The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Intraterrestrials A Foretaste of the New World

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Book 2

"A Seed Germinates"

Dialogue 1

L   I feel quite nervous. The others have given you such a build-up that I had started forming a picture of you as someone really quite formidable. Needless to say you are utterly different from what I had imagined.

F   You were expecting to meet a dragoness in her lair?

L   Not exactly that, but somebody a lot more reserved than I think you are. At one point someone even said you were a bit shy.

F   That was perceptive of whoever it was. Sounds like Melanie.

L   It was.

F   I do feel a bit shy still at times. I was certainly shy as a child. As for being formidable, well I can be that at times if that seems to be what people are asking for.

L   We thought you were probably going to suggest a general get-together of the five of us, well six if we include Paul. They’ve told you about him?

F   Yes. He still seems to be a bit of an unknown factor. It’s really up to him.

L   I’m a bit afraid he’ll try to winkle me out of the group and get me on my own. I’m furious with him and attracted at the same time.

F   That was a factor in my suggestion that we didn’t meet as a group yet. In any case I wanted to get to know you a bit first.

L   Am I being vetted?

F   Don’t be an idiot. You know, I wish they didn’t give people the impression that I’m a sort of mystical initiate behind the scenes of I.T. I’m nothing like as wise and wonderful as they make me out to be.

L   Well, you are older and probably wiser than the others. And I imagine in a group situation they tend to defer to you a bit.

F   Yes, that does happen when we have met a a foursome. You know, obviously, that the overall tone of conversations, even in as closely knit a group as we are becoming, alters radically with each mix of two, three or four people. When it is just Joe, Melanie and I there is a more equal balance. But with Richard it alters. It’s just a little bit less integrated, and I think this is what gives them a feeling that I’m controlling things from a higher level.

L   Are you?

F   Good question. You know, Lucia, you’ve been coming towards this little assembly of souls for some time. It was time you surfaced. There is a sense in which I do get tempted to exercise too much control over the situation. I need someone to share some of my own difficulties with.

L   I could say the same. I’ve found a great closeness with Melanie. She’s already helped me quite powerfully over my sexual hang-ups and muddles. She and I are already on quite an even keel there. I like her very much. But I feel... how can I put it? I feel she lacks a real sense of herself as a woman. She’s intelligent and clear and confident in dealing with someone like me. But when it comes to her own life she seems to come unstuck somewhere. I feel she really needs to wade in with Richard and tie him down somehow.

F   I’m quite sure that’s what you’d do in similar circumstances. But with Richard I think you’d be wrong. He refuses to be tied. What are all these personal relationship problems really saying to people, Lucia? Why do people go on and on in our time making just that sort of mistake with each other?

L   I think I know something about it, but I don’t know what to do about it.

F   What do you think it is then?

L   I think we’re afraid of bringing our sense of higher presences, intraterrestrials as you call them, into direct connection with other people’s experiences of the same thing. We try to work out our relationships in too limited a sphere of action, on too low a level. I suppose it is an astral level and a sexual level.

F   Yes, I know this is true. And when I try to do something about it, it simply takes me over. I invoke a higher level of myself as I think, and there I am exercising power over people in sometimes quite a formidable way.

L   Did you have close personal relationships when you were younger?

F   Yes, indeed. But after a few bad experiences, one particularly frightful affair, I simply withdrew. Then Joe and I were a bit close for a time, but it wasn’t really right. I’ve been on my own for a long time.

L   When you feel yourself being taken over by a sort of power thing with people, do you think it is this unresolved sexuality that comes into play?

F   Yes, I think you’re probably putting your finger on it. But I don’t know what to do about it.

L   My life has been almost the exact opposite of that. As I said to Melanie I’ve really played the field sexually, all over the place. But at the same time it hasn’t really touched my deeper levels. I seem to have left a free space where I can begin to be aware of higher beings, sometimes as quite a powerful presence. But my looseness on a sexual level has had a dangerous side as well. Melanie probably told you that when the contact we had encouraged me to be more deliberately aware of my higher being I was nearly driven out altogether. I suppose astrally I’ve simply made myself too loose.

F   It looks as if you and I represent two poles of the same thing. We need to find a balanced position half-way somewhere.

*****

L   I’m...

F   Stand up. (She does the same). Here, hold my hands a moment.

L   It’s coming back. I mean, I’m here now.

F   Breathe a bit more deeply. There. I’m here too.

L   Fiona...

F   Don’t be scared. Just breathe. Now, say what is there in your mind.

L   (Slowly) When two, or three, are gathered together in my Name, there am I, in the midst.

F   Who is speaking these words, Lucia?

L   I am speaking these words. I have spoken those words. These words will be spoken in me. I shall become those words.

F   Don’t stop breathing. Breathe your thinking. Think your breathing. I am in the midst with you. I am you. We are each other.

*****

L   Things can never be quite the same again.

F   No, but they will be very nearly the same. We forget very quickly.

L   That’s tragic. We need to be like that all the time.

F   No, it isn’t tragic. Forgetting is just as important as remembering. If we didn’t forget we couldn’t remember, and remembering is the clue to our whole path of development.

L   Why does coming down to earth have to be so painful?

F   Because pain is the door to remembering. When we are in pleasure, in joy, we are. When we are in pain, we become. When pleasure and pain are in balance, both present together, we achieve. And in achieving we fulfil not only ourselves but the earth itself. We are the earth. We are the earth’s awareness.

L   Stop now Fiona. I can only take so much of this sort of thing. I need time to digest it.

F   We need time, full stop. When you enter the timeless, and don’t forget to breathe, back you come into time. But the reality lies in the movement.

L   T.S. Eliot said that... "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." He said it was an occupation for the saint.

F   Yes, he talked about it all the time. "The still point of the turning world".

L   "There the dance is, and there is only the dance". But Fiona, does it really have to bring us all back into religion? If religion is really the price of all this I’d rather stay as I am. I simply can’t stand the atmosphere of religion and religious people. Religion always seems to me like sticking pins through butterflies. "You’ve just had a transcendent experience? Join the club. Sign here." They don’t just bring it all down to earth. They positively stamp it into the mud.

F   If they didn’t do that people at an earlier stage of development would lose touch altogether. Simple religions, and even trendy new-age mysticisms and occult games are necessary introductions for some people to the possibility of stillness and attainment. You not only have to have the temple, it has to have inner courtyards and outer courtyards, places of acclimatisation where people can start to lose some of their fear and scepticism. We are in such a courtyard.

L   Fiona, are you a Christian?

F   (Pause). Well, I haven’t signed on the dotted line. I don’t go to church. I’m not an anthroposophist either, although I did join the society. Like most people, when I was young I joined things. But I don’t operate very well in groups.

