Training for the Incoming Ray: Ceremonial Order or Magic – Synthesis

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“The Seventh Ray of Ceremonial Order or Magic

Special Virtues:

Strength, perseverance, courage, courtesy, extreme care in details, self-reliance.

Vices of Ray:

Formalism, bigotry, pride, narrowness, superficial judgments, self-opinion over-indulged.

Virtues to be acquired:

Realization of unity, wide-mindedness, tolerance, humility, gentleness and love.

This is the ceremonial ray, the ray which makes a man delight in “all things done decently and in order,” and according to rule and precedent. It is the ray of the high priest and the court chamberlain, of the soldier who is a born genius in organization, of the ideal commissary general who will dress and feed the troops in the best possible way. It is the ray of the perfect nurse for the sick, careful in the smallest detail, though sometimes too much inclined to disregard the patients idiosyncrasies and to try and grind them in the iron mill of routine.

It is the ray of form, of the perfect sculptor, who sees and produces ideal beauty, of the designer of beautiful forms and patterns of any sort; but such a man would not be successful as a painter unless his influencing ray were the fourth. The combination of four with seven would make the very highest type of artist, form and color being both in excelsis. The literary work of the seventh ray man would be remarkable for its ultra-polished style, and such a writer would think far more of the manner than of the matter in his work but would always be fluent both in writing and speech. The seventh ray man will often be sectarian. He will delight in fixed ceremonials and observances, in great processions and shows, in reviews of troops and warships, in genealogical trees, and in rules of precedence.”

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As I may have mentioned before my personality ray is ray seven. If you look closely you will be able to see the influence in the blog content.

The incoming ray is this ray ceremonial order or magic. Inherent in this is a major challenge for humanity, which so often is disorganised and in disarray. Winging it, is not seventh ray. The seventh ray may be précised as “the ray of having your shit together”. This is a long way from higgledy-piggledy and in some ways anti-hippie but in other ways it is the ray, par excellence, of natural rhythm. Everything should be in synch and on time with natural law and rhythm.

Yes, ritual traditional magic, craft, and mantra are a part, but only a small one.

Organisation, vivification, and energising are what proper order brings. An organism needs to organise and carry out its given physical plane learning. Karma can be thought of as residual “shit” that you have to deal with. Hence in working off your shit you get your shit together, less new karma, debt paid off.

Many people resist being organised and have never experienced the slick and the smooth of all cogs working in unison. People who are self-obsessed are separative and do not view themselves as part of the holistic whole. ME is a luddite spanner in the works. It causes discordance and discord, dis-chord, the sound jars.

The challenge of the incoming ray is to eradicate this notion of self and alchemize it into the holistic-whole, or ONE. The one humanity.

To say to a sloppy ill disciplined person, who is fond of the weird and the whacky, that they need to have their shit together is to ask for resistance.

“Hey man, that is not New Age!”

“Yes, it is! Get a haircut and pull up your trousers. You need to focus and stop being so dissipated!”

If one meanders and only cherry picks the easy fruit off the tree of teaching, then one will not taste the golden apples higher up the tree, which need more and continued effort to attain. Many choose only those teachings that are strap-on to normal life. Few want radical change. One could say people want to keep their cherry pie and eat it.

The seventh ray is also the ray of constant evolution and application. This is because Synthesis takes new learning and incorporates it with the knowledge heretofore garnered. Knowledge is never complete, because of constant synthesis one could say that knowing is a present participle synonym of evolving, knowledge relates to evolution. True knowledge cannot ever be concrete and finished.

Synthesis is an antithesis of Idealism and Devotion, the departing sixth ray. Sixth ray separates, cleaves and divides, seventh ray heals, stitches the rent wounds of division and stirs its synthetic pot of alchemy in search of the new.   

The seventh ray is unlike the division with which our current world is so very badly scarred!!

It is time to synthesise and not cleave, the synthetic cauldron of inspiration must overcome the axe of cleavage.

