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At The Crossover

Christ the Redeemer at Rio de Janeiro

“I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly . . . that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” — Gospel of John

VICTORY OVER DEATH

While attending a memorial service for a departed friend recently, I sat down in one of the pews waiting for the service to begin. When I looked up toward the closed casket, my eyes were met by a large crucifix on the wall behind it with the graven image of the crucified Jesus. I felt a sudden pall of sadness; not for our departed friend and his family, but for our Lord and King whose crucifixion is still being celebrated by Christians two-thousand-plus years after his victory over death and his glorious resurrection.

I long for the day when Christians take down the crucifixes in their churches and elsewhere — ideally, do away with “Good Friday” altogether and only celebrate Jesus’s victory over death and His Resurrection from the tomb. It’s not that He didn’t make the best use of what was imposed upon Him by the world. He did ask His Heavenly Father to take that cup from Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, yet He yielded to His Father’s Will. He knew well what was ahead and yet embraced it fully and used it for a higher purpose: a victory over death and the opening of a portal to eternal life for all of mankind.

His victory is what I celebrate during Holy Week . . . and I invite all of my Christian readers and friends to celebrate with me. Let the joy that was His be fulfilled in our hearts and souls this day.

THE CRUCIFIX AS A CROSSOVER SYMBOL

The crucifix can be seen as a crossover symbol, with its vertical and horizontal aspects joining and crossing at the point of the Golden Mean, the Divine Proportion (1.618) — the vertical representing Heaven and the horizontal representing Earth. The Spirit of God descends from Heaven and touches the Earth. Angels descend from the Realms of Light and incarnate in earthen forms in order to extend that Spirit below the horizontal into the world; to serve the Creator on Earth and bring Heaven here. By extending your arms, like the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates, you assume the posture of a cross, signifying that your body temple provides a crossover point between the invisible and visible realms — between Heaven and Earth.

This is the true meaning and significance of the Cross of Jesus. He came to Earth not to die but to demonstrate for us how to live in union with His Father and bring the experience of Heaven on Earth into our lives. Sadly, the world rejected Him and redacted His teachings to align with the traditional religious concepts held sacred in the human mind . . . then crucified His body on the cross at Golgotha, the “place of the skull.”

We are a death-oriented people. We worship death as a necessary evil; a way of escape from pain and hardship, as well as the way to enter Heaven. Truth is, HERE on earth is where the ultimate experience of life take place. Angels in the realms of Light long to have the experience of living on this beautiful planet where Mother God, the Queen of Heaven, creates a Paradise of Edenic beauty and bounty on Earth — Her Queendom. Where delicious fruits and crisp vegetation can be tasted and lifted up in flesh temples as loving tithes to Her Lord and King.

THE “PLACE OF THE SKULL”

It is said that Martin Luther threw an inkwell at the devil upon awakening one night, and that he was plagued by many demons. My mentor used to cite this incident and then would suggest that he must have smashed the inkwell against his own skull, making and bringing home the point that our demons are in our own heads and projected out there; that the crucifixion of the Christ Spirit is taking place in the skull of human beings where the self-active mind of man shuts out the Kingdom of God from being experienced, by the priesthood and by the faithful. Christians pray unceasingly “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” but they do not allow it to be done. They have their own wills to exercise and fulfill in their lives, individually and collectively.

Am I being too harsh or irreverent? I don’t think so. After all I include myself among those who once recited the Lord’s Prayer daily in seminary while studying to become a Catholic priest. I, too, believed that Jesus died for my sins and that we had to die in order to go to Heaven. How well I recall the many times I knelt at the foot of a large crucifix in the seminary chapel gazing up into the eyes of the image on the cross depicting the brutal crucifixion of Jesus and feeling a deep sadness while trying to get in touch with the anguish and pain He must have felt, abandoned by His world He came to save, with hands and feet nailed to a wooden cross. As I recall those formative days of that fourteen-year-old young man’s life — responding to a calling, a “vocation,” to serve the Lord as His priest — words come to mind the Master spoke to the weeping women of Jerusalem as he carried His cross up the “Via Dolorosa” in the “Holy City” of Jerusalem on the way to Golgotha:

