Saturday, March 18th, at the Esoterika Masonic Lodge, 10636 SE Main Street, Milwaukie, OR 97222

The ancient Arabic name for Egypt was “Khemet” or “The Black Land”. The western continuation of the Egyptian magical arts was called “Al-Khemet” meaning from the Black Land. This show explores the many modern incarnations of the ancient science of perfection and the transformation of the “materia prima” of the Alchemists. From Alchemy to Tarot, and the many esoteric and mystical societies existing today, they explore the hidden thread that connects modern and ancient magic.

pre-register on the Rosicrucian Community site.  https://rosicruciancommunity.org/

2. All of Creation is permeated by a Universal Soul that evolves toward the perfection of its own nature.

A universal soul or rational principle, meaning mind, is everywhere present. In man it is what is called soul, the Stoics declared. In matter it is the natural laws by which it manifests.

Excerpt from Mental Alchemy by Imperator Ralph M. Lewis

Traditional mysticism may be reduced to these fundamental principles: the soul is the spiritual self of man; the soul is part of a
universal soul, a soul which permeates the entire universe. That soul is God. The material world and the physical body are the negative side of this positive, absolute soul, or God, which permeates the universe—a sort of imperfection, a falling off from the goodness; and when the soul is embodied in a physical form or body, man as a unity of both soul and body is not perfect. The body, the material, must be brought into harmony with the soul, the immaterial. Man will be confined to a body, in various lives, as long as he permits the temptations, the desires and appetites to dominate his nature. He must struggle to overcome them, to suppress them, to give himself over entirely to those spiritual urges within his own nature; these urges are the dictates of conscience which finds its expression in ethical, moral, and religious conduct.

Excerpt from The Santuary of Self by Imperator Ralph M. Lewis

Dear Fraters and Sorors,

Enneadic Star Pronaos would like you to know that we have found an extremely suitable meeting place in Portland, and propose that we move from meetings at Kenton Lodge, to meetings at Parkrose Lodge.  To that effect, we’ll have a short and focused business meeting by Zoom (and you can call in if you don’t do Zoom) on November 26th, at 3 pm.  

We have six reasons for this proposed move.  

1. The management of Kenton Lodge is difficult to contact, by phone, text or email and they have a history of making significant changes without informing us.
2. In 2020, they changed the building locks, and we were lucky that we had shown up way early to set up for a special event, and they could and did quickly make and deliver new keys to us.
3. Since 2020, the building has not been well maintained; we came to one meeting to find that they had not cleaned up the dining hall after themselves; they had to install powerful fans for a week to get the cigar smell out of the building; and the broken panel of glass in the front door that was broken in 2021 still has not been replaced.  Also, the custodians of the building were not very diligent.  Also, the elevator that our disabled members relied on to get to the top floors went out of service and has not been repaired.
4. In 2022, they moved items from our locked storage room without telling us they had done so, and it took us a week to find out what they had done with our materials.  
5. We contacted them in September about updating our lease and storing our items and they promised to have new leases for us soon.  In November we contacted them again for the leases and heard nothing.  Finally, after we found a new location, their building manager contacted us saying they had just now found new lease forms and were going to send them to us.  
6. The new location (Parkrose Lodge) charges half as much per meeting and would store our materials for free.  The Masons have been upgrading the building with new kitchen fixtures and appliances, adding wheelchair ramps in two locations, and it has ample space for our social events.   It is easily accessible by car, light rail and bus, and has ample on-street and off-street parking.  It has a working stair chair lift to move our disabled members upstairs to the temple.  And last but not least, the management is easy to contact and work with.

For these reasons, your officers urge you to support this proposed move.

You can ask us further questions at the zoom meeting. 

Helpful links

1. Divinity is the Universal Intelligence that thought, manifested, and animated all Creation according to unchanging perfect laws.

Mind and consciousness can never be separated. Where there is no consciousness, there is no mind. But even where certain qualities of mind do not exist, there yet can be mind. An organism, for example, may lack ego construct, that is, the awareness of self, and yet have mind. Where any characteristic of consciousness exists, there is an aspect of mind. If we reduce consciousness to the simplest function of which we have knowledge, we still find that quality of responsivity to which we have referred. It can be postulated that any attribute of consciousness is representative of mind. The extent of the mind may vary, of course, with the development of the organism. It is, then, a corollary that mind and consciousness are synonymous.

The question immediately before us is whether this hypothesis can be applied to Absolute Reality; is it also mind? The highest function of human mind is purpose. Such requires the attributes of reason, imagination and will, all of which are a higher order of the mental processes. Is, then, the Absolute purposeful, as theism and pantheism, for example, would have us believe? The end of purpose or its objective is always external to man. It is not entirely of him. Further, what a thing does by the necessity of its nature as an immanent quality is not purpose. The roots of plants will reach for water. The leaves of plants will turn toward the sun. But these are not examples of purposeful causes in their true sense. The motivation is part of the inherent nature of plants. The chemical elements and vitality which plants seek in the water and sunlight are already of the vital force, the essential quality, of their being. What a thing has to do in order to be is not real purpose. It is an automatism, whether there is an awareness of the act or not.

Purpose must manifest a self-consciousness to the extent that the ego appears deficient or lacking in some factor or condition that would heighten its satisfaction. It is then obvious that, where there is purpose and its related values, there must be a duality of the function of consciousness; there must be a realization of the ego and also an awareness of something seemingly apart from it. In purpose we see that the ego (the self) is endeavoring to expand itself by accretion. This process of assimilation by the ego takes from its environment that which it feels—or imagines—it needs or desires.

Excerpts above from The Conscious Interlude by Imperator Ralph M. Lewis

Briefly, the mystic is one who aspires to a personal union, or oneness, with the Absolute. This Absolute he may call either God, Cosmic, Universal Mind, Supreme Being, and so on. The acme of mystical attainment is Cosmic Consciousness. If we transpose the two words as consciousness of the Cosmic we then have a better understanding of the term. Simply, it consists of man having a consciousness of the Cosmic, the One of which all reality consists.
Excerpt from Mental Alchemy by Imperator Ralph M. Lewis