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An excerpt from ...

THE EASTER MYSTERIES
by Rev Mario Schoenmaker

From Pages 2 to 3 ...

What do we, in fact, celebrate at Easter? What is the content of our Christian Easter festival? From my point of view, Easter indicates the union of the Christ forces with the Earth forces. That's what Easter brings to my consciousness.

Easter is not just someone dying and someone rising again. That in human terms is utterly ridiculous. Even the mystic will look at these things and say, 'This is ridiculous' A physical body, once it dies, cannot be resurrected again in the sense that we would like it. From the medical point of view, a body that has been dead for three days, where the brain cells have died, cannot be resurrected again unless, of course, as my Christian brothers would quickly point out, God is almighty and can do anything. But it just so happens that God doesn't do 'anything'. God works within evolution. God doesn't work a miracle just because you want a miracle. God works within the totality of the universe and therefore the whole of the universe, including the sun, the stars, the moon, have a part to play in the total unfoldment of God's plan in this universe, of which we are but tiny little beings.

I used to go fishing a lot. The reason was because my teacher, when I was very young, said that any time spent in fishing would be added to your life-span. So I thought if I did a lot of fishing I would live a long time. When it finally came to my notice that that wasn't true. I gave up fishing, because it seemed quite ridiculous to sit there and wait for something to come and bite. However, when I did fish, there would come to me one or two thoughts, for in that time that I had to sit here I would let my thoughts wander. As a little boy I wondered about death a lot and why it is that we are so afraid of it.

Why is it that we so often change our consciousness? You have a certain consciousness when you are seven years of age, and then the consciousness you have when you are fourteen years of age is different from the one you had when you were seven. When you are twenty-one and have been unhappy enough to have married at that stage, your consciousness is different again. And by twenty-eight your consciousness is different again because you say to yourself, 'Why the hell did I marry and have so many children and have to work so hard' And by the time you are thirty-five and your children are teenagers, you say, 'Thank God, now I can really get on with life' And by the time you are forty-two your consciousness differs again because you say, 'I really must look forward to something of significance for my life' By the time you come to forty nine you say, 'Life has passed me by' And by the time you are fifty-six you say to yourself, 'Well, I must get my will in order and a few other things, because it may happen to me any moment' Consciousness changes from moment to moment. One cannot say, 'I have a consciousness of such and such an age' You do not. If you are fifty, your consciousness is that of a fifty year old. If you are thirty, your consciousness is that of a thirty year old, etc. The only time that you can have a different consciousness is when you go into the spiritual realms, but this doesn't alter your earthly consciousness.

So what is your consciousness about Easter? This to me is very important because today's consciousness of Easter says, 'I must understand Easter with my earthly sense consciousness'.

And when one reaches deeper and deeper into the mysteries, as I do of late, then one realises that you beings are not aware of your humanity. You beings sitting here are subhuman. This, of course, seems a great accusation. But it isn't. It is stating a fact. For the more we work within the consciousness of our present age, the more we use our senses in order to achieve something, the more we human beings look outward, the less we are conscious of that which is within us.

I know modern psychiatry and modern psychology, and what they are saying. But they still use the senses in order to get inside, and that you cannot do. You cannot reach the human spirit through modern psychology. I think of some of the methods employed in psychiatric hospitals, the drugs and shock treatment etc; what they are doing is killing the senses and killing memory. The human being, once it has been through a hell like that, can walk uprightly and say 'Yes' and 'No' in the right places, but that's all.

In the ancient mysteries, of which we are no longer aware today and through which some of you may have passed - if not all of you, or else you wouldn't be interested in such a wonderful subject as Easter - what did you go through?

In those days, because you were more spiritually inclined than physically inclined, your gaze at the outside world was not permeated by the senses alone. You still had a relationship to the moon, the sun, the stars, although it depended greatly on whom and where you were as to how you expressed this in a religious rite...

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