I put down the book The Temple of Man after a few hours of reading this morning, and sat for minutes … sort of staring in to the yeah, ..Yes, …thank you, space.
I have only just begun the large volume of of dense matter. A discussion at this point is not even possible. Words are not the way, not my words. Just read...
By definition, the Symbol is magic; it evokes the form bound in the spell of matter. To evoke is not to imagine, it is to live; it is to live the form.
Schwaller is converying his message sometime in the 1950's.
The spiritual evolution of earth is entering its final stage; we would therefore destroy the past. This is our mistake. We must look upon our earth as it is, a prison with all its illusions, so that we may call forth the future beyond this constraint.
He will continue the message throughout the one thousand or more pages.
Let us not try to describe the future. To describe it would be to deny it, would be to kill in ourselves the possibility of living this life, which is intangible, "undissectable".
And every page is necessary, because we have lost so much. There is so much to understand.
“Music evokes a state of being. The painter and the sculptor shape it, and then the "surgeon" comes along to dissect and analyze it. Thus does man deny the magic of harmony. He could be other than this, but he is far more tempted to remain as he is and go on loving what he habitually knows.
There are those who do the work, and they understand. We understand, these peope cannot do the work for us. They can't send the message in a group text ...
What could I know, that is, what could I feel and experience of the stone, of light, of the animal, of you, if all these forms were not in me?
We have to do our own work.
I am not responsible for your evil and your good, for your truth and your falsehood. I can do nothing to change you now, but I can improve you by improving myself. This is moral magic. Experience proves the truth, makes it certain, and drives falsehood away.
These excerpts are pulled from the closing paragraphs of his introduction to his years of work. He is relaying intelligence on and of Symbol, but he has first recognized the deception in symbol. Writing this as he was, in the mid 20th century, over 60 years ago, he says “let us put aside the deceptive symbol”.
Today we are inundated with this deception. The words, images, familiar logos, and the gestures and performances by people who are at some level embodying the deception that Schwaller says, is merely a substitute for something else. How much, in our 21st century material world, our 21st century platforms, how much is merely deception, merely a substitute…for what we don't Know.
In the opening paragraph he tells us the purpose of this book is,
“first to show the means of expression used by the Ancients to transmit knowledge, … and second to present an outline of the doctrine of the Anthropocosmos, the guide to the way of thinking of the sages.”
He communicates a warning on the potential dangers transmitting some of what he has learned, and then puts the responsibility of receiving on the reader, letting us know it is on us to be responsible for, and with, the knowledge we take in. And fail to take in.
” for the preparedness of each individual, which opens or seals his or her eyes, must be the sole judge.”
He also lets us know that if we are the casual reader who wants to get all the learning without effort on our part, we will find that is not possible. If we are looking for a cozy read giving us a picture of what we already know, look elsewhere.
One “who cannot find within one’s self the link that ties together the various parts… will see this work in the same light as the uninformed public…”
Establishing his work as esoteric he qualifies for us the difference between “esotericism”and “occultism”. Esoteric being the immanent meaning that can be implied, but can not be not expressed in words. Immanent.
The work is not an intellectual work for cerebral understanding. This transmission is to the consciousness, the state of consciousness prepared to receive .
For me this calls to mind a particular line from a song by Over The Rhine
“there’s nothing harder, than learning how to receive…”
The Anthropocosmos, the human being in the cosmos, holds truths as old as the world, preserved and expressed by the Ancients, but in a language we no longer speak, no longer comprehend.
In the sixty plus years since Schwaller put his learnings on paper we have come closer to grasping a perception of the unity of the original substance of matter. Closer than we have been, but not closer than the Ancients were.
“ This synthesizing intelligence cannot be the result of facts cerebrally defined in time and space, but itself must preside over any analysis of situation, and therefore must be an innate consciousness, …”
When our human intellect works on taking in the unknown and inconceivable, the perceiving and comprehending of information from the senses, it operates from a dualistic sense, a right brain- left brain operating system. The importance of both logic-reasoning and feeling-intuition are expressed as necessary by Schwaller, and he tells us
…”wisdom is knowing how to use them both simultaneously”.
Using our eyes as comparison he beautifully lays out that though we actually see two differing images from each eye we also have a synthesizing intelligence to create a unity of the two views.
The Ancients, the builders of temples, Schwaller says that this civilization was
“ a small island of serenity and peace for people of goodwill. We no longer know where this center of peace can be found, and it is likely that the majority would no longer know how to bear this serenity”.
All excerpts from The Temple of Man - R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz
