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.“
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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 “reciprocalfeeding” 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 . . . andour 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,
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.
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“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 complete “in 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.
OUR PHYSICAL BODIES, living temples that they are, live within a energy vortex field of swirling electric waves that flow counter-clockwise in an upward moving spiral that appears to be connected at an apex with an inverted torque-like energy vortex, in shape much like that of a tornado (See diagram below).
The Turkish Whirling Dervishes have a long-standing tradition that demonstrates this energy vortex dramatically. Here’s a bit of their history, including an entertaining video demonstration.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the term ‘whirling dervish’ before, but you may not be aware of the important cultural and spiritual tradition of these frenzied, spinning Turkish dancers. For outsiders, watching the Whirling Dervishes dance and spin is a breathtaking sight. For devoted members of the Mevlevi Order of Islam, however, the spinning has special significance.
A Frenzied Spinning
The best-known characteristic of a Whirling Dervish is the spinning dance called the Sema ceremony. The Dervishes wear all white long gowns with full skirts and tall hats. Seemingly tireless, the dancers can spin and whirl for hours at a time with their arms held up in the air. They assume this stance so that they are open to receive the blessings and energy from heaven. Each individual dervish spins from right to left using his own heart as a pivot point. Keeping time to the accompanying music, the dervish will rotate slowly at first, picking up speed as the music intensifies until the group of dervishes is all whirling in a fast-paced frenzy with their white gowns spinning.
Finding Sufism
The goal of the whirling or spinning is to achieve a state of Sufism. A form of Islamic mysticism, Sufism is a state of inner power and peace that allows the person to feel a deep love and connection to the rest of the world. Sufism is achieved through rituals and devote practices…one of those is dancing or spinning.
A Centuries-Old Tradition
Whirling Dervishes, as part of Sufism, is a custom that dates back more than 700 years. The Mevlevi Order of Islam was founded in 1312 in the city of Konya in Turkey. The Order was established by the devoted followers of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi,also known as Mevlana, who was a 13th-century Islamic mystic, theologian, and accomplished Persian poet. Under the leadership of Mevlana’s son, Sultan Walad, the Mevlevi Order quickly grew and spread into surrounding cities and towns . . . . (Underscores added. Click on the link for a bit of Rumi’s history.)History Daily
Now I’ve done whirling exercises from time to time and it’s not as easy as the Sufi make it look. I think the rhythm and cadence of their music helped facilitate the dance. If you try it, make sure you do it at the foot of your bed or your reclining chair so that you can flop down on your back while your brain and visual cortex stop spinning the room around you. It’s quite dizzying at first, however I’ve not yet learned how to turn off the dizzying after-effect, so I just fall back onto the bed. It’s a lot of fun, actually, and I do feel an uptake in my energy and improvement of my balance after a few moments. I’ve read that it actually turns your ageing clock back a bit. I encourage you to try it if you haven’t done so already.
The position of the hands is significant and purposeful. The right hands of the dancers are turned palms up to receive blessings and light from heaven above and their left hands are turned palms down to extend the blessings and light of heaven into the earth. And they seem to spin within a swirling energy vortex.
A subject of regression who had been regressed to a prior incarnation during the time of Jesus, described the atmosphere around him as a vortex of swirling light energy. This piqued my interest considerably, as I have experienced my own energy field as a sphere of light during an Attunement meditation that opened up to an ecstatic experience of levitation . . . accompanied by a rushof wind and an awesome vocalized sound that raised the frequency of my body’s cells.
Quite often during Attunement times I feel a lifting up of my physical body from my heart chakra, like a skyhook suspended from a point above my head was attached to my chest. If I’m lying down on a table, my chest often rises up. On one occasion during an attunement class, the student who was offering the attunement apparently thought he was doing something wrong, so he pulled his hands away and stopped sharing the attunement. I wished he hadn’t.
