Rosicrucian Philosophy: The Invisible World

Invisible World

Things that can be seen and handled are permanently real, and there is always a tendency to think that only such things are real. But what of that great invisible world, the world of incorporate beings in which are the souls of the departed who await contact with living beings in the material world? To those who do not conceive of an invisible world, it may be pointed out that a large proportion of our human life is now invisible and impalpable. It is invisible to the sense-bound mind, but the sense-bound mind may be made more hospitable to the thought of invisible and non-spatial existence in general. We ourselves are invisible. What is the physical organism? It is only an instrument for expressing and manifesting the inner life; but the living self, the Ego, is not seen.

Each person will know himself in immediate experience and all others are known through their effects. They are not revealed in form or shape but in deeds and they are known only in and through deeds. Therefore, they are, in this respect, as formless and invisible as God Himself. We cannot ask: ” What is the shape of the Spirit; what is the length of the Soul?” Such questions would be absurd. The most familiar events of everyday life have their key and meaning only in the invisible, and that invisible world is the world of cause. What then is the aim of all Rosicrucians? It is indeed to contact this great invisible world and its entities. It is to find a world of reality and permanence in which the true self, the eternal ego, may be known and in which he may abide in unison and concord with all other egos. Are all those people who believe in an invisible living world fools? Shall we designate those beings who have the ability to penetrate their consciousness into a world of spirits, mad? If we do, then we deny God and His ministering hosts, for they are all invisible but real.

When we see a number of forms moving about in this physical world, do we look upon them as automata. No, these physical forms that we see are doing something or going somewhere. There is thought behind all its meaning and it seems to us entirely familiar. Thus out of the invisible comes the meaning that transforms the curious set of motions into terms of personality and gives them a human significance.

Our estimate of the body itself depends largely upon its connection with the hidden life of the Spirit. A human form is an object in space, apart from our experience of it as the instrument and expression of personal life, would have little beauty or attraction. The secret of its beauty and value lies in the invisible realm. For centuries now the Rosicrucians have contacted, studied and lived in this invisible world and they pass on to all who wish to know, much of their experiences in the invisible realms, But we must learn to distinguish clearly between the personal life and the life of the Spirit.

The great drama of physical life, with its likes and dislikes, its loves and hates, its ambitions and strivings, pleasures and pains, is absolutely foreign to space and never could be in any way discovered in space. In like manner, the life of the Spirit is unknown to the human being; the Spirit is pure, bright, just, permanent, all-wise. But human history has its seat in the invisible.

Take from the human being his mind, and what is left? An automaton. Imbue him with self-spiritual consciousness and he is god-like. How then can a human being contact this invisible world? Firstly, by thinking into it. The majority of persons think only out into a three-dimensional world, a world of effects, and in such a world there are many limitations.

The student who would contact the Invisible must learn that the visible is in the invisible, that the invisible may be known through the visible. Nothing came out of nothing but always something from something; it is then to the great invisible world that we owe our origin. Thus we see to what a large extent human life is now in the invisible realm, but not in the sense of being out of sight, but as something that does not admit in any way of being pictured. It may use spatial phenomena as a means of expression, but itself it is strictly unpicturable. For this great world of reality, if we must have a whereabouts, we must say that not space but consciousness is its seat. It is towards this consciousness then that we move to understand what lies in the visible and invisible.

In Evolved consciousness we may find that the Visible and Invisible are one, that there is no separateness betwixt them; that matter, space, time, are all enveloped in a vast realm which at one moment is visible and the next invisible.

When life leaves the physical body, where does it go? It does not go anywhere from where it was. It has ceased to manifest in a particular form but it remains in its invisibility. Nothing was ever found, nothing is ever lost, but man’s limited, or rather, un-unfolded consciousness may not admit this. The more we dwell upon this view the more mysterious our life becomes for the imagination. We see that our life now actually goes on in the invisible and that space has only a symbolical function with respect to this hidden life.

In its relation to man, the space world is largely a potentiality, waiting for realization by man himself. There are harvests waiting to grow and flowers waiting to bloom; but it cannot be until man sets his hand to work. Man is an inhabitant of the invisible world, and projects his thought and life on the great space and time screen which we call Nature. The world of space-objects which we call Nature, is no substantial existence by itself and still less a self-running- system apart from intelligence, but only the flowing expression and means of communication of those personal beings which we conceive of as a world of persons with a Supreme Person at the head. It is throughout dependent, instrumental and phenomenal. But a problem remains in the relation of these finite spirits to the Absolute Spirit.

The Rosicrucian teachings show how man may consciously contact the world called the Invisible, and realize that the many came from the One and must return unto that One, endowed with a consciousness of Self, with all its gained experiences in the phenomenal and mental worlds. Nothing is hidden from the evolved Soul.

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