Healing Tones

The Vesica Pisces — Womb of the Great Mother

“In my Father’s house are many mansions . . . I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am ye may be also.”

THE WORDS ABOVE are recorded in the gospels as words spoken by Jesus with his disciples just before his ascension. He was standing on earth in the imaginal realm when he said “so that where I am ye may be also.” — just as He was when He came to Miriam in the Garden after His resurrection.

Miriam asked Jesus “‘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 which sees the vision, and it is this which . . .[sees].’” (Pages 11-14 are missing.)

In this same passage from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup, “Miriam of Magdala” speaks directly to Jesus in her vision of him: “Lord, I see you now in this vision.” The Teacher responds: “You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you. There where is the nous, lies the treasure.“

Webster gives two definitions of the word nous: “a – an intelligent purposive principle of the world; b – the divine reason regarded in Neoplatonism as the first emanation of God.” It is the realm between the soul and the spirit; where the Spirit of God reaches down and communicates with the soul, and where the soul sees and communicates with the vision of an apparition from the spiritual realm . . . and it is more than that.

In this instance, Miriam had a vision of her “Rabboni,” her Beloved Lord and Master, — who also told her “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father, and your Father, and to my God, and your God.” Here was the Son of man who had risen from the tomb as the Son of God. In other words, He had transmuted His physical body — evidenced by the image of his face and physical form burned into the Shroud of Turin — and was still in the process of taking his body temple up through the “many mansions” of His Father’s House back to His Father in Heaven. In a word, He was in complete control of His body temple all through the ordeal of His crucifixion and resurrection. This is a profoundly powerful and historical event, forever altering human consciousness and setting in motion radical transformation in His Father’s world, a world which He came to save not to condemn. l can do no less.

Where He appeared to Miriam was not in her imagination. It was a real and dynamically charged realm between heaven and earth where the vibration of spiritual substance was and is at a higher frequency than the physical realm where she stood on the earth. It was out of concern for her safety and wellbeing, as well as regard for His ascension-in-process, that He cautioned her not to touch Him. This is a powerful moment in the story of His transition. This was and is a real place — one of position without magnitude.

With that introduction — setting the stage for the insight Episcopal priest and author Cynthia Bourgeault offers in EYE OF THE HEART — A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, I delight in bringing her to you in this series on The Imaginal Realm: Place of Creation. I think from her writings you will see her as truly a window opened in Heaven pouring out blessings of insight and inspiration. Her comprehension of the esoteric is remarkably clear and profound. Enjoy!

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Is It Real?  

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the word imaginal does not mean “imaginary.” That unfortunate but all-too-understandable confusion was created by Henry Corbin, the noted Islamic scholar, when he introduced the term mundus imaginalis to name that intermediate, invisible realm of causality that figures so prominently in mystical Islamic cosmology. But in so doing, Corbin was drawing on a highly technical and quintessentially Islamic notion of imagination as itself being one of those higher and more subtle energies, possessing will, objectivity, and creative agency.

To our modern Western ears, the word imaginal may indeed seem to suggest some private or subjective inner landscape, “make believe” or fanciful by nature. But while it is typically associated with the world of dreams, visions, and prophecy, i.e., a more subtle form, the imaginal is always understood within traditional metaphysics to be objectively real and in fact comprising “an ontological reality entirely superior to that of mere possibility.” It designates a sphere that is not less real but more real than our so-called “objective reality” and whose generative energy can (and does) change the course of events in this world. Small though it may appear to be, it is mighty, as those who try to swim against it will readily attest.

Walter Wink, one of the few contemporary mainstream Christian theologians who have been bold enough to venture appreciatively into the terrain of the imaginal, describes how this “generative” causality played out in the events following the resurrection. His comments below offer a clear window into both of these key points: imaginal reality is “objective,” and it carries real force:

“It is a prejudice of modern thought that events happen only in the outer world. What Christians regard as the most significant event in human history happened, according to the gospels, in the psychic realm, and it altered external history irrevocably. Ascension was an “objective” event, if you will, but it took place in the imaginal realm, at the substratum of human existence where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place. The ascension was a “fact” on the imaginal plane, not just an assertion of faith. It irreversibly altered the nature of the disciples’ consciousness.”

One need only to read the Book of Acts to sense the breadth and power of this change in the disciples’ consciousness and to grasp the implications of what Wink is saying here. It is true that not all constructions are illusions. However and wherever these disciples came to it, they emerged from the post-resurrection events infused with a clear and high sense of purpose, resolve, empowerment, and above all, the unshakable confidence that their Lord was still present with them — which at the imaginal level is undisputedly true. With their oars planted firmly in that kingdom, they moved forward to change the world. This is exactly what Corbin was trying to convey by the word imagination, understood in the traditional sense. Imaginal reality is a valid construction which, by changing consciousness in its inner ground, changes the nature of reality in the outer world.

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PLACE OF CREATION

“In my Father’s house are many mansions.” The Imaginal Realm is one such mansion. “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am ye may be also.” We belong in this mansion with Him, the mansion between Heaven and Earth. The place of miracles. The place of creation. The nous as the first emanation of God, where “the treasure lies,” and where the ordinances of Heaven are sown as seeds in the Consciousness of Man, male and female, to be set in the Earth.

I am Job — WE ARE JOB — here in THIS day to give the LORD, who yet demands of us — from out of the whirlwind of turbulent human consciousness — an answer to His questions: “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? . . . and answer thou me if thou knowest. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding” (Job 38:4)

We were there with Him. The Creator did not, and will not, circumvent His means for creating this world: Man restored to our appointed mansion in the Father’s house . . . whose “pleasure” it is to give us as our dwelling here on earth. We were placed in the Garden for this purpose: to set the dominion, the governing ordinances of Heaven, in the earth. But first we have to know those ordinances, and to do know them we have to rise up and be “where I AM”— and not as separate individuals but as a collective Body of angels incarnate standing together in one place and in one accord.

This is the Kingdom of God where our LORD and KING reigns over His Kingdom with Man — who is the tabernacle of God, the sanctuary for the One what dwells within the flame of Love that burns eternally, enveloped within the cloud of glory that is Shekinah. Selah

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(I elaborate on this biblical event Cynthia cites in the Book of Acts on page 2 https://healingtones.org/the-imaginal-realm-place-of-creation-page-2/ )