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Partner in Creation
by Don Hynes
Into the silence
I go without regret,
for there You are
whole and unerring,
ready to receive
this weary pilgrim
with the love
of a partner
in creation.
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For you must realize that earth unfolds its properties and powers in union with Heaven aloft above us, and there is one Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all. —Jacob Boehme
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I WAS LISTENING to an audio recording of a presentation by Lloyd Meeker (Uranda) which he gave back in August of 1953 entitled “The Magic Of Creation #4 — Man With God in which he gives fresh insight into a passage in the Book of Genesis that had not stood out to me in the past in quite the same light. Here is the passage:
“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
“And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. . . .”
(Genesis 2: 4-9)
There’s much more to this event that Uranda encompasses in his presentation. The line that stood out to me and which I wish to meditate upon in this post is: “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew:”
I really had never noticed this passage and the implications clearly evident in the phraseology, which I highlighted here. The implication is that creation of all the forms of life, the trees and herbs for example, was first in the heaven before they appeared in the earth . . . and that they appeared in the earth after man was made and placed in the garden planted eastward in Eden “to dress it and to keep it,” as verse 15 states. In other words, man was the means by which creation of living forms manifested in the earth. We are the tillers of the ground of the garden planted eastward in Eden, the dressers and keepers of the garden of Paradise. Perhaps the Double Helix Nebula pictured above is part of the matrix for the Creating Process after all.
I don’t think the Creator handed out an assortment of seeds to Adam and Eve to be planted in the garden. This was clearly an imaginal process of seeding the heaven of human consciousness with an image of the Creator’s design and desire for Creation: the invisible image to be made manifest through Man, male and female, in the visible universe of the earth.
The wording “Eastward in Eden” indicates the future, as our tomorrows come out of the East, where the morning sun faithfully appears heralding the new day.
The garden planted eastward in Eden, is Gurdjieff’s “World 24” and Jesus’s “kingdom of heaven.” It’s Cynthia Bourgeault’s “Imaginal realm.” It’s the heart, the garden which we are commissioned to dress and to keep . . . for one thing, from being troubled. “Let not your hearts be troubled,” are reportedly words the Master Jesus often prefaced what he had to say to his disciples. Nothing brings peace to a troubled heart like love and thankfulness — especially when offered upward.
GURDJIEFF’S CONSCIOUS CIRCLE OF HUMANITY
Bringing back an old Hasidic saying I shared several posts ago from Cynthia Bourgeault’s EYE OF THE HEART:
“There’s an old piece of Hasidic folklore that claims that our world at any point in time is held in its planetary orbit by thirty-six conscious human beings. They don’t know each other, and they don’t even know if they’re among the thirty-six. But the quality of their work, rising like incense into the earth’s atmosphere, creates around our fragile planet a sturdy bandwidth of protection, blessing, and guidance.”
This comprises the gist of Gurdjieff’s notion of what he called a “conscious circle of humanity” . . . through which a “Third Force” can operate to alter the course of world and human evolution and destiny. More on this later.
What exactly is the nature of Gurdjieff’s Conscious Circle of Humanity? Cynthia writes:
Essentially, the conscious circle is an intense zone of imaginal interchange in which advanced beings on both sides of the form/formless divide — i.e., some still in their physical bodies, others no longer so — join hands across the realms for a mutual exchange of wisdom, tempering, blessing, protection, and occasional course correction. You might look at it as a kind of “bodhisattva bandwidth,” in which the best of our human altruism is met and matched from the other side by a sincere compassion for our human predicament and the skillful means to help. This is the circle of “ye watchers and ye holy ones” (as the old hymn goes), antiphonally proclaiming their mutual commitment to protect, uphold, and bring to completion all that has been set in motion here.
The whole notion is by nature evolutionary, incarnational, and collective. Membership in the conscious circle of humanity is not about bailing out of our earthly responsibilities to seek personal enlightenment in more spiritualized realms. It fits squarely within the Gurdjieffian notion of reciprocal feeding; in fact, only within this framework can its purpose really be understood.
A passage from the Book of Malachi (3:7) in the Old Testament speaks to this “reciprocal feeding” and “exchange between the realms”: “‘Return to me, and I will return to you,’ says the Lord Almighty.” And a few verses further: “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” (Mal 3:10). We return, hearts and tithes, to the LORD through a vibrational pattern of wholehearted love response to his unconditional love for each one of us.
THE GROUP DYNAMIC
If Teilhard’s theory is correct, it is a fair surmise that the next levels of conscious emergence — into what is now popularly called “integral” and “nondual” consciousness — will not happen simply through the domino-chain aggregation of individual enlightened psyches. It will require the emergence of an accompanying new “physical arrangement,” or body featuring an even greater degree of differentiated function within an overarching unity.
Teilhard was already envisioning this new evolutionary body as the noosphere, and he had already grasped that its materiality was comprised not of corpuscular elements ordered by tangential energy, but of “thought” exchanged among humans through radial energy — or in other words, rephrased in the language of the Western Inner tradition, that it would operate according to the substantiality and causality of World 24. To the extent that the conscious circle bears witness to that higher imaginal body and in fact arises as a specific expression of it, I believe that groups and Wisdom schools are here to stay as the prime locus of conscious-circle activity as we approach that second axial threshold.
