When this writer was a young man, he loved to go to the movies. Sometimes he would take in one or two films per week. Now, in his dotage, he sees one or two per year, at most. He was an unusual movie lover. Things that impressed most viewers, like stars, or cinematography, were not so important. The story was the all. If a film had a “mythology” that spoke to him, it was a good film. There were exceptions. Occasionally, one or two lines of dialog would set his mind spinning for months or even years. One such instance is the origin of the theme of this essay. It occurred in Lawrence of Arabia.
The film, Lawrence of Arabia, was highly controversial. When the movie came out, it was banned in almost all mid-eastern countries except Egypt, because of its portrayal of Arabs. None of that is relevant to this essay. T.E. Lawrence was a cartographer, self-styled adventurer, and British agent—a prime, rugged, individualist. During the First World War, the Ottoman Turks controlled most of the mid-east, and were allied with the Germans. Lawrence led a band of Arabs, formerly held as prisoners by the Turks. Their task was to destroy the Turk’s capacity to wage war. They were enormously successful. Most of their campaign is not in the film, and most of it is not germane to this essay. The film focuses on the proposed, surprise attack on Aqaba. The only way surprise was possible was if the attack came from the desert. This meant crossing the Nefud desert, a desert so inhospitable that even the Bedouins considered it impassible. They crossed at night when the heat was less extreme. As they crossed, one man, who served one of the chieftains, fell off his camel unnoticed. When they reached water, his absence was noticed. Lawrence said he would go back for him. All of the chieftains strongly advised against it saying, “It was written”. Lawrence was insistent. He went back alone, on foot, during the heat of the day. When he found the man, he carried him back, still during the heat of the day. When he returned, he was hailed as a mighty hero by all. Later in the camp there was a dispute and the man Lawrence saved, killed another man. The chieftains came to Lawrence and told him he had a big problem. According to Arabian tradition, murder demands revenge. The Koran states vengeance is a duty. They told him the revenge would demand a reciprocal revenge from the other tribe, and so on, and soon he would have no army. The only solution would be if an outsider, Lawrence, fulfilled the revenge. So, Lawrence had to take the man he saved with great heroism, to the other side of a butte to shoot him. When he returned, they again hailed him as a hero, and with sympathy, they said “It was written.” “It was written.” These three words have stuck in this writer’s mind for at least forty years.
Why would someone say, “It was written”? In Islamic culture everything happens by the will of Allah, with no exceptions, and Allah keeps close tabs on the world. In some Barbary Coast cultures it is rumored that sorcerers can get away with dastardly deeds because, when bad things happen, it is because of the will of Allah. Judaism and Christianity are not without their own beliefs about the finality of writing. There is the story of the “handwriting on the wall” foretelling the downfall of Belshazzar, as told in the book of Daniel. Then there are the books in the Revelation of St. John:
“And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and the books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.”
In another place it is written: “I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.” Finality.
The books in Revelation are allegorical. Some represent the memory of nature as found in various spiritual worlds. The finality is not allegorical. What is done, is done. We can transmute the essence and energy bound up in deeds, but not the deeds themselves. The essence of our deeds is built into the soul body to eventually be spiritualized. When we have built the soul body sufficiently strong enough to meet our Lord “in the air”, we have met the requisite condition for continuation in the evolutionary creation, some call it salvation. It can’t be taken from us. Finality.
There is a psychological hardening in writing. When something is written, we tend to think it is done. This writer has known artists and writers who have destroyed past works because of their cramping effect on new creation. A retrospective of past creations can be helpful, but not if it encumbers the present. In our post mortem retrospection, we dissolve our spent bodies, and if we don’t, they come back in the next rebirth to bother and bind us. If we think something is done, or over, or finished, it inhibits progress in that direction. This writer resisted formal writing, in favor of speaking, for many years because he was concerned that writing would stop the flow of progressive thinking. He wrote, but would not do formal writing, because of its finality. It took a greater faith in the source of epigenesis within, to take up writing. The image of a brook freezing over but still having fresh water flowing beneath the ice, was helpful to come to a change of heart about writing. When we think something is done, we move on to other things. Diversity is fine but not if it diverts one from a vital stream which has more to offer. There is petrifying vanity in the common phrase, “been there, done that.”
