn to wield", the Tibetan said.

So we can see that this monthly group meditation is a training exercise, and it's one which many of us have been engaged in for years. We are preparing the ground, so to speak, for a group service to humanity which will become an accepted part of religious practice in the world to come. In fact, we’re told that religious institutions in the future will coordinate their major festivals with the moon and, while allowing for diversity of ritual according to their traditions, customs and history, will share in common at the full moon each month the objectives to intensify their spiritual life by consciously bringing in spiritual force; to achieve illumination through contact with the Hierarchy; to store up strength for increased service; and to bring about a fusion between the objective and subjective realms, the outer and inner life of humanity.

This is a tall order, and we are still preparing the foundation, and we are only a small fragment of a tremendous group effort underway throughout the world. So let us use our creative imagination to visualise this worldwide group alignment. Let us visualise this group approach to the awaiting spiritual Hierarchy as a great invocative demand for the release of Light and Love, not for ourselves personally but to pour through our group channel and into responsive human minds and hearts everywhere. This act of group appeal can release untold spiritual power into the world to aid all who seek to love and serve, who work for unity and understanding, who seek to bring the light of mind to bear on world problems, and to communicate the ideas which must mold human thinking in the world to come. Then let us say the Affirmation of the Disciple.

I am a point of light within a greater Light.
I am a strand of loving energy within the stream of Love divine.
I am a point of sacrificial Fire, focussed within the fiery Will of God.
And thus I stand.

I am a way by which men may achieve.
I am a source of strength, enabling them to stand.
I am a beam of light, shining upon their way.
And thus I stand.

And standing thus, revolve
And tread this way the ways of men, and know the ways of God.
And thus I stand.

The very idea of a monthly approach contains the idea of a passage, a transition. Capricorn is very much a sign of transition, for it spans the end of one year and the beginning of the next, in the modern Western calendar. Its keynote also expresses transition, from one plane to another: "Lost am I in light supernal, yet on that light I turn my back." Spiritually, Capricorn is one of two gates of the zodiac, Cancer, its polar opposite, being the other. Cancer admits the soul into the centre Humanity, into what we call "life". Capricorn admits the soul into conscious participation with the centre Hierarchy through initiation, a series of progressive recognitions which continuously expand the consciousness to include more and more of the whole. Initiation has the connotation of exclusiveness, as of a special club with membership limited only to a select few. But in fact, we're told, initiation has to do with the unfoldment of consciousness, and inclusiveness is the key to understanding consciousness. The more we can include of the whole, the more of life we can identify with, the more we move into the consciousness of the initiate.

Both gates, in Cancer and in Capricorn, must be passed through, as the Tibetan described so beautifully: "Through the door of Cancer streams the 'magnetic magical light which guides the soul into the dark place of experience'", apparently because only in time and space—earthly life—can the incarnated soul gain sensitivity to form life, thus fusing spirit and matter. And, the Tibetan says, "it is the magnetic pull of Capricornian energy which upon the returning wheel draws the soul steadily away from form life and experience and constitutes that 'radiant light which leads the soul in safety to the mountain top'".

But the ascent in Capricorn to the mountaintop of initiation is followed by the need to descend down the mountain once again, to return to "the planes of earth", for it is there that the gains in consciousness must find expression. This is why the keynote for Capricorn declares, "Lost am I in light supernal, yet on that light I turn my back." The initiate can’t remain in the bliss of lighted consciousness; he must become the "beam of light" that the Affirmation of the Disciple intones. He must "tread this way, the ways of men, and know the ways of God, and thus stand" at the centre of the cross of discipleship.

What begins as an urge to incarnate in response to the pull of dense form transforms over time into the free choice of the soul to incarnate in form life for the expression of service—for redemptive purposes, not satisfaction of the appetites. I wonder if the present worldwide financial crisis isn't offering the opportunity to free ourselves from the pull of dense matter, of which materialism and the terrible economic disparity are the crystallised result, and to begin to see the world of forms as a place for the redemption of matter by infusing it with spiritual purpose.

Capricorn, as I mentioned, is a sign of endings and beginnings, and the Roman god Janus was depicted facing two ways: looking back to the past and forward to the future. Astrologically, the planet Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn, Saturn being one of the four Lords of Karma who "forces man to face up to the past, and in the present to prepare for the future. Such is the intention and purpose of karmic opportunity", the Tibetan says. We often think of karma as punishment—Judge Judy bringing down the gavel and declaring the verdict "GUILTY!" But the root meaning of "disciple" is "learning boy". The whole purpose of karma is not punitive but educational, so that we can learn through recognition of past mistakes to choose a higher, better way in the future. This is the blessing of memory. The curse of memory is to hold onto and be imprisoned by the past. Not only individuals but whole societies do this. I read once that for the Serbian people an event that occurred 500 years ago is still remembered and kept alive not only in their history but in commemorations in their present culture. That disastrous loss in battle at the hands of their neighbours is kept perennially alive and nourishes a perpetual state of grievance. I don't know if there are any Serbs here to day; if so I don't mean to offend, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say such a practice is not psychologically healthy. At some point, we have to let go of old wrongs and even serious grievances--not only to set free those who wronged us, but to gain our own release from the grip of the past. The poet George Herbert put it beautifully: "He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself, for every man has need to be forgiven."

