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Home, Hearth, and Sanctuary

by Jill Rosemary

Imagine entering into an "inner place of dwelling?" What would it look like?

Imagine sitting in an "interior castle of creative renewal?" What would it feel like?

Imagine being in an "inner sanctuary of living wisdom?" What would you ponder?

Entering, sitting, and pondering.
Inner place of dwelling.
Interior castle of creative renewal.
Inner sanctuary of living wisdom.

The breadth and depth of the interiors, of nature, ourselves, and our lives offer us living inner
environments out of which to live, breathe, and grow.

The inner life for many suggests practices of prayer, services of goodness and understanding along the path of life. Indeed, the inner life is all of these things. Yet there is more and many ways to perceive it when we enter, sit, and ponder.

As you approach your own home and walk up the steps onto the porch, you meet the threshold of the house where the door hangs...a door attached yet hanging in space able to open into another space, other realms. Upon crossing the threshold of the house, walking through the doorway, past the door, you enter into the home--the interior place of dwelling. It is on the threshold, through this doorway, entering into this interior environment that great mysteries of life live, often unseen and unnoticed.

For inside the house is a home of inner beauty. It is a place opened up in the recognition of the presence of that which is living. Outwardly it is possible to think and act through need--needing a place to live. It is possible to desire a particular house and look and purchase it with money. It is possible to never find a house and enter into homelessness.

It is also possible to see the home as a sacred place to be entered into. It can be seen as a cloak or garment created to surround the substances of life. Our bodies are homes for our souls and spirits. They're homes for our organs and blood and breath.

Our physical homes offer us inner places to dwell with the mysteries and sources of life eternal. And in that inner environment, there is inner beauty coined in the dictionary as "a qualification of a high order for delighting the esthetic, the thoughtful or the moral sense."

A loveliness of fragrance and space.
A soft breath of order and movement.
A graceful artistry waiting to be discovered.

For if one dwells within this home of beauty, this environment of the living, it is also home for the imagination. One of our sources of life.

Imagination is the story inside. It is a story waiting to be discovered and told. It is a quickening substance which forms itself into life itself, not only perceived and spoken, but lived out of.

Beauty dwells in unseen places
Like a breeze within the quivering leaves.
She smiles from delicate, rounded buds
of rose and purple spiraling lupines
Shimmering in the dark night sky
in her royal garment of wisdom.

Deep within her place of dwelling
Lies a rich and swelling wellspring
Where virgin lilies transform
And blossoming roses unfold
With overflowing fragrances filling the soul.

Opening the door of the quiet interior
Peace prevails and beckons gently
Every room reveals the substance, hidden deep within the soul
Living homes create a vessel
Where beauty radiates for the I to behold.

Once we begin living from the inside out, we have the ability to focus our eyes and see differently. Inside the home of inner dwelling, of inner beauty, there is another environment to discover...an environment possibly hidden by the weeds and briars of our struggles, yet possible to reach.

This place is called "the interior castle of creative renewal." As we enter the door of the home and continue walking and living more deeply into the environments of life, we can also enter into a vast interior which pulses with inspiration. It is the setting for imagination to come to life. It is the environment filled with the artistry of words, of colour, of movement, of the essence of art itself.

It is a hearth of relationships. It is the heart of the home and the inspiration for life. It is the home of creating. It is the place of birthing and welcoming. It is the environment of creation renewing itself. The hearth opens and fuels the place of warmth and belonging. It creates the place to live together. It allows the art of accompaniment to unfold as a way of life.

An interior castle of creative renewal offers a wellspring of energy, a manor of speaking, a garden of conversation, and a mansion for friends and family to discover each other out of a living spiritual heritage connected to the mysteries of eternal life itself. A substance that circulates through our bodies, our souls and our spirits.

As the home of imagination opens into the hearth of inspiration, we can also go deeper until we discover a place, so vast, so full, yet so quiet, it beckons us to simply be, to be with, to be within, to become, to listen, to empty, to fill and to open.

It is the "inner sanctuary of living wisdom." Whether we find our way there by a certain religious or spiritual practice or by the path of quiet and the question, it is there deep inside our selves--the inner sanctuary of living wisdom--the place of intuition.

When one discovers the inner sanctuary of quiet and of fullness through prayer or meditation, that is one aspect of the sanctuary. Another is sanctuary as conscious daily environment within the home, within our hearts and souls, and within our hearths of relationships.