L   What about I.T.?

F   I.T. has this particular dynamic of disassembly, mobility, not allowing form to overtake content. You can’t join I.T., it’s simply a code symbol for a process. But I stalled your question.

L   About Christianity, yes.

F   No, I’m not a Christian. I think for the time being Christianity has blocked the path of spiritual development for mankind. Christianity has hi-jacked the growth of an awakening, emergent consciousness of the spirit in humanity and put a price-tag on it. The church recognised what was saleable and controllable in what emerged in Palestine 2000 years ago, and marketed it. Sin, atonement, advocacy, and hence priesthood, hierarchy, authority, these could all be marketed and placed as a solid structure between the awareness of humankind and humankind’s true being.

L   What is humankind’s true being?

F   You know that Lucia. You stood looking straight at it ten minutes ago. You showed it to me. You opened a door for me to see it too.

L   It was only a glimpse.

F   The glimpse we get of that reality is not partial, whereas the glimpses of sense realities are only scraps of the whole. When the light breaks through in that way, through the kind of chink that people like you provide, it’s the whole Light which momentarily we see. Light is indivisible. Each glimpse is, so to speak, a hologram of the whole.

L   And that is humanity’s true being?

F   Yes, it is.

L   Has it got a name?

F   Yes it has.

L   Can we speak its name?

F   Names are tricky. They do things to consciousness. They alter time. Spoken thoughtlessly or inadvertently they raise devils instead of gods.

L   Yes. Melanie and I have gone into that a bit. We talked about The Wizard of Earthsea. People need vernacular names, because true names hand power to the unscrupulous.

F   Lucia, without going into the state you brought us to just now, can you stand fully in your body and speak the name of humanity’s true being so that it is acceptable to the Earth, and stands there in our Earth consciousness as a description of what we are becoming?

L   Are we sufficiently protected to do that?

F   I am beginning to know how to invoke that sort of protection. My faint memory tells me that in the past I have been a magician, and I know the techniques and manipulations of power that put walls round what we did. But that is no longer appropriate in our time. We have sacrificed power to awareness of our own spiritual presence. Humanity’s true being protects us to a much greater degree than the old magicians could achieve. But we have to ask it to do so.

L   Let’s do that now.

*****

F   Speak the name now. Lucia.

L   CHRIST IN US.

*****

L   I feel tremendously powerful. I feel I could conquer the world.

F   You could. The first people to have that experience, to be aware of that identity, set out to conquer the world on its behalf. They created Christianity and destroyed half of humanity in the process instead.

L   Instead of what?

F   Instead of joy, then pain, then the marriage of pain and joy, which is the achievement, what is called the pleroma, the fullness.

L   What can I do with this power?

F   Bring it into balance with its opposite, with powerlessness. Apart from that balance power only destroys.

L   Is that done through breathing? Is that why you told me to breathe?

F   It is not only that we bring opposites into balance by breathing. Balance, poise, equilibrium, whatever we call them, actually create the breath, the heartbeat, the whole rhythmic system.

L   I can’t grasp this. Are you saying that if we could master the breath we could understand the world?

F   There are powers which would like us to think so. Breathing is so powerful that mastery of the breath is mastery of the world. What these dark powers don’t tell us is that this is a two way process. Mastering the world is at the same time being mastered by the world. The only way to make the world our prisoner is to be totally imprisoned in it. The idea that we can freely control the world from outside is an illusion. When we act in the world it is also the world which is acting in us. At the level of action in the world we are the world. Understanding the world is something different.

L   How do we understand the world?

F   In the first place by doing what we are doing now, by thinking.

L   There’s something missing.

F   There certainly is!

L   What is the missing factor?

F   The missing factor is we ourselves. We are absent from our own situation if we simply think and act, think and act. We also have to feel. We have to feel ourselves. We have to feel ourselves thinking, feel ourselves acting. We have to be, and we have to become aware of ourselves as being.

L   So in feeling ourselves we are in joy, then in thinking about the world we are in pain, and in acting we synthesise the two and achieve the pleroma, is that it? There’s something a bit wrong with that isn’t there? I mean we certainly feel pain as well as joy. And in becoming aware of ourselves we are certainly also thinking. Moreover in acting we feel both pain and pleasure and also we are aware that acting is a rational thinking process on some level. Isn’t there something contrived about this whole threefoldness of thinking feeling and willing? It’s almost as if they’re interchangeable.

F   They certainly are interchangeable, down here on the earth. But it is the fact that we are in physical bodies that enables us to hold them together. Otherwise they would fly apart. This is why we have to have physical bodies you might say. As spiritual beings we humans are in our infancy. The three forces or entities which manifest in us as thinking, feeling and willing are gigantic powers in the spirit. If we, as minute spiritual infants, were to experience them naked and unmediated, they would blow us apart. We wouldn’t survive for a fraction of a second. Our physical bodies are cunningly and wonderfully contrived to hold together, in a single entity, beings which, in their own infinite sphere, are engaged in titanic cosmic battles and towering harmonic agreements, which we could only survive after multiple incarnations over countless millennia of time.

L   You make our physical bodies sound like electrical condensers.

F   On one level that is precisely what they are. The physical human body is the supreme achievement of the creative universe. It is the only entity in the whole of creation which can contain within its tiny compass the entire scope and infinite variety of the cosmos, yet so stepped down energywise that it can contain the spiritual embryo which we ourselves are, and act as a vehicle and an instrument by which we can grow and mount upwards, and scale the heights from which it was created.

L   No wonder so many people nowadays say that it was implanted into the planet millennia ago by extraterrestrials.

F   That is partially a materialistic distortion by people who have not inwardly grasped the fact that the planet is a living organism which we become part of when we incarnate into it.

L   It isn’t itself simply a single undifferentiated organism though, is it? I mean it is inhabited by hosts of beings, ourselves certainly, but other sentient beings as well?

F   Which is why we arrived at this word intraterrestrials. We came to the realisation that the new-age movement was losing touch with the reality of its own earthly experiences. It is as if a materialist fantasy world of science-fiction had invaded human consciousness and was blowing it up like a balloon, progressively dispersing and thinning out human experience, and detaching it from the planet, of which it is an indispensable part.

L   Are there no gods outside the planet then?

F   Human consciousness is in danger of being dominated by space, and this means that the human soul is getting lost in the depths of time. What is supremely important is that we should find our way back to the intensity and concentration of the present moment in time and the present location in space. That is what we made a momentary contact with this morning when you achieved what you did achieve. The question of outside and inside is one of the inexhaustible mysteries. We have to think, feel and will our way into it in every moment of waking consciousness.

L   I feel you didn’t answer my question.

F   I didn’t. I felt you might answer it.

