The Blue Planet Teaches Unity
With All, But It Also Produces Illusions
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Life is like a sphinx. It confronts us with a
challenging riddle and a dilemma:
“Answer me, or I will devour you.”
Perplexed before the
unknown, we seek to expand our understanding. It is inevitable to transcend the
old small world which we are attached to.
It is also desirable. Yet the mystery of the Universe - astrologically
associated with the planet Neptune - must be unriddled with common sense and
moderation, while we avoid falling into traps.
The search for happiness is
a mathematical equation to be solved. To correctly live every moment and to
recognize the presence of sacredness in daily events are two factors which
produce peace. In order for us not to be devoured by routine, it is enough to
have a clear and altruistic goal in our lives; to concentrate on it; to believe
in ourselves - and to develop full attention.
Each circumstance contains lessons
which help us get rid of ignorance. Instead of trying to dominate others, the
correct thing to do is to observe every event as part of a riddle we must
solve. Three steps are useful in this task:
1) To look at reality from the point of view of a
transcending and lasting victory, because optimism is the fuel of life;
2) To identify, understand and abandon habits and psychological
mechanisms which cause suffering to ourselves or to other people;
3) To use the available energy in those actions which
produce an expansion of consciousness, inner well-being and stability.
The Blue Giant
Happiness is the common goal to individuals and societies, but it is not
always sought in wise ways. As a result of unintelligent manners to seek for
satisfaction, one can see today many a sign of decadence, both cultural and
moral.
Millions of people find it difficult to combine in a correct way two
essential factors in human life: stability and transcendence. If stability is a
lesson from Saturn, transcendence is something we must learn from Neptune, one
of the most distant planets in our solar system.
Travelling since almost incalculable ages at a distance of more than
four billion kilometers from the Sun, Neptune is a giant if compared to Earth.
It is covered by clouds of frozen methane which move around the planet in
speeds of up to 2,000 kilometers an hour. It possesses four rings and 13 known
Moons. Its biggest Moon is Triton, which moves in the direction opposite to all
the other satellites.
The climate and weather in Neptune are not fine to our humanity.
Compared to the Earth, the blue gaseous which stimulates universal compassion
receives 900 times less energy from the Sun. This frozen celestial body has a
rotational conglomerate of tempests whose size is similar to the planet Earth,
and which slowly moves in the anticlockwise direction, leaving behind a vast
trail of clouds.
In spite of appearances, Neptune is not quite one of our local planets. Helena
Blavatsky wrote that its connection to our solar system is illusory.[1] Dane Rudhyar, an astrologer who
studied Blavatsky, considers it an ambassador
to our solar community. Neptune represents and brings to us the cosmic energy
of the Milky Way: hence its unfathomable character. On the lower levels of
consciousness, its mysterious aspects can be seen as mischievous. On the level
of the heart, the blessing flows.
Blavatsky wrote in several occasions about sources of human inspiration which
are far away from our solar system, among them the Pleiades.[2] Although Neptune is near to us, it
has much in common with the outer Cosmos. Since it does not entirely belong to
our local system, it brings to us information about transcendence and the
infinite.
Different celestial bodies have influence over various aspects of life. The
Moon regulates the cycles of our planet which determine ocean tides,
agricultural harvests and the evolution of emotional states. Neptune inspires and
directs in human beings the need for a transcendent union with the Cosmos as a
whole. The blue giant stimulates the feeling of an eternal, silent unity with
Life unlimited. Together with Jupiter, Neptune is co-regent of Pisces, the most
mystical and the last sign of the Zodiac. Pisces symbolizes the culmination of
the evolutionary journey and the occult identity of each individual soul with
the cosmic ocean.
Although all beings search for transcendence in one way or another,
those who live under a strong Neptunian influence experience it with more
intensity. And this is not always done with wisdom and discernment. The
Neptunian search for transcendence can become a trap, as in the cases of
drug-addiction, alcoholism and other forms of exaggeration and dependence.