In Walter Russell’s signature work THE UNIVERSAL ONE—in which he challenges the scientific community with his own table of elements and his inspired concept of the inner workings or the Universe, as well as religion with his own cosmogony and “knowledge” of God’s Creative Powers—is this passage in his NEW LAWS AND PRINCIPLES chapter: (See graph below)
132.The nearer to the axis and to the apex of the cone the greater the density, temperature, pressure, potential, power-time and all effects of electro-positive preponderance.133. The nearer to the base of the cone the greater the tenuity, the speed time and the tendency to ionize, and the lower the temperature, pressure, potential and all effects of electro-negative preponderance. (THE UNIVRSAL ONE, page 260)
What manifests and takes shape in the explicate order under the heaven reflects Life’s design for forms in the implicate order of the heaven. There is only One Law governing the Creative Process: Radiation–Response–Attraction–Union–Unified Radiation. This law governs the electric universe at all levels, including and especially at the level where Man was created to live and function at the crossover point between Heaven and Earth as co-creator with God. The substance of connection between Man and Creator is the medium through which the Tone of the Word that creates Life on Earth is propagated so as to be perceptible by Man and re-sounded in the expression of his living. That medium is the rarified substance of pheumaplasm (spirit substance).
THE SILVER CHORD
Near-Death-Experiences (NDE’s) reportedly involve travel through a silvery tunnel toward a bright light that beckons the individual soul to rise up and come closer.
I gather there is some kind of levitating force, much like that produced by a magnet, which draws the soul up into another level of consciousness and being. From this elevated level, the person observes his or her body and those surrounding it from above, then has a telepathic conversation with another being or guide about whether or not it’s time for the soul to leave the physical realm. It’s all very interesting and intriguing to think about.
What piques my interest particularly is the source of the levitating power that draws the soul upward. In my inner Mind’s eye I envision two triangular vortices of energy that join at an apex or axis, as Russell states above and diagrams below, that have a place of manifestation and focus in our bodies. That focal point is situated in the Pineal Gland located in the Golden Mean Center of the brain.
Looking at the graphic below — which I borrowed from Russell’s book and adapted to my purpose here — in your mind’s eye superimpose an image of the body temple over the lower pyramidal graphic. Where the two spiraling vortices intersect one another, there is an area where the two opposing triangles join at their bases, one pointing up and the other pointing down. The one pointing upward, in my perspective analogy, comes to point in the Pineal Gland at the 7th level of the seven endocrine glands, which are paired with seven spinning chakra vortices. (Click on image to enlarge it)
ENDOCRINE GLANDS
7 Pineal
6 Pituitary & 5 Thyroid
4 Thymus-Heart
3 Pancreas & 2 Adrenals
1 Gonads
“MASS IS ACCUMULATED AROUND A VORTEX . . . FORMED BY THE CONTRACTION OF THE AXES OF TWO OPPOSSING CONES OF ENERGY. THE GREATER THE CONTRACTION THE GREATER THE ACCELERATION OF MOTION WITHIN THE VORTEX”
Counting down from the Pineal gland, we come to the Pituitary gland at the 6th level, and below the pituitary lies the Thyroid gland in the neck. These three energy centers form an upright triangle with the Pineal focusing the Spirit of Love at the apex and the Pituitary and Thyroid glands at the two corner of the base, focusing respectively the Spirit of Truth, and the Spirit of Life.
The lower inverted triangle encompasses the Heart with the Thymus gland focusing the Spirit of Purification at the lower apex—a fiery frequency of the Spirit of Love stepped down four levels. This is the Spirit, or vibration, currently stirring in the hearts of every person on earth, incinerating what doesn’t belong in this holy place designed as a crucible for Love’s purifying and transforming fire. As my friend Chris Jorgensen described this pivotal point in my previous post:
“The crossover point is the sacred place where the Radiation of Being is consciously known and shared. It is the point where Love is made visible. It is Assurance in divine Presence. The current vibration of the world is the Spirit of Purification, the crossover point—the energy, frequency and radiation of the Heart-Thymus. It is a singular point where Heaven and Earth meet.“
I took note of the way the Whirling Dervishes use their own hearts as pivot points around which to whirl—a significant posture to assume seeing as the heart is the true center of gravity in our sacred energy anatomy.
