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The Silent World of Vibrations, page 4: Pleiades, Orion and the Ordinances of Heaven

Seven Sisters of the Pleiades

“Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts, or who hath given understanding to the heart?” —Job 38:35

I’M GOING TO SWITCH GEARS and share an excerpt from SACRED ANATOMY, a book of reflections and meditations on the energy anatomy of the body as a temple of worship that I authored and published back in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. In this post I share a portion of the chapter featuring the pancreas as both an organ and a sacred seal for the release and expression of spiritual essences.

(But first I want to say how much I am enjoying being human. Being a man who enjoys watching a football game on TV while snacking on beer and pretzels just as much as I revel in a beautiful sunset. Just being human and enjoying the simple pleasures of life on this material plane and in this amazingly beautiful world of Nature. I will miss it and will be sure to reenlist for another tour of service to the One, hopefully in the New Earth.)

Our sacred energy anatomy communicates by way of silent vibrations. Our cells communicate via light signals, our endocrine glands via light-bearing hormonal crystals, our brains and nervous system via electrical impulses shooting across synapses.

As below so above: the stars and constellations in the heavens share energy, information and intelligence silently by means of plasma. Suns govern planets and planets their moons by way of silent magnetic fields. Light creates a cosmos in silence. Zodiac signs set the dominion of the seasonal ordinances of Mazzaroth in the Earth . . . without making a sound. In a word, we are afloat in a sea of silent energy and vibrations . . . silent, that is, to our ears.

From my book . . . .

The Capacity to Know and Express Spirit

   As I said, this sacred site provides us with the capacity for spiritual expression, an experience of Third Plane Being. From this plane our heart, with the guidance of our feeling realm, rises to give us the capacity to discern and process spiritual essences.  Here spiritual things are discerned spiritually. This includes the awareness of the presence of spirit, specifically one’s own Angelic Presence. The pneumaplasm generated at this sacred site is fine enough to rise up and begin providing a medium for the transmission of the radiant emanations of spirit from the Fourth Plane of being, where the One I Am stands in the midst of the Seven Golden Candlesticks. 

   Realization of the Presence of the One I Am is the gift of the angel of this church, and with realization comes assurance that I Am the angel incarnate, the One standing in the midst.   I Am the blessing being poured out through my window of heaven into the world.  Being still, I may come to know that I am an aspect of God.  Therefore all things necessary for my presence and service on Earth are provided by my Father in heaven whose unconditional and irresistible love draws forth the substance of the Great Mother of Creation to provide flesh and form for all that I shall ever need to live a creative and fruitful life.  All that is needed is already present with me now and will manifest as needed.

When I contemplate the form and function of the body temple and all its intricate and interacting parts, knowing that here before me and with me is a manifestation of the ordinances of heaven, of the very principles and laws that govern all of Creation, I begin to see and understand with the spiritual eyes of my heart replicating patterns of both structure and function reflecting off the calm and still waters of consciousness within and all around me in the larger whole. Wisdom fills the “inward parts” of my soul.

Balancing Sacred Energy

A beautiful example of this type of contemplative visioning can be known studying the manner in which energy is held in a state of balance by various mechanisms of checks and balances for efficient and effective creativity. We have just considered the balancing of energy harvested from the foods we take into our body-temple. All energies originate in one Source and are initially divided into the duality of the masculine and feminine. They all start out as sacred forces and work together creatively so long as they are balanced.

The balancing of sacred energy, both in the individual body-temple and in the collective body of mankind, is accomplished by bringing the masculine and feminine energies into a place of accord where they work together with the Spirit of Blessing.

The feminine energy is of the heart realm and brings a nurturing sweetness into the mix, along with deep feeling and emotional intensity. The masculine energy is more mental and brings such elements as logic and reason, along with mental calmness for clear thinking.

Imbalance occurs when either one of them becomes overly dominant and controlling. For example, should the masculine seek to dominate and control the feminine, who then withdraws her sweetness, the energy level quickly drops in a relationship. It drops in the individual, as well as in the collective body of mankind, by reason of the same dynamics at work between the masculine and the feminine energies.

As these two sacred energies are brought together in a state of balance and co-creativity, a tremendous blessing is poured out of heaven into the world. Perhaps we might glean more about this important area of human relations by going deeper in our consideration. There is a series of questions in the Biblical story of Job that just might take us there.

The sweet influences of the Pleiades and the bands of Orion.

In this ancient story, hundreds of years older than the Book of Genesis, as recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible, one of several compelling questions asked of Job by the Lord from out of a whirlwind was, “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” (Job 38:31)

Throughout their writings Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda) and Lord Martin Exeter both place these two constellations in a vibratory context relative to our solar system.

The Creative Process works on the basis of creative triangles. The constellations of Orion and Pleiades in this context form a creative triangle with our Sun. Between these three points grid lines of cosmic forces are stretched and interconnected.

The Pleiades bring the influences of the Feminine vibration to bear in our solar system, and therefore in all of the natural world on this planet, including mankind. Orion brings to bear the influence of Masculine vibration.

The Feminine vibration creates the womb and atmosphere, the heaven, for the conception, gestation and nurturing of the things of Spirit in preparation for their birth into the world of form. The Masculine vibration creates the consciousness out of which the Creative Word is spoken and sent forth into the creative field—the earth—to draw creation into form. Both characterize the nature of God and Man and are essential to the proper unfoldment of the Creative Process through which creation is made manifest from out of the invisible heaven into the visible earth.

ORION

This representation of Orion and Pleiades as Masculine and Feminine vibrations respectively is also reflected in Greek and Roman mythologies at least a millennium or more later on in the history of man. For example, Pleiades, a winter constellation, in Greek mythology represented the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione placed by Zeus among the stars, although only six can be seen—because one of them is “lost.” As the story is told in Roman mythology, Orion the hunter, also a winter constellation, abducted one of the sisters and made love to her. Orion was banished by the moon goddess, Diana, who was in love with him. He died accidentally when Scorpio, a summer constellation, bit him on one of his hunting expeditions during exile. Thus they are not present together in any night sky. Orion is accompanied by his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.

This all sounds very much like a modern day soap opera. The man is fleeing the wrath of his scorned lover, to whom he was unfaithful, with his canine best friends at his feet hunting for prey. Little has changed in the saga of male-female relationships over the millennia. As English playwright and poet William Congreve dramatized the saga: “Hell hath no fury like the wrath of a woman scorned.”

All of this adds to the historical evidence that these constellations represent the masculine and the feminine aspects of Man. These vibrations, of course, are operative in both sexes: the masculine being more dominant in men and the feminine more dominant in women—yet their roles are in some instances reversed.

These seven sisters of Pleiades may be seen as correlating with the seven glands of our endocrine system and the seven spirits before the throne of God as John of Revelation describes his vision of a “throne set in heaven.”

(This, of course, is the subject and theme of my book SACRED ANATOMY — where spirit and flesh dance in the fires of creation.)

The Ordinances of Heaven

   One of the meanings of the phrase “to bind” is “to unite or hold, as by a feeling of loyalty or love.” This shines a new light on the question the Lord asked of Job, “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades . . . ?”  Rather than the common meaning of bind, which implies to hold back and suppress—an attitude which the human male has historically held toward the feminine, both in himself and in women—the question could be interpreted as asking: “Can you, man, commit yourself to a state of union with woman?  Can you hold her response in a focused current of love?   Can you embrace the feminine vibration of the Pleiades, both in yourself and in woman, so as to hold it steady while you honor her with the release of your masculine vibration into her womb to fertilize the seed planted there by the Spirit of God?”  The question really relates to the business of stewarding the Creative Process by which the invisible is made visible, or as the Lord’s Prayer creatively commands, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This brings to light another question asked of Job: “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” This can be seen as pertaining to the relationship between God and Man, men and women, between mind and heart, and between Man and Nature. The ordinances of heaven are established as seeds planted in the soil of human consciousness and brought forth in their seasons. Man was put in charge of stewarding this process for the entire Earth.

In what is called “organic gardening,” for instance, the gardener does not merely put the seeds in the soil and forget about them until harvest time. If he did, there would likely not be a harvest. As any truly dedicated organic gardener will tell you, there is a marriage that takes place between the tiller of the soil and the soil itself. There is a love affair here which calls forth every ounce of care and consideration in the gardener for each step and phase along the way of the creative process that brings forth—first the plants, which require a certain kind of care, and finally the vegetables or fruit, which require something entirely different in the way of care. The gardener literally woos the garden until she yields herself into the hands of her lover. If he gets impatient with the soil and starts stimulating it with commercial fertilizers, she knows it and will begin to withdraw her sweetness and her response.

This is reflected in the bitter taste of vegetables grown on plants whose root systems lacked the depth required to reach for the minerals in the soil, which give vegetables their sweetness. If he does not feed her rich organic matter, she will lose her fertility. If he hurts her with pesticides and harsh chemicals, she will give it back to him in her fruit. The garden and the soil are man’s best friends.

   The sweet influences of the divine feminine vibration of Mother Nature long to be taken in hand by the true husbandman who brings, through his gentle but sure hands, the vibration of love that is characteristic of the divine masculine.  His is truly the tender, sure, yet gentle, patient and loving touch.

