The Guardian of the Threshold. I will find a good piece to add to this, from Zanoni.
This miscreant has been talked of for ancient. Be warned - everyone has one. You, me and Two Ton Ted from Teddington who drove the bakers van.
Put simply, the Guardian is the personification of our karma. And for all almost everyone, karma means bad goo. You see, we are all selfish. Over aeons, we have grabbed for ourselves, and tossed our rubbish out the window. Allow me to clarify:
The basic picture of who we are: take note!
When we drop down any level of existence we split in two. Even in our core we are two. Actually we are three, but that is a different discussion - lets get this two thing into our heads first.
There ‘I’, and there is ‘Not I’. Two faces flat against each other, without a sliver of space between. I look out, and my other I looks at me. The perceiver and the perceived. No one in this world realises that our real self is both these I’s. What you do to others you do to me - remember that one? In astral, you are the I looking at the I you are in physical.
If you are anger and fury at the world, or your partner. In dream you are being chased by a mad bull. See how that works? Everything depends on this understanding! What you do to others you do to yourself! Steal from someone, you have stolen from yourself. Give freely, and you give to yourself. Throw your empty beer can out the window of your car, you are throwing it into your own lounge room. Two beings look into each other eyes, and you move from one to the other. That manifests in many ways, way too much for this discussion - just know, there is only you! There is only me.
Over the long life of your deepest being, you have been throwing shit in your own eye. It has built up, until the accumulation of nasty little selfish acts, and major gross acts, builds into a monster so vast and horrifying, that we all look away. Just like Julie’s mother.
Julie’s mother has just had a stroke, where her right brain has suffered damage. her limbs are not too bad, but she has lost the use of her left eye - irreparably. You or me, in an eye accident, would simply use our right eye to look about. But she has damaged the very existence of her left side. She eats only the right side of her dinner plate. She quite simply doesn’t realise the left half of the world in front of her exists - I mean she can scan, but you only scan when you recall there is something there to scan for. That is how we relate to the Guardian. We just refuse to acknowledge it exists. Yet it is there for everyone, ever minute of the day:
Do you get angry, annoyed, get the shits, people are nasty to you etc? Does the world come at you as a bummer? Do you see it is the world that is being unfair? Other people who are being nasty? Or do you see the Guardian, in all it’s grossness? NO! NEVER! It would kill you in one blow if you were to see it.
Once we begin this path, we have already passed enough time shifting from pure selfishness, to the selfishness of ‘family’, then to the level of actually wanting to help others in a vaguely unselfish way. Good karma has slowly chipped away at this horrific monster, such that by the time you step on to the path, you just may be ready to catch a glimpse of the Guardian, with impunity. But be warned, it will be revolting in the extreme.
Notice how we grow tired whenever we have to deal with the yukky stuff in our lives. When we are forced to examine that we have some putrid pustules hidden beneath the skin. in development strategy we always work with two side of the coin. One is our ‘wounds’, our pain, our guilt, our hatred, our envy, our jealousy, our feelings of negativity - our shame. The other side is to inspire and reach for the stars. Build confidence, and love. Absorb beauty in every and all forms - it fills us with joy and soul nourishment. Our Star.
We get tired because like Julie’s mother, we ‘don’t want to know’ on a deep level. The Guardian laughs it’s evil laugh in its hiding place, and runs rampant through our days in disguise of other people’s faults. When will we stop, and have the courage, plus the inner strength, to look it in the eye and see it is just a gnat.
How to get there - to that point. Make no mistake, to face it prematurely is death.
Two techniques: give up our love of ‘disgust’, and second, pay off a few debts.
Disgust:
Tantra sadhu and his family, with their lunch... just testing.
Feel disgust, feel outrage, feel betrayal, feel abuse, feel rejection... then give it up. You can’t skip the feeling part.
Pay off debts:Easy - grab every opportunity you can to give up your own time to help or serve someone else, for free, without complaint and without resentment.
....
Here is an extract from Zanoni, by Bulwer-Lytton. Glyndon has just failed a last test (he was seduced by a pretty girl) by the old Mejnour, Zanoni’s friend - these two are initiates of the ancient order who have passed beyond the reach of death... except of course, Zanoni, who became an initiate in his youth, succumbs to human love, and thus death.
"Glyndon was already deep in the contents of the following letter:
"When I first received thee as my pupil, I promised Zanoni, if convinced by thy first trials that thou couldst but swell, not the number of our order but the list of the victims who have aspired to it in vain, I would not rear thee to thine own wretchedness and doom ; I would dismiss thee back to the world. I fulfil my promise. Thine ordeal has been the easiest that Neophyte ever knew. I asked for nothing but abstinence from the sensual, and a brief experiment of thy patience and thy faith. Go back to thine own world, thou hast no nature to aspire to ours!