Below the level of the Heart center and Thymus gland are three glands in the body that manage hormonal chemistry throughout the body temple—just as the upper three glands administer the hormonal alchemy of incarnation and the ongoing conception and generation of Life in the sanctuary of the temple. The Pancreas at the 3rd level which facilitates emotional and spiritual expression and the realization of manifestation; the two Adrenal glands at the 2nd level that empower physical action and mental focus; and the Gonadal glands at the 1st level where the Spirit of the New Earth patiently fostering a sense of right expectancy. Beyond the 1st level in one’s extended world of creativity.
Based on what Russell cited above in his two principles, the higher one’s consciousness rises to the apex at the crossover point, the denser the plasma that comprises the silvery substance of the chord connecting the person with the Realms of Light, and the greater is the pressure and temperature.
THE PRESENCE OF THE ONE
I am reminded of a passage in the Old Testament that speaks of the fiery furnace being heated seven times hotter than it was wont to be heated in order to incinerate Daniel’s three friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego—which proved to be the right temperature to burn the shackles that bound them without burning the three friends. But greater than that was the 4th Presence seen by King Nebuchadnezzar of “one like unto the Son of Man.”
This is the Spirit of the One that dwells in the midst, the Spirit of Angelic and Archangelic Presence that cannot be touched by the fire of purification for that Spirit is Love, the very fire itself. Nor can the dense plasma of consciousness rising to the apex be touched or penetrated by what is occurring of a violent and destructive nature in the outer world. It can, however, be touched and penetrated, consumed and transmuted, by the high frequency of Love radiating from the One in the midst. What can ascend ascends, and what cannot ascend falls back down toward the less dense lower levels toward the base to participate further in the ascending cycles of the ongoing Creative Process.
“Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”
I will continue in this vein in my next post. As always, I welcome your thoughts on what I have presented. Until my next post,
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hath crowned him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:3-5)
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I LIVE IN AWE of the order and harmony in this vast Universe, and I love contemplating the design of things, both physical and vibrational, and by what power and force they function and move about—like how do the yellow purslane in my wife’s flower beds know when the sun rises and sets so they can open and close with its rhythm and timing? Mysteries such as this give me a sense of wonder at the magic of Nature.
When I first met my spiritual mentor, Lord Martin Cecil, the Fifth Marquees of the House of Exeter, in 1968, my heart was split wide open and my mind lept for joy with what I was hearing him articulate. For eighteen enlightening and engaging years I sat at his banquet table feasting on every marcel of clarifying truth that trumpeted through his resonant voice, and learning how to live them. Those were transformative times. Today I find deeper understanding of what he brought forth in his plethora of services when I revisit them.
In 1979 he gave a rather in-depth and detailed consideration of the design, both physical and spiritual, or vibrational, of planet Earth. Borrowing the transcription from my friend David Barnes’ blog The Great Cosmic Story, I published excerpts of it on my blog in increments starting in June, 2020 and took it up again in my post of July 19th, 2020.
In his presentation, Martin speaks forthrightly to incarnate angels everywhere who are emerging in an apocalypse of light, speaking truth to power and handling situations in the world with assurance, integrity and spiritual authority.
For a comprehensive appreciation of the consideration, I recommend that you take the time to visit these two posts and read the excerpts before reading the one I am reposting here. I am publishing here the portion of Lord Exeter’s consideration taken from my post of July 25, 2020 for meditation.
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Read his words with an open and still mind and a quiet heart. Open to the current that flows through them. It’s in the heart where spiritual essences are discerned and understanding occurs.
