Freedom through renunciation
Capricorn is a sign of contrasts and choices, as its keynote implies: Lost am I in light supernal, yet on that light I turn my back. According to esoteric teaching Capricorn is the Gate into the life of spirit, yet it also represents the densest point of concrete materialization. Capricorn is both a sign of conclusion and of a new cycle of effort. Thus we can understand why Alice Bailey wrote that “effort, strain, struggle, and the fight with the forces of the underworld are distinctive of experience in Capricorn”. These forces exert a powerful undertow of repeated re-entry into the depths of the material realm. Although the power of the will drives all effort upwards towards attainment of the perceived goal, it leads to the discovery that the ascent must be made “on the knees”. “Only when the Capricornian subject learns to kneel in all humility and with his knees upon the rocky mountain top to offer his heart and life to the soul and to human service, can he be permitted to pass through the door of initiation and be entrusted with the secrets of life. Only on his knees can he go through that door”, the writings of Alice Bailey say.
This helps us to understand why renunciation is a major theme of Capricorn. On the spiritual path we learn to conquer by surrendering, to gain by giving up. This does not imply the abdication of the will but, rather, a complete fulfillment of it in the highest spiritual sense. The conflict experienced in Capricorn is caused by dual forces which shouldn’t be seen in opposition to each other but as “two great streams of divine energy, pulling in opposite directions,” in Alice Bailey’s words. The Indian mind, which she said is strongly conditioned by Capricorn, comprehends this duality. As Heinrich Zimmer wrote in Philosophies of India, “Though characterized every moment by perishableness, the universal whirling process in itself is everlasting through the very transiency of its continually appearing and vanishing phenomena—all these evanescent forms. And precisely because these break, it is everlasting. The cloud-shadows of death and bereavement darken the face of the world every second…but they do not outbalance the light, the fulfillment of life’s joy in the perpetual begetting of new forms.”
Again and again, this cyclic process is made visible as the tests of Capricorn are applied through the many little renunciations that govern life—tests which become exceedingly subtle as the spiritual path is trodden and which hinge upon the capacity to share. “True sharing involves many little renunciations”, Alice Bailey wrote, “and it is upon these renunciations that the capacity for freedom is slowly being generated and the habit of renunciation can eventually be stabilized”. Sharing may well be the most urgent need confronting humanity prior to entrance into the New Age. At the same time, powerful retrograde forces are working to impede the renunciations which sharing requires, and this tension underlies the battle now underway throughout the world, for conflict is always present prior to renunciation, it’s said. The very nature of the entrenched forces, which seem so firmly resistant to change, to sharing, is rendering them increasingly crystallized—a critical stage in which change can occur. “When crystallization has reached a certain degree of density, it is easily shattered”, Alice Bailey pointed out. “Again and again, a certain measure of concreteness produces destruction, prior to the release of life and the rebuilding of form”, she wrote.
Just as a gem cutter must shatter a stone to reveal a previously hidden yet radiant facet, so the shattering of many of the world’s established conventions and assumptions will gradually reveal previously unrecognized possibilities. This fundamental truth of spiritual law is one in which we can trust, and Capricorn holds the key to its fulfillment through the implacable will to transform destruction into triumph, and renunciation into liberation from matter. Towards this goal let us work in meditation.