Summer Solstice
Excerpts from The Four Sacred Seasons
by G. de Purucker
(reprinted with permission - Theosophical University Press)
We now celebrate the third of the great spiritual and psychical events of the esoteric year, the initiation cycle centering in the Summer Solstice...
Children of the Sun and Offspring of the Stars: Has it ever occurred to you to ask...why it is that the stars glitter in the violet dome of night; why our sun shines with unceasing glory, pouring forth through aeons after aeons its own substance of light and life and energy; and why, on the other hand, such vast stretches and realms of nature are sunken in apparently cold and crystalline rigidity: asleep, dormant, seemingly unmoving, although indeed pervaded everywhere and throughout (so that not even an atom is deprived of it) by the all-permeant life and consciousness of the Boundless? ...
Spirit on one side and matter on the other, conscious life on one side and relative immobility and somnolence of consciousness on the other. As we look upon tenfold nature and consider her activities, we realize that we can figurate the situation as a vast army of the sons of light working upon dark and sleeping matter, the sons of light existing in their imbodiments between two poles, both of which to our present human consciousness seem to be impenetrable realms of being .... These two, nature's dark side and her light side, are the two eternal pathways, eternal because of being mighty nature herself.
We may speak of the upper or light side as being that of the Hierarchies of Compassion, and the lower or dark side as being that of the Hierarchies of Matter; yet both sides are eternally evolving upwards in everlasting progress. These are but two modes of life, for fundamentally the two are one.
As said a great sage and seer of the Far Orient, Lao-tse, when speaking of the Tao:
Its upper part is not bright, and its lower part is not dark. Unceasing in action,
nevertheless it cannot ever be named, but from action returns again to the spiritual
Void. We may call it the form of the formless, the image of the imageless, the
fleeting and the indeterminable [and yet it is the ever-enduring]...
Without a name by which it may rightfully be called, it is the origin of the spheres
celestial and the spheres material. When it has a name men call it the Eternal
Mother of all things. Only he who is constantly free from earthly passions can
understand its divine essence; but he whose mind is clogged and blinded by
passions can see no more than its outer form. Yet these two, the spiritual and the
material, though we call them by different names, in their origin are... identically the
same. This sameness is a wondrous mystery, the mystery of mysteries.
Understanding this mystery is the portal of all initiation. *
( *passages from the Tao-te-ching paraphrased from Lionel Giles's translation.)
Children of the Sun, Offspring of the Stars: ... When you consider the glittering orbs above us and our own glorious daystar whom we call Father Sun, has it never occurred to you that these very stars are manifestations of the Hierarchy of Compassion, bringing light and life and love and wisdom into the dark realms of nature’s material spheres? ...
A star, our sun for instance, is not only an evolving god in its divine and spiritual and intellectual and psychical and astral aspects, but is also bending towards us from its celestial throne as it were, and thus appears in our own material realms helping us, giving us light, urging us upwards. These are no merely vain words of an empty poesy, but are suggestive truth ....
Little do men know of the immense love, the divine impulses of compassion, which sway the souls of those who make the Great Renunciation, giving up all hope of personal evolutionary progress, it may be for aeons to come, in order to remain on earth to help their fellows and in the service of the world. Unrecognized, unthanked, ever silent, ever compassionate, ...they work steadily on, watching others go past them as the slowly moving river of lives sweeps along in unending flow. There they stand like pillars of light, these great and noble ones. Although they know that some day their reward shall come, a reward beyond all human understanding, nevertheless there they remain through the ages without thinking of their reward, and endure ....
Every man or woman who does a generous, unselfish, and compassionate act is, by the same token and insofar as the compassionate impulse and act extend, a member of the Hierarchy of Compassion and Splendor. Every man or woman who commits an act of selfishness or who follows blindly and solely an impulse of the matter side of himself or of herself is, by the same token and insofar as the impulse and act extend, acting under the influence of the somber and unholy powers of the material world whose chiefs are the dread mamo-chohans presiding at the pralayas, and is, by just so much hindering the forward progress of his fellows; for we are all knitted inseparably together into one web of life, into one living organic union....
It must never for a moment be supposed that the Great Renunciation implies an abandonment of any single part of the manifested universe in order that the neophyte or aspirant may devote himself only to following the sole pathway of light. This in itself is a subtly spiritual selfishness which, let men say what they may, is the spirit governing the career of the Pratyeka Buddhas. It is necessary for the neophyte or chela who desires to pass through even the first gateway of the initiation leading to the Great Renunciation to understand that instead of abandoning the world he remains within it, in order, as he grows ...to serve ever more largely in the cause of all things that are.
The slightest tinge of individual yearning for personal advancement will bar the doors fast against him, for the very core of this initiation is utter self-renunciation. The effort is indeed a titan's labor, for not only must the personal nature be washed clean, but must be utterly transmuted, as far as is compatible with existence in these realms, into becoming a ...vehicle or mediator between all above the neophyte and all below him.... He must, in consequence, be tested in every fiber of his being before he can even raise his heart to dare the greatest trials which will lead him first into the gloom of the regions of the Underworld - and later, when his utterly pure heart and indomitable will have carried him safely out of these, he must be tested in loftier spheres, so that no yearning hunger for more light for himself and for communion with the divinities for his own grace can entice him away from his self-chosen path.......Initiation in every instance... is the bringing...forth into manifested activity of what already exists within the individual. ...No initiation can possibly take place merely by request or by petition; ...it is utterly impossible for anyone successfully to pass through the rites who is not already prepared to do so....
It is upon this great and basic fact of natural fitness that reposes the entire structure of the ethical teaching which the great Masters of the past have given to their disciples. Discipline must precede the Mysteries -- not by any Master's mandate, but simply because it is nature's irrefragable law. Man must prove himself to be worthy, and not only worthy but ready, and not only ready but fit, before his knocking at the portal of the sanctum sanctorum can be even heard; and remember that this "knock" is soundless and made without gesture, for it is a movement of the will, intense and determined, combined with an expanding of the consciousness....
I might say in passing that the greatest and simplest preparation for all the various grades of initiation is our daily life. ...Here (one) can strengthen his character, evoke his will, enlarge his understanding, expand his heart- life. The Masters judge, or rather test, a beginner, a neophyte taking his first steps, by the way in which he acts in daily life and reacts to the temptations and trials that daily life puts upon him. These remarks, I repeat, are no vain words of an empty theory, but are sheer truth; and you will understand this at once when you remember that life is the great school, and that all the initiations, without a single exception, are but higher grades, the reaching of higher classes, in the school of life -- life terrestrial and life cosmic.
In these... remarks I have endeavored to give, by hint and by allusion, some... ideas of the character and range of the matters comprised under the esoteric term, the initiation of the Great Renunciation. It too has its compensations unspeakably beautiful, and its end is the heart of the universe. Yet why do I say its "end"? This is but a... manner of phrasing; for the heart of the universe is indeed boundless Infinitude, and the frontierless deeps of the Divine. Progress, therefore, is endless; the light becomes ever stronger as one progresses along the path; and what the chela would consider the loftiest summits of the Mystic East which he must climb, he finds when he has arrived and has placed his feet upon thosedistant peaks, that there are immeasurable distances still to go, and of a grandeur and sublimity which even the gods have not attained.