“Transmutation With Regard to the Total Earth” (continued)
We have been considering the resurrection. The womb may be said to be the means by which life is born. The substance of love was first necessary if there was to be the substance of the womb. There is nothing else but love substance, all the way through—love substance but at different vibratory levels. And the substance of the womb is the heaven in relationship to the life that is to be born. We find at every level there is a heaven involved—a connection. You may remember that the second day of the creative cycle described in Genesis spoke of the firmament, the heaven, the connection between the waters above and the waters below, between the truth above and the truth below—the means by which what is below may be brought forth. The heaven at any level is rightly a state where there is a particular atmosphere and a particular enfoldment and a particular control, by which the creative process may continue. All that indicates the presence of what is called truth. So there is a heaven connecting the substance of love above with the substance of life below. There is one heaven.
(Right-click on the image and open in a new window for a larger view—or spread image with fingers.)
We may also see that this total area is the Triune Heaven relative to this area here—what we have called the Triune Earth. What is above is spirit, present in the dimensional world, and the fourth, the level of the heart, represents the connection, the heaven, between what is above and what is below. What is below is the Triune Earth—we could look at them as spheres, which gives them another dimension, one inside the other. The visible earth is at the center. Insofar as physical vision is concerned, that is the only one that is visible. All the others are invisible. And if we were looking at the planet earth we might recognize the fact that it is much larger than the physical ash at the center. It could extend out to about the orbit of the moon.
The human view of things, which is based in involvement with externals, always emphasizes the lowest level, so that the earth, the planet, is thought of as being the thing—but it’s only one seventh of the thing. I’m not saying that all the various concentric spheres are regularly the same amount bigger than the one inside. This is merely a diagram of something. But here is a whole. The waters above connected with the waters below by the sphere represented by form, which relates to the substance of the heart—the pure heart, if the creation is as it should be, the pure heart which is the window through which what is above can shine into what is below and therefore be present relative to what is below. It all is there back of what is below—it all permeates what is below. But if the fourth sphere is dense, cloudy, then the larger spheres are not known relative to the smaller spheres in the middle, relative to the earth and to human nature. So the concern is that this veil should be dissolved, the clouds should be dissolved, so that it all may be known as One.
The smallest part of it is the earth. The smallest of us is our physical bodies. There is much greater stature than that. Now we see the earth as quite a large planet in fact, relative to the physical earth—much larger than the physical earth. However even if it is as large as the orbit of the moon in fact, that is very small still relative to the size of the solar system. So here we begin to see the symbol of largeness in one direction and smallness in the other direction.
Now this heaven, which includes the realms of what we call spirit in the dimensional world—seven, six and five—is the cool place, where there is a temperate atmosphere. It’s a comfortable place for angels to dwell. And it is a place of control—this is the kingdom. As the connecting sphere becomes a window through which the nature and quality of heaven may shine, it emerges into the three lowest spheres as the fire of transmutation. In other words, the hot place is the Triune Earth. Here is where the fire is burning in order to transmute the substance, beginning with the physical substance of the earth, into substance of a higher vibratory level. Here is the returning aspect of the cycle—ascension, something moving up. There is the process of transmutation at work in the earth. This is the primary level of where the transmutation is occurring, so that there may be a movement upward, not as though the earth was going someplace—that might not be the concept with respect to the earth but it has been in Christianity. The physical earth is supposed to pop up out of the graves and go to heaven someplace.
But there is no movement in fact in this fashion. It is a transmutation of the substance exactly where it is, not someplace else. And what is occurring may be said to refine—a refiner’s fire by which the substance is refined and changes its nature. We can see this in a very elementary way: the changing of the nature of the mineral earth as it is lifted into the bodies of living forms, whether vegetable or animal or whatever. The substance of the flesh of your body is different to a model of your body made in marble. The flesh of your body and all its various parts are composed of entirely different substance—it’s a different quality, a different nature. So there has been that much transmutation in the experience of your own physical body from the mineral level—something has been happening. It is assumed that it is in the nature of a circle: the substance is just lifted up into your physical body, it stays there for a while, and then bang, it collapses down into the mineral kingdom again. This is not exactly the way it works now, in fact, but it certainly is not the way it was designed to work in the original creation—it isn’t a circle. There is a continuing movement upward, and whatever has been sufficiently refined to move to the higher level moves to the higher level. And what is not capable of moving to the higher level drops down to the lower level, so that it may be acted upon again by the creative fires in the refining process, and gradually it is lifted up. There is less and less left in the way of ash and more and more moving in the ascending spiral.
