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LEGEND

the Key & 4th Fundamental

The Seven Ray Cycles

Occult Cosmology

Science of the Antahkarana & Ray Words of Power

Esoteric Astrology
Superimposition

Taurus

On the Reverse Wheel

April 20th to May 20th

And the word said:
I see and when the eye is opened, all is illumined

Decanates

First decan           Saturn                 April 20th to May 1st

Second decan       Mercury               May 1st to 10th

Third decan          Venus                   May 10th to 20th

 

Please read the prefatory material before investigating your own Decanate Stage, as proper assignment is required. i.e., your birth date does not indicate the stage of development, rather, you must employ a subjective recognition of the state of consciousness (point of advance along the Path of Initiation) which you, or another, has achieved.

See this note on determining the decanate.

 

Step Four: Man, the Aspirant

April 20th to May 1st

Saturn

Upon the Way of Initiation the sign Taurus is entered via Saturn in the first decan, Mercury in the second and Venus in the third.

Under Saturn's rulership we count the cost of treading the Path. Saturn brings discipline, pain, self-abnegation and abstinence. The Lord of Karma is a severe taskmaster; but then the dematerialization of the heavily burdened Taurean aspirant is not a light matter.

The fourth step is characterized by physical crises and obstacles which create difficult circumstances requiring free choice, wise response and discrimination. Gradually, painfully and slowly, the material identifications which limit and imprison your indwelling consciousness are removed, and free expression of your soul will begin to manifest more abundantly on the physical plane.

You have now accepted the training necessary to achieve what has been called "unfettered enlightenment" (R&I 370), voluntarily submitting yourself to the necessary purificatory measures to remove all imperfections of the lower vehicles. The caliber of your physical instrument must be refined, fashioned anew and improved.

The urgent task is the control of the physical nature until the lower pairs of opposites are reconciled. The 'opposites' referred to here are the dense and etheric forces upon the physical plane. These are most definitely faced by the aspirant upon the Path of Purification.

It is during this stage that emphasis is rightly laid upon physical disciplines involving abstinence, vegetarianism, fasting, celibacy, physical hygiene and exercise. It is through these disciplines that the control and mastery of the soul over the physical body can be accomplished and the Taurean be set free when active discipleship is attained, to begin the true spiritual battle fought between the pairs of opposites on the emotional or astral plane. When successful, all dualism will vanish and the secret of right human relations will be revealed. In the interim you have a tremendous amount of work to do.

The process of what we term "etheric substitution" should now commence. (TEV 161) Special attention is to be placed upon your sensory apparatus and vehicles of contact. The four higher etheric grades of atomic substance are to be built into your etheric vehicle and the earlier accumulation of grosser substances eliminated. Your physical body is to become a pure instrument properly prepared to be an unpolluted channel for the creative expression of your soul energy.

Thus you will find it necessary to eradicate undesirable thoughtforms, old habits, outworn vices, past desires, unworthy limitations, and any and all undesirable constituents of your individual aura. Your main preoccupation is to fit yourself for creative soul service along some specialized line of selfless work and become equipped for useful cooperation in group endeavor.

A steadfast investigation into your limitations and disabilities should engross your attention. Patient application of right habits and ways of work must be displayed. To this end all forms of personal egotism, superiority and most especially spiritual pride must be overcome. Here you must avoid the rocks of potential fanaticism and the dangerous residual reefs and shoals of superficial desire. All must be sublimated and your aspiration oriented towards the good, the true and the beautiful and their materialization in some form on Earth.

At this stage you should have overcome all manner of personal insecurities, fears, suspicions, worries; all indifference, carelessness, laziness, cowardice and melancholy. Physical persistence and perseverance are unusually strong and marked in your character, but selfish centralization and force of personality must yet be overcome. Here you will pay the full penalty for any incorrect views, non-virtuous activities and wrong orientations. Persistent unenlightened subconscious patterns, personality tendencies and desires create unfortunate and disturbing effects.