There is also hardening in reading. The act of putting the words together in one’s consciousness tends to fix them in one’s consciousness. Sometimes we put things together that we wish we hadn’t. In the extreme, there is the tendency to think, that because something is written, it is true. Literalism is one of the worst forms of materialism. It is easy to be carried along on the stream of consciousness of the writer. Sometimes one is too far downstream before one realizes where one is headed. Sometimes one doesn’t realize it at all, and is stuck with an erroneous belief based on an erroneous mental construction. Reading requires as much self-conscious self-observation as writing.
The problems presented by writing are compounded and augmented when writing is compiled into a book. A book is more of a presence than sheets of writing. The formal format of a typeset and printed book commands respect. A book is authoritative, which word contains the word author in it. If someone writes a book, the content is given more credence because of it being in book form. Books are records, sometimes official records. When we want to recognize an achievement, we say, “book it”. Businesses keep “books” as financial records. When someone is an expert or maven, we say they “wrote the book” on the subject.
All of these qualities about books are magnified in central, religious books. Every religion has at least one. For Jews and Christians, it is the Bible, for Muslims it is the Koran, and other religions have their own books. Central religious books have magnified authority because they are deemed the word of God, even though the messengers who wrote them were imperfect humans, like us. Internal contradictions, dated information about the world, symbolic instead of straightforward presentation, none of these things detract from the authority of scripture. Religious literalism is more prone to fanaticism, and other dangers, than simple literalism — ‘God is on my side’. No one dares to challenge the Bible, as a given group interprets it, with any hope of remaining in the fold. One must read the Bible with circumspection, and always look for the truth hidden within and behind the surface presentation, or the danger of hardening is great.
Writing is foreign and unnatural. We have a special organ, the larynx, for speaking, but there is no special organ for writing. Written words are usually not like the things they represent. This is true, even when writing is in oriental pictographs, such as Chinese. It is possible to live a natural, healthy life while illiterate. Some great people who changed the world, chose to not write. Socrates, who through his great power of mind influenced western culture significantly, never wrote. Ammonius Saccus, one of the founders of neo-Platonism, which produced prolific writers, is said to have taught orally and wrote nothing. Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, wrote but a few words in the dust.
Writing is relatively new to human culture. Limitation in space allows only a few broad statements in written language, to arrive at the desired philosophical ideas. Some written languages, such as mathematics and cartography, require no knowledge of a specific culture, or an oral language, and they can be abstract or concrete. Some primitive, oral languages were, or are, almost complete ostensive, or deictic, and without grammar. Such languages only point at concrete things without abstract ideas. For instance, there is lemon grass color or fig leaf color, but no abstraction of greenness. Oral or deictic expression need not be primitive. It is the heart of some sophisticated poetry.
Written languages have had their own evolution, a subject too vast and complex for a brief essay on mysticism. Most began in some pictorial form, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese pictographs. The pictures represent actions, things, or relationships which oral utterings also represent. Both vocal formations and pictures eventually became concretized into letters and words. Abstract relationships became a grammar or logic. In all of this, there are many variants. It is all very complex.
