In the same way that the Mithraic Ladder consists of seven steps, so too can the life of a human being. From an alchemical perspective, the human life can be divided into seven distinct stages, each with its own metal and patron gods. These seven ages of man constitute a life ideally lived.
The first age, from zero to 12, is analogous to lead. At this level, base survival is the most important concern of all. Children aged between zero and 12 have to learn not to fall off cliffs, not to run out in front of traffic, not to provoke dangerous animals/people, not to eat poison or to stick a fork in an electrical socket.
This is the realm of Saturn. Being in the realm of Saturn, things are very serious. There is no room for levity when you’re trying to teach a child not to get hit by a bus. Historically speaking, most people died in the first 12 years of life, mostly from childhood diseases. Thus there is a connection between Saturn and the Grim Reaper.
From 12 to 24, the relevant alchemical metal is tin. This is the realm of Jupiter, where joy is the natural state. This second alchemical age is achieved by anyone who survives the age of Saturn, i.e. the age of basic physical survival. No longer being concerned with death or dying, teenagers become primarily concerned with overcoming boredom.
All play and all games occur under the auspices of Jupiter, whose jovial nature embodies the frequency of recreation. Tin is brighter than lead; this represents the overcoming of the saturnine seriousness of the first age and the transmutation of dullness into brightness.
The years 24 to 36 are spent under the auspices of Mars, the god of iron. These years are when a man masters fighting and martial prowess. The peak fighting ability of most men will be during this age. Usually a man learns how to fight as an individual at the beginning of the age of iron. By the end of the age of iron, he could lead a century of men into battle.
Iron can carry a sharper edge than any other metal, hence it represents the basic masculine action of dividing. For millennia, an iron sword was the very emblem of strength and virility. Successful transmutation of tin into iron means that a man learns how to impose order upon the material world. Being able to impose order, he is now a warrior.
Venus rules the years from 36 to 48. Here the relevant metal is copper, representing romance and lovemaking. Having proven himself on the battlefield, here the alchemist has to prove himself with the trophy of battle: a woman. Hence the peak sexual market value of a man who has lived well is between these two ages (the less well one lives, the earlier one peaks).
Copper is both softer and more colourful than iron. This represents the age when man realises there is more to life than battle. Here he must soften because he must engage with his children instead of foes on a battlefield. So he softens, becomes funnier and less serious. Transmutation of iron to copper is about the change from warrior to family man.
From the years 48 to 60 man labours under Athena, the goddess of civic participation. Having raised his children so that they have successfully survived the gauntlet of lead in the first alchemical age, a man moves beyond his family and moves into a position of social power. Silver is more brilliant than copper, representing man’s broadening of focus from family to society.
Plato wrote in Republic that a man is ready for a political life at age 50. By the fifth alchemical age a man should have exhibited enough mastery over his life so far that other people want to be like him. He is not yet capable of radiating divinity but, under the auspices of silver, he can reflect it (as does the Moon). As such he can play a role bringing people together.
Between 60 and 72 a man is in the realm of mercury. Mercury is also the name of the god of the sixth alchemical age. Silver is transmuted to mercury by a process of quickening, in other words, through the entry of the divine into the material world. This is a minor form of illumination compared to the seventh age, but it’s powerful enough to have major effects.
This is the age of greatest temporal power. At the completion of the age of mercury a man might be an emperor with control over all the known world. Compared to a man of silver, a man of mercury has more gravitas and inspires more awe. Some might even consider him a demigod.
From age 72 to age 84 – or until the end of life – a man is in the realm of gold. Here he ought to fashion himself after Apollo, who represents perfection and illumination. In this age a man ought to learn how to radiate divine truth. Learning to do this is the secret of transmuting mercury into gold.
Ideally, a man reaching this stage would retire from all material concerns and focus entirely on readying himself for death. Temporal power has little appeal to those in God’s waiting room. Those who can grow old and die with grace and dignity can be said to have apotheosised, as Socrates did. Dying with the highest possible frequency brings the best chance of taking one’s place among the gods after death.
The example given in this article is idealistic. The actual life of any given alchemist will not progress this smoothly. Aspects of all seven ages are present in every age, and so a person can work the frequency of any stage at any time.
