TEMPUS INVICTUS
Chapter VIII: Group Lecture on History of Religion, May 23, 1957

Greetings, Dear Friends: As you all know this is the Spring season, and one of particular significance to all races and classes of people living on the earth today, just as it has been from time immemorial until the present day. Since the beginning or before the written histories of man upon this planet, Spring, in itself, has had a great deal of spiritual meaning. This week represents many things to many people of the world. To the Jewish people, it is the week of Passover, which dates back more than three thousand years to the time when the Angels of the Lord supposedly passed by the door of those who were marked with the bloody cross. To more than seven or eight hundred million people who denote themselves Christians and who follow the way of the Bible and the cross, they too, in some large or small way, will pay tribute to a custom which started almost two thousand years ago; and yet, even that custom, in itself, is older than antiquity itself. Inasmuch as peoples of the world can be said to be approaching some millennium, some great period of transition, there are many indications in the present day wherein many of the age old prophecies biblically written or otherwise inscribed in tombs, on stones and various places upon the surface of the earth are about to be fulfilled.
With all of this, it is an age of highly developed technocracy, and there are numerous pressures, internal and external, which have subjugated people to stresses far beyond the capacity for human endurance. Looking for ways and means of relief and surcease from these particular vicissitudes of the twentieth century and to be enabled to foresee and point to the future a more directed course that is both logical and will bring to conclusion some of the problems with which man is now beset, it is quite evident that with the superficial examination and agreed by laymen and people who are more vitally concerned in humanitarian efforts, there is great need for an understanding, for a development of a spiritual way of life in which the plan supersedes and fills in various and obvious gaps which are presently existing.
In ages old and days gone by, people were not too concerned with the technocracy of the times. Religion in itself is a development which encompasses the daily life of every individual. There are races and countries on the earth today who still manifest some closeness in their relationship of spiritual values to their daily life. Webster’s dictionary defines religion as a code of ethics whereby the individual conducts himself in these days. Upon examination of such a concept, one is impressed that this gives each individual considerable latitude, and it may be responsible to a large degree in the more abstract derivation of such ethics and principles that the individual, and especially the Christian, has long since come to the parting of the ways with the spiritual way of life, and that he has relegated such spiritual attributes to a one-day-a-week affair, sitting in front of some pulpit and vaguely remembering or disremembering words uttered which were meant for inspiration and perhaps for courage. While the hundreds of millions of Christians are praying in the churches this following Sunday in commemoration of an advent which we know as the crucifixion, yet all the praying and all the hymn singing will not cover up the growlings of the dogs of war which are now fighting and contesting for some superficial issues upon the very ground hallowed in tradition and which nourished the roots of Christianity! It is quite obvious to the thinker and to anyone particularly interested in the destinies of man, in an observation or course back into the pages of history, that the particular fault or particular attributes of any religious system was only valuable to the point at which they could be interwoven into daily life.
Likewise, such concepts were obviously only tailored and intended in some way, through some governing agent, shall we say from spiritual dimensions, which was of the most value to the people of that particular era. Going back further and examining religion in its basic and its most inceptive or beginning process, we find that man had lived in the first elemental stages of his life upon the planet earth, and whether he was a caveman or some primitive type, that man here first became cognizant of certain unknown, unnamed forces which moved about him in his daily life. He began to recognize these forces of the lightning in the sky, the movements of the storms, the floods, the winds, the fires which sometimes swept across the hills, and all these things he tried to explain in his own particular way.
