Chapter 3- Philosophy: 6

Activities Recommended:

• Reasoning exercises (impersonal, objective)
• Jigsaw puzzles
• Poetry writing
• Involvement in poetry reading societies
• Exercises concerning discipline of will
• The observance of good debate teams
• The reading of some much loved fiction
• Intelligent (not sour or critical) company
• Homoeopathic prescriptive for tolerance

All men are energetic to life’s offerings! They are excited and enthused, rapportive and ecstatic - responsive and collective - they love life! However, during certain episodes within a lifetime we can be presented with too many incoming choices and experiences, many of which we have to ‘dutifully’ come to ignore, for the sake of propriety, for ‘peace’ or for tardiness.

Unfortunately, very quickly, the elated and most passionate of feelings are associated with those things that are disruptive or unobtainable to our person. When we begin to become excited or delighted there is a dismay which is fast padding its way behind - an elemental queasiness that says ‘let's be sensible’, or mutters that of former disappointments and so forth.

The philosophically weak are generally such fellows that due to past circumstances have held grave disappointments about themselves and the way it has all worked out. They may be, by contrast (yet true to this nature) the most wonderful of idealists at heart - but due to a depressed ego (‘depressed’ as in sad, and ‘depressed’ as in held under) their tolerance is poor, their reasoning ability lacking tensility, and their sense of self forever in question, or awash in some watercolor splash of ‘oneness’ or nothing.

Reasoning, of itself, brings further gifts to any individual who just happens to be around it, even regardless of their thinking. The child who grows up in the company of those who can reason well (a pure uncontaminated reasoning, rather than a selfish, exploitative, manipulating, lower band of reasoning) shall grow with that mind-space ever after apparent, when compared to the dear little souls who have not had such an advantage. This is measurably illustrated.

To a lesser degree the same can be for adults whose needs are that they should be exposed to some bright minds which correspond upon the higher ethers and make party there amongst the thought.

Philosophy is not frivolity, but it does require a level of happiness that the thinker is relaxed enough to be open to his new ideas. A sad mind cannot comprehend new thought, but closes off from the world and often, because of this, counselling to the sad needs come from the past with those ideas that they already have available - for it is not a time or a possibility to introduce spheres of hitherto unexplored terrain to help move them out from themselves - the condition itself does prohibit it.

And so, for the reasoning, we would look to a balance of happy and enjoyable imaginative experiences, with also the more practical enstrengthening exercises. There is a need for ‘sound’ thinking which holds a proven basis in reality, and there are exercises which can be managed to do just that - re-establish the connections between the mind and the truth which lives independently of the thinker.

Chapter 3- Philosophy: 5

Activities Contraindicated

• Role playing
• Drama classes or performances
• Rebirthing
• Sales positions
• Mediumship

As the ego is inflexible to new and varied thought, the individual needs build a strength upon a strength, rather than come to tax himself in ways which would prove too difficult to manage, or too confusing to his already weakened sense of self.

When the student attempts to assume differing identities outside of his own true experience, he begins to make ‘cells’ (cells alike to honeycomb cells added one upon another) around his veneer of personality. These cells dissipate if not used regularly (not fed with a vitality from interest or action) or will break off after death. However, even though they are artificially contrived by the man they are not of the man. They are distinct, because in fact they are not directly of his being’s lively essences.

Spiritually speaking, everything a man does and says lives in and about him for a while thereafter. Memory is everywhere - we, our bodies, and that which is in the immediate around us, is impressionable to all that we do and say. It is reliving a constant recollection in mime continually.

Now when we set about to manufacture or enact out a role which does not come from a reasonable source within us (i.e. has not a history of experience to verify it, or does not contain the preceding causes for our arriving at that given particular in our behaviour directly) then it happens that we begin to assume personas which can be cells as described, (cankerous cells) or even as ghosts of our own maintaining.

It is true to say that role playing can be useful when it comes to an effort of experience in strengthening the empathetic/sympathetic nerves. However, it is far more valid and reasonable an experience to pursue such empathies in the moment, in the first response, rather than by a reenactment of a past and dead episode now gone. To be moved by a need and respond to it - rather than play-act what should or should not have occurred in the hindsight.
 

Rebirthing is a nonsense to the consciousness. It is a little alike to trying to move your memory into your toe to begin to interpret the sensations it experienced on the bush walk that brought you the blisters. You can communicate these impressions back into your consciousness if you consider it important - yet it is no clear comprehension of the individuality who drove the body, the foot and the toe at that time at all.