As is often the case, Christian Mysticism offers a long-range description of matters like this. It is a description that clarifies the matter, and shows the purpose of it. In The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception we are told, from clairvoyant studies, that we humans did not have voice until the Lemurian Epoch when we were recapitulating the animal-like stage of the Moon Period. We could make sounds but not words. Words came to us after the separation of the sexes, and the division of the creative nucleus into the larynx, on one end of the spine, and the genitals on the other. Also, some of the forms became either male or female, to allow for cooperative continuance in the physical world, while the complex organism was being formed in individual bodies, with the other part of the creative energy. Some of the portion of the creative energy that was developing the body was directed upward to build the larynx, and also built the brain and nervous system. As the brain developed, the spirit was able to begin to enter the dense physical body through the mind, which is the higher spiritual counterpart of the brain. As this came about, we became capable of forming words. This development began during the early part of the Atlantean Epoch. Those early words were words of power that could influence things in the world around us. We were natural magicians, and we were still pure and innocent, because the effects of our selfishness which had caused our fall had not taken hold and developed yet. Cursing came later. Though we could influence the world around us, we could not yet see it as we do now. We saw its inward representations in our inner being as soul pictures. External sense perception came later, in the Atlantean Epoch. As the Atlantean Epoch proceeded, our vehicles became aligned, the Spirit drew into them and developed them, and we gradually became outward. Eventually, by the end of the Atlantean Epoch, the Spirit became indwelling, self-conscious, and capable of clear perception of the without.
In this evolutionary progression a number of important things were, and are, happening simultaneously. It is important to note them, even if it means some repetition. Involuntary, internal, spiritual vision was waning, while external sense perception was waxing. The dense physical body was developing magnificently, especially the nervous system. The mind, and the brain it works through, were developing rapidly. The spirit was becoming indwelling, and it was awakening, through its interactions with the external world. It was becoming conscious through the harvesting of Conscious Soul generated in these interactions. Since the individual spirit is formed in the abstract, subdivision of the world of thought, our powers of abstraction and ideation were awakening and developing. We were becoming capable of universalizing from experience.
Some other simultaneous developments were not so good, or so pleasant. The effects of selfish disobedience, that precipitated our fall too deeply into matter, were coming into their own. They were building momentum, so to speak. They were being played out in our arc into chemical matter. They were hardening the world to such an extent that there was a danger of progress coming to a halt, save for the sacrifice of Christ. We were hardening ourselves and the world through desire. We created a world that was not intended in the divine plan. We removed ourselves from direct, divine, guidance from the spiritual hierarchies. In our earthly consciousness, we became separate from each other because of our spiritual blindness to inner connections and spiritual unity. We could do cruel, unnatural things to each other. We also developed an abstract, materialistic consciousness. This consciousness has become integral to our language, especially to our written language that developed out of this unnatural state.
Not everything about these developments was, or is, bad. We have accepted our condition, and have applied our divine creativity to conquer the world, even though our intent has been selfish. For example, in science and technology, we have delved deeply into the material world with almost incredible detail. In our interactions with chemical matter, we have developed Conscious Soul, and consequent consciousness. Even though the consciousness is materialistically oriented, it is still consciousness, and consciousness is one of our evolutionary goals. Spirit, in its consciousness, will not be denied. We will turn the corner back into the inner worlds, to the home of the Spirit. Even materialistic science seems to be approaching inner reality by the day. In our actions, as we fulfill our duties, we are building our soul bodies. Reawakening clairvoyance and awareness of the inner worlds is inevitable.
In this journey, we are blessed to have the guidance of the Rosicrucian philosophy. The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches that the path of the evolutionary creation is a spiral into, and out of matter. When coming out of matter, we pass though the same states of being that we passed through while going into matter. However, the perspective is different and we are different. We are more evolved beings on the way out of matter, and we are more conscious beings. On our way into matter, we had to sacrifice some things due to the greater limitations deeper in matter. In chemical matter we are most limited and it is here that we learn fundamental lessons of simple, objective being. Max Heindel wrote in several places that, when we regain the things we have sacrificed on the down-swing, we regain them at a higher level. They are better than what we sacrificed.
