Dean said:
>
And finally, someone who is posting appropriately to me.
<

Chris:
I recognise a certain pattern in what you say, which concurs with my own
experience.

Dean:
>
It's usually irritating when others attempt to teach and post not knowing
anything about where I am at or what's going on.
<

Chris:
It's a horrendous fate we all share, stumbling around in the darkness of the
prison, trying to work out where that tiny chink of light is coming from.
Everyone sees it differently, depending on their own personal experiences.

Dean:
>
So many claim to seek but their motivation is weak and they are deceived.
<

Chris:
There are two tools that we can use to free ourselves, once we first realise
that we are in a prison. One is the desire for the truth, whatever the cost to
ourselves. And the other is the ability to detect the difference between truth
and lies, the magical ability to detect the chink of light in the darkness.
Without those two things, we are going to stay locked up.

It is crucial that we never rely on what anybody else tells us: everything must
be tested against that magical ability. It's a quality that Harry Potter
embodies: the Rosicrucian term for it is the new soul. The Bible refers to it,
too, saying that we should test the spirits, to see that they are of God, i.e.
of the one Truth. If we keep using that magical ability, it gets stronger and
stronger.

We all have a weapon inside us, that we use to cut away the lies from our being.
This is courage. In Harry Potter courage is the quality of the House of
Gryffindor, to which Harry belongs, and the weapon is represented in the books
by the sword of Godric Gryffindor, which comes to true Gryffindors at the moment
when they really need it. It is the sword that Harry uses to kill the Basilisk
in Book 2, which Ron uses on the locket horcrux and Neville uses to kill the
snake horcrux in Book 7. In the Bible it is called the two-edged sword.

Every time Jesus went into the temple, he came up against a bunch of Pharisees.
Harry is continually finding people who support Voldemorts aims, are Death
Eaters in disguise or are under one of Voldemort's spells and therefore
controlled by him. Whenever we look inside ourselves (we are the temple) we find
lies trying to masquerade as truth. We need to face them, unmask them, and that
way we gradually clean ourselves up.

As we unmask the lies, the truth begins to get stonger within us. We start to
understand what is going on.

Dean:
>
I had no idea J.K Rowling had this ability. For a long time I had her in my mind
as just another story writer in the crowd. I had this pre-conceived vague idea
that she was not an author I could count on for anything of real importance.
<

Chris:
That's just what I thought. It's why I didn't read the books for years.

Dean:
>
But apparantly, this idea may turn out to be totally false. ... But it seems she
has something magical that I may be missing. And that she has more knowledge
than I suspect?
<

Chris:
Incredible, isn't it? She has put layer upon layer of alchemical symbolism into
the books, in large parts of it scarcely a sentence goes by without a symbolic
meaning. It has been garnered from a huge number of cultures and periods of
history, and some of it is incredibly obscure and would be exceedingly difficult
for a layman to obtain. And she hasn't just stuck it all over the story like
icing on a cake, the story itself is crafted of layers of alchemy, they're part
of the fabric. And alchemy is not just a random collection of symbols, it is a
coherent pattern that you experience systematically as you go through the
process of purifying yourself, of liberating yourself. How do you do what she
has done, without understanding the meaning of it in terms of your direct
experience? Her instinct for the right symbol is spot on.

Dean:
>
If it wasn't for the movies. I would be even less interested in reading the
books.
<

Chris:
It took me a long time to realise what the books were about. When I did, it hit
me like a sledgehammer. But even then it took more than a year of diligent
searching before I started understanding the patterns in it, and beginning to
realise why it had such a strong effect on me. I find it hard to imagine how one
would recognise it from the films.

This latest film, though, may be an exception: the filmmakers pruned it right
down to essentials. I thought it portrayed Harry's possession by Voldemort very
well. If anyone is capable of realising that they have evil within themselves,
then the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film should help them
recognise it, and may start them off on the journey of searching it out to
understand and defeat it.

Our habit is to assume that any evil we come across belongs to someone else, we
project it outside of ourselves, because we don't want to recognise that the
thought about it came out of ourselves. Because we like to think of ourselves as
'good', as 'right'. So most of what we see as 'bad' or 'wrong', we prefer to
attribute to someone else. If we can face the truth and look inside, we can see
where the thought came from. And then we start realising there isn't just one
'us'. Inside us, apart from our Hermione intelligence, our Ron personality and
our courageous Harry heart, we have Fudge, who prefers lies to truth because
they make him feel better about himself, Peter Pettigrew, who wants what's good
for him no matter what the cost to anyone else, and a whole host of other
characters of many shades between black and white, and amongst them Death
Eaters, and Voldemort, the snake-like power, who is the original source of all
the trouble.

Once we start listening to the voices inside ourselves, all clamouring with
eachother to get their conflicting viewpoints across, we can start to see what
the reason for the flaw in the logic is.

If we give up desiring things for ourselves, some of the voices fade and
disappear.

In the empty space that this leaves, within us, the Truth starts to appear.

Dean:
>
And a wealth of information I might have foolishly passed over from her stories.
... I was not searching in anything fictional. Until I started to pick up on the
symbolic nature of things.
<

Chris:
Jo is sowing seeds with her story. People may not understand it now, but at some
point in the future something may click inside them, a tiny light of recognition
will come on, and they'll grasp the thread of the story that they maybe read
many years ago when they were a child, start unravelling it and see where it
leads them. And it will eventually lead to gold, the gold of the Spirit.


Dean:
>
That was very interesting. Is there any particular reason for the
fall, and that we can't remember the liberated state where we
fell from? I don't understand how the fall could have happened.
<

Chris:
Well, Hans has had a go at answering you. If this question seems to you very
important, then I would suggest you pursue it until you know with absolute
certainty what the answer is.

Dean:
>
But something in my mind knows that this is valuable information.
<

Chris:
Trust your instinct, it's almost always right, as Lupin says to Harry in Book 7.
It's going to prove the most valuable thing you have.


And I have a question for you too. You mention that you are experiencing magic.
How do you know what magic is, how do you recognise it, and how is it affecting
your life? I would love to hear the full and true answer to that, either
privately, or better still, on the list ...?


Chris