So it came to pass that as he externalized and began to develop concepts within his mind, these forces of nature began to take on personality. To him, the common derivative of his limited knowledge gave him such vicissitudes and temperaments of human nature as he himself portrayed. Thus it came to be that in the evolution of spiritual consciousness the various governing forces of that ancient man’s world were more or less concerned with spirits, demons, and ogres. As a direct spiritual outgrowth for such spiritual transitions man, in the growing-up process of spiritual evolution, began to develop a finer-grained concept of his spiritual concepts. They took on such personifications as gods and goddesses such as was exemplified in Greek mythology which was borrowed by the Romans and developed into a highly exploited pantheology of those particular eras and times. It is doubtful—if we were to approach either the layman or the Christian or priest and ask him to define to us in a casual way what he considered God to be—that we would get a very logical explanation; for the meaning, the knowledge and the exact portrayal of God cannot be contained in such ideosophies which may be associated with personality or such particular environmental influences with which we may now be in contact. To describe God is like describing everything! Further, if we were to develop our inquiries along these lines into the origin of our present-day Christian orthodoxy; we would find that here again there were certain strange parallels which were drawn and which would lead us basically to the conclusion that there were really no religions in the world except one basic religion. And in some sense of the word the Christian today is worshipping exactly as his ancestors did hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago, and that there is really, basically, very little difference except in the manner of clothing he may wear and the place in which he worships; for God is still the apartness, God is still the unknown, God is still the embolical force which represents not as a pantheology of demons, ogres, spirits, gods or goddesses but only a particularly centralized force of spiritual expression. The Christian too—especially in the latter development in the last few hundred years of his expression—has attempted in various ways to go into numerous countries and persuade—into his way of thinking—the various tribes of aborigines or people who live in that particular area, not being conscious of the fact that the people themselves who he was trying to convert to his own way of thinking were much more ideally suited in their spiritual concepts, perhaps closer even to the secret of life itself than he, the Christian missionary.
The Christian, too, is apt to be found to be extremely ignorant of his own religion. If we were to ask these questions superficially here and there, where we may find opportunity to do so: what is the background of our modern Christianity? What is the background of all of these things in which a person is supposed to relegate his own personal spiritual ethics?—it is doubtful logical answers could be supplied. Perhaps he does not know that all of the customs, all of the various observances of Christianity itself are derived from concepts interwoven and are infiltrations from age-old customs which basically had their origin in some almost forgotten civilization that has left behind it only the traces of stonework, masonry or other remnants and fragments. We have much to consider in an effort to analyze Christianity and the origin of our customs; for instance, the festival of Easter itself is linked back into Egypt ten thousand years before the time of Jesus to the concept of Osiris who went out—and as he was the God of all, considered to be worshipped as we would worship our Father in Heaven—and that Osiris slew the black bull which symbolizes all of the evil with which man came in contact and has its direct counterpart in our modern Christian theology and thinking. Now Osiris was wounded beyond the point of death but being immortal, he dragged himself off to his couch and after three days, arose refreshed, revived and able to carry on.
Other concepts, too, from the Hermetic sciences or understanding from ancient Egypt are carried on through our modern Christianity. We may start with Paul, in understanding the Christian church, and while some of these concepts in themselves may be rhetorical, yet we can refresh your mind and perhaps pass on this information to others, for becoming wise is becoming the way into spirit. Paul, who was known as Saul of Tarsus—half Roman, half Jew—built up, in his lifetime, a tremendous frustration and hatred for Christianity, and under the Roman emissary, persecuted the followers of Jesus after the execution. It was Saul, attired in the armor and regalia of a Roman soldier, when making a journey to Damascus, who was overcome by the heat of the desert and suffered sunstroke.
As in the case of all psychotic phobias, sometimes an inversion suddenly takes place in the human mind, and so likewise with Saul. The inversion from a persecution complex became one of a humanitarian effort, so Saul deserted the ranks of the Romans and went to Greece and Corinth and there began setting up what was to become two of the world’s greatest religious expressions, the Roman Catholic Church and the ancient Byzantine Empire.
Paul had considerable competition. There were two religions in that era of time, around the Mediterranean countries, which had attracted large masses of people; in fact, everybody worshipped one way or the other, the Roman or the Grecian pantheology (Minerva, Apollo, Juno and others too numerous to mention) or the other concept which was Mithraism, a strange mixture of Zoroastrianism and the ancient Hermetic sciences. Paul realized that if he were to draw converts from both, he must express some great degree of attraction to them, and as people are, in some way, like little children—they love parades, they love the regalia, they love various things which can be considered fiestas, or religious observances—so Paul began hunting about for various ways and means to attract people into the new church. The doctrine of Jesus itself offered a very strong attraction, inasmuch as it was considered that it offered eternal life. Yet there had to be other things added to the Christian doxology, and so there came into being and interwoven much of the observances and customs of that time.
