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“Third Force” Intervention

“I have thrown fire on the world. Look! I watch it until it blazes!”

Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas.

* * *

WERE YOU EVER IN A STATE of comfortable assurance that everything was going right on schedule when something crops us that threatens to disrupt your schedule and prevent you from reaching your destination or goal on time — then a surprising event springs up, seemingly out of nowhere, that resolves the impasse and you’re on you way to a timely arrival? Well, such synchronicity is basically what Gurdjieff’s “Third Force” dynamics is all about. But let me share Cynthia Bourgeault’s interpretations and demonstrations of the “Law of Three” from her “exquisitely written love story,” EYE OF THE HEART.

THIRD FORCE

According to the Law of Three, all new arisings in whatever domain and at whatever scale are caused by the interweaving of three independent forces (not just two), which Gurdjieff calls affirming, denying, and reconciling. Where there are just two, there is impasse, and situations logjam. But since it is the nature of life in the created order, flowing as it does out of world 3, to be continuously moving and shapeshifting, third force enters. Impasses break up. New configurations emerge, for better or worse. This will either happen randomly, under the law of accident, or it will happen intentionally, under the law of fate. In the latter case it is an imaginally generated new arising, and the conscious circle often has a distinctive role to play.

Third force is a bit like quicksilver itself; under various lights it can appear to be generated, invoked, midwifed, or discovered in a situation — or it can emerge, seemingly out of left field, through a random event or “coincidence.” The conscious circle can be deployed in any of these directions. While generally its role seems to be to maintain that deep reservoir of spacious, nonidentified attentiveness out of which third force most spontaneously arises, every so often it finds itself functioning directly as third force itself, providing that requisite bridging element that breaks up the logjam and ushers in the new configuration.

The history of civilization is marked by a few great turning points, when things which had apparently been moving in one direction suddenly shift course and move in another, often under mysterious circumstances. I do not want to fall into a magical retelling of history here, where every miraculous plot twist is taken as evidence of imaginal intervention. But as I ponder how third force has played out at some of these significant crossroads in human history, I would like to share three stories, all of them basically anecdotal, that appear to me to bear the particular fragrance of conscious-circle involvement.

The first story was told to me many years ago by my dear friend and teacher Murat Yagan, who trained extensively in the Abkhazian shamanic and Bektashi dervish lineages before emigrating to Canada in 1960 to take up work as a teacher of the deeper imaginal roots of the Western Inner tradition. According to Murat — and he was adamant about this — the origins of Sufism predate Islam and in fact lie in “the order of Melchizedek,” or in other words, directly in the imaginal realm. The marriage of these two spiritualities was effected only in the ninth century through the deliberate intervention of a Central Asian Wisdom council, which directly foresaw that the external container of Islam would be the only vessel strong enough to withstand the devastation shortly to be unleashed by Mongol invasions. Moving quickly to protect a tender shoot of human consciousness beginning to bud in Central Asia, the council effected a union so sturdy that to this day the standard version of Islamic history claims that Sufism is simply “the mystical arm of Islam,” generated entirely within an Islamic matrix.

Sometimes initial calamities, once viewed from the perspective of the conscious circle, begin to make sense in a whole different way. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 is just such an example and furnishes my second story. On the one hand, this violent act of aggression broke up a Wisdom enclave of almost supernatural purity and power. On the other hand, it displaced this Wisdom to the West, where it was sorely needed and well positioned to grow the entire world. As the Dalai Lama, Lama Yeshe, and others of that remarkable lineage made their way to Dharamshala and points west, the cross-pollination began in earnest, and the reinfusion of energy into the West’s own contemplative traditions has laid a sturdy global foundation for the second axial awakening. . . .

“IS PARIS BURNING?”

My third story may be my own fantasy, but only the last connection; all the rest up to that point is verifiably true. During the dark days of World War II, when most spiritual teachers were fleeing for refuge to less war-torn places, Gurdjieff elected to stay put in Paris, in his tiny flat less than a quarter of a mile as the crow flies from the central command post of the German occupation. And in this bitter season of deprivation and hopelessness, he set about generating intentionally the energy of abundance, the missing element in a desperately traumatized world. Using skills he had gained who knows how, he managed to acquire huge stockpiles of food — not just basic staples always available in an unlocked pantry, but elegant luxuries, Armagnac and chocolates, served up in lavish banquets in an atmosphere suffused with the limitless possibility of the human spirit. Those who still remember those banquets know full well that the real food being served was love. . . .

Just over the hill, in the place de la Concorde, during the summer of 1944, the noose was tightening on the Nazi occupation. The American troops had landed in Normandy and were steadily making their way toward Paris. An elaborate scheme had been set in place by those leading the German evacuation that would have left behind a swath of destruction obliterating some of the great monuments of human culture. Dietrich von Choltitz, a general widely known for his ruthlessness, was in charge of the operations. Explosives were placed under Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre. It is all detailed in the book Is Paris Burning?”

Somehow, it never happened. The reasons are still not clear. There was never a moment when it was decided not to blow up Paris. There were negotiations and communications right up to the end, but no moment of decision. Like the tide turning, the moment simply receded.

I could never prove that there was a connection between these two events. But knowing how imaginal causality works and Gurdjieff’s skills in this realm, I cannot not believe it. In my heart I still fiercely hold it as his greatest gift to our West, and I offer up my prayers of gratitude. I will count him forever among the thirty-six.

LOVE CASTING

The “thirty-six” relates to the Hasidic folklore cited in a previous post which claims that our world is held in its planetary orbit by thirty-six conscious human beings, whose work is of such a fine quality as to “rise like incense into the earth’s atmosphere” creating a “sturdy bandwidth of protection, blessing, and guidance.” This, in essence, describes the nature and function of Gurdjieff’s “conscious circle of humanity.”

The number 36 is of course symbolic and can represent a group of individuals as well as individual groups of people, many of which have convened together to form what some are describing as “love casting” circles. I am a participant in a few of them myself. Modern technology today allows us to gather via Zoom conferences, which makes our conscious awareness of one another and of our work more visible and generative.

