Welcome back to this journey through The Kolbrin.
So, we are currently working our way through The Sacred Registers; and this post will, like the previous four, deal with more of the relatively short chapters (this time, Chapters 13 & 14) that we find in this section of The Book of Scrolls (aka The Book of Books, The Lesser Book of the Sons of Fire, and The Third Book of the Bronzebook).
Chapter 13 is entitled The Scroll of Ramkat and, just like some of the short passages we’ve recently had a look at, it is formulaic in composition in that it goes through a catalogue of souls being judged in the afterlife, with each new arrival in the Hall of Judgement portrayed as it truly is, with all pretence stripped away. In a way, it’s a lesson to look beneath the surface of our fellow humans to discern the naked being beneath in all its genuine beauty (or ugliness). So let’s dive on in . . .
We kick off with a reminder that our individual Day of Judgement is when it all comes home to roost. All the tricks we have learned on Earth about how to project ourselves as something other than we truly are – whether we have done it out of a sense of self-protection, vanity, a deliberate deception of others to further our own ends, whatever – are of no use to us now. We are no longer trying to pull the wool over the eyes of gullible human beings but are being weighed up by powers that see right through to our very core. There’s no point in bluffing, no point in hiding behind religious belief systems. Our very essence is naked to these observers and judgers.
Ten examples of souls being judged are given by the scribe, with the section pertaining to each opening with the formula ‘One arrives.’
The first is assessed on his adherence to the Forty-Two Virtues, the outcome of which will determine whether he will ‘dwell among beauty as a godling’ or ‘be given captive to the Keeper of Horrors’ to dwell in darkness. We are not told what happens to this soul.
The second is a soul who suffered under crippling disfigurement and ugliness during his time on Earth, but who obviously lived a good life as the physical deformities are discarded at death, and he moves into a Place of Everlasting Beauty.
The third has been a vile person on Earth, an inner ugliness that is now manifest for all to see. This soul cannot bear the light and flees into the darkness near the Place of Terror where he will soon be claimed by its denizens.
The fourth is upright and just. He has led a decent earthly existence, and any blemishes on his character are too minor to make any difference. This soul is welcomed into the light.
The fifth soul is somebody who has obviously spent his time on Earth frittering away his time and existence. He is, essentially, a hollow vessel which he has masked behind a veil of false confidence and bluster. This soul has no true substance to balance the scales of judgement and, recognising his worthlessness at last, he rushes into the gloom and the Place of Dark Secret Horrors.
The sixth soul was a beautiful courtesan in life, full of a grace and charm that masked a mind awash with lust and unclean acts. The physical beauty is left behind at the portal and a grim horror enters the Hall of Judgement. We are not told the outcome of this one, but we can all hazard a pretty good guess.
The seventh soul led a hard life of degradation and servitude where she was, by turns, pitied and scorned. And yet she persevered and was willing to sacrifice herself for others, receiving very little in return. This woman walks into the Hall of Judgement as a shining beauty.
The eighth soul was kind and gentle, despite being trapped inside the pain-wracked body of a cripple. This one, now freed of its physical prison, strides into the light, a wondrous sight to behold.
The ninth soul is the opposite of the eighth. This one had a marvellous physical body but was obviously last in line when it came to the ‘tools to make you a decent human being’ queue. The great body is left behind, a decaying shell, while the deformed thing that limps into the Hall of Judgement is destined for the realms of gloom.
And, finally, the tenth soul arrives. This one has led a life that was neither good nor evil, as a result of which, the scales of judgement remain balanced. The scribe writes that it is the lot of this type of soul to exist in the Twilight Borderland between the Realms of Light and Darkness, whether to await further education or reincarnation, we are not told.
After that catalogue of personality types, the scribe writes something very interesting. He says that the ‘Great Lords of Eternity’ – to whom he is appealing here as someone with knowledge of the ‘Secret Writings’ but who is, by his own admission, a bit touch-and-go where his own judgement is concerned – once walked the Earth as human beings themselves. Now, the scribe is mentioning this because he hopes it will make these Great Lords a bit more forgiving because they have known what it is to face the temptations of human existence, but the whole question of the potential of individual humans to evolve and develop spiritually into godlike beings is a fascinating one, and something that many esoteric teachings touch upon. Unfortunately, we haven’t got time for it in this post, but it’s something I will explore in later transmissions.
Anyway, back to the narrative, and the scribe continues to beseech the Greater Powers to lend him a helping hand. He has done his research, he says, but what is knowledge without understanding (very true, that!). Humans are a bit hamstrung, he reckons, because we are told to strive for, believe in, and seek for, something, the true nature of which we will only learn after death.
