The Regulating Principle

Welcome friends, to the Festival of Leo. Leo is said to be the dominant fire sign at present and strongly effecting human consciousness. Human beings are above everything else the Sons of Fire and because our God is "a consuming Fire", there is a peculiar quality inherent in humanity that can burn and destroy all that stands in the way of its divine expression. This fiery propensity has direct relevance to the keynote we worked with over the three spiritual festivals: "Let the group evoke the will-to-love and fire the entire world with the spirit of relationship." It is a keynote that strongly resonates with the energies of Leo as both will and love are prime characteristics of the transformed Leo subject who has risen out of the stage of intense self-awareness into group awareness.

It is a fruitful exercise to ponder on what the world would be like if the fiery spirit of relationship ruled supreme, for the imagination activates the very potencies required to transform a spiritual vision into practical reality. And if such a vision were to become a reality, two main principles that we would expect to see established as part of the externalisation process would be „freedom' and „spiritual security'. For this reason, the upcoming World Goodwill seminars in New York, London and Geneva will be focusing on these two principles in the work of reaching out to the public consciousness with the energies contacted through our earlier work during the three spiritual festivals.

Freedom and spiritual security are already seed ideas in human consciousness and engrossing the minds of leading thinkers. Like the three spiritual festival's keynote, they too find resonance with the energy of Leo, for the influence of Sirius reaches the earth via this sign with a leavening power that liberates consciousness from matter and into an awareness of its relationship with spirit. It is called the principle of freedom – an aspect of Cosmic Love – and is focused through the blazing star in the heart of the lion – Regulus. Just as the heart regulates and distributes the life principle throughout the human body, this star regulates the flow of Sirian influences to Earth in a measured and rhythmic manner. This is suggested by its name „Regulus' and its association with the words regular and regulation whose root meaning is "continuing rules for guidance".

The Sirian principle of freedom is thus regulated by the "Little King" in the heart of Leo before entering our solar system; a measure of this is focused through Uranus which the advanced meditator can work and serve with, thus adding the organizing influence of the seventh ray that characterises this planet to the mix. A potent regulating and organizing process then comes into play, adapting the principle of Freedom to life on Earth. While the idea of rules and regulation may be anathema to many who are just stepping on to the spiritual path, the seasoned traveller knows that without them, the middle path between the opposites of spirit and matter cannot be trodden. It is through the obedience of the matter aspect to the rhythms that spirit seeks to impose that liberation is attained. Spiritual regulation kindles a joyous, elevating fire within substance enabling the freedom of the higher spheres to be directly experienced by a human being while yet incarnated on Earth.

Before we go further let us pause for reflection and then say together the Gayatri:

O Thou Who givest sustenance to the universe.
From Whom all things proceed.
To Whom all things return.
Unveil to us the face of the true spiritual Sun,
Hidden by a disk of golden light,
That we may know the truth and do our whole duty,
As we journey to Thy sacred Feet.

OM

Leo is the polar opposite of Aquarius whose energies of blending and the tendency to amalgamation are now flowing more abundantly over the earth. And through the interplay of the forces of Leo and Aquarius, we have one of the keys to ordered, ceremonial living on earth in harmony with spiritual laws and rhythms. We are currently going through an epoch where major adjustments are being made to the way human life is governed on earth, where people are rebelling against dictatorial regimes and demanding freedoms that have long been denied. Apart from the basic freedoms being demanded throughout North Africa and the Middle East, other, psychological freedoms are also being sought, and in many areas of human activity, excessive and unnecessary regulation is being challenged.

One of the most notable challenges of this type is the ongoing assessment of the relationship between the media and politics brought to a head by allegations of phone hacking by journalists. This pernicious invasion of privacy is a psychological menace, especially when information obtained is twisted and distorted to appeal to the public's lower appetite for sensationalism and titillation. More serious still though is the fact that the media's reporting on national and international affairs influences public understanding and its subsequent viewpoint. In the hands of the forces of light the media carries a miraculous power to expand and deepen our sense of relationship with the world and one another. It brings us into contact with the lives of people in distant lands, of different creeds and cultures, highlighting the rich diversity of the human species at the same time as consolidating a sense of relatedness through the revelation and confirmation that the same emotions and sensitivities run through all. We are dependent on unfiltered, unbiased reporting to help cultivate this essential sense of global relationship. Equally though, any manipulation of the truth by the media divides, fragments and debases on a similarly large scale, posing an insidious threat to the psychological freedom of the people it is meant to serve.