L   I think there are gods outside the planet. I think it is a male being which I sometimes feel approaches me, and that’s why I tend to be drawn out of my body towards it, and to be united with it. I feel it is my other half, or other side. I feel it is my more real self, and that it belongs to the stars.

F   Have you ever met a man who said:- "I think there are goddessess inside the planet. I think it is a female being whom I sometimes feel I approach, and that’s why I sometimes feel drawn into my body towards it and to be united with it. I feel it is my other half, my other side. I feel it is my more real self, and it belongs in the earth.

L   (Laughs loudly) How absolutely astonishing! You repeated my words exactly as a perfect mirror image. You must have amazing powers of concentration.

F   Well I think I’ve learned to listen! But the thing is, have you met such a man or men?

L   Well of course I have. Every time a man falls in love with me; and then we lose it all at once when we make love.

F   Exactly. Why do you think that is?

L   Well I have the feeling that men don’t actually see me at all. They see something else. I’ve always thought it was simply a mirror-image of themselves which they lose at the moment of orgasm. And there I am in front of them, all glamour dispersed. Mostly they are deeply disappointed and take it out on me. ‘Can’t think what I saw in her’, they say after a few more times. Post-coital depression sets in.

F   You’ve been unlucky. So have I. But perhaps it isn’t such bad luck after all.

L   Why?

F   We’ve been able to see some things a lot of people don’t see. They just get on with it. We ask questions, and I think we get true answers.

L   Don’t you think a lot more men than women project that sort of experience? Why do you think that is?

F   Oh, a lot of women make gods out of their men. But women are the real earth-beings. They make a better job of the projection! They adjust to earth realities... babies and washing-up. Most men go on fantasising and look for the goddess in the next pretty young thing.

L   Are you saying that women have more sense for the real divine than men?

F   No, not at all. Who creates the churches? Who scans the sky for UFOs and extra terrestrials? Who sends rockets to the moon and the planets? Men are natural denizens of the outer realities. That’s why they are reluctant to admit to the real existence of goddesses on earth. Men have as powerful a sense for the numinous as women have, but they have less sense for it in its incarnated planetary form. They want the goddess to be a phenomenon. They’d rather have a rock-star Madonna than the Sistine Madonna. They want heaven to stay outside where they think it belongs. Their GOD is unitary and above all male.

L   So they have created a male world to embody him.

F   And that male world is destroying the earth.

L   But men wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t made it possible.

F   Not only possible but in a way inevitable.

L   How?

F   By being the unattainable sexual goddess ideal for man. By putting all our energy into that. By aiming at Marilyn Monroe and then crashing down into our fat or skinny, smelly, boring monstrous selves. In a word, women’s God is also unitary, but female. We want heaven to stay inside where we think it belongs. So we have created a female world to embody our female God. And that female world is destroying the stars as effectively as man destroys the earth.

L   Stars are indestructible.

F   So is the earth, but humanity is having a jolly good short at destroying both.

L   It seems you are implying that there is something one-sided in the green revolution. We ought to be paying just as much attention to the way in which the reality beyond the earth is being denatured and eroded. We need a golden revolution as well.

F   We confuse GOD with the gods and goddesses. Outer space is peopled by gods of all shapes and sizes, some beneficent, some malevolent, destructive and anti-human. Inner space is equally populated by goddesses, and not all of them are on our side either. Feminists counter the male paternalist hijacking of GOD by attempting to erect a unitary goddess opposition. But that misses the point altogether. GOD is beyond polarity neither male nor female. GOD is all there is. GOD is Being itself, Being aware, Being aware of itself, Being thinking its awareness of itself, Being aware of thinking its awareness of itself. GOD is immanent in Being, but constantly transcends that immanence. So GOD creates polarity but is never subject to it. Gods and goddesses are another ball-game altogether.

*****

L   Fiona, when we went into those altered states earlier, that was something different from gods and goddesses wasn’t it?

F   You know it was.

L   Can you describe what was happening?

F   Do you know the word hierophant?

L   Yes.

F   Do you remember what it means?

L   I think you’re telling me that I was acting as a hierophant just now, and that I should remember that, because I’ve done it before. Is that what you’re saying?

F   Listen, I’m not teaching you. I’m not your teacher.

L   What are you doing then?

F   I’m doing what a man I know calls "putting myself in service of your higher being". At least that’s what I’m trying to do. As I told you, I find it very difficult to do that, and I frequently find myself controlling the situation instead.

L   I don’t think you’re doing too badly. I’m a lot less disciplined than you are. I flounder about more.

F   Well you’re less experienced than I am, but you’re not doing too badly either. You’re responding to suggestions and allowing things to happen without interfering in them. You’re also staying awake. You didn’t slip out of your body this time, so you’re responding to an intuition that you don’t want to be mediumistic.

L   That’s quite right. I feel quite sure that’s not what I’m meant to do. But what are you doing while I do my hierophant bit?

F   I’m more of what should be called a priest, if it weren’t for the fact that the word has been thoroughly downgraded. Most priests just go through the motions in a traditional way. They have no real idea what they’re supposed to be doing, they just hope that God knows and carry on as they’ve been taught to do. I’m talking about catholic priests, but in protestant churches they don’t even get that far, in fact they don’t even call themselves priests. They prefer to think of themselves as pastors, guides, shepherds of their flocks. But we don’t really need to go into all that. You know it already.

L   So what does a real priest do?

F   A real priest creates and makes him or herself responsible for what is called a temple. It doesn’t have to be a physical structure, although it is often helpful if something physical is there to act as a focus of attention.

L   What’s a temple for?

F   It’s a receptor, a receiving station, a set of parameters, a place where the god or goddess can manifest. In the last resort it is the earth itself which is the temple.

L   So the temple is the female half of what we’re talking about.

F   Exactly. In ancient Greece they had this picture of Zeus descending from the heights and impregnating the swan, Leda. But that is rather a primitive level of what we mean.

L   Why doesn’t the Christian church have hierophants?

F   You can feel, can’t you, that we’re getting nearer and nearer to the point when we are going to have to use the Name again, the Name that emerged in you when you became momentarily a hierophant.

L   The C-word. Why am I so obstinately reluctant to pronounce that word?

F   You pronounced it loud and clear an hour ago.

L   I feel that it itself pronounced itself in me. And before that it spoke one of its sayings in me.

F   But you were not being mediumistic then either. You were aware that the "I" of the Being and your own "I" were one being.

L   We’re talking about Names again. I feel that the saying of that Name in a purely referential – not reverential, referential – sense is straight blasphemy.

F   And this is the girl who hates religion and religious people.

L   Religion is blasphemy. Religion is a secularised compromise with atheists. Religion is a cowardly disguise for responsible spiritual life. And look at the result. In our time Christianity is nothing but tarted up humanism.

