Facing the lower guardian and facing the higher guardian!

Bradford comments;

As students of Knowledge of the Higher worlds it is suggested that
we encounter and read Zanoni. A fascinating tale of Initiation and
facing the lower guardian, our own shadows our own doubles. It is a humbling experience when you see some of the things that truly make up your hidden instincts and desires. These untransformed FORCES, forces in the human soul that we have not fully acknowledged or penetrated, truly place before the student of Spiritual Science something to study carefully as we review the powerful dictum KNOW THYSELF.

“The moment he awakes, the normal man of to-day sees nothing of his astral body. He would indeed be horrified if he did, that is if he perceived the sum of the instincts, desires and passions that have accumulated in him in the course of his repeated earthly lives. Man does not see these. He would not be able to endure the sight. When he does dip down into his own nature, into his physical, etheric and astral bodies his attention is at once deflected from this to the external world; he there beholds what beneficent Divine Beings spread over the surface of his sphere of vision, so that it is in no way possible for him to sink into his own inner nature.

“We are correct therefore when in speaking of this in spiritual science we say: The moment a man awakes in the morning he enters through the door of his own being. But at this door stands a watcher, the “little guardian of the threshold.” He does not permit man to enter his own being, but directs him at once to the outer world. Each morning we meet this little guardian of the threshold, and anyone who on awakening enters his own nature consciously, learns to know him. In fact the mystic life consists in whether this little guardian of the threshold acts beneficently towards us, making us unaware of our own being, turning our ego aside so that we do not descend into it, or permitting us to pass through the door and enter into our own being. The mystic life enters through the door I have described, and this in Buddhism is called “sitting under the Bodhi tree.” This is nothing else than the descent of a man into his own being through the door that is ordinarily closed to him. What Buddha experienced in this descent is set before us in Buddhistic writings. Such things are no mere legends, but the reflections of profound truths experienced inwardly — truths concerning the soul. These experiences in the language of Buddhism are called “The Temptation of Buddha.”

“Speaking of this Buddha himself tells us how the Beings he loved approached him at the moment when he entered mystically into his own inner being. He tells how they seemed to approach him bidding him to do this or that — for instance, to carry out false exercises so as to enter in a wrong way into his own being. We are even told that the form of his mother appeared to him — he beheld her in her spiritual substance — and she ordered him to begin a false Askese. Naturally this was not the real mother of Buddha. But his temptation consisted in this very fact, that in his first evolved vision he was confronted not by his real mother but by a mask or illusion. Buddha withstood this temptation. Then a host of demoniac forms appeared to him, these he describes as desires, telling how they corresponded to the sensation of hunger and thirst, or the instinct of pride, conceit and arrogance. All these approached him — how? They approached him in so far as they were still within his own astral body, in so far as he had not overcome them at that great moment of his life when he sat under the Bodhi tree. Buddha shows us in a most wonderful way in this temptation, how we feel all the forces and powers of our astral body, which are within us because we have made them ever worse and worse in the course of our development through succeeding incarnations. In spite of having risen so high Buddha still sees them, and now at the final stage of his progress he has to overcome the last of these misleading forces of his astral body which appear to him as demons.”

Now all who pursue higher knowledge and the path of objective Initiation must slowly learn to catch sight of this encounter with our lower guardian and examples from literature and film help. These examples help but of course not knowing or comprehending that such potent facts exist in every individual and that literature speaks also of the truth of these events, we treat film and literature as mere entertainment, not indicators of our own powerful cultural ZeitGeist schooling.

However if we are attentive we can catch glimpses of real occult and spiritual schooling and know what we are seeing in terms of seduction and cold forces of power.

With that in mind we can place “Portrait of Dorian Gray”, by Oscar Wilde as a portrait of elaborating the infection of our double
and our shadows and how they slowly can take us over.

Also for our consideration as well we can place Prospero’s relation to Caliban in Shakespeares’s “The Tempest”. We can place the model of the fully enhanced occult decision of some alternative world to follow the forces of the double, and enhance the forces of the lower guardian, in the special effects of “The Chronicles of Riddick”, which has created special effects toward the enhanced relationship of a world where our doubles dominate.

