IN THE PRONAOS OF THE TEMPLE OF THE TRUE ROSY CROSS

Franz Hartmann

Our salvation is the life of Christ in us.

THE place or state wherein the true Rosicrucian lives is far too exalted and glorious to be described in words. When we enter the vestibule of the temple of the true Rosy Cross, we enter into a region of unalloyed bliss and happiness. There is an effulgence of super-terrestrial light, where all laborious thinking and exercise of the imagination for the purpose of drawing logical inferences about the unknown, ceases, for in that light is the realm of pure knowledge; to live there is to perceive, and to perceive is to know. Into that paradise of celestial consciousness nothing impure can enter. No room is there for terrestrial flesh and blood; but the spiritual beings which inhabit that realm are made of the flesh and body of “Christ,” in other words, of the substance of the spiritual soul.

H. P. Blavatsky, in her “Key to Theosophy,” says that there are beings having attained a state of spiritual consciousness which would entitle them to enter the state of Nirvana; nevertheless, out of compassion for mankind, they still remain residents of this earth, inhabiting invisibly for mortal eyes the astral plane of our planet. In that, she describes the true order of the Golden and Rosy Cross as a spiritual Brotherhood, and if one of these superior beings, for some purpose or other, reincarnates in a human body upon this planet, then will there be a real Rosicrucian in a visible form upon this earth.
The “history” of that “brotherhood” is the history of the evolution of the world, and that of the spiritual regeneration of the soul and the body of man; for although each of these individual beings had its own terrestrial history and experiences in passing through many incarnations upon this planet, nevertheless, in its essential points the history of all is alike, and consisted in the conquering of the low and the unfoldment of the high. They all had to bear the Cross of suffering before they could become crowned with victory; they all had to crucify their selfish and personal will, and die in regard to all that attracts the soul to the sphere of earthly desires and illusions before they could have the spiritual faculties of their souls unfolded like the Rose whose leaves are unfolded by the rays of the rising sun.