F   (Laughs). I think you may have to modify some of those statements.

L   (Laughs too). Oh, Fiona dear, what are we going to do about all this?

F   As you said, it’s about names. What has happened is that you feel the C-word is no longer a Name of Power in the Wizard of Earthsea sense. It has become a nickname, a soubriquet, something bandied about in pubs and on the street as an ordinary oath, a swear-word. What do we do when all our words are downgraded, when people have taken all the sacred symbols out of the Temple and desecrated them in the gutter.

L   But we know something different, don’t we? We know that it is possible to open ourselves to the level at which the CHRIST can speak in us. There! I’ve said the Name. And unlike a Roman Catholic I didn’t make the sign of the cross as I did so.

F   They know the Name needs protection. But they haven’t reached the point where their own being protects it in the act of speaking. Nor have we all the time. We have to trust the path, and that means losing fear and the superstition that goes with it. Then we can begin to restore the name CHRIST to its former power. Now I’ve said it too.

(They get up and hug)

L   I’m getting hungry. Whatever time is it? Christ, I must go!

(Covers her mouth)

Oh lord, whatever have I done?

F   You haven’t done anything very serious darling. The profane world is also part of reality. We are in it. We are transforming it. It takes time.

L   But why am I so thoughtless?

F   One day we shall reach continuity of consciousness, continuous presence. That’s the object of the exercise. We’re getting there.

L   When are we meeting again?

F   Keep in touch with Melanie. She loves to be the contact point. I’ll ring her. Anyway, soon, soon! Off you go. It’s been lovely.

(A last hug, and Lucia goes.)

*****

Dialogue 2

R   What’s wrong with you these days Mel?

M   Is there something wrong with me?

R   Well, something’s wrong. I don’t seem to be able to get through to you the way I used to.

M   No, that’s true, Perhaps the whole notion of ‘getting through’ to someone has something wrong with it.

R   What do you mean?

M   Well, perhaps if things are right with people in the first place the idea of getting through to them doesn’t arise. Did you always feel you had to get through to me from somewhere?

R   Well I thought I knew you. Heavens above, I did know you. I know you now. I love you very much indeed, darling girl. But I feel you’ve pulled away from me somewhere.

M   Yes I have. I know I have. I’ve told myself for ages that we’re a very well adjusted couple. We each have our own life and our own needs and we’ve found a modus vivendi that suits us very well. But in my heart of hearts I know perfectly well that, at least on my side, this simply isn’t true. I’m lonely and sad, and I’ve had to withdraw a bit to cope with it.

R   I’m really amazed. I had no idea you felt like that. Why on earth didn’t you say something? Did you think I wouldn’t understand? I think the world of you Melanie. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make you happy.

M   People’s happiness is not ours to command Richard. We can only make people as happy as they can be in the part of them we actually see. If there are parts we don’t see we have no access to the happiness or misery in those parts. We can’t make people see us. It either grows out of our hearts or it doesn’t. So it becomes a great temptation, perhaps a necessity, to adjust to things as they are between us.

R   You’re saying I simply don’t see you. Are you also saying I don’t love you? That my love is an illusion?

M   Richard, in your heart you know that that can’t possibly be true. To doubt that would be to undermine your whole picture of yourself. And that picture is one you share with me. I see that picture and I love it deeply. I love you, Richard. I know that you are in some ways a very lonely man, that you need your loneliness and value it. I do my level best to guard and protect that need for a lonely path. But in doing that I’m beginning to fail myself. I’m not being honest with you about my real needs. And I know that if I fail myself I shall start to fail you. That’s what you sense in me and why you feel you can’t get through to me.

R   I think I know what you’re saying. You want me to come and with live you. We’re back where we were three years ago. You say you are protecting my lonely way, but your real self wants to be inside that space.

M   I think there are two halves of you that never meet. The love you have for me is in one space; the need to be by yourself is in another. I don’t think these two selves talk to each other. Moreover, I don’t think either of them see what is happening to me.

R   I’m beginning to think I’ve been deceiving myself about our relationship all along.

M   I don’t think you really trust that loneliness of yours. I think you are afraid of losing it. I think I trust it more than you do. In spite of the deep reality of your love for me I think you feel threatened by me. Richard, I don’t threaten you at all. Your freedom is of as much value to me as it is to you. I positively depend on your freedom. It is not I who threaten it. It is the division in yourself which does that. These two beings in you need to talk to each other. They need to resolve their differences. Then perhaps you will be able to turn towards me and really look at me.

R   Melanie, I don’t think I know you at all.

M   On the contrary, I think you know me very well. But there is a compliant, self-deceiving side of me which has begun to create a gap between us. Some conversations I have been having recently have begun to make me realise that I am afraid of losing you. I’m trying to be more honest with you, and that means putting our relationship at risk. I can’t be honest with you without being honest with myself at the same time. I have more needs in our relationship than I have been admitting. But simply declaring these needs will only make you feel more threatened. I feel you need to allow your love of me to make you more perceptive of me, otherwise you will end up with a romantic dream of me which will drift away and leave you with nothing. If you start to see me clearly as well as loving me you will see my needs and want to help me with them, as far as that is possible and right for you to do so. (Cries:) Oh Richard, I’m sorry. I’ve become a bit exhausted in our relationship, and not really known what to do next.

R   I feel I’ve been thoroughly selfish, only thinking about my own needs.

M   Living, thinking, striving very intensely in one’s life is an inherently selfish activity. Only love opens windows into that. It’s not easy to keep the balance.

R   What do you really want, Melanie?

M   O, that’s very simple and normal. I want to live with you and bear your children. And I want you at the same time to have all the scope you need for finding yourself in life, finding out who you are, and what you are really doing on this planet. Couldn’t be simpler could it?

R   Melanie, you’re wonderful. I don’t know how you put up with me. You’ll have to let me mull all this over and see what I come up with. I need to look more critically at my life.

M   There’s something else. I.T. is changing too. It’s reached a new threshold with Lucia coming in, and now perhaps Paul. You know what? I should go and have a heart-to-heart with Fiona if I were you.

R   Why do you think I should do that?

M   I don’t know. Just an inkling of mine. She’s a wise old bird. Normally she keeps her counsel, but if you put a pennyin her slot she sometimes disgorges a jackpot.

R   Well I might try it.

M   Are you staying here tonight?

R   I thought so. Why?

M   Lucia’s coming about lunchtime so I need to stay in. I wondered if you could pick up something for supper. We could eat together here if you like.

R   I’d love to do that. I’ll gather a few of the things we usually get at the market.

M   See you later, then. Bless you darling. I love you very much.

R   Me too. Bye.

