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from Her-Bak Egyptian Initiate ~ Free Will & Fate
Her-Bak watched the sky. For months he lived more by night than by
day. One who knows what pertains to the stars will think it a duty
to bring out the gifts of so exceptional a student, one who shows
such keenness in the search for the truth, accepting no compromise.
The Astronomer therefore was able to carry out a stiff programme
to train Her-Bak in exact observation, in the precise calculation
of the stars' courses, in the interpretation of phenomena and all
the while, in spite of such rational exercises, to practise
him in the intuitive perception of invisible causes.
He habituated Her-Bak to 'live' the celestial movements while
remaining in touch with nature; to rid himself of obsession
with allegories as with appearance.
A day came when the disciple noted for himself the effect of
certain stellar situations on human disposition and activity.
This gave the Master profound satisfaction and in agreement
with the Sage he revealed to Her-Bak little by little the
meaning of certain configurations;
The legend of the seven Hathors who attend births, bringing
the new borne good or bad fortune, became for the attentive
pupil a parable showing how forces that flow from the
conjunctions of Earth and Heaven affect men for better or worse.
He saw it as a law of Necessity, exhibited in the connexion of the
star-pattern in the band of the Zodiac with the hour of a man's
birth. Patient and profound examination of a large number of
cases, in nature and those registered in the temple, changed
hypothesis into conviction.
Time passed. Her-Bak taught himself, and grew melancholy.
The Sage, watching him, knew the reason for this. He allowed
it to reach a maximum and precipitated a crisis. An eclipse
of the moon drew a number of observers to the terrace. The
Sage and Her-Bak, sitting apart with the Astronomer, listened
while he described the progress of this phenomenon, dwelling
on its disagreeable influence over man and vegetable.
A profound sadness, growing with the moon's reddening gleam,
completed the disciple's despair.
`Fate! What a frightful burden!' he exclaimed.
`What negation of personal effort! If our whole destiny is
settled by the stars we can change nothing...why fight against
oneself? It is useless to try and push on at the cost of such
sacrifices with a process that can only work out in its own time.'
Serenely the Sage watched the moon. `You are right, my son.
Nature's fate and the animals are fixed by the stars...what
advantage is there for them to know how it works? A
disappointing enquiry. A useless luxury. You have seen
through it. Then abandon such wearisome labour. Set up house,
feed and clothe a wife. Make your life a long day of happiness
...if the stars permit.'
Despair gripped Her-Bak's heart. A sob choked him. Tears he tried
in vain to keep back blinded him. The eclipse was now total and
a sound of chanting to the beat of tabors and sistrums came sorrow-
fully through the night. He rose and shook his fists at the
moon and the invisible singers.
`What use are these shows? Can they hasten by one moment the
return of light? All is written in the stars. All is in vain.'
The Sage signed the Astronomer not to intervene.
'If you're sure of this, Her-Bak, follow your harpist's advice.
Seek less costly pleasures, for it is useless to go against
the heart.'
`Heart or reason, no matter! They are ruled by the stars. My
instincts, my nature, my body...all is determined by number,
by the stars, forces whose plaything I am. Why give us the
illusion that our heart is master. My heart is a puppet, a
slave, like all else, of fate.'
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| The Sage waited for the storm of primordial grief to abate.
Then he lifted his grave voice and Her-Bak seated himself,
trembling.
`My son, there is error in what you have just said. Your
heart, seat of enlightenment, .. sia .. is it not here
that your divine KA dwells? But your KA isn't fate's
slave, for it is no part of Nature. All else on Earth or
in Heaven, even the solar disc that lights us, is part of
Nature, but the spirit-soul, like divine RA, is not.
If the spark becomes conscious in your humanity it grows
into a vital germ and through this, if you let it govern
the animal-human in you, you will be the master of your
fate. The soul is not subject to the stars.'
`But all my being suffers their influences!'
`As you have just suffered the depressing experience of
an eclipse, for the instinctive self is subject to them.
But as soon as animal man begins to obey his higher self
he only feels them as inclinations, no longer compulsions.
The soul is free and can alter its course. But I repeat,
the condition of independence is submission to the immortal
consciousness.'
Her-Bak refused to accept hope without certainty.
`If my soul didn't suffer the influence of the eclipse, yet my
lower self rejected the higher...the result is the same.'
`No. You obeyed it when it urged you to examine your doubts.
That is where free choice lies. Your body will always feel the
influence of the stars: you will free yourself when you
learn to be neutral and follow the instructions of your heart
without letting things perturb you. This is the way of MAAT.
The wonders that are spoken of it, the promises that are
made, would be empty words had they no relation to this
fact, that it liberates the man who is conscious of such
liberty from fate.'
Her-Bak submitted a point..
