Last week, whilst waiting for my computer to finish backing up, I listened to Max Richter’s Dream 1 on YouTube. The accompanying video, a piece of historical footage taken on the New York subway, is mesmerizing, but on this occasion, it was a viewer’s touching comment beneath it which caught my attention.

With a couple of class A expletives removed it reads: ‘...to think that so many people 100 years ago had their own sense of awareness, their own problems, they went through childhood, had friends in elementary school, first crush, first kiss, first heartbreak, first job, read books, walked down streets, looked up at the sky, experienced life in their own way…idk, I can’t explain it, but its trippy. All those lives that are now just a memory somewhere…’

That somewhere is in us. The awareness generated by those lives which are now a memory, lives on in us as part of the great systemic upcycling process, to which the product of our own experiences in incarnation will be added and passed on to our descendants.

My colleague, Reshad Feild, claimed that each of us in incarnation is connected to 14 generations of ancestors. I didn’t doubt this claim because I knew the quality of Reshad’s seer’s utterances, but it was many years before I could corroborate it from within my own Astrological frame of reference.

I understand now that are 14 sub-planes of consciousness, from the most basic kind of awareness considered to be human to where we now stand - opportunities in time and space with desires that propel us into our own experiences.

We draw in the experiences of our ancestors in the form of awareness registered on these 14 planes through the three lower chakras that define the human being and give us our foundation: the base, the sacral, and the solar plexus. Coming in through the base and the sacral chakras, the experiences of those who have gone before give the human family the things that it will inherit, and which are important to physical evolution: instincts, shared physical tendencies, cultural awareness conditioning different lifestyles through beliefs, sexual rules, values and motivations. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, which is the familiar presentation of the situation.  When the third chakra, the solar plexus, is active, we become of significance to the evolution of consciousness because then we have an awareness of a Self who is driven to realise its desires.  The evolutionary stakes are raised.

The Irish painter, Francis Bacon, who was as famous for his existential philosophy of life as he was for his artwork, said quotably: ‘We are born and we die, that’s how it is. But in between we give this purposeless existence meaning by our drives.’

Esotericism has no argument with this; it has been saying the same thing, albeit less succinctly, for aeons: we are all born, we will all die, and our drives do give meaning to our existence.

Yet three things come together in the solar plexus of a human being: the past, the present and a future made from what the merging of the past and present have created. Ouspensky said that when three things come together something happens.

What happens is that in the solar plexus chakra we may eventually find a desire to seek a way on, which proves strong enough to drive us to action, adding intent to dispel purposelessness and aspiration to transform the energy behind all our drives. Then we can access experiences of a different kind that stimulate the higher chakras: the heart, the brow, and the crown. There we find meaning in our own lives; and live with a sense of purpose, not simply in conformity with belief systems but through direct experience. We use belief until we know with our own being that we are different for learning to manage our lives, dealing with our demons and, later, to accessing new powers and capacities.  Then we live with commitment and awareness which puts us under different laws. This is what counts; belief is simply the packaging around the ladder’s early steps.

This is not Enlightenment, but conscious living in everyday life which enables us to make a different relationship with the Three Worlds under higher laws than those of accident and fate, a development which passes back to our ancestors.

The solar plexus centre, therefore, acts as a kind of anvil and introduces the evolutionary variables. What will be created from the energy of desire when it is hammered by Life? Will it move our awareness on? Will our drives move us upwards to create a spiral or will we go round again, often with diminishing returns?

The Existentialist, who is not seeking this way on, is trapped in the lower chakras where he confronts the precariousness of the human condition under the laws of accident and fate. Perhaps he does not want to search for a higher way; perhaps he finds it, but his intellect can see only moonshine and self-deception; or perhaps, as in the case of Bacon who had strongly mystical tendencies which he suppressed, he will not allow himself to find or accept it.

Bacon’s consciousness was trapped on a Grand Cardinal Cross, most likely through the mutable houses, although his birth time is not recorded. The Grand Cross is a room without doors (not to be confused with the Esotericist’s Cross of the Heavens which gives a direction to awareness).  A very great liking for the attention and acclaim his existentialist stance brought to him, played a part in his entrapment.  It was cool in intellectual circles in the post War years to believe in nothing, as it is now and for much the same reason. When we perceive ourselves to be let down by life, presenting this absurd existence as anything other than what it appears to be is seen as only an intellectually contemptible deception, which our pride will not let us be taken in by. Then our sense of superiority is all that is left to provide us with our bitter compensation.

What we so often forget when we lament the quality of our times, the loss of the Golden Ages, or the absurdity of the human condition, is that the cyclical processes which take individuals and civilisation from the heights to the depths is the Dance of Life. It has ever been this way. Human activity may shape the forms it takes, but not the fact of rise, decline and fall. Behind the successes, drama, and failures of the human family down the ages, the Heavens turn the wheels of the cycles without pause, bringing in and taking away. They are always turning, always bringing in new conditions and destroying existing structures; there are always opportunities for us to gain in awareness.

The evolution of consciousness is not about winning, nor is it about

having the right conditions in the form of ease and leisure to think big and significant thoughts.  It is, first and foremost, about the experience of living with commitment and humanity, with space for growth in understanding to give the point to our existence and suffering. Failure is often better for this, both in individuals and civilisations. There may be loss and pain in our world, but there is no waste in this system and each of us contributes. An investment in self-development which encourages learning through suffering, is an investment in the future of the human family. Our struggles and our small achievements in growing in awareness will assist those who come after us, to whom we will be just memories.

All of us at DKF-K join with our friends in the USA to send our best wishes for a peaceful, healing time, especially for those experiencing a first Christmas without a loved one.

As in previous years, we are putting up the Meditation and Candle-burning Plan. Please feel free to download it and sent it to anyone you consider may benefit from it.