Under Saturn personal desire becomes fully transmuted into spiritual aspiration. You will likely have to wrestle with sexual issues as you attempt to relate your lower nature to your higher Self. A correct understanding of sex, its true function and purpose, is necessary in order for you to reach complete union with your divinity. Sex must be seen as a symbol of an inner duality which must be transcended and brought into union.

You may here rightly ask yourself: In what way do I hinder my progress on the Path? The major hindrance to the building work that you are intended to do in your group, is the violence of your personality reactions when you are emotionally upset, your furious self-assertion in the attempt to justify such violence, and your dramatic self-pity. Cease visualizing yourself as the center of your own world. Unless you can learn to decentralize yourself, cease this constant self-thought and self-commiseration, you undermine the constructive work towards your next step upon the Path to Pledged Discipleship.

The path of meditation and silence becomes the line of least resistance as you strive for the inner assurance that the Will of your soul is rightly placed within the seat of power, both in yourself and the Whole. Be prepared to be fully tested until you truly know beyond all shadow of doubt that blindness leads to sight, darkness to light and death to liberation.

Keep in mind that the fourth rung of the ladder in Taurus is marked by a steady, measured progress. Through hard work and concentrated focus, your task is to practically apply the knowledge gained through life experience, and no longer blunder blindly forward counter to spiritual interests. Saturn offers immense opportunities for progress on the Path, but a full and all-exacting price must be paid. Love of possession, acquisitiveness based on the illusion of material need, prostitution of spiritual love, and any and all forms of riotous living will cost you dearly.

In connection with your spiritual and meditative work, avoid becoming too abstract and stay well-grounded because spiritual achievement for you in this life will come through the blending of the highest possible point of spiritual recognition with your enlightened mind and your physical brain consciousness. The keynote is soul-mind-brain alignment.

As an advancing aspirant your main task is to demonstrate the intelligent use of force with right motive, free from submergence in all the myriad forms of illusion, glamour and maya. All forms of force manipulation must be completely motivated by unselfish desire with the aim of furthering the life-plan of your soul. A number of key glamours will have to be addressed, including the love of being busy without real motive, active scheming, and acting from individual self-interest contrary to the group good.

When you do stand relatively free from glamour you fulfil a special function liberating other people from glamour and illusion, sharpening their minds and inspiring them. Skillfully, you can take ideas from elevated levels of consciousness, make them attractive, adapt them to the immediate need and render them vocal by the force of your intellect. Only when you succeed in demonstrating your ability to manipulate energy in order to reveal beauty and truth, is initiation taken.

Saturn will teach you to become the epitome of isolation, concentration, diligence, austerity and patience. Expect to cultivate a highly developed natural antipathy to wastefulness and extravagance. Be patient with yourself. The subjective tests of this decan are exceedingly difficult, slow and painful to master, as acquiescence to the Greater Life involves difficult personal sacrifices. Pain, glamour, illusion, misery and misfortune may temporarily hold you back, delay or retard the life-plan of the 'builder', your soul, but cannot prevent your ultimate spiritual success. Although depression, darkness and the depths of despair mark moments of your life-path, learning to overcome selfish focus and to extend the hand of active comfort, love and sympathy to others is the key to your release. All urges to take material advantage or mental control of less fortunate, less intelligent or weaker people must be overcome. These personality urges and tendencies are to be replaced by the demonstration of true sharing, a focus on the common good, goodwill, honesty, truthfulness and group loyalty.

Your service work must be rendered with no thought of self but with spiritual intent, in an effort to meet the needs of those who look to you for help. In this manner you aid, heal, benefit, comfort, teach and render service to many people.

Awakened to the revelation of the inherent light of your divinity and under the constant pressure of your overshadowing soul which is superimposing itself upon you, do not be overwhelmed by the apparent evil and the forces of darkness arraigned against you, but endeavor to stay constantly in touch with the heart of love which beats behind the world of outer seeming.

