Creating the New Earth Together

Posts tagged ‘Easter’

The Transcendence of Resurrection

THE WAY I SEE IT, Jesus was never not in complete and utter control of his physical body throughout the ordeal of His trial and conviction, the mockery of being crowned with thorns, spit upon and flogged, the carrying of his cross through the streets of Jerusalem “and up to the hill of Golgotha—called the “place of the skull” (KJV, John 19:17-18)—even through the crucifixion and apparent death of His physical body. The silver cord of connection with his body was never loosed or severed. In the end He simply transcended his physical body and rose in consciousness to what spiritual author Joseph Chilton Pearce describes as the “causal body”— with which He may even have had an NDE (Near Death Experience). At least this is the way I see it.

This was not unique to Jesus, as we each have a causal body, only it’s not so much a “body” as an essence of spirit. That spirit, or causal body, is who and what we are, and is not a separate entity from God the Creator, any more than the Son of God was separate from His Heavenly Father. As He truly proclaims in John 10:30, “I and my Father are one.” So is it with each and every incarnate Being. To come to a conscious awareness and actual experience of that oneness with our Creator is the challenge of our earthly journey.

At the age of eighty-four I’ve become peculiarly and intensely interested in transcendence and transfiguration. I wasn’t aware of this interest until I inadvertently withdrew a book from off the shelf of our library and opened it to the author’s final chapters where he addresses what is now the very topic of this blog post: Jesus’s transcendent experience, otherwise called and celebrated as his “Resurrection” from the tomb — where, from all outward signs, his “dead” body was placed, wrapped in a shroud of white cloth, anointed with precious healing oils and laid to rest. What occurred after Joseph of Arimathea and a few women had laid his limp body to rest in the tomb, rolling a stone over its entrance, is a process I am compelled from within my heart to meditate upon and explore in a series of posts.

The Holy Shroud of Turin, with its scorched image of Jesus’s entire body imprinted on it, provides ample cause to contemplate what awful transmuting fire must have moved through His body to resurrect the living currents of vital energy that could lift it up to a higher vibrational level of manifestation. His resurrection was at the same time clearly a supernatural and a biological event of transcendence and transmutation.

RISE AND SHINE!

Yes, indeed, shine your light! But you first must rise! To “rise” is another matter altogether. It’s a required step toward shining. In a transcendent state, to which we all aspire, one’s light is found to have always been shining — only not outwardly — until one rises up in consciousness and identity to the level of one’s “causal” body where one’s radiance is the light of one’s world.

I can easily relate to Joseph Chilton Pearce’s perspective of “bodies within bodies”: physical, subtle and causal. From my own spiritual path the word “pneumaplasm,” coined by Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda), serves my understanding best as descriptive of the “subtle” body. The “causal” body lives and moves independent of the physical and subtle bodies, whereas the subtle body, or pneumaplamic body, is generated out of the physical body as the causal body of spirit expresses its divine qualities with feeling, thought and action of a benevolent quality. Spiritual expression brings about the release of the transforming power of love — the only way open to human beings today as the physical and mental approaches failed miserably.

Again, my spiritual path defines the “causal body” simply as “spirit.” Spirit is divine in nature. Physical and subtle bodies are by nature human. The two are brought together when spirit incarnates and transmits its godly characteristics and benevolent qualities to the human person for expression. Patterns of design and control for the unfolding of one’s earthly journey are also established in the subtle body (pneumaplasm) for the execution of dominion over one’s world. Not domination but dominion.

The word “dominion” derives from the Latin for “lord”: dominus. Dominion is exercised by the lord incarnate whose “body” (of sorts) is causal by divine design, exercising dominion over the physical body, and by way of the body over ones world, in a benevolent, loving, non-imposing manner. Domination, to the contrary, is exercised by the human ego that has taken possession of one’s mental faculty in order to force its contriving and self-serving will upon one’s physical body and one’s world. It’s an apt model of David Hawkins’ Power VS Force –The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior.” They’re not so hidden to one who has risen in consciousness and in identity to the level of spirit in one’s causal body — causal in the sense of creator and designer of the physical body.