Dharma of the Day #3

do not see apparent adversity as bad

rather see it as doorway, a garland

with which to decorate the new

within every challenge can be found

a seed which might germinate

into new experience and knowledge

all seeds whilst they are rooting

need careful care and attention

and newly sprouted stems

need to be rotated else they acquire bias

the germination of knowledge

is an act of love

which when tended, brings bounty

it is an act of receptivity to the spirit

knowledge which arrives quickly

is not so profound as that which

takes longer to mature,

much like vintage wine aged in its cask

vintage wine has more nuance

than that fresh from the vine

it has more depth and a subtle aroma

when wisdom arrives

it is like an old slipper

familiar to the foot

and slightly battered around the edges

it is not possible to attain wisdom

in the absence of trial

for all things have a price

only this one seems to be of better value

in learning to tend a garden

one learns much about Dao

and rhythm and seasoning

it makes one a better cook

in the Zen of gardening

hurry and haste are soon found

not to have any place

complete absorption in the moment

 –

in this manner one learns much

about the present

inherent in any gift of power

and all about, economy

better to tend a small garden well

than to take on a country estate

beauty in the small

heals the heart

in tending a garden

one tends one’s own heart

this teaches one

a sense of inner love

And what could be wrong with that?

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

I am currently reading l’étranger by Albert Camus which is one of the books in his Nobel Prize citation. I am reading it in French, and he is a darn good storyteller. The other book of his I read was essays.  He is a better novelist. I am enjoying it.

The main protagonist ends up in jail and he describes how after a time he forgets life outside and gets accustomed to the rhythm of prison life. He says that the days of the week lose their meaning and that all he is concerned with is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. These comprise his temporal horizon.

It is a bit like that here on the compound. The outside world does not impinge overly and I am, for now, pretty busy taking care of things for the wife and about the house and garden. One day blends softly causal into the next. There is a sense of eternal now. But I do know that tomorrow I will go up to the supermarket for supplies and petrol for the garden implements.

There are two other external appointments next week, the osteopath for me and the haematologist for the wife. The nurses will come here twice to take blood.

This is my temporal horizon, supermarkets and medical.

Ryōkan Taigu (良寛大愚) (1758–1831) was a quiet and unconventional Sōtō Zen Buddhist monk who lived much of his life as a hermit. Ryōkan is remembered for his poetry and calligraphy, which present the essence of Zen life.”

In some ways our way of life is hermitic too. Ryōkan had his hut on the hill and would from time to time go down to the village for alms, rice.

I have heard it said that all true paths are “filled with emptiness”. I have been much influenced by Ryōkan. I have a T-shirt with one of his poems on the back.

It kind of links to a concept that I have, and the idea is what I call “liberation in and by the mundane”.

Lusting after the highfalutin, the glamorous and kudos laden, causes suffering. Concentrating and absorbing into the mundane with a mind bereft of any thinking, any internal dialogue, has much more equanimity. In reality human beings do not need anywhere near as much stuff as they imagine. Nor do they need quite so many pass times.  People are greedy and afraid.

People are very scared of the silence; this pervades here aside from the birdsong. To be alone in one’s mind with only one’s self for company is a terror for most. Some people have radios and TV on all the time for company!! What a nightmare!!

To have the ‘phone umbilical severed is terror beyond imagination.

In a couple of hours’ time, I will probably make a hot chocolate for the wife, then sort out her medication.

Now while she sleeps exhausted on the sofa I will go and dead head the ginormous yellow rose which climbs up the side of the house and which the wife has fixed to the balcony using cable ties.

Yeah, I like that: “liberation in and by the mundane”.

16 Days 1800 Kilometres

Not long back from Rennes and today’s journey showed just how much rhythm there is to life in France. I have chosen to drive there in the “lunch window”. There was very little traffic midday Sunday. It was nose down elbows up time. In the entire 300km round trip I only passed three lorries on a main route national. One of those was Spanish heading to Brest to go home. People take the Sabbath here.

When I left the hospital in the big city Rennes, the streets were next to deserted.

The rhythm of day here, day driving may be soon {hopefully} drawing to an end.  It is not easy watching someone go through the aftermaths of high dose chemotherapy. The baseball bat medical approach takes people close to that doorway into the other world. The physical plane effects are nasty and difficult to bear. She went outside for the first time in over two weeks, today.

It is possible that she will come home soon{ish}.

I foresee in my crystal ball, a vacuum cleaner, a mop, some toilet cleaner and some sink work.

No doubt there will be a shopping list to take to the ladies up at the pharmacy…where we are getting plenty of loyalty card points.

Because I defrosted the fridge Trip Hazard and Felix are getting a small pork joint for tea…

It is bloody quiet here this evening, nothing stirs on the road.

Soon I will ask; “Who led the long march?”

And Trip Hazard will answer “miaow”..