In the final analysis Saturn presents new fields of spiritual opportunity and new forms of powerful energy. When the mind is successfully in the position of the "controller" and sufficiently animated by the "light of reason" you will attain the fifth rung of the ladder and the stage of Accepted Discipleship. (TWM 355) Then, and only then, will you develop a correct understanding of the three-fold Path and thus be fit to stand a worthy candidate for initiation.

 

Step Five: Man the Disciple

May 1st to 10th

Mercury

You have now reached a point where you are learning your spiritual lessons in a group—a group of fellow disciples who are undergoing the same experiences, who are oriented in the same direction, who are occupied with the same problems, and who are motivated by the same desire to serve.

You recognize that you travel not alone but are supported, sustained and strengthened by your group brothers. The results of your renewed consecration have definitely produced a clearly defined service and a love of your group. This constitutes a powerful aid and brings a sense of life, joy and love that has served to negate your ancient loneliness and offset the attitude of solitary suffering. Have in the background of your consciousness at all times, the three Mercury keywords: joy, stability and the Plan. (DINAI 667)

The tests, trials and lessons of Mercury serve to teach you how to move forward in spite of the activity of the pairs of opposites, saying to yourself: I am not this; I am not that; eternally, I am the Self. These lessons you are learning with rapidity.

Increasingly you are paying less and less attention to the reactions of your senses and successively standing free and unafraid whether the experience being undergone is one of high import and of spiritual satisfaction, or is one of the "dead-level" happenings in which nothing brings joy and where only pain, fear and suspense are to be found. (DINAI 664)

Mercury in the central decan transmits the intuitive light of the soul to the mind. As a Taurean disciple you will be tested on your ability to correctly interpret the inner meaning and significance lying behind material circumstances and physical events. The happenings, the ideas, the life and knowledge of the soul realm are being registered with increasing accuracy and from your soul-infused mind they are being transferred to or imprinted upon your physical brain cells.

You are now endowed with quick and sensitive feelings, capable of responding to every subtle impression. You have a delicate sensitivity to every change in the atmosphere, but you must ever strive to preserve a necessary balance of peace, quiet, rest, rhythm and equilibrium.

Your desire for outer activity must be tempered by inner activity. Static states of boredom and restlessness must be overcome. In the secluded state of meditation you will reach harmony based upon right relationship and rhythmic adjustment to the Whole. It must become impossible for you to transgress your spiritual vows, oaths and pledges. Abandon forever the meaningless actions undertaken out of ambition for eminence in your personal life. Make your life and your practice one and the same by firmly keeping your mind upon the spiritual. Never look backwards, cut all unnecessary ties, and be happy if no-one wonders where you are or knows where you can be found.

At this point you should be content to allow the outer glory to pass away because you have seen revealed the beauty of the inner light of your own soul. You would just as likely choose a life in a lonely mountain hermitage retreat without any regrets or attachments. But can you yet say that all forms of self-grasping, self-cherishing and self-referencing have been successfully eradicated?

Characteristic strengths of the successful disciple include a facility for creating harmony from conflict, the capacity to reconcile, compromise, mediate, heal, bridge and make peace. A skillful life dedicated to creative living and service should be your natural forté and spontaneous expression. All creative efforts are focused upon the refinement of your artistic and aesthetic sensibilities, your musical and literary abilities, your intuitive powers and the fostering of spiritual imagination. You act with creative spontaneity and the ability to improvise, and as a personality exhibit a wonderful sense of drama, a love of color, and the capacity to create, express and produce beauty.

You are engaged in the bridging process, as one of your major talents is the ability to harmonize the emerging new ideas with the old, preventing any dangerous schism or cleavage. A true intuitive, you have a facility for the art of synthesis and the ability to adapt the old and the new so that the true pattern of right relationship is preserved. Thus you have become a pillar of the Great Work. You now have the ability to successfully ground and anchor some worldwide movement in concert with like-minded souls. Your task in this regard is exceptionally difficult and taxing.

