Healing Tones

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” (Psalm 19:1)

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG BOY I lay in the grass at night and feasted with my eyes and my soul on the magnificent beauty and unfathomable wonder of the heavens. On a clear and quiet night I could hear the stars singing in my heart. They do indeed declare the glory of God. They come out of God and shine forth His Glory, manifesting the evidence of the Presence of the “One Who dwells” within the Shekinah pattern of Being: the cloud of glory, the Light that shines and the fire that burns. All of it is created by Shekinah, the Word, as John wrote in the first lines of his gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

For me, George Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation encompasses and declares the wonders of the heavens and the glory of the Creator.

Worlds Within Worlds

World 1

World 1 is the Holy Absolute, the Godhead. The “inaccessible light,” the holy impenetrable, ineffable, unknowable monad before “God took perceptivity and divisibility,” as Jacob Boehme describes it.

Of course, this is one of those giant forks in the road where the mystical tradition or the Christian West split theologically. For the Western theological mind—with a few notable exceptions—there is no “Godhead behind God.” The Trinity is the full, total, irreducible expression of the whole of divinity. The mystics of both branches, of course, have always smiled serenely at this. They know better.

This world corresponds with do on the Ray of Creation, or dominus—the Holy Absolute.

World 3

World 3 is the primordial ternary, whereby the Godhead—ever indivisible and unmanifest—brings himself into “perceptivity and divisibility,” i.e., a “manipulable” inner configuration that will support “the impressure of nothing into something” (again, Boehme’s words), thus launching the long march toward outward manifestation. For both Boehme and Gurdjieff, this fundamental reconfiguration of the inner monadic ground inexorably requires threeness, and what will emerge many worlds later as the theological doctrine of Trinity is in fact merely a distant echo of this more primordial upwelling of the Law of Three, rightly named by Gurdjieff as the “Law of World Creation.” Indeed, following a brilliant lead handed to us by Boehme, we can say that it is only in this realm that one can properly begin to invoke the term “consciousness” (con-scientia, meaning “with-knowing”), because until there is a “with,” there can be no “with-knowing” but only the bare, inscrutable will of the monad (which Boehme calls scientia.) Consciousness is not the fundamental ground of all being. It is rather the first manifestation — which occurs in World 3 — of perceptivity and divisibility. The two are joined at the hip.

This world corresponds with si on the Ray of Creation, or siderum — all the stars, all the galaxies, all possibilities, infinite possibilities.

World 6

This world launches the inaugural leap into outward manifestation, that first declension in Valentin Tomberg’s spectrum of energy, where consciousness “condenses” into “psychic force” and begins to move as an actual energy stream, creating, animating, and shaping the created order. On traditional metaphysical maps it corresponds to what is known in the East as the “causal” and in the West as the “logoic.” By whatever name, it is primordial substantiality, the highest and most powerful expression of the pure creative eros that brings all things into being. It is the world that quivers into life when Teilhard writes, “The physical structure of the universe is love,” or when he remarks, equally astoundingly, “Love is nothing more than the impressure, left in the heart of the creature, of the physical convergence of the universe.” Eros as logoic force, pure generativity, the blue of the flame in the heart of the monad. For J. G. Bennett, this is the demiurgic world from which the entire created order emerges. In the Gospel of John, this is “the Word.”. . . The big bang is here; this is where our universe story begins. And while opinions may vary on this point, my own take is that it is the highest realm that can be directly touched and borne while still in human form. It is beyond personal; it is itself the great intertidal zone between the unmanifest and the primordial manifest. I would call it the true logoic realm: pure spirit, pure causality, pure eros moving untempered by any sort of human mediation like the wild, roving spirit font it can only be.

This world corresponds with la on the Ray of Creation, or lactera — the Milky Way, our galaxy; the place where it is all unfolding for us.

World 12

World 12 is the Christie. I know this ascription may surprise some of you who are used to seeing “Christ Consciousness” positioned higher, as one of the nondual realms at the very top of the Great Chain of Being. I do not believe this is so. Even World 6, to my way of thinking, is already situated solidly within the causal or logoic bandwidth (not in the true nondual, which from a cosmological perspective denotes the unmanifest realms).

We have just seen above that World 6 bridges the gap between the manifest and unmanifest, and as its processionary offspring, World 12 would necessarily be subsumed within its overarching causality. Moreover, I concur with the ever-cage-rattling Bernadette Roberts in her insistence that “logos” and “Christ” are not the same, but rather, Christie is the “middle ground” (or mandorla, to give it its plane geometry name) that emerges in the overlapping zone between the human Jesus and the fiery divine logos — between Worlds 24 and 6, if you want to put it that way. And that is a very good way to picture World 12. It is the world of fully incarnate and embodied love, the fullest of what bodhisattva consciousness can look like in form. It is the endpoint of the personal realms. And it is the world, I believe, in which we must locate what Teilhard envisions as the Omega Point, where all things are summed up in Christ — because this is the last world in which such a summation has any relevance. Beyond, all is summed up in logos. It is the consummatum est of a particularly rich and luminous outspeaking of the word love, emerging from the fires of eros to its transfigured fullness as agape.

This world corresponds to sol on the Ray of Creation, or the sun — the center of our solar system. From here emerges warmth, light, and cosmic ordering.