“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.“

There’s so much prophecy encoded in that response to the weeping women. Those days have come for millions in war-torn countries such as Ukraine, and where earthquakes and torrential floods have displaced millions from their homes and devastated villages leaving mothers nothing to bring their children home to and raise a family; husbands and fathers gone off to fight their country’s battles and defend their homelands from enemy invaders; too many never to return home, dead or alive.

I feel in my gut that those days have arrived for the entire world and they will be apocalyptic for the human race and for all life on Earth — unless we turn away from our self-centered destructive ways and return to our LORD and KING of Heaven and Earth. This is His world, after all, as are we His body.

A passage from the Book of Malachi (3:7) in the Old Testament wants to be brought forward here:

“Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty.”

OUR CATACLYSMIC PAST

There have been six documented mass extinctions, the last one being at the end of the last ice age 12,800 years ago with the Younger Dryas meteor impact that melted the ice cap and caused an apocalyptic deluge that washed away entire advanced civilizations in North America and in parts of Europe and Asia, raising sea levels and sinking the great civilization on the island of Atlantis. Evidence of this massive rush of waters over land can be seen here in the scablands of Washington State and the region around the Great Lakes and the lakes themselves. We may well be headed for a seventh mass extinction.

I highly recommend Graham Hancock’s “Ancient Apocalypse” now streaming on Netflix. It’s a well documented series on our cataclysmic past, a topic well worth visiting at this time — as it seems humanity needs a sobering splash of cold water in the face in order to wake up to reality.

It could well happen again as conditions in the heavens are similar in the Winter Solstice of today as they were in the Summer Solstice 12,800 years ago when Earth wandered into the thick debris tail of the Taurid comet and got showered by a raining mass of meteors. The Zodiacal science of Mazzaroth is an exact science, and our absence from the crossover point of dominion over the whole earth has allowed our planet to be knocked off of its appointed orbit and start wobbling on its axis. Like the Children of Israel, we are wandering in the wilderness of the cosmos into dangerous areas where cataclysms have happened in times past. The Taurid comet observes a 26,000-year cycle, according to Graham Handcock’s documentary. That’s approximately the length of two precession cycles of the earth’s axis around the 12 Zodiac constellations, each cycle being 12,700 – 12,800 years.

I don’t mean to be a prophet of doom and gloom here. But, based on our cataclysmic past, we earthlings would do well to take heed — or as my parents would say “You better straighten up and fly right!”

I will close with those uplifting words from Psalm 24 immortalized in Handle’s Messiah:

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.”

Happy Easter

Anthony

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Ancient Apocalypse, Angelic Incarnation, Apocalypse, Ascension, Beliefs, Catholic Church, Christianity, Dr. Palombo's blog, Easter, Healing Tones Blog, Holy Week, Jesus, Lent, Love, Resurrection, The Jewish Zealots, The Messiah, The Mind, Transformation, Transmutation

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Escape from Plato’s Cave

If you make people think they think, they will love you.  If you make them think, they may hate you.

I LOVE TO THINK CRITICALLY. To be found wanting, and sometimes completely wrong, about what I have believed, especially for years.  It helps to distance my sense of identity from my intellect . . . and my human ego, which has been rather large, and troublesome at times.  I have a good mind and I enjoy using it correctly.  It’s given me much pleasure and service. But I am not my mind. 

I invite you to think with me for the length of this post about the current state of humanity . . . honestly . . . and about the way we’ve been going about creating our world.  I will use Plato’s allegory of the Cave in order to demystify where we have been in our awareness up until today, when we appear to be emerging from our hypnotic sleep.  I hope that you will enjoy the thinking process.  

