The Easter Festival of Love and Light
This year's Easter celebration occurs on Sunday March 31, 2024, six days after after the Libra Full Moon and Aries Solar Festival, occurring on Monday, March 25, 2024. Easter always occurs during the Aries month of the year.
Easter marks the first of three Global Spring Spiritual Festivals occurring at the time of the Aries, Taurus, and Gemini Solar Festivals. These festivals were instituted by the Tibetan Ascended Master Dwaj Khul and given to humanity in the middle of the 20th century through the telepathic stenography of Alice Bailey and others in the Theosophical Spiritual Tradition.
These three Full Moon Solar festivals incorporate elements from Mystery School teachings of both East and West, drawing from Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian Esoteric traditions.
These three Solar Festivals are intended to be a focus for spiritual development for humanity around the world, based upon the yearly seasonal cycles in co-ordination with the rhythms of the Sun and Moon, and the stellar entities that inhabit the Plane of the Ecliptic, the Zodiac, far beyond our Solar System.
During these three Spiritual Festivals, humanity unites with the Earthly Elementals and with Angelic presences, all presiding over the structure and growth of mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms, uniting human beings with the Web of Life on our blue-green planetary home.
Awakened humanity, united with the Elementals and Angels associated with planet Earth, joins in collective meditations and spiritual practices, illuminating the physical and subtle realms with energies of love and light during these three Global Festivals.
Rainbow, Photo by Austin Schmid on Unsplash
Easter celebrates an intensely personal moment, the resurrection of the Spiritual Master Jesus Christ, following his self-sacrifice and crucifixion, engineered by the Jewish and Roman rulers of Palestine.
Christ blazed a trail to spiritual heights for those who choose to follow his example. Aries personalities, of course, are the trail-blazers par excellence of the Zodiac so it is energetically appropriate that Easter occurs in the Aries month of the yearly seasonal round.
This supreme act of spiritual generosity and compassion had immense spiritual implications.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Paolo Veronese,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Libra personalities are considered to be concerned with the well-being of the community as much or more than their own, so the death and resurrection of Christ exemplifies the highest Aries and Libra virtues during springtime, and heralds the Victory of Light over the dark seasons that preceded this one.
Good Friday, the day Jesus Christ was crucified, falls each year just before Easter Sunday. We rejoice and remember the day Christ rose from the dead, appearing in his Luminous Light-Body to Mary Magdalene.
According to Christian Wisdom Teachings, the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ balanced the Cosmic Scales, and brought forgiveness for all human beings for original sin, which had weighed heavily on the souls of all incarnated humanity for long ages of time.
This "original sin" was the act of plunging so deeply into material reality that humanity became overly attached to individualistic existence that we lost our connection with Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose, becoming enmeshed in the illusory world-view created by the egoistic personality.
The original sin consists of mistaking an egoistic world-view for the true reality, that we are all interdependent beings, interconnected with one another and the entire web of life. The true reality includes but also transcends the reality we can apprehend with our five senses.
Christ exemplifed the virtues of the spiritually evolved Aries personality, which puts personal integrity and one's own spiritual guidance above all other considerations. Christ's Self-consciousness was tempered by a Libran concern for the well-being of the community.
In fact, Christ sacrificed his life to create an energetic bridge that would allow humanity to re-connect with Spiritual Realms by following Christ's teachings and connecting with the energy of the Cosmic Christ in prayer and meditation.
7 Chakras
Peter Weltevrede, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
In the 21st century, the worldview of rational materialism has come to dominate humanity's consciousness. It is more important than ever for Lightworkers and spiritual seekers to seek to Unify their consciousness with the energy stream initiated by Jesus Christ through the Mystery of his death and resurrection.
In this way all of us can experience Unity with our Higher Selves, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose, and transcend the self-imposed limitations of the egoistic personality, with its narrow, individualized perspective.
Easter is also a Festival of World-Renewal. Esoteric Christian teachings tell us that the death and resurrection of Christ infused the energy of the Cosmic Christ into all the realms of creation, from the lowest Underworld to the Earthly plane of existence, and upward to the highest heavenly peaks.
In the 21st century humanity is required to Unify consciousness with the Web of Life on planet Earth, while simultaneously subordinating the egoistic personality to the guidance of Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose.
At this time of the Easter Festival, something Divine seeks to restore equilibrium between humanity and the natural environment of Mother Earth.