About 550 B.C. in the ancient land of Persia, there was born a man who was later known as Zoroaster. According to history, he was one of the first of the immaculate conceptions. He was born in a shepherd’s hut on a hillside and witnessed by the shepherds. His father was the Father of all, and the son’s name was Mithras, or the son of Light, and his mother was a virgin, the mother earth.
So it was that finally, in the derivations of that particular concept, Zoroaster actually became Mithras. Going back, too, into Egypt, this particular conception of the immaculate was further fortified by the Osirian derivative. Osiris, who overshadowed Isis, mother of earth, who begat Horus, the interceder; and even ten thousand years before the time of Christ, Horus stood in picture form before the throne of Osiris and interceded for all those who believed he had the power to intercede in their behalf. And so it was borne into the Christian doxology some of the concepts which have given rise to great conflict.
We can imagine, if we will, if we’re in the position of some savage aborigines or some person who lives in a country which has no contact with civilization, what a struggle it is in his mind to accept in full content the Bible as we know it. The two diametrically opposed doctrines pose great problems of compromise. We can hardly imagine accepting the one god who gave the strength of arm to Samson who slew the thousands of soldiers with the jawbone of an ass. We could hardly imagine, too, that it was the one God, the God of Jesus, who stood the earth still so Joshua could kill another thirty or forty thousand Philistines, or that he would burn the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because he was angry at the people. The Old Testament is a derivative of the ancient Chaldean concepts in the time of Father Abraham more than two thousand years before the advent of Jesus. Father Abraham, as a revivalist in that time, and dissatisfied with the ministry of various sects and cultisms which existed in that ancient land, decided to do something about it, which he did. During one of the revival meetings, a great meteor crashed to the earth near the encampment. Today this meteorite resides in the central citadel in the city of Mecca and every true Moslem must go to Mecca and walk seven times around the stone and then kneel and kiss it before he is admitted to heaven.
The average Christian does not know that the context of the Koran, as it was written by Mohammed, is based on the first five books of the Old Testament, the Books of Moses, as they were written in bibliography and that it was the purpose of Mohammed five hundred years after the crucifixion to reestablish the old concepts of Abraham and Moses back into Arabia and the ancient land of Chaldea. And so we can go on, and we can arrive at one particular place of introspection after another where we will see the similarity and the parallel of not only our modern Christianity and doxologies as we know them today, but which link us with the past ages and epochs of time.
Buddha, who was born about five hundred years before Jesus, taught a simple way of life, a simple psychology, the enlightenment, the contact with the inner self, Nirvana. Two hundred and fifty years later, until the time of the reign of King Asoka, Buddha was a failure and his religion had not, in any sense of the word, permeated farther than the county in which he lived. Buddha had traveled all over the Malayan Archipelagos and left behind him the basic points of future infiltration for the coming of the new religion.
During the reign of King Asoka, Buddhism was established in India, and with it came the usual watering-down process to which all great movements, great Avatars and their truths, have been subjected. Buddhism in many respects retains parallels with modern Christianity. The ennobled form of enlightenment is an exact counterpart of the Ten Commandments. The three Pitakas or baskets of bread again exemplify the Holy Trinity. Even though such derivatives are impounded today, there is in their present form of Hinduism, the old Brahministic concepts which came down from the transcripts of the Aryan race from the planes of Mongolia many, many thousands of years ago—Brahma, the Father of all; Vishnu, the preserver and interceder of life; and Shiva, the devil. Today in India there is a pantheology of more than thirty million gods. It is estimated there is one god for every ten people in India. Everyone worships according to how he sees life.
He has constructed his own spiritual code of ethics, and he revolves automatically to such plateaus of expression as he finds in the neighborhood; and as the neighborhood is literally festooned with temples and shrines, there is little difficulty in India to find the level of your understanding. Man, too, is slow to change. Back some thirty years before the birth of Buddha, another man was born in a northern province of India named Mahavara, who later became known as the genie. It was he who established the genieistic concepts which too are woven into the concepts of modern day Hinduism and gives that particular pantheology not only a very fantastic external appearance, but is very bewildering to the layman and student alike to attempt to probe beneath the surface. Resolving all of these things as we do into what we might call a potpourri of concepts, ideologies, theosophies, religions, cultisms and extractions and derivations of many and varied ideas in the world about us and in the way in which we find man living on the planet earth, we begin to wonder, we begin to search and we begin to think—does man have a way to satisfy the future needs, the generations which are to follow; are the age-old prophesies of the Bible to be fulfilled, and how?