The incarnating process takes many, many years before the layers of a man are fused together and awakened into a full knowing. During the sacred passage into this life, when the individual enters into his infancy and drives down into matter with a ferocity of spirit, love and great joy - he has supporting him, and within him, the fiercest advantage and the greatest of ecstasies (not to mention vitalities) as he shall ever have during the course of his life to follow. 

Minute by minute the heavenly forces retire slowly unto death - however, at the point of birth and for the first seven years after, the soul within the frame is completely protected from the trauma that the consciousness of the adult might come to know later. It is a blissful existence, empowered by the innocence that the wisdom from heaven does bring.

Rebirthing only begins to become meaningful as an interpretive review from the time of puberty in which the forces then negotiated and begun to be comprised, unfortunately bear down upon the soul much sadness, which was not formerly felt before. This will not be the case in the future adolescent to come - yet particularly now, when the forces spill out and into the awakening ego as they do, materialism is painful and the emanations of men become as an immense pressure to the soul within.

Mediumship is destabilizing - as is the example shown to us by the many suffering schizophrenics, who have weakened to such a condition which do admit all kinds of ‘inhabitants’ to them. All of us are inspired by sources of consciousness which are outside of our own - this is common enough. Even in mere day-to-day thinking dialogues of inner argument occur. However, for the individual who has not the capacity or the strength to exercise his discriminatory thought processes as well, there shall only be a huge confusion to follow if he pays attention to outside sources, valuing them higher than his own directives.

This is one of the main reasons it cannot be stressed enough to students that they needs come to all ideas respecting their own heart and mind in every matter foremostly. Added to this is the respect we shall give to ourselves by saying there is no better entity to motivate my body and my mind and know my heart as myself. Therefore, why give it over to an unknown? 

The glamor of the invisible soon becomes tedious if there is no good substance to the offering. Unless an individual is born with a blood-clairvoyance which of itself develops naturally (without the opening of the fissures through drug taking or development circles etc.) then the mediumship might just require a medium-tugboat to get it back into more safer waters than before!

It is true to say that dramatic roles can actually forge a reality for the actor - that he shall truly become the part that he plays, should he enliven that reality by working his consciousness intently. By living it as it were - he can invoke it to repeat itself right here within his physical circumstances. However, for the philosophically weak this practice inhibits the individual from getting on with the necessary task of knowing himself.

Usually, when one is flexible enough, it is both useful and enjoyable to learn about the nature within by contrasting without. It is not uncommon either to watch men who are powerfully adept in their philosophical thinking to be able to summon many personas and assume them temporarily, knowing the whole character as if from the inside. But they are not doing this, at their stage, to learn about themselves in the process - they are moreover experiencing the other person in the practice - and this can be achieved safely only when their own sense of selfhood is so firmly proven and known to themselves that it is unshakeably unimpressionable to the personas they then go on to assume. The cells may become as reference points, but are not distracting to the consciousness as they would be amongst the egoically weak.

 

Chapter 3- Philosophy: 4

CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATION

My Philosophy is part of me

And comes with the dawn,

Infilled with selfhood, confidence, power and tone -

Proceeding out from the Immovable Kingdom

Known in my reverie,

Secret and sacred,

Gaining strength

From turning round and round and upside down.

Exhilarated when equilibrium returns,

It knows not the rigidity of strength

Nor the flexibility of weakness,

Is not experimental -

Only moving from knowing to further Knowing;

Is not speculative -

But moves from truth to further Truth,

Is not dialectical,

As the higher is called forth by the Higher,

Is not forceful -

But only suggests,

Is pleased to give way and be awash

To beauty, joy and Love.

Chapter 3- Philosophy: 3

A Prayer for Philosophical Strength

To the Sages of Thought

and the Congress of Exalted Reasoning -

Dear Divinities,

Today I pray

For great illumination

To glimpse behind the curtain

At this stage of our Creation;

To divine the very mysteries

Prismatic and complex to Truth

In both the adoring Heavens

And in this, our Blessed Earth.

As a mantle to God, may I find

The Word as is heard, as is known,

Pronounced in my being

My thought, and my heart

Be it now, be it here,

With your Love.

AMEN

Chapter 3- Philosophy: 2

Commentary:

The food we consume can readily inspire within us an expression of temperament characteristic of its own taste sensation.

Although each individual displays predominant characteristics of just one of the four of these temperaments, we do experience the conditions of all four, pronounced not by our outer personality necessarily, but regarded within.

The very temperamental nature of the substance of the food does speak to us and encourages within us the elemental persuasions thereof:

• SANGUINE: enlivened heavenly forces
• CHOLERIC: enlivened will forces
• PHLEGMATIC: subdued, containing forces
• MELANCHOLIC: contemplative soul searching

Ordinarily we mix our influences - sometimes all four may be represented at any given meal - but for the purpose of this exercise we are coming to know the experience with a heightened definition which will markedly work upon us.