♦ ◊ ♦

MOST OF WHAT WE HAVE CREATED in our world has been patterned after reflections from out of the past cast upon our clouded mental lens and filed away in our subconscious mind.   Much of it is reflected in the opaque substance of the veil separating human consciousness from Divine Consciousness, blocking inspiration from within.

For example, here in the USA we love our freedom and our democracy that grants us that freedom . . . and we have historically sought to destroy (as in kill) anyone who threatens, or whom we think threatens, that freedom or our democracy.  It’s just the way we’ve always done it.  History doesn’t repeat itself.  We keep reenacting history and stuffing the expansive nature of life into historical molds.  Uranda spoke to this “mould” acceptance several decades ago: 

Human beings have banded together to accept a mould into which all shall be crowded to smother a consciousness of those powerful inner drives. Society has tried to crowd the individual into an arbitrary mould; and to whatever degree one accepts that mould, he is “good.” To whatever degree one resists that, he is “bad.” Doing bad things is almost always the result of a misapplication of the principles of living in the early life of the individual, which has set up a pattern of internal conflict. We need to emerge out of the prison that has been established by these arbitrary moulds. In the world of humanity it is conceived that the only safe place for any good person is in “prison.”

The Master Jesus saw this condition in his day and sought to free the people from their culture of hate for the suppressive and persecuting Romans. His teaching to “Love your enemies; do good to those that hate you” did nothing for his popularity.  On the contrary, he was hated by the Scribes and Pharisees who kept the faithful imprisoned by the Law of Moses: “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you teach the Law of Moses, but you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.”  We have our own Scribes and Pharisees today continuing to keep the faithful from entering the kingdom of heaven before death takes them Home, and refraining from entering themselves.  Religion is big business — as are wars . . . and the politics of both.  

WARS CAST THEIR SHADOWS OF FEAR AND HATRED

As my friend on the other side of the pond reminded me, the English still hate and fear the “Hun”— a derogatory term for the Germans in WWI who crushed neutral nations and imposed brutal rule upon conquered peoples.  More recently the British suffered the destruction of much of England by Hitler’s German forces.  Hatred and fear of tyrants in neighboring countries continue to ignite and fuel confrontations and wars. The past tends to condition our perception and the way we handle our affairs in the present, as well as our expectancy of the future, clouding inspired vision of new possibilities and ways forward without fear and hatred, and absolutely without war.

The saving and redeeming grace is that what separates also connects.  Cleaning up our mental lens, both conscious and subconscious . . . and purifying the veil of our hearts connecting us with the Divine . . . is the only way to see what IS rather than what we have been taught and deeply programmed to BELIEVE.  Love alone casts out fear and purifies the heart. 

Our future arises from out of what we do now; the seeds we plant in the soil of the present moment. We chose to pattern it after the way things have always been.  It’s time we let go of the past entirely . . . and let the dead bury the dead.

Waking up out of our hypnotic stupor, we may be bedazzled by the beauty that’s always been there under our noses, so-to-speak, but covered over by our dark projections.

The following story came to me today as I read from blogs that I follow.  I won’t reveal whose blog this came from so as not to arouse any bias that might get in the way of seeing and realizing what is being implied by this allegory. Suffice it to say he’s a very reliable and trustworthy blogger. It’s an old story that still holds sway in today’s world. It demonstrates, for one thing, the wise saw that says it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.  Here’s the story.

♦ ◊ ♦

PLATO’S CAVE

About 2,400 years ago, the Athenian philosopher Plato (student of Socrates, mentor of Aristotle) described the Allegory of the Cave, writing while using the voice of his martyred mentor Socrates.  Socrates is most famous for his powerful logical approach for avoiding hubris, beginning all philosophical and logical quests for truth with the position that “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”.

