Dear Friends,
- Hindus have been waiting for Kalki for 3,700 years.
- Buddhists have been waiting for Maitreya for 2,600 years.
- Jews have been waiting for the Messiah for 5,500 years.
- Christians have been waiting for Jesus for 2,000 years.
- Sunnah have been waiting for Prophet Issa for 1,400 years.
- Muslims have been waiting for a Messiah from the line of Muhammad for 1,300 years.
- Shiites have been waiting for the Mahdi for 1,080 years.
- Druze have been waiting for Hamza Ibn Ali for 1,000 years.
-Most embrace the idea of a “savior” and claim that the world will remain full of wickedness until this savior comes and fills it with goodness and justice.
Our problem on this planet is that people are waiting for someone else to come and solve their problems, rather than doing it themselves. – Imtiaz Mahmood
And “what if” all of these have returned, as representatives of our solar Christ, exist on the inner planes and are accessible for us to listen to and ACT on? This return is in us, and is us, as we take on the Light of Christ and become Christed Beings, thus freeing ourselves and giving expression to the New Age.
This is the Age of Activity. The problems of humanity are mended by a mighty power, which is within all of us, to act in love, demonstrating compassion and forgiveness. We can drop the stones we use to throw at others, reaching up for Love—which is less than a stone’s throw away, giving birth to the Christ yet again. A Blessed Holy Season!
The prophets, the messengers, the chosen ones, are a golden chain, A single soul. Deny one, deny the rest! Just one sun, seen through different windows -Rumi
Some Readings/Meditations for Christmas:
It is now the hour for us to rise from sleep, because our salvation is nearer than when we came to believe.
The powers of heaven will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming upon a cloud with great power and majesty…”look up, because your redemption is at hand.”
Law must give place to Love, and separate races and nations be united in one universal brotherhood, with Christ as the eldest brother.
When our hearts have the living faith, have received Jesus Christ into them, then will the light of the world be born within us as in a humble stable.
So peace will come again on earth, but a peace unlike aught known before. Then will the will-to-good flower forth as understanding, and understanding blossom as goodwill.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called wonderful., Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. [God with us] Isaiah 7:14
Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his reward is with him and his work before him. Isaiah 62:11
There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse and a flower shall spring out of its root, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and the spirit of the awe of the Lord shall fill him.
Divine Mother, Let my soul give birth to that peace that passes all understanding.
And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
Mary said: For myself I ask nothing, but for the human race, all. Let the Messiah be born!
And Mary said, my soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
The Lord gives Light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
That Christ is the true Light, which lighteth every one that cometh into the world.
As many as receive Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
From Father Paul: Awakening, Return, Feast
The awakening, the return and the feast were taught by our Lord in the parable of the prodigal son. And these, along with epigenesis, are really the foundation of the process of illumination, both of mind and body, at which point the light may be received, can come in, and can become an existent part of our physical being. For until this takes place, the regeneration and the fruits of the Spirit, which are really the epigenesis, will not be existent and will not be known. It will not be seen or experienced. And those things are experienced not in the physical but in what some people call higher mind, or I would call it the lower heaven world. They are in the upper psychic world, so to speak.
The awakening we are talking about happens at the moment when the individual starts to become conscious of the fact that he is a living being which is partly god and partly man. When he comes to the state of understanding that he has a personal divinity which is a part of the Whole, then he begins to come to a point where he knows that God exists, and that he exists with Him.
As to awakening, you’ll know when you have succeeded. It is usually after you have gone through a certain portion of life, or a short period at least, where you swear that every person you ever knew has turned his head away from you and doesn’t want anything to do with you for some reason or other. You thought you had friends here and there, but you find out that you haven’t got anybody.
Then you start to look around and wonder if there is a Jesus Christ someplace. Because I have never seen it to fail that most people just can’t be bothered with any spiritual advancement until they get down to the spot where everybody else has turned their back. They’re hungry, and their heart is hungry too, when everything else has failed them. And then they’ll turn to see if there’s anything left, really, that will help them out. This is an experience that every person goes through sometime or other. Now, the people you are calling friends may still be your friends, but with their every action it doesn’t appear that way to you. And this happens.