*****

Dialogue 3

M   So you went to see Fiona? My god Lu, you look quite different. What’s been going on?

L   You feel different too. Stronger somehow.

M   I’ve had it out with Richard.

L   Oh bless you Mel! How did it go? Was he uptight about it?

M   Well he tried to be at first. But I just forged ahead. He was quite shaken I think. He went away in a pensive mood, but still warmly affectionate. I’ve burned my boats with him, but I don’t feel scared. I feel it’s all part of the general clearance that’s going on in the group.

L   I wonder if the reason impulses like this I.T. thing seem inevitably to get stuck in fixed forms has to do with people failing to do that. So instead of opening doors for people in general to start living in a more meaningful way they just get bogged down in their own ‘stuff’.

M   Rudolf Steiner talked a great deal about ‘karma’. In fact you could say that through him the whole eastern notion of karma was reborn in a western form. He cleared out the whole rigid notion of a sort of revengeful fate pursuing people, and superstitious pictures of ‘metempsychosis’...

L   You mean being reborn as a caterpillar or something if you were a bit of a creep in your last life... (hoots of laughter)

M   Yes, all that sort of nonsense, and he showed how the whole interplay of relationships on Earth is a self-devised and enormously intelligent device for untying in the next life knots one has tied in a previous one. But what was even more insightful, he showed how karma, so far from being a kind of grim revenge of the gods upon our misdemeanours, was the inevitable process of the fall of man into matter; and that this so-called ‘Fall of Man’ was at the heart of the divine plan for humanity.

L   How do you see that?

M   The whole secret of the difference between humankind and the gods seems to lie there. If we remain content to see the whole universe as based only on love, then humanity is intended simply as the latest version of self-perpetuating manifestations of successive angelic hierarchies.

L   So all the hierarchies of angels do as they’re told, but humanity is supposed to do as it likes.

M   Yes, exactly. But if doing as it likes is not also what God likes, so to speak, humanity simply ceases to exist; not out of a sort of divine disapproval, but because it is acting as a destroyer of its own created nature.

L   So, we see evil, tragedy and pain as sort of alarm systems to warn us that we are in danger of self-destruct. What becomes of freedom then? Do as you like but if it isn’t what God likes you’re clobbered.

M   No, because our freedom goes deeper than that. Steiner talked about the twin nature of humanity as ‘God-willed Man’ and ‘God-estranged Man’. The whole mystery of humankind lay in the notion that a being could emerge with a unique synthesis of freedom and love inbuilt into its nature. But if this freedom was simply bestowed on us from above it wouldn’t be freedom at all. It had to evolve. In other words, we were invited to be partners in our own creation. Freedom from the gods implied complicity with the gods. They had to agree, and not all of them did agree.

L   This gets very complicated. Why can’t it all be simple?

M   At the heart of it there is a prodigious simplicity, because at certain moments the author steps into the scenario and initiates a new cycle. Oh here’s Richard. Come in, darling. Lucia’s pressing me very hard to explain the entire universe, and I was just about to get out of my depth.

R   Where had you got to? Incidentally, as you see, I found the afternoon was free after all. I haven’t had any lunch. Lucia, can I help myself to a sandwich or something?

L   Go ahead. You know your way about my kitchen cubby-hole. There’s some ham and salad in the fridge. Put the kettle on. Melanie, let me get this straight. If we, as you say, were partners in the creation of our own nature, then at some level we accepted the necessity of pain and suffering as fail-safe mechanisms for the survival of our freedom in a world of divine law... divine law which was the product, the mechanism, you might say, of divine love.

R   We not only accepted it, we conceived of it. We were in on the mystery from the beginning. Where’s the butter? Oh here it is. Lucia, we talk about God as if he a sort of giant, archetypal person. But the notion of ‘person’ doesn’t come into it when we are talking about the creation of humanity. Lucia, we are God. We did it. And by ‘we’ I mean also the whole galaxy of angelic hosts, of which we are the latest edition, the contemporary version. The idea of ‘person’ comes later, after the Fall, you might say. Has Melanie told you Steiner’s picture of ‘God-willed Man’ and ‘God-estranged Man’?

M   Yes, I was talking about that just before you came in. Most of what I was telling her was a watered-down version of things you had told me. You came just in time.

R   As I came through the door you were saying something about the gods not all agreeing. They not only didn’t all agree. They stepped in, some of them, and exploited the new development with versions of their own. It was they who transformed the necessary safeguards which man and the angels had devised in order that freedom should not destroy the very nature of humanity as love. And created actual evil out of it.

L   You say ‘man and the angels’. Didn’t woman come into it?

M   The goddess had plans of her own.

L   ‘Mary kept all these things in her heart’. Mel, Mel, hold me love please. I go all out of balance. All right, I know breathe, breathe! I am breathing. I’m puffing like a porpoise. Why do I keep quoting these things out of the Bible? I don’t believe in all that stuff.

M   Lucia, you have to bring the different bits of yourself together or you’ll go a bit potty. You have to find a centre.

L   That’s what Fiona said. And it was when she said that, I found myself quoting the Bible for the first time.

R    I don’t believe those are just quotations, Lucia. When you said that just now about Mary I felt you were speaking directly out of the experience of Mary herself. What did you say the first time with Fiona?

L    "When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst".

R    There, you said that without wobbling.

L   Yes, but this time I was only quoting. This is what seems to happen with powerful words. They get born out of you like flames, as it were. Then they condense and harden off, and they become simply quotations. I think that is what makes me so prejudiced against religion. It has lost its source in the flame.

M   The tongues of fire the apostles experienced.

R   It would help me a lot, Lucia, if you told us about these experiences you’ve been having since you joined us. How many times has it happened?

L   I think this just now made the fifth time. But they’ve all been different.

M   Well it happened twice when we were together, didn’t it, Lu?

L   Yes, and then twice when I was with Fiona. And now again here.

R   What seems to spark it off? Let me say, I’m not simply asking out of curiosity. I’m beginning to realise that your arrival among us is like the flowering of what the group has been aiming at all along. I feel it was a very wonderful happening.

L   But I’m also very muddled.

M   Yes, I think we have something for you too.

L   Fiona also said something of the sort. She said I had been approaching the group for some time, and now I had surfaced as it were.

R   Venus appearing out of the waves.

M   Stop flirting, Richard.

R   Well she is lovely isn’t she?

M   Yes, she’s very lovely indeed. Stop chewing that sandwich and dropping crumbs all over Lucia’s floor. Where’s that tea you were supposed to be making?

*****

L   You wanted me to talk about these experiences I’ve been having. I find I have to overcome a reluctance to do that. Why do you suppose that is?

R   Have you any idea why?

L   It would be a bit like getting undressed.

