Hi I’m Mel Van Dusen and welcome to the show you know I think many of us can remember as children some defining moment where some incident happened that took our lives in a different direction and for me one of those defining moments was when I was in the fourth grade and
Mrs. Duckworth my teacher would have a lottery every so often and lucky children would go to some interesting event and for me when I was chosen one time we got to go to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and San Jose and seeing the mummies there and going through the
Tomb and looking through at all these artifacts and really learning about an ancient mystical system I remember that it seemed kind of similar to what I had learned in the church but not really but anyway that was the beginning of a process for me whereby I looked for the
Commonality in the various religions and philosophies and today we have with us here who better to explain this but the president and the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians Julie Scott Julie welcome to the show Thank You Mel yeah Julie how would you describe the Rosicrucian order to
Someone who had never heard of it the Rosicrucian order is a philosophical and educational organization it’s not a religion and members are all around the world men and women who study natural laws in order to live in harmony with them and what do you mean by natural laws
Well natural laws are things such as cycles or understanding the growth patterns or understanding how things work in nature so that we can apply it in our own lives I imagine when people look at Rosicrucian Park I think the museum is the only museum in the world with egyptian-style
Architecture it is yeah yeah they look at all these strange images and they wonder you know what in the world is going on in there so what is the greatest misunderstanding that people have about the Rosicrucian order well typically I think people misunderstand and believe that the
Rosicrucian order is a religion which it is not we encouraged Rosicrucians to participate in whatever religion they choose to or not and I think that people also misunderstand anything that’s called mysterious or mystical because it may seem a little bit spooky or unusual when really again these are just natural
Laws that people can understand and then apply in their lives I checked out your website and there’s a Rosicrucian timeline and help me to understand this but on the timeline there is atlantis dynastic Egypt the Essenes the Orphic mysteries the Pythagorean school hallucis the ISIS mysteries Kabbalah Mithraic mysteries Hermeticism
Gnosticism Neoplatonism alchemy the Templars and the Sofia tradition what is the common thread that holds all these different traditions together as it comes down to us today as the Rosicrucian order well this is a tradition that’s been perpetuated over the millennia and it started thousands of years ago when people had a much
Closer relationship with nature and understood things in a different way than we do now and people gave their lives to perpetuate this wisdom sometimes these various traditions that you just mentioned had to go underground in order to protect themselves yet there were always individuals who perpetuated this
Wisdom and allowed it to be passed on and never lost uh-huh give us an example of an ancient mystery religion and how that helped the people at the time well these are in various traditions there’s the ancient Egyptian traditions is an example of that well there were initiations that took
Place in ancient Egypt and these presented objective lessons of laws that show that we’re really connected with each other and even more than that that we have a connection with the divine the Greeks did the same thing in the Eleusinian mysteries and at the tradition at Delfy now I don’t want to
Suggest that anyone knows exactly what took place in their initiations the these ancient traditions usually required that the participants promised not to share right this the secrets of the initiation however we are familiar with the traditions and with their philosophy and can understand from that mmm-hmm how do you understand the word
Divine you use that word before what does that word mean to you well the divine is that spark that exists within us that is a piece or an aspect of whatever the great mystery of the universe is some people call it God or the cosmic it’s Rosicrucians
Never define God or the divine it’s it’s understanding that there is a power that’s greater than we are individually and with which we can feel connected now here between us we have this figure rather than let him just languish there throughout the interview why don’t you introduce him well this is a very
Important philosopher not just in the Rosicrucian tradition actually to practically everyone in Western civilization this is Pythagoras and he began the Pythagorean school centuries before our era and these were mystics who were so reverent of the divine or the cosmic or the natural laws around them that they spent their entire lives
Studying them they studied laws and relationships for example the relationship between music and mathematics and this was really the beginning of the scientific inquiry so science began in Western civilization as we know it with the Pythagorean school and these were mystics who sought to understand science in order to feel