If you think that you would like to participate is such a love casting circle, drop me an email for more information and contact references. One of my group coordinators is in Jerusalem, another in Toronto and a third in Hawaii. Then there are smaller circles of light workers who “meet in the field” weekly at various times — the “field” being Rumi’s realm in consciousness “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” where Rumi says : “I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”

THIRD FORCE INTERVENTION

“Even from the days of your fathers ye have gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return to me and I will return to you, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Malachi 3:7)

The rest of that passage is relevant today:

“But ye said, Wherein shall we return? Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I shall rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field saith the LORD of hosts. And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Malachi 3:7-12)

Our world is cursed with a plague that is destroying the lives of our children, our youth, and our elders. With over twenty wars currently waging globally, and the pending threat of nuclear annihilation, this civilization is on a fast track to self destruction. Not the planet, just the mind-made world on its surface.

God loves this world so much that He sent His only begotten Son to save it from destruction. His coming was as a third force at a time when affirmation of the promise of a Messiah by the prophets and sacred scripture was strong in the minds and hearts of the people, and denial of the truth of the oneness of heaven and earth was strong as well. He came to reconcile the separation between His Father in Heaven and His children on earth, and to restore our consciousness to the awareness of the presence of the Kingdom on Heaven within us and all around us.

But His “Third Force” intervention in the downward path humanity was on at that time occurred on the cross when he cheated death and then, as though from out of left field — although He had forecasted His resurrection — He rose from the tomb, and in so doing altered the course of human history.

Third Force intervention is happening again today in what is called ” The Second Coming of Christ.” Only this time it’s happening in and through a collective body of chosen ones, incarnate angels who have come here to prepare the way for His coming on the clouds of heavenly human consciousness by casting the fire of love into the world and thereby generating the spiritual plasma needed to accommodate the transmission of the Christ Spirit into the world. I repeat His words recorded in the Gospel of Thomas:

“I have thrown fire on the world. Look! I watch it until it blazes.”

That fire of love is beginning to blaze, as the words of this poem by Martin Cecil proclaim:

* * *

THUS IT IS

From age to age

Love’s word rings forth,

“The truth is true and all is well,

Unconquerable life prevails.

Oh, man, whose strident dreams

Lead gravewards,

Return to calm and noble

Character of life.

Blaze forth pure virtue.

Depart false ambition’s restless schemes.

Busy thought and troubled feeling

Trespass not in virtue’s wise serenity

Where firm control and awful power

Eternally abide.

Here earth’s pains are healed

And cruel chaos of mind’s spawning

Is called again to order and to beauty.

* * *

Let’s make our world a “delightsome land” again, by returning the tithes of our heart’s love to the One whose world this is, the LORD of hosts. For it’s through our hearts that His Spirit returns to this earthly realm.

I welcome any thoughts you may have in response to this post and wish to share. Until my next post,

be love . . . be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Cleansing Our Lens of Perception

Rainbow Heart

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

* * *

IN CHAPTER SIX of EYE OF THE HEART Cynthia Bourgeault’s writing is, for me, the clearest and most pragmatic of all I’ve read of her writings thus far. This essay is about cleansing our “lens” of perception — not only so that we see the world, both physical and spiritual aspects, as they are; but more importantly so that we “see” ourselves as we truly are, and not as we imagine ourselves to be — the “price” of seeing clearly being the self-centered and isolated egoic self in exchange for the “Real I” as part of the greater Whole.

It’s not necessary to synthesize this chapter for the sake of brevity, as it’s already as succinct and comprehensive as it can be. I think it serves my readers best as an excerpt without interpretation or condensation. I think you will thoroughly enjoy reading and flowing with Cynthia’s stream of consciousness. (Note: you may want to refer back to my previous post when she references the various “worlds” through which we travel as we ascend in consciousness.)

IMAGINAL PURIFICATION

IN THE PAST two chapters we’ve been looking at some of the ways in which imaginal causality expresses itself in this world. Now it’s time to look a bit more closely at some of the ways in which this expression can be distorted — or in other words, areas in which some purification of the vehicle is necessary in order to ensure a greater reliability and consistency of connection.

The Sufis call this work “polishing the mirror” or “cleansing the lens of perception.” For Christian readers long accustomed to associating purification with sorrow and penance, this “housecleaning” metaphor may indeed offer a refreshing new take. In this more praxis-oriented context, the issue is not so much remorse for our moral failings (although that never drops out of the picture) as it is a deliberate effort to keep the viewing screen clear so that what falls on it is not immediately distorted by lower-order agendas.

The biggest single area of distortion lies in the tendency to drag the interpretation down to the level of magical thinking. At this level the focus is on individual “signs and wonders,” almost invariably drawn from the stock repertory. An eagle feather drops in your path, a rainbow appears in the sky, a shooting star streaks across the night sky, and suddenly you are in receipt of a personal message from God! Or perhaps you race on ahead and start filling in the pieces of the imaginal puzzle with your own imagi-nation and mental calculations. Then you are in some ways worse off than if you had never begun, conscripted to a scenario that exists only in your own head. In both cases there is a level confusion going on here, and this confusion is what will inevitably switch the message (however accurate it may have been at its initial point of impact) onto a generally unreliable track.

Who is this “I” who is receiving the message? The confusion is between two levels of consciousness, which in the classic typologies of both East and West are known as “psychic” and “subtle.” The bottom line is that imaginal causality belongs to the subtle level of consciousness; all attempts to capture it at the psychic level will lead to distortion — at best innocuous, at worst downright dangerous.

The psychic level of consciousness is that intermediate state at which a growing sensitization to transpersonal (a.k.a. “psychic”) phenomena is still firmly tied to an egoic (or narrative) self-center . . . and insofar as it does signal the initial opening of the imaginal capacities, it represents progress. But it is a very unstable place in the growth curve, and until the tension is ironed out a lot of damage can be done.

I will speak only in passing here of those more dangerous levels of magic and the occult, which happen in exactly this configuration at its extreme negative pole, i.e., a pronounced psychic capacity tied to a strong, amoral personal will. With concentrated attention and training, it is indeed possible to draw down the energy of World 24 and even World 6 to wreak havoc on this earth plane. Gurdjieff called such people “hasnamusses,” but perhaps the old term evil will serve just as well. We see them in the Hitlers, the Jim Joneses, the cult leaders run amuck, and in many more who wreak harm in a much more subtle but pervasive way (I would personally place Ayn Rand in that category): too much psychic power, too little love.