Our inner place of dwelling opens our homes of inner beauty.
Our interior castle of creative renewal offers us the new arts of the hearth and the warmth of connectedness. Our inner sanctuaries of living wisdom leads onward.

For within this sanctuary lies the intuition--the immediate perception of truths independent of reasoning--the intuition of love. It is a rocker next to a baby's basket that holds a mother or a father who quietly perceives how to begin to love the child. It is the presence of one another to each other and how we not only perceive the space, but what arises out of us as interest and willingness to be in each other's continued company. It is the mystery of living out of the passion and heart of life to discover companionship which leads to the virtue and inner capacity of com-passion. It is the art of true accompaniment blossoming into a ripened fruit of warmth and experience through the seasons of the soul and spirit.

The inner sanctuary of living wisdom, therefore, unfolds into the sanctuary of a love so divine that it becomes conscious. And in that consciousness and presence of love, there is peace, genuine peace arising out of genuine interest.

Imagine entering into an inner place of dwelling. What would it look like?
Imagine sitting in an interior castle of creative renewal? What would it feel like?
Imagine being in an inner sanctuary of living wisdom? What would you ponder?

Homes of inner beauty, hearths of healthy relationships, and sanctuaries of conscious love and living peace offer us today a new way of living from the inside out in daily life itself.

The question of humanity is no longer: What is the meaning of life? but instead: What is life? How do we enter into it, keep it alive, and grow out of it?

It is a time of environments. It is a time to enter inside to sit and ponder, not for one's own development alone, but more importantly to allow beauty, genuine interest, and truth to awaken in our hearts and soul so that as we enter more deeply environment after environment, we can begin to acquire the capacities to know how to keep it alive, thriving and well. It is our spiritual birthright to actively awaken our higher sensibilities of imagination, inspiration and intuition, not as crowns of glory, but as active arms embracing one another and life in the presence of the grace of love.

The Templars as a revelation of esotheric Christianity - a Revelation of the Grail

by Nicolaas de Jong.

In the 12th Century many things started to move in the spiritual and political field in Europe. The Catholic church had shown many decayed processes, like paying on forehand for ones sins, the richness in which higher priests surrounded themselves (as being often from a high noble background), and the growing power of the civilians in the cities, which showed clearly the disbalance in possession of noblemen, clergy at the one side and peasants at the other, with the growing power of the citizens in the background. Spiritually the malcontent showed itself in a strong growth of groups of cathars, of which the Albigenzes in France were the strongest. Many church authorities turned against these people, and they were called develish and pagan, and ultimately were even extinguished (the Albigenzes at Mount Segur in the Pyrenees).
Other reactions to this malcontent were less violent, like the Franciscan monk order, which went back to the roots of christianity in returning to devotion and poverty. And the Templar knights, which were a monk order that turned themselves outward, to the world, as being knights that put their swords in service of Christ. The latter had developed an initiation path that was directly connected to the current of Grail chistianity, being started in Europe in Avalon, but prepared already a long time before.
In this article will be pointed at the esoterical side of this current, as well as at the individualities that initiated it.