(See page 2 for the rest of this consideration. I welcome any thoughts, insights and realizations you may have and wish to share about this post.)

Anthony (tpal70@gmail.com)

For a copy of SACRED ANATOMY simply send your request to me by email. Price is $35 + S&H.

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Divine Feminine, Divine identity, Divine Masculine, Dr. Palombo's blog, Endocrine system, Energy, Energy anatomy, Healing Tones Blog, Love, Man-Woman Equality, Man-Woman Relationship, Masculine & Feminine Energy, On Human Relations, Partnership Paradigm, Sacred Anatomy, The Divine Feminine, The Divine Masculine, The Science of Mazzaroth, Zodiac

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BIOCENTRISM: The Illusion of Segregation in a Unified Cosmos

IT IS SAID THAT FOOLS RUSH IN where angels fear to tread . . . and so it may well be.  The self-active mind foolishly speculates about reality.  The Christened mind walks gingerly but confidently upon this sacred ground with humility and intent to offer insight and blessing.  Emerson said it more poetically:

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently.  We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

We Heavenly Beings incarnate in these Human capacities and endeavor to integrate racially segregated variety back into a state of integrated wholeness and unity—albeit segregation in only a condition of consciousness.  All peoples of the planet make up One Human Race. This endeavor, therefore, is futile if exercised merely in the social order without addressing the issue of separateness in our consciousness, where we see the whole as separate parts.  For example, we think of our solar system as having a sun with planets orbiting it, each a separate entity; when in reality our solar system is one entity and functions as one whole undivided entity.  As the authors of BIOCENTRISM succinctly state it . . .

We “see” separations between objects only because we have been conditioned and trained, through language and convention, to draw boundaries. . . . We see only that for which we are looking.  

I recently returned to a book I had set aside some years ago—for reasons that have only now become apparent—entitled Race And The Cosmos, written by Afro-American author Barbara A. Holmes.  She writes:

I am suggesting that we view issues of race and liberation from the perspective of the cosmos . . . This is a reasonable choice, given that the universe is an integral aspect of any human endeavor, even when it is a taken-for-granted backdrop for our activities.  I am challenging all justice seekers to awaken to the vibrant and mysterious worlds of quantum physics and cosmology. . . .  All the narratives that frame reality have been unsettled by the Hubble telescope’s unblinking eye and strangely responsive but unseen quantum elements.  From cosmic and quantum realms we learn that we are connected to one another in unexpected ways.  Theoretical physics suggests that, even when separated, entities that have once been in contact will react to changes in the other.

I resonate with this author’s perspective.  How we view the Cosmos and our relationship to it and within it seems vital to our movement forward into a new way of living together in harmony on Earth.  In that context and rationale, Dr. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman’s BIOCENTRISM has afforded me expansive insight into where Barbara Holmes is coming from in her timely book. 

First of all, “racism” is an illusion.  We do not see racism because it is “out there.”  Racism only appears to be “out there” because we continue to see it “out there,” projected by our race-conditioned consciousness.  We will continue to have racism in human society for as long as we continue to look for racism in human society.  As soon a we stop looking for it, and consequently seeing it, racism will vanish.  As soon as we look to find diversity in our unity and learn to appreciate it, the illusion of racism will cease being a dividing factor in our consciousness, and therefore in our world—and I speak here to my own state of race-conditioned consciousness as well. People behaving in a segregated fashion does not negate the reality of oneness.  If we do not believe this, then it’s upon us to prove it out in our living.  Make the change in consciousness, and the way we see our world will change instantly—along with our world. 

The power of observation is real and transformative. “Behold I create a new heaven and a new earth for the old heaven and old earth are passed away . . . and the former things shall no longer be remembered.”  I have lived in hopes of seeing this day dawn—and so it has. 

With that foreword, I will complete my review of chapter 11, as well as this series.  Continuing from my previous post, the authors conclude this section of their insightful book taking a final look at the nature of space and coming to the conclusion that all things in the Universe are truly connected, in more ways than we’ve imagined.

♦ ◊ ♦

ABANDONING SPACE TO FIND INFINITY

Einstein’s relativity is fully compatible with a much more flexible definition of space. Several threads in physics indeed imply that a rethinking of space is necessary to move forward: the persistent ambiguity of the observer in Quantum Theory (QT), the nonzero vacuum energy implied by cosmological observations, and the breakdown of general relativity on small scales, to name a few. To this we may add the unsettling fact that space as perceived by biological consciousness remains a domain apart, and remains one of the most poorly understood natural phenomena.

To those who assume Einstein’s development of special relativity necessitates the reality of external, independent “space” (and likewise assume the reality of an absolute separability of objects, what quantum theory calls locality, and rest the concept of space on this basis) we must emphasize once again that to Einstein himself, space is simply what we can measure using the solid objects of our experience. . . . As science becomes more unified, it is to be hoped that we can explain consciousness as well as idealized physical situations, following the current threads of quantum mechanics that have made it clear that the observer’s decisions are closely linked to the evolution of physical systems.

Although consciousness may eventually be understood well enough to be described by a theory of its own, its scaffolding is clearly part of the physical logic of nature, that is, the fundamental grand unified field. It is both acted on by the field (in perceiving external entities, experiencing the effects of acceleration and gravity, etc.) and acts on the field (by realizing quantum mechanical systems, constructing a coordinate system to describe light-based relationships, etc.).

Meanwhile, theorists of all stripes struggle to resolve the contradictions between quantum theories and general relativity. While few physicists doubt that a unified theory is attainable, it is clear that our classical conception of space-time is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Among other nuisances, in the modern view, objects and their fields have blurred together in what seems to be an eternal game of peek-a-boo. In the modern view according to quantum field theory, space has an energy content of its own and a structure that is very quantum mechanical in nature. Science is increasingly finding that the boundary between object and space is growing ever fuzzier.

SINCE SPACE IS ILLUSORY, WHERE IS THE UNIVERSE ?

Moreover, experiments in quantum entanglement since 1997 have called into question the very meaning of space and ongoing questions as to what these entangled-particle experiments mean. There are really only two choices. Either the first particle communicates its situation far faster than the speed of light, indeed, with infinite speed, and using a methodology that totally escapes even our most desperate guesses, or else there really is no separation between the pair at all, appearances to the contrary. They are in a real sense in contact, despite a universe of seemingly empty space standing between them. Thus, these experiments appear to add yet another layer to the scientific conclusion that space is illusory.

Cosmologists say that everything was in contact, and born together, at the Big Bang. So even employing conventional imagery, it may even make sense that everything is in some sense an entangled relative of every other, and in direct contact with everything else, despite the seeming emptiness between them.

What, then, is the true nature of this space? Empty? Seething with energy and therefore matter-equivalent? Real? Unreal? A uniquely active field? A field of Mind? Moreover, if one accepts that the external world occurs only in Mind, in consciousness, and that it’s the interior of one’s brain that’s cognized “out there” at this moment, then of course everything is connected with everything else.

A separate oddity is that during high-speed travel, especially near the speed of light, everything in the universe would seem to lie in the same place, unseparated and undifferentiated, directly ahead. This bizarre wrinkle comes from the effect of aberration. When we drive through a snowstorm, the flakes seem to come from in front of us, while the rear window hardly gets hit at all. The same thing happens with light. Our planet’s eighteen-miles-per-second motion around the sun causes stars to shift position by several seconds of arc from their actual locations. As we increase our velocity, this effect grows ever more dramatic until at just below light-speed, the entire contents of the cosmos appear to hover in a single blindingly bright ball, dead ahead. If one is looking out any other window, there appears nothing but a strange, absolute blackness.

The point here is that if some thing’s experiences alter radically depending on conditions, that thing is not fundamental. Light or electromagnetic energy are unvarying under all circumstances, as something that is intrinsic and innate to existence, to reality. By contrast, the fact that space can both seem to change its appearance through aberration, and actually shrink drastically at high speed, so that the entire universe is only a few steps from end to end, illustrates that it has no inherent, let alone external, structure. It is, rather, an experiential commodity that goes with the flow and mutates under varying circumstances.

The further relevance of all this to biocentrism is that if one removes space and time as actual entities rather than subjective, relative, and observer-created phenomena, it pulls the rug from under the notion that an external world exists within its own independent skeleton. Where is this external objective universe if it has neither time nor space?

We can, at this point, formulate seven principles:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would — by definition — have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles — indeed all particles and objects — is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatiotemporal logic of the self.

Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

♦ ◊ ♦

In his youth, Einstein believed that he could build from the physical side of nature without the living side simply with mathematics and physics. In his later years he concluded that “there is no free will” as the life-created and life-centered Universe is what it is and will continue to unfold as it pleases in accordance with natural law, human ignorance, interference and manipulation notwithstanding. Our only freedom is to choose between life’s way and “the highway.” In our arrogance, we have chosen the highway, to the destruction of life’s sustainable and supportive natural world. What absolute insanity.

Does it not make more sense to simply let Life build a natural world and provide for us the life-sustaining fruits of Mother Nature’s cornucopia?  And for us to return to tending the Garden while co-creating a domicile that is compatible and in harmony with the natural world?  We may even stop dying from diseases . . . and stop waging wars!