But he ends his scroll on a note of optimism. We are free, he writes, to visualise our individual goals as we each see fit, and it doesn’t really matter how closely our visualisations match the actual reality. The important thing is that we do set goals and attempt to achieve them, because even if the goal you set is itself non-existent, the effort you put in will at least get you somewhere. It is those who do not seek at all that get nowhere.
And so, onto Chapter 14, and this one is entitled The Scroll of Yonua and it is heartbreakingly sad. It is written in the form of an address of a husband to his wife. They have both passed on, but, having shed their mortal skins they now stand revealed in their true essence, spiritual reflections of the lives they have led. He has become a shining being of beauty, while she is a creature of nightmare.
It begins with the husband telling the monster that was his wife to get out of his sight and slink back into the murk and gloom. During life, she had obviously attempted to drag him into her own webs of temptation and evil, but he’d resisted. He bids the hideously deformed thing to depart back into the darkness to her foul companions in misery.
The husband is sad, he says, at his wife’s fate. She who once walked the Earth so selfishly and arrogantly now has no rest amongst the slime and excreta, the decay and the filth. He calls her a ‘wriggler in the slime’ and that it is now too late for her to approach the purifying flame.
The wife was a wrongdoer, soft and complacent, a wallower in pleasure and luxury; self-centred, lacking self-discipline, doing nothing for others. Could she not see what she was doing to herself by behaving like that; did she not understand what kind of revolting creature she was forming inside herself? Did she not realise it was that misshapen thing that would be her vessel after death, and not the once beautiful human shell? The husband wishes he could help her, but it was she who chose the course that brought her to the nightmarish monstrosity she has become. Every disfigurement was the fault of her own debauched actions – nobody else is to blame for her ugliness after death.
Yes, he loved her while they existed together on Earth. She was the most precious thing in his life, and he adored her. He stayed calm headed when she was wilful and spoke unkindly to him; but she was also unfaithful, cruel, deceitful, and perverted. And although her behaviour did not improve over time, still he remained with her, even though the years grew increasingly bitter and harder to bear.
The husband had obviously passed over before his wife as he has arrived at the portal in the hope of welcoming and reuniting with the woman who, despite her failings, he was willing to forgive and still considered to have been the love of his life. But what came through was a thing of horror, a walking nightmare, a hideously ugly reflection of a hideously ugly life. The husband is appalled, he wants to die again in order to forget all this, because he can now see clearly that during life she cared for nothing but herself and earthly goods, and any affection she showed was hypocrisy. He knew that she was fickle, and pleasure-loving, selfish, cruel and deceitful, but he was patient and kind and willing to forgive. He finally realises, here at the end, that she is lost to him. Lost, he says, and worse than lost.
Utterly devastated by what he has seen, the husband begs for some spark of compassion from the Higher Powers. He is told that there is a way, but only when both parties can find in their hearts the power to move forward. In the case of the wife, they say, it is a forlorn hope. She chose her path, and he must now tread his own. She is not the companion of his path, they say. He must look upon her as a necessary evil, somebody who, in forging her own path of selfish, uncaring indulgence, unwittingly provided him with the opportunity to exercise his own uncomplaining selflessness with which he was able to cloak himself in glory. He must now erase the memory of her and move on further into the light.
Chapter 14 ends with a reminder that we would all be wise to hold close: ‘Each is the maker of his own future,’ writes the scribe, ‘the fashioner of his own being’.
So, what do we make of all that then? The two chapters we’ve taken a look at in this post are pretty much on theme with The Kolbrin’s drift at this point in the work, in that they are related to (a) the soul’s journey after physical death, and (b) our actions on Earth reflect in how we present after death. If you want a more prosaic commentary, then they are about the nature of our true, inner selves that manifests in the way we treat others. This is, of course, all related to the concept of karma which is, in turn, all about both maintaining balance on all levels and treating others as you would have them treat you.
As far as self-help goes, there’s a lot we can take from these two chapters. Although Chapter 13 is about how your earthly life reflects in the appearance of your kohar (your soul or astral form), it is also about how you are perceived by others while you are still here. If you are a good person, most people can sense that – you become beautiful to them, whatever your physical appearance. How often have you heard one person say about another ‘Oh, so-and-so’s not good looking, but they become attractive the more you get to know them’. Conversely, if you treat other people like dirt and carry on like a knobhead, that, too, becomes palpable. People can sense that you are a wrong ‘un.