There is a transmutation occurring with respect to this total planet, not just with respect to the earth aspect of it, which is the very smallest aspect. There is something happening with respect to this total planet—a movement upward; an ascending cycle is at work. But since man left his position it has been a very slow and limited process. Everything has been at a standstill virtually. It is not working the way it should—only partially so—and very little has occurred of the true creative process since man fell. It couldn’t, because there was no man in place to let it happen.
This outlines something which is incapable of being encompassed by the human mind; but it is something that is happening, whatever words may be used to describe the process, of which it is necessary to become increasingly aware. Here is something actually occurring with which we are associated. If we tend to sort of blot it out of our experience with the idea that mentally speaking we can’t grasp it, then we certainly can’t participate in a way that is going to be of any value in the process itself, for which we carry a very definite responsibility.
As angels we carry that responsibility, and we are here to let that responsibility be fulfilled. As we move together these things naturally will clarify themselves to the extent that we are willing to let it be so, willing to let the Word of God be spoken in our own individual and collective experience. There is the ascending cycle at work, even though it isn’t working the way it should work. It is limited and restricted, and a lot more is descending than needs to descend in the true state.
How simple and simply wonderous is the Creator’s design for our home among the stars. The heavens and the Earth, the invisible and the visible, are inseparably one. The last paragraph of Lord Exeter’s presentation holds the key to how the process of transmutation of the total planet unfolds with our participation. As angels incarnate, we have access to the power of love that, when given expression with feeling in thoughts, words and actions, generates the fine substance of spirit, what has been called pneuimaplasm, that serves as a vibrational bridge between the Heaven and the Earth. Through this substance moves patterns of design for the New Earth that are pre-ordained by God and established in the New Heaven. In a word, this pneumaplasm allows for an attunement between what is above and what is below. The Spirit of God, as it did in Genesis, moves upon the face of these waters and manifests light, the light that is the life of man and of all creation on the surface of the planet. It also brings the transmuting fire of love to bear on the physical substance of the earth, the earth of our planet and the earth of our physical bodies by which we incarnated and through which we live and serve our Creator here in earth.
As I say, we have access to this power along with the spiritual technology to extend the currents of love through our hearts, our consciousness and our hands in blessing to our planet — the blessing of Father Sun to Mother Earth. We play our parts in this attunement blessing in the process of transmutation by which the earth and all that lives on her surface is lifted up in the refiner’s fire and caused to ascend to a higher frequency. This is now being done by many angels on earth who recognize and have assumed their responsibility and purpose for incarnating — and I now that they welcome other incarnate angels to join them in this blessing of our Home among the stars.
As always, I welcome comments from my readers as I enjoy and value others’ thoughts along these lines. Until my next post,
“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.” Albert Einstein
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In the wake of the series, The Spirit of the New Earth Vibration, and while scanning my documents in search of a file, I came upon something my friend PenDell Pittman scribed and sent to me several months ago. With his permission, I will share it in this post. As you will see, it echoes and expands in a most clear and thoughtful way the theme of my last few posts in which I described the creative process through which the Spirit of Love moves down into the body mediated and differentiated into seven vibrational frequencies by the 7 glands of the endocrine system in order to touch the physical realm and re-create and maintain the new earth of our physical bodies. PenDell’s meditation envisions the same creative process as it unfolds Creation itself in the larger cosmic context. The opening words of Genesis explode in my mind:
“In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said: “Let there be light.” (Genesis 1:1)
And the universe unfolded out of the Light, shaped by the sound of Love’s Word, differentiated into 7 rainbow frequencies composing the Music of the Spheres. In five cosmic days, the world of Nature was created as a setting for Man and Woman to live and share the ongoing work of creating the world of beauty we see around us in Nature. As PenDell envisioned and describes it step by cosmic step in this beautiful writing. . . .