To further confuse and conflict the present-day investigator’s mind, another pressure has been brought to bear—pressure from what we might call the scientific technocracy of this day and age. But at least we can say of the scientific technocracies that they have produced very tangible results. In attempting to equate what we consider the evolution of man in future spiritual dimensions in what is commonly called the Aquarian Age, the Golden Age, the age in which God is supposedly ruling the earth, the heart and mind of mankind, as the common denominator of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as ye would be done by,” Jesus said, “Ye have heard of the laws of Moses and of the Ten Commandments, but I give thee one greater than all these—that ye should love thy neighbor as thyself and love thy God with all thy heart and soul.” Jesus did not tell us how we should come about these things, no more than when he said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven which is within, and all things shall be added unto you.” Nor again was the implication the direct knowledge as to what the Kingdom of Heaven was like and how we should arrive at that point; and so we have arrived in our modern Christian doxologies with many strange interpretations of what this particular state of consciousness may be. Some people have envisioned it as riding around on a pink cloud and playing a harp. Such things are not only laughable but can be fatal if they are pursued long.
We should visualize first that if we are to draw anything from our analysis and our equations as to what man will be in the future ages, we must have a very basic and tangible point, a sort of pivot place where we can place the fulcrum or leverage which we will use to pry away the encrustation of the accumulated ages, to arrive at the nutshell or core and kernel of truth. Strangely enough, we cannot revert into the age-old pantheologies of the past for they do not contain what we need. We must seek directly into the field of what we call physical science as it is expressed in the world today.
Back in 1919 Einstein gave to the world a simple mathematical formula based upon the concept that there was no such thing as a solid, and that solids were easily converted into energy and vice versa. We today know the scientists of the world have built up a whole great atomical science. We now know that in the more abstract way there is actually no such thing as a solid. The walls of this room, the earth that we walk upon, all substance and form, the very bodies that we possess are nothing more or less than the accumulation of countless untold millions of small planetary systems of energy called atoms—atoms held in a certain particular way in a dimension which is called time and space. When we have begun to master this concept, then the secret of universal creation begins to unfold before us. We can pyramid upon this concept of energy in its various dimensional forms and transpositions, the true equation, the true answer to everything in life—and there are no exceptions. We do not resort to some book which is mythically compounded—and which is composed—as one Dutch philosopher of the 16th century said, “The Bible is composed of many lies, derelictions, fabrications, and omissions, and there are parts filled with murder, and some of the things are filthy and not fit to be read.”
Go back again into our equation of energy and the building up for ourselves a substantial platform whereby we too can join our brothers over the seas of interplanetary distances to distant horizons, to other solar systems, and to planets which are far evolved beyond the dimension of consciousness of our own. What is the Golden age, the Aquarian Age? Will Jesus come, as some adventists believe, upon a great blazing cloud? And man will be destroyed in his entirety, and that only 144 thousand shall be saved? Among the 800 million Christians living today, they all believe they belong to the 144 thousand. We must resolve our equation into more factual and to more demonstrable equations which will give us the true values of life. When we have mastered the concept that the world is not the materialistic, solid, reactionary way of life in which it is commonly supposed to be, we need not become mere creatures which sprang forth from a genetical reaction, to live only in one time and in one place, that we must die and wait a thousand years to spring forth in some vague way at the call of the trumpets. When we begin to understand energy and all of its implications and all of its magnitudes, its grandeur and its glory, we begin to probe directly into the mind and heart and soul of the Infinite Itself.
You and I and everyone in this room—or the countless millions of people who have come and gone upon this planet and every other planet in this and any other universe—are cells in that great Infinite Mind. We are spiritual creations, and outwardly we manifest only in the external countenance of the physical body such idea and form as have been brought to us in the way of our evolutionary path. As cells in the Cosmic Infinite Mind and concerning ourselves as we do, that we have been created not from the mud of the bank of the river but from the energy substance of the Infinite Mind Itself. If God is Infinite, He must maintain infinity by also being finite in all consciousness, in all forms and in all substances. So therefore, the Infinite has placed in each and every one of us all of the condiments, all of the elements, all of the knowledge and wisdom which the Infinite Itself possesses. It is you and I who resolve ourselves as spiritual embryos into the material world to become oscillating polarities; and through the worlds of experience, we multiply the agents of wisdom which build within ourselves the necessary structure which will bring us higher and higher in the evolutionary path of spiritual progress to the time and place when we shall become direct reciprocating polarities with the Infinite Consciousness.
