A Cosmic Initiation: Magister Templi

From what I can glean from Paul Foster Case, in his THE TRUE AND INVISIBLE ROSICRUCIAN ORDER, the grade of Magister Templi focuses on various stages of the journey of the soul--of individuality and personality, the recognition of the World Soul. And all of this journey points towards Cosmic Consciousness.

This looks to be complicated, but let's begin! Case declares that the Magister Templi must "arrive at the realization that the semblance of separate individuality is but the effect produced by the One Self's power of *concentrating its limitless energy at any particular point in time and space.*"

Case proceeds, stressing that "The perfectly harmonious relationship between the consciousness, subconscious, and superconscious aspects of the Life Power...is an actual state of being for the adept who is about to complete his advancement to the Grade of Magister Templi."

Case has supposed the process of understanding accrued by the aspirant, the adept having finally reached the level of Magister Templi.

Hegel, too, considers that the different stages of the psyche-- aiming towards the greater comprehension of understanding-- are precisely a process!

Quoting Hegel via Sean Kelly's INDIVIDUATION AND THE ABSOLUTE: HEGEL, JUNG AND THE PATH TOWARD WHOLENESS, the natural individual "arises out of the different relationship of the individual to the genus...these differences represent the differences of the Concept."

The three moments of the Concept are: 1.) Universality; 2.) Particularity; and 3.) Individuality.

Following the process of the psyche, universality corresponds to the stage of childhood--the child is its own universe.

As for youth, Hegel describes this as the stage of "the developed opposition of the tension between the ideals, imaginings, reformings, hopes, etc., of a universality which is itself still subjective, and immediate universality; on the one side there is the world which is inadequate to the yearnings, on the other the attitude to this world of an individual whose existence is still lacking in independence and maturity."

For Hegel, the stage of adulthood is when "the man attains to the true relationships: he recognizes the objective necessity and rationality of the implemented world with which he is confronted, and by obtaining a conformation of and a place for activity in the being-in-and-for-self with which the works of this world are accomplished, the individual becomes SOMEBODY, an actual presence with an objective value."

The individual has become a Person!

Now I'll try to discover what some interpreters consider the links to be between the personal soul and the Cosmic Soul. Let's start out with Case: "Human personality is a medium for the transmission of the high potential of the Life Power... working at superconscious levels, to the lower potentials of embodiment in the field of existence below the level of human self-consciousness. A Master of the Temple never for a moment loses his awareness of his relation to that which is below...He is the witness of the mighty works of the One Identity."

Now, not unexpectedly, Hegel views a Cosmic Soul who undergoes process: "Reason is Spirit when its certainity of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself."

"The *living ethical* world is Spirit in its *truth.* When Spirit first arrives at an abstract knowledge of its essence, ethical life is submerged in the formal universality of legality or law. Spirit which henceforth is divided within itself, traces one of its worlds, the *realm of culture,* in the harsh reality of its objective element; over against this realm, it traces in the element of thought the *world of belief or faith,* the *realm of essential being.*"

And "Both worlds, however, when grasped by Spirit-which after this loss of itself, withdraws into Itself-when grasped by the *Notion,* are confounded and revolutionized by the *insight* [of the individual] and the diffusion of that insight, known as the Enlightenment; and the realm which was divided and expanded into *this world* and the *beyond,* returns into self-consciousness which now, in the form of morality, grasps itself as the essentiality and essence as the actual self; it no longer places its *world* and its *ground* outside of itself, but lets everything fade into itself, and as *conscience* is Spirit that is certain of itself."

Hegel proceeds, in that "universal ethical beings are, then, the substance *qua* universal, and the substance *qua* an individual consciousness." And, "The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the part, and each part is a Spirit at home in this whole, a Spirit which does not seek its satisfaction outside of itself but finds it within itself, because it is itself in this equilibrium with the whole."

Hegel alludes to the Phoenix as a motif for the Life of Nature, "eternally preparing for itself its funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes is produced the new, renovated, fresh life-Spirit-consuming the envelope of its existence...does not merely pass into another envelope, nor rise rejuvenescent from the ashes of its previous form: it comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit."

Hegel remains realistic: "It certainly makes war upon itself-consumes its own existence; but in this very destruction it works up that existence into a new form, and each successive phase becomes in its turn a material, working on which it exalts itself to a new grade..."

For Hegel, "Nothing in the past is lost-for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is Immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but [only] an essential *now.*"

This implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends-- has come to comprehension--via the experience of all its earlier steps.