Christ is the perfected Aries personality, the “Lamb of God”, whose sacrifice takes away the “sins” or “karma” of the world, wiping out debts in a Spiritual Grand Jubilee, and preparing the way for the spiritual liberation of humanity, just as the sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” at Passover heralded the Exodus of the Israelites into freedom!
Something Divine seeks to bring peace to the warring classes of humanity.
Something so sacred, so subtle, yet so powerful that in its global balancing act it is both disruptive & healing at the same time.
At the time of Easter, we celebrate the blending of the energies of Aries and Libra. Esoterically, Aries represents the egoistic personality, and Libra the Cosmic Equilibrium of the Higher Self.
This is a very auspicious moment indeed for our meditation practice. Now is the time to celebrate the subordination of the ego in favor of the Higher Self. Now is the time to demonstrate our willed intent to connect with the Higher Self, Christ Consciousness, through meditation, prayer, ceremony and ritual. Now is the time to surrender and allow ourselves to be guided on the path of Spirit.
On Good Friday, as he hung dying on the cross of wood, Jesus the Christ attained a world-altering spiritual victory over the personal ego which opened for all of us a doorway to the Way, the Truth and Eternal Life.
The Hanged Man, that most daunting Tarot Trump, number 12, symbolizes the difficult process of re-orienting the life force from subservience to the egoistic personality to the service of the Higher Self, The Unity of the Web of Life, and the Universal Source of Creation.
This re-orientation is the goal of all spiritual practices, both East and West. Seekers have used techniques such as meditation, fasting, prayer, ceremonial magic, vision quest, and even martyrdom to subordinate the ego, purge the Self of the mind’s illusion of separation, and attain the unity consciousness that is the fruit of this Great Sacrifice.
The Hanged Man also depicts the crucifixion of the body. This is the card of surrender, the card of death by water.
Those who were crucified normally died a long, slow death from suffocation brought about by the collapse of lungs filling with water, as they found themselves unable to maintain an erect posture, sinking down with fatigue, increasingly unable to breathe.
Symbolically, it was through being filled with the element of water, which represents the emotional power of compassion manifest as unconditional love, that the ego of Jesus died on Good Friday.
Tarot Trump 13, called Death, refers both to physical death and to the death of the egoistic personality, which is an illusory death. For the personality remains after this death, but it is stripped of the illusion of control.
The aspirant no longer lives to satisfy individual material desires at the expense of others, or without thought for the consequences of actions upon the larger Web of Life that comprises the great Karmic Wheel of Existence figured in Tarot Trump 10, The Wheel of Fortune.
This is the death by water that is the culmination of the spiritual exercise pictured in Trump 12, the Hanged Man. As at the moment of physical death, the ego is submerged completely in the collective consciousness of humanity and the evolutionary record of all sentient beings incarnating over time on planet Earth.
This is the true baptism of water, and this baptism leads to new life, to a true rebirth of the spirit, the flesh and the soul.
The death of the ego is long and slow, and our ability to remain constant during this process of suffering and ego-death is made possible only by a constant renewal of faith. Yet as Jesus the Christ experienced on his cross of wood, every aspirant reaches a point where he or she will cry “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”
Each aspirant must rest assured that despite all feelings of despair and loss, the process is only purging us of the illusion of the separate self, the illusion that the egoistic personality is in control of our lives. Jesus the Christ remained Self-aware on the cross, in a spirit of total surrender.
In our spiritual practice, whatever it may be, we must also surrender to Universal forces far beyond the control of the egoistic mind, in a spirit of love, with a sincere desire that our sacrifice be offered for the salvation of the Whole, and thus we will achieve a great spiritual victory.
This rebirth, the Resurrection of Christ, is figured in Tarot Trump 14, called Art, referring to the spiritual art of alchemy. In this card, an angel is pictured, balancing two cups with water flowing between them, or overshadowing lesser figures of the Divine Lovers in the background. This angel is the Higher Self, and the new life is a life lived in accordance with the dictates of the Higher Self.
Suddenly the aspirant discovers a new, vast creativity operating through him or through her, leading and directing the aspirant’s life in new directions. Through a series of miraculous synchronicities and felicitous encounters, this powerful force elicits flashes of loving wisdom, triggers acts of compassionate service, and fosters a continuous consciousness of the Unity that underlies the apparent dualities of material creation in this Universe.