M   Yes. I’m beginning to feel we have to look at the idea that these episodes have a lot to do with your sexuality and what you are doing with it.

L   You mean they’re connected with...

M   Richard, Lucia confided to me quite a lot about her sexual life. Do you want the conversation to take this path?

L   I think it has to. I’m not usually so bashful.

M   You described what had been happening over the last months as a sort of celibate sabbatical! (Laughter)

L   Instead of defiantly playing the role of loose woman and getting increasingly uncomfortable with it.

R   Actually feeling guilty do you mean?

L   Not as simple as that. I enjoy being beautiful, and I’ve been through what most of my kind go through over that, knowing that there is a perfectly innocent side to it, but also that you can’t sustain it in the face of men’s sexual pressure; nor in face of the sort of prissy puritanism that surrounds everything to do with sex, especially among older people. So it’s more defiance than guilt. I’m beautiful and sexy and bugger the lot of you! It becomes a way of life.

M   But then it began to pall a bit.

L   Well, I did begin to wonder where it was taking me. Especially after some shaming episodes, like when a man I respected got interested and ended up calling me a tarty bitch in front of some of his friends who I also liked. So I withdrew a bit from all that.

M   At the same time there’s something about being celibate on principle that is also defiant, isn’t there? Some women make a profession of it, and it’s not usually the most attractive women who do that.

R   How has it been with you, Mel? I mean before you and I met?

M   Well I never felt myself as being in the front line of sexiness, Richard. Yes, I know what you’re about to say, but that is especially for you, and yes, I think I’m the sort of woman whose sexuality only emerges with a particular man. When that fails, as it so often does, there is heartbreak. But there’s also a secret realisation that one-man women are specially blessed in some way. It’s something you can’t take any particular credit for, it just happens.

L   All the same, a hell of a lot of women do take credit for it in an unpleasantly arrogant way. I feel women like me, whether we are tarty bitches or not, are as you said, Mel, in the front line. We take most of the brunt of men’s untamed and sometimes brute sexuality, and we get precious little support from the respectable majority in doing that.

M   Well, a lot of them say it is mainly you who provoke it.

L   They certainly do, and there is obviously some justice in that. At the same time, it’s a man’s world, Mel. Men broadly speaking call the tune in most of these things. Streetwise women dance to that tune, that’s all. We sort of draw off the excess energy, and in doing so very often it is we who get men to realise that there is a richer, more fruitful life with the little woman and her kids at home. Shit, I’m talking like a Hollywood film script!

R   I think you’re wonderfully clear and honest about it all.

L   If I am it’s because there’s space with you I.T. lot to come to the surface of my life, as Fiona put it.

M   What I felt we were beginning to come to, Lu, was that there was an actual connection between these, (shall we call them?), psychic episodes and the change in your sexual life.

L   When I’ve been thinking about them afterwards I’ve had the curious impression that these were events happening much more to you, and also to Fiona, than to me...almost that they were happening to the world, as it were, even to people who only heard about them happening, or read about them happening in a book. For me they were much more like losing consciousness, losing my hold on my body, speaking in spite of myself.

R   What you are talking about, Lucia, is mediumship. Many people claim that mediumistic phenomena are directly connected with suppressing one’s normal sexuality.

L   And yet I also know that what I was seeing and giving voice to was something absolutely wonderful.

M   It is absolutely wonderful, Lu. But do you remember what we said the first time it happened? I asked you who you thought the ‘presence’ was, and you said you thought it was yourself.

L   But now you seem to be saying that it was simply the result of my repressed sexuality!

M   Lucia, don’t allow the rubbishing values of our ordinary society to cloud your actual experiences. You experienced something wonderful and so did I. So, I presume did Fiona, though you haven’t told us yet what happened then. Just because a typical psycho-analyst would dismiss what happened as nothing but disorganised glands doesn’t mean that the episodes didn’t themselves occur, and that they didn’t open up new perceptions. What we are dealing with now is the possibility of further confusions and deceptions beyond the obvious ones.

R   This is really quite extraordinary! Joe and I have had endless discussions about who these Intraterrestrial presences really are, and a lot of the time we have come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that we are sensing anything more than a somewhat deeper layer of our own being. Are you confirming that?

M   I would be very hesitant to say there was no evidence. What I am saying is that as far as Lucia and I are concerned we have been experiencing a very powerful and wonderful presence which we sense as the visible approach of a deeper level of her own being. I find it quite distasteful and destructive to rubbish that as nothing but the product of Lucia’s wilful celibacy. The sexual aspect opens the door, but what that open door reveals is something ineffable and beautiful in itself, Lucia’s higher being. How much higher I’m not prepared to say. Possibly only as far as her astral self. We all have such higher levels and it is wonderful when they are revealed. But they can also lead to the possibility of further illusion. Seeing Lucia’s higher astrality world be wonderful, but it would also be illusory, especially if we start to think we are already seeing into the spiritual world. We are only touching the outer fringe of reality, and even that may be distorted by the fact that Lucia is somewhat mediumistic.

L   I don’t want to be a bloody medium.

M   You don’t have to be. Mediumistic vision is a sort of psychic illness. But that doesn’t mean that you are any more sick than the rest of us. We all have this potential, but in most of us it is concealed because we stay in our bodies. Your particular mix of, first, over-expression of sexuality and then suppression of it simply revealed in you what is potential in all of us.

L   And yet what happened was so wonderful for all of us. It was still more so when I got to Fiona. I really feel that there something more came through, something much more real and somehow in control.

R   That’s probably because Fiona herself is so much more in control. But I think we need to be with Fiona to hear about that. Shall we stop this now, and see whether she is ready to have this meeting with all five of us that we talked about?

L   Which raises the vexed question of Paul again. Have you seen him again. Richard?

R   No. He seems to have gone back to Dorset. He lives down there, quite near to where the conference was. I thought he would have been in touch with you. As a matter of fact I thought he was rather gone on you.

L   Do did I. I don’t know whether to be relieved or miffed.

M   He’ll surface again when he’s sorted himself out. I feel he wants you, but he doesn’t quite know whether he wants I.T. He’s afraid he can’t have one without the other.

R   (Laughs) Poor Paul! Oh dear I seem to have dropped him in it, don’t I? Look, I’ll give Fiona a ring and fix something up, shall I?

L   Stay now, won’t you, and have something to drink?

R   I think Mel wants to go shopping, don’t you love?

M   He’s suddenly getting all solicitous, aren’t you sweetheart?

R   What on earth’s that supposed to mean?

M   I’ll tell you later. Come on.

R   ‘Bye Lucia. I still think you’re beautiful whatever she says.

L   So do I. Get out of here, you two!