“I HAVE OVERCOME THE WORLD.”

Prince of Peace

The Master Jesus spoke those words just before his passion and crucifixion on Calvary. His exact words as recorded in John 16:33 are, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”  He transcended His physical body and maintained His identity with His causal body, which in his case was and is our Lord and King, the “Only Begotten Son of God.” Having complete control over His physical body via His subtle body, He did not let it die. The Only begotten Son of the Father was not sacrificed for the sins of the world, a rationalization Paul later contrived, nor for any other purpose rationalized subsequently in Christian dogma. He overcame death by not dying. He then proceeded to raise up his comatose physical body, transmute it to a higher vibration so as to fuse it with His causal body, His very Being, and return to His Father in Heaven — after spending forty days with His disciples eating and drinking with them and bestowing upon them His benediction of love and comfort. These things of spirit are beyond space and time. They are truly and literally timeless.

There is much to share along these lines revisiting Joseph Chilton Pearce’s THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE ~ A Blueprint of the Human Spirit — author of THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG. The book is filled with quotable passages that have the ability to bring about a radical shift in perspective. His chosen character on which to shine light is Jesus himself and his passion and compassion, as the following excerpt demonstrates.

THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE by Joseph Chilton Pearce

I like the way he speaks his truth. I’ll share more along these lines in my next post of this series. Until then, have a Happy Easter Day.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

“That their joy may be full.” (John 17)

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May your Easter be the happiest one ever. Until my next post,

Be lifted up! Be full of joy!

Anthony

Email: tpal70@gmail.com

The Transcendence of Resurrection

THE WAY I SEE IT, Jesus was never not in complete and utter control of his physical body throughout the ordeal of His trial and conviction, the mockery of being crowned with thorns, spit upon and flogged, the carrying of his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and up to the hill of Golgotha, even through the crucifixion and apparent death of His physical body. The silver cord of connection with his body was never loosed or severed. In the end He simply transcended his physical body and rose in consciousness to what spiritual author Joseph Chilton Pearce describes as the “causal body”— with which He may even have had an NDE (Near Death Experience). At least this is the way I see it.

This was not unique to Jesus, as we each have a causal body, only it’s not so much a “body” as an essence of spirit. That spirit is who we are, and it is not a separate entity from God the Creator, any more than the Son of God was separate from His Heavenly Father. As He truly proclaimed in John10:30: “I and my Father are one.” So is it with each and every incarnate Being. To come to a conscious awareness and actual experience of that oneness with our Creator is the challenge of our earthly journey.

At the age of eighty-four I’ve become peculiarly and intensely interested in transcendence. I wasn’t aware of this interest until I inadvertently withdrew a book from off the shelf of our library and opened it to the author’s final chapters where he addresses what is now the very topic of this blog post: Jesus’s transcendent experience, otherwise called and celebrated as his “Resurrection” from the tomb — where, from all outward signs, his “dead” body was placed, wrapped in a shroud of white cloth, anointed with precious healing oils and laid to rest. What occurred after Joseph of Arimathea and a few women had laid his limp body to rest in the tomb, rolling a stone over its entrance, is a process I am compelled from within my heart to meditate upon and explore in a series of posts.

The Holy Shroud of Turin, with its scorched image of Jesus’s entire body imprinted on it, provides ample cause to contemplate what awful transmuting fire must have moved through His body to resurrect the living currents of vital energy that could lift it up to a higher vibrational level of manifestation. His resurrection was at the same time clearly a supernatural and a biological event of transcendence and transmutation.

RISE AND SHINE!

Yes, indeed, shine your light! But you first must rise! To “rise” is another matter altogether. It’s a required step toward shining. In a transcendent state, to which we all aspire, one’s light is found to have always been shining — only not outwardly — until one rises up in consciousness and identity to the level of one’s “causal” body where one’s radiance is the light of one’s world.