These things inspire me to write about the cosmic context of our presence on this planet. We are connected to this larger context, and within it to one another, and to extraterrestrial beings, in ways we are only now beginning to become aware as we evolve from our narrow earthly consciousness to planetary consciousness, and further on to galactic, and ultimately, cosmic consciousness.  There are galactic beings who are very much aware of and concerned about what we do here with energy, particularly nuclear energy—and I believe they are protecting us from ourselves, along with the Earth. This planet was created as a sacred place for the creation of living forms and it will not be allowed to be destroyed by nuclear war, tyrannical aggression notwithstanding.  Let’s not bring nuclear war to our world by harboring fear.  Let love radiate without concern for results—and the truth of Love is Oneness.  Fear not. 

I will continue to explore the nature of consciousness in my next series.  Until then,

Be love.  Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Credits:  Graphic at the top is by Rose Meeker.

 

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A Nuclear Community, Part 4: Collective Sovereignty

If you continue in my word . . . you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (Jesus)

Continuing from where we left off in the last post:  In her timely and important book THE RETURN OF KING ARTHUR, poet and spiritual author Diana Durham speaks to the tenuous phase in the transitioning from the old to the new paradigm of leadership in community.  Letting go of our former beliefs—particularly those about the model of leadership in community—in order to let go to and fully embrace the new world being born, can be daunting, and hesitation for too long could prove fatal. One could drown in the rising tide of change in the direction and speed of the currents in the river of life if one holds onto the familiar shore of the past.  The only sane thing to do is let go and swim out into the central current of the river. 

Our beliefs about the truth—that the Spirit of God dwells within us, for instance, and that we are gods—are not the truth; they are but guides to the truth.  When we know the truth of our oneness with God, we move beyond our belief to knowing that I Am an aspect of that Divine Spirit.  We find freedom in knowing the truth, freedom from our beliefs. But oh how we love our beliefs and defend them with religious vigor:  “Oh no, I am not divine. I am only human.” Beliefs may need defending, and can be denied.  Truth, however, the Word of Life, needs no defense, and cannot be denied.  The Word of Life is “You are divine, made in the image and likeness of God, and in that Image and likeness you share the authority of God in speaking truth.”  

Heretofore we have depended upon leaders and mentors to lead us in the truth.  That model is fading away, leaving many floundering in the dark waters of today’s chaos looking here and there for someone to tell them what to do and in what direction to go, what to hold onto.  Looking around, we only see our elected leaders floundering themselves in the rising tides of rebellion and protestation desperate to hold onto power and control of the masses; and our mentors are fading away, moving on from their earthly roles. The pews in churches are emptying in the wake of corruption among the clergy, and in Rome itself, and their failure to deliver the goods, even offer resolutions to moral issues, such as contraception and abortion, by which the Faithful are able to abide.  The churches are largely out of touch with the Faithful’s spiritual needs and moral issues in life.  They cannot teach what they themselves do not know—and know that they know.

Our leaders and mentors have traditionally been men . . . even holy men such as Buddha and Jesus.  Someone recently posed the question in a conversation we were having about abortion, “What would Jesus do?” Unfortunately (or fortunately), Jesus is not recorded as having said anything about abortion in the scriptures. His only answer to a crowd poised for stoning a harlot was “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Today we have many “good” people casting stones at “bad” people.   

We’re left to decide our own course in the abortion controversy . . . and it is a conundrum that has found no resting place of resolution in the legal or legislative debates or courts of justice.  We are totally on our own solving this problem we ourselves have created.  A solution will not be forth coming without a fundamental change in human consciousness and subsequent change in human behavior.  Primarily a change in identity from human to divine.  We sometimes say “God only knows.” Well then, let us find our true identity in God and know and act with love in divine authority. 

Rise of the Feminine

A very interesting turn of events takes place in the story of the Grail Quest Diana revisits in her book when Sir Bedivere finally yields to King Arthur’s command and lets go of the sword.  The dominant masculine energy that once empowered leadership from the top is met by the rising Feminine, who comes to take back her power (the sword of truth) in equal and balanced partnership with the Masculine, a very poignant and prophetic event in the story.  This is from chapter eleven, “The Chalice of Collective Sovereignty,” as excerpted from my book SACRED ANATOMY and the chapter on the spiritual significance of the Pituitary gland:

Speaking of her own personal transformation within the container of intentional spiritual community that went through a transformation itself in the wake of the passing of its spiritual God-parent and leader, Diana writes:

There is a great fear of losing the sword—a fear of losing the tradition and forms that have embodied the truth for us, and a desire to try to preserve them in some way—to disobey Arthur’s command.  Twice Sir Bedivere, that most loyal and trusted knight, tries to hide Excalibur before finally obeying Arthur and throwing the sword into the lake.  After all, if we don’t preserve the sword, we might lose everything . . . .

Very often this is the way. The injection of spiritual reality brought by the great avatar, like Jesus or Buddha, one who is able to pull the sword of power, of spiritual authority, back out of the stone of fixed belief and tradition and wield it as a living reality, is turned after their death into a religion, a series of beliefs, a tradition.  And people warm themselves on the little spark that still glows in the embers of that tradition, but they don’t inherit the mantle of spiritual radiance. They have not become entrained into the understanding of what it really means to “Worship God”; they have not completed the quest . . . .

. . . . Thanks to Guinevere and Morgana (the heart’s wisdom), Excalibur is not destined to become a sacred relic of past glory “stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings.” The heart’s instinctual knowing of what is right has overridden the fears and the structures of the mind, thus ensuring that Arthur’s true legacy—the legacy of potency, of truth, as represented by his sword— has become a living possibility available within the subconscious mind for us all to draw on.  It has not fossilized into a tradition for the elite to fight over—whether a political elite or a priestly elite; it is beyond the reach of corruption, and can only be accessed by the innocent and the true. Thanks to the quest for the Grail, thanks to the heart’s compulsion to take on one’s individual path and authority, the Round Table could become what it was a promise of.  Our network could be transmuted from a community into a new and potent consciousness of oneness.

This is why no matter which thread of the plot we retrace to uncover the cause of Camelot’s downfall, we find ourselves staring into the face of the feminine, whether it be the actions of Guinevere and Morgana or the quest for the Grail itself.  Only the heart’s wisdom knows how to take us from symbol to reality and carries the passion and assurance that will allow the “old order” to change and find renewal.

So we can begin to approach the meaning of the fulfillment of the Grail quest from a number of different—but related—angles. First of all, the finding of the Grail . . . means that the sense of personal separation from inner source—which I have also called the Grail King energy, love, or God—is healed.  Once this happens, our dependency on a King Arthur mentor figure ceases, and we begin to live our lives from a direct sense of what fits, of what is ours to do.  We can trust the compulsion of our heart because the heart realm is now operating as a direct “transmitter” of our own inner being and purpose.  In this way, the heart realm is the place of connection, or oneness, with God or spiritual source, and once that consciousness of union with source is a grounded reality within us—once the ego that thinks of itself as the center of the universe is no longer dominant—then there is a basis for connecting deeply with others. The heart realm becomes the means of connecting with others, with one’s “neighbor.” Therefore, we also begin to share a sense of oneness with one another, and a sense of being—hologram-like—parts of a whole that also contain in miniature the design of the whole.

The sense of oneness with others, combined with the ability to discern direction for ourselves, enables the other meaning of the Grail to emerge, which is the aspect of collective leadership: the circle of many individuals forming one body.

Collective leadership is not possible while we are still dependent on a mentor figure both for our own sense of spiritual alignment and for a sense of direction.  Nor is it possible unless there is a sense of oneness to bind us together—as well as the ability to discern for ourselves (as opposed to being subject to “peer pressure”) what our actions need to be.

We remember that the individual sword—or sense of authority—is earned by going on a quest for the Grail.  Perceval is given the sword on his first visit to the Grail Castle.  The return of Arthur in a form of the return of many individuals wielding their individual swords—in other words, the condition of collective leadership—cannot come about until the Grail is found and this collective consciousness is formed . . . .(pp. 203-206)

The Grail is found in the legends, and finding the Grail symbolizes not only the individual experience of open-hearted connection to spiritual source in oneself but also the emergence of the possibility of collective leadership.  When Sir Bedivere throws that sword into the lake, a woman’s hand reaches up to take it. A new opportunity has been fertilized: a new union between masculine and feminine, and the emergence of an era of collective sovereignty. When we talk about the rise of the feminine we are describing a crucial aspect of this new era. Obviously this new possibility has been emerging for some time in the form of the suffragettes and the women’s movement.  Closely allied with the struggle for equal rights for women was the civil rights movement in the United States. Leadership has been rising up from the grassroots, bringing immense changes and balancing out some of the injustices of society’s myopic structures. Collective leadership implies both the roundness of the chalice cup—without hierarchy, containing all—the feminine; and the absoluteness of the sword, the element of individual responsibility required for true leadership: the masculine. (pp. 6-7))

     What Durham is describing here is a renewal process of the Pituitary Gland that appears to be underway, both within individuals and within the collective body of Man.  As these two energies find a way to work in harmony and balance within us as two in agreement, individually and collectively, the Spirit of the Womb can then work its hormonal and alchemical magic of renewal of life on the planet.  Paradise (Camelot) can then be restored.  

