Christ is the Divine Messenger
This text is mainly based on the Bible and on The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity.
This Article's title Christ is the Divine Messenger, is a wonderful statement We shall at first read in the Bible whether or not Christ is of divine origin.
In Matthew 17:5 we are told: "…behold a bright cloud overshadowed them; and behold a voice out of the cloud which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him." A similar statement can be found in Matthew 3:17, in Mark 1:11 and 9:7, in Luke 3:23 and 9:35 and in Deuteronomy 18:19, which says: "And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken untomy words which he shall speak in my name, I willrequire it of him."
It seems that we can be sure, now, that Christ is of "divine" origin.
Is He a Messenger? Certainly, as the New Testament asks the reader to "hear him" and the Old Testament informs us of "…the words he shall speak in my name". And it is in the name of God.
How can we be sure that Christ speaks in the name of God? We refer now to The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity, in order to learn Who Christ is.
According to Mystic Christianity, the evolution of man, in our present Great Day of Manifestation, is divided into seven Periods called the Saturn Period, the Sun Period, the Moon Period, the Earth Period, the Jupiter Period, the Venus Period andthe Vulcan Period. We are presently in the secondhalf of the Earth Period. We have just passed the end of our involution and are beginning our evolution, or the spiritualization of matter and our return to God our Father.
In this scheme of evolution, Christ is the highest Initiate of the Sun Period. This means that this Initiate, Christ, has completed His union with the Second aspect of God, or WISDOM. According to Mystic Christianity, the three Aspects of God are WILL, WISDOM and ACTIVITY. The entity we call the Father, has completed His union with the First aspect of God, WILL; then comes the Son, also called Christ; then Jehovah, the Highest Initiate of the Moon Period, who has completed His union with the Third aspect of God, or ACTIVITY.
A messenger always bears a message, and Christ brought us, in addition to His new Commandments, a very important message. In order to understand His message, we must study briefly the visible and invisible composition of man.
The Rosicrucian Philosophy, or Mystic Christianity, teaches that man is a complex being who possesses:
(1) A Dense Body, which is the visible instrument he uses here in this world to fetch and carry; the body we ordinarily think of as the whole man.
(2) A Vital Body, which is made of Ether and pervades the visible body as ether permeates allother forms, except that human beings specialize a greater amount of the universal ether than other forms. That ethereal body is our instrument for specializing the vital energy of the sun. It is seen by clairvoyant vision to extend about an inch and a half outside our visible body.
(3) A Desire Body, which is our emotional nature. This finer vehicle pervades both the vital and dense bodies. It is seen by clairvoyant vision to extend about 16 inches outside our visible body, which is located in the center of this ovoid cloud as the yolk is in the center of an egg.
(4) The Mind, which functions like a mirror,reflects the outer world and enables the Ego to transmit its commands as thought and word, and also to compel action.
The Ego is the threefold Spirit, the God Within, which uses these vehicles to gather experience in the school of life. The three aspects of the Spirit are:
-the Divine Spirit, which has emanated from itself the dense body,
-the Life Spirit which has emanated from itselfthe vital body,
- the Human Spirit which has emanated fromitself the desire body.
The Message of Christ concerns the vital body:
When we analyze the vital body of the human being we find that it includes the four ethers and that in man all four ethers are dynamically active in his highly organized vital body:
- By means of the activities of the chemical ether, the human being is able to assimilate food and to grow.
- The forces at work in the life ether enable him to propagate his species.
- The forces in the light ether supply the dense body with heat, work on the nervous system and the muscles, thus opening the doors of communication with the outside world by way of the senses.
- The reflecting ether enables the Spirit to control its vehicle by means of thought. This etheral so stores past experience as memory.
The ethers we shall particularly speak of now are the life ether, the light ether, and the reflecting ether, as Max Heindel gives a wonderful definitionof the CHRIST WITHIN in The Web of Destiny, page14:
As new forms are propagated through the second ether of the vital body, so the HIGHER SELF, the CHRIST WITHIN, is formed through this same vehicle of generation, the vital body, in its higher aspects embodied in the two upper ethers.
