Tradition says that in the dim past this planet's mental atmosphere was charged with the thoughts of men and women who exercised the power of mind in lust, arrogance, and ambition until extreme measures had to be restored to by the planetary God.
This story (which is merely a legend) relates that perversion of nature and her innocent life energies began cycles ago, when man in the first exuberance of psychic power built up a priestly hierarchy in the ancient continent of Atlantis. These masters of black magic dominated the world and dispossessed the cosmic mind. Extraordinary measures of safety for the whole race became necessary, and the higher powers planned and carried out the destruction of the continent Atlantis and all its people. The very soil of the continent which these occultists occupied had become saturated with lust and selfishness, and it was condemned as unfit to remain a part of the parent planet. The corrupted soil was scooped out of what is now the Atlantic Ocean and thrown off into space, where it became the lifeless mass known as the moon. The earth reeled like a drunkard under this terrible surgical operation, and still wabbles out of true perpendicular, the result of the shock and of the removal of so large a part of its body. Before this catastrophe occurred, a tropical climate extended to the very poles. The remains of tropical plants and animals are found in the frigid zones today, mute evidences that a great and sudden change has at some time taken place in the planet's relation to the sun. The withdrawal of warmth from the poles resulted in an unnatural coldness that congealed rain into snow and ice, which slowly piled up at the poles until they capped the earth to a great depth. This brought about the great glacial period, which lasted thousands of years, a reminder of which we get in icy blasts from the north, with months of cold and snow. However, the earth is slowly regaining its equilibrium and will in due season be restored to its pristine golden age, and all the desert places will bloom as the rose. So runs the tradition.
But how about the states of consciousness that man has built up and from which he would be free? No one can play fast and loose with God. What one builds one must care for. What man forms that is evil he must unform before he can take the coveted step up the mountain of the ideal. Here enters the factor that dissolves the structures that are no longer useful; this factor in metaphysics is known as denial. Denial is not, strictly speaking, an attribute of Being as principle, but it is simply the absence of the impulse that constructs and sustains. When the ego consciously lets go and willingly gives up its cherished ideals and loves, it has fulfilled the law of denial and is again restored to the Father's house.
As all desire is fulfilled through the formative word, so all denial must be accomplished in word or conscious thought. This is the mental cleansing symbolized by water baptism. In a certain stage of his problem man makes for himself a state of consciousness in which selfishness dominates. Personal selfishness is merely an excess of self-identity. This inflation of the ego must cease, that a higher field of action may appear. One who has caught sight of higher things is desirous of making unity with them. That unity must be orderly and according to the divine procession of mind. One who is housed in the intellect through desire may be ushered into the realm of Spirit by zeal. The first step is a willingness to let go of every thought that holds the ego on the plane of sense. This willingness to let go is symbolical of John the Baptist's crying in the wilderness, denying himself the luxuries of life, living on locusts and wild honey, and wearing skins for clothing.
The personalities of Scripture represent mental attitudes in the individual. John the Baptist and the Pharisees symbolize different phases of the intellect. John is willing to give up the old and is advocating a general denial through water baptism—mental cleansing. The Pharisees cling to tradition, custom, and Scripture, and refuse to let go. John represents the intellect in its transition from the natural to the spiritual plane. The Pharisees have not entered this transition, but cling to the old and defend it by arguments and Scripture quotations. Jesus, who represents the spiritual consciousness, does not take the Pharisees into account as a link in His chain, but of John He says: "Among them that are born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist: yet he that is but little in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." Jesus recognizes that the mental attitude represented by John is a prophecy of greater things, in fact the most desirable mental condition for the intellect on its way to attainment, yet not to be compared with the mental state of those who have actually come into the consciousness of Spirit.
Every man who cries out for God is John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. You who are satiated with the ways of the flesh man, and are willing to give up his possessions and pleasures, are John. The willingness to sacrifice the things of sense starts you on the road to the higher life, but you do not begin to taste its sweets until you actually give up consciously the sense things that your heart has greatly desired.
There are many phases of this passing over from John to Jesus, and some involve unnecessary hardships. The ascetic takes the route of denial so energetically that he starves his powers instead of transforming them. Some Oriental suppliants for divine favor castigate their flesh in many ways, starve their bodies, slash their flesh, and then salt it; they maltreat the body until it becomes a piece of inanimate clay that the soul can vacate until the birds build their nests in the hair of its head. This is Oriental denial, atrophy of the senses. Some Occidental metaphysicians are trying to imitate these agonizing methods of discipline, but in the mind rather than in the body.
John the Baptist stands for the mental attitude that believes that because the senses have fallen into ignorant ways they are bad and should be killed out. There is a cause for every mental tangent, and that which would kill the sense man, root and branch, has the thought of condemnation as its point of departure from the line of harmony. In John it seemed a virtue, in that he condemned his own errors, but this led to his condemnation of Herod, through which he lost his head. We learn from this that condemnation is a dangerous practice from any angle.
The intellect is the Adam man that eats of the tree of good and evil. Its range of observation is limited, and it arrives at its conclusions by comparison. It juggles with two forces, two factors--positive and negative, good and evil, God and Devil. Its conclusions are the result of reasoning based on comparison, hence limited. The intellect, judging by appearances, concludes that existence is a thing to be avoided. The intellect, beholding the disaster and the misery wrought by the misuse of men's passions, decides that they should be crushed out by starvation. This is the origin of asceticism, the killing out, root and branch, of every appetite and passion, because in the zeal of action they have gone to excess.
Yet John the Baptist has a very important office in the development of man from intellectual to spiritual consciousness. As Jesus said:
"This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, Who shall prepare thy way before thee."
Thus John the Baptist is the forerunner of Spirit. He stands for the perception of Truth which prepares the way for Spirit through a letting go of narrow beliefs, and a laying hold of divine ideas.
The beliefs that you and your ancestors have held in mind have become thought currents so strong that their course in you can be changed only by your resolute decision to entertain them no longer. They will not be turned out unless the ego through whose domain they run decides positively to adopt means of casting them out of his consciousness, and at the same time erects gates that will prevent their inflow from external sources. This is done by denial and affirmation; the denial always comes first. The John the Baptist attitude must begin the reformation. Man must be willing to receive the cleansing of Spirit before the Holy Ghost will descend upon him. Whoever is not meek and lowly in the presence of Spirit is not yet ready to receive its instruction.
This obedient, receptive state means much to him who wants to be led into the ways of the supreme good. It means that he must have but one source of life, one source of truth, and one source of instruction; he must be ready to give up every thought that he has imbibed in this life, and must be willing to begin anew, as if he had just been born into the world a little, ignorant, innocent babe. This means so much more than people usually conceive that it dawns on the mind very slowly.
All who sincerely desire the leading of Spirit acquiesce readily in the theoretical statement of the necessity of humility and childlikeness, but when