Creating the New Earth Together

Posts tagged ‘Easter’

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

Category:

Easter, Healing Tones Blog, Kingdom of Heaven, Resurrection, Uranda

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What Really Happened in Gethsemane Garden?

No Power On Earth Could have Touched Him

The Final Victory

“He who had moved among men before

and disappeared at will prior to that time—

do you not think that, if His disciples had been holding steady,

He could have disappeared in any moment He had chosen?”

—Uranda, January 27, 1952

URANDA: On this beautiful day, which gives promise of a springtime not too far away, let us meditate for a moment upon some of the principles that our Master revealed in relationship to this phase of our own progress along the way. The Master said, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do,” and that work which the Father gave was finished before that experience that was made necessary to our LORD by human imposition in the trial and the crucifixion. The work the Father gave Him to do was completed before that trial and before the crucifixion, for we have the Word from His own lips: “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” Why, then, was it necessary for Him to experience the mockery, the indignities of that trial, and the sufferings of the crucifixion? It was because man imposed those things upon our LORD. They were imposed by man’s rejection of the divine pattern. 

The ill things that nullify the expression of the beautiful pattern of God’s design on earth are never God’s will. They are imposed by man’s rejection of that which God offers. The shame and the suffering, the indignities, are never the result of the divine pattern or of God’s will. They are the result of man’s denial and betrayal of his responsibilities, and they are imposed by that which man himself does. Very often those who consider themselves Christians, or who long to move along the spiritual path, are inclined to think: “If I had lived, if I had only had the privilege of living at that time when our Master Himself walked on earth, I would not have been among those who were scattered so quickly from that vast throng who were shouting, ‘Hosanna to the king.’ I would not have been like Peter, denying, or like Judas, betraying, nor like the others who followed afar off, for I would have appreciated my privilege and opportunity. And, cost what it might, I would have been among those who stood at the foot of the cross.” So many have felt that way—perhaps they would not express it in so many words. 

Yet today, in this hour and in all the hours to come, we have the same privilege of remaining true, the same privilege of standing at the foot of the cross, the same privilege of proving the reality of our love and our trust. The passage of the centuries has not denied us any privilege that we might have had then, with the one exception of seeing the physical form through which our LORD was manifest. And He said of those who lived then, that for their sakes it was expedient that He should go away; and if it was expedient for them, there is nothing taken from us, because we do not have the privilege, as our minds might think of it, of seeing Him in physical form. It is expedient for us that He so arranged the divine pattern. 

So, let us examine something of what happened and see if we can gain a deeper conviction of that which is necessary to ourselves, that we may come to a recognition that it is not what we feel out of the subconscious heart or mind, it is not what we feel externally, that is properly the directing force in our lives. It is what we see and recognize and realize with the conscious mind to be the truth of the matter, for the mind which is allowing the spirit of God to work in it is stronger than any feeling that can come surging up from the subconscious. It is stronger than any idea that may be buried somewhere in the subterranean phases of the mind. It is stronger than any current of feeling that may be imposed from the outside. 

What you feel is beside the point. As long as the conscious mind continues to yield to the impulses that come from a distorted subconscious mind or heart, as long as it yields to the currents of feeling or action from without, it is saying, “I am not a guardian angel. I am not fortified by the spirit of God. I am a weak thing and I must of needs acknowledge the extent of my weakness and say that God cannot serve me because I am subject to all of these ill things.” He who says that betrays our LORD, as surely as Judas betrayed Him. He denies, as surely as Peter did, and he is not even following afar off. He is scattered into the darkness, hiding in the alleyways, lest someone see and say, “Are you not one of those who followed Him?” 

