Thoughtline  April 1998

The Thinker used to say, "Friend, are you ready for an unexpected communion with the luminous sphere?"
Star Light, Star Bright, First Star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight!

This is a talk about Pisces, the real Pisces. It is, therefore, a talk about sacrifice, renunciation and resurrection. It is also a talk about hope, about love, and about joy, for, hard as it is to realize, hope, love and joy are the true ingredients of sacrifice, renunciation and resurrection.

"When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are..." Well, Jiminy Cricket, I'm the guy who takes fortune cookies seriously, so it should be no big surprise to discover that I am also an incurable wisher on stars. Been doing it as long as I can remember. One of the earliest wishes that I can remember was wishing that June Allyson - or "Meg" as she was know to me in Little Women, would be my girl. I think she married Jimmy Stewart instead, or was that Glenn Miller? What was/is real? does it really matter? What makes one set of images real and another not? Interesting questions for pondering. I think an awful lot depends upon one's point of view.

Wishing, I have come to realize, is a very complex art. There is much more to it than just saying the magic words and making the wish. I am not saying that I do not believe that there are wish-granting angels, and genies and so forth, but I am saying that wishing is inextricably wound up with Karma and the Life Plan of the Soul.

In its lower or juvenile forms, those forms we use before becoming adults, wishing is an extension of desire. It works through the lower centers, being primarily impulsed through the solar plexus center. Fortunately for most of us, our desire bodies and mental equipment are too unfocused to cause a wish to happen without a really serious effort. (Imagine having a 35-year-old woman for a girl friend when you are only 9 or l0.) but that is the clue to wishes coming true. To make a wish come true, takes a really serious focused effort.

I heard a successful writer being interviewed the other day, and to the question about how she had become a writer she told of how as a very young girl she spent a lot of time in the local library. She would look for long periods of time at the cards in the card catalogue, and she would visualize a card with her name on it. She said she always wanted to open a card catalogue and see a card with her name, and now she can, in almost any library she enters, all over the world. That is how wishes come true. They "come true" - that is, they manifest in time and space - because we make them come true. How many lifetimes do you think that writer worked on that wish?

There are, of course, further layers of complexity to the business of wishing. But, contrary to appearances, it is my thinking that most wishes, if they are more than just a momentary flash, do come true. Our present myopic level of vision makes it hard for us to see how wishes or desires may take lives to work out. The fact that reincarnation is not a scientifically acceptable concept, which needs to be considered in the analysis of a

particular human being's psychology is a great hindrance to accurate understanding. It is very much like trying to determine the shape of a camel through an examination of its toe.

It is amazing to think of how the world will change when we are finally able to break out of the bondage of materialistic thinking which has us enthralled - enslaved, actually. Usually when I talk about this situation, I am concerned with the structures of our political, economical and educational institutions. But imagine what the recognition of the fact of our spiritual reality, our immortality and the existence of the 5^th kingdom would do to the field of healing, both physical and psychological.

I do see, I am happy to report, a very large ray of hope on the horizon. As the Piscean Age recedes into the sunset of its incarnation, and the Aquarian dawn breaks upon the shores of our consciousness, we sense a deep shifting in the more developed and focused minds in the world. This shift is from the note of death which dominated the Piscean era to the note of Aquarius which is "Life, and Life more abundantly."

Pisces, of course, is not , never was, about death. It is about sacrifice, renunciation and resurrection. It is about hope, love and joy. However, it seems that self-consciousness, which had been evolving within the human family for the past 20 or 30 thousand years, reached such a point of extreme development within the past two or three thousand years (even, perhaps passing into that state where it totally dominates life and becomes a detriment to further evolutionary growth) that the illusion of one being one's physical vehicle totally blocked out the reality of the subjective side of life.

Consequently, all of the previously gained wisdom, knowledge, evidence of the subjective realities were reduced to the realm of mere myth and fantasy. their immediacy was veiled. It was OK for religious types to talk of such things, but they were not to be taken seriously in the day-to-day living of one's life.

If all hope of knowledge or understanding of the subjective realities are gone, we can see how death becomes a very dominant player in the unfolding life. As long as the focus of one's life is held prisoner by the notion that one is one's physical vehicle, that the material or physical world is all there is, that this is as good as it gets, resurrection holds little promise. Thus, the overriding focus on death within virtually all aspects of human interaction and living, and especially in the various religious presentations over the past few thousand years.

But Pisces, as I said, is about hope and sacrifice, love and renunciation, and joy and resurrection, not death. True, when one renounces something, it dies. Take a bad habit, like smoking - you renounce it, and it dies. Usually, it does not die easily. In the case of smoking it can be pretty painful. That is because the astral being that the habit has created in this case is strong and does not want to die. So it fights. A lot depends on the level of will brought to the renunciation.