In order to understand why Christ must be formed and born in all of us, we will refer to another quotation in Mystic Christianity (Teachings of an Initiate), which makes the subject quite clear:
Let it now be remembered that the qualifications necessary for our emancipation from the conditions prevailing in Atlantis were partly physiological: we had to evolve lungs to breathe the pure air in which we are now immersed and which allows the vital body to vibrate at a more rapid rate than did the heavy moisture of Atlantis. With this in mind we shall readily see that future advancement lies in freeing the vital body entirely from the trammels of the dense body and letting it vibrate in pure air.
This is what happened in the lofty altitude exoterically known as the “Mount of Transfiguration.”Advanced men of various ages, Moses, Elijah,and Jesus (or rather the body of Jesus ensouledby Christ) appeared in the luminous garment ofthe liberated soul body, which all will wear in the New Galilee, the Kingdom of Christ. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” (1 Corinthians15:50), for it would interfere with the spiritual progress of that day; so when Christ appears we must be prepared with a soul body and thus beready to part from our dense body to be “caught up and meet Him in the air” (1 Thessalonians4:17).
We see that the New Testament confirms the statements of Mystic Christianity.
The soul body is called soma psuchicon by Paul in his Letters, and it is the Christ born within.
The following quotations are taken from theNew Testament. They relate to the Christ bornwithin, also called the Soul Body in English, and soma psuchicon in Greek:
- Romans 13:14 : “But put ye on the Lord JesusChrist, and make not provision for the flesh to ful-fill the lusts thereof.”
- 2 Corinthians 13:5: “Examine yourselves,whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.Know ye not your own selves, how that JesusChrist is in you, except ye be reprobates?”
- 2 Corinthians 6:16: “And what agreement haththe temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell inthem, and walk in them; and I will be their God,and they shall be my people.”
- Ephesians 2:22: “In whom ye also are buildedtogether for an habitation of God through theSpirit.”
- Galatians 3:27: “For as many of you as havebeen baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.”
Other passages in the Bible indicate more or less clearly to mankind that Christ must be born within, including the following:
- Matthew 1:23: “Behold, a Virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel which being interpreted is, God with us.” The Virgin here spoken of is the astrological sign Virgo. Let us give again the defi-nition of the Christ within, or Higher Self, as foundin The Web of Destiny:
As new forms are propagated through the second ether of the vital body, so the HIGHERSELF, the CHRIST WITHIN, is formed through this same vehicle of generation, the vital body, in its higher aspects embodied in the two upper ethers.
The Old Testament gives us similar information:
- Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto usa son is given: and the government shall be uponhis shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
In The Web of Destiny, we read that
…as a child that is born into the world requires nourishment, so also the Christ that is born within is a babe and requires to be nourished to the full stature of manhood. And as the physical body grows by a continual assimilation of material from the chemical region—the solids, liquids,and gases—so also, as the Christ [within] grows, will the two higher ethers grow in volume and form a luminous cloud around the man or woman sufficiently discerning to set his or her face heavenward; it will invest the pilgrim with light so brilliant that he "walks in the light," as a matter of fact. By the exercises given in the Western Preparatory School of the Rosicrucians, it becomes possible in time to detach the two higher ethers, and the man may then step away from his physical body, leaving it for a time invested and vitalized only by the two lower ethers; he is then what we call an Invisible Helper.
Let us gather, now, all the names given to the Soul Body :
In Paul's Letters, we are told about a soma psuchicon (1 Corinthians: 15:44, mistranslated as “natural body”). The Soul Body, which is made ofthe two upper ethers—lighter than air and there-fore capable of levitation—is also the Golden Wedding Garment and the Philosopher's Stone, or the Living Stone, spoken of in some of the ancient philosophies as the Diamond Soul, for it is luminous, lustrous, and sparkling—a priceless gem. It was also called the Sidereal Vehicle and the Astral Body and by the Mediaeval Alchemists, because of the ability it conferred upon the one who has it to traverse the starry regions. But this Astral Body is not to be confounded with the Desire Body which some of the modern pseudo-occultists mistakenly call the Astral Body.