Upon you much depends, and your co-workers sorely need your strengths. Nonetheless, although you spare yourself no pain, do not forget to take care of your health, sanity and overall well-being. Do not use your group work or spiritual service as an excuse for neglecting your own needs.

The Taurean disciple is gifted with a noble Mercurial fighting spirit quick to incite. Through constant struggle and crisis, battle-by-battle you grow in Spirit. Do not to allow yourself to become overly dramatic or unnecessarily embroiled in constant conflict and turmoil—inner or outer. Any of your unstable personality patterns, spasmodic actions and tendencies toward unpredictability, unreliability, ambivalence, indecisiveness and vacillation are to be eliminated. Unregulated passions and non-virtuous actions must be overcome, as must any inertia, indolence or procrastination.

Confidence and composure are to be maintained at all times free of any traces of moodiness, agitation, worry or self-absorption in suffering. As a struggling disciple you are being tested on your ability to translate knowledge gained through experience and transmute it into some definite forms of demonstrated wisdom. The illumination of the synthesis which lies behind the duality of life and the correct expression of proper human relationships is your goal.

Under the Fourth Ray and Mercury, your life as a disciple moves forward through moments of crisis. This eventually leads towards a more stabilized attitude of detachment based upon conscious personality renunciation, upon a right orientation of personality to soul (the one Master, the Light of Life) and to the Hierarchy of Servers.

There is increasing power of control by the soul—the One who knows no attachment and who stands at-one with all souls in all forms. Your stability and steadfastness, which is the power to stand unmoving in the center of your environment and in the midst of changing circumstance, will be tested. When the need for quiet and poised strength arises, or when protest is required, or powerful action, stand in steadfastness and with patience and await right indication of the way to go. This waiting will often change the direction of your intent and no action will then be taken.

Maintain above all that steady vision that sees the inner side and not the outer happening. The high water mark of the fifth step is the achievement of complete liberation from the control of your own lower mind. Reality and formlessness increasingly occupy the subjective consciousness of the initiate-disciple.

Ultimately your outstanding service is the dispelling of world glamour and illusion. To the evolved Taurean there are no insuperable difficulties or crises. You must ever remain a constructive, forward-moving force. Creative work and the materialization of the spiritual vision are paramount. The successful disciple works under inspiration, aspiration and vision, bringing about transformation, transmutation and eventual translation upon the mountaintop of Initiation.

Recognition of the truth and a steady unwavering maintenance of the spiritual ideal is the key to spiritual success. Emergence into Light is the keynote—a symbolic way of expressing the reverse of the immersion in darkness and ignorance. Freedom from the desire to possess, freedom from acquisitiveness, characterizes the life expression of one who is truly desireless. You must establish a sense of Reality as the ruling principle of your life. Your attachment is to the unseen, the true, the subjective and the Real; likewise you must achieve detachment from the seen, the false, the objective and the unreal. In other words you must strive to master renunciation and cut at the root of your cyclic life in the world of illusion enmeshed in material form.

Through the successful evocation of your spiritual intuition unity and harmony have prevailed, and likewise right judgment, pure reason and the wisdom of the soul. Harmonizing of all that has been achieved through the activity of the form life is your keynote. A complete realization of the nature of the emptiness of non-existence awaits you at the next step.

At the sixth stage you will attain the realization that form is emptiness and emptiness form. It is the attainment of this knowledge which will keep you from the extremes of opposite polarities, and you will henceforth make no errors in your efforts to develop correct judgment. The attainment of the Ultimate Wish now awaits you. Go in peace, my brother, and in the spirit of true comradeship upon the Path.

