Cathedral Contacts[From The Rosicrucian Digest June 1938]
| The
"Cathedral of the Soul" is a Cosmic meeting place for all minds of the
most advanced and highly developed spiritual members and workers of the
Rosicrucian Fraternity. It is a focal point of Cosmic radiations and
thought waves from which radiate vibrations of health, peace,
happiness, and inner awakening. Various periods of the day are set
aside when many thousands of minds are attuned with the Cathedral of
the Soul, and others attuning with the Cathedral at this time will
receive the benefit of the vibrations. Those who are not members of the
organization may share in the unusual benefits as well as those who are
members. The book called "Liber 777" describes the periods for various
contacts with the Cathedral. Copies will be sent to persons who are not
members if they address their requests for this book to Friar S. P. C.,
care of AMORC Temple, San Jose, California, enclosing three cents in
postage stamps. (Please state whether member or not--this is important.) |
REALIZATION OF GOD
AFTER all is said and done,
and after considering all of the doctrinal and ritualistic and creedal
interpretations of God and His laws and of religion generally, the fact remains
that each of us has a realization of God only in accordance with our own
understanding, our own evolution, our own development and our own sincerity.
Not one of us can honestly
accept and adopt another person's understanding or realization of God. It may
be that we will find some whose interpretation or understanding coincides or
agrees with our own, and in such a case there is much benefit to be gained from
mutual discussion and comparison of religious experiences. But it is absolutely
wrong, and contrary to divine principles, for any one of us to ignore or modify
or adjust our own individual realization and interpretation of God and His laws
to make them conform to or include the realizations and interpretations of
others.
Our realization of God is a
distinctly personal and intimate matter. Unless it is personal and very
intimate, we can have no real understanding of God. It is for this reason that
the Rosicrucians of ancient times and of the present day refer to God as
"the God of our Hearts." This means the God of our emotional and
religious interpretation or understanding. We may all agree upon certain
fundamentals in regard to God and His existence, His nature, qualities and
attributes. But we find as we go through life that there are those who limit
God, and confine Him to a certain locality or condition, and who attribute to
Him certain qualities that are typically human, because of human prejudices,
enmity, jealousy, hatred, revenge and so forth. There are those who would limit
the attributes and powers of God to scientific principles, and who claim that God
cannot perform miracles, inasmuch as they would be inconsistent with human
discoveries and understandings of scientific principles. Then there are those
whose conception of God is so broad, so indefinite, so vague that God can never
become an intimate companion, a sympathetic father, a real friend. The mystic
likes to believe and does believe that God is so real and so close that he can
"walk with God and talk with God." And of course there are those who
conceive of God as being merely a principle or a law, or a divine process of
some kind.
God is known throughout the
world by many names, and identified with many qualities and powers. Typical of
this widespread diversity of understanding of the nature of God is the
following poem by William Herbert Carruth. It has been repeated and quoted very
frequently by mystic philosophers and even by atheists and agnostics. The
mystic, however, finds in this poem an attempt to understand God and to
identify God with all of God's processes and laws and qualities without in any
way belittling the supreme, sublime majesty of the Father of all creatures.
EACH IN HIS
OWN TONGUE
A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave-men
dwell;
Then a sense of law and
beauty,
And a face turned from the
clod,
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite, tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the
cornfields
And the wild geese sailing
high;
And all over upland and
lowland
The charm of the golden-rod,
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God.
Like tides on a crescent
sea-beach,
When the moon is new and
thin,
Into our hearts high
yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from the mystic ocean
Whose rim no foot has trod,
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.
A picket frozen on duty,
A mother starved for her
brood,
Socrates drinking the
hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood;
And millions who, humble and
nameless,
The straight, hard pathway
plod,
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God.
* * *
If you have ten hours a day
to spend as you please, you may perhaps afford to waste an hour of it--perhaps;
but if you have only half an hour each day at your own free disposal that
half-hour becomes a sacred opportunity of life, the chance to change the
quality of your existence, to multiply the capital on which you are doing
business in the vocation of living.--Edward H. Griggs.
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