Freedom through the Gateway of the Imagination

Good evening friends and welcome. Scorpio is the sign most associated with the dweller on the threshold, when all the mental, emotional and physical vices that hold us prisoner in the world are confronted head on in the fight for spiritual freedom. And this battle for freedom of various kinds is responsible for much of the tension that exists in the world today. There is the fight for the so-called "free world" and for the rights of individuals and minority groups; the fight for freedom from religious or state imposed restraints; and again, the fight for freedom from hunger and disease that so many in the world suffer from. And as well as this, there is the struggle towards release from outer material, emotional and mental constraints that will finally allow the individual personality to achieve true freedom in the light of the soul.

Rudolph Steiner expressed freedom as a "view of the world based on spiritual activity, on action, thinking and feeling that arises from the individual human spirit"1. He said, "I call a thing free which exists and acts from the pure necessity of its nature, and I call that unfree, of which the being and action are precisely and fixedly determined by something else". Based on this definition, few are truly free as many are trapped by their own ideas of freedom in relation to the society in which they live. True freedom is pure creativity; it is acting in accordance with spiritual impulses that inspire the personality directly from the soul and then expressing them in the world. If true freedom existed, there would be no need for man-made laws. This would not be anarchy as all would be living and acting in a state of spiritual order – each a law unto himself but also resonating harmoniously with all other souls expressing the qualities of unity, peace and love, each in their own creative way.

The freedom of which we speak in general terms today is therefore relative, and the degree of liberation we can attain depends upon our vision and what we imagine freedom to be. For many the freedom they seek is simply entrance into a more comfortable prison house from which liberation must again be sought later on, but the lesson that every human being has to learn is that freedom cannot be achieved through the escaping of duties and responsibilities. Rather the contrary. Also, some who fight for the freedom of others may be physically incarcerated and yet remain far freer than those who impose that captivity. An example would be Aung San Suu Kyi fighting for democracy and human rights in Burma/Myanmar today.

Another bid for freedom is to be seen in the work of the artist engulfed in bitter, inner conflict and fighting for liberation to a new perspective and understanding of life. We see much of this taking place today, and while the art produced may not always be of the highest spiritual quality, its symbolic portrayal of an area of human psychology communicates meaning and a measure of enlightenment for others. So who is to judge its value? Kew Gardens’ current exhibition of Henry Moore’s sculptures of large freestanding and reclining forms conveys his particular slant on freedom. According to Moore, the freedom he wanted was freedom from any reason for doing them in the first place or for finding a "meaning" for them. The vital thing for an artist, he said, is "to have a subject that allows (him) to try out all kinds of formal ideas – things that he doesn’t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with." Experiments of this kind are perhaps a way of discovering and breaking through conditioning patterns of thought and feeling that are limiting our perspective in some way. No matter what we create, the inner impulse must come from somewhere, and by removing any conscious reason for creating a piece of art, it may reveal something about a more subtle layer of conditioning that lies beneath the surface of consciousness.

By way of contrast, a completely different kind of artistic freedom was reported on recently concerning a young Somalian. His time was spent extorting money from people at roadblocks in Mogadishu on behalf of warlords and with the aid of an AK-47 assault rifle. He wrote that since birth, he and others had been fighting without knowing if it was right or wrong. One day he received his first taste of a new vision when he heard the unique sound of a hip-hop fusion group composed of young Somali refugees living in neighbouring Nairobi and he packed up and joined their group to play a part in bringing change and vision to his country. The group, named "New Era", appeals to the young and engages them in issues such as HIV and women’s rights, an activity not without its dangers given the traditional, fundamentalist Islamic background of his homeland. Here we see that it is not until we realise that we are in prison that we can do anything about escaping. This challenges our concepts of justice and retribution – for there must be many thousands involved in crime or languishing in gaol who are victims of both their own and their society’s ignorance and whose lives could be transformed through educational techniques – techniques that lead them out of their prison house into a more constructive and appropriate way of expressing their inner identity.

Such sudden transformations of evil behaviour into good highlight the fact that human beings are dual in nature, capable of expressing both the darkest and the noblest of qualities. The task is to bring the light and dark that lies within us to a point of fusion where the soul can take control of the lower elemental forces in our nature – which unchecked can drive us into corruption. Scorpio symbolises this process as it is the sign where our vices fully surface to be transmuted into good. And it is through the use of the imagination to visualise a new goal that we can then escape from our individual prison house. As in the case of the young Somalian, as soon as we can picture something better than what we know, we can drive forward towards its realisation. And for the aspirant in Scorpio, its ruler, Mars, supplies the zeal and fiery aspiration to make real progress towards that new vision.

Of course, it’s not always quite as simple as that for enormous psychological baggage accumulated from countless incarnations has to be shed in order to fully enter into the light of the soul. In this connection we are told that two factors from the past emerge in the Scorpio experience. These are memory and the consequence of memory, the Dweller on the Threshold or the sum total of all experiences, thoughts and desires that have gone to make the personality and which in their accumulation, now prevent the soul’s triumph. At a certain stage on the path, the disciple has to recognise that memory is not just the past, but a "creative power", a power recalled from the deep recesses of the mind, from the racial and individual subconscious, from glamours and illusions inherited and unconquered from past lives which he is called to face in the light of the intuition. We read too in Esoteric Astrology: "When the mind has reached a relatively high stage of development, the memory aspect is evoked in a new and conscious manner and then every latent pre-disposition, every racial and national instinct, every unconquered situation and every controlling fault rises to the surface of consciousness and then—the fight is on. The keynote of Scorpio is, however, Triumph. This is its major expression upon the physical plane."