Art represents the infusion of spiritual energies of love and light into the material world, and their expression in acts of creativity, compassion and service that unify matter and spirit and bring to fruition the evolution of human consciousness in Self-directed acknowledgement of our true, angelic nature. In this initiation, the aspirant transcends rational humanity even as rational humanity transcended the existence of the Ape, and becomes primarily a spiritual creature living simultaneously in the two worlds, harmonizing them both through every thought, word and deed.
If you would like to know more about the Mysteries of the Tarot, you can find much of this week’s Easter material and much, much more in my article “Tarot, the Yoga of the West”, which discusses the spiritual significance of all Twenty-One Trumps.
Meditation Practice for the Easter Festival of Resurrection
At the moment of his Death, Christ unified his own Body of Light with the etheric body of the planet, permanently infusing the energy of transcendent Self into the Earth’s aura, according to clairvoyant and Esoteric Christian spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner.
After his death, and a descent into the underworld, Jesus Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday in his immortal, subtle energy body. Thus the Resurrection of Christ, which we celebrate this Easter Sunday, is the Feast of the appearance of the Immortal Light Body of Christ walking upon the Earth. Easter is the Feast of the manifestation of Holy Spirit within the four elements of the material creation.
Esoteric Christians know of a special mantra that encodes the entirety of these Wisdom Teachings of Jesus Christ in a few syllables, a mantra that invokes the energy of the Cosmic Christ for protection, for healing, and for sharing with those in need, those who suffer, those who are in danger of death.
This mantra was given to Jane and myself by Bishop John Rankin of the Liberal Catholic Church in the early Nineteen Eightes, when Jane and I were doing healing work with individuals infected with the HIV-AIDS virus. Bishop Rankin told us to use the mantra for our own protection and for healing others. We have found over the years that this powerful mantra can be chanted aloud when clearing spaces of detrimental energies, or when performing healings and clearings of individuals in need. You can also say the mantra silently over and over as you meditate and in this way bring your own aura into resonance with the energy field of the Cosmic Christ.
Here is the mantra.
Invoke the secret name of Christ. Chant the following to yourself over and over, "Yod, Heh, Vau, Heh, Yod, Heh, Shin, Vau, Heh", pronounced "Yod, Hey, Vow, Hey, Yod, Hey, Shin, Vow, Hey".
Angelic Fire
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
These Hebrew letters stand for JHVH or Jehovah, and JHSVH (Jeheshua or Jesus). The four letters comprising the name of Jehovah, YHVH, stand for the four elements, fire, water, air and earth. The fifth element, which is spirit, is called Shin. When you put Shin, or spirit in the middle of the four elements, into YHVH, you get Jeheshua, or Jesus.
Jesus indeed infused spirit into the material world through his Divine presence and ability to sacrifice everything, even his own body, for love. So chant these nine letters over and over to yourself as you meditate and breathe deeply and slowly. In this way, you can attract Christ consciousness, the spirit of Jesus, into your aura, your mind, and your heart.
Subsequent to this great spiritual victory of Jesus the Christ, on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christ infused the material elements with the energy of Spririt.
Connecting with the Cosmic Christ while out in nature at Easter time is a powerful spiritual practice that connects us to both Spirit and Nature simultaneously.
At Easter, the energy of Christ Consciousness is accessible to all aspirants through meditation upon the beautiful forms of nature, through immersion in the elements of nature, through communion with the sky, the sea, the rivers, mountains, trees, and flowers.
Sit quietly in your garden, walk slowly and thoughtfully through a park, meditate in a forest or by a running stream, and speak directly to Christ. Begin by saying the Mantra of the Cosmic Christ aloud or silently until your mind is still and peaceful.
Say his name, give thanks for his Blessing upon the Earth, and give thanks to the Earth for nurturing the spiritual evolution of human beings, and your own personal evolution.
Whether or not you are a Christian, if you have faith, if you quiet your mind, and if your intent is pure, you can hear Christ speaking directly to you, and experience a moment of Unity with the Risen Christ impulse.
Ask and it shall be made known to you, make a request and it shall be granted to you, open your heart and the chains of ego will fall away. Ask for your freedom and you shall be freed. This is Christ’s Easter promise.
Connecting with the Divine Mother at Eastertime
This is a season especially sacred to the Divine Mother. Around the time of the Spring Equinox, in mid-March and through April, the Divine Feminine is adored as Cybele, the Great Mother Gaia also known as Rhea and by many other names.
