By Basile LeChivalier

It is a sad fact that the vast majority of those who are currently pursuing a spiritual—as opposed to religious!—path, are doing so essentially from an intellectual point of view. Few and rare indeed are they who understand that “spirituality” is a WAY OF LIFE, which requires one to be in constant communion with the Divine Within, that Presence with which we, as aspirants, must each develop a personal relationship. Interestingly, there are those who have chosen to clothe this Divine Presence in purely human terms, and as such, have named it God, an image which, in popular religious movements, one is required to accept without question and to which one must also submit.

The Mystic, on the other hand, contends that “GOD”, the Divine Source of all that is, is in essence unknowable. How then, is one expected to “KNOW GOD” or, as required of members of the OSTI, to honor one’s commitment to “GOD FIRST SERVED”?

As a Templar Organization, CIRCES/TRI/OSTI is very much tied to the Christian Tradition in its pristine—Gnostic?—expression. By this is meant that rather than submitting to dogma, as Templars we are each required to consider Jesus, later known as The Christ, as an “Exemplar” rather than as a “Savior”, who died to wash away our sins! In other words, as Templars, in our quest to incarnate the Christ Consciousness, we are required to follow the example as laid out by the life of Jesus. “How is this incarnation of the Christ Consciousness to be accomplished”, you ask! The answer to this fundamental question may be found in the words of the Master Jesus himself: Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven…In order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven ye must become as little children.

Become as little children?!?!?! For the vast majority of us, “becoming as a little child” is the last thing in the world we want to do! Why? Because childhood for far too many of us was a time punctuated with trauma, hurts, fear, anger, unresolved issues! In other words, for far too many of us, childhood is the last place we want to visit. In fact, if the truth be known, for the overwhelming majority of human beings, childhood is the period during which we built that Tower of Isolation and Defensiveness against the slings and arrows of life. That Tower of Isolation and Defensiveness is what we call our personality—not to be confused with character—behind which we hide our true nature and from behind which we launch attacks at anything and anyone that appears to remind us of the circumstances, which led to the creation of our Tower of Isolation and Defensiveness in the first place. But the sad fact is that until we gather up the Courage to face our fears; the Honesty to acknowledge our vulnerabilities; the Integrity to own up to our own misdeeds; the Vigilance to be aware of our own shortcomings; the Altruism to forgive ourselves, those who may have done us harm, as well as others for their shortcomings; the Loyalty to our own highest ideals; the Rigor to stay the course and the Yearning to give birth to the Christ Consciousness, which reposes within us, we will, consciously or otherwise, forever consider “spirituality” to be but an intellectual pursuit. In other words, an important prerequisite for giving birth to the Christ Consciousness is the conscious development of an inner state of CHIVALRY, a state referred to metaphorically as the presence of the Celestial Virgin. Indeed, it is within this inner state of CHIVALRY, this state of the Celestial Virgin, that the Christ Consciousness first begins to stir and make its kinetic presence felt in the consciousness of the aspirant.

Interestingly, the challenge with “spirituality” as an intellectual pursuit is that under such conditions we too often end up betraying our own innate idealism, with the result that we generate within ourselves an unconscious sense of guilt, a condition, which, to our chagrin, engenders certain events in our lives, which we then promptly, defensively misinterpret, but which, in reality, are intended to bring to our attention the fact that we are being unfaithful to the ideals we profess. So what happens if and when we do create within ourselves that inner state of CHIVALRY?

On the evidence of it all, at least as presented by those who have, and by those who are currently attempting to “walk the walk”, to use a popular colloquialism, one of the first things that occurs is that one begins to be confronted by events, which call forth into outer, objective consciousness, many of the emotions and reactions, which one has long buried in the basement of one’s Tower of Isolation. For example, if as a child one decided that a certain behavior was antithetical to his or her preferred conscious self-image, then suddenly one finds oneself indulging in that very same behavior—sometimes in dreams—under conditions often identical to those under which, during childhood, one had condemned the behavior in question. Of course, there are those who would suggest that such occurrences are nothing other than evidence that one is being tempted by the Devil, by things of the past. But another way of looking at the “birth” of such “unacceptable” behaviors in one’s life is that they are popping up at this juncture in one’s quest precisely because over the years one has invested them with such enormous amounts of energy, and now that one has decided to “lower the barriers”, so to speak, one is being presented with the opportunity to diffuse these previously unconscious time-bombs in order that the newly liberated energy may now be used constructively in the interest of creating one’s inner state of CHIVALRY.

In addition to these “unexpected” and “unpleasant” events, there is, in addition, the fact that as one begins to become more and more in tune with one’s innate Christ Consciousness, many of those who one considers to be “friends” and “colleagues” begin to turn against him or her. Such a situation is analogous to what occurred in the original Pythagorean Schools, when at a certain point in the progress of the aspirant, his friends and colleagues would turn against him. The intent was, of course, to determine how “psychologically transparent” the aspirant had become, because it is only under such inner conditions of CHIVALRY, referred to as “psychological transparency”, that one is assured of the imminent presence of the Celestial Virgin through whom the Christ Consciousness will be born. Without Judas there could be no Christ!

In this regard, recent and not-so-recent events have all conspired to convince those responsible for the spiritual well-being of CIRCES/TRI/OSTI that the course upon which we have embarked is one which is most conducive to assisting the member in his or her quest to give birth to the Christ Consciousness. And because it is the rare individual indeed who will enjoy a certain measure of success in this undertaking, it is to be expected that membership in CIRCES/TRI/OSTI will always be rather limited. Such rare individuals soon come to understand that one’s strengths are but opportunities to act in the most constructive ways possible, while one’s weaknesses or vulnerabilities are likewise opportunities, permitting an appeal to the infinite goodness and creativity within us all, for inspiration to act constructively in the interest of the greater good. Such an inner understanding is indeed worthy of a Templar for it is indeed evidence of CHIVALRY in action!