My mother has a theory that this world is one gigantic prison, known as “The Pen”. This theory is based on the observation that most of the people walking the streets of the West look like the inmates of mental asylums. It’s apparent on first glance that there’s something seriously wrong with most people here – so what’s going on?
This essay will explain from an Elementalist perspective.
Many of us have found ourselves wondering how we got here. Of all the possible worlds that one might incarnate into, what did we do to deserve to incarnate into this one, full of violence, sickness, death and misery? It seems like a punishment to be born into a world where we inevitably die, and almost always in extreme pain.
The truth is that we’re all in The Cosmic Penitentiary, a.k.a. “The Pen”: a prison for criminal souls.
As above, so below: we got put in The Pen for the same reason that criminals in the human world get put in prison. In the human world, society decides that certain elements within it are injurious to the greater good, and so it expels them into quarantine zones that we call jails, prisons or penitentiaries. This is roughly analogous to how the human body expels excrement and urine.
In the cosmic world, elements that are injurious to the greater good are similarly expelled – into lower dimensions that serve as quarantine zones. In Elementalism, these dimensions are collectively known as the Hell Realms, as depicted in the theology of many different religions. This world is one of them.
If we do enough self-inquiry, and are fully honest with ourselves, we will agree that it’s perfectly fair that low-frequency fragments of consciousness are forced to incarnate among their own kind. Once this is accepted, it’s possible for true healing to begin; it’s possible to direct one’s life in such a manner that low frequencies are transmuted into higher ones.
A penitentiary is somewhere a person is sent to if they are too arrogant and need to learn some humility. Each of us have been forced to incarnate into The Pen on account of that our selfish behaviour in previous lives has disgusted God. The punishment for this is to die – that is to say, to experience the utter helplessness of dying and death, with a view to being inspired by this into spiritual reformation.
The beings in the higher dimensions, who we share the Great Fractal with, did not want to have low-frequency consciousnesses stinking up their otherwise pleasurable experience. This is entirely understandable. Public restaurants don’t allow people who haven’t showered for months to stink up the ambience, so why would beings in higher dimensions allow the spiritual equivalent?
We are forced to incarnate among our own kind, whether we like it or not.
In the same way that trashy people attract trashy people in this world, and in the same way that classy people attract classy people, trashy fragments of consciousness attract trashy areas of the Great Fractal, and classy fragments of consciousness attract classy areas of the Great Fractal. As per the Law of Assortative Reincarnation, every fragment of consciousness reincarnates in a world full of similar frequencies.
All of us have a relatively low frequency of consciousness as a result of crimes committed in previous lives. Some of us were murderers, others were rapists, robbers, liars, fraudsters. All of us were odious enough that the majority part of the Great Fractal does not want to be associated with us. But because of our pride we are unrepentant. As such, we have to be punished.
To punish a criminal consciousness, it isn’t enough to subject it to suffering. So the Hell Realms are not full of demons who were created specifically to torment their victims. It’s much simpler than that. The Hell Realms are populated by beings who create Hell around them through their own selfishness. And as such, they punish each other.
A being sentenced to The Pen, therefore, has behaved in such a selfish manner that the rest of reality has forced them to incarnate here, where they are surrounded by other selfish beings, and thereby learn that selfishness is antithetical to Godliness. This they learn from the suffering caused to them by the other beings, all a reflection of themselves.
Proof that this world is one of the Hell Realms comes from the fact that everything here must die, and that we must kill each other to live. Such a grisly reality makes clear to even the most incalcitrant fragment of consciousness that selfishness is against the Will of God. And if it doesn’t? You just reincarnate here again until you do figure it out.
A world in which one must die is a perfect ego shredder. Just as people are humbled within this lifetime by being put in prison, people are humbled between lifetimes by being put in The Pen.
Choosing wisely and unwisely, along with the consequences that follow, constitutes the greater part of our human lives. We will all make many wrong choices in our time. Don’t be tempted to withhold from making the wrong choice because you think you need to be good, or in order to be worthy or righteous. This is a subtle misunderstanding.
The only way for wisdom to really bear fruit in this life is to move and act from a space of understanding. The goal here, as with all things in this life-long project of self-inquiry, is understanding.
