Before Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the content of major religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Egyptian and Greek mystery cults, indicates a gradual disclosure and deepening influence of the solar Logos, Christ, in earthly affairs and in the consciousness of man. Judaism, whose sacred scripture is the Old Testament, can be grouped among these religions, for it is not Christian per se; but it is prophetic of the advent of the Son of God in human form. The true Christian document is the New Testament, particularly the Gospels.

  The modern pilgrim does not journey East to recover the mentality addressed by pre-Christian religions. At most, any such orientation is summary, taking the form of a recapitulation of the seeker’s spiritual heritage. He may briefly take stock of where he has been that he may the better find himself where he now is. (The careers of Max Heindel and Rudolph Steiner commenced with retrospective reviews of wisdom teachings of pre-Christian cultural epochs.) The modern pilgrim journeys west. He takes the Sun path.

  Up to a point in time during this the post-Atlantean epoch, the mode of approach to spiritual realms feasibly involved a backstepping, a reversal of direction before one’s downward momentum was completed, an attempt to restore a prior condition when man’s soul was in free converse and easier contact with spiritual beings. Geophysically, one oriented one’s self toward the East. He directed his orisons or morning prayers to the eastern horizon, where light first appears. The gesture is symbolic and literal. The literal gesture is based on an illusion involving the revolution of the earth on its axis, which creates the impression that the source of light (Spirit) is from out of the East.

  The present-day aspirant imitates the cosmic motion of the Sun, which is also illusory in that it appears to travel from east to west: again a function of earth’s axial rotation. However this identification with the solar movement signifies a vast change in man’s attitude to living in the physical. The solar deity Christ came to planet Earth and was born into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and subsequently into the very body of Earth through the vehicle of Jesus’ “precious blood.”

  Since that time, the progress of man in search of spiritual fulfillment has been forward into and through the day of his physical body, into the manifest world of tangible forms and space-based events. Armed with the inner light available to man through the Christ Impulse, which illuminates the Earth sphere and all that is therein, man walks with full waking consciousness into three-dimensional experience, into and through the world illumined by the day-star. He looks to what he shall be whereas pre-Christian man looked nostalgically to a former condition of ideality.

  Contemporary man moves forward, formward, westward, deathward—for he now has the Light within, the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This Light directs him through the darkness of sense-experience and becomes more intense and potent for the wisdom that incarnate existence imparts to man increasingly conscious of his spiritual Self.

  Contemporary man opens his eyes in the dawn of his physical being. He crawls toward self-control and gradually wills himself upright and walks out of the morning of his innocence and nescience. He wakes from the dream of Spirit lands and leaves the infancy of Eden. He mounts into the brave and bare high noon of fallen sense consciousness, where hard light can press down on one with a weight that is thick and almost palpable. He heads west in the direction of the setting Sun, the Sun’s second home: the life after death (as versus the life before birth).

  The post-Golgotha seeker acknowledges the supreme value of incarnate existence. Indeed, Christ in Jesus has glorified it; not for itself but for what it makes possible to the Spirit in man, the God growing in man. When, in the ripeness of time, the Sun has set on man’s earthly journey, he assimilates the essence of his life as living Light that will illumine the darkness of his soul. Historically, in the course of man’s spiritual career, there is (or was) a point of no return, a point beyond which it was impossible to deny the physical body, to pull up out of it and backward, as it were, into the realms of spirit, ignoring the wisdom of millenia of incarnate existence and the reason for and inestimable value of physical experience. This point was reached roughly two thousand years ago.

  With the exception of anachronistic involuntary clairvoyance, man had lost direct contact with spiritual realities. The agencies of pre-Christian initiation and mystery ritual had become ineffectual, obsolete, merely ceremonial. Earlier, when those procedures were effectively employed, the physical body became as dead, for the etheric as well as the higher sheaths separated from and left the dense instrument. In the new initiation the body remains vital. Consciousness is empowered to penetrate into higher worlds and simultaneously to retain contact with the dense physical body since its form and function were redeemed and rejuvenated by Christ in Jesus.