Around 3000 years before Christ, Abraham, the father of both Jews and Arabs, conquerred the Fillistines in Palestina and after his victory, he entered the region where later on there should come the city of Jerusalem. From the caves of mount Moria (one of the two mountains on which Jerusalem is built nowadays) the priest Melchizedek came to him, offering him on a plate a chalice with in it wine, and besides it a piece of bread. This ritual act was the forebode of what Christ did 3000 years later at the Holy Supper, telling his disciples that the wine was His blood, and the bread His body (for through His death and resurrection He became the Lord over the Earth ever since). Now if you look thoroughly to those three things, you can understand that these are closely connected to the three higher spiritual capacities man can develop when he individualises himself. A chalice has the form that our soul may become when we open it up for the spirit, in such a way that the angels may form images in this chalice. We call this clairvoyancy or imagination. The wine as being Christs blood one can see as the faculty of inspiration, which means that through the feelings, which are awoken in the heart (where the blood is being centered and sent into the body), we can learn to guide processes by each time balancing from the feelings. And the bread is the summary of the physical body, for in it come to a blossoming the highest fruits of the Earth. It is the high spiritual capacity that we can develop when we develop our ideals and thus transform ourselves and our surroundings. This capacity is called intuition, which we may have from other beings as well, for example when we see all of a sudden clearly the possibillity for development of another person. So through this ritual Melchizedek made a kind of promise to Abraham.
In the 3rd century A.D. this Melchezedek returned as Mani, an initiate that developed a kind of religion, called manicheism, that was based upon the old Persian teachings of the forces of light and darkness, once initiated by Zarathustra there. It made it possible for the people of his time to understand the coming and deeds of Christ, as being the God of the light that came to conquer the one of the darkness. Mani was the returned Melchizedek, and at the time of Christ he was John the Baptist, which was resurrected by Christ in the youngster of Nain. His religion spread over eastern Europe, the Middle East until India, and many early church fathers took up his ideas. Mani has build his ideas upon the books of Scythianos, the Germanic initiate: this was the returned Abraham. At the time of Christ it had been the apostle Thomas. Well, Mani gathered four spiritual leaders around him, being besides himself Zarathustra or also called Master Jesus (for it was Jesus of Nazareth, who had carried the spirit of Christ since he was 30 years old), a person in whom was incorporated Gautama Buddha (for Gautama, as having become already a Buddha about 500 B.C., did no more incarnate), and this Scythianos or Abraham. Together they decided to bring the Grail to Western Europe, as they knew that development should continue there, after the Roman empire would fall, and they made up a plan to bring that forth. For when Christ had come to Earth, the main thing He did was bringing the individual ego for each man (who was before more living in herds, tribes), so that each individual can go an own development ever since (remember that Christ already showed Himself to Abraham in the burning bush of ´morango´, saying “I am the I AM”). Many happenings in Europe can be seen from that light.
First of all this Scythianos incarnated to awaken the higher Ego of the Germanic people. This we know from the legend of Sygfrid, who woke up the Walkure goddess Brunhilde. For her he had to conquer a kingdom of his own, but after he got involved in the family story of the Burgundoni, called the Nibelungen, he got killed. A part of this story is that he conquerred the dragon and took its gold. Not known, but quite important, is that this fight took place in Middle America, where it is known as the victory of Quetzlcoatl over Taotl, as the latter asked to be honoured by cutting out hearts of people. So the Rhine gold, which Sygfrid/Quetzlcoatl won, comes from America.
In England there had been for a long time a mystery place called Avalon, an island in the mists. It is said that mother Mary together with Joseph of Arimathea went there and took along the chalice which had been used at the Holy Supper and later on in which the blood of the died Christ on the cross had been taken in. I don´t believe this to be a true historical story. According to me it was more in this way that the Celts in Ireland and Scotland (where Avalon lies in between) kept the only mystery places in which the death and resurrection of Christ had been observed. Later on there came more and more contact with the West Gothic tribe that by then lived in Aquitania (soutwest France), that became acquiantant with the knowledge of the Grail, being represented by the chalice and its wine and bread, as they went through this Celtic initiation. In this Germanic tribe was a family line called ´Anschaue´ (meaning clairvoyant), in which a boy called Parcival incarnated. Parcival was an incarnation of Mani. In that time (around 840) there was a Celtic English king, called king Arthur, that had a circle of knights around him. They were the flower of Celtic christianity that had come forth of the mysteries of the Grail in Avalon. Parcival went to king Arthur, and took upon himself the task to find the Holy Grail in order to rescue that Avalon Grail knowledge, which was about to fade because of the changing consciousness and entering of more and more Germanic tribes in England. After making many efforts and mistakes, Parcival arrived at the Grail Castle (the inner third eye, where lies the consciousness of imagination, clairvoyancy), and became the Grail king by helping the sick Grail king that he met. In the circle around king Arthur, called the knights of the Round Table (as they all had equal rights) lived a knight called Gawain, who later on conquerred the black magician knight Klingsor, that kept emprisoned in the mind many noblemen in Europe. By this victory they were freed from their ban of Klingsor, and could see the Grail again. This Gawain was an incarnation of Scythianos.