Let us see what happened at the time of our Master. He had finished the work that God gave Him to do, but certain things were imposed upon Him. In either case, He was going away, as far as His physical form was concerned. But do you think He could cause His body to be changed more easily after all this humiliating experience than otherwise? He could have ascended without the suffering, the crucifixion and those days in the tomb. Man imposed that upon Him and made it necessary. Sometimes people ask a question and say, “But did not the prophets say He would have to die? Does not the Bible say there could be no salvation except as His blood was shed, etc.?” I grant you that after this experience was all over, certain ones developed some ideas with respect to it. And in the pattern of prophecy in the Old Testament you will find those things which recognized not only the possibility but the probability of the manner in which man would function. But because it worked out the way it did, the human interpretation has been on the basis of one idea only; and there has been a complete failure to recognize the fact that an alternate path, the ideal path, was foretold just as surely, as definitely, if man would have allowed it to have meaning. 

That which was of God’s design was revealed by the prophets much more abundantly than those comparatively obscure texts that recognized the probability of what man would do. Because man did fail, the texts that relate to that possibility are picked out and held up as what was prophesied. And it is not so at all, because God’s provision of the pathway did not require that Jesus should die. It was human beings that condemned our LORD to the indignities of the trial, so-called, and to the sufferings of the cross. God did not require it. From God’s standpoint, it was not necessary, and I can take the book cover to cover and show you how the pattern was revealed there. Let us examine it. 

The idea of the shedding of the blood, from the standpoint of the spear in the side and the nails in His hands and feet, is supposed to have had some particularly efficacious result—that God, being a hardhearted something-or-other, would not accept the salvation of a single man, woman, or child unless His own Son should physically bleed. Anyone who stops to consider that which is revealed of God in the Bible will recognize that that is so completely out of character that there is no reasonable excuse for any person believing it. It is completely out of character. The blood is the symbol of life. He had shed His blood, in the true sense, before He ever reached the agonies of Gethsemane or the sufferings of the cross. He had shed His life upon the earth. He had shed the currents of His life in the revelation of Deity. He had revealed the principles of life. He had given His life to the revelation of the things of God, and He Himself said before any of these things took place, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” There was a recognition that certain things were yet to be faced because of what man had imposed upon Him, but it was not the divine plan or purpose or necessary from the standpoint of God, as if He were a bloodthirsty being who demanded that blood be shed. No. That is not the character of God. It was not the plan or purpose of God. And the only reason why our Master accepted that outworking was because man imposed it upon Him. 

Who imposed it upon Him particularly? Who among men? Herod or Pilate or the power of the Caesars? Oh, no. Who imposed it upon Him? His disciples were the ones who imposed that upon Him. It is true. They simply accepted the focalization of the world in the hour of stress, rather than remaining true to their focalization in Him. But consider if the hour of crisis had come and all twelve of the disciples had remained steady. There are those who say Judas, poor creature, was predestined to do it; someone had to do it in order for God’s plan to be fulfilled. Someone on earth had to be a traitor and betray our LORD! Oh, no. God is out of character the moment anyone begins to conceive such an idea. God never predestined anyone to be a traitor or to betray the things of God, let alone the Son of God! Judas did not have to betray Him. It was not necessary; it was not a part of the divine plan. It was a part of human failure. 

Consider. If it had worked out according to that which God had made available to them, if according to God’s true plan there had been a following through—of course the Master knew, particularly toward the last, that they were not going to hold when the crisis came; but, even so—suppose Judas had not betrayed Him, suppose Peter had not been of that type who would deny Him, suppose twelve men had stood faithful and true to their LORD on earth—twelve men, not one wavering, not one breaking in the face of the crisis—then His Body on earth, the body of these twelve men who were supposed to be the key men of the Christ Body which should fill the earth, holding steady, would have allowed Him to carry out God’s plan. Not from the standpoint of continued work on earth in the sense of His doing it, but His doing it through the members of His Body—the very principles He had outlined to them such a few hours before, the principles and Laws that He had expounded to them over and over again through the three and a half years of His ministry with them. But if that Body, the focalization of the Body in twelve men, would have held the pattern, hundreds and thousands who had received blessings at His hand, who had cried “Hosanna to our king,” would have stood if the twelve disciples had stood. And there would have been a Body on earth. 