Another saying—that one can forgive, but can't forget—I don't think holds true. Memory isn't infallible. Some of our most cherished, deeply held memories can harden or crystallise into a form that only vaguely retains the original quality of the actual event or experience itself. In other words, memory can distort. And in addition, the doctrine of the Law of Karma teaches that karma is not for purposes of punishment but for the restoration of equilibrium—of balance. And this is accomplished by the direct experience of whatever one sought to hold at a far distance from oneself. Just as inclusiveness is the key to understanding consciousness, so the path of initiation is the accumulation of experience leading to a breadth of understanding that leaves no one and nothing "beyond the pale". Perhaps that's why the Tibetan defines true harmlessness as the completed point of view. In such a state karma is brought to an end; there is no need for a further correction of course.

Apart from all this, there is another problem with memory. The Tibetan said that "memory is the holding on to that which has been known." In this sense memory becomes a factor of limitation to the further development of the mind. This may be why an acute memory can actually be an expression of an overdeveloped concrete mind. Last year there was the release in the media of research into those rare cases of people who have such highly developed memories that they can remember exactly what they were doing on such and such a date years ago. Any date, no matter how trivial the life lived that day might have been, they could remember in detail. Several of these people were interviewed in the media and they all described their capacity as a curse—a burden that weighed on them enormously. And you can see why.

It has been said that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but perhaps what is meant is that those who don't learn from experience have to live through it again and again until they do. The movie "Groundhog Day" is wonderful depiction of this truth. On a higher level, one of the Rules for Initiates and Disciples given in The Rays and the Initiations says, "Let there be no recollection and yet let memory rule." When the lessons of experience have been assimilated so deeply that they become an ingrained habit, then the experience itself can be forgotten—released. "The initiate wastes no time in looking backward towards the lessons learned; he works from habit—based on instinctual memory.

The spiritual Constitution of Man confirms this establishment of habit in the permanent atoms—the "memory cells" which serve as repositories of past experience. Although the human soul reincarnates over and over again, we don't retain (most of us) any memories of past lives, and this is a blessing. We are reborn each time with a clean slate in terms of memory (not karma) so that our minds can look forward. But at death the soul reviews the past incarnation and isolates the three main experiences of that lifetime which were the main conditioning factors in that life, and which also hold the keys to the next incarnation. Esoterically they are "the three seeds or germs of the future," as the Tibetan called them. Seed One determines the type of physical environment which the next incarnation will return to. Seed Two determines the quality of the etheric body and therefore the ray energies and the centres that will be active in the next incarnation. And Seed Three gives the astral or emotional key and the relationships that will be renewed in the next lifetime.

That is all that the soul retains at the close of a particular incarnation. Just as you can't drive by looking in the rear-view mirror, so you can't develop spiritually by continually looking to the past—either for reasons of resurrecting "past glory" or out of shame or guilt. What the soul needs us to know, to recognise and account for, will come to the light of mind, as the disciple discovers in Scorpio. When he enters into battle with the pairs of opposites, the memory is evoked and then every latent quality rises to the surface of the personality, and then, as the Tibetan says, "the fight is on". Perhaps humanity collectively is reaching this stage at the close of the age, when Christ predicted that "all things shall be shouted from the housetops". And indeed it seems this is a time for such a reckoning. From our discussion of memory we can see how important it is to have free minds. The goal is what the Tibetan called "right forgetfulness, or the elimination out of the consciousness of all those forms which have hitherto veiled the Real."

These are just a few points to hold in mind on the experience of the spiritual seeker in Capricorn. The journey to the mountain top of initiation is made over many lifetimes, and it's very difficult to gain an understanding of its implications, but some closing words from the Tibetan help to clarify: "The wonder and the immensity of the drama unfolding in the universe is a proof of its reality, and the grasp of man, small though it may appear to be, is a guarantee of his divinity. Stage by stage we slowly make our approach to the goal of conscious and intelligent awareness. Step by step we are mastering matter and making more adequate the mechanism of awareness and of contact. Little by little we (and by that I mean the human family, as a whole) are approaching the "place of recognition," and are preparing to climb the mountain of vision. If aspirants but realised the wonders of that revelation, and if they grasped the magnificence of the reward given to their efforts, we would have less failure, more courage, a greater and steadier achievement, and consequently a more rapidly illumined world."

Let us work now in meditation with our keynote, "Lost am I in lighted supernal, yet on that light I turn my back."

FESTIVAL OF CAPRICORN
New York, January 10, 2009
Sarah McKechnie

Top of page ^