Every atom in your body exists simply because it is internalized by a direct dynamic driving force from another dimension. If you care to, you can envision these things as spiraling, radiating forces of energy, cascading on up and up into infinite vistas and horizons or great and multiple cosmos of these whirling energy forms. They all assume in their own proper relationship, in their own dimension the transposition of their own frequency relationship, governed by inexplicable and the strongest laws which supersede any which are known to man, because the Infinite functions without law, for the Infinite is the Law; It—in the functioning from the Source or Fountainhead—multiplies, recreates into infinity and into all finite forms a direct counterpart, a transposition in some form but primarily as energy.
We, therefore, in our concepts have now arrived at the time and place where we are no longer protoplasmic creations as in a theory on the Darwinian evolution. Darwin was concerned only with such metamorphoses as could be discerned in the physical dimension, and he would have been out of his time and place had he known that all evolution takes place in the spiritual planes; and any creature, fish, fowl, or man himself is only manifest in such form in direct proportion to the energy context of the psychic self of that particular form.
What is the spiritual soul of man? What is it that determines the various reactionary life-sustaining forces which are necessary to carry us on from one day to the next? Every human being creates for himself, every sixty seconds, one million five hundred thousand cells in his body. You have no conscious knowledge of this, nor do you have any direct participation of it as far as your conscious mind is concerned. What is the conscious mind that the doctors of today are struggling with to determine the secret of its energy, the brainwave machine which determines certain forms of resident frequency which stem up and down the pulsating nerve energy? Energy itself is a direct transposition of life in all of its form and substance. You and your five senses—touch, smell, hearing, sight and taste only transform these particular things, as they are energy wave forms, into some meaningful derivation as an oscillating polarity with the subconscious which is a part of the psychic self.
Man, therefore, as a spiritual being, is resolved into an energy body composed of millions and millions of vortexes of energy and have, as counterparts for themselves, externalized into the form of flesh the direct counterpart of their intelligence quotient. These wave forms have been inflected into the psychic self through many, many lifetimes of experience, through countless thousands of years of evolution, all taking place in spiritual rapport with the psychic self—for the substance of the psychic self in the countless billions of wave forms, each portraying its own I.Q., determining what you are today and what you shall be in the future, every thought and action; and as the switchboard of your mind links you with the subconscious, so you inflect into yourself, into your psychic structure the quotient of experience. And that, in itself, explains to you that casting your bread upon the water, so it shall return.
There is not a man or person living upon the earth today who is not manifesting in some direct ratio and proportion all that he is today, what he has been yesterday, not the yesterdays of tomorrow, not the yesterdays as we have concerned them with life upon this present earth, but the yesterdays of ancient Egypt, India, yes, Atlantis and Lemuria.
Customs as old as the written history of man himself—he brings them down from age to age and generation to generation, inflecting and re-inflecting into his conscious structures, reliving the consequences of karma, the psychic shocks, the death of a loved one, whatever it is that you care to conceive or name, you will find the answer directly and clearly given when you understand the relationship, the form of energy, the transposition of energy in our everyday life. You and I cannot see or hear the hundreds of radio and television stations which are portraying both sight and sound invisibly into this room at this moment. The instrument in the corner was designed for such interpolation. It can—by simple component parts which resonate in direct frequency to the transmitter—resolve in the pulsations of energy across the screen of the tube, the picture as it is being exactly portrayed from the iconoscope in the television transmitter. You are exactly like that television set. You are reflecting consciously in every way, in every movement, in every walk of your life, in a direct counterpart of an energy wave form which you have implanted in your psychic body in some way, in some manner, in some form, and your very body is a direct evolution and a development, a form and substance, in an intelligent way, from the comparative values of experience as they were resolved from one dimension to the next, from one lifetime to the next.