He who had moved among men before and disappeared at will prior to that time—do you not think that, if His disciples had been holding steady, He could have disappeared in any moment He had chosen? Could humanity have heaped the indignities of the cross or mockery of the trial upon Him? No. Why did He accept that imposition? The Body that He had been building through the years of ministry died, scattered first—the scattering of the disciples. When they broke, when they slept in Gethsemane instead of watching with Him one little hour, when they slept, when He came to face the final pattern, of course the LORD would not have suffered as He did—even in Gethsemane—had this pattern been holding properly. Because already Judas had gone out to betray, His body had started to decay and die, the body of His disciples. That body of the disciples was scattered, brought to the point of death before His physical body as a man was brought to the point of the crucifixion.

If that body of twelve disciples had remained steady and true, no power on earth could have touched Him, because then the victory would have been assured without His going through what He did. The same truths would have been revealed in the outworking of the cycles of time, but there would have been a Body established—twelve key points, with others rallying around vibrationally. And if they had sought to touch Him, whether He would have used spiritual power to prevent it or whether He would have disappeared is beside the point. That would have been for Him to choose and it is not for me to speculate upon, but they could not have touched Him. That we know. If the body He had built, or undertaken to build—the Body of many members—had held true, His physical body would not have had to be on the cross. But on the cross of spiritual creative activity, the crossing between heaven and earth, there would have been a revelation of divine power that would have carried through effectively and saved man centuries of suffering, sorrow, misery and death. The Body would have been complete and this world would have been restored already. 

It is not until after this plan had failed to carry through that we have the prophetic portrayal, for instance in Revelation, of that which should yet be done. Because in Isaiah, and many other places, there is mention made: “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” That is part of the prophecy of what was divinely ordained for the time when Jesus Christ should come on earth, that which could have been, but man prevented it. Man spoiled the pattern of God, so there was a divine reorganization and a re-projection of the same goal under a new pattern. Not all was lost, it is true. Our Master had finished the work. He had revealed Deity, established the truth on earth, set the pattern. And somewhere there would be those who would follow through, those who would not be so quick to betray for thirty pieces of silver or their own human desires. 

I wonder how many of you know why Judas betrayed, what the working of his mind was. . . .

Click on this link for the rest of the story.

Credits: Great Cosmic Story blog, David Barnes, Author

I welcome your thoughts and responses to this service by Uranda above. Until my next post,

Happy Easter

Anthony

tpal70gmail.com

Category:

Crucifixion of Jesus, Eastet, Gethsemane, Good Friday, Holy Week, Jesus's Agony, Judas, Resurrection, Uranda

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At The Crossover

Christ the Redeemer at Rio de Janeiro

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

VICTORY OVER DEATH

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

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

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

THE CRUCIFIX AS A CROSSOVER SYMBOL

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

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

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

THE “PLACE OF THE SKULL”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUR CATACLYSMIC PAST

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Easter

Anthony

Category:

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

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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

 

Category:

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

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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 Oster. Oster (Ostern being the modern day equivalent) is related to Ostwhich means the rising of the sun, or simply in English, east. Oster 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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The “Jesus of Faith” Vs the “Jesus of History” – part 5:2 The Crucifixion Plot

I remember when I was fourteen and studying for the Catholic priesthood kneeling in front of a large carved image of Jesus hanging on a cross above the altar in the chapel and struggling to get in touch with feelings of guilt and sorrow for my sins, sins for which this man is said to have died an ignominious death. I was actually able to bring myself to sorrowful tears of repentance. Such memories serve me today as motivation to write about the deception that has been created and maintained for two-thousand years by the Catholic Church and by Christianity in general.  I truly believe that, if Jesus were to come back today, he would have all the crucifixes taken down and destroyed. It is his life of love and compassion, his “good news” about the Kingdom of Heaven being right at hand, that I believe he wished to be remembered by and not his crucifixion.