`Doesn't liberty come about by itself little by little without
intervention of man's will, as change comes about in species?'
`It's a remarkable achievement,' responded the Sage, `to
formulate two resounding errors in one sentence. Freedom is
the fruit of personal effort to go beyond nature. As to the
development of species, there is no such thing as physical
evolution: there is no progress except in the acquisition of
consciousness. The existence of species merely seems like a
pattern of advance, periodic and regular, with its renewings
that have similar but not identical characteristics. Every month,
every decade, sees the birth of insects that hatch at the
appointed hour: the same law tells a bird to prepare a nest
when the time to lay eggs approaches. As well as this sequence,
verifiable because short-term, we must also recognize the
existence of long-term phenomena that are less easily checked:
I am speaking of geneses that produces hitherto unknown creatures.
One sees in certain epochs the appearance of animals, plants,
and minerals for which no seed is known to have existed,
abnormal births following vast movements as if Earth had changed
its place in the sky. This is in effect the case. The cause of
such apparently sporadic phenomena lies in the universal
harmony; changes in the heavens that give fresh character to
an epoch are also the creative cause of such variations.
When a new age begins types that were a product of the
precedent era subsist until degeneration of seminal power by
exhaustion of the primitive urge, then vanish. Don't let
yourself be taken in by so-called accidents that together make
a logically seductive picture. Judge by cause, not effect.
The cause will be found in the principles of generation.'
`Am I to think,' Her-Bak asked, 'that we needn't see the products
of nature as an uninterrupted sequence of things that spring
from one another by natural transformation?'
`Such a theory would assume a physical perfection of species
through gradual evolution. This would be wrong.'
'You told me,' said Her-Bak, 'that there is in nature a variety of
organs that make a whole in man. Is there also, in the animal
kingdom, an evolution that achieves such a whole in the mammifer?
Now you seem to deny it.'
`You confuse evolution with adaptation and sequence,' the
Sage replied. 'I have said as well that every organ incarnates a
principle function which becomes self-conscious in matter.
In the act of creation all possibilities, functions, organs and
species are contained as ideas. Their incorporation happens in
accordance with stellar times or cycles and looks like a series
of accidents. Thus, man is not a synthesis of embodied species
or functions but of cosmic states; a synthesis that can only
take flesh when nature has embodied all organs or expressions
of function ideally completed. He is a complete expression of
his universe, an effect of a synthesis in the heavens.
But in man's primordial state there is no opposition, no
duality, consequently no death. He is a complete image of the
All and this must lie in the purpose of the creative Cause. But
there is also in man's paradisal unity a "possibility" of
scission, as in the creation of Heaven and Earth: there is then
a fall. But scission isn't a necessity. In the complete man
there would be simultaneity of states and, again without
division, he would have identity with the Cause, whereas as
Man fallen we are conscious of such states as separate and
in phases.
Creation then is the principle of the fall, while perfection
as willed by the Cause, and without all that is consequent
on the fall, is no longer creation in the same sense but a
manifestation or incarnation of unity.
`Species are a shaping of numbers and functions contained
as ideas in the principal creation, possibilities that is,
made real in a kind of succession outside time, which seems
absurd to the cerebral intelligence. The principal creation
should be regarded then as a virtual creation that will
appear effective to us in corporeality. We can say now that
once they have appeared on Earth species only evolve in
consciousness, but they can't adapt themselves to the
conditions of existence and the necessities of the time.'
`As to their appearance on Earth, listen carefully to my answer
and try to give the words their true meaning: each Neter,
when the time comes, calls into life the particular, and the
assemblages of particulars, that belong to him.'
`This produces the appearances of a continuous process of
evolution. If there were such a thing we should be able to
watch the change of mammifer into man and the growth of human
intelligence out of ignorance into the highest range of
consciousness so far experienced. And the further we look
back the more clearly we see evidence of a state of high
"knowing" that as we go back was more and more a state of
receptive intellect or intuition.
The nearer we return to the humanity of our day the
more it degenerates, with the progressive complexity of
rationalism, into analytic materialism and loses the
art of vital synthesis that belonged to the Ancient Masters.
This sacred science has always known of certain cosmic factors
that human thought only rejects because they are outside the
range of its cerebral faculties. Indisputable evidence of such
Knowledge proves that there existed in very remote times a
higher humanity now degenerate in races that are exhausted,
unable to advance otherwise that in the mode of animal evolution.
There is no possibility of growing from brute animal into
reasonable man: there must therefore be a special inspiration or
quickening that separates the human from the animal kingdom
absolutely.
`Was it this quickening,' asked Her-Bak, `that gave man intuitive
or infused knowledge, or did he acquire it consequently? Is
there an evolution of consciousness in humanity or degeneration?'
