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Archive for December, 2021

Biocentrism: Behold! And Everything Matters!

“The only things we perceive are our perceptions.” —George Berkeley

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNVERSE and with our world is one of creator with creation—not merely in a mechanical or physical sense, as in building houses, roads and cities. I’m thinking in terms of the dynamics of quantum physics, the realm of preform where everything in held in “wave form” until it materializes into “particle form” in the simple action of being observed by a conscious being. 

Do Christmas and New Years exist outside of human consciousness?  For that matter, does anything exist outside of human consciousness? According to Biocentrism, there is an existential relationship between life, consciousness and physical reality. The world of “solid” form springs into visible existence the moment it is observed. A tree falling in the forest makes no sound without someone present who has the capacity to perceive the perturbed air molecules and interpret them as sound.  A candle’s flame of hot gas has no color or glow unless a functional pair of eyes are present to observe it and call it candlelight.   

This is the fascinating field of Biocentrism as explored and elucidated by Robert Lanza, MD with the assistance of Bob Berman.  From the introduction of their book BIOICENTRISM—How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe:

This book proposes a new perspective: that our current theories of the physical world don’t work, and can never be made to work, until they account for life and consciousness. This book proposes that, rather than a belated and minor outcome after billions of years of lifeless physical processes, life and consciousness are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the universe. We call this new perspective biocentrism.

I will do my best to represent their tenacious explorations and resultant findings in a series of blog posts.  I hope you will enjoy this series and benefit by the work of these two critical thinkers.  There are seven “Principles of Biocentrism.”  I will take them one by one with each post. 

The First Principle of Biocentrism: “What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.”

Our science to date has failed to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are the bottom line in understanding the larger Universe—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. . . .

Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the first second of time after the Big Bang rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.

But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious: conscious awareness. As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

CREATED BY LIFE FOR LIFE’S PURPOSES

The word biocentric simply means life-centered, which characterizes the creative design and purpose of the Universe and all its vast and multifaceted structure and content, both animate and inanimate.  In simple terms, the Universe is created by invisible Life to express Life through visible, material form.  In quantum terms, the Universe is created by Light as a dynamic mechanism for moving creating energy out of invisible, intangible wave-form and into visible, tangible particle-form.  Where we come into this dynamic equation is as a means on the ground floor of the Father’s House of Many Mansions for bearing the Light of Truth and bringing it to bear at the threshold of creativity where the invisible, intangible and inaudible become visible, tangible and audible.  In a word, we ground Consciousness for the Creator in the Heaven to create on the Earth—which was created as a womb for beauty to be born, to borrow a line from a hymn I shared in my Christmas Day message.

WE ARE THE LIGHT OF OUR WORLD 

My wife and I love to sit on the East bank of our beautiful lake and watch the sun set in the Western horizon, often glorified by clouds lighted and brilliantly colored by the rays of the sun.  On one occasion we observed how the sunlight, reflected off the surface of the waters, made a direct and separate path of light to each of us—not a single path of light, but two.  Then we remarked how each person on the boardwalk that evening had their own individual path of light from the setting sun.  This is also true for rainbows.  There are as many rainbows in a single sighting as there are human beings looking at what we might think is just one rainbow.  No two people see the same rainbow.  We each have our own.  Notice how the rainbow created in the spray of a lawn sprinkler moves with your movements.  It’s yours and nobody else’s. 

This gives me pause for deep consideration and meditation.  What does it mean?  What is this phenomenon telling me?  That I center a world?  That, like in the movie It’s A Wonderful Life, without me the world that I center would not exist, as though I had never been born—like with George Bailey’s wish his guardian angel Clarence granted him to show him how much his life meant and mattered to everyone in his world.  It’s a tear-jerker of a story for me every year, such a softy that I am.  Of course Clarence steals the show.  What really gets my eyes watering is the final scene where all the people in George’s world of care and service come to his rescue with so much love, generosity and robust appreciation.  That gets to me whenever and wherever I see it demonstrated. 

My life matters.  Now there’s an interesting and dynamic word.  Matters can have two meanings: counts as something and materializes.  My life counts a great deal to many, and it materializes as I live it.  It unfolds out of my consciousness moment by moment, day by day, year by year.  My living on Earth leaves a trail of forms, as well as relationships and friends, that came into manifestation and formed simply by reason of my presence and creativity in it.  I am responsible for a world that no one but I created—of course with the help of many other important people whom I’ve met in my journey—and that implies a shared consciousness, and a collective consciousness involving as many as draw near in creating a world in which to live together in community.  It’s a sobering thought when I stop to consider the implications, an obvious one being that I am not alone in this world.  We are one family of Man living on a relatively small planet adrift in a galaxy of heavenly bodies speeding through space and time.

Space and time?  What are space and time?  Do they really exist?  How do I know there is a vast cosmos “out there” set in motion by a “Big Bang” that allegedly occurred billions of years ago?  Years?  What is time?  How can the infinite be measured by the finite?  The ineffable by the effable?  Where does all this exist except in our own imagination, our own consciousness—two more interesting and dynamic words:  imagination is the ability of the mind to make images, and consciousness is a capacity with which to know.  They’re verbs, not nouns.  The Universe isn’t a “thing.” The Universe is a dynamic living organism, the nature of which scientists have only been able to speculate:

George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named, came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he would say, “are our perceptions.”