That said, I would like to share religious historian Michael Baigent’s perspectives on the crucifixion of Jesus from his controversial book The Jesus Papers – Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. The chapter heading from which the excerpts are taken, “SURVIVING THE CRUCIFIXION,” speaks for itself.

Jesus’ crucifixion was politically motivated, and Jesus was well aware of the political reality of the time. The main contention between the Jews and the Romans was their refusal to pay taxes. This played a pivotal role in both Jesus’ betrayal by the Zealots, as well as in a survival plot orchestrated by Pontius Pilate himself. I’ll let Michael Baigent detail his scenario.

If the Sadducee priesthood wanted to be rid of Jesus because they saw him as a messiah and a threat to their power, and if the Zealots too, for different reasons, wanted to be rid of Jesus, then word of this would have reached Pilate. And this intelligence would have put him in a very difficult position. Pilate was Rome’s official representative in Judaea, and Rome’s main argument with the Jews was that they declined to pay their tax to Caesar. Yet here was a leading Jew — the legitimate king no less — telling his people to pay the tax. How could Pilate try, let alone condemn, such a man who, on the face of it, was supporting Roman policy? Pilate would himself be charged with dereliction of duty should he proceed with the condemnation of such a supporter.

The New Testament represents “the Jews” as baying for Jesus’s blood. And this apparent guilt of the Jews stuck for millennia — it was only acknowledged as fraudulent by the Vatican and excised from the teachings as late as 1960. But as should now be clear, it was not “the Jews” in general who were calling for Jesus’s arrest and execution, but the militant Zealots, those who hated the Romans and would sacri­fice even one of their own for their political aims. In the scenario presented here, Pilate would have found himself in a serious dilemma: to keep the peace he had to try, condemn, and execute a Jew who was supporting Rome but whose existence was causing public disorder, the flames of which were being fanned by the disgruntled Zealots. Pilate needed to try to square the circle on this; he desperately needed a deal.

And the deal, I suggest, was this: that he try Jesus and condemn him as a political agitator, thus appeasing the Zealots, who threatened widespread disorder. This was the last thing Pilate needed on his watch, especially since he was aware that he was falling out of favor with the Roman authorities. But while he condemned Jesus and had to go through with the required sentence of crucifixion, he could not dare have it reported to Rome that Jesus had actually died. So Pilate took steps to ensure that Jesus would survive. He spoke with a member of the Sanhedrin and friend of Jesus, the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea.

Technically, how could a crucifixion have been faked? Just how could Jesus have survived? Was it possible at all to survive a crucifix­ion of any length of time?

Crucifixion was not so much an execution as a torturing to death. The procedure was very simple: the victim was tied, hanging to the crossbar, while his feet were supported on a block at the base of the cross. His feet were also usually tied at the block, although at least one example recovered by archaeologists reveals that a nail might be driven through each ankle. The weight of the hanging body made breathing very difficult and could be managed only by constantly pushing upwards with the legs and feet to relieve the tension in the chest. Eventually, of course, weariness and weakness overcame the ability to keep pushing. When this happened, the body slumped, breathing became impossible, and the crucified person died — by as­phyxiation. This was reckoned to take about three days.

As an act of mercy — only the brutal Romans could come up with such a definition — the legs of the victim were often broken and so deprived of any strength whatsoever to maintain the weight of the body.  The body would drop, and death by asphyxiation rapidly followed. We can see this in the New Testament. John reports that the legs of the two Zealots crucified beside Jesus were broken, but when they came to break Jesus’s legs, “he was dead already” (John 19:31-33).

On a side note, a statement in the Koran, “They did not crucify him,” could be translated as “They did not cause his death on the cross.” More relevant is the teachings of a heretical Egyptian Gnostic that Jesus had been substituted by Simon of Cyrene on his way to Golgatha and died in Jesus’ stead.

