Author: Helen Valborg
Publisher: Theosophy Trust Books
ISBN: 0979320518
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The remarkable essays in this volume were written for the expressed purpose of helping both the newcomer to spiritual thinking as well as the skilled practitioner to see the everyday objects - from the wind and ships to deserts and lakes - and subjects - from dogs and ravens to dolphins and whales - surrounding us as concrete embodiments and living symbols of the fundamental spiritual Essence from which everything has evolved. These universal symbols are not just accidental mental constructs but are living realities that not only point to spiritual dimensions far beyond themselves but profoundly embody those spiritual realities. Learning to see the world around us afresh in the light of its spiritual dimension reorients us to taking up again the age-old task of treading the Path and aids us in activating our higher spiritual capacities which, when awakened, shed the pristine light of universal Theosophy on the path of spiritual self-regeneration in the service of humanity. The 28 wide-ranging articles in this volume span a wide spectrum of human thought: from the Tetraktys to the Cross, from the Altar to the Mirror, from the Pentagram to the Dodecahedron, from the Dog to the Dwarf, from the Heart to the Fool; indeed, from Shamballa to Paradise. These essays reveal the fundamental religious, philosophical, and scientific aspects to the most mundane and most refined realities of our common, everyday world. Both the serious reflection upon and casual reading of these essays is a joyous expedition through the all-too-common truncated perceptions we have of our world to a higher level of awareness of the myriad ways in which the life of the universal Spirit is made manifest.
Author: Allen H. Barber
Publisher: Horizon Publishers & Distributors
ISBN: 9780882908083
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Lord's Plan of Salvation is deeply interwoven with symbolic representations. This is especially so with respect to Christ and His atonement, baptism, and the temple. In this book, Allen H. Barber lists over 300 symbols, explains their meanings and tells how the Lord uses them to teach His plan of salvation through the scriptures, the prophets, and in the temples.
Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 57
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Book Description
Cross is the time-honoured symbol of pre-Cosmic Divine Mind. The four points correspond to birth, life, death, and immortality. The Hidden Deity represented by the circumference of a Circle, and the Creative Power (Androgynous Word) by the diameter across it, is the cornerstone of Esoteric Cosmogony, Theogony, and Anthropogony. With the old Aryans, the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans, the diameter across the Circle embraced the idea of eternal and immovable Divine Thought in its Absoluteness, separated entirely from the incipient stage of the so-called creation. With the Hebrews, however, that which has been embodied in the Pentateuch and especially in Genesis, is simply the secondary stage of Cosmogenesis, i.e., the mechanical law of creation, or rather of construction; while Theogony is hardly, if at all, outlined. Jehovah was the tribal property of the Jews and no higher, inseparable from, and unfit to play a part in, any other but the Mosaic Law. Astronomically, the “Most High” is the Sun, and the “Lord” is one of his seven planets.. The meaning of Moses beseeching the Lord to show him “his glory” interpreted by two Kabbalists. Moses and Jehovah are in numerical harmony because the number of Moses is that of “I am, That I am,” i.e., 345. The number of Jehovah is 543, the reverse of 345. When the “back parts” of Moses and his “face” are added up we have 888, which is the Gnostic-Kabbalistic name of Jesus. The Sphinx has been devouring the brightest and the noblest intellects of Christendom but, at last, she is now conquered. It is not the Sphinx, however, who, burning with the shame of defeat had to bury herself into the sea, but the variegated symbol of Jehovah, whom Christians have accepted as their God. The Cross is one of the most ancient symbols, perhaps the most ancient. IAO is certainly a title of the Supreme Being, and belongs partially to the Ineffable Name; but it neither originated with, nor was it ever the sole property of, the Jews. IAO is an old mystic name of the Supreme deity of the Semites. In the old religion of the Chaldeans the highest divinity, enthroned above the seven heavens representing the spiritual light principle, was also called IAO who, like the Hebrew Yaho, was mysterious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated only to the initiated. The ansated Cross represented Vishvakarman, the carpenter and artificer of the Gods crucifying the “Sun-Initiate” on the cruciform lathe, imparted the grand idea of man’s spiritual birth, not his physical regeneration. The candidate for initiation, being attached to the astronomical Cross, is a much grander and nobler idea than that of the origin of terrestrial life. On the other hand, the