7 VIBRATIONS IN NATURE
Vibration 1: Lines of Love Force radiate into the unformed.
Vibration 2: The unformed is attracted to and becomes stimulated by Vibration 1. A Womb for Vibration 1 is established and becomes Vibration 2. In harmony with Vibration 1, Vibration 2 begins to radiate Lines of Force further into the unformed.
Vibration 3: The Radiation of the harmonization of Vibration 1 and Vibration 2 create patterns of complexity in the unformed which blossom into Vibration 3, the Life Force.
Vibration 4: The radiance of Vibration 3 moves out into a wider radius, enticing greater complexity. Eurythmic relationships emerge between existing complexities. This intermingling sets in motion a new pulsation that adds Assurance and Clarity to the Lines of Love Force.
Vibration 5: Lines of Force moving through Vibration 4 bring about an urge for greater specificity. Direction and Purpose are established within the matrix of complexities by the radiation of Sanctification.
Vibration 6: The radiation of Vibration 5 brings a calming influence to the creative cauldron out of which a focus of intelligence and coordination comes into play and begins to apply itself as the Force of Tranquility, flowing gently within the matrix of complexities.
Vibration 7: The Vibration 6 Lines of Force pour out into atomic substance causing it to tremble. Cymatic patterns of design begin to appear in the atomic substance that in time find relationship in symbiotic configurations that grow in complexity. In Patience a New Earth is born.
In this new beginning in our day, God is incarnate on Earth in a body of heavenly hosts who have found one another and connected along ancient lines of eternal friendship. A new Heaven has already descended upon human consciousness for a New Earth, a void awaiting its birth. Darkness is once again upon the face of the deep of tomorrow. The Spirit of God once again moves upon the face of the waters; and the angelic host incarnate and awake say in one voice with one accord: “Let there be light!” And there is light. And in the Light of Love there is peace in the heart and stillness in the outer mind. And the peace and stillness allows the minute and specific details of design and control in Heaven for the New Earth to unfold and reveal themselves, all in the seasons of the Lord and the rhythms of the Music of the Spheres. Patience is the call of the day. Let it all unfold naturally.
The light of love shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not comprehend it, for the darkness thinks itself to be the light, the dim and waning light of “knowledge” worshipped by the human intellect. Nevertheless, the light of love shines in the darkness and enlightens the world and human consciousness so that the New Earth can be clearly seen coming down from God out of Heaven, and joyously welcomed.
And we’ve only just begun Day One. Let love shine into the darkness without concern for tomorrow. All is well and well in our hands, the hands of God on Earth. Let it be so.
“I have thrown fire on the world. Look. I watch it until it blazes.” —Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas
The “fire” that Jesus threw on the world was not wild fires like we’re experiencing along the West Coast. It’s the all-consuming flame of love, the atomic power at the heart of creation. In this series I will explore how the design of true community unfolds naturally and organically, fueled by atomic power released under the control of the stabilizing design and dynamics of the atom. Without further intro, I’ll dive right into it.
Our Judaeo-Christian model shaping social and family configurations, dictating human morality and ethics, and designing community structure and governance, needs to be revisited in the light and context of the Natural Laws governing all of Creation, from atom to galaxy and beyond. In our close in relationships, for instance, monogamy is not a natural arrangement. Neither is marriage, for that matter. They have been necessary, however, as temporary control measures in humanity’s fallen state of consciousness—as are all man-made laws.
Bible “thumpers” and scholars will surely take issue with me on this and argue that marriage was established and sanctified by the Creator from the beginning when He created Adam and Eve and declared that a woman shall cling to her husband and the two shall be as one. However, we must remember that the Creation Story in Genesis was written by the patriarch Moses and not by an eyewitness to Creation in the Garden of Eden. . .and it was most likely redacted in order to support the seventh and tenth Commandments. His was the job, after all, of governing these unruly tribes of Israel reveling in their newfound freedom after their release from bondage in Egypt. Moses’s Ten Commandments gave him the leverage and divine authority he needed to reign in and cultivate the Nation of Israel into a civilized “Chosen People.” That’s my speculative opinion anyway, for whatever it’s worth.