It seems appropriate to pause now and use an esoteric mantram that embodies the discipleship attitude of striving to free oneself from the rule of the personality and similarly to help free humanity from its bondage. The intent of the Hierarchy is to increase our capacity for freedom in order that we may function effectively with that "life more abundantly" which the Christ will bring and which demands that the spirit of man be free—free to approach divinity and free also to choose the Way of that approach. The mantram bears the name, "The Affirmation of the Disciple", and the Tibetan tells us that it involves certain inner recognitions and acceptances which are readily perceived by those whose intuition is sufficiently awake; but its meaning should not be beyond the ability of any sincere student and thinker to penetrate if it appeals to them as significant and warranting their effort.

So can we take a few moments of reflection and then sound 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 focused 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.

OM

The mantram of the disciple encourages the correct use of the creative imagination – a faculty that is stimulated in a new and vital way in Scorpio. So often the imagination is used negatively to picture bad situations or events and even illnesses lying in wait for us, instead of getting on with the opportunity the present affords us to reorient ourselves towards the soul and reality. Generally speaking, imagination is more often than not used in the anticipation of either pleasant or unpleasant experiences, and the morbid imagination is a big factor in causing depression, one of the serious obstacles to liberation for many well-meaning people today. Here the negative scenarios that repeatedly crop up in the mind eventually become "encased" and literally block out the light of escape into new worlds and the beauty that surrounds us. In these cases the urge of the soul’s vision and will to express "good" on the physical plane is sensed but the personality is incapable of living up to the soul’s demands. When this occurs, the friction set up in the consciousness of the disciple can lead to disease in the form of depression through a sense of futility and failure.

The spiritual imagination has been described by the Tibetan as "the factor of greatest service to man" in its capacity "to take the place of the ancient glamour by means of which we have fabricated the untrue world in which we appear to live and move and have our being." In order to establish the right use of the imagination, we have to be alert to when we are unconsciously using it in a harmful, glamorous way, and one of the techniques for doing this is the practice of an evening review. This is more than just a recall of our conduct and interaction with others. It is a revision of our lines of thought and use of the imagination throughout the day. We not only see the effect that they have had for good or bad on our speech and actions but also discover habitual patterns that are imprisoning us in selfishness and desire. It is a liberating exercise through which we learn how to reorient the creative imagination towards the recognition of our true being, the divine observer, and examine ourselves in the presence of its unconditional Love.

Persistently undertaken, the evening review is one of the most powerful techniques we have to speed up our progress and dismantle those "forests of delusion" of thoughtforms wrongly cultivated. Devoting a small time each day to this enables us to move on, to forget the past after consciously assimilating its lessons. This practice encourages the transmutation of experience and knowledge into wisdom, which fused with the imagination, evokes higher ideals and vibrations and consciously weaves them into the substance of one’s being. In this way we are truly liberated from the past.

Pertinent to these thoughts on the right use of the imagination is what Rudolf Steiner called the "moral imagination". Steiner wrote that the only truly moral person is one whose morals are created from the inner resources of spirit. Here creativity comes first and then application. In contrast to this, someone whose morals are based on the ideas of others, on tradition or culture, is simply following that which is given to him and which appeals to his sense of rightness. Error lies, Steiner said, where moral content is not newly created at every moment, but is inherited and comes to be regarded like the laws of nature. "As a moral being each individual produces his own content. What happens to man, and in man, becomes a moral element only when in human experience, it becomes an individual’s own." This does not mean, of course, that spiritual teachings or religions have no place in helping evolutionary unfoldment. Their purpose is to help each individual unlock the door to truth that resides within each human heart. After that it is up to them to become a living expression of what is discovered therein. These thoughts are beautifully encapsulated in the following passage from the Bhagavad-Gita:

"For the possessors of wisdom, united in soul-vision, giving up the fruit of works, freed from the bondage of rebirth, reach the home where no sorrow dwells.

"When thy soul shall pass beyond the forest of delusion, thou shalt no more regard what shall be taught or what has been taught.

"When withdrawn from traditional teaching, thy soul shall stand steadfast, firm in soul-vision, then shalt thou gain union with the Soul." (Gita II, 51, 52 and 53.)

Freedom through the right use of the imagination puts a man in touch with the springs of his own creativity. No longer does he follow the conventional wisdom of the day because he is at one with the soul and expressing the energy of truth of that constant contact. The imagination that helped him win through to this state of freedom is now used with complete mastery to literally create images in thought substance which can relay truth to humanity in a manner that can be understood and used at its particular stage of conscious unfoldment. The truths that humanity now needs are those that will help move it out of its individualistic expression into holistic group consciousness.

This is part of the work that we do during these full moon periods as we approach higher centres of Life and Light, in an appeal for revelation on behalf of humanity. It is an act of freedom through the right use of the group imagination. It is an affirmation that the starry heavens, the solar system and the planetary spheres are all the manifestations of great spiritual Lives carrying specific qualities, meaning and opportunity as we cycle into and out of their conditioning influences. While they are conditioning, they are not controlling, and simply help us to evolve into a state whereby we can use our own moral imagination in a greater measure of freedom from earthly constraints. The full moon work is steadily building the new world religion which will reveal this to humanity and teach it how to bring about its own freedom through the conscious invocation of these great Lives who are free in every sense that we can imagine, while yet still evolving themselves. The truth that can be evoked from them by those working in meditation is now available to release many from the wheel of rebirth and into a new state of liberation. Through the right use of the group imagination, let us now make our contribution to that end, using the keynote Warrior I am and from the battle I emerge triumphant.

Christine Morgan

Festival of Scorpio
London
October 2007

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¹ The Philosophy of Freedom – Rudolph Steiner