AMORC IS A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Monograph No. 4 of the 4th Degree in the Initiate Section opens with a quote from John Benjamin Butler Burke, who, as I mentioned in my last blog, seems to rate rather poorly as an actual mystic as he does not seem to affirm definitely that there is a core of consciousness at the center of the universe.
At the very end of his discourse, Burke says somewhat poetically,
-Whether we too, dim units that we are, shall persist self-conscious in that great ocean independently of all time, science cannot answer. Many men will say yes. Not because they think it; but because they feel it must be so. The old answer is the same as that which Plato had to give more than 2500 years ago, although he cannot have been blind as to its inadequacy: that if Goodness and Love, like truth, be realities, whatever atoms may really be, that which delights in virtue must b e happy, and in harmony with the totality of things. In the correlation of vital phenomena are that unity and that plurality at once rendered a continuous whole.
Although Plato did have some kind of view of the indivisible level of matter, what we call atoms, it was not the same as Democritus, but a more, refined geometric view. Nonetheless, his view on life after death and his view of the universe as a reflection of a creative principle, called the GOOD (‘agathon’- in Greek) make him clearly side with those who believe in life after death.
In AMORC UNMASKED, I discuss, in depth, Plato’s story of Er, a slain warrior who dies and is assigned, unlike most, to remember the contours of the afterlife, after he somehow is revived on earth as perhaps the first, in-depth account of an NDE experience in Western literature. I quote the following from The Republic, one of Plato’s most famous dialogues, as translated by Benjamin Jowett-
-Ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world.
Suffice to say in this story, Er fully experiences the life between lives, where the dead arrive in the afterlife and must drink from the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness- before they are born again. Plato clearly is an advocate of survival after bodily death.
And, whether adequately or not, there is a whole industry now, past lifetime therapy, which utilizes hypnosis to dredge up memories that have, in this lifetime, been somehow buried. There is also an abundant literature which recounts reincarnation memories that happen spontaneously, in children when they first learn how to speak, in dreams, even in psychotherapy and certainly in various cultures, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism, where religious leaders are chosen based on their ability to remember, under special conditions, artifacts from their past.
I believe, therefore, that this little discussion by Burke- blurs Plato’s belief in the afterlife and, moreso, blurs his firm commitment to some kind of direct apprehension of the Good, a form of mysticism, probably related directly to the teachings of the Eleusinian mysteries. With all the mysticism suggested by Plato, even that which is discussed obliquely, again I believe this concurrence gives a rather unmystical view of reality, one that does not cohere with even AMORC’s view of Cosmic Consciousness as the heart of its teaching.
Why is it here, then? I think there is even a bigger question when gets to heart of the Monograph, and its strange use of a quote from Genesis. I will discuss this in my next blog.
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