Understanding requires that you meet what is trying to move out of your inner state into an expression in the world. We begin with mind in all things, and then it moves outward into an expression.
This can be either wise or unwise, skilful or unskilful. This is what eventually affords us with wisdom or what the Buddha referred to as ‘Right View’. Right View is not a claim there is an objectively correct solution for everything, rather it indicates a correct way of looking things. It speaks to our orientation. Are we wanting to be right, or are we wanting to understand? Are we wanting justification in all we do, or do we want to see deeply into the way things really work?
In some ways we are better off making mistakes again and again if we don’t understand yet – but at least choose with your eyes open. Then you will learn something. When understanding arises for you, it will have substance and lasting value. You will then have the capacity to be grateful for the mistakes you have made and see how graciously you have been humbled and corrected.
A lot of people find this mysterious, but it really needn’t be. If you know what to look for, it won’t be mysterious. The small windows with which you see into unconscious patterns of behaviour, when used regularly and with ongoing commitment, eventually allow you to see more. The windows gradually become wider, allowing for a broader view of things within.
Many things are so small that we are content to simply let them fly, whether it is making a comment, using a certain tone, allowing something to privately irritate us, or withholding affection or appreciation from someone as punishment. This is because we don’t tend to be aware of the total impact of our small errors.
If you want to get grit out of your shoe so that you can stand and walk comfortably, you don’t just want the biggest pieces out, nor do you only want most of the small bits out – you want all of it out. The smaller pieces will bother you even more when there is less grit in there.
It is the same principle with your inner environment.
If you want peace, you need to look at every tiny factor that contributes towards an outward movement from misunderstanding. Grit in your shoe is grit in your shoe – one subtle interruption to peace of mind is an interruption to all of your peace of mind, not just a part of it. The False Self can be deluded into thinking that it wants certain particularly troublesome pieces of grit out so that it can focus on keeping the others, but that is the power of delusion for you.
Some suffering actually works for ego as a convenience, other suffering not so much. If you want to get rid of your suffering but keep your unreasonable expectations, or your long-standing arguments, your progress in self-discovery will be impeded. You can only go so far when you place artificial limitations on your process of inquiry.
A lot of writers on this subject tend to hesitate from giving specific examples. I’m not sure why this is the case. I think it may be because when we are given specific examples, it is seen as a little like being spoon-fed, and the idea is that it may reduce our capacity to independently assess for ourselves whether an act expressed is unconscious or in harmony or with the truth of who we truly are.
It makes sense to me that we can’t just be given beliefs or moral principles to fall into alignment with, because this would disregard the role of understanding. I feel that in some cases, being given specific examples does serve to shine some light on the kinds of things we are looking for in this type of exercise. Perhaps not all the time, because we do need to learn a measure of independence in this arena. We should be able to look for ourselves with fresh eyes and discover what is pertinent to us, not because someone who thinks they know better has told us that this behaviour is wise – this won’t help much.
The Buddha is reputed to have once said:
“…just as a goldsmith would test his gold by burning, cutting, and rubbing it, so you must examine my words and accept them, but not merely out of reverence for me.”
The Buddha was first and foremost a human, and he was being totally upfront with us about our shared human interest in discovering for ourselves the value of what is said, not the projected image of whoever appears to be saying it.
You don’t need someone you think is enlightened telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, that would be old hat. Do you really want to give the power of your mind away so easily? What if it is the only realm of jurisdiction that you really have? What would you do with the knowledge of an enlightened being if you didn’t totally understand it? Would you keep it in your head, like a treasure kept in a box?
Again, understanding is paramount – you need to know what it is, how it works, how to use it – otherwise it is no good. If I write a sentence, I anticipate that it will be tested by a discriminating reader, not swallowed hook, line and sinker. If you test what is said, you are practicing what the Buddha taught; you are practicing wisdom. If you do not test what is said, but you take hold of it anyway, you are practicing idolatry or false religion – even if what is said is true.
This is what a baby does. A baby will suck anything that is put into its mouth. If we want to be adults in this world, if we want a life that reflects our maturity, we can’t afford to just take anything in without knowing what it is. Abandoning all discrimination is not the same thing as faith.