Kwan Yin, Photo by Jack Prichett on Unsplash
In Japan & China, this is the season to worship Kwan Yin, the Lady of Compassion. Kwan Yin is known to many in the East and West for her unselfish action upon reaching the final spiritual goal of enlightenment. She refused her own personal Liberation to become a Bodhisattva--one who works for the liberation of all before accepting it for herself.
Kwan Yin brings her Compassionate Service to all in the hopes that their souls will evolve & receive liberation from the endless cycles of despair. Call upon her in your hour of need and she will respond, for that is her nature, her service, and her highest desire.
It is no accident that Our Lady is Worshipped at this time of year, when the Life Forces are rising, when the chi is evident in the first golden hues to paint the weeping willow branches, when the birds' song serenades you at dawn, when the first robin is sighted, when animals & people alike mate & seek union. The fecundity of our fields, farms, hearths & bodies is very much present in our consciousness, our daily tasks & all around us for "those with eyes to see” and hearts to hear.
Now is the time to practice walking meditation. Go out into nature & observe the earth as it awakens. In the northern hemisphere, and especially in the Northeast US snowbells appear, daffodils are poking through the cold ground, alliums emerge from hiding, the iris shows us her blades & the first shoots of purifying spring plants make their appearance, bursting through the sometimes still frozen ground.
Our slumbering winter selves need spring herbs: hyssop, angelica, mullein & dandelion as they too begin their springtime emergence from the awakening earth to help enliven our bodies. Time to purge the accumulations of sloth, the energetic residue of the heavy foods of winter & to emerge from the gestation of the inner worlds of wintery contemplation. Now is the time to rejoice as we move into the increasing sunlight, feast upon early spring green shoots & move our bodies with renewed vigor.
Lightworkers, meditators, and all those who are sensitive to world events have also been connecting to the sometimes turbulent energies we feel around us, not just from spring's energy breaking up our frozen places, but also from the broader changes our Garden Planet & Humanity are undergoing at this point in Gaia's Soul evolution.
This spring, at Satya Center, our hearts are full – we sense increased planetary sorrow when we hear about & think of our sisters & brothers, our grandmothers & grandfathers and all of our children around the world who emerge from winter without enough to eat, with no place to sleep, no fields to plow or small piece of earth in which to grow healthy food.
Now, during this Festival Season celebrating both Christ and the Divine Mother, more than ever we feel the need for the re-emergence of the energy of the Divine Lovers and the need to usher in a time of balanced male & female relations. (Those who want to understand more about the ancient Wisdom School teachings of the Divine Lovers, and their significance to the New Aquarian Age, can read our article, “The New Age of the Divine Lovers”.)
The last gasp of the patriarchal war-mentality of the Age of Empire with its emphasis on wielding 'power-over' others is fast coming to an end. More and more, the ugly face of Imperial greed shows itself naked to the world.
It seems that the wealthy among us are waging war against the rest of humanity and upon Mother Nature herself in an endless quest for more and more profits.
Greed seemingly takes the upper hand in political decisions to divert water from people and gardens to industrial farming operations that deplete the soil and produce nutritionless food, in political decisions to displace thousands to create dams that will power environmentally unsound industries in the Third World, in the power of unscrupulous landowners in communities large and small to blast gravel mines deep within the earth, in the willingness of nations large and small to wage wars to usurp natural resources -- the list is endless.
Unfortunately, this greed leads to assaults by the predatory and warrior classes upon the great bulk of humankind and upon our environment. In this undeclared class war, many casualties & horrors are perpetrated every day. This class war cannot continue unabated without destroying our human civilization around the world.
The fallout from this unrelenting war of the greedy against the rest of the world is spiritually and factually related to the tumultuous changes taking place both politically & environmentally across the globe, from both human created disasters to Earth changes taking place in order to cleanse the many toxic assaults made upon our Mother Earth.
However, there is something else going on, sometimes more subtly than the cacophony of war & greed that seems so overwhelming. Something is taking place in the auras & the hearts & minds of many of us as well as in the etheric body of the earth itself; something which acts to bring the unbalanced state of human existence into balance.