Where the kingdom is, there also is the King. Paradise cannot be restored until Man is restored.  Man will be restored when he acknowledges and pays homage to the King of Heaven; when he turns his heart away from the material world and toward the King in utter abandon and worship—not in some separate heaven somewhere, but right here within himself where the Kingdom of Heaven abides patiently awaiting for us to repent, turn around and enter in.  

In the Grail Quest story, when Perceval finally finds the Holy Grail, he was asked a test question, which he failed to answer correctly. The question posed was “Whom does the Grail serve?” If I recall correctly, the promise of the Grail was abundance of all that pleases and satisfies.  It seemed to Perceval, the simple fool that he was sitting there amongst the Knight of the Round Table, about to partake in the feast spread out before him, that the Grail serves human beings, and in that assumption he failed to answer the question correctly. The correct answer was, and still is: “The Grail serves the Grail King.” Having failed to give the right answer, he found himself outside the Grail Castle and in the company of an old hag who proceeded to list all his faults and shortcomings. 

And so it befalls men and women in the realm of self-serving and self-pleasing human relations, where the Grail King is not allowed to drink and savor the sweet nectar of love from the Holy Grail of the Pure Heart of Humanity.  We judge and measure one another by our faults and shortcomings.  Perhaps I will find words to expand on this theme in my next post. I welcome your thoughts.  Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

 

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A Nuclear Community

“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 level of 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

Until my next post of this new series,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

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“Fifth Way” Love: A Romantic Path to Transformation

I will open this post with the excerpt from Cynthia Bourgeault’s signature work, The Meaning of MARY MAGDALENE – Discovering The Woman at the Heart of Christianity – with which I closed my previous post, and will continue quoting her commentary in its entirety. She quotes here a passage from the Gospel of Philip:

“The one who creates objects works outwardly in the external world. The one who labors in secret, however, works within the icon, hidden inwardly from others. The one who creates make objects visible to the world. The one who conceives gives birth to children in the Realm of the Unseen.”

In this complex distinction . . . Philip insists that begetting must come “from above”. . . .  It requires a free and conscious regeneration in the Spirit. “Begotten” is an alchemy in which spirit actively participates, and its fruit is the anthropos, or completed human being. 

THE SPIRITUAL KISS THAT BEGETS

From Philip’s point of view, then, lineal descendents of Jesus, even if they existed, would not be “anointed ones,” unless this claim were to be validated by their own spiritual transformation. The kingdom over which the Anointed One reigns is beyond the space/time continuum and cannot be inherited lineally (that technicality consistently overlooked in the literal-mindedness of The Da Vinci Code); it can be entered only by becoming a new kind of human being–what Philip actually describes as “a new race of human be­ings . . . . Only true sons and daughters can gain immortality,” he writes in analogue 56, “and no one can gain it without becoming a true son and daughter.” Progeny cannot be fashioned out of flesh and blood; they are the fruit of an alchemy of consciousness.

Philip makes it clear that this is the kind of spiritual procreation that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were chiefly about. As we discussed in chapter 10, his symbol for this type of richly engendering spiritual love is the kiss, which (as is universally the case throughout the Near Eastern culture) is seen as a sign not of sexual attraction but of spiritual begetting. When he indicates in analogue 37 that “the Master loved her more than the other students and many times would kiss her on the mouth,” he is not describing an illicit romance but rather a sacred exchange of their deeply commingled beings. The spiritual kiss is the symbol par excellence of Fifth Way love.

From a Fifth Way standpoint, this kind of intense and trans­forming love, “which is really the birth-pangs of union at a higher plane,” will indeed bear fruit. But the fruit may not be human children so much as an energetic sphere of pure creativity, in which reality is touched at the core and love itself is the progeny.

As analogue 66 points out, “The one who creates objects [i.e., literal offspring] works outwardly in the external world. The one who labors in secret, however, works within the icon, hidden in­wardly from others.” In other words, the work goes on at the imaginal (or causal) level, and its potency is made manifest not by producing new people but by engendering transformed people­ giving birth to children “in the Realm of the Unseen,” in the words of the text. (Underscores mine)

“FIFTH WAY LOVE”:  AN EROTIC PATH TO TRANSFORMATION

The “Fifth Way” is a spiritual path based on relationship. Cynthia Bourgeault calls it “conscious love” rather than “tantric love” so as not to put a stumbling block before her parishioners. She is an Episcopal priest whose passion is to restore the romantic love affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as the center piece at the heart of Christianity. The term itself is a deliberate spin-off from George Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way,” the “Way of the Conscious Man.” Boris Mouravieff (d.1966), a little known Russian esotericist who studied Gurdjieff’s system intimately, coined the phrase and used it in his three-volume Gnosis to represent “courtly love as a spiritual path and of the way of transformation through mystical union with one’s ‘polar being.'” Cynthia’s comment:

“While he [Mouravieff] stops short of saying that Jesus and Mary Magdalene practiced this path, he makes it clear that its headwaters lie deep within the marrow of Christianity itself, and he insists that it represents “The purest and most sublime realization of the Christian spiritual path.” 

THE “SONG OF SONGS”

More commonly known in Protestant circles as “The Song of Solomon, Bourgeault associates this erotic book of the Old Testament Bible with Mary Magdalene, seeing it as an ancient testament to the practice of “Fifth Way Love.” I will share my favorite passage from the Biblical texts and then offer a commentary on it. The song opens with the kiss that begets love:

The song of songs, which is Solomon’s. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. 

Because of the savor of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee…. 

The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Our winter is currently at the door in mid October, not a time to be leaping and skipping. Perhaps, then, we could see this passage metaphorically as describing the nature and character of Life itself and of the Beloved who abides within us each one, peaking out through the windows of our eyes and showing himself through the lattice of our veiled and guarded hearts. The Beloved is always there, “standing behind our wall,” when our world gets dark and seemingly impossible to navigate.  Always there to turn to for assurance that all is well and as it should be. Always there to love in passionate embrace and simply say: “I love you with all of my heart, with all of my mind, and with all of my body. With Solomon I sing . . .

Place me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm. Strong as Death is love; intense as Sheol is its ardor. Its shafts are shafts of fire, flames of Yah (Yahweh). Deep waters cannot quench love, nor rivers sweep it away.”

AN UNLIKELY BIBLICAL TEXT

Like Mary Magdalene herself, the Song of Songs has had a long his­tory of both admirers and detractors. It has been called, with some justification, “the most unbiblical book in the whole Bible,” and there are those who feel that its inclusion in among the wisdom writings of the Old Testament was a grand mistake. But others see it as nothing short of scripture’s mystical highpoint, an inexhaustible fountainhead of beauty and spiritual wisdom. Among this latter group was Rabbi Aqiba (d. 135), one of the most influential of the early rabbinic commentators, whose celebrated words eventually carried the day: “All the ages are not worth the day on which it was written for all the writings are holy, but the Song is the Holy of Holies.”

At the heart of all this consternation, as you might expect, is the fact that this text is a love song–and not just a mild-mannered, “spiritual” love song, but an unabashed celebration of erotic pleasure. From its opening salvo, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” to its parting affirmation, “Love is as strong as death,” it never breaks stride, In eight canticles of stunningly evocative imagery, it sings the glories of carnal desire in exquisite and scintillating detail. 

KENOTIC LOVE

Kenosis is the act of emptying oneself, a characteristic applied, by Paul specifically, to the path that Jesus took in his life of service. It was the path Mother Theresa took and other saintly souls.  Cynthia writes: 

As Paul so profoundly realizes, self-emptying is the touchstone, the core reality underlying every moment of Jesus’s human journey. Self-emptying is what  brings him into human form, and self-emptying is what leads him out, returning him to the mode of glory. The full realization of Jesus’s divine selfhood [our divine Selfhood] comes not through concentration of being, but through voluntary divestment of it. . . . Stripping oneself and standing naked: this is the essence of the kenotic path.

KENOSIS IN THE FIFTH WAY

We have already seen that kenosis is the tie-rod of Jesus’s entire teaching, connecting the inner and outer realms of our human experience in a single, unified gesture. “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend” (John 15:13) is one of his most celebrated dictums. But when that “friend” happens also to be one’s uniquely beloved, one’s romantic partner or spouse, kenotic practice takes on a particularly intense and even a sacra­mental character. This is because the root energy it works with is the transformative fire of eros, the energy of desiring. That messy, covetous, passion-ridden quicksilver of all creation is tamed and transformed into a substance of an entirely different order, and the force of the alchemy accounts for both the efficiency of this path and its terrifying intensity.

Vladimir Solovyov, that great nineteenth-century philosopher of love, was among the first to grasp the enormous implica­tion of this point, which defines both the modality of the Fifth Way and its ultimate destination:

The meaning and worth of love. .. is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for another the same ab­solute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but … as the shifting of the very center of our personal lives. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love [erotic love]; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibil­ity of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: “They shall be one flesh,” that is, shall become one real being.

