Vingilot Programme Part 3

Astrology and Planetary Service

Lesson 1 Overview

It is not possible for human consciousness to remain stationary. Sooner or later, like cyclists
unable to peddle, we will topple over into negativity of one kind or another. We are designed
to move forward, and an awareness of what is possible, an aspect of what we call future,
draws us onwards, as we try to grasp hold of its promise. This is part of what it means to be
human.

Future does not mean the same to all of us. To those who are still focused upon the material,
the future means more: more time to create or acquire more things. The promise is held by
those things, which will be expected to be better than what has gone before and to enable us
to enjoy our lives more. In the respect that time, as it runs through his hands leaves him
something to hold, the materialist is better served by the future than those who are focused
upon quality of life, and for whom the promise is in the nature of the times which are to come
and which must be better than what has gone before. Further on still in terms of awareness,
we realise that better is in ourselves and nowhere else, and a better quality of being does not
just arrive, it has to be earned.

For the esoteriscist, future is contained within a higher vibration. Because it is still out
there, we have not yet taken it into ourselves and mixed it with what is already there to make
the present, and so it contains new opportunities. Possibility is the gift of time, but it is a gift
that has to be unwrapped.

At my primary school we used powder paints, and it did not take many grains of any other
colour to turn your blue sky into something sombre and stormy. In this way, many a seven
year olds sunrise became an apocalypse. For the same reason we find it difficult to bring in
possibility: it has to meet with what is already in the pallet. So often the promise falls away or
is killed off, and all we have left is more time, like a bundle of paper that was the wrapping
around the gift.

As we advance upon them and our enticing vistas become mere surroundings, we tend to lose
interest in them and continue to scan the horizon for what might come next. Indeed, this
scanning of the horizon is so compelling an activity, that we will spend most of our lives
doing it. This way, through our sense of dissatisfaction, we generate what DK in the Bailey
books calls Fire by Friction, and this friction warms up our spheres of activity.

The esotericist who should have no use for sentimental ideas, knows that God can not afford
for us to be content. His System relies upon the inventiveness that human dissatisfaction
fuels. We are always trying to find new ways to fix things. The only real difference between a
spiritual questor and the research chemist is that they seek their respective solutions in
different spheres of activity.

Happiness may be our goal for as long as we suffer, but when we no longer suffer, it is not
because we are happy but because we understand our purpose, individually and collectively,
and can look our dissatisfaction in the face, understand why we are dissatisfied, and learn
how to work constructively with it. Then we make our peace with ourselves and with what is,
whatever it is. There is freedom in this, for us and for the planet, and, perhaps, happiness too
although this will no longer be a matter of importance. Happiness has an identity for as long
as it eludes us, but in fact it is one with an appreciation of life.

Our planet contemplates its own role and personality issues on the mental plane, using the
agency of those beings, including any human beings, active upon it. Collectively, the human
family forms the solar plexus, which processes astral energies. The solar plexus of our planet
is located in its skin, in the film of organic life, which exists on its surface, and which
receives prana from the Sun and emits astral substance.

The energy of the solar plexus can either be sent back upwards to open the heart centre or it
passes on downwards to the sacral centre where it will make new forms.
This is as true for a planet as it is for us humans. All planets with moons are fighting the
involutionary pull, just as spiritually-aware people perceive that they are. Our spirituality is
born from this tension and is a response to it. Our personal moons are in our lower chakras
(which is why a full moon can show us what we need to see in ourselves).

When the planet wishes to overcome personality limitations, it looks just as spiritually aware
humans look, to what is passing into and out of its lower chakras, particularly the solar
plexus, which can send energy either up or down. When humanity is materialistic in its
interests and focus, then to make things better for itself, it sends energy down into forms.
This deprives the planetary heart of nourishment. So, when it is no longer comfortable in its
own skin, Earth will shed it, leaving it for the Moon to pick up.

Everything has its price. The esotericist knows that too, and gets his own opinions and
preferences out of the way in order to assess prices more objectively.

After 2012 the Moon will be stronger for having picked up the discarded skin, but as far as
Earth is concerned, its influence more confined. The attraction of materialism may be
lessened by this process. Aided and abetted by a higher level, i.e., those who comprise the
planetary heart centre, mankind will yearn then most ardently for something else, in a way
that modern, industrialised man, dulled by physical comforts and whose yearning is for more,
does not and, perhaps cannot. That yearning for something else will send energy upwards to
the heart.

Those who are willing to hear that our Earth wants a fitter, trimmer, less emotionally
conditioned body know what is coming our way. But if humans are active on planes
additional to the astral and physical, what else can we expect? How do we bring our intention
and expectations into line with those of the planet? Towards what do we now reach to avoid
toppling over?

