Gnostic Retreat From Afar

(Artwork today comes to you courtesy of a beautiful local artist, Liza Paizis).

Amidst the worst 'flu I've had for quite some time, amidst the somewhat ironic company of my own self only (no communal retreat living for this black duck this weekend), amidst the chaos of a bedroom cleanout, I found:

- Reverend Mother Anastasia's Sophianic Vespers, which are worth any number of Inquisitions for the reading;

- the grass under my feet after doing a Spring Garden meditation walk in the Botannical Gardens in autumn (I finally got back there Chris, and to Piguenit, yay!);

- that plans can change super super fast, multiple times in a day, and this doesn't have to change the underlying sense of peace and calm that I intend to carry, with me. And that was pretty cool.

The remnants of my meditative ruminations go like this:

A simple analogy or a developmental path?

'Fundamentalism is to exoteric chaos what mysticism is to esoteric chaos.' - Caroline Myss

Why developmental?

'The mystic is ever conscious of duality. He is the seeker in search of light, of the soul, of the beloved, of that higher something that he senses as existing and as that which can be found. He strives after recognition of and by the divine, he is a follower of the vision, a disciple of the Christ, and this conditions his thinking and his aspiration. He is a devotee and one who loves the apparently unattainable - the Other than himself.

Only when he becomes an occultist does the mystic learn that all the time the magnet which attracted him, and the dualism which coloured his life and thoughts and which gave motive to all he sought to do, was his true self, the one Reality. He recognises then that assimilation into and identification with that one reality enables duality to be transmuted into unity and the sense of search to be transformed into the effort to become what he essentially is - a son of God, one with all sons of God. Having accomplished that, he finds himself in the one in Whom we live, and move, and have our being.' - Alice Bailey.

Now, does being a prophetess, too, seek only to condition? Time, indeed, will tell......