In “The Matrix” we observe how our strictly Ahrimanic doubles have inserted and superimposed their own world over the lost human paradigm. “The Matrix” series is one of the most advanced outlines of the intents of the Ahrimanic double to overcome the mission of humanity and our Angels. And because we constantly fail to see the hidden mystery in plain sight before our eyes, we dismiss the entire depth of grasping our own Angels and we fall right into the trap that is being set by the Ahrimanic doubles weaving in all human souls as a latent kingdom.

In “The Fisherman and his Soul” also by Oscar Wilde, we can place a clear encounter and the full dynamics of what it means that the shadow becomes severed and roams freely from the moral and ethical training of the heart and mind. We can place “Phylos the Tibetan” there and dozens and dozens of themes of the current trendy, “Black Romanticism”.

“The Revenge of the Sith” reveals two different lodge groups like two different political parties that oppose each other in refined occult points of direction. One following Yoda, designed from our experiences of Buddha as we passed through the Mars devachan before incarnating on Earth. Yoda, supposed higher initiate adviser of the Jedi, like Odhin/Buddha now resides in the mars Deavachan. The same twelve chairs of the Jedi council and those of the Knights of King Arthur, the signs in the zodiac and the disciples around the 13th, Christ reveal all the underpinnings of traditional initiation insights but without some potent updates. These are the same twelve streams and twelve chairs Steiner brought into the first true Initiation center and university of the Consciousness Soul age, the 1st Goetheanum.

“Rudolf Steiner characterizes the Lesser Guardian of the threshold as that being whom we perceive at the threshold of the spiritual world, barring our way and preventing our entry into that world when we have developed faculties of clairvoyance.

He is said to be a being of Angelic nature, an Astral being that lives in close communion with the human being and carries the sum total of all the human being has made of him or herself, all the good and the evil through all his various incarnations. This being can then be said to safeguard the memory if you like, of the past Karma of the individual human being and the reasons for the ‘blows’ of destiny which he or she suffers. The human being however does not see this Guardian angel until the threads that connect thinking, feeling and willing – three aspects of the Soul that live in the finer Astral body and Etheric body – begin to loosen and become independent as a result of esoteric training. Until then whenever the human being approaches the threshold, either at death or on falling asleep he or she will not see this guardian, but will fall into a condition of sleep.

The point is that this being is there whether or not the human being perceives him.

In life this condition of sleep occurs in the evening as we fall asleep.
In the evening the Lesser guardian prevents us from entering the spiritual world, with full consciousness, because before we can do so we would have to pass through our own being, that is, what we have ennobled of our Karma during the day and what we are yet to ennoble in the future. This is a ‘memory’ of that which is imprinted in the Etheric body or body of memory.

Let us look at this more closely.

When we fall asleep our Astral body and Ego begin to lift themselves up out of the Etheric body and the Physical body on the bed. The Astral body and Ego lift up firstly from the Etheric body and then from the Physical body. In ordinary life we perceive the world through our physical bodies, that is through our physical senses, our brain, and we are only able to remember these experiences because we have an Etheric body – life and blood. These two bodies Physical and Etheric are integral to Ego consciousness of the physical world and all its phenomena. When we fall asleep we leave these behind and if we are to perceive and remember, we need other senses.

We cannot rely on the Physical and the Etheric bodies in the spiritual world so we must build for ourselves Astral organs of sense, that is organs in the Astral body through which the Ego can experience the spiritual world. At the same time we must develop Etheric currents, which ‘light’ up these Astral Organs. The Ego builds these organs and harmonises these currents through moral spiritual training and insofar as these are fashioned and harmonized spiritual perception in the spiritual world can begin. This fashioning of the organs of sense occurs when the Ego works to perfect thinking, feeling and willing in the Astral body, when this is achieved these three aspects of the soul begin to loosen from each other and from the finer aspects of the Physical and Etheric bodies. It is then only the power of the Ego that can keep the human being from losing all connection between them. This means the Ego must be morally strengthened through spiritual exercises to prevent the imbalance of the human personality. Before now, spiritual beings were responsible for keeping these three aspects connected, now the Ego itself through training will need to create the thread that binds thinking, feeling and willing in everyday life.

