Theos-Talk Archives (February 1997 Message tl00619)

Jerry Hejka-Ekins <jhe@toto.csustan.edu> wrote:

> By "later" I assume you mean later in time, not later in the
> book, which is not chronological (unless you have the Phillipines
> version).  I would be interested in your identification of those
> letters, and I would check them to see if there are any physical
> differences between them and the others, or if they have physical
> features in common.

Yes. Later in time. Physical differences? Do you mean in the actual letters
themselves? Such as paper, handwriting ... etc? Are the letters or photographs
of them preserved somewhere? Well now you've got me interested in looking.

> Who is Gene Cosgrove?  What is his story?

He was before my time. My spiritual teacher knew him. From her comments
and from the few out-of-print books he authored that are in my possession,
here is what I know of his story:

Eugene Milne Cosgrove was at one time a close associate of Alice Bailey. He
withdrew from her teachings to give his students a better understanding of the
Christ. My teacher, ARC, said he was an unselfish man devoting himself to
small groups throughout the U.S. and Canada, where he moved from his native
Scotland. At a minimum he had contact with Master M, though he gave few
details of his contact and preferred not to emphasize it much. As he said in
one book (approximately), "I say to the student, lay more emphasis on
mastering than Masters. Then They will give assistance." His books were very
poetic. In the foreward to one book he said he thought there was a seer in
every poet. Subjects covered range from meditation to mantrams to group
functioning in the Aquarian age.

Someone I met at while in school said that a large library of works from
people related to AAB is maintained and cross indexed. He actually found a few
works of EMC there. Since the books have been out of print for a while, I am
photocopying my favorite, "The High Walk of Discipleship".

Perhaps remembering EMC, my teacher wrote (excerpts from her book The Pelican
and the Chela),

When you have become a poet,
you have weeded out all unnecessary things to say.
When one becomes a poet,
he has moved beyond the traffic of the commercial lanes.
He has united with the Angels and is standing back of the wings,
looking on the stage of life, describing the fanes ...
He must timidly approach the pulse-beat in time
to reach the heart of saying things which rhyme.
Celestial-primed to speak in verse
what men have not the courage to converse.
Each poet writing in the invisible Sun
must give birth to his death of lives many undone.
He must tear away the flesh concealing the thrum
of his soul ...
He must be as a bulldozer scraping out the unclaimed road.
He must be a towering building awaiting its erosion by earthquake and time.
He must teeter on the edge of life,
He must sink down deep in the Earth, breathing its life.
He must find the passion to be passionless.
He must be a seer, a dancer, a teacher, a preacher.
He must be a healer.
He must outrage him who sleepeth.
In every man, a poet is concealed. The poet who awakens him
must find him when he has finished dreaking the bitter of the cup.
He must provide him with a clean vessel from which he must sup ...
In the Earth, he was a bumbler and mumbler. In the learning, he was
a tutor and sender.
In his own legislature,
he was a parliament made up of building blocks of error and failure ...
His brain which was bored and jaded
from waiting for its insighting message gave off in repetition events
which had long been outdated.
The poet is a seer living in houses not made with hands.
The poet is a magician, making something out of what men call nothing.
The poet is a sage turned inside out,
exposed to the acids and winds of self-doubt ...
Wherever poetry comes to birth, men are ready for a leap over the
graves and dry bones of man's crying, striving and trying.
Every poem conceals a burial, a grave, a resurrection.
All poets have been stripped of Maya-sense. Caught between Heaven, the limbo
and Earth, they must dare to give life to things long dead ...
They must have discounted gurus of the mouth, who by speaking overmuch have
lost touch with the sacredness of Light ...
They must often come with clothing besmirched
by the ears of careless listeners who give to give them birth.
Poets are lonely, thinking through energized hearts to tell something to the
autistic closed minds, who work in the world to be settled but never set ...
they are not exhibitionists about things which rhyme.
The hammers of their balance are mallets or anvils pounding in the Divine,
the beautiful.
The wonder of the poet is that he lives at all
or that he speaks where there is no call ...
The wonder of the poet is that in every age and clime,
he rises again, that men may hear within the Universal Rhythm of the Rhyme
within the Word.

------------------------------