Closer with the divine so they brought science and mysticism together as they could at the time absolutely yeah I think this is a good time to give people for watching an idea we haven’t been to the Rosicrucian park here in San Jose and just an idea of the park itself
And there’s some things I’d like you to comment on I think at the very beginning there is the entryway into the park on one side of it there is a scale and I’d like you to tell us what the symbolism of that is so if we could see that
Cutaway shut up please this is one of the entrances to a Rosicrucian park this is the scale of judgement where you see the feather of truth weighed against the heart to make sure that you’ve lived a good life you’d face this at the end of
Your life in a tomb in ancient Egypt so here we go into a Rosicrucian park which we began almost 80 years ago this is the front of our science building that’s in the center of Rosicrucian Park with our fountain of waters this is the outdoor shrine in which are interred the ashes
Of the founder of our organization H Spencer Louis and here is the grand temple of the Rosicrucian order members meet here regularly Julie the park is beautiful we saw just a few things there that that I could get on the camera but there are magnificent buildings and expanses of
Areas and really grand buildings I encourage people go to the park and check it out it’s a beautiful place thank you very much yeah do you spend much time there I do spend a lot of time there I purposely move close to a Rosicrucian Park it’s in a beautiful
Neighborhood and our grounds are are tenderly cared for so yeah I enjoy spending time there even in my off time right and we’re in the heart of Silicon Valley here have you found that that many people think that mysticism is hostile towards science and vice versa well it depends on the individual
However I know a lot of scientists there are a lot of Rosicrucians who are hardcore scientists who just keep going deeper and deeper until you have no choice but to reach the mystical and certainly a lot of mystics who find the science of the world around us quite fascinating as well
Uh-huh and you have a progression of courses that you offer and I think and it starts out with such subjects as the illusory nature of time and space and meditation it goes on to free will karma and reincarnation and by the end of this program what might a person expect well
The Rosicrucians of centuries ago were alchemists and these were people who didn’t just turn lead into gold they were they they used alchemy as an allegory for for their refining their qualities from the more dense to the more refined in themselves in themselves now this was personal transformation so
The metals were a metaphor for something that was within right right yes and so the idea is that as you’re exposed to new ideas to more than just the usual ways of leaving that you develop abilities that you may not have had before that you open your mind to other ideas to other
Cultures and this adds not only to our personal growth but also to understanding others and tolerance of other cultures mm-hmm how has being with the order enriched your life well it’s enriched my life and in so many ways first of all I’ve met some fascinating people been introduced to
Just such interesting topics and it’s done a lot for me personally in understanding and being educated in topics that I just hadn’t been exposed to before for example well developing my intuition and understanding simple things like physiology and biology as well as probably most especially understanding the wisdom of the Ancients
And how this can be applied today can you give me one example about how one can improve their intuition that’s not secret yeah that’s right secret well there are very simple techniques of you can do something such as when the phone rings pause and see if you can intuit
Who it is that’s calling you and you start with very simple exercises like this that eventually we reintroduce all the topics that are Rosicrucian studies in the first 15 months of the lessons and then we go back and address them in a spiral coming at them from different
Perspectives over many years of study so that one wasn’t a secret okay good now you’re you know it was only after you agreed to be on the show that I found out that you were the Grand Master and that kind of took me aback do you ever
Wake up in the morning and think to yourself my god I’m the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians well I know what it means to be the Grand Master and it means that I’m the lead ritualistic officer so I am a Rosicrucian student like every other Rosicrucian we don’t
Have a guru in our organization I’m earning like everyone else so I understand completely what it means to have that title and if anything it it may mean that I’m the most humble student of all I’m learning a lot you are you know when I first met you I
Thought my god this is someone that I could really relax with there’s no pretense here well thank you this is no overwhelming overpowering energy that was going to blow me away I find you just tremendously open and accessible and you know completely without pretense
What do you do to do this how do you manage this and and yet you know just be a kind of like a someone you find it easy to talk with on the street well you’re very kind thank you Mel this is part of the Rosicrucian tradition and
It’s I mentioned the ancient Greeks one important tradition in Greece was Delfy and you probably know the injunction their vessel to know thyself right and it’s you know where we all have this divine spark within us we all have the potential for anything everybody’s learning so it’s just understanding that