  Christ walked as a man among men. He descended from out of the East. As an incarnating Ego descends through the worlds of thought, feeling and vitality, gathering from each the material for its forthcoming bodies, so the solar Christ descended through the Earth’s four sheaths. First, he entered the planet’s mental sphere where he was dimly cognized by ancient Hindus as Vishna Karman. He gravitated toward the desire plane and was identified as the Lord of Light by Zoroastrian priests, the Magi, to whom He was known as Ahura Mazdao. Yet later the Earth-directed Christ was perceived by the Egyptians (and called Osiris) and Chaldeans as he entered the sphere of the Moon, which is the etheric. The early Hebrew culture experienced Christ as the lunar deity Jehovah, known to Moses as the I Am—-contiguous to Earth and man but not yet indwelling. When the Christ Being came near to touching the physical earth the Greeks and Hebrews had premonitions, indeed visions, of a glorified human, a god-man. Finally, in Palestine, Christ was incarnate in Jesus. The I Am became clothed in flesh.

  With the resurrection of Christ from the body of Jesus, man received the spiritual impetus to go forward in waking, walking consciousness to the God of his origins. But he takes with him what God has evolved in him through Christ. He does not return to a former condition of precarnate blissful ignorance and untried innocence. He does not deny the world in which he finds himself; he embraces it. He comes full circle. Yet he himself is immeasurably above what he initially was. From the seemingly interminable battle with physical existence he returns as a victorious warrior. A grail knight returns a grail king. A seeker of Christ returns a bearer of Christ. He has conquered the enemy of Death. He has overcome the dreadful adversary of egoism. And he has rendered powerless the once paralyzing forces of spiritual materialism. The Son went forth a Pure Fool. He returns a wise and virtuous heir to his Father’s spiritual Kingdom.

  Pre-Christian religions-—particularly Hinduism and Buddhism-—intimate that man’s condition of ultimate liberation restores him to his original pre-carnate condition. Out of Nirvana he descends; to it he ascends. Eons of illusion or maya intervene. No more is this, in fact, true than that the Eden of man’s spiritual infancy is one with the spiritual fruition man shall attain in New Jerusalem. The progress is from an etheric garden (called Eden), a spiritual kindergarten, to an etheric city (called New Jerusalem) where love-wisdom bonds all humanity in a spiritual community or cosmopolis. Between these two poles of spiritual becoming lies a tomb in Palestine. Man accepts and affirms his fallenness—-his status in the physical world. He lives through it. Knows it. Uses it. Dies to it. By it he develops and works toward perfecting his Ego- or I-consciousness, thereby individualizing God.

  Ironically, the altars of many conventional Christian churches face east. Yet the tabernacle in the wilderness (minutely described in the Old Testament) was prophetically aligned on an axis whose entrance was at the east and whose innermost sanctuary was furthest west. The directional emphasis in this figure is on mankind’s mentalization and spiritualization through incarnational development, through work and service in the material world.

  The spritual evolution of humanity is characterized by Teilhard de Chardin as noogenesis, an increasing cerebralization of consciousness. The coccyx and sacrum are in the eastern access of the human body temple, the ground and seat of its spiritual thrust. The path defined by the spinal chain describes a raising of consciousness and comprehension by enlightened will, step by step, stone by stone, body by body, life after life, ultimately to a condition of transformed consciousness, the uninterrupted consciousness of life above the mutation of mortal forms.

  Through Christ humanity can and will complete the circle of creational being: evolving from creature to creator. Each human spirit is destined to consciously pierce through the veil of materiality and death and begin the ascent on the other side of physical being, walking the trail blazed by the Way Shower, the Light of the world. Through Christ man will reunite with his Heavenly Father and offer up his wisdom, his power, and his love-—his triune spirit dynamized and perfected. The spiritual gold of transmuted suffering, the rare essences of his earthly pilgrimage—-these are the precious acquisitions of his spirit. This, his own glorified being, is his gift to the Father.

  —George Weaver