A biologist is at first glance perhaps an unlikely source for a new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and some cosmologists predict that a unifying theory of the universe may be discovered in the next two decades, it is perhaps inevitable that a biologist finally seeks to unify existing theories of the “physical world” with those of the “living world.” What other discipline can approach it? In that regard, biology should really be the first and last study of science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by the humanly created natural sciences used to understand the universe.  (underscore added)

A deep problem lurks, too: we have failed to protect science against speculative theories that have so entered mainstream thinking that they now masquerade as fact. The “ether” of the nineteenth century; the “space-time” of Einstein; the “string theory” of the new millennium with new dimensions blowing up in different realms, and not only strings but “bubbles” shimmering down the byways of the universe are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to one hundred in some theories) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled up like soda-straws at every point in space.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND LIFE

This brings us back to the quantum field out of which all forms emerge.  Consciousness and life, the very foundational realities that underlie the biological and chemical worlds scientists search and research, yet know nothing about but live to hopefully know what they are and how they tick before their time runs out.  Time: an illusionary convenience we invented to organize and schedule our calendars of events.  Space: an imaginary finite way of attempting to measure the infinitely eternal HERE an NOW.  

THEORIES ABOUND IN THE SCIENTIFIC MIND

Today’s preoccupation with unprovable physical “theories of everything” is a sacrilege to science itself, a strange detour from the purpose of the scientific method, whose bible has always decreed that we must question everything relentlessly and not worship what Bacon called “The Idols of the Mind.” Modern physics has become like Swift’s Kingdom of Laputa, flying precariously on an island above the Earth and indifferent to the world beneath. When science tries to resolve a theory’s conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, dimensions unknown to our senses and for which not a shred of observational or experimental evidence exists, we need to take a time-out and examine our dogmas. And when ideas are thrown around with no physical backing and no hope of experimental confirmation one may wonder whether this can still be called science at all. “If you’re not observing,” says a relativity expert, Professor Tarun Biswas of the State University of New York, “there’s no point in coming up with theories.”

Absent the act of seeing, thinking, hearing—in short, awareness in its myriad aspects—what have we got?  We can believe and aver that there’s a universe out there even if all living creatures were nonexistent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a thinking organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really there?

For the moment, therefore, we’ll accept on a provisional level that what we’d clearly and unambiguously recognize as existence must begin with life and perception. Indeed, what could existence mean, absent consciousness of any kind?

. . . . This “Is it really there?” issue is ancient, and of course predates biocentrism, which makes no pretense about being the first to take a stance about it. Biocentrism, however, explains why one view and not the other must be correct. The converse is equally true: once one fully understands that there is no independent external universe outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place.

We live, largely unaware, at the hub of creativity in a world that spins around us having materialized out of our collective consciousness.  This is one responsibility from which we cannot escape or run away from to some distant planet or moon.

We do not just have a consciousness.  We are consciousness itself, the capacity to know—in the biblical sense of that word as when Adam knew Eve and begot Cain and Able.  We are given the privilege and responsibility to engage in intercourse between Heaven and Earth to beget life forms that reflect the harmony and beauty of Heaven inherent in the many dimensions and frequencies of Light.  Through our eyes and consciousness the Creator can see and enjoy Creation—perhaps even bring it out of wave-form into particle-form where it can be seen and enjoyed. 

My friend in Loveland, Colorado, Jerry Kvasnicka, expressed this privilege with passion in a response to one of my blog articles:   

We are surely the lucky ones, to be incarnate in this body of flesh and able to sample all of sights, smells, sounds, tastes and other physical sensations combined with the thoughts, feelings and the ineffable essences that well up from the deepest recesses of the soul, all of which may visit us daily as we walk from place to place on this sacred Earth.   

I welcome any comments and thoughts you may wish to share.  Until my next post in this series, I wish for you a very Happy New Year and a healthy 2022.

Be love.  Be loved

Anthony 

tpal70@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Atomic substance, BIOCENTRISM, Consciousness, Creativity, Dr. Palombo's blog, Energy and Matter, Healing Tones Blog, Life, Physics, Qunatum physics, Science, Subatomic particles

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The Incarnation of God, 3: Unveiling Love, the Gift of You

           Love is at the Heart of Creation 

Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.  —Dylan Thomas

I GREET YOU ON THIS CHRISTMAS MORNING in the Spirit of the Christ, whose birth we celebrate today. Let peace reign in your heart today and throughout the New Year.

Cynthia Bourgeault takes this chapter of her book, THE WISDOM JESUS, home to an unveiling of love.  Recapping the previous two paragraphs for continuity of thought, here is the final installment of this series on the incarnation of Jesus.

♦ ◊ ♦

LET ME BE VERY CLEAR HERE. I am not saying that suffering exists in order for God to reveal himself. I am only saying that where suffering exists and is consciously accepted, there divine love shines forth brightly. Unfortunately, linear cause-and-effect has progressively less meaning as we approach the deep mysteries (which originate beyond time and thus have no real use for it). But the principle can be tested. Pay attention to the quality of human character that emerges from constriction accepted with conscious forgiveness as compared to what emerges from rage and violence and draw your own conclusions.