The Need for
Discernment
The universe is a large family. Every healthy human being has a spiritual
relation to planets and stars. The energy of transcendence is situated in a
strategic place in his soul. The way the individual manages such an energy in
his daily life, however, depends on his talent to live correctly. Transcendence can liberate a human being from his limitations and make him happy. It can also
cause confusion and make it impossible for him to see anything in a clear way.
Individual life must maintain a balance between stability and
transcendence. The two things are necessary. If someone is too attached to
routine, an illness can be the natural instrument to make him recover his
contact with the infinite. Death and other forms of loss are passports to
transcendence, when common sense is abandoned.
If a society falls victim of materialism and forgets ethical values, then
a social disease emerges which forces
it to re-examine its basic assumptions and re-establish its commitment with the
progress of human soul. Violence,
drug-addiction, alcoholism, the exaggeration and commercial exploitation of sex
and the lack of ethics in politics, all result from the wrongly managed impulse
to transcend, which comes from Neptune. Its distortion threatens the nations
which forget their true goals. And the destruction of a nation is first moral,
then physical.
The Drug-Addiction
Trap
The conventional strategies adopted by political leaders to fight the
problem of drug-addiction have had poor results, because politicians prefer not
to see the wider context of challenges like alcoholism and the abuse of drugs.
Many a political leader uses drugs in the first place. Drug cartels are
often influential in the political world and operate with huge amounts of
money. They have more than one friend in the banking system, and they finance
political campaigns.
One must also acknowledge the fact that fighting the use of drugs is
fighting an effect. It is useful. However, unless one fights the causes of
drug-addiction, one’s effort is condemned to play the role of an aspirin: it
fights the fever, and does not eliminate the sickness. It prevents the worst, and
cannot win the struggle.
The temptation to use psychotropic drugs is created in the minds of
millions of people by the fact that psychoactive drugs seem to cancel in the
consciousness of the user the immediate
practical effects of the Law of Karma and the limitations that he must face
as a citizen.
The appearance of transcendence is only a trap. The drug-addiction puts
the individual into a prison and disconnects him from the natural rhythms of life.
Through it he acts with violence against his own organism. The use of psychoactive
drugs steals from him common sense; it destroys lucidity and prevents the
correct work and coordination of his five senses.
Defeated by the false transcendence caused by the drugs, the individual gets
stuck into a subtle underworld in
which he loses the notion of limits, and deludes himself in the belief that
this is a form of freedom.
The loss of his ability to see limits in life is a hallucinatory form of
anesthesia. The truth-seeker who has correct information about the Path feels
deep respect for the limits of life in the outer realms of reality. He transcends
them in peace and in a balanced way. He expands his consciousness while preserving
a thorough and accurate perception of the lower levels of life, which he
observes with detachment.
The citizen who has common sense develops a clear project regarding his
future. Instead of trying to escape from an unpleasant reality, he gradually
builds the reality he would like to see. He does that in harmony with the law
of karma. He humbly obeys the law. He knows it is necessary to sow, before
harvesting. Many are not so blessed.
Millions
of people have no clear goal in life and get vulnerable to drug-addiction and
other harmful forms of wasting time. A few examples among many are the
addiction to “journalistic” news about a thousand different subjects;
dependence on futile information about the “personal lives of famous people”,
about football championships or the excessive use of television in general.
Dispelling Hypnotisms,
Seeing the Whole
Both TV-centered
domination of minds and drug trafficking serve the power schemes of
materialistic civilization. These two mechanisms attack the creative
potentialities of younger generations. False transcendence makes it impossible
for them to deeply question reality and largely erase from their minds the
ability to change the world for the better.
Individuals who have definite
and noble goals in their lives are dangerous from the point of view of those
who manipulate psychological games of power. They reject blind obedience to the
god Money. They do not believe in the God of Appearances and Personal
Comfort. From the point of view of
organized mediocrity, every idealist is a troublemaker.