The moral inversion at work here is not only an affront to the image of our common humanity, it also badly misinterprets the nature of the higher energy itself, which appears under this filter to be simply an impersonal, amoral, “spirit in third person,” another mechanistic force to be harnessed — not, as it really is, a powerfully compassionate and coherent relational field bearing the moral heart of God. When Teilhard de Chardin insisted adamantly toward the end of his life that “God is a person, God is person,” he was not picturing an old man with a beard up in the sky. He was saying, rather, that as we proceed further and further into those luminous spheres, we encounter more and more fully the personal, radiant, tender, and intimate presence of the divine heart, which can never be relegated to an “it.” It is always a “thou,” and it pulls us inevitably toward greater thouness, the ultimate sacrifice that is love’s.

The imaginal realm properly corresponds to the subtle level of consciousness, which in turn corresponds to a different kind of selfhood. We move here necessarily from a narrative or egoic seat of selfhood to the beginnings of authentic witnessing selfhood. The concept is not well understood in Christian spiritual theology, which still tends to confuse the mythical beast of “true self” with the high egoic functioning of world 48. Witnessing selfhood is a World 24 phenomenon. That discrete sense of a personal “I” marching along a linear timeline held in place by memory and desire, gradually shifts to a larger and more unboundaried selfhood, the “wave” form of oneself, as it were.

Paying attention not to what you are but to that you are is how the anonymous medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing summarized this fundamental shift in perspective.’ For Gurdjieff, this would be the beginning of the transition from “essence” to “Real I.” I have written extensively about this transition elsewhere, most recently in my book The Heart of Centering Prayer, so I will not elaborate further here.” But I would want to make very clear, with regard to our present concern, that imaginal causality can only be reliably read beginning at the level of witnessing selfhood and sooner or later demands that one join it at that level. The cost of admission to this new and more intense bandwidth of reality is ultimately your phenomenal self. Those things that you once thought were you — your history, your emotions, your particularities, your “descriptions” (as Beatrice Bruteau calls them) — are precisely those things offered into the refiner’s fires in order to create a being that can reliably listen and respond.

Seeing with the Eye of the Heart

In the Western Inner traditions there is a strong implicit thread that this shift to a new seat of selfhood is inextricably linked to a new operating system of perception, centered in the heart. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God,” said Jesus, in these words of the sixth beatitude inaugurating not only a new pathway of purification but in fact a new phenomenology of it. The heart is already implicitly identified as the seat of imaginal vision, and as the teaching gets fleshed out over the centuries, particularly in mystical Sufism, the consensus continues to build that the heart (rather than the cognitive mind, i.e., the brain) is the true organ of spiritual perception and the seat of our imaginal selfhood. . . . (All embolden emphases added)

—Bourgeault EYE OF THE HEART

PURIFICATION OF THE HEART OF GOD

Over the past eighty-three years I have re-created my physical body twelve times over. With each new body a new mind was created as well, which allowed me to think anew and see anew, influenced by teachers and friends. What wasn’t created anew was my heart. Not my physical heart but my spiritual heart. That came with my spirit when I incarnated — and to the degree my mind has played its role in protecting my heart, I have retained some innocence. To the degree my mind has been self-centered and self-active, and has failed to protect it, my heart has accumulated such ill patterns as shame, guilt, and blame, to mention but a few of the many impure and disruptive feeling patterns and emotional impulses cluttering and sullying my heart’s lens of perception.

Many of these patterns were established in early childhood and during my youthful years of “exploring the field,” so-to-speak, mostly with wreckless abandon and blind disregard for how my actions may have impacted and affected those around me. Some of them came with the larger collective body of which I became a member when I incarnated. Looking back now — which can be a dangerous and even fatal exercise — patterns of regret, remorse and self-loathing crop up for release and forgiveness — literally to be given up for transmutation in the purifying fire of unconditional love.

At the end of this eighty-three-year-old tunnel, I find my Self in the Light of this New Day as inseparably part of a Body, having no isolated and insulated existence — in the presence of my LORD God, naked and unashamed, having been freed of shame and guilt in the Presence of unconditional Love. As the lens of my heart continues to be cleansed — largely under the pressure of challenging circumstances and recurring memories of past “moral failings” — I continue to participate in the purification of the Heart of Humanity, which is the Heart of God; and I relinquish all identification with the debris rising up and out of my personal field and the collective field of this Body, of which I am but one member of billions. None of it is who or what I am. I assume identity with my true Self as being one with the angelic Fire of Purification. One with Love. Love is what and who I Am. Love is what and who you are.

I know it to be the truth, for myself and for each and every one of us. We belong to One Body, outside of which we are nothing. That Body is the Body of God on Earth. So, if you think and feel that you are insignificant, a nobody, then I encourage you to let go of that isolated and insignificant self and let go to your true Self. You, as a Human Being and incarnate angel, are essential and vital to the healing and restoration of the Body of God on Earth. That’s no small and insignificant role we are privileged to play while we are on Earth.

Knowing this as truth brings with it a certain responsibility from which these is no escape. There’s work to be done — spiritual, emotional, mental as well as physical — as none of us are free of our past, personal and collective, as long as one of us is bound to it.

Let us not be “burned up” with the debris that’s on fire and disintegrating in Worlds 96 and 192. Neither let us be distraught and destroyed with it. Rather let us identify with the Fire, be one with the Spirit of Purification, whose place of presence is the Heart. Let my heart, one with the Heart of God, be purified in love’s fire so that I may see as God sees me and all the members of His Body.

We belong in Gurdjieff’s World 24 . . . in the “Kingdom of Heaven”. . . where we receive our instructions: the ordinances of heaven from the Holy Absolute in World 1, their “dominion” of which we are ordained to set in the earth and manifest Creation.

