I tend to think the Rosicrucian outlook is checked by just enough seeing, traveling, and internal verification that I'm pretty comfortable with it.
The idea is, as it is also in esoteric Buddhism, that we're evolving toward certain ends - we came up from mineral to vegetable, vegetable to animal, animal to human. That evolution includes reincarnation and times of reflection in heaven/devachan between, each time with increased intensity due to increases in consciousnesses, but even that is not a permanent cycle - rather it's an escalating one. Apparently there are vast vistas of consciousness and even things that could be likened to physical existence that we would tend to put in the 'afterlife' category just because we have no other terminology for them; our cycles of incarnations are like escalating sine waves with each cycle midpoint continuing at a higher point.
Some would suggest, particularly in Rudolph Steiner and Max Heindel's tradition, that we as present humanity are what the angel choir directly above us were when they were what we are now and we were in animal form - that about the time the next level of animals comes up to incarnate in human-level consciousness (a level that tends to take the title 'Lords of Form') we'll be a tenth angel choir - the name for that tenth angel choir seems seems to be, not just in Rosicrucian circles but in many organizations, referred to as the Ishim. These are also the saints who ascended out of physical incarnation as we know it, the saints beneath the throne in Revelations, they're the souls that have perfected their experience of being human and each time a person does that the psychological and spiritual temperature increases a bit and people are a bit more likely to be able to do the same who are in line behind them.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
12 Mar 2015, 1:52 am