We all have an opportunity to relate to others to participate and and offer something in the world okay I want to be blunt when I go when I first went to the museum as a kid and I saw these mummies hmm I was enormous ly fascinated and by
The tomb why is that why are people so fascinated by these things well you’re right that Egypt has has had this allure for for millennia and certainly since the 1920s I think it’s because Egypt never reveals all her secrets there’s always still some secret that’s still
Left to be discovered and this is from everything Egypt covers everything up with the sand with you know the Sphinx was covered with sand up to here at one point so it’s understanding that there’s more than meets the eye that these symbols mean more than they may appear to mean
Huh I think this is a perfect point to uncover the sands from ancient Egypt a bit mm-hm and do another shot this time of the museum we had some very interesting things for you to see in this museum so here we go now this is the front of the museum okay the
Beautiful place we’re zooming in on the entry there anything you’d like to say well this is modeled after the temple of Amun at Karnak and it’s a strong strong thank you thank you master collection the statue that you see behind me here is one of the rarest pieces in the
Museum collection so statue of Cleopatra the seventh the famous Cleopatra it’s actually one of only seven remaining statues of Cleopatra in the entire world here we have the mummified head of an Ibis bull now the APIs bull was believed to be the living incarnation of the God the top
And lived in the town of Memphis and when one APIs bull died he was mummified just like the king would be in the form of a god and the priests would search the country for the new APIs bull when he was found would be brought to the
Palace to live as the new APIs bull behind me we have two of the most beautiful coffins in the museum collection they’re from the say I pureed in Egypt over here we have the coffin of loser manu and beside him is the coffin of his first cousin the lady to a washer
Read both of them were from the very powerful the Sun wood family and thieves and it’s within the coffin of Buser manu that we found the museum’s unwrapped Egyptian mummy The Mummy that you see before you is one of the four mummies we have on display here at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum
Now as you can see this mummy has been completely unwrapped however we did not do this to him he came to the museum this way and as a result we don’t know his name were not sure if his occupation and we can only guess about when he may have
Lived now he arrived at the museum in the coffin of Lucerne Montu however we believe that it is most probably not him today can you explain to us what this is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is also home to a full-scale replica rock-cut tomb now the late 1930s as well as the 1960s
The Rosicrucian order sponsored a number of camera expeditions to Egypt an area comp and his son now in many asan you have a number of tombs of the nobles and they photographed about 40 different tombs of those 15 we’re in very good condition so took the most pictures of
Those 15 brought them back to the museum and use those images to create the tomb that you see here could I go in absolutely following this is the offering chamber in Iraq Raqqa – now the primary purpose of the offering chamber was to provide a place with a
The disease could come to bring food every day in this way the deceased would never ever ever have to worry about starving in the afterlife here we have a sous table statue and the primary purpose of the sir table statue would be to provide a place where the deceased could look
Out and make sure that everyone was bringing him the proper amount of food so that he would be able to eat in the afterlife and if you follow me down here we can go down into the burial chamber so we’re now down in the burial chamber of our replica rock-cut tomb and over
Here on this wall you can see the images that are diseases painted all this future service performing a tasks that he’s going to have in a sign in the next life something you won’t have to do any work himself and if you come over here
On this wall you can see our team owner performing one of his favorite sports hunting so you take these burgers in his hand shake them until it noise which would stir up the rest of these wild birds if you would take his hunting stick and throw it out and if
You happen to knock one on the sky his hunting cat would go get it now in the middle of this tune we have our sarcophagus now this type of sarcophagus would have been reserved for the Pharaoh someone can receive it as a gift from the Pharaoh or for the APUs full and as
You can see they’re very large and they would have been buried because they didn’t think that two members would be able to get into them as easily but as you can see they’ve got Stephen Armstrong is the curator of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Stephen Armstrong mr. Armstrong thank you so
Much for inviting me here it’s been wonderful well we’ve enjoyed your visit very much we’re happy you’re able to be with us if mr. Armstrong I see all these wonderful things which are relevant and significant with symbolism how are the artifacts here relevant to your philosophy of life today well for me to