Gurdjieff’s map of the worlds may be useful in helping one see where one is currently living: in heaven or in hell . . . or perhaps in between. If you’re moving through hell, as the saying goes, remember that it’s only an illusion, so just keep moving . . . UP! Up, up and away, as the song goes. Leave the world to its own undoing, and just let love radiate through your heart without concern for results. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation: A Cosmic Symphony

“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”

* * *

BEFORE getting into the main topic of this post, I would like to share a comment on my previous post by my poet friend, Don Hynes, along with his songful poem of blessing:

“This is a beautiful post. The historical scheme may be questioned but the vibration is perfect. In this air cycle of awakening our purpose is to accelerate human conscious-ness that it may rise with the ascending vibration of the Sun enveloping the Earth. Of course the specific consciousness is my own, the individual always, but also to befriend each other in this task, those seen and unseen, known and unknown, that all may rise in this new day. If you will allow, I’ll close with a few poetic words that might add to your masterwork:

We are an old people,
the stories say among the first,
who walked the land
when fresh with the Creator’s touch.
Though scarred with years of trouble
we still sing the blessing songs,
greeting the Sun each day
with the thankfulness it deserves.
And so I sing for you this morning
a song of your belonging,
child of a distant Light
and ancient Mother,
may you walk in beauty
all your days, and if forgotten
may this song remind you.

* * *

THANK YOU DON. We are indeed “an old people” . . . and we live on an old planet in an even older universe. How old nobody can really know, though scientific estimates have been made. What is time anyway? Everything happens in this eternal now. There is, however, great but simple method to the ongoing unfolding evolution of the universe as it moves forward through cycles of chaos-to-order and dissonance-to-consonance.

As George Gurdjieff reminds us in his Law of Seven (also called the Law of Octaves) — which I explored in my previous post — “nothing continues forever.” Creation unfolds within an energetic and musical continuum. Or as Russell Walter postulates, “Everything that is, is of everything else that is. Nothing is of itself alone. All created things are indissolubly united”. . . and sing together the “Music of the Spheres,” as George Gurdjieff demonstrates in his “Ray of Creation.” And there’s no one more articulate and comprehensive in unpacking Gurdjieff ‘s complex and profound vision of “worlds within worlds” than Episcopal prelate and author, Cynthia Bourgeault. So I will share excerpts from her book THE EYE OF THE HEART in bringing you Gurdjieff’s cosmogony in the context of her life’s journey in search and discovery of the “Imaginal Realm”. . . and its location and function within the Ray of Creation. This first excerpt if from chapter two “Worlds Within Worlds.”

The Ray of Creation

Gurdjieff actually makes use of two cosmic maps, and to situate the imaginal sphere of operations within his teaching, you have to overlay them.

The first, and probably more widely known of these (because of its close tie-in with the enneagram and the Law of Seven), is his Ray of Creation, which, as I have mentioned already, is the Gurdjieffian version of the Great Chain of Being. In most respects this follows the standard processionary model of traditional [religious] sophia perennis metaphysics, with progressively denser and colder kingdoms emerging out of that initial fiery explosion of the divine will-to-form that sets the whole thing in motion. The counter-entropic trajectory is not at first clearly visible.

What is immediately interesting about this map, however, is that the entire ray is located within the physical universe — although of course, the word physical here must be expanded to the widest and wildest reaches of our cosmological imagination. Gurdjieff’s “Megalocosmos,” the vast celestial canvas on which his map is drawn, stretches even beyond the fourteen billion years of our present “universe story,” reaching back into that implicitly endless matrix from which big bangs emerge like virtual particles. It is on the grandest possible cosmic scale that his vision plays out.

So too, the realms on this ray are not named by spiritual or theological names, as is typical of sophia perennis metaphysics. You will not find here logoic realms, angelic realms, heaven and hell realms — or for that matter, imaginal realms. Instead, you will find actual inter-planetary locations, named in an order that some of you may find strangely familiar: dominus (Holy Absolute), siderum (all galaxies), lactera (Milky Way, our galaxy), sol (our sun),fatum (fate, our own solar system or sphere of planetary influence), mixtus orbis (“mixed realm,” our planet earth), regina coeli (queen of the heavens, the
moon) — or do, si, la, sol, fa, mi, re, do. (bold emphasis added)

Wait a minute! Isn’t that our modern Western musical scale?

Indeed, it is. And this is where the second fascinating feature of the Ray of Creation comes in. According to Gurdjieff, our modern major scale actually preserves in the names of its notes and the arrangement of its intervals a vestigial memory of an ancient esoteric teaching about the “cosmic solfeggio,” not only in the way in which the created order originally came into existence but also in the way in which energy is continuously transmitted and replenished along the Ray of Creation. That knowledge is still there, hidden in plain sight in the musical scale, to be dug out by those so inclined; its articulation dovetails precisely with what in the Gurdjieff work is known as the Law of Seven, the Law of World Maintenance.

This is not the place to get sidetracked into a lengthy discussion of the Law of Seven. . . . But from the point of view of imaginal exchange, it does yield up one very interesting piece of data, again a stable feature of the Law of Seven. If you look at the schematic that follows, you notice those two lines cutting across the map, between do and si near the top and between fa and mi closer to the bottom. These correspond to the “hesitation” points on the ray — half steps on the musical scale — where a new infusion of energy, or a different kind of energy, must be introduced in order to keep the whole ray flowing on trajectory. Otherwise the whole thing will veer off track or be halted at a threshold it cannot cross. In Gurdjieffian terminologies, these are the “shock” points, the places where the entire progression is the most vulnerable but, equally, the most permeable.

GURDJIEFF’S RAY OF CREATION

In the case of the higher (do-si) shock point, that bridging energy is provided by the will of the Holy Absolute, still close enough to ground zero to easily span the descending gap. In the latter case, as we will see shortly, the shock point falls right between fa, the traditional endpoint of the so-called subtle realms, and mi, the beginning of those “dense material realms.” And this is exactly the place where traditional metaphysics and I locate the imaginal realm. In other words, the mi-fa shock point falls right in the middle of the imaginal intertidal zone. In and of itself, if you ponder it deeply, this realization will tell you most everything you need to know about the primary cosmic function of the imaginal realm and our specific human contribution to this sphere of operations. But since these ideas may be very new to some of you not previously familiar with Gurdjieffian metaphysics, rest assured that I will circle back in chapter 3 and unpack them much
more systematically.

