Via Christa: Via Christa Life: Appendices: The Burning Sands of the Desert

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The Burning Sands of the Desert

By Linda Mihalic

The way to Wisdom’s Well is a path through the burning sands of the desert in consciousness. As a series of fire initiations, the burning sands are a series of trials by fire designed to consume the darkness of self, especially pride and ego, sufficiently to open the Christos initiations on every degree of ascension attainment. These initiations grow more painful only when you resist them.

Warning: Completing this initiation often takes
more than a single lifetime.

Navigating the hot, dry and barren burning sands of the desert is your task as you begin walking the Via Christa to reach your full Path of Destiny. Coming after the excitement of awakening as a Neophyte undergoing Rebirth, and following the new Light on your path as a Disciple, you must face and overcome the sheer drudgery of the same old hard, boring conquering of self as an Adept seeking to become a Mystic, a Master, a Priest and a Christos.
You know you are wandering in the burning sands when you reach a drab place in consciousness, where everything is monotonously repetitious, the same-old, same-old, where you’re sure nothing new will every happen in your life again. Durig this time your countenance may appear grim because you’re grimly determined to persevere. Yet you can and must choose to smile! Here you learn to endure joyfully, not as a grueling torture.
You will face the burning sands in at least three periods in your journey on the Via Christa. During your first experience of the burning sands of the desert, you lift selfish desires of the impulsive appetitive soul to become one with your personal will, which fully awakens the pineal body and pituitary gland into your Oversoul's I AM consciousness. The self-centered selfishness of ages reveals itself in this period as the dregs of egoism, arrogance, pride, rebellion, and resentment.
Passage through the burning sands of the desert may take weeks, months, years or decades to complete. You must walk the last half of the burning sands alone. Unfortunately, most candidates for ascension quit there, well before finishing the journey to glory.

“The burning sands of the desert initiations are designed to immolate your selfishness.”

The path of the burning sands, fire initiations, temptations, and bathing in shafts of fire are all methods of purifying self and cleansing soul records. Together with obedience to law, this helps you to sublimate and ascend the creative fire.
Until you pass the 33 Degrees of Initiation (the expression of perfected personal responsibility), the pineal body and pituitary gland are adequate for limited spiritual seeing and hearing. However, to ascend farther, you must lift the base of your spiritual seeing and hearing to the hypothalamus gland, which requires a second set of the burning sands initiations.
You may have to revisit the burning sands several several more times, depending on the fervency of your desire to ascend. A flagging desire, unsupported by will, trips you into losing your initiative and hence your way among the dunes. The burning sands of the desert initiations are designed to immolate your selfishness, that which holds you back from conquering and ascending. You will lose only what your soul no longer needs.

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Linda Mihalic
1946–
Christian Platonist, American Idealist,
minister, teacher, author, and editor of
The Via Christa

Edna Lister chose Linda Mihalic as her successor in 1971, following Lotus Judson Landis, who had met Edna Lister in 1932 and was ordained by her in 1956. Linda left corporate America in 1981 to work for the Society of the Universal Living Christ full time. She was ordained by Lotus Landis and assumed formal leadership of the Society in 1991.

References

The Oxford English Dictionary: Compact Edition 2 vols. E.S.C. Weiner, ed. Oxford University Press, 1971.

Guyton, Arthur C. and Hall, John E. Textbook of Medical Physiology, Saunders Co.; 11th. ed., 2005.

Related Topics

Note: For an in-depth discussion of the burning sands of the desert initiations, go here.

See Burning Sands Initiations

See Creative Fire

See Christos Degree

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