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As Moses' mission drew to a close his role of racial leadership was conferred on Joshua who, as we saw in the work on Exodus, occupied a place in the life of Moses comparable to that of John in the life of Christ Jesus. He was the most intimate with his master in that he was the most advanced of his disciples. The hour had come for giving him the special instructions he was now duly qualified to receive. The Lord (Law) was revealed to him, we read, in a pillar of cloud (Water Initiation). He was not yet sufficiently advanced to receive a revelation by the pillar of fire (Fire Initiation) as had Moses, his teacher and his inspiration.
After Joshua's illumination he shared with Moses the ability to hear the music of the spheres. It is said, therefore, that "Moses came and spake all the words of this song in the ears of the people, he, and Hoshea the son of Nun." While Moses sang his song to all the people, its deeper import was for the inner circle of his disciples, foremost of whom was Hoshea. He is mentioned specifically. Hoshea is the spiritual name of Joshua. To the initiated that name reveals the status to which he had attained, a status so exalted that he was able not only to hear the song, but to sing it with Moses.
Singing the Song of Life is an achievement belonging especially to the Water Initiation. Life is a unity, and its song is a universal song whose keynote is struck in the heart. It is heard by means of a spiritualized sense of hearing, which correlates to the mental qualities of meekness and docility: "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." It is to this keynote of universal life that a virgin spirit (man in his true essence) vibrates; and in the processes of evolution this fundamental spiritual harmony gradually extends outward from the virgin spirit into its vehicles which manifest in the phenomenal worlds. The song of Moses is the outpouring of one in whom this process was being completed.
The spirit, functioning in the music of the spheres, unfolds its color harmonies in the soul, which is the mediator between the god within and the man without; thus the latter is brought into conformity with the universal sound patterns. When this is achieved, the protective forces against "evils and troubles" are invincible. The song of the soul then serves to recall the objective mind from illusions of the sense world and to hold it poised in the life that lies behind and beyond them. It "shall testify against them as a witness."
From the racial standpoint the song of Moses may be interpreted as an articulation of the ideal set before the Fifth Root Race for its ultimate attainment. It is a lofty ideal which only a few have thus far realized. The multitude recognize it only as "through a glass darkly," having little or no conception of the manner and method by which the ideal of spiritual power and illumination may be reached. Yet, however superficial the understanding of this ideal may be, it nevertheless serves as a measuring rod in determining the relative values of all other ideals placed beside it.
The song of Moses is found in the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy. When we listen to its cadences with the ear of spirit we come to understand why it is called the Magna Carta of prophecy. The only other song comparable to it in profundity and inspiration is the song of the Lamb in Revelation. Both are chants of Initiation, the one voicing the ideal of attainment for the Old Dispensation. the other, for the New.
References to Deity are couched in anthropomorphic terms, but esotericists recognize that only the operation of natural law is thus personified. From a literary viewpoint, the song of Moses, like the other songs in the Bible, is a poem, and we expect to find in it the figures of speech which go to enrich poetry.
In the following discussion of this unique Song, we have quoted the verses in their poetic arrangement while retaining the language of the King James translation.
The song of Moses was his "swan song" — a farewell to Earth. It expresses the glory of translation from Earth to heaven, which he was about to experience. It sounds the note, not of death but of life — life more abundant and everlasting. His life had been lived in close communication with Divinity; and now, as he drew near to the borders of the heavenly world to enter therein, his whole being was suffused with its gracious light. With divine tenderness he sings, "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew, as the rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass."
To an "old soul," tried and purified in the furnace of experience, Law is the signature of the One God, the Rock, whose name it publishes. In publishing the name of the Lord, Moses made known to his disciples something of the deeper mysteries he had touched when communing with Divine Intelligence in the burning bush and on the heights of Mount Sinai. It was the I AM in Moses that called upon the heavens to give ear and the Earth to hear the words of his mouth. He was sounding the keynote of the Mosaic Dispensation, the rhythm of the Mystery School which he served. "Set your hearts, " he afterwards urged his hearers, "unto all the words which I testify among you this day." He assured them that to thus attune themselves to the note he set for them was no "vain thing": "It is your life and through this thing ye shall prolong your days."
In the foregoing verses Moses is describing events which occurred at the destruction of Atlantis, when the "Chosen People" were led out of the "waste howling wilderness" by an Archangel, called in the Bible the Angel of the Lord (Michael). All the seemingly anthropomorphic references to Deity in the Old Testament have reference to the Archangelic Race Spirit rather than to Godhead Itself; but the Angel of the Lord, the Archangel Michael, is identified with the Law and personifies it, because he is its true representative. To the spiritual vision of the patriarchs, Michael was no mere abstraction, but a living Identity with whom they held communion and whose leadership they accepted.