In his political masterwork “The Republic”, Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave to justify his core political thesis that the ideal ruler is the “Philosopher King”, essentially a wise philosopher-dictator who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are collectively wise enough to choose a good master.  Modern readers can immediately detect the conflict of interest which lies at the heart of this Platonic ideal, that being that Plato (and by inference Socrates) are basically nominating themselves as authoritarian rulers over Athens. Personally, I find the logic that the Cave allegory justifies the philosopher-dictator as the ideal leader both a bit contrived and circular. However, I suggest that the Allegory of the Cave is a profound and immortal insight into a fundamental aspect of human society which is at the center of the observations of both 20th century political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt as well as her 21st century intellectual successor Dr. Mattias Desmet. 

The Cave is essentially a metaphorical thought experiment which uses a literary device similar to those employed in Aesop’s Fables, in which stories of talking animals are used to bypass the human mental defense mechanisms that can make it so hard for each of us to accept observations and critiques concerning fundamental behaviors. The Cave relates a fundamental, prototypic human myth.  It tells the story of the inevitable coupling of human discovery with the tribal rejection which all true innovative pioneers, all dissenters, all paradigm shifters know far too well.

The setting for the Allegory of the Cave is a hypothetical dark cavern inhabited by a group of prisoners who are all bound hand and foot facing the same wall. The prisoners have been there since birth; they have grown up together, and this is the only reality that they know.  Behind them is a burning fire maintained by the rulers of the cave.  The rulers have different objects and puppets which they hold up so that the prisoners can see the shadows cast by the objects as they interrupt the light of the fire, and the rulers make sounds and generate echoes for the prisoners to hear. These rulers of the cave are the puppet masters, able to control the reality which the prisoners are able to experience. As these shadows and sounds are all that the prisoners have experienced since birth, they do not question and do not know anything different from this shadow reality. They think that this is what life is, a reality of shadow, sound and echo.

The prisoners compose and share names for the shadows, develop competitions to determine who is best able to guess which shadow will turn up next, and give each other awards and praise for the ones with the most accurate predictions. From their standpoint, this is life.

One day, one of the prisoners gets loose.  His chains break, and in a confused state he stands for the first time, looks around, and sees the fire. Lying on the ground next to the fire he sees the puppets and objects which correspond to the shadows on the wall. In a great leap of insight, he concludes that the shadows came from these objects, and that the puppets and fire represent a greater reality than that which he had previously known.

Feeling empowered and  energized like never before, he begins to explore the cave, finds his way to the entrance, and leaves the shadowy fire-lit confines. The bright sun burns his eyes causing great pain, so he shields them with his hands. Gradually his eyes adjust to this new environment. He drops his hands and opens his eyes fully, seeing for the first time the greater world outside the cave. He sees color, sun, trees, animals, grass, mountains, and has yet another epiphany that he has become able to see the true nature of the world for the first time. The shadows had been mere surrogates of this greater truth.  There was much more to life than he had ever imagined. Filled with joy over this new experience, he feels a wave of gratitude and awe as awareness dawns that he has become able to directly perceive the true nature of the real world.

Then he remembers his fellow prisoners, the people he had shared his entire life with. He pities them for being trapped in their limited understanding of reality, for their ignorance of the larger real truth which they are neither able to experience nor perceive.  Overwhelmed with waves of pity, empathy, and anger at the puppet masters who have imprisoned and manipulated the reality of those that he has grown up and spent his entire life with, he returns to the cave determined to share what he has learned and help the prisoners see the larger reality, and to help free them from their bondage by the puppet masters.

The freed prisoner returns to the cave and his friends, hoping to enlighten and free them from their chains.  But they cannot understand what he is saying and trying to do. He tries to explain the greater reality that he has seen and experienced, but they cannot even begin to understand what he is trying to describe. Imprisonment in the cave is the only reality they have ever known, and they cannot understand anything else. They notice that the eyes of the freed prisoner have changed due to exposure to the sun, and that he now has trouble seeing, naming and interpreting the shadows. They laugh at him, and all concerned agree that leaving the cave is a waste of time. They then threaten to kill both the escaped prisoner as well as anyone else who dares to break their bonds and leave the cave.

