In Much Wisdom Is Much Grief

On what the Tree of Life gives, and what it takes away "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Ecclesiastes 1:18 A moment comes to everyone who walks this path long enough, and nobody warns you about it beforehand. You are reading, the Zohar , say, or Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah , or the dog-eared copy of Crowley's 777 that has followed you through three apartments, and something clicks. A pattern rises out of the chaos of symbols and numbers, and for a split second the universe makes perfect, terrible sense, and then you wish it did not, though by then it is too late to choose. The Tree first became real to me on a Tuesday afternoon in late summer. It stopped being an abstract diagram and became a map of reality I could see operating everywhere, the Sephiroth no longer pretty circles with Hebrew names but living forces, currents of divine energy running through everything around me, through me, and through t...

Ronnel D. Chua·

The Key That Was Taken

Jesus, the Kabbalah of Entering, and the Orchard of Pardes Luke records a sentence that many readers pass over on the way to something else. Jesus is at table in a Pharisee's house (Luke 11:37), speaking to the nomikoi , the lawyers whose trade was the interpretation of Torah, and the King James Version gives his words this way: "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52). The verse usually gets filed as a rebuke, one more entry in the long ledger of Jesus quarrelling with religious authorities, and the reader moves on to the next pericope without much thought. The accusation, though, is oddly concrete. He charges the lawyers with removing an object, a key, and with failing to perform an action, entering, and the Greek presses the second charge by using the same verb, eiserchomai , twice inside one clause, once for what the lawyers refused to do and once for...

Ronnel D. Chua·

The Scholar and the Seer

Could Rizal and Blavatsky Have Met? I. Two Lodgers in London In the summer of 1888 two of the more remarkable minds of the century were living a few miles apart in London. One was José Rizal, the twenty-seven-year-old Filipino physician, novelist, and reformer, whose Noli Me Tángere had been published in Berlin the year before and had made him a marked man in the eyes of the Spanish friars. The other was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, fifty-seven, Russian-born, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who was finishing the book she regarded as her life's work. No record shows that they ever met, and the question this essay asks is whether they could have, and what the asking teaches. Rizal arrived in London in late May 1888 and took lodgings with the Beckett family at 37 Chalcot Crescent, a curving terrace of houses at the foot of Primrose Hill. He had come with a single purpose. Spanish accounts of the Philippines before the conquest described its people as barbarians whom Spain h...

Ronnel D. Chua·

Past the White House

A Sunday walk down Buray Avenue, September 12, 2021 A little past one on a Sunday afternoon I decided to walk home, under a sun that kept losing its nerve, ducking behind thick dark clouds and then peeking out again like Peter Pan at a nursery window. My way took me past the White House where the Divine Master once lived. The house has grown old and largely untended, and the few patches and improvements someone began on it in recent years now lie fallow and unfinished, as though the workers stepped out for lunch and the lunch lasted several seasons. Walking by, I wished it had been preserved the way the Rizal house in Calamba has been preserved, with a gate people could pass through and rooms they could stand in. From the road I could see its side, the outer walls worn by weather and by the slower erosion of years. If walls could speak, or could keep the voices and whispers that passed through them long ago, what a joy it would be to put an ear against them and listen backward throug...

Ronnel D. Chua·

RA: The Master Universe

How a Self-Created Sun God Ruled Egypt, and Why We Still Look for Him in the Sky I. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow "I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and I have the power to be born a second time," says the speaker of a spell in the Egyptian Book of the Dead , in E. A. Wallis Budge's translation of 1895; "I am the divine hidden Soul who createth the gods." The voice belongs to the dead person who hopes to rise like the sun, and the boast is borrowed from the sun himself, from Ra, the god who died every evening and was born again every dawn. Ra stood near the center of Egyptian religion for something close to three thousand years, from the Old Kingdom, when the kings of the Fourth Dynasty began to call themselves "Son of Ra" and those of the Fifth built sun temples to him, down to the Roman period, when his priests at Heliopolis still kept his rites. He was more than the visible sun. He was the power behind life, the king of the gods, and the keeper ...

Ronnel D. Chua·

The Secret Doctrine of the Spiritual Division

Immortality, the Divine Master, and the long-lived ones "Ako ang nag-tago sa walay pagtago, ug ako ang nagtug-an sa walay pagtug-an. Ang akong guitaguan guitug-an, guitug-an ug akong guisulti ang akong guitug-an, managkauban pa sila." Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion, Main Office, San Jose, Dinagat, December 9, 1970 Anyone who reads through the messages of the early leaders of the PBMA notices something within the first few pages: the older the message, the more teaching is packed into it. Those early texts carry an urgency that later documents often lose, as though the speakers knew the audience in front of them would not always be there to hear. Working through the preserved materials recently, I came upon a piece of doctrine that deserves careful examination, because it lies close to the center of what the Spiritual Division claimed to be. Lolo Adriano's Message of 1978 The message that opened the question came from General Adriano dela Concepcion, known in the organ...

Ronnel D. Chua·

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