I will give some examples of typical unconscious patterns, not to tell you what is wrong and what is right, but to help open your eyes to areas of your life which you may need to examine in order to foster skilful living. There will be many areas close by that require similar attention. As always, the responsibility for a thorough investigation lies with you.
Maybe no-one has told you this before, but I have total confidence in your capacity to examine your inner world in a balanced, healthy and truth-conducive way.
It is not a chore; it is one of the most beautiful things humanly possible. The results remain to be seen. I do not withhold an attempt describe the results in order to be mysterious, but to respect the freshness of your own experience. Suffice it to say, those who have gone before you in this venture have discovered that all we have to lose in self-inquiry is that which is not real to begin with. Then you can marvel at what remains.
I will now share some brief examples followed by a specific thought form that might accompany them, and afterward, a general explanation of how these contribute to our suffering. Some of these may be things you have noticed before either in yourself, or perhaps in others. We are all particularly adept when it comes to noticing symptoms of falsehood and delusion in other people.
When you deliberately leave certain books out to imply to others how complex or intelligent you are. “I’m great. I know so much – people love me”.
When you want to demonstrate to strangers that you are capable of walking or driving away from the traffic lights with a high reaction time. “I am faster than you. See?”.
When you walk, speak or move a certain way hoping that others will make the connection that there is something very special or distinguished about you. “I am a dark horse – I am very sophisticated”.
When you feel a sense of desperation when you want to win an argument, defend yourself, or make a point to others. “I just have to be right and express my opinion”.
I have given just a few examples, because we really could fill a book with them. I know some of them seem juvenile, but we do carry a lot of misunderstandings all the way from childhood through to adulthood in only superficially modified form – it is all a way of begging for love, worth and attention.
We don’t need many examples for the spirit of these movements to be identified. You can sense the place within you that they emerge from. More generally people just call this suffering, but in Buddhism, this is referred to specifically as ignorance. It is a gut-level sense of being a separate being, a fragment of the universe that defines itself as so small that it must be promoted and defended in order to ensure its foothold in existence. It is ignorance in the respect that the attitude is in ignorance of your true nature.
Our true nature rests in unity, and doesn’t need to be promoted or defended. Interpersonal advertisements are not a tool of the true self, which has no need to show strength, skill or virtue. Being itself establishes worth, and understanding will reveal this.
Every little thrill that you get when you entertain any one of these deluded thought forms is strengthening and supporting that separate sense of self. When a spider builds a web, it has to maintain the structure constantly, making repairs and adjustments in tension here and there, otherwise the whole thing will decay and fall apart. The false self is doing the same thing.
Every minuscule portion of energy you send its way will keep the whole operation running – and an ego can subsist on very little energy for a very long time.
Have you noticed what happens for example when you really make an effort to look attractive, and you haven’t received a compliment about your looks for a long time? If that sort of thing is really important to us, we might start to remember a time where a compliment did make us feel wonderful, if however very briefly, and relive it all over again. Or, we might fantasise about a fictitious scenario.
This helps an ego in starvation mode so that the sense of a separate self is held more firmly in place. What would otherwise happen is the pain of withdrawal might become so great that the deficiency of the personality structure is itself called into question. This variety of ‘rock-bottom’ event could provide the critical mass needed to awaken out of the mind’s dream-state, so the False Self tends not to let that happen.
I say this in some regard to appease the honest part of your curious mind, but please respect that none of this is to be believed. It is to be explored and investigated by you.
These brief examples I have given you may seem paltry and trivial, but like the grit in your shoe, every tiny bit contributes and something small can ultimately result in a great deal of suffering.
None of this is of any use if we don’t arrive at some measure of true insight, allowing for the relief of suffering. I wouldn’t mention these small things otherwise. What I most want you to see about them is the way in which they promote a certain aspect of you while simultaneously denying another. You should also see how each of these brings two things with it – thrill and suffering, inseparable like two sides of a coin.
Do you get a sense with each of these examples how the tiny revenue of excitement that is a reward in each one of them contributes to keeping you locked into a worldview in which there is a separate ‘you’ there, stretched between duality of values, worthy or unworthy, good or bad, strong or weak? See whether you can get a palpable sense of what it feels like to be rewarded chemically and psychologically with each of these, because this is the thrill of the ego, the False Self.