♦ ◊ ♦

Human beings defend their beliefs, often with their life blood . . . and with the life blood of their fellow man. We as a race have yet to unshackle ourselves and come out of Plato’s cave?  We are still held prisoners of our past . . . and we appear to feel safe and comfortable in our state of deception . . . too comfortable. Thankfully, some of us have felt uncomfortable with our comfort, as many have awakened . . . or been awakened by one global crisis or another, and the politics thereof . . . and masses of protesters are begging and eager for the leaders of our nations to stop making war with one another . . . and to please do something about banning assault rifles on the streets again, as they were banned between 1994 and 2004, thank you then President Bill Clinton!  And that’s all I’ve got to say about that!

Returning to the first line of this post, without critical thinking and extensive research, one is not likely to see the profiteering and manipulative politics churning beneath the deceiving surface play of events.  One has to turn away from the news media and peer through the smoke screens to see the puppeteers controlling what we see and hear about what’s going on in the world . . . the cave wall.  Then throw off the shackles and leave the cave, without taking up battle with the puppeteers.  Bask in the sunlight and breathe the fresh air of the beautiful world of Mother Nature.  As one enlightened soul commented on Facebook on the R.E.M song lyrics “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. . .“Mostly I have such a deep appreciation of Life with all of its sides. Gratitude seems to give me a door to bring love to the scene.”   Now that’s what’s real . . . and peacefully comforting.  Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

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Beliefs, Beyond belief, Conscious Evolution, Consciousness, Deception, Divine identity, Dr. Palombo's blog, Ending Wars, Fear, freedom, Hate & Fear, Healing Tones Blog, History Repeats itself, Hypnotic State, Jesus, Kingdom of Heaven, Love, Mind of God, New Heaven and New Earth, Plato's Cave, The Mind, The mind and true thinking, True Identity, Truth, Wars

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The Mystery of Consciousness: Conveyor of Light and Love

Where your heart is, there also is your treasure. 

A LINE FROM A POPULAR POEM BY RUMI about a field “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” has been repeating in my head since I published my previous post: “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”  And it truly is. There’s just so much going on in our world today for one to crowd into one’s thimble-size mind.  Another saying that Rumi penned from his home in Konya, Turkey, speaks of the heart’s treasure: “I looked in temples, churches and mosques. But I found the Divine in my heart.” 

In the movie “The Sound of Music,” Maria (Julie Anderson) sings “I go to the hills when my heart is lonely.”  Today, amidst the devastation in Ukraine and the repercussions the sanctions levied against Russia are having on the economy here and globally, I go to my heart to find peace and sanity.  Peace, because love abides here; sanity, because in my heart I know and understand that all is well in the Hands of God. 

By divine design, we human beings are the hands of God here on Earth.  Whatever happens, let me be a beacon of light in the darkness of human consciousness . . . and human consciousness is truly filled with darkness.  But darkness is simply the absence of light.  It’s not something of itself.  It’s nothing.  Light is something! Let there be light! 

A large mass of humanity has withdrawn from the light of love and hunkered down in the shadows of fear and uncertainty.  But let the Spirit of Love move upon the face of the waters of human consciousness and, Voila! There is light! And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness does not comprehend it. “How can you be so calm and peaceful amid such atrocities and violence?! Where is your outrage!? Your condemnation of Putin and his murderous foot-soldiers who have exterminated tens-of-thousands of their fellow countrymen, women and children included?!” Such reactions are only incapacitating spiritually and contribute nothing but fuel to the fires raging in human hearts and minds, clouding and darkening vision.  If there’s one thing needed at this time it’s clear vision.

