Theos-Talk Archives (August 1997 Message tl00131)

At 09:01 PM 8/4/97 -0400, Titus wrote:
<frienly snippage of points of apparent agreement>

>I'll admit to being a little confused about how HPB's words are being
>interpreted in the discussion which has ensued.  Your comments bring us back
>to the original topic - always a good thing to revisit when we get off into
>tangential and increasingly abstract subjects.  HPB said, approximately, that
>we need a clean life and a pure heart.  I find no fault in that.  Ethics go
>together with compassion.  Compassion without ethics is no compassion and
>ethics without compassion are no ethics.  Yet, they are a distinct yin-yang
>pair and both need to be cultivated in their own way.

I fully agree with you. As for how we may have gone off on a tangent
regarding HPB's remarks... Could it be that HPB was speaking to two
audiences at once? That there were layers of meaning to what she said?
Let's take the concept of a "clean life". This is a standard Christian-type
admonition. However, to aspirants and chelas, it could have a deeper,
occult meaning in terms of refining the vehicles by living a life that
ejects coarser matter from them. IMHO, this would include constant
vigilence over the mind and emotions so that lower manas and kamas would be
of a vibratory rate that would be responsive to stimulation by higher
energies. A "pure heart", hmmm. Something to do with the heart chakra,
maybe? I have to think about that more. Or she could have been saying just
what she said without blinds and hints. ;-D
>
>I'll give a concrete example of each case.  Fine print: this is drawn from
>people within my experience and no similarity is implied to anyone on this
>list!  Some parents I've known say they love their children.  Yet they don't
>discipline them at all.  Closer examination showed that they were using their
>children for their own needs and they were afraid "lose" them if they did't
>give them their every want.  Is that love a complete love?

No, it's not pure love. It's a selfish "love" where the ultimate object of
ones apparently "loving" behavior is the self.

> At the other
>extreme, some parents were very controlling and harsh.  Ostensably, they had
>high ethical standards, but in reality they were merely vicariously making up
>for their own lack of ethic.  Are those real ethics?

Not at all. In addition to the reason you gave, the parents could also be
following the "ethical" system imposed upon themselves as children. The
failure here is that the so-called ethical system is not motivated by
compassion nor by insights arrived at via the parents' own spiritual
journeys, but soley as an unthinking adoption of societal mores. Again,
selfish goals are the motivation ("what would the neighbors think if...")

<friendly snip of my query about "enantiodromia">

>As I recall, Heraclitus used it first.  In the sense that I used it
>(plagiarized from Jung) it means a reversal of dominants.  When one polarity
>of a truth is emphasized at too great a cost of the opposite, the opposite
>comes in with a vengeance.  In this case compassion without careful attention
>to ethics becomes the opposite of compassion.  Likewise ethics without a
>cultivated compassion become unethical behavior.

Thanks for the explanation! All of this rings very true. IMHO, it is an
effect of the duality of maya where the principle comprising the polarity
is not understood, nor expressed.

<freindly snip>
>
>Since you're interested in astrology, I had the following in mind when I said
>that: I associate ethics with Capricorn, ruler of the bones; and I associate
>emotional sensitivity with Cancer (opposite of Capricorn), ruler of the
>stomach and breasts - kind of soft fleshy things.

Fascinating! I like where you went with that! Actually, I think it's also a
correlation to the energies of the planetary rulers of these signs, Saturn
(crystallization, concretization) and the Moon (fluidity, changeability,
empathy). So, we can consider ethics as a concretization (Saturn) of
compassion (lunar empathy or feeling *with*). We have a dynamic polar axis
here between the Moon and Saturn, but we haven't gone far enough. So I
think that Neptune, the Moon's higher octave, is involved in this, too.
Neptune represents transcendance of the boundaries (symbolized in Saturn's
rings and shattered by Uranus). If these boundaries can be said to be those
between the self-not/self, the dissolving action of Neptune represents
transcendental Love based on the realization that all is one. The key is
eventually getting past Saturn's rings. ;-D Thank you for this morning's
"meditation".

Lynn

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Lynn Moncrief
(techndex@pacbell.net)
TECHindex & Docs
Technical and Scientific Indexing
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