We observe in the above that a distinction is made between the Most High and the Lord. "When the Most High divided the nations, the Lord's portion was Israel." This is a valuable clue to the Archangelic tradition of the Old Testament. It is still clearer in the Septuagint, where we read: "When the Most High divided the nations, when he dispersed the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the Angels of God; And the Lord's portion was his people Jacob, and Israel the cord of his inheritance."
This division of the sons of Adam took place in Atlantis. In that remote period of the Earth's history the glorious Archangel Michael drew to himself those Egos qualified to become the seed for the new or Fifth Epoch race then to be developed. These, as we have seen, were the Original Semites, the common ancestors of various post-Atlantean races of today. Michael found his people in the "waste howling wilderness," and he led them about, he instructed them, he kept them as the apple of his eye. Like a mother eagle bearing her young birds on her powerful wings, so Michael the Archangel bore the Israelites on his wings of fire, transporting them from the dangers of doomed Atlantis to a place of safety in the Gobi Desert, where the Fifth Epoch, post-Atlantean race came into being.
All this had life and meaning for Moses. By powers unfolded in Initiation he could read in the Memory of Nature, for it is said: "Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations." The ability to read in the Cosmic Records has reference to powers belonging to that state of consciousness in which an Initiate transcends concepts of time and space, and enters into the Eternal Now, where the past is still a present reality.
Therefore, the uneven ways of human life had not blinded Moses to the even ways of God. His life was not centered in the fluctuating conditions of personality, but in the invariability of the eternally abiding spirit. It was of the ever-present, guiding principle personified in Michael that he affirmed with certitude: "He is the Rock, his work is perfect; for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.."
Those who live in accord with cosmic law "suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock." The rock here spoken of is none other than the Philosopher's Stone. It is the power that taps the high sources of Good and draws therefrom celestial wisdom (honey) and divine love and tenderness (oil). One in whom these qualities and powers are manifest is made to "ride on the high places of the earth" and to "eat the increase of the fields."
Jeshurun is a name for Israel. Israel was the name specially given to the ten tribes first carried away into captivity. In their prosperity they forgot their guiding principle and His representative, the Archangel Michael, "the Angel of the Lord." Among esoteric and metaphysical students today we find a similar reaction. When suffering afflicts their bodies and sorrow their minds they cling to the Law (Truth); but with the return of health and prosperity they "wax fat," and kick, and forget the Rock of their salvation, with the result that they enter upon a cycle of evil that ultimately brings afflictions upon them once more.
All of the afflictions — disease, sickness, famine, sorrow — described in the above passage are the results of infringements of cosmic law. In their ignorance, the unregenerate seek to escape from the law in some manner, but the Race Spirit, whose mission it is to bring a certain racial ideal into physical manifestation, will not allow infringement to pass uncorrected. The process of correction must always involve suffering, however tender and loving the Archangelic Leader may be, since the personal will of the individual is in conflict with the harmonious ideal of the race. This is true whether we consider the word "race" in its narrow or its broad sense.
Moses, an Initiate, from the depths of his compassion exclaims,
Deuteronomy 32:32,33
For their vine is the vine of Sodom,
And of the fields of Gomorrah:
Their grapes are grapes of gall,
Their clusters are bitter:
Their wine is the poison of dragons,
And the cruel venom of asps.
The vine of Sodom and the field of Gomorrah represent, esoterically, the two poles of spirit within the body of man which, having "fallen" out of balance, become the source of untold mischief. The feminine pole or love principle "fell," becoming "submerged" (Sodom) in the passionate nature, by whose fires this principle may be destroyed. It was allowed to descend to such disastrous depths in Sodom, with the result that fire from heaven fell upon the city to the utter destruction of its people.
In the remaining verses of his Song (Deuteronomy 32:34-44), Moses directs his vision into a future that has now become the present. The chaos and conflict, the sorrow and suffering, that all the world is experiencing today, he saw as the inevitable consequence of the road humanity was traveling. He looked upon cosmic law to which belonged "vengeance and recompense." He saw the "foot" of humanity "slide in due time; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste."
These words are peculiarly applicable to this time of reckoning when, on the one hand, the forces of evil are rampant and, on the other, the forces of idealism rise to unparalleled heights. The latter share in the lofty vision of Moses; the former are "sliding" toward the doom he so graphically described.
But now as then there is a Promised Land for those who remain faithful, a new civilization, dedicated to peace and plenty, of soul as well as body, and founded on Truth. Of this the Lord speaks through Moses:
It was in the assurance of this transcendent truth that Moses calmly ascended the heights of Mount Pisgah (Nebo) to pass into the great silence and there await the final event of his earthly career. He was, in this phase of his development, attuned to the cosmic soul song: "I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live forever."
It is in such assurance of the victory of Truth over error that modern neophytes may calmly pursue their career of service to humanity, singing with Moses,
— Corinne Heline
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