In a restored state of consciousness, a new model and paradigm of governance by Love and the Truth of Life come into play. As the Master Jesus told those who challenged him on the issue of divorcing and remarrying,
For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
He was speaking to a somewhat elevated level of human consciousness, compared to that of the Israelites of old, attempting to elevate it even further by extending an invitation to humanity to rise up, “come up hither,” and enter the Kingdom of Heaven, a spiritual levelof consciousness, just above the mental and physical levels—an invitation few at that time accepted. Nevertheless, through His own victorious life, He established the Way by which resurrection and ascension would be possible for the entire Body of Humanity after his resurrection from the tomb and his eventual ascension from this earthly plane back into Heaven.
As human consciousness rises to higher and higher levels, and human beings are increasingly governed by Spirit from within, rather than by man-made laws—laws that the Master himself admonished us not to make beyond the two Great Commandments He had given—marriage ceases to be necessary.
This is already a dawning reality in many sectors of society, even within the Judaeo-Christian world. Couples are coming together as “partners” in life. Angels may not marry but I believe we do come in inseparable pairs, or as “soul mates,” most often with only one incarnating leaving the other to provide guardianship and heavenly connection and support.
Conscious awareness of our angelic nature has already dawned in the experience of a growing number of awakened souls who are conscious of their presence in heaven on earth—the kingdom of Heaven that is at hand and all around us. Obviously, we are not even close to a collective transformation and transmutation of the mass consciousness of humanity. However, we are on our way, and a new Golden Age awaits us. This I know.
The Nuclear World of Controlled Power
The atom is a micro model of right relationships in true community. In it is manifest the working dynamic of the One Law, simply stated by Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda) (1907-1954) as “Positive Action, Negative Reaction or Response.” Walter Russell called it “The Law of One.” As I consider these two nomenclatures, I see how compliance with the One Law would bring about Oneness in the human family as “one Nation under God.”
Consider what we now know about the structure and dynamic operation of this fundamental building block of Creation. At the center of the atom dwell one or more positively charged Protons and one or more neutral particles called Neutrons. Orbiting around this central hub of focused power are a number of Electrons carrying a negative charge. Looming behind this nuclear structure lies a potential of awesome power held in check by the integrity and stability of the tiny atom. We know this by reason of our experience destroying that integrity and releasing that awesome power to destructive ends.
As I pondered this model at three o’clock yesterday morning, awakened by a pressing urgency to explore it further and perhaps do a blog series on it, I am finding much food for meditation as I write. It’s a huge and complex consideration. It may not be relevant to all that’s going on in our world today with the West Coast ablaze and smothered in smoke, and the Southern Gulf States ravaged by hurricanes, including our home town in Southwest Louisiana, not to mention the human tragedies occurring globally in war-torn nations, and the divisive political climate here in the US, my thoughts today soar in the New Heaven and engage in the imaging of tomorrow and the New Earth already being born in and through the hearts, minds and innovative activities of thousands around the globe. So, I ask you my readers to bear with me as I dream of a new world for tomorrow in the midst of a crumbling and burning old world of today. There’s a legendary phoenix in the ashes.
I will continue in this exploration in my next post and leave you with this provocative saying of the Master Jesus:
“Let those who seek, continue seeking until they find. And when they find, they will become troubled. And when they become troubled, they will be astonished, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]”–Jesus, The Lost Gospel of Thomas
Consider what we now know about the structure and dynamic operation of this fundamental building block of Creation. At the center of the atom dwell one or more positively charged Protons and one or more neutral particles called Neutrons. Orbiting around this central hub of focused power are a number of Electrons carrying a negative charge. Looming behind this nuclear structure lies a potential of awesome power held in check by the integrity and stability of the tiny atom. We know this by reason of our experience destroying that integrity and releasing that awesome power to destructive ends.
Healing Tones 