I can easily relate to Joseph Chilton Pearce’s perspective of “bodies within bodies”: physical, subtle and causal. From my own spiritual path the word “pneumaplasm,” coined by Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda), serves my understanding best as descriptive of the “subtle” body. The “causal” body lives and moves independent of the physical and subtle bodies, whereas the subtle body, or pneumaplamic body, is generated out of the physical body as the causal body of spirit expresses its divine qualities with feeling, thought and action of a benevolent quality. Spiritual expression brings about the release of the transforming power of love — the only way open to human beings today as the physical and mental approaches failed miserably.

Again, my spiritual path defines the “causal body” simply as “spirit.” Spirit is divine in nature. Physical and subtle bodies are by nature human. The two are brought together when spirit incarnates and transmits its godly characteristics and benevolent qualities to the human person for expression. Patterns of design and control for the unfolding of one’s earthly journey are also established in the subtle body (pneumaplasm) for the execution of dominion over one’s world. Not domination but dominion.

The word “dominion” derives from the Latin for “lord”: dominus. Dominion is exercised by the lord incarnate whose “body” (of sorts) is causal by divine design, exercising dominion over the physical body, and by way of the body over ones world, in a benevolent, loving, non-imposing manner. Domination, to the contrary, is exercised by the human ego that has taken possession of one’s mental faculty in order to force its contriving and self-serving will upon one’s physical body and one’s world. It’s an apt model of David Hawkins’ Power VS Force –The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior.” They’re not so hidden to one who has risen in consciousness and in identity to the level of spirit in one’s causal body — causal in the sense of creator and designer of the physical body.

“I HAVE OVERCOME THE WORLD.”

Prince of Peace

The Master Jesus spoke those words just before his passion and crucifixion on Calvary. His exact words as recorded in John 16:33 are, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”  He transcended His physical body and maintained His identity with His causal body, which in his case was and is our Lord and King, the “Only Begotten Son of God.” Having complete control over His physical body via His subtle body, He did not let it die. The Only begotten Son of the Father was not sacrificed for the sins of the world, a rationalization Paul later contrived, nor for any other purpose rationalized subsequently in Christian dogma. He overcame death by not dying. He then proceeded to raise up his comatose physical body, transmute it to a higher vibration so as to fuse it with His causal body, His very Being, and return to His Father in Heaven — after spending forty days with His disciples eating and drinking with them and bestowing upon them His benediction of love and comfort. These things of spirit are beyond space and time. They are truly and literally timeless.

There is much to share along these lines revisiting Joseph Chilton Pearce’s THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE ~ A Blueprint of the Human Spirit — author of THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG. The book is filled with quotable passages that have the ability to bring about a radical shift in perspective. His chosen character on which to shine light is Jesus himself and his passion and compassion, as the following excerpt demonstrates.

THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE by Joseph Chilton Pearce

I like the way he speaks his truth. I’ll share more along these lines in my next post of this series. Until then, have a Happy Easter Day.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

“That their joy may be full.” –Jesus

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What Really Happened in Gethsemane? (Reposted)

No Power On Earth Could have Touched Him

The Final Victory

Credits: Great Cosmic Story blog, David Barnes, Author

Until my next post . . .

Be love. Be loved.

~Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Rise and Shine

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.Song of Solomon

On this Easter morning I invite you to share Uranda’s Easter message:

I Have Finished the Work

I Come To Thee

Uranda, April 8, 1950

It is a joy unspeakable and full of glory to see you, according to your responses and according to the degrees of your letting go, coming under the Law of the Kingdom, that I may receive you Home in the Kingdom in the Name of my LORD. That self which has been crucified in you and which has been placed in the tomb shall surely, according to the faithfulness of your Polarity, come forth in the Resurrection and the Life, not the old self that it was, for the former things are passing away, and in the Name of my LORD and KING all things are being made new.

