Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine

Western Wisdom Bible Study

The Four Thousand Fed

   In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them.

   I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat:

   And if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way for divers of them came from far.

   And his disciples answered him, From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?

   And he asked them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven.

   And he commanded the people to sit down on the ground and he took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his disciples to set before them; and they did set them before the people.

   And they had a few small fishes and he blessed, and commanded to set them also before them.

--Mark 8:1-7

   The deep spiritual truths contained in the Bible are always to be found by considering its incidents and parables from a symbolical viewpoint. By keeping in mind that the message of the Holy Writ is above all else the Way of Attainment, one may gain a vision which enables him to see immediately through the husk of mere words to the precious kernel within.

   In the above passage Christ Jesus is speaking of the spiritually impoverished people of that time. They had so lived the sense life -- having neither sowed, tilled, nor garnered the fruits of spiritual endeavor -- that they truly had "nothing to eat." Through long Periods of Involution had they come, and many were at the point of retrogression, ready to "faint by the way."

   Christ Jesus had the message and the spiritual power to begin and accomplish the process of liberating humanity from its self-imposed famine, for such was His mission. His disciples, however, not fully comprehending the mighty power of the Ray of the Cosmic Christ Who had come to make the supreme sacrifice for His Father's wayward children, wondered how "bread" could be given to men in such a "wilderness." Their enlightenment was a part of their training.

   The "loaves" and "fishes" mentioned by Christ Jesus refer to the Pisces-Virgo Age being ushered in at that time. Max Heindel points out that "a new note ofaspiration was to be sounded, a new phase of human upliftment was to be entered upon during the Piscean Age then approaching. Self-indulgence was to be superseded by self denial. Bread, the staff of life, which is made from immaculately generated grain, does not feed the passions like flesh." The all-embracing unity symbolized by the sign Pisces includes the quality of self-renunciation, which was also to be one of the ideals of the New Dispensation.The realization of the unity of "each with all" was destined to bring about the eventual complete surrender of the separate "self" to His will.

   Bound up in this parable is also the mystery of "giving thanks," of "blessing,"or of multiplication. Gratitude and blessings embody the power of Love, the great force of cohesion and attraction. By giving thanks for or blessing something we bring to it more potency, and by properly using cosmic numbers in the process, as indicated by the seven loaves, we may even further augment its potency.

   Thus we are told in this parable that Christ Jesus brought to many spiritual sustenance, which nurtured the famished soul and stirred the Ego to alonging for its heavenly Father and home.

--Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, June, 1975, page 261

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