This is the concern of this final part of the Vingilot Programme.









1. Spheres of activity: human kingdom

Counting upwards Sphere of Activity Planes of Nature
World 1. Base chakra Physical survival Dense physical

World 2. Sacral
centre
------------------------
-rising to Throat
centre
Procreation; creativity

-------------------------
intellectual activity;
self-consciousness
Physical etheric
First Initiation
---------------------
Mental





World 3. Solar Plexus
------------------------
- rising to Heart
centre
Desire; awareness of
past
-------------------------
Love; God is Love;
awareness and respect
for the realities of
others; self
acceptance; awareness
of possibility
Astral
Second Initiation

Higher Astral



World 4. Alta Major
centre receives
from Crown centre
and passes down to
Throat centre
Participation in the
larger picture;
awareness of role for
the human family and
the individual; the
point of existence
Mental Plane
Third Initiation
World 5. Brow centre Sense of belonging to
and able to
communicate with all
that IS
Buddhic Plane
Fourth Initiation
World 6. Crown
centre
Spiritual Will Atmic plane

World 7.Third Eye -
vehicle created from
connection between
the major head
centres
Directing and applying
the Will in the world of
manifestation, to
benefit the future
Atmic, Buddhic &
Mental planes
Fifth Initiation

By definition, a human being operates on three planes of nature through three chakras: base,
sacral and solar plexus. This arrangement generates a quality of consciousness which we call
material. The solar plexus, being the highest chakra in this arrangement, controls the others.
There will be, therefore, in addition to the sense of physicality (base), an urge to perpetuate
our species through the creation of more forms (sacral), a desire for continuity, comfort and
familiarity. Future means more time and a new generation to secure these things, and the past
will be the guide. Memory is powerful and the imprint left on the ethers by what has been is
easily accessed. It is its own storehouse of knowledge, which can be accessed by a range of
divinatory techniques. At death, consciousness exits through the solar plexus and finds itself
on the astral plane.

A human shares these attributes with the animal and planet kingdoms, which also exist on the
surface of our planet. We are part of the planetary skin, which also contains beings that have
no dense physical vehicle, but exists only in etheric matter. The planetary solar plexus is
located in its skin, and what the human family gives out emotionally as it experiences life in
manifestation is the principal determinant of the planets desire nature.

More advanced human beings operate in other spheres in addition to the basic three. Through
the throat centre we engage in intellectual activity, drawing energy up from the sacral centre.
By drawing energy up from the solar plexus, we open the heart centre. These activities make
us aware of Worlds 4 & 5, which are the Spheres of Resolution, although the solar plexus
may still remain the dominant centre. An active throat centre and a developed intellect may
increase our awareness of what is possible for us, individually and collectively, but it does
not, of itself, raise us to those levels; it simply points the way, something, perhaps, that has
been forgotten in recent decades. Knowledge does not make a spiritual being; but living in
accordance with that knowledge may, if it matures into understanding.

The human personality builds itself and comes to know itself through intellectual activity,
and then tries to shed its limitations on the Mental plane as it becomes aware of the larger
scheme of things. The human family writes roles for itself on the Mental plane, drawing on
the energy of the alta major centre to create a point to it all, concepts and ideas that human
consciousness can respond to, and seeking always to improve on what has gone before,
incapable of standing still. The alta major centre finds its agents amongst artists, poets,
writers and philosophers.

Overshadowing the Mental plane is the plane, where all that exists in a state of separation
finds its place and where the experiment in separating out can end. There the human soul is
accommodated. Theosophy calls this the Buddhic plane where the ruler is the Sun, the One
Resolver.

When we are governed by the perspectives of the Worlds of Resolution, even though we may
fall back again and again into material awareness, we can be considered spiritual beings, and
our intention is to lessen the involutionary pull from our lower chakras. We are less held by
the past and by emotional attachments. We see the present more clearly and assess possibility
more accurately.

Our planet contemplates its own role and personality issues on the Mental plane, using the
agency of those beings, including human beings, which are active upon it.
When the planet wishes to overcome personality limitations, then it looks, as we look, to our
emotional self and observe how our patterns and reactions hold us back. When it is no longer
comfortable in its own skin (where its solar plexus is located and where, collectively, the
human family is functional) it will shed it.