You are not now what you were, nor are you yet that which you shall be, for entering into the Kingdom you shall move from Glory unto Glory in the outworking of the cycles of Being which are ordained by the Creator; and you begin to know that the Creator is not far away but is at hand in the Kingdom that is at hand, and you are privileged to share in the wonder of His Creative Work whereby all things are made new. . . .

You can read the rest of Uranda’s Easter message in full by clicking on the link below.

 May your Easter morning and day be filled with joy and uplifting gratitude for the New Day. Until my next post,

Be love . . . be loved

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Credits: Great Cosmic Story, David Barnes editor: HTTPS://GREATCOSMICSTORY.BLOGSPOT.COM/2023/04/I-HAVE-FINISHED-WORK.HTML 

Uranda’s Easter morning service: EASTER DAY IN THE KINGDOM OF THE PRINCE OF PEACE https://greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/2023/04/easter-day-in-kingdom-of-prince-of-peace.html

What Really Happened in Gethsemane? (Reposted)

No Power On Earth Could have Touched Him

The Final Victory

Credits: Great Cosmic Story blog, David Barnes, Author

Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70gmail.com

At The Crossover

Christ the Redeemer at Rio de Janeiro

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

VICTORY OVER DEATH

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

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

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

THE CRUCIFIX AS A CROSSOVER SYMBOL

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

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

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

THE “PLACE OF THE SKULL”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUR CATACLYSMIC PAST

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Easter

Anthony

The Mystery of Consciousness: Conveyor of Light and Love

Where your heart is, there also is your treasure. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONVEYOR OF SPIRIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Happy Easter Sunday. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved. 

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

 

The “Jesus of Faith” Vs the “Jesus of History” part 5:3 – Resurrection

 

Good morning and Happy Easter!

I feel the burgeoning wave of joy and happiness that is resurrected from the womb of human hearts every year at Easter in the wake of the fasting season of Lent and just on the heels of passion Holy Week and sorrowful Good Friday — at least in the Christian sector of the world’s seven-plus billion population. With spring bursting out all over, this is a most appropriate time of the year to celebrate Easter.

(click on the picture to enlarge it)

A study in 2012 estimated Christianity was the largest faith at 2.2 billion adherents or 31.5 percent of the world’s population. The Roman Catholic Church makes up 50 percent of that total, with Protestants — including Anglicans and non-denominational churches — at 37 percent and Orthodox at 12 percent.”  So, nearly a third of the people on earth celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus. Little wonder the day is so bright, even as bright as the Sun rising in the East. 

Hmm. I must look up the origin of the word “Easter.” And I did. Here is one item that stands out among all of the hoopla over the pagan roots of this annual Christian celebration:

Because the English Anglo/Saxon language originally derived from the Germanic, there are many similarities between German and English. Many English writers have referred to the German language as the “Mother Tongue!” The English word Easter is of German/Saxon origin and not Babylonian as Alexander Hislop falsely claimed. The German equivalent is OsterOster (Ostern being the modern day equivalent) is related to Ostwhich means the rising of the sun, or simply in English, eastOster comes from the old Teutonic form of auferstehen / auferstehung, which means resurrection, which in the older Teutonic form comes from two words, Ester meaning first, and stehen meaning to stand. These two words combine to form erstehen which is an old German form of auferstehen, the modern day German word for resurrection.

It was the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 who “ordained that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first  new moon of Spring.” (David Potter of Oxford University Press.)  So, Easter Sunday’s final resting place is somewhere between March 21 and April 25. The date of Easter Day is usually the first Sunday after the first Full Moon occurring on or after the March equinox.

An issue was also settled at this council concerning the celebration of the Passover by the Jewish Christians, as Jesus’ crucifixion was said to be associated with the Passover. Obviously, Christianity emerged out of Judaism. Thus the consolidation of the two celebrations by Constantine.

