Alchemy Indepth: The Human Transmutation Circle
from: https://rurushu.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/alchemy-indepth-the-human-transmutation-circle/
Ancient Egypt, for instance, was a mighty focus of genuine spiritual culture, but so many people think (wrongly, of course) that the truth about it can only be reconstructed from archeological finds. And so we have endless rows of Egyptologists, laden with doctorates and professorships, burying us under an avalanche of texts explaining their widely divergent ideas and conclusions, so that in the end one despairs of ever making head or tail of it all. Indeed it is hopeless to think of finding out the truth in that way.
So now, let us look at what really happened. We have explained how the innate urge towards self-realization can easily degenerate into self-preservation, owing to the misconceptions arising from a distorted consciousness. The result is astral encapsulation, pollution and destruction and, finally, insanity. And that insanity is very often expressed as hostility and anger towards the truth. Truth cannot do otherwise than drive man along the road towards the final goal. But the I-central human being resists it.
Ischa-Upanishad
They who strive after the knowledge of the finite will end up in darkness, but they who strive solely after the knowledge of the infinite will end up in even greater darkness.
They whose aim in life is the perishable will end up in darkness, but they whose sole aim in life is the imperishable will end up in even greater darkness.
Only he who knows that the perishable and the eternal are one will pass across the abyss of death.
“Satan is not a spirit of destruction. There is no essential evil in the universe. Our present form of the “devil” is merely derived from the Greek nature god Pan. As Goethe says, Mephistopheles, or Satan, “is part of the power that still works for good while ever scheming ill.” Satan is really karma, but he is more than that. He is the temptation from which arises strength.
When the Mysteries were celebrated in ancient Egypt, there was an evil spirit called Typhon or Set who brought about the death of the good Osiris. It is the red Set that has given us our concept of the devil; but Set was nothing but the material world, the ground of man’s temptation, and also the environment in which he gains immortality through self-discipline. Therefore, Set, or Satan is divine opportunity; the world into which we come in ignorance but from which we depart in wisdom.“
- Manly P. Hall