This process of building up spiritual organs, this ennobling of the Astral body by the Ego can be described in hermetic terms as a process of ‘rarefaction’. When we perfect the Astral body, insofar as this is achieved, we rarefy thinking, feeling, and willing, into higher organs of sense, what is left behind from this process of rarefaction is what might be called the condensate, the sludge, the imperfect aspects of the three soul members. The object is to rarefy, or spiritualize all of thinking feeling and willing in order to create healthy organs of spirit and therefore navigate the spiritual world with a degree of certainty, in the same way that healthy physical senses make it possible for us to navigate the physical world.

What happens to what we have not redeemed? What we have not redeemed, the condensate becomes an obstacle to our spiritual striving. What do I mean by this? It clouds our spiritual vision, literally, like a fog.

These freed, condensed aspects of thinking, feeling and willing are a measure of how far we have to go before our Astral bodies are perfected, that is before we have ‘clear and unobstructed’ vision. To become cognizant of this fog, which is of our own creation, is wonderful for our progress because once we recognize it we can do two things: we can recognize what we have created that does not meet our highest ideal and this makes it possible for us to know how to go about redeeming it. This cognition of what I call the ‘personal occult fog’ is facilitated by the Angel guardian of each individual and in this context he is called, the Lesser Guardian of the threshold – that is the guardian that stands at the portal to the lesser spiritual world.

The moment the human being begins to rarefy his soul aspects into organs of spiritual sense and the Etheric currents begin to move somewhat harmoniously through them, the spiritual environment begins to ‘light up’ – literally, for the student of spiritual science. What is usually darkened or hidden behind physical existence begins to delicately show through – that is the physical layer is penetrated to what is behind it. This is the Etheric world. This Etheric world is met by our Etheric Currents, in the same way as the physical world is lit up by the sun. Our inner sun therefore meets the outer spiritual world and lights it up. What we must remember is that this world is always perceived through the spiritual organs we create and the currents that are our own, through organs that are fashioned by us (perfectly or imperfectly) and through our inner light, which is projected out clearly, or through a fog.”

Pop culture trends provides us with the training of the double in a descending line and also ones that produce cartoonish re-makes of the Knights of King Arthur and the Initiates of the Round Table via the twelve chairs of the highly trained and ethical Jedi Knights. But all these wide flung insights are left scattered and relatively useless because we really have had no higher education that can bring these stray insights together. Except with the entire body of Spiritual Science itself.

All of the things we watch, have watched and failed to penetrate much deeper are spin offs, knock offs of actual Spiritual Science Schooling, which has become watered down Pop culture. Pop culture that fizzles out when it meets the reality of true spiritual schooling and in depth real human history. No one wants to open and take seriously the actual sub-surface complex contents of every single human spirit. But film looks at these awful human contradictions and higher potentials and outlines IMAGINATIONS and systems that an attentive and serious student of the soul can work with.

In facing the Higher Guardian of the Threshold, one has also to pass a kind of test. The Test for Buddha and the failed or misunderstood Eastern traditions is that there is a state called Nirvana that puts the schooling and the occult unfolding of human development undergone on Earth behind one. Buddha had to face that test because as a Bodhisattva he had completed his earthly schooling and faced a kind of graduation from earthly karma.

The test that Buddha who had followed humanity down from the Old Moon as an Angelic Being, as Odhin (see Norse Mythology link) and the term Boding or Buddha (YODA)…Buddha had to face the test of the higher guardian of the threshold if he wished to cash in his chips and sever his ties with humanity. Having achieved Human Angelhood by participating with human karma and human evolution the Buddha could have left town with no forwarding address.

OR would He volunteer in freedom to continue to work with a Being who only requires Freedom and Love of Freedom and asks nothing of the human being save that perhaps, Love and Wisdom become the cornerstone of raising humanity back to the family of the Divine, would Buddha continue to work for humanity and the Christ Being?