All of the above applies to language, oral and written. We have lost the fabulous memory we possessed in the Lemurian and early Atlantean epochs. In its place we have written annals available to everyone. We can analyze the past with reason. In doing this we can abstract moral principles that apply to things beyond our limited personal experience. By writing the results of experiments, anyone can read and determine for themself, whether something is objectively true, and we can generalize knowledge. We can even extend our perception through photography and other means of recording. We can scrutinize and analyze recordings in superlative detail. We have an almost ultimate book that is the internet, with all of the information, true and untrue, that it contains. All of these things are important.
In the Rosicrucian philosophy we are admonished to perceive things clearly and precisely with great detail. However, the way we are doing this now, though progressive and helpful, is still external and indirect. Scientists no longer do much with direct perception. Instead, devices do the perceptive work. Physicists have photomultiplier tubes sensitive to single photons. Scientists are doing proportionately less direct, intuitive thinking. Instead, they do brute force computerized analysis of massive amounts of data. Sometimes it is called “needle in a haystack” analysis. Doing things this way may be good for our evolution with regard to helping the mineral kingdom by building these devices, but is it good for our individual, evolutionary development? Maybe, but only if we are also developing directly.
We have grown significantly through writing, and all of the other indirect activities, but they are still indirect. These indirect things are products of the consciousness of a fallen humanity. When we fell, we began to know death. The deeper we have progressed into our fall into materialism, the more deathly our consciousness has become. As science sees it, in the second law of thermodynamics, everything is entropic; all energy is dying and going into chaos. However, death, in itself, is not bad, but not living is. Christ came to give us life: “I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” The spiritual life is direct. One doesn’t pray indirectly, and one doesn’t want to meet the Teacher indirectly. It is only when one addresses an archetype directly, that it sings its truth. Forms will continue to lose their useful value and dissolve, but life will continue onward.
All of the indirect and deathly things will pass away. That includes materialism, books and this essay (which its author is beginning to think may be a good thing). In the Rosicrucian philosophy, we learn that death is an important time. In the natural, unwinding panorama, when the archetype has run out at death, everything is re-experienced. It is important that we give full attention to the panorama. It is important because, if possible, nothing must be lost. Nothing. Our life here is precious. An entire past evolution, and hundreds, if not thousands, of years of preparation have been put into it. We do not want to waste experience. Our moral and spiritual future depend on how much we get out of our experience.
As we evolve, the panorama can be more than personal experience. Our experience is formed from the stuff and principles of nature. With skill and intent, we can be capable of harvesting the evolution of nature as it unfolds in the world through our lives. After all, we, as nature forces, built it into the world between lives.
Max Heindel repeatedly speaks of the advantage of efficiency in the life of spiritual aspiration. One of the places he mentions it is in regard to the retrospection exercise. With retrospection, we don’t have to wait until death; we can remember, and take advantage of our life experiences now. With retrospection, one can harvest more than one’s personal experiences. One can retrospect nature for the Creator. For most of us, this writer included, doing this is still only a dream. Provided we do the work to realize them, dreams are not bad things.
Some of the things that apply to personal death, apply also to the cultural death of our evolutionary deviation. Nothing must be lost. Writing and books may die, but not the consciousness and the talents developed through them. The memory we develop through the retrospection exercise, should eventually exceed the memory of the Lemurian and early Atlantean Epochs. Moreover, it will be voluntary and, even more, objective. All of the objectivity of written records will be available without writing, and it will be living. It will be incorporated, along with advances in communication learned through all means of communicating, into a new ability. The result will be a new form of pictorial communication which is a return of the pictorial communication of the Lemurian Epoch regained at a much higher level. Max Heindel calls it “Jupiter Period objective picture consciousness” capable of being “impressed on the minds of others”. This is something we can aspire to, even with our current, feeble communication skills. It is motivation for us to work through our present tasks and trials, to something more live and free.
Because of the nature of some of the material in this essay, there was no small amount of anguish experienced in composing it—this write dislikes spouting doctrine, even to get to living principles. At its conclusion its writer can look back in relief and say, “It was written.”