At any rate, I have often suspected that the most profound product of this world is tears. I don’t mean that to be morbid. Rather, I mean that tears express that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving. In the tears flows a sweetness not of our own making, which has been known in our tradition as the Divine Mercy. Our jagged and hard-edged earth plane is the realm in which this mercy is the most deeply, excruciatingly, and beautifully released. That’s our business down here. That’s what we’re here for. ♦ (Emphasis added)

Unveiling Love

IF MY HUNCH IS CORRECT, you can see how it significantly rearranges the playing field. Our earthly existence, then, is not about good behavior in preparation for a final judgment. It’s not a finishing school in which we “learn what we need to learn,” nor a sweatshop in which we work off our karmic debt. Right here and now we are in the process of speaking into being the revelation of God’s most hidden and intimate name. That’s a difficult assignment, particularly when “success” and “failure” mostly wind up being the complete opposites of what we would normally expect in life. But the most productive orientation for our time here is not to focus on how quickly we can get back to our spiritual homeland, but to give ourselves fully to the divine intimacy being ventured right here and now. We might reassure ourselves that in some conscious (or deeply trans-conscious) way, we have chosen to bear our part in what mystical tradition calls “the suffering of God”: the costliness that is always involved in the full manifestation of divine love. We’re doing it here and now, through the marrow of our own human lives, consciously lived. And these space-time conditions, as fragile and as frustrating as they are, are precisely the conditions which allow it to happen. As the poet Dylan Thomas expresses it in the beautiful lines with which this chapter began, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.” It is the reality of the chains that creates the beauty of the song.

Mediator as Bridge

From a God’s-eye view of creation, the real operational challenge is not sin and evil; it is posed by the vastly unequal energetic frequencies between the realms. How can the sun touch a snowflake? How can the divine radiance meet and interpenetrate created life without incinerating it? This is the ultimate metaphysical koan—to which Christianity proposes as its solution the mystery of the incarnation.

This realization, in turn, opens up a whole new line of insight into John’s statement, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” The Son, in this wider metaphysical context, is no longer the one who bails us out or who rescues us from our fallen state but the one who becomes our bridge between the realms. Recognizing the enormous difficulty of our mission, Jesus comes to accompany us on it, advocating for our human finitude in a way that respects its integrity but doesn’t allow us to get trapped in it. As in the traditional theological understanding (but with a very different flavor), he becomes our mediator. Standing at the confluence of two vastly different orders of being, he offers his own life as the sanctuary between them.

“Become All Flame”

As we have seen already, these great metaphysical paradoxes lend themselves more easily to poetry and metaphor than to the theological scalpel. One of the classic images Christian mystics have used to portray this cosmic mediation is actually very ancient, from the Old Testament. In the book of Exodus (3:1-6) the story is told of how Moses, while tending his father-in-law’s flock of sheep in the Midianite wilderness, suddenly comes upon a bush fully engulfed in flame and yet miraculously intact. The miracle is quickly revealed as an angel of God speaking through the flame. But for the Christian desert hermits later inhabiting that same wilderness, the burning bush became a symbol of Jesus himself: all flame, yet perfectly intact within his finite container. And there were those among that desert fellowship who yearned for that same incandescent ground. In one of the most famous of the desert parables:

Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.

Would it be possible for us, too, to “become all flame”? Could our own lives become such a perfect fusion of infinite love and finite form that light would pour from our being as an actual physical radiance? I have indeed seen this light in more than a few realized masters toward the end of their earthly journeys; it is the fully revealed mystery of human life lived as a conscious sacrament. How we get there is the secret Jesus will unfold for us through the course of his own consciously sacramental life. But our first step in joining him on this journey is to recognize that his incarnation is not about fall, guilt, or blame, but about goodness, solidarity, and our own intimate participation in the mystery of love at the heart of all creation. ♥

♦ ◊ ♦

Life is sacred wherever it is expressed in Nature.  A life lived with love is truly a sacrament.  I love Cynthia’s passionate presentation of the incarnation and life of Jesus.  Speaking of passion,  I was listening to Bishop Michael Curry on NBC’s Today Show this Christmas Eve morning give his Christmas message, which is all about giving the gift of YOU to all those you meet in your daily activities by greeting them with a smile and a kind word or two to make a connection with them for sharing love.  He exemplifies this in his own robust ways.  We each have a gift to give of our Self, which is a gift from Heaven from whence we came into this world.  The gifts of Spirit are always coming down from God out of Heaven.  We need only be still enough and prepared in our hearts to receive and deliver them.  My friend in South Korea, Jae Hyoung Lee, shared this timely message on his Facebook page today: 

How careful are you that the atmosphere in you, that your state inside yourself, is of such a nature that the delicate things of God will not be destroyed? Such things will be destroyed by self-indulgence in such things as resentment, fear, hate, jealousy. All such attitudes produce a coarse atmosphere within a person, where the delicate plant cannot grow, where the delicate plant in fact will be destroyed. The way the world now is the atmosphere is so coarse that the things of God cannot exist here. They must first be placed in a womb, and the womb is provided by human beings, who were created for this purpose. We are the human beings through whom this development needs to take place, and we are responsible for maintaining security.  —-Martin Cecil

There a beautiful hymn we used to sing in choir that speaks of the womb of the Earth for beauty to be born and our crowning role as emissaries of beauty and light.  I’ll leave it with you to hold in your heart during this Christmas Season and throughout the coming year. 