The former journalist and publisher Dan Hind, author of "The Threat to Reason" and more recently "The Return of the Public" writes insightfully and persuasively on this subject. He contends that public opinion is not currently the product of an open process of inquiry and debate. "To an extent we can only guess at", he says, "it is the achievement of private actors. It is high time we made public opinion a public matter." Due to the News International debacle that has engrossed the public's attention, Hind says that, "for the first time in a generation we have an opportunity to discuss how the media currently operate and what we need from them….The power to commission investigation and the power to publicise what is discovered are currently in the hands of a tiny number of professional editors and owners. These powers can no longer be monopolised by individuals who are unrepresentative, unaccountable to the public, and vulnerable to all manner of private pressure and inducement...Who, after all, would tell us that the media were failing in their self-appointed task to keep us informed? The media?"1 Hind goes on to elaborate on an idea for putting the media more under the control of the public, and explores how the public can create the means by which knowledge can be gained and shared without the interference of state or commercial institutions.

To a degree the problem we are facing with media empires is an inevitable one arising from the explosion of communication networks that now criss-cross the globe. The powerful personalities of the era have moved into dominant positions, taking advantage of technology to reach out and influence far more people than was possible in previous times. Spiritual integrity in the messages that the media relay can help to transform the epoch of the selfish, integrated personality into the era of soul sensitivity and group relationships. This area is largely influenced by Mercury – with Leo and Mercury being closely connected through numerical affinity; Leo is the eighth sign, counting from Aries via Pisces, while Mercury is esoterically called "the Messenger at the eighth gate". It is certainly true that mass messaging through communication networks, now virtually instantaneous, is redefining our understanding of time and space. The pioneers of our time are no longer conquerors of new physical terrain but conquerors of the ethers; and while this is a good thing where unadulterated truth is broadcast, humanity has to be alert to the dangers of psychological imprisonment by the subtle conditioning agents of powerful, but self-interested parties.

Freedom of thought is vital to transform humanity into one, creatively vibrant organism, fit to take on the role of planetary stewardship. The psychological crisis of the communication networks present us with a golden opportunity to transmute the speed obsessed personality, trapped in time and space, more towards the soul infused disciple, emancipated into a timeless yet dynamic awareness. As the cultural theorist, Paul Virilio, somewhat controversially put it, "…the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases". Elsewhere he says "The hazard of this fixation on speed is that it has structured the world to function in a constant state of crisis, an unending cold war of environmental and economic exploitation. Speed is making hot wars increasingly impractical. If it is over in an hour and everyone loses, then the only way left to fight a war is through economic and environmental attrition, to see who collapses first… The culture that develops out of this permanent state of crisis is a culture that is fixated on security; security and speed: who can protect themselves best and fastest. The result is a war waged in time instead of in distance. The physical world ceases to be the battle field and instead the battle becomes one of ideologies and economics and speed…We live in a world no longer based on geographic expanse but on a temporal distance constantly being decreased by our transportation, transmission and tele-action capacities…the new space is speed-space; it is no longer time-space."2

Expanding on this comment, sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman remarks, "one may say that speed is a sort of ethereal substance that saturates the world and into which more and more of our action (and particularly of actions that truly count) is transferred, acquiring in the process new qualities that only such substance makes possible and inescapable. The new speed renders the action momentary and thus virtually unpreventable, but also potentially un-punishable. And the mirror reflection of the action's impunity is the potentially unbound and incurable vulnerability of its objects. One of the most consequential effects of that new situation is the endemic porosity and frailty of all boundaries and the in-built futility…of all boundary drawing. All boundaries have become tenuous, frail and porous. Boundaries share in the new facility of disappearance; they are effaced as they are drawn, leaving behind – as the Cheshire cat its smile – only the (similarly volatile) memory of drawing. Geographical discontinuity matters no more, as speed-space, that envelops the totality of the globe's surface, brings each place into nearly the same speed-distance from each other and makes all places mutually contiguous."3