I like this first map because it is real. Not only does it accord with a more contemporary understanding of the relationship between matter and energy, it also situates the whole unfolding here (admittedly a huge and vast “here”) rather than in some mirage-like “spiritual” realm that floats “above” our visible solar system like a huge celestial theme park. It calls us to order, to a path of transformation that does not lead us away from materiality but straight into it and through it. Particularly when we enter those two lowest realms, mi and re, we are talking about our actual earth and our actual moon, and we are discussing planetary evolution along lines strikingly parallel to Teilhard de Chardin’s. Nor will Gurdjieff let us off the hook here. For him, the major vehicle mediating that mi-fa shock is the biosphere — yes, organic life on earth! — and its ultimate recipient is the moon, not our eternal souls. And yes, our conscious attention and willing participation will certainly make a huge difference in how our contribution is mediated and in which realm it is received. But willingly or unwillingly the tribute is exacted, and it is paid in the coin of this realm, in flesh and blood. Our inner work exists within the Megalocosmos and for the sake of the Megalo-cosmos, not the other way around; it is important never to forget this.

MIXED REALM

Our own Earth realm has long been known on the cosmological maps as mixtus orbis, the “mixed realm.” While the full explanation for this designation is complex, something does seem to get mixed and mingled here. We humans are curiously bilingual; we speak the language of this world with all its charms and nuances, but we also strain toward that invisible other that seems to hover right beyond us in those dazzling glimpses and visions: that intuition of “another intensity,” in the words of T. S. Eliot, to which we know we also belong. That invisible but always interpenetrating other is the imaginal realm.”

The earlier metaphysical roadmaps, as mentioned, tended to draw a sharp dividing line between matter and spirit, with the result that the imaginal, hovering just on the horizon of our mixtus orbis, often appeared to be a world in itself, with no obvious commerce with our own. As the last outpost of the “spiritual” realms, how and why would it bridge the divide into the material realms? In the previous chapter I tried to recast this traditional metaphysical habit in terms of the more contemporary under-standing that there is in fact no such “divide” but rather a single continuum of energy manifesting in various degrees of subtlety or coarseness. Transposing the metaphysical map from its original Platonic milieu to this more Einsteinian one in fact takes us far beyond traditional esoteric understandings of the imaginal, which focused on the personal and elusive nature of this realm, into a new appreciation of its collective and evolutionary importance.

It was Gurdjieff who really got the ball rolling here by adding in the key puzzle piece (undetectable through the lens of traditional sophia perennis metaphysics), which he called “reciprocal feeding.” He proposed that along the entire Ray of Creation (his equivalent term for the Great Chain of Being), there is a continuous, active exchange proceeding in both directions — not only from higher realms to lower but also from lower to higher — in order to maintain the entire ray in a state of dynamic equilibrium according to a cosmic principle to which he gives the rather unwieldy name “Trogoautoegocrat.”

Mouthful though the term may be, the idea itself is a remarkably prescient attempt to view the entire created order as what we would nowadays call a “self-specifying system,” a whole greater than the sum of its parts, whose chief metaphysical feature is no longer involution — the gradual loss of energy as the lower end of the chain plunges steadily toward entropy — but rather an elaborate homeostasis that preserves (and even increases) the energy of the total system as each realm makes its required contri-bution to the whole.

Gurdjieff referred to this system as “reciprocal feeding” for good reason: the exchange he has in mind involves the actual transformation of cosmic substances based models—more like digestion than the simple information-sharing favored in contemporary consciousness . . . .

But the idea itself is fairly straightforward and so flagrantly timely for a planet careening toward ecological catastrophe that I believe it’s simply no longer conscionable to allow it to be held captive in a maze of Gurdjieffian Fourth Way esoterica. More to our immediate concern here, this broader vision of what amounts to a vast intergalactic bootstrapping is utterly essential if we hope to have some true feeling for what the imaginal realm is all about, beyond just some allusive bandwidth of inner guidance and bedazzling intensity. If exchange is indeed the principal business of this realm, we must picture this exchange from the outset as a two-way street. (All bold emphasis added)

WHERE IS ALL THIS LEADING?

That’s a very appropriate question to ask at this point in the series.  My destination, after laying the groundwork, is the creating ground of the “Imaginal Realm” and the “reciprocal feeding” that takes place in the “exchange between the realms.”  This is the realm where we’re destined to ascend in consciousness, where the two realms meet — and from whence we, as a “conscious circle of humanity,” co-create and recreate the “mixed realm” of the New Earth . . . and our moon, which is included in Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation. Our fascination with going to the moon is significant at this time . . . but are we in position, mentally and spiritually, to take on the re-creation of our moon while our Home planet goes neglected and raped for her resources? I think not. We would treat Her Majesty no differently. But then, maybe not!

I do hope you enjoy flowing with Cynthia’s stream of consciousness as much as I do. I will share more in my next post, “Worlds Within Worlds.” As always, I welcome your thoughts, insights and inspirations. Until next time,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com.

“Visionary Activism”

Horsehead Nebula

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

I TRAFFIC WITH VISIONARIES — and there seem to be many in these historic days of awakening who are serving up a banquet of food for serious thought, much of it conveying nourishing energy for ascension of consciousness out of the dark and depressing mode of modern-day madness and fear-driven despair that’s imprisoning the spirits of human beings the world over and into the light of a New Day dawning.

One of these visionaries is my longtime friend and colleague energy healer and lightworker Will T. Wilkinson, currently living in Hawaii, author of NOW OR NEVER — A time-traveler’s guide to personal and global transformation; and co-author with Master Charles Cannon of AWAKENING from the AMERICAN DREAM: From Crisis to Consciousness. Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, writes in the foreword of Will’s book, “Now or Never reveals how to balance authentic mystical experience with radical, urgent, wise action in the world.” This is the theme I wish to explore in this blog series.

In a recent posting, Will offers insight into the controversial and problematic technology of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). I encourage you to read his previous post of April 2nd The Activation Intervention for an introduction to this one.

A.I. vs N.I — We are visionary activists and it’s now or never time on planet earth. (April 9, 2023)

Many of you who watched the video I linked last week on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) have reported in. “Wow. OMG. I didn’t know. We’re screwed. What’s going to happen? Etc.” Here’s the link again for those who’d like to catch up. And, the audio for listeners. Big thanks to my contributors, so grateful my writing has value to you. Spread the word!