This awareness is fundamental to a sound understanding of 2012, and an assessment of
what are our options. It is part of the definition of a human being to have a physical
reality created by our base centre. To be disincarnate is not an option for us until our
consciousness has cleared the Astral and Mental planes. This journey through
separation can only end in the place where the wheel stops turning. Only there may the
vehicle be discarded and then we are no longer human beings but, rather, the realised
product of human evolution. In more contemporary parlance, we will then have Fifth
Dimensional consciousness. But we do not have Fifth Dimensional consciousness for as
long as we are hooked into the Astral and Mental planes; for as long as this is the case
we simply have awareness of the possibility of a higher kind of consciousness, which is
not at all the same thing. Then, without our physical vehicles we are merely dead
human beings.

To be here on the Earth, continuing the journey, and living in accordance with the
perspectives of the Worlds of Resolution is the highest expression of a human being. This
way we help feed our own and the planets higher principles. Our spiritual systems have ever
enshrined instruction and encouragement to us to undertake this stage of the journey. Master
KH urges us to work until the end, whatever we understand by that.


2. Spiritual Teachings

Spiritual teachings do not originate in our everyday worlds, nor can they be stored for long
within them. The urge to seek out and engage with possibility is with us, but what directs and
focuses effort is something created very consciously on a higher level in order to draw energy
upwards, which is then passed down through suitable agents amongst the human family, to
work their effect like yeast in the dough of material life.

We have been created in time and to what we are able to respond to changes with time, and
new teachings are required all the time. They have a relatively short shelf-life. If we are
sentimental about teachers and teachings we will not see this. Excessive reverence for what
has been is an emotional trap; the solar plexus creates the sense of past and binds us to it.

The teachings of Christianity, for example, are appealing to the emotionally polarised, who
are aware of how desire causes us to suffer, but its teachings now are largely irrelevant to the
intellectually polarised who may be out of touch with their emotions or in retreat from them.
It takes a different kind of message to penetrate this kind of crystallisation, and if we do not
see this, or will not accept it, then more and more people are left to slide into materialism
where future simply means more time to create and arrogate more forms. Indeed, this is the
story of the contemporary Western world where education and intellectual food have been so
widely available.

The Vingilot teachings are for the people we are now; still on our journeys, with active throat
centres, inclined towards occultism rather than mysticism, somewhere between Worlds 3&5
(Theosophys Third and Fourth Initiations), still bound by physicality, but with enough
freedom from emotional reaction to assess options and use time in ways that bring us closer
to the Spheres of Resolution.

We may also be people, who have left romantic ideas of love behind, to be no less
disappointed by experiences of community, which can be just as infused with romance. The
problem is that for as long as we are still self-centred, engaging with others, whatever form
that takes, has to mean more for us; it has to provide us with solutions to fear, loneliness,
boredom and unfulfilment. This is the angle, which has to go, and for it to go, we have to find
a cause and commit to it because we perceive that it serves some progressive aspect of
planetary life, and give to it for itself. Fulfilment, like happiness, has an identity only when it
is absent; fulfilment is one with contribution.

Only this way, can we find the way onto the Fourth Initiation, which frees us forever from
self-centredness. The alta major centre understands selfless commitment.

People with active throat centres talk too much and do too little. What is the measure here?
Nothing more exacting than the statements that we make so readily about what we are able to
do and what we will do. We talk ourselves into believing that we have already made the
necessary changes on the physical plane. We make statements that amount to falsification of
who we are because we are not reconciled to the price, the effort and the sacrifice so often
involved in making change.

This is a dangerous place for a human being because we can get caught up in those delusions.
An active throat centre can produce thought forms so crystallised that death itself cannot
dissolve them to release the Ego from them.

There are few people more self important and sure of their own spiritual significance than
Initiates of the Third degree, and there are few descents more rapid (and more necessary) than
that from the top of the mountain into its workaday foothills where we make our painful
progress towards the Fourth Initiation, but there is freedom also because things no longer
have to glitter, and that includes ourselves. We can be human again: ordinary people on our
journeys, and prepared to work our passage and make mistakes, but with the expectation now
that the resources of a higher world can be drawn upon. Then we can take our place quietly in
the spiritual landscape, the new world, which the Third Initiation discloses to us. Until then
we will be trying to arrange around us and to control like despotic rulers of new territory. It is
a new world that Third Initiation discloses to us.

It is to those ready to work that these teachings, which are concerned with making things
happen, are now offered.




















I am Autumn
Yavie

Peaking and Drifting
Dissolving and Offering
Distillation of All

Breath of Air
Fans flames of Change
Ripeness combusts
In preservations domain

Wander through the shadows
Amber woven gates
Where the fruits of all the light
Bequeath their final taste

Winged prayer of sacrifice
Of the eternal return

A dusk unto a dawn
J udith Way
2011