This is a safe way for an individual to manifest and experience differing perspectives, all true to himself, yet from four very different approaches. If he alternates a sweet meal with a savoury, a sharp with that of a watery, (and so it goes) he becomes willingly conversant in diversity, he begins to define well and make further comparisons.

Philosophy begins in reason, reason begins in actuality - actuality (in this instance) is brought to us via our sensing of it.

The nutritive substances we assimilate nourish us, stimulate us, and become in us.

After one week of these observances the student will come to a mixed meal with a greater awareness than before of that which it comprises. Taste itself will be furthered.

Seven days - no more than once in two months - and if repeated, place the week into a differing phase of moon cycle from the previous, as each of the temperaments are affected uniquely in these varying days as well as their placing in relation to the seasons.

Chapter 3- Philosophy: 1

CHAPTER 3

Philosophy

Dietary Exercise Suggested:

(To be undertaken in one week periods)

Foods consumed within the one sitting are to be consistent in theme with the characteristic expressions of the temperaments (singly), and not to be confused within the one meal together. The four sensations are to be alternated, although the order this is done in is not important.

Example:

AIRY

SANGUINE DISHES: Sweet Sensations

Grain: Barley

Sweet curries (not hot, with fruit in); sweet pies (pumpkin, sweet potato, fruit, etc.); sweet soups; sweet syrups, desserts, stewed & fresh fruits; blossoms; beverages; honey; milks & milk products (more to do with the milk than the cream) etc.

[Note: the Brothers don't recommend dried processed sugar. Maple syrup, golden syrup, treacle, honey or dates and raisins etc. are all preferable.]

FIERY

CHOLERIC DISHES: Spicy and Hot Sensations

Grain: Oats

Mustard; paprika; chillies; pepper; horseradish; onions, leeks; hot curries; savory dishes in general which awaken the senses extremely.

WATERY

PHELGMATIC: Fluidic Dishes

Grain: Wheat

Soups; stews; casseroles (none of these to be overly tasty, but rather very bland); pulses; nuts; oils, cream; dumplings, pancakes, bread; melons; pumpkin; squash; zucchini and juices etc.

EARTHY

MELANCHOLIC METABOLIZERS: Bitter, Sharp, Tart and Salty Sensations

Grain: Rye

Citrus; parsnip, turnip; radish; soups & stews (can be salted); Raw Food Diet; aromatic bitters; bitter herbs: parsley; artichokes; rye breads: pumpernickel; milk products can be included like sharp cheeses or unsweetened yoghurts; pickles; vinegar: salad dressings (not so oily); celery; capers; olives pickled etc. 

 

The Twelve Pathways- Reaching for the Stars

Reaching for the Stars

Virtues predominant:

There can be a virtue of a kind when trying to manage the impossible, in that the future itself is not brought about by certainties living in the present, but rather hopes which are not as yet so very possible.

This therefore can conclude the twelve in its place as the last, being but a forerunner to a time which is not of now, but yet to be realized.
The virtue we can position here therefore, in an almost meaningless occupation (considering the truth occultly around it) is that there is a love of the subject which longs to know more and shall go anywhere it can to find what there is. It is also a knowledge of eventual fulfillment - though not in the immediate, it is still comprehended.

Hazardous problems in the deficit:

• Promoting falsehoods in place of truth

Lesser problems:

• Dissuasion of learning because of disappointment through lack of discovery
• The consumption of false foods and synthetic, chemically based products which have no etheric vitality or signature about them
• Glamorizing (and the persuasion thereof)
• Pontificating
• Flippancy (trivializing)

When reading through the problems that are possible in any one of us, it may appear discouraging when we find one or more that may pertain to a character weakness we acknowledge that we have. However, if there is just one sentence amongst the many which you feel describes a problem that you suffer, then under its category to come you may find the exercises useful, even though you may not have the majority of disorders so mentioned.

The Twelve Pathways- Religious Studies

Religious Studies

The virtues attributed:

The ability to suffer the hardship and sorrow of a collective humanity through the strength afforded by Christ and the Fellowship of all within.

Courage, illumination of souls - the striving and the pure intent - these are the virtues so given and then received.

Deficit disorders - major:

• Bitterness
• The enjoyment of disasters and ruin of others

Deficit disorders - minor:

• Lacks in poise, grace and style
• Inability to sing
• Unsympathetic to others’ problems or stories
• Displays weak mindedness
• Given to enjoy political argument (rather than action)