The key takeaways for me from the video are:

  1. The creators of A.I. don’t understand how it really works, especially how it learns and programs itself.)
  2. Safety protocols are not in place so we can’t know what A.I. might do as it continues to exponentially x exponentially increase its intelligence.
  3. There’s no way to know for sure if the answers that A.I. gives us are just information gathered from available data or developed by A.I. according to what it determines that we want to know. In this latter case, that would indicate conscious manipulation.
  4. “Who might be in there?” is a question some A.I. engineers are asking, raising the wild possibility of a resident intelligence pre-existing in the technology, in which case we are discovering rather than inventing. The Big Question then changes from “When might A.I. become sentient?” to “When do we realize that A.I. is sentient?” What a thought.

Meanwhile, life.

What’s to be done about something we can’t do anything about, something that can very easily take over control of every system in civilization everywhere on earth in the same instant? Well, for starters, how about replacing that question with a vision? As one of my mentors loved to say in moments like this: “The truth is true and all is well, unconquerable life prevails.” A.I. stands for Artificial Intelligence, which is what it is. The reality that predates A.I. is, of course, life, which we might call Natural Intelligence or N.I. And guess which one is and will always be superior?

Think nature. Think your beating heart, the regulated procession of sun and moon and planets and stars, choreographed perfectly in every moment by something I call N.I. If we’re witnessing a competition or even an impending war, A.I. doesn’t stand a chance. Because it’s not plugged in to source.

But, the grim reality is that we, the human race, could end up as collateral damage. I believe with all my heart that what determines that is just how plugged in we are? And how many of us are transmitting Life / Love in every moment of our lives. This can’t be a new age concept anymore… it needs to become our urgent priority, making every minute count.

I received a stellar comment from an old friend that opens a magical doorway of understanding for us relative to just who “we” might be. Don wrote in response to last week’s essay on visionary activism, raising an intriguing possibility. It’s highly relevant as we consider how focusing our energy can meet the threats of the moment. Referencing my commentary on how I responded to a seemingly random thought about my deceased mother, Don wrote:

I’m interested in the origin of the “thought” of your mother. Could that “thought” be a “communication” with “higher” intelligence, that “voice” a direct link to a “guidance” within and without? Rather than a “random” thought, an intentional prod toward a depth of feeling contained in the synapses of memory? A “feeling” as you put it, that urges toward compassion. Perhaps we have partners in “activation” that we might access when we consciously open up the lines of communication and link our incarnate Self to Source. Might our minds be the access tool for this connection, our hearts be the instrument upon which “We” play, and this “activation” as you term it, be the next frontier in conscious evolution?

I zoomed this morning with a dear friend who just “lost” her partner. He was one of my best friends and we’ll celebrate his life in a ceremony next month. She told me that he visited her, about three weeks after his death. He communicated in the strongest terms that he was more present than he has ever been, that he’s just been absorbed back into the trees, the sea, the birdsong, and the wind. I feel that, I feel him with me. So, our wonderful opportunity at his celebration is not to let him go but to let him be, and to welcome him to be with us as he chooses.

Does this apply to everyone all the time? What if that line between life and death is not as absolute as we’ve believed? Yes, the body is de-activated. But is that the end for the person? Do they live on in another dimension and could they continue interacting with us? Many would say “Yes!” based on dramatic personal experience, including me. I would also add that we’re all visiting each other all the time, whether we’re still in our bodies or not. Can we share love in those moments? Is this our contribution, an amplification of N.I., broadcasting to sustain stability in our world?

Perhaps this is our real community, a tribal assembly in consciousness that is constantly dancing together around the campfire of the moment.

The blessings and threats of A.I. are real. We can’t know how it will develop, for our benefit or our destruction. But we are not powerless. We are visionary activists and it’s now or never, here on this planet we call home.

INTELLIGENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Chris Waldberger, South African writer, teacher and student of literature and philosophy, weighs in on the “illusion” of AI:

But contra the sentiments expressed by Musk et al, even in a hipster publication, I managed to express an opinion that because consciousness is immaterial, some kind of humanoid computer can never be built. This would be true even if an ‘organic’ machine mimicking a brain were to be possible. And obviously a mechanical, metal machine could not even get close. I referred to atheist philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel in this regard, who had famously abandoned materialist Darwinism as he concluded the mind was not reducible to the brain and was thus not a product of blind and random mutations.

Much of this illusion of AI comes to us from the fallacious ‘mind body’ problem, begun by Descartes. But the truth is there is simply no reason to imagine your body as a kind of machine with a ghost pilot lodged within. ‘We’ do not live in a fleshly cabinet. We are beings in the world and our souls are, as per Aristotle, the forms of our bodies. This is why Christianity has always taught the necessary resurrection of the body if we are to live eternally.

Additionally, we know now that our guts are a kind of second brain, and that nerves will register electrical activity before the brain apparently sends a signal.

This all means that to build a human mind, you first need to build a human being. Therefore you cannot build a mind, because you cannot build a human being.

INTELLIGENCE or COMPUTATION?

This begs the question “What is intelligence?” Webster’s second definition is “Superior mental powers.” It’s an intangible capacity of Mind to process thoughts; a function not an entity or “thing” that can be made. It’s a verb not a noun. There is only one Mind shared by all living beings, including human beings, as all things are One. “There are no two things,” to borrow a phrase from the writings of Walter Russell.

One of the tenants of Chiropractic Philosophy differentiates between “Universal Intelligence” and “Innate Intelligence,” the first being Divine Intelligence governing Creation throughout the Universe, and the latter being that aspect of Universal Intelligence with which we are born that governs the many functions of our physical bodies. Both need a means for manifesting creation and governance. Consciousness is that vibrational plasma by means of which Divine Intelligence transmits creative design and control into the various realms of manifestation. Another name for this vibrational substance is pheumaplasm, or spirit substance.

Another word for consciousness is heaven. There is a heaven, a layer of consciousness, for every level and realm of Creation. The substance of consciousness is vibrational or spiritual in nature, created by Universal Intelligence. Another name for Universal Intelligence is God, who is Spirit, life itself. Since man cannot create life, nor give life to forms, man certainly cannot create Intelligence. Man can only generate electrical current to move in and throughout forms, such as computers. But electricity is not life, no matter how well it mimics life. It’s artificial; humanly contrived. Its ability to be so directed in gathering information (data) from memory storage in silicon chips and then to create computations and narratives is not intelligence. It’s pure and simple electrically controlled and directed computation.