In the path of “Fifth Way Love,” as Cynthia Bourgeault presents it in her book, and as she portrays the intimate companionship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, the eros is transformed and transmuted to a higher level so as to become an erotically ecstatic bridge between the physical and the spiritual worlds, making the oneness of heaven and earth an actual and tangible experience.  The ultimate transformation takes place between “polar beings” who become one blended substance, so that one cannot tell where the boundaries of one’s own body stops and the other’s begins. For there is no “other” and no boundaries. There is only the One I Am.  

We will shift gears in my next post, leaving the realm of the “Holy of Holies” to explore the mysteries of the Universe–as Walter Russell understands and explains them anyway. We are in for a profoundly intellectual roller coaster ride. So, sharpen your mental focus before you read my next post. The theme will remain in the domain of the masculine and feminine energies at work within us and throughout the illusory universe.  Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony     (tpal70@gmail.com)

Category:

Alchemy, Alchemy of Begetting, Books on spirituality, Christianity, Eros, Finding Self in Another, Human Relations, Identity in the One, Love, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Rise of the Feminine, Romantic love, Sex, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The path of romantic love, Transformation, Transmutation, Union with God

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Loving the “Lord thy God”

What does loving the “Lord thy God” entail? What does it mean to love God with all of one’s heart, and with all of one’s mind, and with all of one’s strength? A deeper question yet: Who is the “Lord thy God”?  If this is the first and great commandment – which, presumably, precedes the second one that commands we love our neighbor as our self – then it seems important, even essential, that we know what the first commandment means and entails.

For me – the only one I can speak for – it entails coming to know oneness with the Lord that I am and identifying with my divine Self.  It hasn’t always been that way with me. I was brought up to believe that God was separate from who I am.  I developed a strong pattern of love response for this image of God that I had fabricated in my mind based on what I was taught in my youth: that God was separate from me, up in His heaven, and so I prayed to and came to love this God with all of my heart and all of my mind and with all of my strength.  While it felt good and lifted my consciousness up a bit to love some divine being who is supposedly much greater than me, it really never felt honest, nor complete. I always felt that I was being attracted to something or someone outside of myself, “up there” somewhere.

Awakening to the truth of the matter was galvanizing for me. There is no one “up there” outside of myself. There is only who and what I Am here and now.  In the Biblical story of Moses’s encounter with God on Mount Sinai – or Jehovah as God was known to the Israelites – when Moses asked God for his name, God answered “I AM THAT I AM.” God is the Essence of existence in all forms of life. He is the I AM is all things living, including human beings. That is your and my identity as one made in the image and likeness of God, a son or daughter of God. It is the identity of each one of us as individual expressions of God. Accept it. BE it and love it with all of your heart, mind and strength. Give it expression in your daily living in acts of kindness and appreciation. Then you cannot but love your neighbor as your very Self because your neighbor is your very Self.

The truth is simple. We are divine beings incarnate in human forms. Why have we made it so complicated in our theological doctrines and religious dogmas?  Perhaps it is because you can’t sell the truth.  You can only sell doctrines and dogmas as truth, which makes them mere beliefs in and about the truth. When one comes to know the truth one is set free from his or her beliefs and moves beyond them into the experience of one’s true divine Self: one with God, one with neighbor, one with All.  So is it. So let it be.

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

Category:

Beyond belief, Identity in the One, Love, Loving God, On Human Relations, True Identity, Truth

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On Human Relations . . . . part 6: The Path of Romantic Love, page 4

My Chorale PicIn chapter seven of her powerful book MARY MAGDALENE – Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, “Reclaiming the Path of Romantic Love,” Episcopal minister Cynthia Bourgeault paints a much different picture of the spiritual path Jesus walked than the one painted by Christian orthodox interpretations of the four gospels. Continuing from where we left off in the previous post, Cynthia speaks to the question “Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene lovers.” I will let you read directly from the final two pages of this chapter.

Having described Jesus’s spiritual path as being anything but celibate, an “enstatic” path of conserving pranic energy, Cynthia makes her case against traditional Christian concepts and beliefs to the contrary.

By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel account affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic — love completely poured out, expended, squandered. In contrast to clarity, it is the arche­typal image of purity, the complete self-giving of the heart.

THE PATH JESUS WALKED

And right here, I believe, we come to the fundamental problem with these celibate models of transformation. It’s not merely their monochromatic viewpoint or the implicit devaluing of a whole other stream of Christian spiritual wisdom whose roots are in passionate human love. Rather, it is the fact that at key points they seem to be slightly out of kilter with the path of transformation that Jesus himself walked and taught. One might say that this model points us toward John the Baptist rather than Jesus: to­ward those ancient and time-honored practices of renunciation, asceticism, and self-concentration through abstinence, whereas if we really look closely, we see that Jesus himself seemed to be con­stantly pushing the envelope in the opposite direction — toward radical self-abandonment, reckless self-outpouring, and the trans­mutation of passion in complete self-giving.

But it is right there, at the center of that cognitive dissonance, that a window of opportunity opens up. Rather than trying to smooth it over and pretend it does not exist, as the church has done for nearly two thousand years, we need to tune in and listen to it very carefully, for it gives us exactly the tool we need to proceed.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene lovers? To date, nearly everyone seems to be trying to solve that riddle from the outside, like good investigative journalists. It’s all about finding new evi­dence: secret documents and societies, new gnostic gospels, purported lost tombs, hidden mathematical messages embedded in the lines of existent texts — some new piece of data that would settle the issue one way or another. Equally, those who are ap­palled by the very notion of a romantically involved Jesus build their case by recourse to doctrines and templates that did not exist until three or four centuries after he had left the planet. It’s all external logic.

But there is another possibility, which has been sitting there right under our noses all along yet so far seems to have been consistently overlooked. That is to evaluate the evidence from the inside, on the basis of the path itself. For Jesus was, after all, a teacher, and the teaching itself is there to be consulted. Once one has compensated for the negative set and drift of the celibate current, it is merely a matter of asking a single question: In the light of what Jesus actually seems to have been teaching, is there anything in the teachings themselves that would have precluded such a love relationship?

If Jesus were indeed walking the path of classic monastic brahmacharya, then the answer is obviously yes; celibacy is an essential requirement of this path, and to diverge from this requirement would violate his integrity and sabotage his spiritual power.

But what if in fact he was walking a different path? A path difficult to identify because it was so close to its own headwaters that it was missed by nearly everyone both then and now? What if he was not an ascetic at all, but was in fact following a whole new trajectory, previously unknown in the West and with its own ways of understanding integrity and purity? Along this other trajec­tory, it might indeed be conceivable for him to be in a human love relationship, although that love would probably not look like what most of us are familiar with.

Let’s see what the teachings themselves have to say.

Thus ends chapter seven with a segue to chapter eight, and to the rest of Cynthia’s provocative treatise, for that matter. The title of chapter eight is “The Great Identity Theft.” Who was Jesus and how was his presentation of himself perceived by the world he came to save from itself?  There are two brief paragraphs midway through this chapter that speak to these questions.

In the Aramaic language of Jesus’s immediate followers, one of the earliest titles given to him was Ihidaya, “the Single One,” or the “Unified One.” In context, it speaks unmistakably of this state of inner oneness; it designates the anthropos, the fully realized human being: the enlightened master of Eastern tradition, or the monad or “undivided one” of hermeticism.

The “great identity theft” to which the title of this chapter refers is that in remarkably short order this term, which was so clearly intended to designate Jesus’s attained state of inner oneness, should come to be interpreted as “singleness” in the sense of being unmarried, “the celibate one.”

Jesus was not necessarily monastic nor ascetic, which leaves him available to a romantic relationship. Actually, according to Islamic scholar Ibrahim Gamard, monasticism was not mandated by the Koran. In a letter to the author in 1998, Gamard shared the insight that “in the Islamic tradition monasticism was disapproved of in the Qur’anic verse which states that the monasticism of the followers of Jesus was invented by them and was not something commanded by God.” As I said, this leaves Jesus with the option at least of having a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene as his wife and partner in a shared service to Humanity: personal transformation via a path of romantic love.

I will leave it there for now and continue with “The Path that Jesus Walked” in my next post . . . . or not. This series seems to be complete, so I may let this be the concluding post to the series on Human Relations. We’ll see what the Current of Inspiration brings us for exploration. Thanks for sharing this consideration with me. As always, your comments are welcome.  Until my next post,

Be love. Be Loved

Anthony

Read my Health Light Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com for helpful information about health and wellness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Celibacy, Eros, Human Relations, Jesus, Love, Man-Woman Equality, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Romantic love, Spiritual intimacy before phsical, The path of romantic love, Transformation

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On Human Relations . . . . . part 6: The Path of Romantic Love, page 3

“Without the quicksilver of eros nothing transforms . . .”

My Chorale PicIn the previous post I presented and considered the first two of four propositions, or myths, that are all “firmly rooted in the soil of celibate spirituality–that together have subtly sabotaged our ability to see romantic love as an authentic path of spiritual transformation” presented by Cynthia Bourgeault in her boldly provocative book The Meaning of MARY MAGDALENE — Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity.  In this post I will present and consider the third and fourth myths and share some of Cynthia’s thought provoking views and commentary from her book — which I highly recommend to my readers.