Our God did make the earth a place of beauty, love and light, Where skies and seas and all of life reveal Him with delight. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born. 

The flowers drink the rain and sun above the good brown earth, And do not seem to have to try to fill their life with worth. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born.

And man He made with crowning care to share His majesty, To let His gifts of life appear, His glory ever be. For God did make the earth a womb where beauty might be born.

May your Christmas be a joyful celebration of the gift you are and the gifts of friends and family.  Feel free to share my Christmas message with friends and loved ones.  See you next year!  

Merry Christmas . . . and Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends and neighbors! 

Anthony

 

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Birth of Jesus, Christianity, Christmas, Healing Tones Blog, Incarnation, Jesus, Love

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The Incarnation of God, 2: Many Mansions

“The crucifixion wasn’t really the hard thing for Jesus; the hard thing was incarnation.”  

THE PASSAGE ABOVE, attributed to the mystic Bernadette Roberts, sets the tone for this second in a series of three posts on the theme of the incarnation of Jesus, the son of God.  I continue from where my previous post left off sharing from Cynthia Bourgeault’s  beautiful and provocative book, THE WISDOM JESUS, Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message.  We came into Being in Heaven before coming into Human form on Earth, and our journeys here were anything but pleasant.  We fell into this illusive world “from a lighter gravitational field to a heavier one.” With this post I celebrate the Winter Solstice and the beginning of yet another solar cycle initiated by the increase of Light.  Enjoy.  

♦ ◊ ♦

“Many Dwelling Places”

We Christians still inhabit a rather small universe, metaphysically speaking. We know that we live here on earth, and some of us may believe that above it is a place called heaven, counterbalanced by a place down below called hell. At very best it’s a three-tiered universe. But the ancient wisdom traditions (now strongly reinforced, incidentally, by findings emerging from modern physics and cosmology) universally suggest that we need to throw this three-story world out; it is far too cramped to contain the vastness of divine consciousness. There are many realms, wisdom teaches: not just earth, heaven, and hell, but countless densities or dimensions of existence, all of which exist to manifest or mirror an aspect of the divine fullness. Jesus himself states this very clearly to the disciples in his farewell discourses in the Gospel of John, when he says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” (John 14:2). He does not mean physical places but rather states of consciousness or dimensions of divine energy (as we saw in chapter 3 with Jim Marion’s recognition that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was Jesus’s way of referring to nondual consciousness). The tradition of sophia perennis (perennial wisdom) pictures this vastness as a “great chain of being” or “ray of creation.” which begins in a pure, high-intensity, invisible, subtle consciousness and “descends,” thickening as it does so, into this world we inhabit: the realm of sharp edges and tables and chairs and human beings crashing and banging against each other in a finite and terribly solid world.

The contemporary Christian hermeticist Valentin Tomberg envisions this ray as a vast energetic cascade, beginning in divine consciousness itself and ending up in our familiar empirical universe. In Meditations on the Tarot he writes:

“Modern science has come to understand that matter is only condensed energy. Sooner or later science will also discover that what it calls energy is only condensed psychic force, which discovery will lead in the end to the establishment of the fact that all psychic force is the condensation, purely and simply, of consciousness; i.e., spirit.”

Like a mountain whose base is solidly on the earth but whose summit is hidden in the clouds, this insight leads us step by step up the ray of creation. Modern physics certainly would have no difficulty with the assertion that matter is only condensed energy; this is officially the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what about this next realm, “psychic force”? Here the paths divide. This second form of energy is well known to spiritual seekers, but largely invisible to hardcore science; it is the energy flowing through prayer, attention, intention, and will: those more subtle exchanges which science has so far declined to measure but which we know have the power to create demonstrable effects in the physical realm.”

Beyond psychic force, yet another energetic realm awaits us, claims Tomberg, for psychic force is itself only the “condensation” (that is, the densification or coarser expression) of a substance incomparably more intense and subtle: pure spirit, pristine consciousness itself, unmediated by any form of expression. This primordial quality is known by many names in the tradition-“I AM” in Judeo-Christian tradition, wujud (“reality”) in mystical Islam, rigpa (“pristine awareness”) in Tibetan Buddhism. The names vary, but the understanding remains the same. Virtually unanimously, the ancient wisdom roadmaps picture the cosmos as a vast light stream, radiating out from the ineffable Godhead through the realm of primordial intention (known in Christianity as the logos), into archetypal form and energies, and finally into human, earthly becoming. Our life here in this physical cosmos is merely the endpoint of a long journey of what you might call “divine redshift”— that is, the condensation or cooling down of the intense energy of pure spirit in order to make physical manifestation possible.

Down Here on the Edge

So here we find ourselves on this plane of existence, at or near the bottom of the great chain of being. What are we to make of our position? What are we doing “down” here in a world that seems so dense and sluggish, so coarse and fragile and finite? Even in our dreams we move faster than the speed of light, and our mystics and visionaries are perpetually reminding us that in our heart of hearts we remember and yearn for a state of greater spaciousness and fluidity.