Whatever happens, let me be a beacon of light in the darkness

I find it somewhat challenging to refrain from outrage and remain non-judgmental in all of this death and destruction being heaped upon Ukraine and her citizens.  But that doesn’t mean I have blinders over my eyes.  I see clearly what is happening—at least what the news is telling and showing us—but only with my eyes. 

“A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten-thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee, for only with thine eyes shalt thou see and behold the reward of the wicked.” (Psalm 91:7). 

I looked up the word wicked and it has several connotations and applications: vicious, depraved, (wicked habits); mischievous or playfully malicious (a wicked joke); obnoxious or offensive (a wicked stench); formidable or excellent (a wicked tennis player).  The Psalmist most likely would characterize the wicked as “vicious” and “depraved.” Who, then, are these “wicked” ones who are reaping their rewards? I think we all have had some part in wickedness; surely any and all who have lived for the material treasures of the world rather than the spiritual treasures of Heaven. 

CONVEYOR OF SPIRIT

Perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch, although a good segue to the theme of this post, the word “wicked” has the word “wick” as its root—which is a woven chord for conveying liquid, like the wick of a candle which is designed to convey the melting candle wax up to fuel the flame for light.  Consciousness is a conveyor of Spirit, given to us by the Creator as a means of connecting with Heaven and for conveying the Light of Truth and Love into the world.  By design, we are much like the whirling dervishes of Turkey who spin ’round and ’round, with one hand pointed upward toward heaven and the other hand turned downward toward the earth, as they provide a channel for bringing Love down from God into the world.  

There’s a wise saw that says you can’t fix a problem at the same level as the problem, but from a level above the level of the problem.  And so it is with the problems that plague human consciousness.  The solutions are to come from above and not from below.  The design for the New Earth descends from Heaven above into the heaven of human consciousness . . . but only as there is room to receive it.  Filled with wickedness, there’s no room for the Truth of Life, which is Love.  We need to cast the devil—literally the divider—out of our heaven, as Jesus did: “Get thee hence!”  Then there will be room for the Truth of the New Earth to emerge from the New Heaven and replace the old earth. 

A large part of the old heaven is occupied by the Christian belief that Jesus came down to earth from Heaven to die for our sins and redeem “us sinners” from the hands of the Devil.  That is a redaction and a lie conjured up by Saint Paul and the Council of Nicaea, the most grievous of lies ever perpetrated upon human beings. 

The truth is that Christ, the Son of God, incarnated in Jesus and came to show us how to love God and one another.  That’s the truth, and I think it’s time that Christians, and particularly Catholics, do away with their crucifixes and repent for having worshiped the murderous crucifixion of the Son of God all these centuries.  I am certain that He doesn’t want nor like that his crucifixion is still being celebrated as the purpose for his visitation to this planet.  We can celebrate His life and victory over death by His resurrection without dragging him through that ignominious ordeal in our memories and our Holy Week liturgies.  Please, take him down from the cross and worship the Father in spirit and in truth, which is all He asked.  His true passion was and is the return of Love of God and love for one another to humanity and to His Father’s world. 

If a cross is needed, one can replace the crucifix with the balanced cross of St. Benedict, which is a plus ⊕, symbolizing a cross-over point between Heaven and Earth, which is what Jesus was and what we are designed to be.  (This cross is believed to protect one from the Devil and was used in exorcisms to cast out demons.)

I’ll leave you with the beautiful and rich Russian choral music of Grechaninov’s Passion Week, Op. 58:1, Behold the Bridegroom, performed by the Phoenix Bach Choir, Kansas City Chorale, conducted by Charles Bruffy.  Enjoy this first track of the album.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=65aDlqi4KQI&feature=share

Have a Happy Easter Sunday. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved. 

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

 

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Beliefs, Catholic Church, Christianity, Conscious Evolution, Consciousness, Dr. Palombo's blog, Easter, Healing Tones Blog, Jesus, Love, New Heaven and New Earth, Resurrection, The Crucifixion of Jesus, The Gospel of Love

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