Myth Number Three: Human love is inherently different from divine love

This is what has been handed down through Christian church teachings. Actually, it was Plato who classified love by types: agape and eros — although he didn’t attribute agape exclusively to divine love nor eros exclusively to human love. After all, the Greeks had their riotous gods who were capable of both human and divine passions. Rather, agape love to Plato was impartial, disinterested love and eros desiring love, which both the gods and humans were capable of experiencing. Plato’s delineation, non-the-less, set the foundation for such discussions for two-and-a-half millennia since, writes Cynthia Bourgeault.

It was a Swedish Protestant theologian in the 1930’s by the name of Anders Nygren who relegated eros to human desiring. His “monumental” three-volume work Agape and Eros, in which he writes “eros is man’s way to God; agape is God’s way to man,” had a powerful and pervasive influence on contemporary Christian spirituality. Cynthia writes:

According to Nygren, eros is by its very nature filled with desire and neediness, hence impure; by contrast, God’s way of loving is free, clear and impartial, motivated only by the goodness of the giver. With one deft stroke of the theological scalpel, Nygen essentially divided the core energy of love into two separate species and assigned to erotic love (the only love humans are by definition capable of) a permanent second-class status that essentially negates its value as a spiritual path. It is hard to escape the implication that if one is following a path of passionate commitment to a beloved, one is on an inferior spiritual track, or no track at all. This despite love’s unassailable record as the most potent force at our disposal to unify the heart and transform the soul.

Fortunately, the damaging pronouncements of Nygren has impacted only the modern era. Earlier generations of Christian teachers considered eros a “wellspring” of transforming energy that one simply had to learn to work with in one’s spiritual path. Cynthia quotes John Climacus’ sixth-century writings to exemplify this historical fact:

“I have seen impure souls who threw themselves headlong into physical eros to a frenzied degree. It was their very experience of that physical eros that led them to interior conversion. They concentrated their eros on the Lord. Rising above fear, they tried to love God with insatiable desire. That is why when Christ spoke to the woman who had been a sinner he did not say that she had been afraid but that she had loved much, and had easily been able to surmount love by love.”

The goal of “surmounting love by love” for a thousand years formed the heart of the Christian mystical program of transformation, culminating in the twelfth century in the magnificent “monastic love mysticism” of St Bernard of Clairvax and those following in his wake (and notice that whenever eros is mentioned in a text, the figure of Mary Magdalene hovers right in the background). To the extent that it still conceives of God as an object that one can “concentrate one’s eros” on, it ultimately falls victim of that same dualistic fallacy we have already seen in the first myth. But it is far, far better than what has been served up today in the name of religious and psychological health; a gutless, passionless numb “agape clone” that goes nowhere at all. Without the quicksilver of eros nothing transforms: a secret which I believe Jesus himself knew and worked with in his teachings in a profound way, only at a unitive rather than a dualistic level.

Now, of course, if you were fortunate enough to escape such indoctrination in your upbringing, then none of this serves you very much, excerpt perhaps as an educational piece at an intellectual level. I am intrigued by perspectives on historical events that shed light on the path I have traveled over the last seventy plus years. You see, I was born into a Catholic family, groomed for a priestly vocation — which was more my father’s desire for me than my own — and educated in the hallowed halls of Roman Catholic seminary. Only the halls of Catholic seminary were not so hallowed as they were hollow and empty of any transforming energy. Eros was a path to a life of mortal sin, the punishment for which was eternal damnation and separation from God. So, it thrills me to have someone like Cynthia Bourgeault articulate so eloquently some of the undercurrents that were churning beneath the turbulent and confusing terrain upon which I spent the formative and developing years of my life, as well as their origins in history.

Don’t worry for me, however, for the Church’s brain-washing, for some strange reason, seemed like water poured over a duck’s back. It didn’t penetrate the core of me. My guardian angel was apparently protecting me. However, I did not escape the damage to my human psyche and the spoiling of my physical enjoyment of a fully enfleshed life of healthy sexuality as a young man. That came later after awakening to the truth of love and of life.

But enough about me. Let’s look at the fourth myth, the one that lured me into the seminary and, ironically, disillusioned me at the age of 21 and sent me in search for the truth of love in human relations, both with the divine and with one another, a search that would last only seven years. Let me share some of her thoughts and perspectives right from her powerful book.

Myth Number Four: Celibacy is a state of greater purity.

The mistake here–and it is one commonly made in spiritual teaching — is to confuse purity with clarity. Clarity has to do with attuning the mind. Purity is about awakening the heart. The two can overlap each other, but they are not synonymous.

I enjoy her distinction between purity and clarity. She goes on to give a little history of the practice of celibacy.

In Hinduism, where the practice of celibacy as an applied spiritual technology (known as brahmacharya)  arose more than three thousand years ago, the objective has to do with conserving and concentrating prana, the vital energy or life force, so that it can be utilized for spiritual transformation. The modern Hindu master Swami Chidananda has restated the traditional wisdom by explaining it in this way: “Prana is the precious reserve of the seeker. Any sense activity or sense experience consumes a lot of prana [the sex act most of all, he claims] . . . The highest of all goals in life, spiritual attainment, requires the maximum pranic energy on all levels.”

For Swami Chidananda, the practice of celibacy harnesses pranic energy much like a dam harnesses the force of water for the purpose of turning huge turbines, and like a lens concentrates the rays of the sun to burn whatever they are focused on. Cynthia continues:

In the most ancient and powerful understanding of the practice, celibacy belongs among practices that can be classified as enstatic — those that have to do with conserving, collecting, concentrating. The positive side of this kind of practice is a significantly enhanced clarity — a relative freedom from the energy-consuming turmoil of the physical lusts and emotional passions and thus a greater capacity to stay present to the higher frequencies of spiritual energy.

For exactly this reason — that celibacy is a “storing up” process — its shadow side is avarice. One must be alert to a subtle tendency to withhold or “preserve”oneself, to hold oneself back from full engagement in the human sphere in order to have access to those higher realms of truth and light. Under all the aura of “selfless giving” with which the practice of celibacy generally cloaks itself, there can be a subtle spiritual acquisitiveness at work, betrayed in the very phrase “spiritual attainment.” Which “I,” one wonders, is this “I” who attains?

Cynthia gives her reader pause to consider what’s really at work in spiritual attainment. She then turns toward the life and death of Jesus in a most remarkable portrayal of him as being anything but enstatic in his public ministry.

By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel accounts affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic — love completely poured out, expended squandered. In contrast to clarity, it is the archetypal image of purity, the complete self-giving of the heart.

Such is the character of unconditional love: “. . .the complete self-giving of the heart.” This reminds me of Jesus’s words to his disciples during his sermon on the vine and the branches: “Greater love hast no man than this; that he lay down his life for his friends.”  He was giving them all that he had to give, and for a truly selfless reason: “. . . that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” (John 15:13)

The joy of giving fully of oneself is like no other joy.  It’s a joy that utterly sets one free. This, I believe, is what’s really behind the mad rush to buy presents for loved ones and friends at Christmas time every year. We do get much joy out of giving.  I’ve actually read of a tribal community where there is no word in their language for “Thank you.” Such is their awareness that the pleasure and joy of giving are the giver’s as much as, if not more than, the receiver’s. I love Cynthia’s portrayal of this great Teacher as one who spent himself fully during his three-and-a-half years of public ministry. It is the Jesus that I can easily hold as a hero and model of true manhood.

In my next post I will share Cynthia Bourgeault’s view of and commentary on “The Path Jesus Walked.” So, stay tuned for more inspiring posts on my Healing Tones blog.

Wishing for you a Happy New Year and a healthy and happy 2016!

Anthony

Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com.

 

 

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Celibacy, Eros, Human Relations, Jesus, Love, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Romantic love, Sex, Spiritual intimacy before phsical

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On Human Relations, . . . . . part 6: The Path of Romantic Love

My Chorale PicAn intimate, romantic, and sexual relationship with another human being, far from distracting one from spiritual attainment, can open a fast-track path to spiritual transformation: the path of romantic love.

This path is cluttered with signposts bearing moral Christian doctrines that warn of a sinful destination for those who seek erotic pleasure in natural sex drives that were designed to bring couples into a state of ecstatic union, along with the function of propagating the human species — sex solely for gratification not withstanding. The church is solely responsible for the degradation of sex from sacrament to sin in human relations, using Jesus, the celibate divine redeemer, and Mary Magdalene, the human “sinful prostitute,” as models upon which to base its thwarted and therefore false premise.

I’m in my second reading of Cynthia Bourgeault’s profoundly insightful and thought-provoking, if not controversial, rendering of  “The Meaning of MARY MAGDALENE – DISCOVERING THE WOMAN AT THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY.”