It’s curious, when you come to think about it, how virtually all the world’s spiritual traditions see this earthly realm as somehow deficient. Depending on the tradition, our world is either an illusion or a mistake, but in either case we “fall” into it, from a lighter gravitational field to a heavier one. We have seen how the Judeo-Christian tradition upholds this understanding in its primordial myth of the fall of Adam and Eve. Other traditions (primarily the Eastern ones) see this world as a mirage, an illusion to be dispelled. Still other traditions, such as mystical Islam, carry a profound sense of exile and a “nostalgia for the infinite.” Here is not home.

Is there another way of looking at this? I believe there is, and I think that it is actually at the heart of what is intended by that beautiful mantra, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” But it is so spiritually counterintuitive that it remains almost entirely unspoken — at least I myself have never heard it spoken or written about in any of the traditions. To the extent that what I am seeing here is correct, Christian wisdom steps out into unknown territory, leaving even sophia perennis behind.

Here is my take: Yes, this is a very heavy, frustrating, difficult density that we come into by taking birth in the human realm. Because of the binary, finite nature of both the physical world itself and the egoic operating system we use to navigate it, it seems as though we’re always bumping into sharp edges. Life presents us with a series of seemingly irrevocable choices: to do one thing means that we have to give up something else; to marry one person means we can’t marry another; and to join a monastery means we can’t marry at all. Our confused agendas clash both inwardly and outwardly, and we cause each other pain. Our bodies age; we diminish physically; loved ones fall out of our lives. And the force of gravity is tenacious, nailing our feet to the ground and usually our souls as well.  I remember my granddaughter, now five, who from the very moment she arrived on this planet expe­rienced an intense frustration bordering on fury at her inability to move. “What the hell?” she seemed to be saying as she flailed her little arms and legs and tried even at four months old to wriggle herself across the room. I have never seen a child who
felt the constriction of this planet as much as she did. 

Yes, we come into constriction, but is that the same as punishment! I believe not. I believe rather that this constriction is a sacrament and we have been offered a divine invitation to participate in it. 

Remember our discussion of sacrament at the beginning of this chapter! A sacrament reveals a mystery in a particularly intense way while at the same time offering the means for its actualization. And in this sphere of human life, the sacrament is finitude and the mystery is “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known….” 

Notice that there is a subtle double meaning at work in this phrase. At one level “I loved to be known” is a synonym for “I longed to be known” (and the phrase is often translated that way). But you can read the words in another way: “I loved in order to be known”– and when you do, they reveal a deeper spiritual truth.  In order to become known to another, we must take the risk of loving that person, and this includes the real possibility of rejection and the even more painful prospect of heart­ break if the beloved is lost to us. It is difficult to risk love in a world so fragile and contingent. And yet, the greater the gamble of self-disclosure, the more powerful the intimacy and the more profound the quality of devotion revealed. 

Could it be like this for God as well? 

Could it be that this earthly realm, not in spite of but because of its very density and jagged edges, offers precisely the conditions for the expression of certain aspects of divine love that could become real in no other way? This world does indeed show forth what love is like in a particularly intense and cost­ly way. But when we look at this process more deeply, we can see that those sharp edges we experience as constriction at the same time call forth some of the most exquisite dimensions of love, which require the condition of finitude in order to make sense — qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness. These mature and subtle flavors of love have no real context in a realm where there are no edges and boundaries, where all just flows. But when you run up against the hard edge and have to stand true to love anyway, what emerges is a most precious taste of pure divine love. God has spoken his most intimate name. 

Let me be very clear here. I am not saying that suffering exists in order for God to reveal himself. I am only saying that where suffering exists and is consciously accepted, there divine love shines forth brightly. Unfortunately, linear cause-and-effect has progressively less meaning as we approach the deep mysteries (which originate beyond time and thus have no real use for it). But the principle can be tested. Pay attention to the quality of human character that emerges from constriction accepted with conscious forgiveness as compared to what emerges from rage and violence and draw your own conclusions.

At any rate, I have often suspected that the most profound product of this world is tears. I don’t mean that to be morbid. Rather, I mean that tears express that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving. In the tears flows a sweetness not of our own making, which has been known in our tradition as the Divine Mercy. Our jagged and hard-edged earth plane is the realm in which this mercy is the most deeply, excruciatingly, and beautifully released. That’s our business down here. That’s what we’re here for. ♦ (Emphasis added)

♦ ◊ ♦

I love Cynthia’s passion and I’m finding her insights enlightening relative to the evolution and transformation taking place in Christian thinking and in the collective consciousness as a whole, probably because I still have a place of compassionate caring in my heart for my Catholic roots.  Not that I’m setting out on a mission to save the Catholic Church.  It’s the betrayed and misled that I care about, and who I have in mind and heart sharing Cynthia’s writings.  Please feel free to wisely share these blog posts with friends and family.  We will find out where the author is taking this consideration in the final series installment, which I will post on Christmas day.  Until then, Happy Solstice.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com 

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Ascension, Christianity, Christmas, Dr. Palombo's blog, Healing Tones Blog, Incarnation, Jesus, Love, Planet Earch

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The Incarnation of God

“I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” — Islamic Tradition

CHRISTMAS IS A YEARLY CELEBRATION of the incarnation of God’s only son, the Lord of Love and Prince of Peace, on Earth. I would like to share with you an insightful view and perspective of the incarnation of Jesus as a fully humanized being, taken from Cynthia Bourgeault’s beautifully written and profoundly insightful book THE WISDOM JESUS.  Its author is an Episcopal priest who has written several books exploring Jesus’ life as a mystical teaching and sacrament. 