Realize that people 5,000 years ago loved life soggy mortality and enjoyed their families and friends just as we do today really gives me a sense of the commonality of humanity across all of time and space and I think in particular the yearning for transcendence the yearning for spirituality is something
That is so important to us today especially as we’re surrounded by technology which of course makes so many wonderful things possible and yet we must make sure that we don’t lose the ideals that have been part of humanity the very dawn of time as evidenced here and our recursion Egyptian Museum what a
Wonderful way to put it thank you so much for having me it’s been a joy okay thank you I think the theme of what we just saw was immortality of the soul I’ve had two guests on this show who have had near-death experiences and I’ve read a
Little bit about the Egyptian view of life and death and the car remember it’s the car the BA that leaves the body and it is able to go through solid substances and it’s able to turn back and look at the image of itself I just find that tremendously
Interesting that there are people today who have the actual experience that the Egyptians seemed to have had and yet it takes a brush with death to experience that how did the Egyptian how are the Egyptians aware of this phenomenon that the soul is eternal well that’s a
Subject that a lot of people are very interested in and presenting different perspectives on for some Egyptologists they really don’t give the ancient Egyptians a lot of credit for the complexity of their belief system however there are many today that are seeing the similarities with the shamanic tradition and the understanding
Of going to another plane of consciousness or another plane of awareness and returning with the ability to communicate with communicate just beyond what’s in our local area to heal and they understood the place that you went to after you passed on it was a place called droite that not only was
The place of death it also was a place like an acorn has the potential for all of life they saw it as that it was also a place of incredible potential so their belief system was actually very complex and very profound and it included not just the two aspects of the soul that
You mentioned a total of five aspects of the soul that had very that that went to various areas and had different experiences after the end of their physical body I have a lot of technical friends who again I keep bringing this up but they pursue the scientific method
I think to their own detriment you know that feelings suffer and I think after laughter you’re going through the process of just you know pushing feelings aside and you know relying on so-called facts that after a while many of them don’t know who they are anymore
Do you see that I do that as some people I know well this is a pendulum that keeps shifting back and forth and it’s actually in the 1600s when the Rosicrucians first made our presence known this was a time of great superstition and religious intolerance
And it really in order to be able to survive and to present ideas that were not superstitious everything had to be presented in a very scientific way that could be validated without any emotion or even any subjectivity in it so we’ve kind of taken it from one extreme to the
Next and certainly a lot of the greatest scientists see that when you get down to the core of you know even a cell or the body you get to something that you just keep going deeper and deeper and you find energy and information and something that really just can never be
Pinpointed their zahl ways that great mystery right at the end of Rosicrucian studies one comes to a knowledge I am told and the knowledge is a kind of gnosis it’s kind of knowing and that I understand it’s not definable but could you tell us something about it well
There really is no end to Rosicrucian studies even when we complete the lessons that it takes many many years to complete all the lessons and to participate in the various initiations which take place as you progress in our studies even then we look at the earliest lessons again with a completely
New perspective so there is no it’s it’s developing other ways of understanding beyond just the intellectual and there’s no end to that right on your website there is a interesting quote from the Quran that I looked ahead to read it several times before I got it
The quote is and in the shifting of the winds and in the clouds that are pressed into service betwixt heaven and earth are signs to people who can understand there are signs to people who can understand and you in a way I think provide that serves you provide a method
By which people can understand and it relies on intuition and the benefits of these courses you offer and it relies on the student being open to learning if we’re closed and think we know it all already know learning is going to take place so so it’s we participate in our
Learner Julie I’m so glad that you could be on the show thank you so much and you’re wonderfully easy to be around I think and the information comes easily and you’re a real credit to the order I was expecting some overpowering presence you’re a wonderful person well thank you
Very much thank you so much thank you I hope you’ve enjoyed the show I certainly learned some things from it and I hope you’ve enjoyed it so please uh tune in next time and I’ll see you then thank you bye bye
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