Fourteen stations of the cross

Fourteen key events in Jesus’ walking the way of the cross. The fourteen stations of the cross are a coil of energy that unwinds, and they are also the spiral of energy whereby we build the divine momentum of our attainment and of our initiation on the Path. God has not ordained that we should face the full energy and weight of our entire past karma in one day, and therefore, he unwinds that coil of energy increment by increment—as Jesus tells us, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”^[1]

The initiation of each station is to take that energy and demand that it be transmuted by the sacred fire according to the nature of the initiation of that station. That which cannot stand the trial by fire in love is consumed by the Holy Ghost, by the violet flame, and that which can stand is sealed for eternity.

The stations on the lines of the cosmic clock

The stations can be charted on the lines of a clock representing the twelve solar hierarchies. We place the first station on the twelve o’clock line and proceed in a clockwise direction. Each time you change a position on this cosmic clock, it is an entirely different initiation because you are dealing with different energies.

The first station

The first station is “Jesus is condemned to death,” the twelve o’clock line. This is the line of God-power, and it is the line of the Hierarchy of Capricorn. The misuse of energy on that line, the misqualification of power, is condemnation. The fallen ones have ever misused God’s power to condemn the Christ.

When you are on the first station of the cross and you feel the heaviness of the weight upon you of world condemnation of the Son of God, you acknowledge it, and you immediately call for the transmutation of personal and planetary momentums of the condemnation to death not only of Jesus Christ, but also of the Mother and her children.

The second station

The second station is “Jesus is made to bear his cross,” the one o’clock line. This is the line of Aquarius, of the New Age. It is the line of Saint Germain, and the energy of this line is love. And therefore, the cross we are made to bear is the cross of all perversions of love—personal and planetary. Every time we have misused the energy of love we have forged our own cross. And the only way our own Christ Self can come down from that cross is if we requalify that energy of hatred, mild dislike, irritation, dislike of the Christ within ourselves or within other people with love.

The third station

The third station is “Jesus falls the first time,” the two o’clock line. It is Pisces, a water sign. The quality is God–mastery, and we find that Jesus fell for the first time on this line. This is the cross of the planetary momentum of death, of doubt and fear—fear that God does not exist, doubt in his existence, fear of our own selfhood, fear of separation—and it is endless human questioning. When we are on this station, we give our invocations for the violet flame, we name that death momentum, we call for the glory of God in the energy of God-mastery, and we go on.

The fourth station

The fourth station is “Jesus meets his afflicted mother,” the three o’clock line of Aries and God-control. This is the line of the ego, where we must choose between the human ego and the Christ Ego. We must surrender the ego that we love most—the ego that is our own. But we often do not admit that it is our own, and therefore we objectify that love in another. And so we find that the one whom Jesus loved most was his mother. As he looked into the eyes of Mary, he determined that he would go on. He would separate himself from that which he loved most and therefore slay the carnal mind within that, through human sympathy, would cause him to remove himself from the Path. The misuse of this line is the conceit of the ego that would carve out its own path according to its own terms.

The fifth station

The fifth station is “Simon the Cyrenian helps Jesus to bear his cross,” the four o’clock line. The initiation on this line is under the Hierarchy of Taurus, an initiation of obedience. In our desire to come into conformity with the will of God we will have to surrender the concept that by might and by power we can do this initiation all by ourselves and that we can do it without acknowledging the need for intercession, the need for the Holy Spirit to help us through the person of the friend.

On this station we also face our own internal rebellion against the requirements of the Law of God. That rebellion can well up within us like a Vesuvius. It can cause us to be arrogant and out of sorts and bullish. Taurus is the sign of the bull, and we throw our weight around like bulls and we say, “I’m not going do this,” until finally we are brought to our knees in the realization that our rebellion has brought us to the place where we have to cry out for help.

The sixth station

The sixth station is “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus,” the five o’clock line of wisdom, the line of the teaching. This initiation is the transference of energy from the Teacher to the disciple, from Spirit to Matter. The perversion of this line is ignorance of the teaching and ignorance of the Law. It is a willful ignorance that results in envy and jealousy of those who have the light because they have passed through the path of initiation.

The seventh station

The seventh station is “Jesus falls the second time,” the six o’clock line. The fall on this line is under weight of the personal and planetary misuses of the energy of the Mother under the Hierarchy of Cancer. The six o’clock line is the base-of-the-spine chakra. All misuses and abuses of the feminine ray, of our soul and of our body temple, will be up for transmutation on this line. It is a challenge of the emotional body because it is a water sign. The perversion of the station is inharmony and discord that manifests as indecision, self-pity, self-justification. We justify our discord and our inharmony.