Having emerged from a Catholic upbringing myself, and having spent seven years in Catholic Seminary, I do enjoy sharing this author’s vision of what Christianity could be simply by adopting a more metaphysical view and understanding of it core truth and of the One whose birth we celebrate this week.  Cynthia takes us from where we’ve been in our religious path of worshiping God, to where we are now at the threshold of opportunity for a radical shift in our attitude and consciousness, and forward to how we could easily move into a more spirit and love based path to knowing God.  I will share selections from her book in two or more blog posts.  I hope you will enjoy her as much as I do.

♦ ◊ ♦

THE INCARMATION

IN THE FIRST PART of this book we explored Jesus’s teachings as a comprehensive spiritual path. In this second part we will be shifting our focus to consider Jesus’s life itself as a teaching. By “a teaching” I mean a model, of course; all authentic teachers walk the talk. But more than just a model, I want to consider his life as a sacrament — that is, as a spiritual force in its own right. The traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” But what to my mind this definition does not make sufficiently clear is that a sacrament does not merely symbolize a spiritual reality; it lives that reality into existence.

Jesus’s life, considered from this standpoint, is a sacrament: a mystery that draws us deeply into itself and, when rightly approached, conveys an actual spiritual energy empowering us to follow the path that his teachings have laid out. This sacramental life of Jesus rests on four cornerstones which are both historical events and cosmic realities: his incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension. Together they compose the foundation of the Christian mystical and devotional life, and to open oneself fully to the meaning of these great mysteries is to be able to read the inner roadmap of the Christian path. In the next four chapters we will be exploring each of these mysteries in turn. My hope is to move beyond the usual theological and critical-historical explanations in order to follow the living mystical thread that will allow us to appropriate each one of these mysteries as food for the journey.

Since the ground we will be traversing is also the sometimes prickly shared territory of Christian liturgy and sacramental theology, let me remind you once again of my own background here, so that you will know where I am speaking from. While I wear the collar of an Episcopal priest, most of my lived liturgical life has been within the wider stream of Benedictine monasticism, primarily Western and Roman Catholic (although the Episcopal liturgy is in most respects identical), and it is from this perspective (as well as my earlier training as a medievalist) that I will primarily be speaking when I describe the ritual celebrations that unfold these great mysteries. I am less familiar with the Orthodox traditions (except through my exposure to the  Christian inner tradition), but at ease within the Celtic and Oriental Orthodox spiritual streams, whose extraordinary insights I will draw on at appropriate moments. As Meister Eckhart once observed, “There is no being except in a mode of being,” and the Western Catholic mode of being is the stream in which I have primarily come to know what I know. With that disclaimer in place, let us see what we can discover about the first great mystery, the incarnation.

“For God So Loved the World . . . .”

I remember being struck many years ago by an insight from the contemporary mystic Bernadette Roberts that crucifixion wasn’t really the hard thing for Jesus; the hard thing was incarnation.” Crucifixion and what followed from it — his death and resurrection — were simply the pathway along which infinite consciousness could return to its natural state. What was really hard for infinite consciousness was to come into the finite world in the first place. With nothing to gain from the human adventure — nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, and a dangerously unboundaried heart that left him defenseless against the hard edges of this world — Jesus came anyway: that, claims Bernadette Roberts, was the real crucifixion! As we saw earlier, Paul grasped that same point in his beautiful hymn in Philippians 2:9-16. The first self-emptying that Jesus goes through is the self-emptying that lands him in bodily form on this planet, a human being. There is definitely something spiritually counterintuitive about this business of incarnation, and to really get what’s at stake in this mystery is for me the acid test as to whether you understand what Christianity is all about.

Unfortunately, this understanding is hard to come by: not only outside of Christianity, but inside it as well. Make no mistake, Christianity is intensely a religion of incarnation. Millions of people caught up in mass hysteria during the Christmas season can’t all be wrong! But even the sentimental excesses of the season only go to reinforce the point. There is a deeper truth at work here that stirs us in spite of ourselves. Who among us has not awakened in the wee hours of Christmas morning to catch the live broadcast of the Ceremony of Lessons and Carols from Westminster Abbey and thrilled to the sonorous reading of those immortal words from the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us”? There is a deep soul-truth here that both contains and redeems our frantic efforts to penetrate its meaning at a more superficial level.

If you were to imagine the great world religions like the colors of a rainbow, each one witnessing in a particular way to some essential aspect of the divine fullness, Christianity would unquestionably hold down the corner of incarnation — by which I mean the vision of God in full solidarity with the created world, fully at home within the conditions of finitude, so that form itself poses no impediment to divinity. There is another beautiful phrase in John’s gospel proclaiming: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (John 3:16).  At its mystical best, Christianity reverberates with the warmth of this assurance: with the conviction that creation is good, that God is for us, and that what ultimately gets worked out in the sacred mystery of Jesus’s passage through the human realm is a profound testament to love.

Who Screwed Up?