*****

Dialogue 4

F   I hope you didn’t mind me suggesting we met here instead of up your end of town. I had a particular reason, which I’ll tell you later, but I know it’s rather a long way for you and Lucia, Melanie.

M   Bless you Fiona it’s perfectly simple thanks to Richard’s car. He simply picked Lu and me up from her place, and Joe’s this end anyway.

R   No problem. These are journeys we’re all quite used to anyway because of work. Except for you Lucia, it’s a bit off your usual stamping ground, isn’t it?

L   On the contrary, it feels almost like coming home for me. Till I started the art-school course I had a room here in Abbey Road. My mum still lives in Carlton Hill where I was brought up, walking distance from this house. I really love St. John’s Wood.

F   How interesting! I wonder if I know your mother by sight. I have friends in Carlton Hill. Never mind, we can talk about that another time. The reason I suggested meeting here was to do with you anyway. I expect you’ve told the others about our talk here and how it went, have you?

L   Only up to a point Fiona. We talked quite a bit about me and my psychic episodes, but not about the special thing that happened here. I rather wanted to wait so that you could be here too. I felt it was important to be clear about what did happen, for my own sake As well as everybody else’s.

J   I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on.

R   Yes, I’m sorry Joe. There doesn’t seem to have been an opportunity to tell you in spite of our meeting every day. Things move so fast.

J   That’s why I always lay such stress on mobility. But it needs a lot more presence of mind to keep all the balls in the air than it does when life is more compartmentalised. This I.T. life has a certain style which takes time to get used to.

R   It’s skill as well as presence of mind Joe. The analogy of juggling is quite apt. I see I.T. as a way of living out consciously things which usually go on automatically in a kind of dream.

F   What one discovers I think is that ninety percent of what happens in our lives we simply don’t notice at all. They don’t really move any faster, Richard. It’s simply that we block out everything which in our half-dreaming state we couldn’t take on board without going crazy.

M   In one sense, Fiona, things clearly do move faster. Technology for example compounds a problem which is there anyway. In fact, the more material stuff we take on board the dreamier we have to become to cope with it. Look how many people move in a sort of zombie mist from work to television and back, salted with a bit of sleep, sex and sport, and then back to work again.

R   Till cancer, ulcers, heart attacks or Aids rescues them from the nightmare and gives them a chance to reincarnate. (Shocked laughter, rather rueful).

L   Oh lord, is that really the sort of awareness that opens up in the I.T. School? I think I’ll go back to the peaceful existence of a streetwise sophisticate. It’s less of a strain.

F   Yes, but quite seriously, that’s why the Beings have nudged our awareness to the point of trying to get things organised. But not in the old style of sorting our lives into insulated compartments. It’s not a filing system we need, it’s an organisation that really is organic and alive, and as Joe says, mobile.

L   I remember you saying the other day, Mel that it’s also a rather dangerous procedure. You even said people sometimes end up in mental homes doing it.

M   The psychological profession, with few exceptions, is engaged in pushing things in a diametrically opposite direction. They condemn what we are doing in raising people’s awareness as over-stimulation, pushing people nearer to the precipice. They want to damp things down, tranquillise people, get them into more healthy physical activity, less introspection.

F   We, on the other hand, believe fundamentally that human beings are fully capable of facing up to the fact of their own mental, psychic and spiritual evolution. At the same time we know perfectly well that the path of awakening is fraught with danger. Particularly is this so for people who, for mysterious reasons, have a natural orientation towards psychic experiences.

L   Like me.

F   Yes, and like more and more people every day, especially in your generation and younger. Which brings me to why I suggested your coming here today. More preparation has gone on in this room than has probably happened in the other rooms where you work. I mean the sort of preparation we need for dealing with this new event in the life of the I.T. enterprise. That sounds a bit pompous, but it is also a reality. It is an aspect of what we call temple-building, the recognition of sacred space, and the actual creation of places conducive to the raising of awareness. Over the years, long before we called it I.T., this room was a place where Joe and I and others had worked in that sense. It used to be a lot more complicated and fussy than it is now, didn’t it Joe, bristling with altars, icons, pictures of prophets and saints and gurus, crystals and incense everywhere. At a certain point we cleared the lot out. Now there is nothing but this single artefact, which Joe made, and the candle.

J   You might call it a point of reference, Lucia. It’s the opposite pole to mobility, a voluntary, almost arbitrary, still point by which to measure what we are doing in I.T.

L   "The still point of the turning world".

J   Exactly. And you can stand it anywhere you happen to be.

L   Like Aaron’s rod in the wilderness.

F   And his breastplate with the pillars Urim and Thummim on it.

L   It’s beautiful, Joe. I’m trying to think what it reminds me of. Oh I know. It’s like a menhir, a bit like the one on Callanish which I’ve never seen except in photographs, or the one on St Agnes in the Scillies, which I have seen.

J   Oh have you, Lucia? How splendid! I’m glad you’ve seen that, it’s one of my favourite places.

L   Called Gugh!

J   That’s right! It’s on a little peninsula off the main island, which you can’t go onto except at certain states of the tide. You can’t see it from the main island, you have to walk round to the seaward side.

L   And then you suddenly come on it a little below you in its own protected valley with the sea behind it. You walk down a couple of hundred yards to it.

J   You feel it’s been waiting for you. (They look at each other, sharing this.)

R   I think all those stone-age monuments only come into existence when people look at them. What happens when too many people do it is, they cease to be able to do their job.

J   Like Stonehenge, which is beginning to look positively exhausted, worn out by being stared at by millions of people.

L   What is their job then, Richard?

F   Well, that is precisely what we are referring to when we talk about temples. Sorry to butt in, Richard.

R   No, I was trying to think what it is they do. I think menhirs are like concentrated, condensed temple-forms with a special relationship to people who worship there on their own.

L   What do you mean by worship? That’s another word that makes my hackles rise!

F   Yes, it’s sad how many people like you have been alienated from crucial experiences by the way religions have downgraded them. I feel you’re always experiencing worship, but you’d call it being awestruck, deeply impressed, coming to awareness of your own presence in relation to something. It’s when that gets tacked onto someone else’s dogmatic, proselytising, often downgraded notions of the sacred that people like you get so indignant about it. You probably have more capacity for true spontaneous worship than people like that do. They’ve been told by priests to worship. You do it anyway. But don’t fall into the opposite trap and think you’re better than they are. I’m not suggesting you do that, you’re too spontaneous. But plenty of rebels do. They become just as dogmatic in their prejudice against formal religion as the churchy people they reject. Also they are plenty of isolated struggling individuals inside the system who live what somebody called "lives of quiet desperation" surrounded on all sides by religious philistines. I think those are the ones I.T. is really geared to finding and rescuing, the ones who stay inside the system out of loyalty.