Semites had no other or higher purpose in life than that of procreating their species. Geometrically demonstrated, the Jewish Deity is merely an even number — the illusionary duad — never the One Absolute All; symbolically, a euhemerized Priapus. And all this can hardly satisfy those thirsting after real spiritual truths, not such a blasphemous and gross caricature of the Ever Unknowable. Even the most learned of modern Kabbalists can see in the Cross and Circle nothing but a symbol of the manifested creative and androgyne deity in this phenomenal world. But the Eastern Occultist declines to worship any anthropomorphic God. A Being, “having a mind like that of man, only infinitely more powerful,” is no God that has any room beyond the cycle of physical creation. That Being is, at best, one of the creative subordinate powers, the totality of which is called the Sephiroth, the Heavenly Man, and Adam Kadmon — the Second Logos of the Platonists. The initiated Hindus know how to “square the Circle” far better than any European. Western Mystics commence their speculation only at that stage when the universe “falls into matter,” as the Occultists say. From the first to the last chapter of the Pentateuch every scene, character, and event are connected with the origin of birth in its crudest and most brutal form. God is a Circle, the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Circle and Cross are inseparable. It is not in the Bible that we have to search for the origin of the Cross and Circle, but beyond the Flood. Deity is eternal perpetual motion, the Ever-Becoming, as well as the Ever-Universally-present, and the Ever-Existing. The Circle is its outward veil. The Crux Ansata unites the Circle and the four corners of the Cross. The Cross below the Circle stands for human procreation, and therefore oblivion of the divine origin of the Cross within the Circle and the divine pedigree of Man. The cruciform noose is a Cross in a Circle, a Crux Ansata truly; but it is a Cross on which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogin passes through the “strait gate,” the narrow Circle that widens into an infinite one, as soon as the inner man has passed the threshold. The Pleiades are the central group of the Milky Way, and the Central Point around which our Universe of fixed stars revolve in their respective orbits. It is this Circle and the starry Cross on its face that play the most prominent part. The Universe is periodically manifested by accelerated Motion, propelled by the Breath of Unknowable Power. The Spirit of Life, Infinite Wisdom, and Immortality are symbolised by the Circle and the Astronomical Cross within, the ouroboric Serpent or Dragon, and the Winged Globe which evolved as the Egyptian Scarabæus — suggesting the peregrinations of the Soul, each lower form unfolding a higher one. Self-moving numbers preceded mathematical numbers. The Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers, were represented as Invisible Circles, the prototypic causes and builders of the heavenly orbs, which are Their visible bodies or coverings. Our visible Sun orbits ever closer around the Invisible Central Sun, which is the Spirit of Kosmos — abstract and formless because homogeneous and impartite — the Centre of Intelligence-Wisdom in every organised Universe, and Solar systems to be. Theos is neither the Spirit of Truth nor Spiritual Intelligence, but their Father. Far greater and more exacting deity than the “god” of this world, supposed to be “good,” is the Law of Karma. And this Universal Deity demonstrates that the lesser one, our personal god, has no power to arrest her mighty hand, for causes initiated by our thoughts and actions generate smaller causes, and call forth the unerring Law of Retribution that predestines nothing and no one. The Honoured One dwells in the Centre as in the Circumference, but it is only the reflection of the hidden Deity. The plane of the surface of the Circle is the World Soul. Those who, by unifying and individualizing the Universal Presence, have synthesized it into one symbol — the Central Point in the Crucifix — they have never seized the true Spirit of the teaching of Christ, and by their spurious interpretations they have degraded it in more than one way. They have forgotten the Spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it — as though the Boundless and the Infinite can ever be limited and conditioned in one man, or even in a nation! Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to have fathomed out the archaic mystery of the Cross. The four points of the Cross represent in succession birth, life, death, and immortality. To crucify before the sun is a phrase used of initiation. It comes from Egypt via from India. The initiated adept, who had successfully passed through all the trials, was simply tied on a couch (not nailed) in the form of a Tau or a Svastika, without the four prolongations, and then plunged in a deep sleep, the Sleep of Siloam. Vishvakarman, the all-seeing god, the great architect of the world and creative power, sacrifices himself to himself. The Spiritual Egos of every mortal are of His own essence, and one with Him. The symbol of Crucifixion is the origin of measures, shadowing forth creative law and design. Man was the primordial Word, the very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever they were, to carry the idea by the sound of a man. The numerical value of that word is 113, and carried with it the elements of the cosmical system displayed. The figure of Vithoba, even to the nail-marks on the feet, is that of Jesus crucified, in all its details, save the Cross. That man was meant, is proved by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on the Tree of Life. That tree, through its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture, and by the ignorance of Christian schemers, has now become the tree of death! Thus one of the seven esoteric meanings, implied in the mystery of Crucifixion by the inventors of the system, is now revealed by the geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The queer injunction in the Old Testament to crucify men before the Lord, the Sun, is no prophecy at all but has a direct phallic significance. The Cross is not a human invention, it is a time-honoured symbol of cosmic ideation and of the divine soul in man: eternal in its potentiality, periodical in its potency. Later, it expanded in that of the mortal who, by crucifying his flesh and passions on the Procrustean bed of torture, is reborn Immortal — leaving behind the animal-man tied on the Cross of Initiation. Like an empty chrysalis, the Spiritual Soul is now free as a butterfly. Much later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the Cross was degraded to a phallic symbol. Eventually, the Cross was adopted and manipulated by Christianity, yet it was phallic from the very beginning. But the Cross does not belong exclusively to the Churches: its metaphysical meaning is too much for the champions of the religion of sensualism to grasp. The Cross is pre-eminently is Kabbalistic, representing the opposition and quaternary equilibrium of the elements.
Author: D. A. Mackenzie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780710308542
Category : Symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The author deals comprehensively with the eternal symbols of the Swastika, the Spiral, the Ear, and Tree Symbols. The book begins by showing the connection of certain symbols with the Seine and the Nile, and contrasts the "Doctrine of Cardinal Points" and its relation to the Doctrine of Mummification. Next an explanation is given to the problems of animals etc, placed in heraldic opposition, and we are led to the flying disc symbol of ancient Egypt. The work sheds much light on the theory of the diffusion of culture from Egypt.
Author: Neal Silvester
Publisher: CFI
ISBN: 9781462116768
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Become a hero in the battle against sin--with a little help from Batman. This rousing book is full of awesome pop culture references that offer new perspectives on gospel topics and truths. Equal parts inspiring and entertaining, it's perfect for teens, young adults, and youth leaders.
Author: Roger Haight
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 160833256X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 938
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Book Description
Already hailed as a landmark in contemporary Catholic theology, Jesus Symbol of God surveys scriptural data, the key moments in the development of doctrine, and the distinctive horizons of our contemporary world to develop a comprehensive and systematic christology for our time. The task of christology is to explain what it means to say that Jesus is the bearer and revealer of God in the Christian community, the decisive mediation of God's salvation -- or, in other words, the symbol of God.
Author: Joshua Mobley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567702529
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
How do Christians understand the Trinity? How does this understanding relate to other Christian teachings? In conversation with key thinkers in contemporary and classical theology, particularly Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, this book argues that a theology of symbols can help us glimpse the mystery of the Trinity and see how this central Christian teaching corresponds to Christian understandings of creation, humanity and the church. A symbol is not here understood as an arbitrary sign, but as a sign that mediates the presence of the symbolized. Joshua Mobley examines the understanding of the Father as “symbolized” in the Son who is the “symbol” of the Father by the “symbolism” of the Spirit, the personal agent of unity between Father and Son. These trinitarian relations then structure creaturely relations to God: God is symbolized in creation, which is a symbol of God by participation in the Son, and the church is symbolism, the union of creation with God by the power of the Spirit. Mobley thus argues that a theology of symbol helps coordinate trinitarian theology with key themes in Christian dogmatics.
Author: Helen Valborg
Author: Helen Valborg
Author: Ivan Nikolayevich Zhavoronkov
Author: Donald F. Dreisbach