Later on, about 700 AD, this Gawain came back as the after after grandson of Parcival, known as Lohengrin, and had to revelate the Grail knowledge in Europe. But besides this, he had to prepare the Germanic people in western Europe for inner development, for until then they had lived on the countryside, were very much bound to nature and the cosmos, but had not developed an inner life. So he and his fellow knights drove out and funded cities, in which the inhabitants could develop inner lifes, but to prevent that these became too egocentrical, he made them develop trade, and thus the hansa cities in northern and western Europe were being funded (hansa means swan, an image for the ego of man). Besides he should have children but not tell his noble background, so that the noble name and therewith nobility should extinguish, as heredity goes via the mother. This latter however failed.
When this all was thus prepared, Grail christianity could show itself more to the outern world. This started in France, where in the beginning of the 12th century there was a group of young revolting knights under the guidance of Hugo of Payens that gathered and went to the Holy Land to see what was left of the old knowledge of the Temple of Salomon (in which was said that the 12 world mysteries were hidden). Hugo had been a participant of the 1st Crusade under the guidance of Godfried of Bouillon, so he knew Jerusalem, for it had been conquerred then). They went there with six, found those mysteries, brought them to Europe, and initiated in 1119 the order of the Templar knights. When returning they were granted by the abt of Clairvaux, called Bernhard, a highly estimated person of that time (an incarnation of Mother Mary), so their order was accepted by the catholic church. As has been poined out, Hugo of Payens had been the apostle Thomas, and hence the symbol of the Templar knights became the cross of Thomas.
Now the Templars had as main aim to put their swords in service of Christ in order to restore the Kingdom of Heaven upon the earth (which, as seen backwards, was quite early in development). It was a mystery current of the will: by doing so, they were able to see Christ and the Kingdom of Heavens with glimpses at certain stages of initiation. This was mainly arrived by wordhipping Mother Mary, as she was experienced as the contact to the Holy Spirit and was the keeper of the doorway to heaven (in this way Mary had shown herself at the first ´Pentecote´). Anyway the Templar order succeeded in keeping peace and order for about 200 years in Europe. They had an extended economy during that time, because many people joined. Not only knights, but there were many craftsmen and households with many women involved in the order. A Templar knight had to give all his posessions to the order, which ment as well all the servants and their families around him (if they wanted this). In return he begot a paper that gave him and his men access to all the posessions of the order, wherever he came. The road to the holy land was kept safe, and they could travel freely there, without posessions with them, as to prevent robbery. These papers gave rise to something new, namely a banking system, where the order was the bank. There was the backing up of the previous posession of the knight (later banks first used valuable goods like gold against this bankpaper, but nowadays this is left behind). So the order grew rich by the time, and gathered a lot of posessions and gold. The 12 secrets of the Temple in Jerusalem were being laboured and out of these grew the building impulse of the gothic cathedrals, which had as na aim to make concrete the resurrected body of Christ and the path to the heavenly kingdom in stone. Quite recently there have been found gold coins from the 12th century, both in the ports of La Rochelle (France) and Buenos Aires (Brasil) with the image of an American indian on it. This shows clearly that the Templars knew about the Americas. A secret department within the Templar order sailed out to America and dug there for silver, through which the construction of the cathedrals could be paid more easily (1). The organisation of the order was in districts, ruled by a master, and the overall rule was by a greatmaster, the first one being Hugo of Payens. Becoming a knight or master had to do with certain initiation degrees. Several side movements grew out of this, like the freemacons in England (12th century, first these were macons), who after the Temple secrets developed little by little their own initiation path. Besides this they were involved in alchemy, the art of dealing with life processes (al chim is Arab for black earth, this is what you see when you stand upstreams the river Nile in Egypt and look down on its banks – the only places where in Egypt there could grow something).
Not so known is that the troubadours, which had a school in the Provence (southern France), was a part of the Templar impulse. These people got quite an extended education and initiation: they could sing and play an instrument, but as well they could act, mostoften as the clown of a court, in which role they could well influence political decisions. Mostoften they were the secret advisor of a duke or king. Besides that they could influence with their music the elemental world ( a remnant of the mysteries of Avalon), and they in a way continued the mysteries of Marduk (in christian esoterics called the Archangel Michael), where the soul of the people was very much raised, so that they could take up the impulse of love. Known of them is mostly this part, for they wrote many love songs. (2)