Related to that, but on a slightly different tack, is something that it has taken me, personally, several decades to fully get my head around; and that is the deceptively simple philosophical/esoteric maxim that was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: KNOW THYSELF. It is an axiom that has been employed in various forms by philosophical schools, religions, and cults down the millennia, but, for our purposes here and now, it is about understanding the real you. Not the you that you imagine yourself to be, but the real, genuine you. Now, that concept is actually pretty huge, so I’m only going to take a bite-sized chunk out of it for the time being, and I’m going to attempt that by taking you on what might, at first, seem like a roundabout journey:
Many of you will probably have heard of something called the DISC Profile. For those that haven’t, it’s a kind of personality assessment tool that analyses an individual’s aptitude for (D)ominance, (I)nfluence, (S)teadiness, and (C)oncientiousness. A ‘graph’ is created by splitting a circle into four quadrants, each designating one of the four ‘types’ D, I, S, and C (in that order clockwise). By answering a series of questions, a person is placed somewhere in that circle. The more of a certain aptitude their answers to the questions imply they show, the further to the edge of that quadrant they are placed. So, for instance, somebody whose answers imply they display high (D)ominance traits, is placed towards the outer edge of the circle in the D quadrant, whereas somebody who shows up with (S)teadiness as their identifying trait, but it is not particularly strong, is placed somewhere near the centre of the circle in the S quadrant.
Let’s now suppose that a job is up for grabs. That job, because it involves quite a bit of getting results no matter what it takes to achieve them, requires the ideal candidate to have medium to high levels of the (D)ominance trait and so a marker is placed in the appropriate place in the DISC circle. By plotting the DISC assessment results of applicants for that job on the same graph, it is visually easy to identify which of them will be most suitable for it – the nearer their assessment places them to the job’s position on the graph, the more likely they are to be suitable for it. This is a basic way of explaining the concept, but I hope you get the drift.
Now, the reason I am banging on about all this DISC baloney is that, as explained, as well as showing who is most suitable for a job, it also shows up who is most unsuitable for it. In the example above, in which the job requires a high level of (D)ominance (obtaining results at all costs), somebody who is assessed as having high levels of (S)teadiness (cooperation and sincerity, traits which are not that useful for getting the job in question done) will be placed on the very opposite side of the graph from the job and furthest away from it.
What is important for our discussion, here, is that if, for some reason (there are no other applicants, perhaps) somebody who is a high ‘S’ gets offered and takes the job that would much better suit the character traits of a high ‘D’, things can get unhealthy (it would be the same the other way around of course). Because, according to the DISC profiling method, the further away on the graph you are from the job on offer, the more energy you will have to expend to change your innate character to do what that job demands of you. I am not saying that cannot be done. It can, but constantly having to swim against the stream of your natural inclinations gets very tiring, and will lead, ultimately, to unhappiness, not just for you personally, but for those around you, whether or not they are directly connected to the job.
So, how does that rather convoluted digression tie in with the concept of KNOW THYSELF? It’s actually quite simple. Once you accept who you actually are, you don’t have to expend any extra energy on being somebody you are not. If it upsets you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, then don’t do it! Easier said than done, I know. Sometimes it’s difficult to walk away from peer pressure, especially when it means losing so-called friends or becoming the butt of snide comments for being a ‘kill-joy’ or whatever; but it’s worth a little short-term disruption. I once worked with a lady who told me that she used to be a ‘people pleaser’ (her words). She said that everything she did, everything she went along with, was because other people, including her own family, wanted her to do it, and she felt she had to acquiesce and play along for fear of upsetting them. But she was desperately unhappy, because there was never any time to be her and do the things in which her own soul rejoiced. So, one day, she stopped. She moved to another country, built a new life with people that she feels comfortable with, and she is now a far, far happier human being.
This concept of ‘knowing yourself’ should, in my book, be followed up by the process of ‘becoming yourself’, which is often the harder part of the deal. How many times in my life have I seen young people acting all ‘hard’ and aggressive because that is the way they believe their peers want them to behave, when inside they are gentle souls who abhor violence? (‘An awful lot’ is the answer to that rhetorical question). How many times have I witnessed newly made-up managers totally wreck a work environment because they are trying to exercise authority in a way that does not come naturally to them? (Again, the answer is ‘an awful lot’, but at least in this scenario, there is hope if that person can learn – or be taught – to manage in a way that better suits their true mentality). Sometimes it takes balls to force yourself to the realisation of what you truly are. There is no shame in it – it is simply having the courage to see the true you. You will be much happier once you’ve done it. Know yourself! Then the next step is to love yourself!
Anyway, I’m sure everyone gets my drift, here. It causes a lot of inner tension to be something you are not naturally inclined to be. If you have a gentle nature, then embrace it – a gentle nature is a beautiful thing and a gift of the multiverse to this world.
So, I’ll finish up this post by just re-emphasising the closing sentiment of the Scroll of Ramkat. It doesn’t matter, it says, if what you put your life’s effort into turns out to be not what you expected. The point is that you made the effort, and that is a worthy end in itself. You may not end up where you expected, but you will end up somewhere.
No effort to make ourselves better people is wasted effort.
OK, the next few chapters, 15-18 are scroll fragments – they are very bitsy, so I’ll cover them off quickly in my next post. I hope to see you all there.