“THE CONSCIOUS CIRCLE OF HUMANITY”

I do resonate with Will’s perspective with regard to artificial intelligence compared to natural intelligence. There simply is no basis for comparison. A.I. cannot exist without N.I. in the human beings who developed it. Will’s vision of “real community” is worth exploring further.

Switching gears a bit to bring into this consideration one of my favorite authors and visionary herself, Cynthia Bourgeault: this excerpt from chapter eight of her beautiful and insightful book EYE OF THE HEART: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, sets the tone for this series.

“There’s an old piece of Hasidic folklore that claims that our world at any point in time is held in its planetary orbit by thirty-six conscious human beings. They don’t know each other, and they don’t even know if they’re among the thirty-six. But the quality of their work, rising like incense into the earth’s atmosphere, creates around our fragile planet a sturdy bandwidth of protection, blessing, and guidance.” 

This comprises the gist of George Gurdjieff’s notion of what he called a “conscious circle of humanity.” Cynthia elucidates Gurdjieff’s notion:

Essentially, the conscious circle is an intense zone of imaginal interchange in which advanced beings on both sides of the form/formless divide—i.e., some still in their physical bodies, others no longer so—join hands across the realms for a mutual exchange of wisdom, tempering, blessing, protection, and occasional course correction.

I will explore this “imaginal interchange” further in this series with Cynthia Bourgeault’s insightful vision and guidance. So, if this topic interests you, stay tuned. Until my next post,

Be love.  Be loved

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

The Great Exchange Between the Realms

Sunrise at the Pyramid of Giza

* * *

MY HEART IS FULL this morning as I put fingers to keyboard and mind to articulating this fullness. It’s been a turbulent two weeks mentally and emotionally . . . but a victorious hurdle-jump, Thank you Father, with an increase in the intensity of energy, especially love energy.

Just after landing this morning and a dreamy night’s sleep, Cynthia Bourgeault’s EYE OF THE HEART caught my eye from my chairside table and invited me—more like a command than an invitation: “Pick me up! I’ve got more to share with you and with your audience.” So I sat down with a cup of Earl Grey tea and read Chapter Three: THE GREAT EXCHANGE.

As I finished reading, Bonnie joined me in the living room with a fresh cup of coffee. What transpired next was sheer magic as we engaged in a most stimulating conversation about the many levels of consciousness out of which the people in our world live and express . . . from the inspiring sublime spiritual down to the grosser levels of human degradation and depletion where getting is more dominant than giving. Our interchange was initiated by what I had just finished reading . . . along with the last sentence of a passage from an excerpt I share in my previous blog post—and with which Bonnie particularly resonates:

“In this realm the fruits of our human striving—both conscious and unconscious—are offered up to the whole. From this realm, in turn, we receive blessing, inspiration, guidance, and vivifying force, which are ours to share and bestow here below. Like a Sufi dervish, we receive and bestow, receive and bestow, as we turn and are turned within the greater cosmic dance.

After our conversation, I turned my attention to the world-radiation service hundreds of us share every morning, receiving and bestowing a unified current of Love from Heaven into the Earth and the world of human beings. Even as the radiant Attunement Current moved out through my hands and entire being, an equally full responsive current returned to ascend upward in gratitude for the blessings bestowed.

This giving-and-receiving dynamic spilled over into my breakfast time as I blessed the gifts of Mother Earth’s bounty, welcoming them into my body temple and lifting their essences of grateful praise up to the One who created them and breathed life into their forms. What an utterly delightful state of mind and consciousness, I thought, is available to us in this mansion of the Father’s House! I just have to share it with you and all who read my blog. I pray for the capacity for writing and sharing what I’m seeing in my heart. I surrender to the River . . . and the River speaks . . . through me and through Cynthia. I certainly hear the rush of many waters as I ponder what I shall write. Listen.

* * *

“Blessed is the Lion whom the man devours, for that lion will become man. But cursed is the man whom the lion devours, for that lion will become man.” —Gospel of Thomas, Logion 7

THE GREAT EXCHANGE

In this tiny, cryptic saying from the Wisdom teachings of Jesus, we actually find the kernel of the entire complex Gurdjieffian notion of the Trogoautoegocrat* laid out in less than thirty words—Certainly the moral kernel of it. Food, transformation, upward and downward exchange between the realms—it’s all here, together with the stunningly unequivocal answer to the question “What happens when we throw ourselves into the mix? The answer is that we wind up in the eye of the needle.

In the first of these parallel, trompe l’oeil [imaginary] transformations, man devours the lion, which means that he has digested, i.e. integrated, the fire and strength of his animal nature into the higher order of his conscious humanity; and the lion, thus transformed, steps forward as a servant and a vehicle. This is upward transformation.

In the second, when the lion devours the man, the man simply loses himself in his lower order bestiality; his human consciousness and cleverness become servants for his primordial rage, and what emerges is chaos and destruction. This is devolution, the downward trans-formation. And as the saying ironically acknowledges, “that lion has now become man.” It gets up in the morning, puts on its clothes, makes breakfast, makes policy, determines the fate of the world — and fills the atmosphere around him with the psychic toxins of his rage, fear, and alienation. This is “the terror of the situation,” according to Gurdjieff. And we do not have to look far from our immediate world situation to see it playing out.

A book authored and recently released by Kyle Harper touts a telling title: Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. In the introduction is a fairly accurate assessment of how insidiously humankind is being devoured by the lower kingdoms, particularly by the parasitic and pathogenic realms of Nature, while our sciences proclaim to be “winning the battle” over diseases. This recent pandemic is a classic case in point. The human immune system is greatly overtaxed handling a toxic environment.

The goal of this book is to tell the story of how we have acquired our distinct disease pool and what it has meant for us as a species. It is a history in which we are a part of nature, rather than apart from it.” Harper’s argument is based on four sections of humankind’s technological innovations and how they impacted our relationship with diseases: fires, farms, frontiers, and fossils. “Modernity is not a one-way street to human supremacy over nature, but a kind of escalating ratchet, in which humans have gained a remarkable but unstable advantage over an ever-growing number of parasites.” Pathogens have one goal, and that is to pass on their genetic code. Humans have crafted themselves to be the perfect hosts for this goal due to our immensely dense population and the high transmission rate of our global interconnection. Humans are a successful species, and pathogens and parasites have benefited from our success.