That, my friends, will be the future religion. As to whether that circumstance will ever arrive upon this planet earth is a matter which is open to debate for the world and the planet earth in itself was intended, conceived and created for the purpose as a plane of relationship of interpolation for various millions of untold souls who have come and gone through the world of experience and created for themselves the necessary evolutionary substance in their psychic selves which enabled them to go into other planets and to other solar systems, into other worlds which have gone beyond the time and place of their own world. Will our own world ever develop such a time and place that we will be completely rid of all of the old false ideosophies and pantheologies of the past? Will we be able to outlive the fanaticism of our present day-religious systems? Will we ever be able to evade the self-delusion of chasing the will-of-the-wisp, the false materialistic concepts? As far as the majority or bulk of the people upon the planet earth today are concerned, the answer would be a strong, strict and emphatic “no”; they, like you and I and everyone in this room and all truth seekers, who have passed that point, that fork in the road, will—in some way, some place, on some earth—remain in such subjugated materialistic concepts until they, too have imbued within their psychic self the necessary elements which will enable them to live in a higher dimension of consciousness.
We cannot be pacified in any sense of the word by adventism. The false concept is, in itself, that of a preacher who will stand on the platform and scream to the congregation, repentance, and ye shall be damned into eternal hell, and in the next breath, say that you need not worry, Jesus died for your sins; Jesus will even wash them away and you will be white as snow. Such things are unfactual, unrealistic, and should he avoided at all costs. Perhaps they are necessary stepping stones in the evolution of the more primitive minded people of the earth, but you and I—we are the seekers; ahead of us, and in the superconsciousness of our own selves, is the Christ self of which Jesus spoke. “Of myself I can do nothing, but with the Father within. . .”—and what is the Father within? It is that of which I spoke, that immortal cell of eternal life; all of those things of infinity that is the Christ self. Within you, within myself, every one of us—large or small, fat or thin, sick or well, whoever he or she is, on the face of this earth, or in any other world which we care to imagine—has that same Infinite cell, the same infinite number of wisdom quotients, the same necessary condiments known which will enable him to live beyond the time when he again needs the physical coil of flesh to express his way, his understanding of the experience dimension.
It is wonderful, indeed, for many of us to envision to ourselves interplanetary communication with other worlds. To old souls, such things can be relegated to the horse and buggy days; and even though people themselves who fly the flying saucers can likewise be said to be in the horse and buggy days, there comes a time and place, even beyond the need of flying saucers. Interplanetary relationship, residing on a plane of universal introspection—call it mental telepathy, astral flight, or whatever you wish—it is being done consciously and it is being done by many people in our present-day and from other worlds. If the question resides in your mind, as it still may do, will these biblical prophecies be fulfilled? In the second epistle of Peter, “The Lord cometh as a thief in the night, and the earth shall be consumed and even the elements burned with a fervent heat.” The old prophet, Peter, looking into the future, saw the explosion of an H-bomb, and knowing nothing of these things, could well misinterpret the meaning—and so it was brought into the New Testament. Yet, it does not mean that this world will be consumed by atomic fire or nuclear heat.
There are other ways in which man will destroy himself much more realistically and much more factually than any H-bomb could ever do, for the death of a human being merely means the transposition of the ego consciousness from one dimension to another; but the slow death of spiritual retrogression will revert the cell’s life, the infinite cell, the infinity of God, back into the abysmal cosmos, back into the lower orders of the astral world, back beyond even the time and place where redemption is possible.
The ultimate meaning of these things in themselves are complete abstractions and beyond the realm of conception from the finite mind, and possibly the Infinite alone knows the answer; but to you and I as truth seekers, can begin today and bring into our consciousness a true conscious realization of infinity and the motivating forces, these tremendous things which are ever about us. God, or the Infinite, is the energy of life. Historic works in many places will bring to the conscious realization that many scholars, avatars and philosophers have reached that point of introspection in their past lives; men like Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, and a host of others have all reached a place in their own introspection when they have begun to conceive inwardly the “Kingdom of Heaven which is within”, and they have begun to place themselves, as it were, to realize that it is the Father within, the great titanic forces of the mind, the capabilities of man to express himself universally and constructively into such dimensional concepts of interpolation that help lift up the less fortunate being from out the abysmal swamps of ignorance and despair.
We rest our case with you.