Here then, we see a great challenge looming before humanity – the unavoidable confrontation between the personality and its need for speed and boundaries in space, and the soul, living in a state of dynamic omnipresence. The transmutation of speed-space into dynamic omnipresence is the tantalising goal ahead of humanity. All boundaries are destined to crumble – be they physical or psychological – as we head towards that unimaginable time that sees, in the Tibetan's words, "the production of a subjective synthesis in humanity and of a telepathic interplay which will eventually annihilate time. It will make available to every man all past achievements and knowledge; it will reveal to man the true significance of his mind and brain and make him the master of that equipment and will make him therefore omnipresent and eventually open the door to omniscience."

Due to the explosion in electronic communication, information is relentlessly circulating the globe at the speed of light; the nature and quality of the information generating crises of moral discrimination in the public consciousness. Humanity's sense of discrimination and ethical orientation is being honed and tested as never before, pointing to a future where the speeding circulation of isolated pockets of knowledge is transmuted into an interconnected world of wise and loving sharing. Leo is a major player in helping to bring this about, providing the energetic impulse to cross the gulf between the stage of the integrated personality and the soul. Through an inner orientation, the intense focus on the physical plane that results in speed is regulated through the practice of ceremonial magic.

The speed of light and the force of knowledge are no longer governing factors but a field of service to the soul-infused disciple. Consciousness is focused above the lower planes of human enterprise from where influences such as Mercury and Uranus can be drawn upon with facility during the full moon of Leo. "Mercury illumines the mind and mediates between the soul and the personality, being the Messenger of the Gods…Uranus embodies the energy of the seventh ray and its work is analogous to that of Mercury, for the seventh ray is the ray which relates spirit and matter…thus producing manifestation." Directed into the world of thought, influences such as these help the volatile mobility or rajas of the lower mind to take on sattvic or rhythmic qualities in harmony with the higher spheres of the soul and the Spiritual Triad. The whole world of the personality then starts to move rhythmically in tune with the soul; "speed space", to use Paul Virilio's term, is endowed with a dynamic tranquillity through which the true principle of freedom is contacted and known.

Esoteric groups can assist this regulation of the thought life of humanity by observing the mass thoughtforms associated with world affairs on the concrete levels of the mental plane, and penetrating to the heart of any issue through one-pointed meditation, generate a vortex into which the higher light and wisdom of the spiritual planes can pour. At the heart of all world problems the principles of solution already exist, planted by those who thus serve the Plan. They are principles that can spiritually regulate human behaviour once recognised, appropriated and translated into moral and ethical codes by the intelligentsia of the race. These principles are a means transmuting the personality's state of awareness into that of the soul, and the freedom and spiritual security that accompanies that expanded consciousness and sense of group relationships.

We are at a critical juncture in humanity's unfoldment, moving through a period of world crisis where it is essential that the extroverted personality nature is regulated and internalised towards the soul, while the nature of the soul is simultaneously externalised through the personality. The outer appearance and character of the personality must be ruled through rhythm and ritual so as not to detract or take precedence over the shining reality within. At present, the personality saturates its own speed-space with kama-manasic or desire-mind activity. By developing a sensitivity to Leo's higher influences as they pour through Regulus, the centres of consciousness that substand the human organism are encouraged to start revolving in upon themselves and (taking on fourth-dimensional characteristics), linking the inner and outer planes together as one. The personality's vehicles then become a sacred space into which the light, love and power of God's Plan can pour and direct outer activity. The architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, summarised this well in a comment he made on architecture that equally applies to the human being as the architect of his vehicles of expression: "The space within becomes the reality of the building".

So let us work together now to evoke the principles of regulation, and visualise it transforming all human activity bringing freedom and spiritual security in the process. In the words of the mantram of unification:

"…Let the soul control the outer form,
And life, and all events,
And bring to light the Love
That underlies the happenings of the time.

Let vision come and insight.
Let the future stand revealed.
Let inner union demonstrate and outer cleavages be gone.
Let love prevail.
Let all men love."

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1. http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/dan-hind/blueprint-for-democratic-media-system
2. http://www.daaq.net/folio/bibliography/b_virilio.html
3. http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/jan2002_bauman/print