World 24

World 24 is the “Kingdom of Heaven” as Jesus put it and supremely the home range of the imaginal. It is the world of presence, where the outer forms of physical materiality are illuminated from within by the light that pours from world 12 and above, and where human consciousness — awake, three-centered, and having passed that first conscious shock point (which it supremely tends and mediates) — fully inhabits this physical world, takes instructions reliably from the higher realms, and participates fully in the required cosmic exchange. This is the world of conscious man or woman — “man number four” in Gurdjieffian terminology — who lives awake and willing right there at the junction point where the “the two seas meet,” infusing the staleness of the lower worlds with the vivifying energy of his or her authentic presence.

This world corresponds to fa on the Ray of Creation, or fatum –– our immediate solar system.

World 48

This is the “world” as we know it and transmit it through the best of human culture. It is the world of philosophy, ethics, and religion; the world of intellectual striving and cleverness and of industry, curiosity, science, technology, and the arts — in other words, the first fruits of civilization as best we know them. It is the world of high rationality. The world of high egoic functioning and self-reflective consciousness. The world that Teilhard mostly had in mind when he described the “noosphere.” But for all its giftedness, it still falls just below that first conscious shock line; hence, it is still, in Gurdjieffian terms, preconscious and “asleep.” It is Prospero’s castle, entrancing and seductive, but ultimately a mirage.

This world corresponds to mi on the Ray of Creation, or the mixtus orbis. At its best, it symbolizes the fullest flourishing of the biosphere, the “Eden” of the Ray of Creation.

World 96

The thickening deepens. World 96 is the “formatory” world, as Gurdjieff calls it, where everything operates on autopilot, in cliches and thought-bites: stale, conditioned, habitual. There’s not even any real thinking that goes on here, as there is in World 48; it’s all recycled opinions and stereotypes. In Gurdjieffian terms, this is the world of personality, the world of “not-I”; of all that is artificially acquired and that obscures our real essence. It is monochrome, repetitive, and boring — uncreative, stony, and inanimate; the lowest world in which human consciousness can even barely hold its shape.

This world corresponds to re on the Ray of Creation, or regina caeli — the moon; pure geosphere, not yet able to support organic life; the youngest and most unstable element in the chain.

World 192

World 192 represents the hell realms. It is the world of the deeply disordered, anguished, and psychotic, the spawning ground of evil and the demonic, where consciousness has lost all spaciousness and congeals toward an unbearable density. The “bardo realms”— craving, wrath, pride, envy, and desire; obsession fixated to a deadly bullseye-turned-wormhole. Here self-reflective consciousness turns on itself like a rabid dog biting its master. This is the final outpost before consciousness collapses into outer darkness — or simply goes comatose. Cosmically, it is the collective pain body of humanity and of the planet itself.

This world does not correspond to any point on the Ray of Creation, but I envision it as the endpoint — the bottom do — at which the entire octave has run its course and simply implodes.

Bourgeault, EYE OF THE HEART

Composite Map of the Worlds

(Click on the image to enlarge)

This last phase in the Ray of Creation, the “endpoint” and “bottom do,” may be thought of as the “creative void” awaiting the movement of the Spirit of God and the creative Word, “Let there be light” – the dust of the earth to which all forms return – the end-phase where the “former things” pass away into oblivion, the elements that comprised the forms once again available to participate in further creation.

In THE TRIUNE RAY, Uranda writes:

Creation is eternal. It never ends. It never began. It is, and was, and will be, eternally. Thus is the law of eternal progress made possible. The eternal progress of the positive center, God, which includes the Divine Being within each individual, is not a progress of Inner Soul development, but ever a progress in further creative activity, i.e., continual creation. The eternal progress of the negative body of creation, which is form physically manifest, is the response to creative action which draws form into oneness with creative expression so that it is transmuted from responsive form into the active expression of the positive center.

As rapidly as that which is now the form of negative response is absorbed into the positive center through transformation — is changed into a new heaven and a new earth, so that “the former things are passed away”— it, being one in God expression, takes part in further creation.

The Christ radiance of God Being goes forth and creates, and that which is created is drawn to, and absorbed into, the Christ radiance so that it may take part in further creative action.

Radiation, response, attraction, union, unified expression, which is radiation — thus is the creative cycle completed.

[To the wayfarer:] Seeking the Light, thou shalt surely find it when thou shalt look within thyself and let that Light which is within thee flow freely through thee in every thought, word and deed. Thus shall thy whole being be dedicated to the radiation of the Triune Ray, which is the Light, Love and Life of the Christ expression from thy Father within thee.

THE HEAVENS DO INDEED DECLARE THE GLORY OF GOD

The glory of God must first be revealed and declared by Man restored before we set about creating a new and glorious world. And only by the Word of God spoken by Man can the Ray of Creation, the Triune Ray, manifest a world that declares the glory of God. Let it be by the Word of God spoken by Man restored.

With love in our hearts we can restore and rebuild our world. Just behold how love built and maintains the Universe of galaxies, suns, planets and their moons. Listen to the music of the spheres resounding in the heavens. You can hear it on a clear and quiet night under the canopy of stars far away from the city lights.

I welcome your thoughts, insights and inspirations. Share them in the comment feature, or send them by email. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com