Healing Tones

“The rain keeps falling and the vapor keeps rising.” —John Muir

THE CYCLE OF WATER on earth, rising as vapor with the sun’s heat and falling as rain to water and cool the earth, reminds me of a passage in Genesis:

“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.” (Gen. 2:6-7).

JOHN MUIR wrote about this cycle when describing one of the features of the natural world faithfully demonstrated by the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming: “The rain keeps falling and the vapor keeps rising.” Water plays a vital role in our physical anatomy and physiology. So much so that the Creator waited until it had rained on the garden before forming man from the dust of the ground. Wet with rain the dust became molding clay — not that this is how the Creator formed man. But I think you get my point. Water has been in our lives from the beginning of life on earth, as has the cycle of water from vapor to rain and back again to vapor as the energy of the sun warms the air and the surface of the waters.

Metaphorically, in this cyclical exchange the sun represents love, water symbolizes truth, and the gift of their communion is life shared by all breathing beings and living forms on earth. However, this is a “two-way Universe,” as Walter Russell demonstrates in THE UNIVERSAL ONE, and the cycle isn’t complete until something is given back. Something needs to return to the Source of Love: the vapor of heartful responsive love, praise and thanksgiving in a returning cycle. This is our role as stewards of the Creative Process.

When the heart is open upward in love response to God’s love streaming down and moving upon the surface of the waters of consciousness, a mist-like substance is generated and ascends heavenward to provide a bridge of plasma between Heaven and Earth. This plasma was given the name “pneumaplasm” by Uranda, and it forms the “silver cord” of connection between us and our Creator. It is by way of this silver cord that God communicates with us — giving and receiving — and we communicate with God — receiving and giving. I believe it is part of the means by which angels, incarnate and disincarnate, communicate.

As with the water cycle where the vapor rises toward the sun, and in its ascent creates clouds and atmosphere around the earth that reflect light, so does our love response to Love given and received from Source create an atmosphere around us that reflects the light of our own radiant divine being. We then become suns to our worlds.

AS BELOW SO ABOVE

This exchange of vapor between the oceans of the earth below and the atmosphere and rain clouds above is a reflection of an exchange occurring between the higher realms. Cynthia Bourgeault writes beautifully about this exchange in EYE OF THE HEART, which I shared in a earlier post “The Great Exchange Between the Realms.” If you haven’t read this earlier post, then I recommend you do so in order to deepen your understanding of this process Gurdjieff describes as Reciprocal Feeding. This exchange is dramatically and colorfully demonstrated with the Arora Borealis’ rain of charged particles from the sun feeding our planet with replenishing sun-substance.

WHAT ARE WE HERE FOR?

I would like to take this consideration to the higher realms of Gurdjieff’s “Ray of Creation,” Worlds 6 through 24, launching from World 48, “Mixtus Orbis,” where we live and have our being on Earth, pausing in World 24, the kingdom of heaven, where the gifts of Spirit rain down from above to bless mankind and the earth through the open hearts of human beings, bringing the “kingdom of heaven” (world 24) down to earth (world 48).

(I refer you to my post of May 8th for a review of Gurdjieff’s “Worlds Within Worlds.”)

Continuing from my previous post, Cinthia Bourgeault posed a question at the end of the excerpt. She then proceeds to give her answer, in which she makes a distinction between eros and agape love:

* * *

But what if there is no mistake? No fall? What if this frustrating arrangement furnishes exactly the right conditions for the expression of something that can be expressed in no other way? Suppose there is some quintessence of the divine heart that can reveal itself only under these conditions, only when thus Tensioned, like a cello string pegged between heaven and earth? And if so, what might this quintessence be?

What if it is love?

Well, that’s not how we were taught to think about it, is it? “God is love” is almost the first thing you learn in Sunday school, furnishing the complete and sufficient explanation for the created order. From the effulgence of divine love the visible world comes forth, imperfectly reflecting a quality that already exists in divine perfection. But if seven decades of living into the Christian Mystery have brought me anything, it is the growing clarity that love is not the alpha; it is the omega. The agape love that nearly universally is assumed to be the starting point for creation is not in fact the starting point. It is the fruit of a long transformative journey whose eye of the needle is right here, sitting squarely on that mi-fa shock point.

The mystics, of course, have long intuited that something like this might be the case. I have spoken already about Boehme’s brilliant intuition that “the impressure of nothingness into something” is not accomplished without, like Odysseus, engaging the Scylla of constriction and the Charybdis of desire. In those first primordial stirrings by which the “Endless Unity” brings himself into “divisibility and perceptivity,” there is no effulgence of agape; there is only constriction, compression, and craving.

The Endless Unity begins its journey into form by a fundamental self-tensioning, compacting the only “raw material” as yet at hand — the divine will into a “magnetic hunger'” (which is at that point insatiable since nothing as yet exists on which to slake it) so that a current begins to arise within the Divine Unity that will eventually draw all things toward the whirlpool of being. The current thereby generated, streaming out into World 6 as the fundamental creative force, is not agape but eros, the pure creative fire of attraction and desire.

Mystics of all ages have felt this erotic force churning and pulsing through the entire cosmos, not only as its enlivening passion but as its basic structural principle.” But this is not yet the deepest and most mature realization of love itself. It is not yet that most intimate laying bare of what lies hidden in the divine heart.