This is unequivocally the most powerful book I have yet read on the story of Mary Magdalene and her role in the life and ministry of Jesus. The author, an Episcopal priest, literally plumbs the depth of my soul and awakens dreams of a “perfect world,” almost to the point of disturbing my default inner peace by arousing once again that painfully familiar longing for a seemingly unattainable state of “singleness” as a whole human being — ironically, a singleness that can only be obtained, according to her insight and perspective, in the state of holy matrimony. Cynthia’s Jesus came to “reclaim the path of romantic love” and to uplift marriage between a man and a woman to its original state of “one flesh” that no man can “put asunder”– and he walked his talk. He was not celibate by any connotation of that word. Nor did he recommend celibacy as the higher path to spiritual transformation. His was a life fully “enfleshed” as a whole human being, and that’s what made him such a powerful magnet and lightning rod. The people loved him for his authenticity. The governing religious leaders of that time hated him for the same reason.  Actually, in their gross darkness, they simply did not comprehend his light, and it frightened them and threatened their self-serving authority.

This book has a Voice. One that speaks from out of the ancient past, spanning time from the “beginning”– the Edenic origins of Man and Woman — up to and including the life, public ministry and death of Jesus the Nazarene, only not the Jesus introduced to us when we were children and foisted upon the Christian world since the fourth century Council of Nicea.  Cynthia’s Jesus is a whole human being who “emptied” himself fully of both his humanity and his divinity, leaving no part of his soul and body unused in service to his heavenly Father and to Humankind. And it was his intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene to which Cynthia attributes the fulfillment of his mission and purpose for incarnating on the planet when he did. I should say the fulfillment of their shared mission and purpose.

That said, I don’t think that I can do Cynthia’s book justice in a blog-long book review. So, with the thought in mind that my readers may be inspired to read Cynthia’s book to fully enjoy her viewpoint on these timely issues, I will simply share a few passages from her book that moved my soul to the point of shouting “YES! That rings so true!” I will share and comment on them as they come up in my second reading. Enjoy and be blessed.

I will start at the beginning of Chapter 7, “RECLAIMING THE PATH OF ROMANTIC LOVE,” just to give you a sense of the tone of Cynthia’s voice, along with the context in which she writes. Here she speaks to the issue of celibacy in a priesthood supposedly modeled after Jesus and his celibate apostles — or were they?

NEARLY TWENTY YEARS ago, long before The Da Vinci Code uproar broke, I was serving as parish priest in a small Episcopal congregation in Colorado. When the gospel appointed for one particular Sunday in August was Luke’s account of that anonymous “sinful” woman with her alabaster jar, I decided to take the risk of breaking open some of the insights that even back then were beginning to emerge from a growing spate of Mary Magdalene studies. My parishioners were a bright and intellectually curious bunch, so why not? During my sermon, I gently presented Margaret Starbird’s assertion (in her book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, named after this very gospel passage) that the anointing of Jesus’s hands and feet described in the text was not simply a random act by a penitent woman, but an exquisitely symbolic ritual enacted between two lovers about to be separated.

The fire storm was predictable.

I had tried to pave the way as carefully as I could. My point in raising those issues, as I made clear both in the sermon itself and in the discussion that boiled over afterward, was not to argue the case one way or another, but rather to get at some of the attitudes underlying the way we Christians do theology — and more important the way we do love. “How do you feel about the possibility that Jesus had a human beloved?” I asked these parishioners. “Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Why?”

The responses were pretty much what I expected: “But if Jesus had sexual relations with a woman, he couldn’t be sinless.” “If he loved one in particular, he couldn’t love us all impartially.” “How could he be the son of God unless he gave himself completely to God?” The overwhelming consensus was that if Jesus had known erotic love, he could not possibly have also been the full embodiment of divine love. It would somehow disqualify him as the divine redeemer.

I could hardly blame the congregation for feeling that way.

After nearly two millennia of reinforcement, these assumptions have become so much of the landscape of Christianity that they appear to be part of the seamless structure of revealed truth. But in fact, assumptions are what they really are — not core tenets of the faith, not anything that Jesus himself taught, but superimpositions of a male, celibate, priestly theology which for nearly two thousand years has been the only game in town.

The complicated history of how this situation came to be could fill a book in itself (and in fact has several times over). The short version is basically this: during those first four centuries of Christian life, as leadership moved from a charismatic eldership model to the threefold sacramental ministry we know today (bishops, priests, and deacons), part and parcel of this evolution was an increasing tendency to view both Christ and his apostles through the prototype of celibate priesthood. This is of course a flagrant anachronism in light of the unambiguous scriptural references to Peter’s mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14) and the only slightly more ambiguous allusions in Luke to the other disciples’ “companions.?”

But counterbalancing the testimony of the gospels themselves was a growing discomfort with conjugal intimacy, a discomfort whose roots probably lie in the extreme Essene asceticism out of which Jesus himself most likely emerged (we will be exploring this topic in greater detail in the following chapter). Beginning as early as Paul, this unease was magnified in each succeeding generation by a chorus of Christianity’s most influential thinkers including Marcion, Tatian, Jerome, and Augustine. The consensus grew stronger and stronger that sex and the sacraments simply didn’t mix. By the fourth century edicts were in place forbidding married priests to have conjugal relations with their wives. Not long thereafter married priesthood itself dropped astern in Western Christendom, and celibacy became the entrance requirement for admission to the power structure of the church.

It gives one a bit of a start to realize that for the better part of two millennia, Christian theology has been written, shaped, formulated, and handed down almost exclusively by celibates talking to other celibates. In that respect, it is extraordinarily monolithic. And from this exclusively celibate template emerges the only image of Christ our tradition has allowed us to entertain: of a celibate renunciate whose “sinless” purity would necessarily entail sexual abstinence.

At the age of twenty-one, this very requirement barred my own entrance into the Roman Catholic priesthood after seven years of seminary life, during which I tried in vain to suppress my body’s natural erotic urges and my soul’s longing for a feminine soul mate.  Cynthia goes right to the heart of the highly emotionally charged premise that in addition to all the roles attributed to Mary Magdalene — apostle, visionary, healer — “there is still one remaining to her, which may just be the most important of them all: soul mate.”

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene lovers? Were they secretly married? That, of course, is the claim laid out in  The Da Vinci Code and a number of other books and documentaries and which the church angrily refutes.

The question would never have a fair hearing in Christian circles, she goes on to say, where the “mote” has not yet been cast out of our own eyes while we dare to pass judgement on those who entertain a different view from our own.

It is one thing to argue the case for reclaiming Mary Magdalene as apostle and wisdom-bearer, purveyor of a sorely needed feminine presence in the church; it is quite another to tie this claim to the theologically taboo subject of a romantic involvement with Jesus. Two-thousand years of dogma and tradition have left the field so thoroughly land-mined with negative assumptions and stereotypes that it is virtually impossible to see anything other than red, like my congregation that morning. The question will inevitably be heard as an attack on Jesus and as an act of sabotage upon the Christian faith itself.

After two-thousand years of programming that celibacy is the highest Christian way when compared to the second-rate path of committed spousal love, “it is hardly surprising that our Western anthropology of human sexuality is abysmal.”

In the secular version relentlessly foisted upon us by contemporary culture, it’s all about pleasure, performance, gratification. In the bedroom of the faithful, it’s still all too often about duty and shame: a begrudging debt to future generations which, even when carefully managed, is still tainted with carnal sin. Mention “erotic love” and people will immediately hear “sex,” then immediately thereafter, “dirty.” The idea that there could be anything holy about this kind of love is too alien to even consider. That’s simply the way our ears have been trained to hear it; we are all children of a cultural stream whose vision of human love  has been shaped by the shadow side of celibate spirituality.

From the gutter, the view of the gossip and speculation around Mary Magdalene and Jesus in various studies is less than holy and rather “scandalmongering,” Cynthia writes.

We are really presented with only four options:

1. That Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s mistress;

2. That theirs was a politically arranged marriage, strictly for dynastic purposes;

3. That they were sexual consorts in some Gnostic Mystery religion, ritually reenacting the sacred hieros gamos, or union of the opposites;

4. That the whole story is purely archetypal, a great Sophianic myth depicting the integration of the masculine and feminine within the human soul.”

With that, I will leave you to ponder these options for yourself and return in two weeks to compare your choice of options to Cynthia’s in my next post as we continue to explore romantic human love as a path to spiritual transformation. I will present four “propositions” or “myths”– all “rooted in the soil of celibate spirituality — that together have subtly sabotaged our ability to see romantic love as an authentic path of spiritual transformation.” Until my next post, then . . .

be love ~ be loved.

Anthony

Read my Health Light Newsletter on-line at LiftingTones.com.

 

 

 

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Human Relations, Jesus, Love, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Romantic love, Sex, Transformation, Union with God

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On Human Relations, part 4: A New Relationship with Iran?

“TEHRAN’S PROMISE  — The revolution’s midlife crisis and the nuclear deal.”

My Chorale PicTHE NEW YORKER this month features an excellent and well written article by Robin Wright on the Iranian Nuclear deal. I’m bringing it into my blog, and particularly into this series on human relations, because it’s about the personal relationship between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, a relationship that, in my opinion, was made in heaven for the specific purpose of bringing about this Nuclear deal with Iran—and more. It opened a window to the world through which the promise of a new relationship between the people of Iran and the rest of the world can be clearly seen, even through the distracting and manipulative cloud of propaganda Washington Conservatives have been putting before the American people via the media.