The tiny thrill is a poison that is making you sick, because you have misunderstood through a culture of learned ignorance. You thought that the only way to feel anything was to be addicted to thrill, and then confuse that with happiness. You actually got it totally backward – thrill is suffering, and real joy comes through peace which is the absence of suffering.
We all got it completely backwards.
It is all the small links in the chain that bind the addiction to personal identity. Each one is worth examining, because you might just find the chain falls away altogether with a little persistence. Successfully understand one dysfunctional energetic form deeply within your mind and heart, and you will be well on the road to understanding them all and discovering a peace without boundaries.
We were all caught in the same honey-trap. This may be embarrassing for a time, but that too is a natural phase. See what it feels like to give yourself some peace and let that embarrassment and shame go – we don’t need to make another victim identity out of it.
When we use a sense, or a muscle, we know what happens. Our abilities become clearer, stronger. Our task in inquiry is just the same way. We develop an acute awareness of when energetic movements within our minds or hearts are coming from a place of separation, wanting to isolate ourselves as an identity – the special one, the rebel, the hero, the holy man or the victim – and we sense keenly when movements originate from a sense of unity.
The latter are harder to spot, especially at first, because they are spontaneous, and lack of premeditation that the movements of separateness thrive on. This is why the unity that moves through you is sometimes referred to in Buddhism as sunyata or emptiness.
It isn’t that there is literally nothing there, it is that unlike separation, it doesn’t depend on structured form and content to maintain its abiding existence. This is why it never feels compelled to promote or defend itself, and why it feels peaceful and secure without clinging to anything even though change is happening all around it.
Sadly, many people in this life will never come to know the value of this because of just how deeply we have been collectively enthralled by the addictive conditioned states that the modern world excels at producing. The truth is, you can’t serve two masters, and you can’t bend two bows.
I have confidence that what is true in us wants so profoundly to express itself through us, particularly at this time when our established human ways are consistently failing us, that those of us who are called to the responsibility of self-inquiry will meet this task head on, and likely with rapid success. Not only is this peace waiting for us in our own lives, but it is waiting to be shared with every entity in all times and places.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
You might have noticed that awareness is an integral component of who and what we truly are. Where we are, it is, and where it is, we are. The time usually arrives when the task at hand becomes to deepen our level of engagement with what is true. The reason is that if you’re undergoing an experience of awakening on the level of awareness and mind, you are only seeing part of the experiential component to awakening as a whole.
There’s something else asking to be attended to in waking up that is really indescribable, but in order to distinguish the process from concerns directly pertaining to awareness and the morass of mental constructs, I will refer to it as the heart. It isn’t really the physical heart, and it is not separate from any other aspect of awakening, but we are limited by language in this enterprise.
A person can undergo an enormous existential shift as a result of awakening at the level of what we call the mind, the ego or the reflexive self. It can have multiple effects that may take years to settle. During this time, you may not even begin to realise there was anything behind awareness in the subtle emotional body.
This is the heart, waiting patiently in line to wake up.
It contains and encompasses the entire energetic history of our choices, values, and relationships. This encounter can be confusing to those who have awakened from mind, especially since the ‘awareness’ aspect of you often has to spend so long coming to an even keel after seeing through all of its various beliefs and illusions.
Awakening from mind can be disillusioning, disarming, and liberating. Sooner or later, however, it does become plainly obvious that waking up only at the level of mind is not a full expression of who we truly are all the way in. I don’t mean to sound mysterious about it, but this is just something that arises in you, in some form or another.
This whole process is really all very straightforward and natural. It is just that we have invested so much of our life energy in surrounding ourselves with that which is not natural that it becomes confusing even trying to look toward the sun to find the light of day.
The ‘modern’ problem, seemingly going back at least as far as anyone can recall, is that nothing is clear anymore. Somewhere along the way, we humans have collectively lost our clarity of vision (that is, if we have ever had it). We don’t know who we are, we do not know the nature of our own deepest being. If that were true, conflict at any level would no longer be possible.
More than ever before, the focus of society is in feeding distraction, exacerbating differences and normalizing the role of conflict at every level.
