Adoring the Sun

Salutation and praise unto thee,
O life-enkindling Sun, child of Creation’s Lord!
O thou lone all-seeing Eye of the vault celestial!
Extend thy light that I may see,
but dim thy glory that I be not blinded.

Unmask thy countenance, O God of Light:
For I am a lover of Truth
and I would behold the spiritual essence
concealed by thy golden disk!

So reveal unto my perception
Thy shining and inmost nature,
Even that high spirit which infuses thee
and is one with the primal flame of mine own being.

O life-enkindling Sun, child of Creation’s Lord:
Salutation and praise unto thee!

That’s the text of the Solar Adoration recommended to neophytes in the Aurum Solis Order. The instructions are to practice the adoration at dawn and dusk. This brings the student into alignment with the daily rhythm and orients the attention to the solar energy.

It’s a simple, but delightful practice. Try it!

Reverend Grand-Mother Marsha+

Hearty congratulations to Mother Emerick on the birth of her new grandson!May the the Lord smile upon little Jaden and his family.Emerald City Gnosis: BRAGGING AND BRAGGING!!

in His entirety

Through grace God in His entirety penetrates the saints in their entirety, and the saints in their entirety penetrate God entirely, exchanging the whole of Him for themselves, and acquiring Him alone as the reward of their ascent towards Him; for He embraces them as the soul embraces the body, enabling them to be in Him as His own members…the intellect, because of its freedom from worldly cares, is able to act with its full vigor and becomes capable of perceiving the ineffable goodness of God.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296 – 1359)

Path and Current

Talking to a friend last week I noted that I feel as though I’ve stepped into a “current” in taking the ordination to the priesthood and in devoting myself to serious study of Gnosticism and the Western Mysteries. I was intending to use the word in the sense that western occult folk do — a coherent (sometimes ancient, sometimes emerging) tradition, the Golden Dawn current, the Chaos Magick current, etc — the river metaphor implied by me “stepping into” it was unconscious.

But my friend wasn’t sure what I meant and demanded an explanation.

Two things came out in our conversation that I wanted to share. One is my interior, very river-like sense of stepping into a current. I have, over the years, taken on various practices, read various books, occasionally sat with various teachers, but I always found it hard to shift a deep feeling that this was just all me. I was doing all the work, whatever changes were my psychology, shallow or deep. Sometimes I might project all that on other people or things, but ultimately it was all me. Lots of striving and seeking.

What’s shifted for me is a new sense that, in addition to me and my various efforts and strivings, I’m being nudged, assisted… drawn along on my journey. Something not entirely recognizable as me, not quite inside me, not quite outside me is exerting pressure to keep going. When I engage in a practice, there’s a very different sense going on, it’s not that it’s easy… perhaps it’s like I have company.

There’s a current which is also a sense of communion.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the distinction between a current and a path. This is simpler to point out. When I talk about my Path, and it seems similar when friends use the term, I’m referring to my personal journey with the sense that it has a continuity from past to future. My Path is very individual, each person’s Path seems to be, though that’s likely to be an artifact of us all being individualists.

A Current, by contrast, is not individual. It’s something that becomes present to me, that I choose to step into, that I can allow myself to be drawn by or that I can explore. My Path joins the Current.

Buddhists (and others) talk about the Way. A Way is really a Path trod by many in common over a long period.

I guess for a Way to develop a Current, it would need to rain pretty hard. Eventually you might get a stream or a creek or a river. Like the Nile. Or the Ganges. Or the Jordan.