The relationship between these two men had its beginnings back in 2003 when Zarif was Iran’s United Nations Ambassador.  Kerry and Zarif “played pivotal roles in getting the process (of the Nuclear deal) started, through back channels: in 2003, as Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Zarif orchestrated a secret overture, nicknamed ‘the grand bargain.’” This initiative is what set things in motion and led to an unannounced trip in 2011 by John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “to explore an offer by the Sultan Oman to host covert diplomacy. That led to five secret rounds of lower-level U.S.-Iran talks, in Muscat, in 2013.”

Here’s what really piqued my interest in this relationship.

The most serious diplomacy since Washington severed relations with Tehran, in 1980, began shortly after Kerry and Zarif were appointed as their nations’ top diplomats. Their first meeting, in September, 2013, was supposed to be a handshake and an exchange of pleasantries in a United Nations hallway. The idea was to “get out without causing any incidents and build from there,” a Kerry aide recounted. But, at the last minute, Kerry decided to pull Zarif into an empty office, near the Security Council chamber, for a substantive conversation.

“Kerry’s whole approach to diplomacy . . . is premised on the belief that personal relationships matter, because they enable you to get things done, even in very difficult situations,” the aide said. “It was Kerry’s belief that this was going to be a relationship that would really matter.” Zarif was willing. The two men talked, alone, for almost thirty minutes.

The rest of the story is now copy for the history books. “The Iran deal, announced on July 14th, capped a dozen years of secret overtures, false starts, clandestine meetings, and unpublished correspondence between Washington and Tehran.

THE POLITICS OF THE PEOPLE

A huge transition is underway in Iran between the old revolutionary leadership and the new generation. The article’s parallel and probably more significant theme is about the people of Iran, the next generation of young people who represent more than sixty percent of Iran’s eighty-million people, “A baby-boom generation, born after the revolution, (that) doesn’t share all of its priority.” Iran’s youth are not so enamored by the hard-liners’ religious fanaticism over an ideal Islamic state.  They are more interested in pursuing and engaging the rising tide of modern technologies flooding Iran via the internet. Wright offers a canny insight into the climate being generated by Iran’s public that “clearly wants reentry” into the larger world of commerce and culture they have been insulated against for decades by their revolutionary elders, the majority of which are “over the hill” in age and soon to be on their way out literally.  The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, himself turns seventy-six this month.

“The original generation of revolutionaries will disappear in the next ten years,” Saeed Laylaz, an economist and a former adviser to President Khatami, said. Laylaz, who was imprisoned for a year after the 2009 election, added, “The new assembly [the Assembly of Experts, a group of eighty-six theologians] will reflect the new generation.”

All of Khomeini’s grandchildren—there are fifteen—back reformers. . . .  Half a dozen of the grandchildren were educated in the West. Some of the grandchildren have considered running for parliament of the assembly. . . .  A loose coalition of reformers, moderates, and centrists hopes to flood the field with candidates, so that even if they are disqualified in large numbers many of them can still compete.

As Robin Wright describes the rising tide of liberal youthful energy,

“It’ a tsunami,” Said Rahmani, the C.E.O. of Sarava, Iran’s first venture capital fund, told me. “This generation is worldly. They’re educated. They work. They have spending power. They’re not dependent on anyone. They have a different range of thinking.”

These days, the energy—and the locus or charting Iran’s future—is less in heady debates about the ideal Islamic state than in a practical scramble to exploit twenty-first-century technology to change society. More than a third of the population uses the Internet. Giant billboards for a new smart-phone model were plastered across Tehran this summer: “NEXT IS NOW.”

Iran has its Amazon.com in Digikala, which accounts for more than eighty percent of online retail, valued recently at a hundred-and-fifty million dollars, started up by a set of thirty-six year old twins. Online commerce is increasingly defining market prices in Iran.

WESTERN INFLUENCE

“America, particularly, haunts Iran,” Robin writes. “. . . After decades of living is a pariah nation, Iranians seem to crave normalcy—but on their own terms. Figuring out their relationship with the outside world is a big part of the transition. They have tried repeatedly and failed.”

The chant “DEATH TO AMERICA!” we hear so much talk about in the arguments against the Iranian Nuclear Deal in the halls of Congress and in Western media propaganda is limited only to Friday night Islamic prayer meetings. It is not the cry of the people.

“’Death to America’? This is politics and not related to people’s thinking,” Elnaz Mobahat, the owner of Manhattan Grill, one of Tehran’s chic new restaurants, told me. The place is adorned with American kitsch. One wall features photographs of sports stars, including Tiger Woods. “There are fourteen million people in greater Tehran, and maybe one hundred thousand attend Friday prayers,” she said. “Most people say we should talk to the Americans and solve our differences. We can both benefit. There are many investments opportunities in the oil and food industries.” She pointed to the ketchup bottles on every table. “Look, we use Heinz!”

A RELATIONSHIP FORGED IN FIRE

John Kerry and Mohammed Karif brought to the negotiating table the raging undercurrents of their nations’ turbulent warring histories and deeply scarred collective psyches conditioned by a track record of dishonesty, deception and consequent mistrust and paranoia. They were thrust by the gods of fate into a crucible together to process the relationship between their respective nations and between Iran and Israel and all the other nations in the world. And that crucible served its purpose by giving space for the many factors that make up human relations to be brought forth and released under pressure into the cauldron of heated debate and negotiation. The Iranian Nuclear Deal was not made in peaceful interchanges. It was forged in fire.  Robin Wright tells how it went down in all of its emotional and frustrating details.

It got much harder over time. The world’s five other major powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—were technically equal players. But the United States increasingly took the lead in one-on-one meetings with the Iranians. More than a year after that first encounter, the chasm on core issues was still deep, despite an interim Joint Plan of Action, a confidence-building step that curtailed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for modest sanctions relief. It did not address long-term limits or rewards.

As the original deadline for a final deal loomed, last November, Kerry and Zarif met in Oman. The senior State Department official described the meeting as “extremely contentious.”

Kerry’s aide said, “Both sides left thinking that we had just spent a lot of hours and a lot of time under very tense conditions and in very tense conversations that made little progress.” A deal looked doubtful. A few days later, the six powers agreed to extend the deadline until June 30th.

In February and again in March, Kerry was on the verge of backing away from the conversations entirely, US officials told me. On February 21st, as Kerry was scheduled to fly from London to Geneva, Wendy Sherman, the Under-Secretary of State and chief nuclear negotiator, called him to say, “We are nowhere.” Iran was backtracking. “I really don’t think you can come under these circumstances,” she said. Kerry instructed her to tell the Iranians that he would skip Geneva and fly home. The next morning, Iran was more forthcoming, and Kerry subsequently flew to Switzerland.

On March 27th, in Lausanne, tempers flared three nights before the deadline of a so-called Framework to define what each side would accept in a final deal. At the last minute, negotiating with the Americans, Iran took an important matter off the table. The five other major powers were supposed to show up within a day, but there was so much left unresolved that Kerry decided he might have to abort. He arranged to go to Zarif’s suite. At 10 P.M., they met alone. Kerry’s style is to coax rather than threaten. But this time, two US. officials told me, Kerry was blunt. He told Zarif that unless there was progress the sessions were “basically done.”The next day, the issue was back on the table. Six days later, the major powers and Iran
announced the outlines of a potential agreement.

“There were moments when you just had to push through,” Kerry’s aide said. The most confrontational exchange took place on May 30th. The talks were “brutal, just brutal,” the State Department official recalled. According to Kerry’s aide, “It was a lot of the two sides banging their heads against each other.” At one point, Zarif got up, walked around the room, and announced, “I have to leave.” He then sat on a chair against a wall and put his head in his hands.

Kerry, known for being unflappable, lost it, too. Toward the end of six difficult hours, he slammed his hand down on the conference table so hard that his pen flew across the table and hit one of the Iranians. “It stunned everyone, because it was so out of character,” the State Department official said.

Both sides left Geneva feeling deeply pessimistic. The next day, Kerry vented his frustration by taking a vigorous ride from Geneva into France on his racing bike, which he often brings on trips.  As he was starting up the challenging Col de la Colombiere, he rode into a curb and flew off the bike. His right femur was badly broken, and he had to be medevaced to Boston for surgery. After the news broke, one of the first e-mails he received was from Zarif, wishing him well.

Love and mutual respect held these two men together through thick and thin. Few if any in our halls of Congress know what took place at these negotiations. Nor do they seem to care. Who among them takes into account that in ten years when this deal expires the old hard-line leaders in Iran will have been replaced by the younger generation of reformers who want more than anything to be in a peaceful and fruitful working relationship with the other nations of the world, particularly with America? And I don’t think they want to annihilate Israel, nor develop nuclear bombs. We simply need to trust that the process that brought these two men together will help us forge a new relationship with Iran. An irresistible force was set in motion based on mutual love and respect. And love never fails.  It’s at the heart of all meaningful relationships.

I will share more from this important article in a couple of weeks. I hope you have enjoyed reading about this historical and significant development in the Middle East as much as I did. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved

Anthony Palombo, DC

Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com.

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2015, Iranian Nuclear Deal, On Human Relations, The Iranian People

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