The truth is, we do not belong at the evolutionary level of creation, certainly not at the level of “survival of the fittest.” Our mansion in the Divine Design is several levels higher, where we were made perfect and completein the image and likeness of God.” Our Human forms may be evolving, but not our Being, who and what we are.

We do not offer much in the way of blessing to our earthly habitat, nor to our own and other species. Out of all species on the planet, we are the only specie that is methodically destroying our sources of sustenance: poisoning our food crops with carcinogenic pesticides, polluting our air and water with toxic chemicals, and raping our planet of its mineral resources, not to mention our proliferating toxic landfills. The metaphorical Lion is devouring man and has become man, who is consuming his habitat and is therein cursed before he is born.

This is all a reversal of the divinely-ordained purpose of transmutation and exchange between the realms, where blessings and nourishment rain down from above and refined substance ascends in currents of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator of all the realms.

This bestial devouring activity has infected the nations of the world. On the global scene, nations compete with one another for dominance. The current hegemon is the United States of America, Inc., whose apparent goal is to foist its Democratic “genetic code” onto other nations . . . whilst oligarchic elements, both here and abroad, seek to infect Democracies with authoritarianism. The Military Industrial Complex—against which President Eisenhower warned us six decades ago—is the authoritarian Lion that has devoured and become Corporate America, amassing great wealth on the battlefields of nations. War is Big Business. We may not like nor want to look at this ugly side of our nation’s—nor our specie’s—character profile; but ignoring it doesn’t change it. The Lion has devoured the man, who is in dire need of transformation.

Cynthia continues sharing her profoundly insightful vision and perspective:

“The role of a conscious human being is to provide the phenomenal earth world with energies which otherwise would not be effectively transmitted to the creations and units which make up our world,” writes William Segal, one of the most brilliant first-generation students of the Gurdjieff Work. That is the bare, perhaps unglamorous bottom line. Whatever we like to think we’re up to in our philosophical or spiritual fantasies — saving the world, saving our souls, attaining full enlightenment — in terms of cosmic exchange, we are transformers, of molecules and of meaning in equal measure. It is the cosmic function apportioned to us in the great Trogoautoegocrat. If we do it a certain way, something happens to us and to the planet; if we do it another way, something else happens.

All the world’s spiritual traditions have tried to orient us rightly here through a fundamental baseline morality: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Even in the absence of any further instructions, a simple adherence to the great moral precepts emerging from the first axial age will keep
humans basically in right alignment to perform their required part in the great exchange. The transmission chain will flow smoothly. The lion will proceed toward man.

But the shadow side of these ancient moral teachings is that they tend to rely on an individualized, fear-and-punishment-driven vision of an afterlife to motivate compliance. In the pervasively secular and skeptical culture of our times, where the fires of hell hold about as much clout as Santa or the tooth fairy, the human moral compass has increasingly defaulted to unabashed self-interest. “Go for the gusto!” “Get all you can get!” “You’re worth it!” We all know the slogans; they are the mantras of our brave new world. And that is not merely a personal moral failure, claims Gurdjieff; it is an ecological catastrophe, for it amounts to a systemic breakdown, as across a broad sector of an entire pivotal species, “the lion devours the man,” and the flow of those essential energies between the realms is destabilized.

Even at the turn of the last century, Gurdjieff was already deeply concerned about what he saw to be a significant drop in the level of being required of our human species and hence of our ability to play our required part in the cosmic homeostasis. There’s little question that the past hundred years of our
planetary unfolding have more than borne out his concerns. When we collectively devolve, simply using our ambition and cleverness to live as successful lions, in that same downward spiral we fall below the critical threshold needed to maintain our place as “conscious human beings,” the fundamental pre-requisite for our full participation in the great exchange. When that function goes unperformed (or gets performed in a distorted or toxic way), it is not merely “our immortal souls” that suffer; the entire cosmic equilibrium is thrown out of whack.

I think we all sense in our bones that there is a closer and more organic connection than we would com-fortably like to admit to between the kinds of energies we humans pump into the atmosphere as the fruit of our moral actions and the tangible effects of this “imaginal pollution” on the biosphere. We sense this, but we do not know why, for the traditional metaphysical maps are still based on outmoded science, and the modern scientific maps (with the notable exception of the one proposed by Teilhard de Chardin, who was at least bold enough to make a first stab at a new paradigm) do not yet integrate — or in most cases even acknowledge — the moral dimension implicit in all this. What does the handoff between radial and tangential energy actually look like? In what sense is human virtue an actual “food” supporting organic life on earth? And where and how in our own work of conscious transformation does the exchange between the realms actually get played out?

These are among the crucial missing pieces embedded in those overlapping diagrams of the worlds we started to consider in the previous chapter. In this chapter I will continue to explore this perhaps strange new way of fitting the pieces together in the hopes that it might open up a fresh angle of approach to some of the tragic impasses (intellectual, spiritual, ecological) of our own times. As we move beyond the traditional moral arguments into a closer look at the actual mechanics of the exchange that goes on here at this all-important mi-fa junction point, I think we will see with deepening resolve — and perhaps with deepening “remorse of conscience,” as Gurdjieff would put it — why our human orientation toward the good is not a personal virtue but a collective cosmic responsibility.

The operative word for me is “collective.” As we human beings continue to increase our love for one another, unconditionally, even as the Lord of Love loves us each one, that collective Body will naturally and magically come together. We all know this. All that remains is for us to consistently do it. Our Creator needs us as One Body to do the Greater Works sorely needed in our world.

I leave you to ponder these things as I turn my attention to Holy Week when Christians the world over observe Lent with ashes on their foreheads reminding them of their earthen origin . . . and destination . . . one scenario anyway. I have another to share in my next post. Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

*Trogoautoegocratic refers to an open system dependent on external, higher forces. A system under trogoautoegocratic law will submit to a process of transmutation in order to sustain indefinitely. Transmutation is the generation of heat and light through conscious works and voluntary sacrifice.

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