The return to God is the letting go so that things can happen. And this is where we lay everything on the altar. You lay it all on the altar and ask nothing. Now, when you do this, you are letting go and letting God. Until you do, you haven’t done anything, because that is the moment at which you have returned from strictly mortal consciousness to a point or interim of where you begin to start to have what is commonly known as God-consciousness: cosmic consciousness, or a consciousness in the higher mind. Without this you are, as the theologians would say, still Adam in his prehistoric state and have not yet earned the right to enter the banquet room of the feast. You have not returned to the Father, and therefore no feast is possible to be had. This is when you start to receive the Light of Christ, when the body and the face begin to change. Your body starts to take on and go through the rebuilding process.
The feast doesn’t come until after you’ve gotten a full dose, so to speak, of that Light within you, when you have a real honest-to-God illumination–and I’m not talking about you sitting there in meditation and seeing one of those little white balls running across, you know. It is when you really have got it so you can’t miss it, so that you are never in darkness again.
The feast in reality is only made possible because of the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we use this in a blanket way, because this tells the whole end resultant of the great cosmic play, in reality; for only then will epigenesis exist, which has the power to let the illumination take place. Man in himself could not reach illumination. Man in himself would not have earned it. This is a great cosmic gift. It has been made possible by the Father from the first, but in this age and in this day it is distinctly, more than ever before, a gift of God.
We were designed from a cosmic standpoint to have that Light, and we rejected it once, or maybe a hundred times, but at least once. We rejected putting ourselves, our “all”, upon the altar, or we refused to let go and let God. And I can say it in a few more ways too, but it’s all the same. And so now we need the grace, the epigenesis, the power, that extra gift of the Creator, the evolving life to push us across the line to get us really started.
AWAKENING II ( cont. from last issue)
“AWAKE, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”
…The wisdom which results from new birth shows us that we are truly Children of the Sun, even now. When this knowledge comes, it wells up in our hearts as a song of Joy, and we turn from the limitations of the senses to the freedom of spiritual knowing.”
In Malachi 4:2, the prophet said, “For behold, the day comes, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble, the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of Hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear My Name, the Sun of Righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”
The Sun, when it comes, and the Christ with His Spirit returns to earth, will be so dazzling as to destroy all the darkness before it. It will burn the dross, and only the gold, the righteous, shall remain.
When the Christ Spirit comes to show man the way, by its very brightness, the negative shows up the more prominently, as the brighter the lighter, the darker and more defined the shadow cast by an object.
If you placed a light within your body so strong it make all transparent, except that which was foreign to its inherent nature, or that which was not good, the evil tendencies would show out the stronger, and have to be faced. There would be no nice dense place to hide the faults.
As long as there was no light, mankind could hide his sins, but now they show, and he has to get rid of them, or leave the scene.
On the other hand, to him who loves God, and wants to do well, and turn to Christ, then does this merciless spotlight become the healing Sun of Righteousness.
Just so, a great teacher, who come to emulate Jesus Christ on earth, to bring men to the Light, and to God, the Father, has to first flush all negation to the surface, where it can be gotten rid of before he can work with the True Son within the man. He has to rout out all the anger and hatred and dissipation, the lies and stealing. He has to make the subject face them and consciously turn from all attachment to them.
Jesus healed many people and performed many miracles. He woke Lazarus from the sleep of death, in order that the faith of many might be strengthened.
Paul promised that he would wake us all when he comes, in Cor. 15:51 – “Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed.”
The Psalmist declares in Psalm 27, verse 1,
“The Lord is my Light and my Salvation.”
The awakening comes from the Lord through the Scriptures as Psalm 119 proves, when David says that, “Thy Word is a lamp to my feet, and a Light to my Path.”
The Scriptures declare the Glory of God.
Some people awake and fine their Soul empty. Isaiah 29, verse 8: “But he awaketh and his love is empty, but the awaketh and he is faint.”
Others wake up as if they were once dead. Ephesians 5:14.
“Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead.”
After the Great Awakening, the Light of Christ comes. In other words, “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”
Nothing can progress spiritually for us ‘til we are awakened, by Christ through the Light of his word in us.
In Acts, chapter 16, verse 27, the following is recorded: “When the jailer awoke and saw that the doors of the prison had been opened, he drew his sword and was on the point of killing himself.” The jailer is mass mind. When mass mind sees the arousing of the believer, it will destroy itself.
In Romans 13, verse 2, Paul says “Because as I think you have realized the present time is of the highest importance, it is time to wake up to Reality. Every day brings God’s Salvation nearer.”