Something Divine seeks to restore equilibrium between humanity and the natural environment. Something Divine seeks to bring peace to the warring classes of humanity. Something so sacred, so subtle, yet so powerful that in its global balancing act it is both disruptive & healing at the same time. This subtle energy is the energy of rebirth, the prelude to the restoration of the Dominion of the Divine Lovers -- it is the Sacred Emergence of the Divine Feminine.
Eastertide & Passover Season is the perfect time to speak about the need to recognize, name & embrace the return of the Great Mother. Whether your belief system is secular or new age or if you are celebrating traditional religious practices, it is time to hear, acknowledge & awaken to the in pouring energy of the Spirit of the Divine Mother!
We have lived through many thousands of years where the Mother has been denigrated, disempowered & disenfranchised; where girl children have been dismissed as inessential or far worse, times when girl children have been maimed, killed, sold into slavery or abandoned. There are still places today where young girls are mutilated as part of their circumcision rites of puberty, robbing them of any future pleasure they may take in the act of sexual pleasure itself, or the union which creates new life or in childbirth.
For thousands of years our very language has been subverted to empower only half of the human population & to heap abuse & violence on the female half of the human family, and on Mother Earth & her creatures as well. Even the word devotion has lost its original meaning of consecrating oneself and instead has come to more commonly mean submission to the Divine Patriarch. The Latin word ‘mater’ the root of the word Mother & Matter has been defiled to its current meaning of substance, devoid of any Divine origin.
It is no accident that Feminism has been trying to find its way and give women a voice, (really since the 1920's) or that a film like the Da Vinci Code has found a popular cult following. And it is no accident that the Divine Mother makes her presence known in a new way among Catholics in the reemergence of the Devotion to the Magdalene.
According to many modern Biblical scholars, Mary Magdalene was Christ’s most beloved disciple. It was Mary Magdalene who anointed Jesus as Messiah on the Mount of Olives during Holy Week with the spikenard she carried in her alabaster jar. The word Messiah means ‘the anointed one’. On Easter Sunday, it was Mary Magdalene who enjoyed the visitation of the risen Christ when she came to his tomb in the garden to anoint his body. It was Mary Magdalene who proclaimed the miracle of Christ’s resurrection to the other Apostles.
This Easter, let us say a prayer in Her name. For Mary Magdalene, the Bride of the Christ, embodies the Sacred Union of the Divine & His Bride. The Magdalene is the perfect female example of the Bride of the Divine, the Goddess celebrated in the Hieros Gamos, the Union of the Divine Lovers.
Esoterically, this Sacred Union celebrates the union of the individual soul with the Holy Spirit, with Sophia and the Christ principle, the eternal energies of Divine Wisdom and Divine Love. As Margaret Starbird writes so eloquently in Mary Magdalene: The Bride in Exile "The ultimate union of flesh and divinity occurs in the 'temple of the Holy Spirit'--each human person."
For that is the true goal & the true meaning of the Sacred Marriage or Hieros Gamos-- the union of our lower & higher selves. The alchemists were attempting to unite the microcosm and the macrocosm.
The ancient alchemical workings were based upon the wisdom teaching encapsulated in the phrase 'as above, so below' and those few words picture their true work – the true meaning of their search to create gold from base matter.
For the base matter is our own lower nature, our egoistic personality, and the gold is the human being completely connected to the Higher Self, refined through the fires of existence on this beautiful, difficult planet of learning, purified by experience and suffering, and perfected by the exercise of love, love in accordance with Divine Will, according to the Divine Plan of Love and Light, which is celebrated during the Festival of the Sun in Aries every year at this time.
Each of us, on our own spiritual path, has been given that momentous task of alchemical transformation as part of our birthright. Each of us walks our own labyrinth to find our own center & in so doing, we find we are not alone, not separate, but instead we find that we are always in Union with the Divine.
As we work to purify our hearts and bodies, we will find that we, ourselves, are Spirit; in our center and in our devotion, we will find God.
That is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. For the Divine is immanent. Goddess/God is everywhere informing& sustaining all of the Universe.
Each of us has access to that knowing of the Divine within ourselves. By turning inward, each of us will find our own Divine Higher Self & in so doing, we will each of us, perform that Higher Marriage of uniting Soul with Spirit.
And we can extend our efforts to fulfill that inner spiritual work to the outer world by being loving, mindful and wise in all of our relations: with our children, our neighbors, our families, with all those with whom we come in contact every day. And we must & can, especially, strive to reach & speak to the Divine in our Beloved love partners as we reach to the Divine spark within ourselves.