Buddha chose door number two, humanity and the Christ Being. (see link to Buddha/Jesus) He chose not only to participate and offer his highly lynphatically and etherically sound higher spiritual body, but carried the unfallen Adamic principle..volunteered to work with Christ and Zarathustra to advance humanity. He continued the work of the cosmos and the lifting of humanity after he had completed his most advanced schooling.

It makes one wonder, does it not? Of course I wonder very different things. You probably wonder what in the name of Buddha am I writing about? Well education and opportunities to grasp higher initiation schooling, don’t happen every day and consider yourself lucky enough to read this at this moment and that you study further and connect to the links I left in this piece. Links to far reaching cohesive insights.

It makes me wonder and I have good reasons for wondering this, but it makes me wonder where St. Francis was in all this if St. Francis was also once a pupil of Buddha? It makes me wonder if St. Francis hadn’t also sought an incarnation to be near one of the Jesus children… The question would be open as to if St. Francis was there, he was the most devoted follower of the Buddha, and even what sex was he, that he/she might have been there as well is an interesting question in itself.

In any case, Buddha, when tested by how to proceed with the Higher
Guardian, decided to work on a larger project dealing with the
humanization of the Planetary Beings themselves and challenge and
transform something of the Mars forces into the Mercurial forces by
literally pivoting and embodying his karma into the Mars forces and
thereby transforming Mars from within the Devachan. And it is only
within Spiritual Science, David Spangler and our research here that
anybody can focus on just how the inner aspects of Mars are being
transmuted due to the deeds of Buddha and St Francis.

Yet when faced with the dynamic temptation of the higher guardian,
one of the clearest recent examples of the MIRROR – MIRROR effect,
and the whole new paradigm of how to face the full Power of becoming
a God or Goddess because you have earned it…and what happens if
you choose or have this temptation before you? The Higher Guardian
temptation has been strikingly presented and accords with Knowledge
of the Higher Worlds studies in the example of Galadriel and Frodo in “Lord of the Rings”.

Galadriel, and the Galahad factor of the Grail reveal this higher guardian
temptation. Galadriel reveals this temptation powerfully and clearly
within an Artistic medium of film and Literature and with an accurate use of special effects to capture the moment.

Now we know in speech that EL at the end of a name shows a higher
power and divine indicator. GabriEL, MichaEL, RaphaEL, UriEL a
shattering confronation with the Self at a Higher Guardian level. A
magnification of the forces latent in the soul arise when we are faced with the Higher Guardian of the Threshold. Such a confrontation and threshold experience has been offered in the character of Galadriel.

As far as Earthly examples, so far none are better than the moment in “Lord of the Rings” between Galadriel and Frodo, when Frodo offers the Ring to Galadriel. This scene reveals one of the most potent and striking pictures of how we confront the temptation of the Higher Guardian on the path of Initiation and open our understanding to the deeper roots of our being through indications from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It is simply outstanding.

“At this point, Frodo offers to give her the Ring, if she would ask
for it. He comments that it is too great a matter for him. In a way
Frodo is being tempted – to pass the Ring on to a person of power.
But the real temptation is for Galadriel. She could wield the Ring,
and preserve her domain. Essentially her wish would be granted, for
she could guard the Ring. She confronts the challenge, analyzes her
desires and rejects them. She demonstrates the consideration and
weighing up of choices and the exercise of free will, even although
the course of ultimate good will cause her personal diminishment.

MEETING THE HIGHER GUARDIAN OF THE THRESHOLD

‘I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands, and behold! It was brought within my grasp. The evil that was devised long ago works on in many ways, whether Sauron himself stands or falls. Would not that have been a noble deed to set to the credit of his Ring, if I had taken it by
force or fear from my guest?

And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place
of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark,
but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the
Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the
Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth.
All shall love me and despair!’

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued
a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She
stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and
beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her
hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and
lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white,
whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West,
and remain Galadriel.’ “