Unfortunately, Christianity as a religion has never had a sufficient metaphysical understanding of its own core truth. The message gets obscured by its primary interpretive vehicle: the theology of fall and redemption. Virtually all Christian teaching begins from the supposition that Jesus’s incarnation is brought about by the fall of Adam and happens in response to it. “As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive” is the classic Pauline formulation of this idea (I Corinthians 15:20). The primordial parents Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and plunged the world into chaos; Jesus came to rescue it. Thus, incarnation is framed from the start within the context of God’s response to a mistake that should never have happened in the first place. This assumption, in turn, deeply colors our understanding of the phrase, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” It sounds like: “God didn’t give up on us; God bailed us out.”

In a more mystical nuancing of this same basic idea, we encounter the theology of “0 felix culpa”~”O happy fault”~ to quote the first line of a traditional Gregorian Advent hymn which expresses this theology particularly clearly. Rather than blaming Adam and Eve, this line of argument claims, we ought to be grateful for them because their mistake set in motion the chain of events through which Christ would fully reveal himself to this world. Without that initial fall there would have been no need for the redemption. In the most subtle versions of this teaching (as in Karl Barth’s Christ and Adam) linear cause and effect are reversed, and we see Adam and Eve falling into this space/time continuum out of God’s “prior” decision (that is, already made in eternity) to reveal himself in human form. Rather than being the cause of the fall, Adam and Eve become the instruments of the ultimate divine self-communication. This is a much more affirmative teaching, which brings the theology of fall and redemption to its most mature expression.

But I would like to push the metaphysical envelope still further and see if we can approach the mystery of the incarnation through a conceptual framework that does not rely on fall and redemption at all but unfolds along an entirely different line of understanding. Instead of a cosmic course-correction, this other approach envisions the steady and increasingly intimate revelation of divine love along a trajectory that was there from the beginning. The best expression of this idea is actually contained in a beautiful saying from Islamic tradition (although its roots go down into perennial wisdom ground): “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality — ­beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative — projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love. And remember that “realize” has two meanings: “to recognize” and “to make real.” The act of loving brings hidden potential to full expression, and the more intimate and costly the self-giving, the more precious the quality of love revealed. This subtle and beautiful understanding of creation will also, as we shall see, have something very important to show us about our true work as human beings.

♦ ◊ ♦

We are each one an incarnation of Divine Being.  Our personal incarnations were stressful and limiting, descending from the peaceful Realms of Light and landing in the dark wet terrain of busy embryonic cellular activity; from flying freely in the air of spirit to crawling on our bellies until our toddling forms learn to walk and run.  How we yearn for the freedom we knew before incarnating.  I remember very vivid dreams of flying above the ground at breakneck speed in my youthful years.  Who hasn’t had such dreams?  And I can relate to the thrill a jet pilot must enjoy flying through the air at supersonic speed.  One has to be fit and well trained to fly a jet.  Likewise our human capacities need compassionate care and vital nourishment in order to be fully fit and available in accommodating the incarnate divine beings we are.     

Yet here we are, fully awake and learning how to navigate a multidimensional universe of energy-shaped-and-driven hard and complex materiality only God comprehends.  Being incarnate gods ourselves, we have been gifted the privilege of sharing in Divine Consciousness and comprehending reality that is incomprehensible to the human intellect—for the darkness cannot comprehend the Light in the same way that Light comprehends the darkness.  We incarnate to bring Light into the dark corners of Creation to bring forth a heavenly world here on Earth where we are.  This gives us great cause for celebrating, at Christmas time and throughout the year. 

I celebrate you, dear reader, this Christmas, along with my own Divine incarnation—and my gift to you and myself is unconditional love and acceptance.  May the joy of Love fill you full to overflowing during this Holiday Season.  Until my next post — which will be published this coming Wednesday,

Be love.  Be loved.

Anthony    (tpal70@gmail.com)

Credits: Artistic drawing by Rose Meeker, author of MAGIC AT OUR HAND – Releasing Our Lives into Order and Beauty

 

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Adam and Eve, Ascension, Birth of Jesus, Books on spirituality, Christianity, Christmas, Dr. Palombo's blog, Healing Tones Blog, Jesus, Kenotic Love, Love, mysticism

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Love, an Antigravity Force

“True love demands sacrifice, because true love is a transforming force and is really the birth-pangs of union on a higher plane.” –Anonymous¹

OUR HUMAN FAMILY has not been under so much pressure as it is now for some time. Listening to all the reports on the state of our planet’s shifting ecology, we are in the throes of an existential crisis—at least existence as we’ve known it in our lifetime.  Like a house of cards blown by a wind, our “civilized” world is collapsing around us, as though clearing the space for something new.  Will we go down in history as yet another lost civilization, or will we ascend to a higher level of consciousness and create a more balanced and sustainable world?  A heaven on earth?

The answer to that question lies largely in the polarity of our orientation, and with what tonal frequency we resonate at a spiritual level in our hearts.  What vibrational tone moves us, and in what direction?  What do we most value and love?  Because we will dance to the music that resonates in our hearts and go in the direction of that which we love, that with which we desire union.  What is it that my soul longs to know oneness with? 