This same scenario can be applied to anything in life - a gained threshold, a body. What is renounced dies. However, what does the renouncing doesn't die. Death is what happens to a form when the living inhabitant exist or moves on or leaves. Life can never die. Life is life.

The renouncer, the actor, the being, the Christ in us, is liberated. However, if one's sense of the real is locked into the physical or material world, sacrifice, which is really saying "yes" which is really the action generating renunciation, which is really a glorious liberation and resurrection into the New, is cast as a terrible thing. If one's sense of the real is locked into the physical or material world, there can be no liberation in renunciation, just death. Sacrifice, which leads to renunciation and resurrection and which is actually a willing and joy-filled transference of identification to the new or next state, becomes some painful thing that only fools or those suffering from a martyr complex do, because there is no such thing as the "New and Formless Light."

Renunciation is the step necessary for resurrection to happen - no renunciation, no resurrection. Holding on to that which should be let go, needs to be let go, will eventually be let go, regardless of how hard one holds on, leads only to pain. The holding on is the result of a self-conscious-generated illusion. It is the reaction of an identification, often an unconscious identification, of oneself with that onto which one is holding. Letting go in these cases, letting go of what one things one is, means death.

This set of factors combine to generate a force known as fear. Fear, we all know, is a very, very strong motivator. The fear of death enables us to withstand enormous levels of pain. The pain we are feeling is bearable as long as we can hold off death because death is worse.

This death does not have to be our physical death. In fact, most of the time it is not. We suffer, as I said, a thousand little deaths before the big one, but we do not seem to learn anything from them. We fail to see that when we do finally, let go of that which we were holding, we move on. We are resurrected. We are liberated into a new situation.

Life is mad eof such stages. The life of which we are currently conscious, this one we are living right now, if you are more than two months old, has seen thousands of little deaths, and, if you are living a life of striving, a few major ones. That which we have made or that which we have acquired - be it a job, a skill, a position, a home, a friend, a wife, a child - has been taken away, sometimes overnight, and we are left stripped of that which we thought we were. But we go on. We endure. And if we have the wisdom to let go of that which we had, let go of the identification with it, we grow from the experience. "The Thinker, compared such tests with the tempering of a blade. He knew that only by the alternate application of heat and cold could indestructible strength be forged." Supermundane II, p174. this is life on planet Earth, friends. We will, as Ram Dass has observed, "See ultimately that we have to die into truth, we have to die into God, we have to die into love."

But more than this current little life which we think of as so overwhelmingly important, because we are so myopically identified with it, there is the Path. Our little lives are microcosmic episodes in the macrocosmic cycle we call the Path. So, if you are not liking your life, better find out what the deal is because there is a log more just like this one on the way. Our lives have gone over the centuries and through many, many incarnations to where we stand today. The progress has always been one of sacrifice, renunciation and resurrection. some day we will stand on the threshold of the Great Renunciation and we will sacrifice the causal body, the Temple of the Lord.

So, wishing is good, if your wishes are for the good - be it the good of your fellow workers and group brothers or the general good - and wishing on a star simply invokes the energy of a Luminous Sphere. Wishing is a way to direct energy, to set up flows and put light on the paths of others.

I know about three wishes that I would like to share with you:

"That your knowledge may be transmuted into wisdom and the eye of vision control your living processes and all your undertaking is the desire (deep within my heart) for each and all of you."
Disciples in A New Age I, p102.

"That your vision may expand, and your power to think and reflect abstractly may grow, is my hope and wish for you."
Seven Rays, Vol. V, p207.

"One simple rule towards comprehension and attainment ever holds good. The Great Renunciation becomes possible only when the practice of the little renunciations governs the life of a disciple and a group. The renouncing of ambition, of all personality ties, and the renunciation of all that hinders progress as it is revealed to the eye of the soul, lays a sound foundation for the final great transference, based upon the renunciation of that which for aeons has connoted beauty, truth and goodness, and which has seemed the ultimate goal of all aspirational effort. The endeavor to see that which lies ahead and beyond the apparent finality of should fusion faces disciples, among them some of you, at this time; and that all of you may penetrate beyond the veil of the should and eventually see that veil" rent from the top to the bottom," and thus be enabled to say with those of like degree "It is finished" my earnest hope. Then will open for you as for others, the Way of the Higher Evolution, and the glory of the Lord will be seen in a new light - a light which will dim and throw into the shade all previous goals and visions."
A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Vol. V, p 224-5.

Those three wishes or hopes were made by a Master of the Wisdom on our behalf, who signed himself as Your Master, Friend and Teacher - The Tibetan.

My wish is that we can live up to these wishes.