One other thing, not so known either, is that in his next life Hugo of Payens returned as Richard I, king of England. This king saw that the order had lost Jerusalem and the holy land, main seat of it. So he looked for companions and started the 2nd crusade in order to get it back. When he crossed the Iberian peninsula, he was asked to help the Portuguese in their fight against the Mores, and so he helped to set free Lisbon, which was a step in the independance of Portugal. While he was cloesely connected to the Templar knights and fought together with them (he could not enter the order, for then he had to give up his country, besides he had already gained the highest order of greatmaster in his predecessive life), there was created a bond with the Portuguese state and these knights, which has remained ever since. Richard conquerred Malta and gave it to the order. He did not succeed to conquer Jerusalem, even though he had reconquerred great parts of the holy land, and had to sign a peace treatise in the end with Salladin, the Arab king at that time, that the Templars were allowed to enter the city freely. Saladdin had tried to make friendship with him, had already become a christian before, but Richard distrusted him, and went back to Europe (where he was caught by the Austrians and emprisoned for a long time). Saladdin died shortly after this, he just faded away because they had failed to make peace. This could have restored christianity in the Middle East, but it did not, so many wars followed. The karmic story behind this was that Richard had been Abraham 3000 years B.C., and at that time Saladdin had been Ismael, the first son of Abraham and father of the Arab people, that had been sent away by his father.
Anyway, Jerusalem was lost for the Templar order ever since. This however did not disturb their existence and expansion. With this not only good people joined it, and with the growth of the posessions, it as well attracted people being fond of it. So with the French king Phillip the Beautiful, who wanted their gold but did not give up his posessions and become a member of them. He installed a shadow pope at Avignon, Clemens V, and had him make a trial against the Templars, with the charge of betraying Christ. As a matter of fact, one of the initiation acts of the Templars was that they had to spit on a sculpture of Christ hanging on the cross. which had to be done while the cross was already empty and Christ resurrected. But from the outside this looked quite awkward, and hence this charge. The members were being foltered and pushed in the end to admit that they had betrayed Christ, and so in 1312, about 200 years after its start, the order was dismissed, and their goods given to the state (though not in France, unfortunately for Phillip).Only in Portugal the order could continue, because a new name for it was created, the Order of Christ, as its fate is closely connected to that of the Templars. Actually much later king Henry the Sailor did order to sail out in order to look for the Americas anew, because he knew it existed. The karmical background of Phillip of France is that he had been conquerred in previous lifes by Hugo of Payens, in the story of Quetzlquoatl and Taotl (Sygfrid and the dragon) and in Gawain against Klingsor. A later incornation of him is in Ignatius of Loyolla, the initiator of the Jesuit order.
After the fall of the Templar order, esotheric christianity in Europe threatened to lose its continuation, and soon after this Christian Rosenkreuz (an incarnation of the apostle John) tried to put up a new order in this line. But he met a lot of fear at the courts. Thus he decided to make a more secret organisation, the Fellowship of the Rosecruce, that worked in a more hidden way in Europe with the same methods as the Templars did. They only revealed themselves in a book in the 18th century, called ´The Secret Teachings of the Rosecrucian Fellowship´, when Delavoisier and others revealed their findings in chemistry, which in itself had no more to do with the living essence of nature. In the 19th century the consciousness of western man changed and with the coming of the Theosophist and Anthroposophist movements Grail christianity begot a more exotheric side which was apt to the spirit of that time. Rudolf Steiner, initiativetaker of Anthroposophy, gathered some important people around him, amongst whom previous Parcival/Mani and Hugo of Payens/Gawain, together with Godfried of St. Omar, the co-founder of the Templars, and by doing this he was able to start the new mysteries in 1923. This means that more spiritual directions in esoteric christianity can be developed ever since. (3)
Now in Portugal in Tomar the knowledge of the Templar knight background has been saved and worshipped. Typical here is the harvest feast, where the women carry high stocks of bread on their heads, an image of the body of Christ that is in their Grail chalice. This is still a continuation of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit, now in more exoteric shape. What will the Portuguese people develop out of this?

Notes:
1. In the 10th century the pope had forbidden to sail the Americas, as he knew the double over there grew quite strong. Before that time the existence of it was quite known.
2. There has been suggested that they belong to the cathar movement, but this current is denying mostly the love of life and pleasure for earthly things as they preferred to stop the flow of incarnations and return to the state of the Paradise, which makes it quite unbelievable the troubadours belonged to this current.
3. In 1879 the Kali Yuga or Dark Age was over, and man could try to enter again the realms of the spirit little by little.

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