Now the Easter egg can be traced back to practices in pre-dynastic Egypt as well as amid the early Christians of Mesopotamia.  From there it spread into Russia and Siberia through the Orthodox Churches. In Christianity, for the celebration of Easter, the Easter egg symbolizes the empty tomb of Jesus. An ancient tradition was the staining of the Easter egg with the color red in memory of the blood of Christ shed during his crucifixion. The egg is also a symbol of fertility.

Significance of the Resurrection

I will now return to my consideration of the Foreword of Stevan Davies’ book The Gospel of Thomas – Annotated & Explained, written by the his Series Editor Andrew Harvey. I will continue from where I left off in my post of April 7th on the theme of “Kingdom-consciousness.”

If all the Gospel of Thomas did was relentlessly and sublimely cham­pion the path to our transfiguration and point out its necessity, it would be one of the most important of all religious writings — but it does even more. In saying 22, the Gospel of Thomas gives us a brilliantly concise and pre­cise “map” of the various stages of transformation that have to be unfolded in the seeker for the “secret” to be real in her being and active though all her powers. Like saying 13, saying 22 has no precedent in the synoptic gospels and is, I believe, the single most important document of the spiritual life that Jesus has left us.

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants taking milk are like those who enter the Kingdom. His disciples asked him: If we are infants will we enter the Kingdom? Jesus responded: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper, and thus make the male and the female the same, so that the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female. When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.

When Jesus says in saying 19 “If you become my disciples and listen to me, these stones will serve you,” in saying 24 “There is light within a man of light, and he lights up all of the world,” and in saying 106 “When you make the two into one, you will be called sons of men. When you say ‘Move, mountain!’ it will move,” he was not speaking in incandescent poetry; he was describing the actual powers that God gives those who risk becoming divinized, powers that can alter natural law and “burn down the house” of the oppressive power structures of the world.

Fourth and finally, we see in saying 22 the final cryptic sentences of the saying: “When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.” What these lines describe is nothing less than the physical transformation that mystical union makes possible, the bringing up of ordinary matter into the living truth of the Light.

The ultimate sign of the Christ is the victory of the Resurrection, which is the marriage of matter and spirit to create a wholly new and eternal substance. Those mystics who follow Christ into union come to know and taste the glory of the Resurrected Body in their own bodies. The pow­ers available to the human being willing to undertake the full rigor of the Jesus-transformation are limitless. What could not be done to trans­form this world by a group of seekers who allowed their whole beings­–psychological, spiritual, and physical–to become increasingly transfigured by the living light?

The greatest of all modern philosophers–Sri Aurobindo — saw that only an “integral” transformation could provide the force and inspiration to change that must occur if humanity is to survive and evolve. Jesus in saying 22 has anticipated Sri Aurobindo’s vision and provided the map to its realization.

There may be very little time left to take the adventure into total being that the Gospel of Thomas advocates with such astringent brilliance and pre­cision. In such a terrible age as ours, it is easy to believe that the dark powers, the powers of that corpse of the world that the Jesus of Thomas so fiercely denounces, have won already, and there is nothing even the most passionate of us can do to turn around a humanity addicted to violence and destruction.

Despair, however, is the last illusion. The Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus who gave it to us continue to challenge us to dare to become one with the Divine and start living the revolutionary life that streams from union and that can transform all things. This worst of times needs the clearest and most unflinchingly exigent of visions to counteract and trans­form it; in Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Thomas and in his living out of their reality through and beyond death itself into the eternal empowering glory of the Resurrection, we have the permanent sign of the Way, the Truth, and the all-transforming Life that, even now, can build here on earth the reality of God’s Kingdom.

As this series  The “Jesus of Faith” Vs the “Jesus of History” winds down, I will return to my desk to write, edit and publish my final post of the series. Until then, I wish you each one a Happy Easter and offer my thanks to you for sharing these considerations with me over the past several weeks.  Until my next post, then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

Photo credit: Craig Burrows “The Invisible Light that Flowers Emit”   Click on the link to see more of Craig’s flowers.

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