World Salvage: Imagining what has not yet come to be:
Proceeding from Aquarius, the sign of world service, the energies of Pisces culminate (for it is the twelfth and final sign) in producing the world Saviour. In Pisces, the writings of Alice Bailey tell us, “we have the fusion of soul and form as far as man is concerned, producing manifestation of the Incarnated Christ, the perfected individual soul, the completed manifestation of the microcosm.”
The Christ principle, also sometimes referred to as buddhi, is another term for the soul—the expression of God Immanent, pervading all forms, conditioning from within all kingdoms in nature. The Christ principle, or buddhi, is the power of the force of evolution, progressing through the cycle of reincarnation, which drives the soul back to union with its kind. As Alice Bailey expresses it, “Through separation the soul finds himself, and then—driven by the indwelling buddhic or Christ principle—transcends himself, and finds himself again in all selves.”
This touches upon the unique place which the human kingdom is destined to serve in the great chain of being. Through man, Alice Bailey wrote, the laws of unity for all three groups, superhuman, human, and subhuman, can be worked out intelligently. “Man, therefore, acts as the Mediator” for all the lives that share our planet. Mediation is the highest expression of the energies of Pisces and the supreme act of world salvage, as Pisces’ keynote expresses: I leave the Father’s Home and turning back, I save.
These thoughts help to clarify the role of the imagination as the seed of the intuition, for, as Alice Bailey put it, “that which is not existent somewhere within our apparently complex planetary system cannot yet be imagined”. The imagination constructs a pathway between the outer “world of seeming” and the inner “world of meaning”. Through the use of the imagination, a vision of the Plan can be registered and given form, in preparation for its manifestation.
Karen Armstrong, the scholar of religions, writes in her new book The Lost Art of Scripture, “Homo sapiens is the only animal with the ability to envisage something that is not immediately apparent or has not yet come to be…” and she quotes Jean-Paul Sartre’s definition of imagination “as the ability to think of what is not”. The capacity to visualize, to imagine, something that doesn’t yet exist in manifestation is an achievement of the Piscean age, in which the capacity for abstract thought was developed. The past 2000 years have served to orient human minds towards ideals such as sacrifice or service, and to aspire to that which is not yet existent on the outer planes.
Age after age, human beings have imagined, aspired, and visualized a better world. We are coming to realize, however, that the achievement of this world will not come as a “gift from above” but rather as it is wrought out through the human experience of turmoil and conflict, clarifying the vision and generating demand for resolution through right choices. Now, as humanity enters into the age of Aquarius and applies the lessons of service in relationships with the kingdoms above and below the human, it is being subjected to those energies and forces which will break down the barriers of separation, and which will blend and fuse the consciousness of all people into the unity of the Christ consciousness. The confusion produced by the intense and conflicting ideologies of the present time is the guarantee that the Christ consciousness is rapidly awakening, for it is revealing fundamental cleavages that have to be recognized and which must be bridged by people of intelligence and goodwill.
Collectively, as human beings imagine a better world, so will it come to be. This opportunity holds the key to the profound significance of meditation as a path to world salvage: I leave the Father’s Home and turning back, I save.