The “coarse material” contributed for this transfiguration of eros is our own finitude. Only when love enters the constructal givens of this world and encounters the constrictions of choice, finality, separation, tragedy, betrayal, and heartbreak do its most tender and exquisite facets begin to emerge — qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness. These mature and subtle flavors of love make no sense in a world where everything simply flows. They are cured on the rack of time — and at that, only in the awakened human heart willing to consciously bear the conditions as intentional suffering. A = ek is my own alchemical formula for this, where a = agape, e = eros, and k is the kenotically surrendered heart. (Kenosis, of course, is the Greek term used by St. Paul in his celebrated hymn in Philippians 2:5-11 to convey the radical non-clinging that comprises the very essence of the mind of Christ.)? When that depth of surrender is laid before the surging force of eros, then the inexpressible music begins to sound.

Is it simply another one of those imaginal felicities that the name de Pasquale means “paschal?” For of course this same alchemical formula is at the heart of that one great mystery for which “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” Yes, of course there were other options. “Do you think I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” says Jesus as the soldiers come to arrest him in the garden at Gethsemane. But then the eye of the needle would be sidestepped.

If here in the density of World 48 is exactly the place where the quintessence of the elixir of agape is to be extracted, then the conditions must not be overridden but rather lined-with the grace of that flowing, higher luminosity, lined with World 24, so to speak — so that the crucible of transformation can be endured here, so that it does not break our spirits. That is for me the imaginal meaning of the paschal mystery. Our Common Father really does love this world, because it is here that the restless roving and churning of that sea of eros comes to rest, and we hear in the silence the still, small voice of love.

This is also for me the real charter of the conscious circle of humanity. We are called to work back and forth across the divide of finitude not because the conditions here at the denser level are false, but because they are hard. Help is needed here, and it is freely and gratefully given. Because what we give back here, though miniscule and always, I suppose, clumsily offered, is indeed that “hidden treasure” for whose sake the entire created order came into being.

* * *

Of course, there was a “fall.” A fall from grace and stature by original man (male and female), as Genesis records, and of which many myths and legends tell. Thus the need for a crucible here in world 48 to provide a way back to world 24, Eden, through the “eye of the needle”– a phrase of biblical origin used by the Master Jesus in speaking of the kingdom: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25) This was not just a parable. There was a small archway door in the wall around Jerusalem called “the eye of a needle” of which Jesus was speaking, and his audience knew well the problem camels have passing through it. All of the baggage and supplies, including the rider, had to be removed from off the camel’s back, which had to kneel down and crawl forward in order for it to pass through this small archway.

Well, I don’t think the King wants us to crawl to Him on our bellies. That said, the only way we can return to the Kingdom of God is by unloading our baggage of false identities, beliefs and troubles and bow down in humility before the King. We can do this easily with the “grace of that flowing higher luminosity . . . so that the crucible of transformation can be endured here, so that it does not break our spirits.” By the grace of the King, the crucible will not be heated beyond our capacity to endure purification. While speaking of these “end days” when the old earth shall pass away, the Master was recorded as saying: “if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” (Mark 13:20) I don’t think it’s anybody’s business who “the elect” are, though some religious sects proclaim they are.

EROS AND AGAPE

I will speak to Cynthia’s scenario of Love’s creating process wherein she writes “love is not the alpha; it is the omega. The agape love that nearly universally is assumed to be the starting point for creation is not in fact the starting point. It is the fruit of a long transformative journey whose eye of the needle is right here, sitting squarely on that mi-fa shock point.”

Eros and Agape may be thought of as two ends of the same Creative Process of Love, which Uranda formulated in five steps: Radiation — Response — Attraction — Union — Unified Radiation. Unified radiation implies a collective grouping of people drawn together by Love to “Let Love radiate without concern for results,” as Uranda instructed. As we well know, love is an irresistibly attractive force, and it will draw unto itself resonant substance — the elect. What doesn’t elect to resonate with Love’s beautiful Tone simply drops down to lower levels where it may continue to participle in the purification and transmutation cycles of the Creative Process.

THE “CONSCIOUS CIRCLE OF HUMANITY”

As groupings of light workers and attunement servers — Gurdjieff’s conscious circle of humanity, if you please — increase in number and work synchronously together, the frequency of the collective consciousness shifts to a higher vibration where fear and its companion “flavors” cannot be sustained. Peace and love and their companion flavors, thankfulness and generosity — “qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness” Cynthia mentions above — enlighten and transform human consciousness, and subsequently human behavior. Wars and crimes can thus become impossible to enact. Ultimately, disease and death pass away with the passing of the old heaven and the old earth.

The old heaven and earth pass away as we give our lives over to stewarding the emergence of the New Heaven and the New Earth — as we let “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In a word, when we give our utter love to the King and welcome Him into our hearts where He rightly establishes and reigns in His Kingdom on earth. Our love rising to our Lord and King extends our invitation and welcome to Him to return and abide with us once again.

THE EARTH IS SACRED

I will leave you to ponder these words of Martin Exeter:

The true nature of man is God. This certainly does not indicate that all that God is is man, but all that man is is God, rightly. Awakening to this awareness, then the setting in which we find ourselves, the earth itself, is seen to be a sacred place, a holy place. There is one way by which God can walk on this planet, and the facility is man. (Martin Exeter, April 7,1985)

I welcome your thoughts, insights, and comments. Until my next post and series,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com