The simple answer to such a longing is to be found in the directive of the Master Jesus, what has become well known as The Two Great Commandment:  “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all of thy heart, and with all of thy mind, and with all of thy strength.” With all of one’s heart, mind and body.  Nothing held back.  “And the second is like unto the first: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  In these two directives, as I would call them, lie the sacred path of ascension. 

ATTUNEMENT WITH LOVE

We are all blessed by our friendships.  I’ve been blessed and privileged to share a brief but potent time of Attunement every morning with a dear friend and colleague long distance.  We’ve known each other for over twenty years now and I’ve come to love him as a brother . . . and I can say as myself because he exemplifies to me qualities that I know are true of my own inner Self, primarily unconditional love and acceptance of me just the way I am . . . which has inspired me to love and accept myself, and others, unconditionally.  This has been my experience over the years with all my friends and attunement colleagues.  So much love and appreciation has been expressed by so many.  

The current of love that flows between my friend and myself seems to have grown more intense and substantial over the years.  This past year the Attunement Current has been increasingly more intense and has become a powerfully magnetic force that has had an uplifting impact on my physical body, as though every cell is being drawn up into an ascending current of magnetic energy.   

While the Attunement Current in itself is a powerful healing force — healing in the literal sense of mending back together that which has been fragmented and separated from the whole — there are powerful cosmic forces on the move “out there” which are having enormous impact on us and on all life forms on the planet.  While we call this force the Attunement Current, it is the magnetic current of love that is increasing in its manifestation through human hearts the world over, interestingly more so since this viral pandemic has disrupted “business as usual” in human affairs. 

It’s as though a Great Pause has been ordered in the Music of the Spheres here on Earth by the Great Conductor as a new score in the symphony of Life awaits the downward beat of the Conductor’s Baton, and the orchestral musicians are poised in eager readiness to play the first notes in their score together with one magnificent and harmonic transforming sound.  One can hear the cacophony of instruments tuning as the pure sound of the oboe plays the tonal A 440.  We can even hear an Overture  pre-sounding in the heaven of consciousness.  The Song Celestial is about to be played and sung on Earth.  It’s time to finetune our instruments of body, mind and heart with the Tone of Love. 

When I see and hear musicians playing their instruments and singing in concerts, I see angels of sound come down out of the Realms of Light to bring heavenly music to Mankind and to this beautiful planet.  Last night we attended a Christmas Concert presented by the Masterworks Chorale I sang with for several years, now back from a long pause due to this pandemic.  It was so good to hear these angels singing their sweet and glorious songs, especially the children’s choir and the brass ensemble.  Christmas music  is my favorite tradition each year.   God bless all musicians, who have come together in choirs and orchestras the world around, finding one another and regrouping to offer their musical gifts to the world, sorely in need of such upliftment at this time of trial and tribulation. 

I’m thinking of our neighbors up in the Midwest who are in anguish in the wake of devastating multiple tornado strikes that tore through several states last night from Arkansas through Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, leaving death and unprecedented destruction in its 250 mile path, and so many homeless in cold winter nights.  They will be having a different Christmas this year as they help one another recover and rebuild, along with hundreds who have come from other areas to lend a hand.  There is so much goodwill in human hearts.  People come together in hard times.  We are so blessed to live in such a world of generous and caring friends and neighbors.  God bless us all, as Tiny Tim exclaimed in that wonderful Christmas Story.  Let us gather in Rumi’s field of no right doing or wrong doing and offer a prayer for those whose worlds have been so suddenly upended. 

I will leave you with this timely video that was shared on Facebook this week by a friend.   

A GATHERING OF THE TRIBE / POWERUL

 

Here we are.  Let the New World be born through all of us together.  Everything we do matters.  Until my next post,

Be Love.  Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

¹ Anonymous:  From The Recapitulation of the Lord’s Prayer written anonymously and published by a 20th Century British contemplative, a student of the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky.  I borrowed this “mystical gem” from Cynthia Bourgeault’s beautiful book THE WISDOM JESUS.

  

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Ascension, Attunement, Dr. Palombo's blog, Healing Tones Blog, Levitation, Love

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Sound as an Antigravity Force

I received a comment from a reader by the name of Jonathan to an earlier post which, apparently, piqued his interest, or a least his curiosity.  I will share his comment first and follow it by the article itself, which is about sound as an antigravity force.  Here’s Jonathan’s comment:

“It would be quite interesting to read the comments. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the way to do so.
Sincerely,
Possible future contributor”

Surprisingly, there were no comments on the post, as it has a most intriguing title: “Pyramid Power” Page 3: Acoustic Levitation.  I would love and welcome a contribution from you, Jonathan . . . and thanks for bringing this 2012 post forward. I will use it as a springboard into a consideration of the dynamics of ascension.  The story is every bit true and most fascinating. I promise you it will astound you.  

Here’s the post:  https://healingtones.org/2012/09/10/pyramid-power-part-3-acoustical-levitation/

The dynamics of the ascending process by which our physical bodies are welcome to ascend to a higher level of being are exactly the same as the dynamics of acoustic levitation: the elevation and intensification of vibratory frequency.  Only the source of the vibrations is Spirit rather then sound.  I will develop this topic in my next post.  I think you will enjoy and benefit greatly by this insightful and promising consideration.  Until then,

Blessings of Light and Love during the Joyful Holiday Season.  

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

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