Identification with anyone or anything is being aggressively encouraged globally. The consensus version of knowing who you are approximates to ‘I am resolutely fixed at these points of identification’, which is actually about as far removed from understanding our true nature as is humanly possible. This is the new benchmark of insanity, and its continuation is only possible if we delay remembering our true nature, at which point the conditioned insanity of identification is retired.
True to form, the Earth is faithfully showing us outwardly what our children are set to inherit, which is a polluted world, both in the sense of our environment and our encultured values. The modern world is a realm of rapid influx of refuse, mental and physical, and we have all contributed as consumers. To at least clear this debris from our inner world, we need to begin by acknowledging that which is true, beginning with an understanding of ourselves.
In the case of mind, this is a new world altogether to become accustomed to when you realise that you inhabit a living reality and not simply a screen of thoughts, beliefs and other projections.
The illusions of the heart are much more subtle energetic confusions than those of the mind, and ask of us an even deeper commitment to inquiry and examination than those of the mind. You can be brightly awake and grounded at the level of mind, and at the level of the emotional body, you can still very much experience the ongoing throes of confusion and separation.
For example, you may be well aware that who you are is not limited by your beliefs or thoughts, yet still experience wounding from spurious comments about you, or you still may experience emotional dysfunction with your close relationships, even if your feelings go unspoken.
Often, the initial entry into awakening leads us to be even less likely to address our own feelings. This doesn’t all settle automatically; it is for most of us a very gradual process of sifting through old energetic cycles and gently reminding ourselves to disengage. You can delay heart-centred awakening forever, and most people do.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
When you have experienced a lot of suffering, it can be relatively expansive and liberating to suddenly realise your freedom from mind, therefore it can be quite a welcome fit. In this regard, awakening can allow is to go for a very long time insulated by an imaginary wall from the neck up.
With the awakening of the heart, however, truth is asking us to return headlong into the heart of the emotional disturbance when this is what awakening from thought promised to relieve. When we awaken from the dream of separation at the level of mind, we are very tempted into living life in a withdrawn and detached kind of way.
Ironically, in some ways, awakening from mind can shift us even more into our head than we were before, just without all of our usual thought identifications. This is an easy way to get stuck, at least in the beginning. Once you have had a taste of freedom from separation, it looks at first as though you are separate from separation – a strange illusion, to be sure.
People caught in this phase will often come across as emotionally detached, dispassionate, and even quite routinely dismissive of others thoughts and feelings because the default attitude becomes ‘everything is just an illusion’. The opening stages of awakening make it look like this is it, the end of the line.
After some time, this new version of things begins to stagnate. This is because the realization is fundamentally incomplete. You don’t just have an awareness asking to be awakened, you really have an entire soul or psyche waiting to be attended to, including mental and emotional realms, and multidimensional energetic systems that aren’t referenced anywhere in modern maps of western psychological literature.
The soul is so complex that it is literally unknowable through external conditions. It can be experienced, but it cannot be contained or subjugated.
We have a collective tendency to occupy so little attention within the space of our own energetic environment. This is why emotional attachments and fixations return again and again, even in what appears to be ‘awakened individuals’. There is an entire inner galaxy of energy waiting to be met by this awakened awareness, and none of it is resolved until we allow that remembrance of our ground of being to settle down into our heart space, the most aggressively knotted and well-armoured of all energetic spaces.
You wouldn’t believe what is down there.
When you really get to know yourself in the quiet reflection of solitude, it can be as astonishing as watching the birth of a universe being renewed in each moment. The filters of our thoughts and expectations make these kinds of revelatory experiences uncommon except in often extreme cases. You really don’t need to die to become more intimately acquainted with the truth of who you are. It can happen in this life, in this moment. Look deeply for yourself and see that which was never born and that which never dies.
Remember, I’m not presuming to announce the truth here- this is all merely a manner of speaking intended to evoke a response in the form of a direct inner reflection on your part. This is all pointing at something important within all of us, and available at this moment.
The expectation here should be to start out very small.
Even broaching the question of whether you ever feel things that are difficult to name or pin down conceptually is a significant beginning. Your dedicated peeks into the unknown, like someone learning the skill of navigating in the dark, will eventually result in glimpses that become irreversible and life-altering. You will not be able to verbally share the depth of your experience with others, nor will you ever feel you need to.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