New
generations can and must avoid the drug-addiction trap. It is up to young people to discover the
power of self-respect and respect for life, and to adopt and manage the
non-violent force of universal wisdom: according to Theosophy, the whole Nature
is sacred, and the true meaning of life is transcendent. The author and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl wrote
that “the drug scene is one aspect of a more general mass phenomenon, namely
the feeling of meaninglessness resulting from a frustration of our existential
needs which in turn has become a universal phenomenon in our industrial
societies.” [3]
The Western society lives many a dilemma. The good news is that human
beings are expanding the use of the right-side hemisphere in their brains and learning
to see life from integrative points of view.
It is ineffective to try to solve challenges as if they were isolated
and disconnected from one another. Directly or indirectly, each problem affects
all the others. Viktor Frankl
demonstrated in his books that conflicts among human beings take place when no
common goal is shared by them. Disharmony does not disappear because an
authority represses it, but after someone shows or proposes a common goal that
is recognized as important by most members of the community.
The Aquarius Age has
started. The Neptunian dream of universal brotherhood, which inspired Pisces
Age, is being liberated from a chain of misunderstandings and making progress
towards its gradual fulfilment. [4]
Old collective hypnotisms are destroyed. Yet there is a gap that needs to be neutralized.
The large scale power structures which lead the economic and political
operations of our mankind are still working in the old ways.
One of the
characteristics of the old Pisces age is the divorce between dream and reality,
and between the sky and the earth, human being and natural environment, poor
and rich, speech and action. An example
of the grandiosity and misery of Pisces Age is the glorious discovery of the
Americas, followed by the insane genocide of millions of slaves and indigenous
nations, in the name of “God” and “Christ”.
The citizen of the
21st century still carries in his karma the signs of the Pisces Age. He wants
to transcend mere materiality and is not mature enough. His dreams are vague.
Many of his attempts to elevate himself only plunge him in a deeper confusion
and materiality. It is the time now to awaken from such a difficulty.
The Revolution in One’s
Soul
Since the 18th century a series of social revolutions were made aiming
at the establishment of a universal brotherhood among all human beings. Their
failures were not complete. The French Revolution made the universal
proclamation of human rights. A much more effective revolution brought political
independence to North America. In the
19th century, Marxism inspired socialist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba.
The Second World War brought a stronger understanding about the importance of
democratic values, human rights and peace. The Cold War (1946-1985) showed we
can’t afford a large scale nuclear war.
The majority of revolutionary attempts was inspired by Neptunian dreams
of solidarity and equality. With a few exceptions, they ended up causing utter
frustration. Yet even by stumbling one can go ahead. Little by little an
international community emerged.
Due in part to the global spreading of means of communication, we are
one step away from eliminating the barriers among nations, as proposed by the
Neptunian visionaries of every country.
This is the Dharma or Duty of
the Aquarian Age. The pacification of human soul liberates the energy of
brotherhood. The transcendent forces of
the giant Neptune are getting stronger every day in human heart. If they sometimes
manifest themselves in destructive ways, it is important to remember that it is
not enough to repress destructive dreams.
One must, above all, use the creative energy of transcendence in correct
ways, so that it can produce good things and reduce the ignorance which causes
pain in human soul. The true revolution is not material. It does not depend on
political parties. It happens in one’s own consciousness and helps enlighten
the world around.
The basic human need
of transcendence expresses itself through the feeling of love and the ability
to be creative. You transcend your personal limitations as you understand you
are part of a larger environment: your family, your community, your job, your
ideals, the whole universe.
To live the transcendence is to be
everything and to be nothing at the same time. It means not having a frozen
image of oneself, or the others. It teaches us the art of silence, and of
plenitude.
One can live transcendence looking at the sunrise, taking a deep breath,
studying classical theosophy, taking a meditative walk, fulfilling one’s duty
in every department of life or helping an altruistic Cause. He who transcends
is in search of that “power which makes him appear as nothing” in the eyes of
others.[5] To transcend is to be
happy right now, without imposing any previous conditions.
Someone could argue:
“If you had half the problems I have, like raising children and working
12 hours a day in order to make ends meet, you would see that I have not the
time and the tranquillity necessary to seek for transcendence.”
And I would say:
“Wrong”.
Difficult circumstances often force us to question the limits of
established realities, and to transcend them.