In favoring the group model over the time-hallowed solitary, however, one needs to be very careful not to fall back into outdated World 48 modalities. I still chuckle at my friend Ajahn Sona’s priceless quip: “What’s the plural of egoic? We-goic.” Wegoic fellowship with all its tricky and laborious protocols is not the way this imaginal body orders itself, and Gurdjieff was very clear in expressing his disappointment when the Babylonian School fell back into such “wiseacreing.” Mentally generated platforms and inflammatory rhetoric simply add to the pain body of this world.
The first priority of a Wisdom school aspiring to conscious-circle partnership must be to maintain a consistently high level of imaginal clarity in which something new can actually be tasted. The synergy is itself the new vibration, the seeing is itself the doing, and all that’s really needed is to hold that vibration for as long as one can, as purely as one can; then like water running downhill, it will find its way into the ground. “Truth has only to appear once, in one single mind,” Teilhard averred shortly before his death, “for it to be impossible for anything to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.” How we get “from here to there” is the real measure of amplitude of the conscious circle when it is doing its job rightly. (emphasis added)
THE “NOOSPHERE”
I bring this next passage forward from an earlier post as it speaks to this “noosphere” mentioned above.
In her evocative and controversial book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene – The Woman at the Heart of Christianity, Cynthia Bourgeault makes a distinction between the “imaginal realm” and imagination which I feel deserves in-depth consideration. The context of this consideration is the vision Mary Magdalene has of Jesus just after his resurrection when she reportedly mistakes him for the gardener. In her gospel, Mary Magdalene tells the apostles of Jesus’s resurrection and goes on to describe her remarkable experience with him.
I saw the Master in a vision and I said to him, “Lord I see you now in a vision.” And he answered me, “You are blessed, Mary, since the sight of me does not disturb you. For where is the nous [the heart] lies the treasure.” Then I said to him: “Lord, when someone meets you in a Moment of vision, is it through the soul [psyche] that they see, or is it through the Spirit [Pneuma] ?”
The Teacher answered: “It is neither through the soul nor the spirit , but the nous between the two that sees the vision….”
The “nous” is the heart, or the “eye of the heart.” It’s our capacity to discern spiritual or vibrational essences. It’s the space between the infinite and the finite, between pure spirit and gross matter — and it is said to belong to Spirit, generated as it is by Spirit for communicating with the physical world and for conveying “images” for the manifestation of “analogues”– the manifest forms. “Images do not arise in this realm, however (their origin is several cosmoses more subtle) [Worlds 6 and 12], and trouble begins when this fundamental cosmic law is forgotten. (Bourgeault)
“Pneumaplasm”
The word “pneumaplasm” was coined by Uranda eighty some years ago to represent this substance through which Spirit communicates with the material world. Uranda was the founder of the Attunement service now being offered by attunement practitioners the world over. I have incorporated sacred sound in my personal attunement service and have written a book about this sacred technology. I would like to share an excerpt from my book, Attunnement With Sacred Sound, from the section “Cellular Replication in a Musical Matrix of Light.”
“Image” and “Analogue” — “As Above so Below”
“Within the particular metaphysical stream that Jesus seems to be working in, image corresponds to that primordial template mentioned earlier—“the origin” of each created form. Very cautiously, you might label it an archetype. At first glance you may be tempted to transpose this teaching into Platonic categories and assume that Jesus is talking about the “ideal form” of a thing. But be cautious in doing so, for there is a distinctly different dynamism at work here. For Jesus, the “image” is not merely a static blueprint, a preexistent prototype that its earthly analogue mechanically reflects. Between image and analogue there is a dynamic reciprocity as they simultaneously articulate the same reality in Two different realms. Image and analogue are in continuously creative tension receiving and fulfilling each other, and it is in the energy exchange that their indivisible wholeness is made manifest.
I like her use of the word “analogue,” which means similar in function but not in origin and structure, as it represents accurately the “dynamic reciprocity” between man and his Creator, in whose image and likeness we are made in order to function as creators ourselves. In our energy and attunement work you might say that we seek to facilitate a clarification, balancing and intensification of this “energy exchange” between image (spirit) and analogue (form) with the intention that the oneness between them may be made manifest in the client’s experience of life, as well as in our own.
The author then offers these words of truth and wisdom derived from Jesus’ teaching:
“When the realms are in spontaneous resonance—“One Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all”— the music of the spheres bursts forth. When they are not, disease and disharmony inevitably ensue. As He quickly points out (again, with a contemporary feeling to the teaching), “Confusion and disturbance resonate throughout one’s whole being”. . . . and sickness and death are the inevitable result.“
Dynamic Reciprocity — Exchange Between the Realms — Receiving and Bestowing — Reciprocal Feeding. The eternal cosmic dance between Creator and Man in Creation goes on for as long as the Music of the Spheres lasts in a world without end. What an exciting time to be living and co-creating on Earth !!!
I will continue this stream in my next post, focusing on the dynamics of Third Force intervention. Until then,
Be love. Be loved.
Anthony
tpal70@gmail.com