Easter. Gnostic Symbols.
Knowledge of Life One. Easter.
(3.8.1) Easter was intended to symbolize the passing of the causal self from the causal world to the essential world, his joining in the lowest collective of the planetary hierarchy, his entry into the fifth natural kingdom. The incarnation in which this transition is made has been regarded as the hardest of them all and for that reason (although wrongly) has been called the “incarnation of suffering”. The newborn essential self (who has acquired an envelope of the matter of the essential world) can very rightly say like Lohengrin: “I do not come from pain and darkness. From light and bliss I here arrived.” Nobody believes him, however, and scorn, mocking and rejection is all he will receive.
(3.8.2) Regrettably, Easter has in the Christian church become a time of sorrow and depression, casting its shadow even on the day of resurrection, which ought to be a day of joy, reminding of everybody’s rebirth to a new and better life. The week of suffering with Gethsemane and Golgotha, being a symbolic description of that incarnation in which the individual reaps his last bad sowing in the human kingdom, should make people see that they daily crucify man. And especially he is so treated whose life is that of perfect sacrifice. And this is so because that individual points out the emotional illusions and mental fictions of mankind and by his life acts like an accusation on the unrepentant. To be a teacher is seldom a rewarding task. But if anyone tries to save men from their enormous ignorance, then he deserves death. Against that individual all the poisoning methods of calumny are used, and never without effect.
(3.8.3) Before man makes the decision to “take the kingdom by force”, he must have seen that earth cannot give satisfaction, cannot calm the heart’s unrest, cannot give the peace of mind. He must have understood that the attainment of higher levels calls for strenuous work, that life is an uninterrupted, lifelong struggle against all hampering powers. These include the ineradicable complexes that ignorance engrafts in us ever since childhood, those paralysing superstitions of convention and misleading superstitions of spiteful moralism, being daily strengthened by the bad suggestions of our fellow men with their perverted views of life, all that which a great teacher calls “the leprosy of habit”. He inculcates that “we have not been given the esoteric knowledge as an appetizer to be served with the soup or the dessert but to be used in the service of life”. “Many people,” he says, “love this book of knowledge so deeply that they put it under their pillows in order to sleep better.”