Psychologist Viktor Frankl lost his brother, his father, his mother and his
wife in Nazi concentration camps, where he also lived for various years. It was
precisely in a concentration camp, while the chances grew stronger every day
that he would be sent to death in a gas chamber due to his physical debility, that
Frankl discovered the starting point from which he would create, years later,
his own school of psychological thought. The central idea was that, once an individual adopts a personal goal
which is larger than his own life, he gains access to an unlimited amount of
transcendent energy. And this elastic force makes him superior to any
outward obstacles.
The Psychology of Universal Love
When nothing was left
any longer to Frankl as a source of hope or victory, he decided to live for his
wife.
Her image in his memory made it possible for him to transcend and become
larger than the forces which pulled him down and invited him to accept the idea
of dying in that concentration camp. One day, as Frankl staggered along his way,
he started talking in his mind to the woman he loved.
“I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return,
and I answered.”
The living unity of the two went on. While the physical and verbal
aggression of Nazi guards proceeded against the prisoners, Frankl realized that
something had lost its importance:
“I didn’t even know if she was still alive. I knew only one thing -
which I have learned well by now: love goes very far beyond the physical person
of the beloved. (…) I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no
means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or
incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for
me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image
of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would
still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of
her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as
vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as
strong as death’.” [6]
The Journey From Pain
to Victory
Viktor Frankl founded the logotherapy
after the war and based his work in accepting the existence of a tragic triad in life: pain, guilt, and
death. By doing this, he acknowledged in his own way the first noble
truth of Buddhism, Dukkha. As an
alternative to the threefold suffering he saw in life, Frankl recommended a
“tragic optimism” and a three-point strategy:
1) To turn pain into victory and inner growth;
2) Transforming guilt into an opportunity to change oneself
for the better;
3) Seeing the transitoriness of life as an incentive to act
in a responsible way. [7]
Frankl said that an effective recipe to overcome difficulties and
transcend materiality consists in living for something we love unconditionally.
In this he coincided with the highest Neptunian teaching, which consists of
universal, boundless love, accompanied by self-sacrifice.
Unlike other schools of psychological thought, logotherapy does not lose too much time with the vicious circles of
self-centered thoughts. It aims at going beyond egocentrism through
self-transcendence. One should concentrate
and organize his life around that which one wants to do in the future and which
one chooses as his special goal and mission.
As optimism corresponds to the lessons coming from Jupiter, the
fulfilment of one’s duty relates to the wisdom from Saturn. The “tragic
optimism” combines both factors and makes transcendence possible in the daily
life. A sage once said: “As we see the divine world, the rest loses its
importance.”
The way to avoid being devoured by the sphinx of life’s mystery is to
decipher it. This can be done by transcending the charming prison of short term
facts. When the personal horizons expand, immediate actions are performed to
attain an enduring and long-term goal, and we can see the radiant presence of
sacredness, in ourselves and in all life.
NOTES:
[1] “The Secret Doctrine”, H. P.
Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, volume I, p. 102. See also “Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky”,
TPH, USA, vol. XII, p. 292.
[2] “The Secret Doctrine”, H. P.
Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., vol. II, p. 551.
[3] “Man’s Search for Meaning”,
Viktor E. Frankl, Rider Publishing, London-Sidney-Auckland-Johannesburg, 2004,
148 pp., see p. 113.
[4] On the beginning of the Aquarius Age, see the article
“The Theosophical Movement, 1875-2075”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline. This chapter
of the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical Literature” is available at our
associated websites.
[5] See rule 16, in “Light on the
Path”, Theosophy Co., India, 2008, Part I, p. 4.
[6] “Man’s Search for Meaning”,
Viktor E. Frankl, Rider Publishing, London-Sidney-Auckland-Johannesburg, 2004, 148
pp., see p. 31. The verse Frankl quotes is from the Song of Solomon or “Song of
Songs”, 8:6.
[7] “Man’s Search for Meaning”,
Viktor E. Frankl, Rider Publishing, London-Sidney-Auckland-Johannesburg, 2004,
148 pp., see p. 111.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st
century, see the book “The Fire
and Light of Theosophical Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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