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The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel

III. THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE WORLD

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When the occult investigator wishes to study an event in the past history of man, he may most readily call up the picture from _the memory of nature_, but if he desires to fix the time of the incident, he will be obliged to count backwards by the motion of the heavenly bodies. For that purpose he generally uses the measure provided by the sun’s precession: Each year the sun crosses the earth’s equator about the twenty-first of March. Then day and night are of even length, therefore this is called the Vernal equinox. But on account of a certain wabbling motion of the earth’s axis, the sun does not cross over at the same place in the Zodiac, it reaches the equator a little too early, it _precedes_, year by year it moves _backwards_ a little. At the time of the birth of Christ, for instance, the Vernal Equinox was in about seven degrees of the Zodiacal sign Aries. During the two thousand years which intervene between that event and the present time, the sun has moved _backwards_ about twenty-seven degrees, so that it is now in about ten degrees of the sign Pisces. It moves around the whole circle of the Zodiac in about 25,868 years. The occult investigator may therefore count back the number of signs, or whole circles, which the sun has _preceded_ between the present day and the time of the event he is investigating. Thus he has by the use of the heavenly time keepers a very approximately correct measure of time even though he is in the Desire World and that is another reason for studying the Stellar Science.

_The World of Thought._

When we have attained the spiritual development necessary to consciously enter the World of Thought and leave the Desire World, which is the realm of light and color, we pass through a condition which the occult investigator calls The Great Silence.

As previously stated, the higher Regions of the Desire World exhibit the marked peculiarity of blending form and sound, but when one passes through the Great Silence, all the world seems to disappear and the spirit has the feeling of floating in an ocean of intense light, utterly alone, yet absolutely fearless, since unimbued with a sense of its form or sound, nor past or future, but all is one eternal NOW. There seems to be neither pleasure nor pain and yet there is no absence of feeling but it all seems to center in the one idea:—“_I am_”! The human Ego stands face to face with itself as it were, and for the time being all else is shut out. This is the experience of anyone who passes that breach between the Desire World and the World of Thought, whether involuntarily, in the course of an ordinary cyclic pilgrimage of the soul, which we shall later elucidate when speaking of the post-mortem existence, or by an act of the will, as in the case of the trained occult investigator, all have the same experience in transition.

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There are two main divisions in the Physical World: the Chemical Region and the Etheric Region. The World of Thought also has two great subdivisions: The Region of concrete Thought and the Region of abstract Thought.

As we specialize the material of the Physical World and shape into a dense body, and as we form the force-matter of the Desire World into a desire body, so do we appropriate a certain amount of mindstuff from the Region of concrete Thought; but we, as spirits, clothe ourselves in spirit-substance from the Region of abstract Thought and thereby we become individual, separate Egos.