J   It was feelings like that which made me sculpt this figure when Fiona suggested we needed a kind of focal point in this Temple-room of hers, something to help us quieten ourselves down when we came in out of the trafficky hurly-burly outside. As you saw, Lucia, it is actually a miniature of a menhir. The one I modelled it on is called the Goh menhir which stands at the corner of a field in Brittany, north of Vannes. It’s very isolated, quite difficult to find, in fact you need a detailed map. You ought to go there one day, Lucia, it’s special.

L   I’d love to. It sounds my sort of place.

J   Perhaps I should take you there.

(Joe moves the pillar between them)

*****

L   I’m standing in the dark in the wind by the pillar on St. Agnes. It’s raining and the darkness is complete. There’s a tremendous storm at sea all round me. The whole island feels as if it’s trembling with the violence of the elements. I feel as if I’m out on the exposed headland of the whole of human life, and that you are all behind me, holding me steady. I’m not a medium, I’m fully conscious. I’m a sense organ for what the I.T. school is doing in the world. All the stone pillars, in a sense, are one, but each one is an antenna pointing out into the cosmos, and trembling, sensing on behalf of the Earth what is going on out there.

*****

F   Psychism is a precious and perilous gift, Lucia. People have been in the habit for centuries of treating psychics as only half- human. One minute they are guarding, even imprisoning them in oracles, pampering them and listening piously to their every word, and then the next minute they’re torturing them and burning them at the stake as witches. What we have to do is to humanise and demythologise psychic ability. There is so much of it now, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, as the old spiritualist movement used to call them, are bursting out everywhere. We have the opportunity to purge the unhealthy aspects of them, and allow them to function as one means among many by which the two levels of reality, sensible and super-sensible, can gradually merge and become one again as they were long ago.

J   But this time consciously.

R   Yes, that’s the difference. You know, we can almost be grateful to the hyperactive, obsessive paranoid life in a technological age

for driving us down further and further into the dream of matter. It adds sharply to the sense of urgency in some of us to wake up and help to wake others to a New World of reality…

L   Christopher Fry... "It took so many thousand years to wake, but will you wake, for pity’s sake?"

M   That’s one of the precious lines George Trevelyan always quoted.

L   Fiona, you said just now that you were nudged into starting the I.T. school by Beings. Are you talking about specific Beings you are in contact with, or are you just saying in a general way that the impulse was prompted by the spiritual world?

F   At some level you know as much or more about that than I do. Perhaps it’s time we told them what we think happened in this room the other day.

L   You see, Melanie and I have been talking a lot about this and I don’t think either of us is clear yet, (do you, Mel?), about where the line is between projected images of our own deeper nature and the actual presence near us, or even inside us, of other conscious entities, other than our own.

M   Also much of this has to do with names and naming.

F   The Wizard of Earthsea again, wonderful Ursula le Guin.

M   The power of the Name to invoke the ‘presence’, to alter time, to reach reality, or equally to open up monstrous phantoms and demons of possession. We have to get the names right, and this means finally we have to acquire the power to bestow new names on things, and even on people.

L   As you did with me, Melanie, Lucia is not the name on my birth-certificate.

R   So you’re in disguise, are you?

L   No, it’s the birth-certificate which is the disguise!

J   Tell us what happened here for you, then.

L   Well, briefly, I’ve got a lot of misgivings and even hang-ups about religion, religious people, churches and all that side of life. But when Fiona and I started to open up the space here the other day, what seemed to happen was that a very high Being spoke in me. Fiona, it seems to me, started to ask me things and I felt this Being speak its own essence in me. That’s the nearest way in which I can describe it. Temporarily I felt that I and it were one. It spoke in me and I spoke as it.

F   Who is this Being, Lucia?

L   This Being is the CHRIST. Saying that now is different from saying it then. The CHRIST has taken a further step, now, today, in this moment, than happened then. After the episodes in Melanie’s room I felt only the pain of "coming down to earth" afterwards. This time I feel that the joy and pain are united. The CHRIST seems to me now to be something concretely present in our actual conversation. This is what "Gathered together in my Name" signifies. The actual naming of the CHRIST has this effect. We become one another in naming the CHRIST in this way.

M   I feel this has a special character because of Fiona, and what could go on between the two of you. Fiona has this special relation to the CHRIST, just as I have to the Name, and Lucia to the Light.

F   That’s why I asked you to come here. The CHRIST is the central secret in the problem of healing and protecting the vulnerability of the psychic, who otherwise falls into the sickness of mediumism. The CHRIST is the reference point, the pillar, the menhir. But the CHRIST is incomplete without the horizontal dimension as well, the Earth’s surface on which the pillar stands. Steiner called it "the CHRIST-will in the encircling round", and he described it as prevailing especially in the rhythmic nature of the Earth, where he said it was the element which conferred blessing on the human soul.

J   So the CHRIST has these two dimensions, you see, a vertical and a horizontal dimension, and these form a cross. It becomes an open question which came first, the intuitive perception of the cruciform nature of the CHRIST in the Earth, or the Cross on which Jesus, bearing the CHRIST, was crucified by the Romans.

L   Another case of synchronicity, apparently.

M   Redfield in "The Celestine Prophecy" would say that it makes no difference. All events and phenomena in the world are ultimately synchronous. Hen and Egg. Cart and Horse.

F   The Rosicrucians added a further dimension to the picture by figuring a rose-stem with its thorns, growing out of the vertical pillar of a black cross, winding round the crossing point, and then flowering as seven red roses in a circle round the centre of the figure. This was the blessing of the soul, healing and redeeming the inherent clash between spirit and matter indicated by the cross itself. Steiner also described how the rose was a demonstration of the healing conferred by the etheric, with its pure green sap, upon the astral, embodied in human blood. The blood, as well as being the physical bearer of the soul, is also the element in humanity capable of sickness, the bearer of the Fall, and potentially vulnerable to evil. The red fragrant sap of the flowering rose arises directly, like healed blood, out of the green sap of the stem and leaves in the etheric. The etheric world itself cannot be sick. Leaf diseases and stem or trunk diseases in the plant world are always invasions by an astral element, through insects or fungi, for example. All this represents how the living CHRIST force in the etheric Earth heals the vertical astral-ego element in the human. It both redeems and validates the Fall of humanity into matter.

M   Now I see why they were called Rosicrucians. The Name embodied their whole perception of reality, Rose and Cross.

F   The CHRIST is both humanity and Earth. Humanity and Earth are one.

*****

L   I didn’t understand everything you were saying about the Rosicrucians. The language is a bit too involved for me. Is that ‘anthroposophical’ language?

F   Yes, those were Rudolf Steiner’s images.

L   I resonate very strongly to the images without understanding all the relationships.