His belt is red, black and white, which are the colours of initiation. When these colours are seen on the belt that rests on the hips, it tells us that he has completely given his power to service and to the higher life. It says, “I have no intention for myself, so anything I do, is for the world”. His belt is the belt of the initiation of the master. He has not yet realised that in the complete giving up of self-power, he is learning to dominate all his elements.
The gold background symbolises the golden thread of the Ancient Wisdom, which goes through all the cards.
This is the man standing on the world he lives in, with the power of his mind to attain the vision of infinite understanding. He has to have a passion for the truth and the vision of a completely free world. Here we’re not talking about ‘freedom’ in the sense of feeling bet ter because one is free of burdens, but freedom in the sense of more loving, giving, allowing and understanding. This vision of complete union with the divine through service to humanity is the opposite of freedom in the ordinary sense. But before that can be achieved, we have to be free of the ties of the world. Initiation goes through stages of nine levels of freedom, but the true purpose and the true becoming is complete fusion with the highest, through complete acceptance of what we aim to free from ourselves. He knows within himself that he is infinite in essence and the aim is to free the essence, not from matter, but rather to free him from the misunderstanding that he is a prisoner or victim in matter. By being in perfect union with a higher and inner being, which is pure essence and the source of all things, the notion of limitation becomes inconceivable. He finds his full realisation and lives his life as if it should never end. He is not an apprentice but a silent master; his mouth is shut, he is smiling and he is actively work ing in a normal place of work. It is said of the master, ‘the world might think he belongs to it, but he stays in it so as to understand it better, in order to leave it behind’. He watches, he’s a witness, he contemplates; he’s in it but he doesn’t truly belong to the world. ‘The master doesn’t work because he knows, he knows because he works’. That is exactly what our Number 1 is coming back to do; he’s coming back for more understanding.
Thoughts are more important than words. Words can only express the value of thoughts, according to the measure and under standing of the world of form. In incarnation, man’s thought must be exteriorised and so manifested in the world. He has to be inde pendent, so he uses the energy not to adapt himself towards secu rity, but to transform the world nearer to his vision. The other way of using the laws of nature is to make ourselves more comfortable and give ourselves more gratification; here we are looking at a com pletely different use.
The Magician wants to know the laws of nature, so that he can use them to make life easier for mankind, this way he allows others to become initiates themselves and reveal man’s infinite possibili ties. While we are using all the laws of nature in the struggle to sur vive, we will have not much of a chance to go beyond the everyday life and ask the vital questions. Transcendence and spiritualisation has to come from within us, so mankind has to have freedom from the dominance of the needs of survival; this is a practical truth for the times we live in.
The initiatic science seeks to understand the whole of nature, right back to its origins, so that the creator can find himself in nature. But before that, we have to make sure that needs, secu rity and protection are not part of the intent. All the laws we have learnt and all the understanding of the power of mind to bring things to us, can be used psychically to control other people; this is black magic. The Magician on the other hand, uses honesty, clarity, strength and perseverance, to do the work and journey through the Major Arcana.
The name for this first card is ‘I Am’. Man ‘is’ only if he has con stant and full consciousness of the Soul and life within him for a full twenty four hours. This means that when we are lying down and falling asleep, we know why we are doing that and we know exactly what our subconscious is doing behind the scenes. That is what ‘I Am’ is about and The Magician is creating and bringing all the tools together in himself to achieve that. There have been several rounds, so it is not just a first-degree initiation and the round he’s come back on might be the last one, for all we know. He symbolises all of us who have followed the inner path, learning to go through our cycles and our degrees.
He ceases to have a passive attitude and let life act on him. Nature and man suffer life; an initiate suffers, but he doesn’t suf fer life. He knows that life is in him and that he has to uplift the world and say, “Get away from me Satan”, where Satan represents the subconscious. Jesus, representing the Soul, does this when he talks to Peter, who represents the material and physical body of the personality with its needs, fears and protective instinct. The Soul, or the initiate, has to truly oppose all his needs, fears and protective instinct and in so doing, he can actually absorb all the fears within matter. Then, with the quality of perseverance he carries on with all the cosmic forces behind him, helping him to uplift. The only way we are going to transmute all the patterns that are locked in the biological life, is by completely absorbing them into our own will and love. The opposition is actually done by absorption and that is a good way of opposing, isn’t it!
When we are on the inner path of consciousness in life, it is a continuous effort to always go beyond ourselves, deeper and deeper where we do not want to go. We keep on going behind, behind and behind, it is incredibly simple. We look at our everyday life and keep on watching and knowing that we are doing it! Every time we say, “I don’t want that any more”, we are on the path and we can’t go back, so we are going beyond ourselves. If we think we have reached our limits and we are still there tomorrow, then we haven’t reached the centre. To keep going beyond your limits is called endurance and we are going in the right direction. We are not talk ing about not using our discriminating power, for there are things one mustn’t endure and we are all intelligent enough to know what they might be. Every time we say, “No I can’t any more” we dis cover there is more love, understanding, humility, giving and more ‘Thy will be done’. This means we are on the right path.