 

Step Six: Man the Initiate

May 10th to 20th

Venus

These words are now written for those glorious Taurians who have attained the sixth rung of the ladder. Subjectively speaking, it is now time for you to complete your analysis of Profound View and attain the Ultimate point or ‘pure view’.

You now need to learn how to recognize when your analysis is complete and you have fully understood the union of mutually exclusive ideas and contradictory characteristics. This is attained through meditation upon correct view and upon inherent interdependence and emptiness—the fact that nothing exists naturally on its own in the universe. As you proceed everything will come together, polarities will no longer alternate, and you will never be unbalanced by extreme views of any kind, having found the Middle Way.

The rulership of Venus indicates that all lunar control has been superseded by the triumph of your soul over the form side of life. Individual self-centeredness has come to an end as you have demonstrated cooperation with the Plan in the fullest sense. You beautifully express the highest adoration and appreciation of both the form side of life and the life of the soul.

The final decan produces the perfected expression of a sublimated, fully dedicated mind endowed with true solemnity. The art of illumined living is practiced as the mind becomes the perfect instrument for the revelation of the soul's love. Under Venus final sublimation is achieved, and of this state the Buddha is the outstanding human symbol.

The Taurean initiate becomes free from the desire to possess, free of acquisitiveness and is therefore distinguished by a true state of desirelessness. Motivated by the wish to appropriate nothing for the separated self, the art and the science of relationship to others and to the environment is now being mastered. A definite spiritual sense of Reality has been established as the ruling principle of your life. Attachment to the unseen, the subjective, the True and the Real is possible because there has been detachment from the seen, renunciation of the objective, the false and the unreal. In a way that it is impossible for the uninitiated to comprehend, your abstract mental polarization allows your higher mind to be continually focused in Reality, Formlessness and Deity.

Your characteristic and carefully cultivated strengths include unmatched kindness, unerring exposition, and abstract mental power to create thoughtforms and render them distinct. You exhibit practical inventiveness, highly developed powers of analysis and discrimination, a real detached objectivity, accuracy and precision in thought and action, power to discover through investigation and research, easy acquisition of knowledge and fluent mastery of factual detail. You have an ability to verify through experimentation, to discriminate truth from error, and you possess technical expertise.

You are the epitome of the forward-moving force and are on the verge of mastering the final stages of the art of guiding and fashioning the real inner man. You know that you must go down into the depths to forge your own weapons for this all-consummating Herculean task. Fortunately, the beneficent enhancement of Venus aids your skillful ability to penetrate the veils of matter until its secrets are revealed, causes known and natures disclosed. You have discovered that which was buried and deeply hidden and succeeded in bring it up into the light. Having achieved the Illumination of the radiant "eye of the Bull" (EA, p.566), the keys to the solution of nature's mysteries lie in your hands.

As a Custodian of the Plan and a cooperative participant in the revelation of divinity, you alone know the profound fullness of the joy which is experienced as a result of bringing solace to a needy world, bringing light to darkened souls and healing in some measure the open wounds of the world's distress.

You have attained the realization that the deepest joy of all lies in the gratitude of salvaged souls, and truly rejoice when you have been instrumental in lifting a brother or sister a little higher upon the ladder. In the final analysis, the gift of Venus is spiritual joy and bliss. This state of bliss is only reached when you have realized your absolute Oneness with Life itself. You alone know the true bliss of the ever-present Great Life about which, for us, speculation is fruitless. You have succeeded in bending the will of your little self to that of the greater Self, and at the end of that task there is nothing else to be done. Having successfully translated your highest ideals into words, acts and deeds you have brought about transformation, transmutation, and translation upon the mountaintop of Initiation.

You, the accomplished initiate, are a great Illuminator, a glorious "Holder of the Diamond" having symbolically attained the peak of the initiatory "Mountain of Blessings". What great undertakings await you we cannot know, but they will certainly involve some line of great creative work which will embody that special aspect or attribute of the Will of God that it is your special task and calling to appropriate and make possible of human expression.