`Again you confuse two problems, that of consciousness in itself
and that of evolution of races. We shall study consciousness
later. Today I will only say you must distinguish innate
consciousness from consciousness that is acquired. The first
is implanted in the new-born through circumstances to do with
heredity and personal incarnation. This, the intelligence of
the heart, is intuition latent and it can be awakened by
training.'
`Acquired consciousness arises out of innate consciousness
ceaselessly felt and confirmed in sensory experience. As
to the races of men, successive epochs of terrestrial
humanity, though they may co-exist, have each embodied and
developed one of the psychic faculty particular to a given
race brings it to its peak, then, when a fresh human season
starts the flowering of the faculty next in succession,
to its decadence. Take the Black race. It began with the
consciousness of instinctive nature. It worshiped natural
forces and developed psychic vision. Its failure, which
is due to the ignorance of the mass, consists in believing
that consciousness of this order is its perfection.'
`But its Sages are not deceived. Today you notice among
ourselves the early symptoms of an analogous miscomprehension
in the use of rational faculty. Mental power, now due to be
developed, will lead man to an insolent confidence in the
superiority of rational thinking and such an abuse will bring
disaster to those who haven't understood the scale of
consciousness. Man's highest achievement is the acquisition
of intuitive-spiritual gifts, which should take cerebral
gifts into their service.'
`The Sages of a given race are those men who consciously make
use of faculties already acquired and develop the specific
gifts of their own race, aware that their importance in the
scale of consciousness is relative, without ceasing to cultivate
subtler modes of knowing. Each race carries its innate
consciousness in itself and the impulse needful for the
flowering of its particular endowment. The consciousness it
acquires is its own too; but the experience of its ..`elite'..
enriches the consciousness of humanity and makes for its
overall progress. Such a race, when this experience is
exhausted, may degenerate; but progress made is established
in cosmic man. In this way consciousness evolves race by
race though each degenerates.'
`Haven't there been at all times men who developed all faculties?'
asked Her-Bak.
`Those who brought what was needful into incarnation. These
are but individual cases.'
`And there is no continuous physical evolution of humanity?'
`Evolution of consciousness brings growth in general sensibilities.
The effort to achieve it is of a vital kind that provokes
reaction in the centres and nervous system, in the sexual
disposition as well. This brings Free Will into play, without
which there is no freedom. Such growth in consciousness
doesn't depend on the will of the intellect or its possibilities
but on the intensity of the inner urge; but such intensity,
which distinguishes an .. "elite" .., is born of disquiet,
a conflict caused by shock when intuitive consciousness
experiences a reality that challenges what isn't real in
ourselves. Such a shock, so fruitful, is the result of events
that leave their mark in the soul. That is why we seek the
challenge of brute reality rather than a sensual or cerebral
refinement that sterilises.'
'I understand this by my own revulsions,' said Her-Bak.
`Don't revolt if you wish to profit,' advised the Sage.
`Accept emotional shock, hurtful experiences. Don't resist
them. They are your most useful means of advancement. You
would know how humanity progresses, Her-Bak?
`There is no mass advance from race to race, any more than
from species to species; but there is selection of
individuals who will be the seed of the race to follow.
Nature pursues her course by phases, with a tendency to
degeneration through inertia. Humanity. left to itself
gains consciousness too slowly, for natural man avoids
educative suffering. Yet from time to time there is a
prodigious leap. Suddenly, in an exhausted world, an
exceptional being arises, at a time and a place favourable
to his development. Such a one is the manifestation of
a higher consciousness that incarnates voluntarily, a
Presence that awakens others who are so predisposed.'
`In this way, at times that can be foreseen, new ..
"elites" .. are formed that increase the gain in human
consciousness.'
Her-Bak listened with growing interest: the conclusion seemed
clear to him. 'Such no doubt was the origin of our wisdom.'
`Yes. And now you will understand what so perplexes teachers
in the Peristyle. They don't see that the beginnings of our
history witness to the co-existence of primitive life and
high knowledge.'
`Master, what peace would come with the solution of the riddle.'
`Try to see where this leads. The man who is outstanding in his
time is always one who has faculties that others of his time
haven't yet developed. He is the precursor of an age that is
on its way to realisation and shows the path. The masses won't
follow, but those who are sensitive to the new state of
consciousness form a group and become the germ of a new race.
Thus races succeed one another in a manner that can be foreseen.
for if the exceptional man is a sporadic creation, precursor
of what is to come, a group can only form if cosmic conditions
encourage it. Such conditions will even constrain a group
to look for a suitable country, whence migration.'
`Here again,' said Her-Bak, 'there is determinative action.'
`Necessarily. It is this that enables us to foresee such
happenings. This is only possible to vision that sees a whole,
advancing because it is living but obedient to determinative law.'
Hotep
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