The eighth station

The eighth station is “Jesus consoles the holy women,” the seven o’clock line It is the line of Leo and God-gratitude. It is the affirmation, the joy, the praise, the acclaim, the release in the desire body of that energy of gratitude. The misuse of this line is ingratitude, thoughtlessness, density, spiritual blindness, the failure to give forth the release of energy as joy, as gratitude that manifests the victory in Leo.

The ninth station

The ninth station is “Jesus falls the third time,” the eight o’clock line. The third fall of Jesus is under the weight of personal and planetary momentums of every form of injustice. This is the Virgo initiation. When you are carrying the cross on this station, you will experience injustice, and you will have to remember the statement of Portia, the Goddess of Justice, who says, “There is no injustice anywhere in the universe.” That is an absolute statement and an affirmation of being. It means that right in the very midst of what appears to be injustice, you can invoke the light of the violet flame and of transmutation, and you can see that behind injustice (which is always either a test or a manifestation of karma—one of the two) is the Reality of God-justice.

The tenth station

The tenth station is “Jesus is stripped of his garments,” the nine o’clock line. This is a cosmic initiation that is given to the lightbearers and to the fallen ones alike. Those who think that they are clothed with fine raiment and that they are rich and increased in the goods of this world will find that suddenly, overnight, they are stripped of their garments—stripped of their money, supply, outer prestige and momentum—and all of a sudden they are reduced to nothing, because we are all required to stand naked before God.

Stripped of all outer ego, stripped of the accumulations of this world, stripped of everything but the light within our heart, how many of us today could pass through the crucifixion? Are we leaning upon the opinions of other people, upon material things? Are these props to our identity?

This test comes to all of us. We will stand naked before the world. The world will judge us. And as we see with Jesus, it does not matter how well we have proven the Law, the world will always condemn. “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”^[2] If they have done it to Jesus, can we expect any better? And so, our desire must be not for popularity, not for acclaim. We must have one desire: the salvation of souls entrusted to our care.

The eleventh station

The eleventh station is “Jesus is nailed to the cross,” the ten o’clock line. This cross on the ten o’clock line is the cross of selfishness and self-love. It is the Hierarchy of Scorpio, and the energy of Scorpio is the vision of God. The blind leaders of the blind are those who have totally obstructed the third eye by their human selfishness. Being utterly selfish, they lead those who are utterly selfish.

Any time our vision is clouded and we don’t know the next step to take in the will of God, let us remember to clear up that record of human selfishness—maybe something we did on Atlantis or Lemuria, maybe something we did ten thousand years ago or yesterday. Whatever it is, the vibration of selfishness deprives us of our mission and of our divine plan.

The twelfth station

The twelfth station is “Jesus dies on the cross,” the eleven o’clock line. Life is energy, and it can be neither created or destroyed. The life that Jesus lays down goes unto God and permeates the heart of every child of God evolving on earth. It becomes the life of all people. It is the external equation of integration.

The supreme initiation on this line is to realize that we must prove indestructibility here and now within this temple. It serves no purpose for us to be indestructible in heaven. We must show the indestructibility of the light of the Christ here on earth. That is the point of the resurrection. That is why he raised up the physical body. He could have left that body in the tomb and returned as a spirit, but he wanted them to see the nail prints in his hands and feet. He wanted them to know that the physical temple, the Mother, the Matter body, was restored.

The thirteenth station

The thirteenth station of the cross is “Jesus is taken down from the cross,” the twelve o’clock line of Capricorn again. Day by day our service is taking down from the cross those whom the world has crucified. They have hung there, some of them, for thousands of years, because no one has come along in the person of the Mother flame to say, “Here, I will help you. I will show you how to enter the tomb, the laboratory of the Spirit, to prove your resurrection.”

The fourteenth station

The fourteenth station is on the six o’clock line: “Jesus is laid in the tomb.” The tomb is a symbol of the chamber of the heart, that laboratory where we prove our eternal life. It is the womb of Matter. It is in the heart of Mother. And it is in the base-of-the-spine chakra, the six o’clock line again. This means that the proving of eternal life is dependent upon our raising up of the sacred fire from that [base chakra to the crown, the perfect flow of the caduceus.

Jesus left the temple in his full mastery of his Christ Self. His soul within the Christ Self descended into the astral plane and preached to the rebellious spirits who had been confined there since the days of Atlantis. He returned to his body for the resurrection on Easter morning.

Passing through the stations

The fourteen stations of the cross are known as the via dolorosa, the “sorrowful way.” This is the description of the observer. It is not the description of the one who is passing through the initiation; for the one who passes through is in supreme joy and passion.

For more information

Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path of the Universal Christ, pp. 194–213.

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