We are creators. And when we leave this plane
we’ll have to live within the world we have created –
not with the things or material effects, but in the
“house” of our thoughts and feelings, and whatever
they may have effected within us. Pondering by M.R. Blighton
The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
(Book: No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
So many things which come for our spiritual good may come in a wounding way. Or perhaps it is
the mother aspect, which Father Paul always described as “the wound of the mother”, when I thought he meant “womb”. It may take a long time to eventually get past the stage of feeling wounded, or to see the blessing within the wound, and the great and patient Love of God and Spirit (which perhaps “went to some pains” to bring it to you). Pondering by M.R. Blighton
Matthew 12:20 A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench…
The shepherd spends much time alone with his sheep in solitary situations. A thing common to almost every shepherd to while away his time is his reed pipe, a frail little instruments of two reeds bound together, hollowed out with holes on the side. Many a joyful hour has been tooted away, and the shepherd is well-noted for his sentimentality concerning his personal reed pipe. As these reeds are very frail, it is easily broken, and it is most common to see a shepherd’s personal reed pipe repaired many times over until sometimes the original pipe is difficult to even see, and no one other than its owner would even consider saving it. But the shepherd will most determinately hold on to it. He will not let it go. As bruised and battered as it may be, he loves it too much to actually break it and throw it away.
The smoking flax shall he not quench. Here we see a little clay lamp, so typical of bible lands, with its wick floating in an hour or two’s worth of olive oil. The oil burns out, the wick smokes. Rather than throw the used smoking wick away as we might possibly do, the owner of biblical times will carefully re-oil the wick and patiently nurse it back to usefulness that it may again burn forth its light. –from David Hamilton in 1972 HOOM newsletter.
THE WORD MADE FLESH
John begins his Gospel thus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” …
There is an esoteric reason why Jesus was born in Bethlehem: it is said that a magnetic center exists between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, through which powerful spiritual currents are passing into the heart of earth. It has been said that for thousands of years before the Christian Era, the wise men and teachers of Mystery Schools were helping to prepare this holy place for the transcendent work of the Christ; for in their innermost center all Schools of eternal truth work together in unity and harmony to lift and enlighten mankind.
At the end of a long straggling street lined with low flat-roofed houses is the shrine to which millions of pilgrims since Jesus’ time have turned their steps, and the Church of the Nativity was erected there in 327 A.D. over the grotto where Jesus is believed to have been born. This church is the oldest monument of Christian architecture in the world. Above the place where the manger-cradle is supposed to have stood, there is now a marble trough placed in commemoration..
Joseph knew of caves in the hillside used as stables where animals were kept, and here he was able to shelter their own donkey and provisions. So he took Mary and made a place comfortable for her. The child Jesus was to be born in this lowly place – but here too was found the great simplicity and lack of pretense which were to mark the life of the Lord Jesus. Thus, Mary “brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” These two were privileged as the first to behold our Lord Jesus in this incarnation.
The next to be summoned to the presence of the new-born King were shepherds guarding their flocks through the night in a nearby field. “And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the brightness of God shone round about them, and they feared with a great fear. But the Angel said to them: ‘Fear not. For behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. And this will be a sign to you. You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger.’ Suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will!’”
When the angels went away from them into heaven, says St. Luke, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child; and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. So it was that the wondrous spirit whom we know as Jesus was born into a pure and passionless body. His body was the best that could be produced on Earth, and the task of Jesus, in this embodiment, was to evolve it to the highest possible degree of perfection as preparation for the great purpose it was to serve.
Since the virgin is also a symbol of purity and chastity, her adoration is common to every world religion. Isis in Egypt and Ceres in Greece are familiar examples. Around the virgin who becomes a divine mother centers the important work of the spiritual Mysteries of each country. Isis had said: “The fruit that I bear is the sun.” The pre-Christian Madonna is represented as bearing in her arms the Sun Child, born at the Winter Solstice, to bring new life to the earth and all mankind.
–From The Story of Jesus
I had a dream many years ago when first in the Order. I was among a group of shepherds in a hillside at night, and while guarding our flocks, we discussed the class we had attended that day, as we were initiates in a spiritual school. It seems as if the hills were someone barren with withered vegetation but there were shrubs and enough forage for our sheep. As we sat together, we were suddenly overwhelmed by a brilliant Light, and out of the night sky appeared angelic messengers. Both visually and internally, we were transfixed by this angelic choir that were telepathically celebrating and directing us to bring our flocks into Bethlehem as the Messiah had just been born and we were to be privileged to greet Him.
The impression after this vision faded was that we at once, still in an elevated state of bliss, moved down the path. We needed no further direction to find the holy family as the clarity of that vision remained,