"It was I who prepared Paolo to receive thee at the revel. It was I who instigated the old beggar to ask thee for alms. It was I who left open the book that thou couldst not read without violating my command. Well, thou hast seen what awaits thee at the threshold of knowledge. Thou hast confronted the first foe that menaces him whom the senses yet grasp and enthral. Dost thou wonder that I close upon thee the gates for ever I Dost thou not comprehend, at last, that it needs a soul tempered, and purified, and raised, not by external spells, but by its own sublimity and valour, to pass the threshold and disdain the foe? Wretch! all my science avails nothing for the rash, for the sensual - for him who desires our secrets but to pollute them to gross enjoyments and selfish vice? How have the impostors and sorcerers of the earlier times perished by their very attempt to penetrate the mysteries that should purify and not deprave! They have boasted of the philosopher's stone and died in rags; of the immortal elixir, and sank to their grave gray before their time. Legends tell you that the fiend rent them into fragments. Yes, the fiend of their own unholy desires and criminal designs ! What they coveted thou covetest; and if thou hadst the wings of a seraph, thou couldst soar not from the slough of thy mortality. Thy desire for knowledge, but petulant presumption; thy thirst for happiness, but the diseased longing for the unclean and mudded waters of corporeal pleasure; thy very love, which usually elevates even the mean, a passion that calculates treason, amidst the first glow of lust; -
thou, one of us! Thou, a brother of the August Order! Thou, an Aspirant to the Stars that shine in the Shemaia of the Chaldaean love! The eagle can raise but the eaglet to the sun. I abandon thee to the twilight!
"But, alas, for thee, disobedient and profane! thou hast inhaled the elixir, thou hast attracted to thy presence a ghastly and remorseless foe. Thou thyself must exorcise the phantom thou hast raised. Thou must return to the world ; but not without punishment and strong effort canst thou regain the calm and the joy of the life thou hast left behind. This for thy comfort will I tell thee: he who has drawn into his frame even so little of the volatile and vital energy of the aerial juices as thyself, has awakened faculties that cannot sleep - faculties that may yet, with patient humility, with sound faith, and the courage that is not of the body like thine, but of the resolute and virtuous mind, attain, if not to the knowledge that reigns above, to high achievement in the career of men. Thou wilt find the restless influence in all that thou wouldst undertake. Thy heart, amidst vulgar joys, will aspire to something holier; thy ambition, amidst coarse excitement, to something beyond thy reach. But deem not that this of itself will suffice for glory. Equally may the craving lead thee to shame and guilt. It is but an imperfect and new-born energy, which will not suffer thee to repose. As thou directest it, must thou believe it to be the emanation of thine evil genius or thy good.
"But woe to thee ! insect meshed in the web in which thou hast entangled limbs and wings! Thou hast not only inhaled the elixir, thou hast conjured the spectre ; of all the tribes of the space no foe is so malignant to man, - and thou hast lifted the veil from thy gaze, I cannot restore to thee the happy dimness of thy vision. Know, at least, that all of us - the highest and the wisest - who have, in sober truth, passed beyond the threshold, have had, as our first fearful task, to master and subdue its grisly and appalling guardian. Know that thou canst deliver thyself from those livid eyes - know that, while they haunt, they cannot harm, if thou resistest the thoughts to which they tempt, and the horror they engender.
Dread them most when thou beholdest them not. And thus, son of the worm, we part! All that I can tell thee to encourage, yet to warn and to guide, I have told thee in these lines. Not from me, from thyself has come the gloomy trial, from which I yet trust thou wilt emerge into peace. Type of the knowledge that I serve, I withhold no lesson from the pure aspirant; I am a dark enigma to the general seeker. As man's only indestructible possession is his memory, so it is not in mine art to crumble into matter the immaterial thoughts that have sprung up within thy breast. The tyro might shatter this castle to the dust, and topple down the mountain to the plain. The master has no power to say, 'Exist no more,' to one THOUGHT that his knowledge has inspired. Thou mayst change the thought into new forms; thou mayst rarify and sublimate it into a finer spirit, but thou canst not annihilate that which has no home but in the memory - no substance but the idea. EVERY THOUGHT is A SOUL! Vainly, therefore, would I or thou undo the past, or restore to thee the gay blindness of thy youth. Thou must endure the influence of the elixir thou hast inhaled ; thou must wrestle with the spectre thou hast invoked!"
…………………………………..
"…heaven! What chills the atmosphere? - why does the lamp grow wan? - why does thy hair bristle? There! - there! - there! at the casement! - It gazes on thee, the dark, mantled, loathsome Thing! There, with their devilish mockery and hateful craft, glare on thee those horrid eyes!
He stood and gazed. It was no delusion - it spoke not, moved not, till, unable to bear longer that steady and burning look, he covered his face with his hands. With a start, with a thrill he removed them: he felt the nearer presence of the Nameless. There, it cowered on the floor beside his design ; and, lo! the figures seemed to start from the wall! Those pale accusing figures, the shapes he himself had raised, frowned at him and gibbered. With a violent effort that convulsed his whole being, and bathed his body in the sweat of agony, the young man mastered his horror. He strode towards the Phantom; he endured its eyes; he accosted it with a steady voice; he demanded its purpose and defied its power.
And then, as a wind from a charnel, was heard its voice. What it said, what revealed, it is forbidden the lips to repeat, the hand to record. Nothing, save the subtle life that yet animated the frame, to which the inhalations of the elixir had given vigour and energy beyond the strength of the strongest, could have survived that awful hour. Better to wake in the catacombs and hear the ghouls, in their horrid orgies, amongst the festering ghastliness of corruption, than to front those features when the veil was lifted, and listen to that whispered voice!
The next day Glyndon fled from the ruined castle. With what hopes of starry light had he crossed the threshold; with what memories to shudder evermore at the darkness, did he look back at the frown of its time-worn towers."