In the Masonic Legend, the Soul Body is given another name, as we are taught how Hiram Abiff, the Widow's Son, left his father, the Lucifer Spirit Samael, after the baptism of fire in the Molten Sea, and how he received the mission to prepare the way for the kingdom among the Sons of Cain, his brethren, by developing their arts and crafts as temple builders—Masons—and teaching them the preparation of the Philosopher's Stone or Molten Sea.
A little further in the Masonic Legend, we are told that the Molten Sea, "being of ultimate purity, it would contain no color, but resemble a 'Sea of Glass,’” which Sea of Glass is referred to in Revelation, chapter 15, verse 2: "And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God."
And in Revelation, chapter 21, verse 11, we are told that the "light of the holy Jerusalem ... is clear as crystal."
In chapter 22 also, verse 1, we read that "a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, is proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb."
Then, still further in the Masonic Legend, we are told of a “stone,” and “this ‘White Stone’ knowledge would even enable the person to lift the veil of invisibility and meet the superhuman Hierarchs,who work in the world with a potency undreamt of by the masses."
And we gather more details on this precious 'stone' in Teachings of an Initiate. Thus, at his baptism, Jesus became 'a Son of the Dove,' and was recognized by another, 'Simon Bar-Jonah,' (Simon,Son of the Dove). At that recognition by the sign of the dove, the Master calls the other 'a rock,' a foundation Stone, and promises him the 'Keys to Heaven.' These are not idle words nor haphazard promises. They refer to phases of soul development which each must undergo if he has not passed them.
What then is the 'sign of Jonah' which the Christ bore about with Him, visible to all who could see? It is the 'House from Heaven' (another word for theSoul Body) where with Paul longed to be clothed: the glorious treasure house where in all the noble deeds of many lives glitter and glisten as precious pearls. Everybody has a little 'House from Heaven.' Jesus, holy and pure beyond the rest, probably was a splendid sight, but think how indescribably effulgent must have been the vehicle of splendor in which the Christ descended….
We find that these 'Stones' for the 'Temple made without hands undergo an evolution or process of preparation. There is first the Petros or 'Stone', the diamond in the rough, so to speak, found in nature.When read with the heart, such passages as 1st Corinthians, 10:4—“And did all drink the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual Rock [Petros] that followed them: and that Rock was Christ”—are illuminating in this connection. Gradually, very gradually, we have become impregnated with the 'water of life' which sprang from the Great Rock.
We are becoming polished as 'lithoi zontes' (living stones), destined to be grouped with that 'Great Stone' which the builders rejected; and when we have wrought well to the end, we shall finally receive in the Kingdom the diadem, the most precious of all, the 'psiphon leuken,' (the white stone) with its New Name.There are three steps in the evolution of 'the Stone of the Sage': 'Petros', the hard rough rock; 'Lithon', the stone polished by service and ready to be written on; and 'psiphon leuken', the soft whitestone that draws to itself all who are weak and heavy laden. Much is hidden in the nature and composition of the stone at each step which cannot be written: it must be read between the lines.
And this is the reason why, in the Mysteries of the Great Operas, Max Heindel tells us that
It is exactly the mission of the Rosicrucian Order, working through The Rosicrucian Fellowship, to promulgate a scientific method of development suited particularly to the Western people where by this wedding garment may bewrought, so that we may hasten the day of the Lord. And the Holy Scriptures give the same piece of information, however in a more "veiled" way.
In I Corinthians 15:37-38, 40 we read: "And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it has pleased him, and to every seed his own body… There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial; but the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another."
In 1 John 3:9, we read: "Who so ever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him and he cannot sin, because he is born of God."
The Bible Teaching enables us to become aware of the fact that Christ must be born within. We have also to understand very clearly that the Christ which is born within us is our true Saviour, and not the Cosmic Christ, that is to say the Christ without. The Christ without, or the Cosmic Christ, helps us in the task of having Christ born within; however, it is our task to form the Christ within. The Christ within, or Soul body, is the vehicle mankind will need to live in the Sixth Epoch or New Galilee.
THIS IS THE MESSAGE BROUGHT TO US BY CHRIST, THE DIVINE MESSENGER.
-Marie-José Clerc
Published in RAYS FROM THE ROSE CROSS (May-Jun 2003)
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