But if Jesus survived without being substituted, how could it have happened? Hugh Schonfield, in his The Passover Plot, suggests that Jesus was drugged — sedated on the cross such that he appeared dead but could be revived later, after he had been taken down. This is by no means such a wild idea, and it has received a sympathetic hearing. For example, in a television program on the crucifixion broadcast by the BBC in 2004 called Did Jesus Die? Elaine Pagels referred to Schonfield’s book, which, she noted, suggested that Jesus “had been sedated on the cross; that he was removed quite early and therefore could well have survived.” And, she concluded, “that’s certainly a possibility?”

The hypothesis forwarded was that Jesus was drugged with a sponge soaked in a sedative mixture of opium and other compounds such as belladonna and hashish when he cried out “I thirst.” Vinegar would have revived him whereas the drink from the sponge apparently caused him to die. Such a drug concoction, which was available and used in the Middle East for medical procedures, would have rendered Jesus unconscious and therefore spared much of the trauma and mental anguish crucifixion surely inflicted upon him. Then there was the incident of the spear thrust into Jesus’ side, not his heart or vital organ, where it is reported that blood and water poured out, indicating that Jesus was still alive.

All that remained then was for Jesus to be taken down from the cross, apparently lifeless but in reality unconscious, and taken to a private tomb where medicines could be used to revive him. He would then be whisked away from the scene. And this is precisely what is described in the Gospels: Luke (23:53) and Mark (15:46) report that Jesus was placed in a new tomb nearby. Matthew (27:6) adds that the tomb was owned by the wealthy and influential Joseph of Arimathea. John (19:41-42), who generally gives us so many extra details, adds that there was a garden around this tomb, implying that the grounds were privately owned, perhaps also by Joseph of Arimathea.

John also stresses that Jesus was taken down quickly and put into this new tomb. Then, in a very curious addition, he reports that Joseph of Arimathea and a colleague, Nicodemus, visited the tomb during the night and brought with them a very large amount of spices: myrrh and aloes (John 19:39). These, it is true, could be used simply as a perfume, but there could be another equally plausible explana­tion. Both substances have a medicinal use – most notably, myrrh has been used as an aid to stop bleeding. Neither drug is known to have a role in embalming dead bodies. Mark (16:1) and Luke (23:56) touch obliquely on this theme as well, adding to their story of the tomb that the women — Mary Magdalene and Mary, the “mother of James,”­ brought spices and ointments with them when they came to the tomb after the Sabbath had ended.

. . . . But there is yet another oddity that we need to note: in the Gospel of Mark, Joseph of Arimathea is described as visiting Pilate and requesting the body of Jesus. Pilate asks if Jesus is dead and is surprised when told that he is indeed, for his demise seems very rapid to Pilate. But since Jesus is dead, Pilate allows Joseph to take the body down. If we look at the original Greek text, we see an im­portant point being made: when Joseph asks Pilate for Jesus’s body, the word used for “body” is soma. In Greek this denotes a living body.  When Pilate agrees that Joseph can take the body down from the cross, the word he uses for “body” is ptoma (Mark 15:43-45). This means a fallen body, a corpse or carcass. In other words, the Greek text of Mark’s Gospel is making it clear that while Joseph is asking for the living body of Jesus, Pilate grants him what he believes to be the corpse. Jesus’s survival is revealed right there in the actual Gospel account.

If the writer of this Gospel had wished to hide that fact, it would have been very easy for him simply to use one word for both state­ments — to have both Joseph and Pilate speaking of the ptoma, the corpse. But the writer chose not to be consistent. Could this be be­cause it was too well known a fact for him to get away with any manipulation of it? This had to wait for the translation of the New Testament from Greek into Latin: in the Latin Bible – the Vulgate – the word corpus is used by both Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea, and this simply means “body” as well as “corpse.” The hiding of the secret of the crucifixion was completed.

Again, it takes only a slight shift of perspective, a standing aside from the theological dogma, to see the crucifixion in a new way. That is, to see how Jesus could very well have survived.

Jesus alive in A.D. 45?

Then there’s this: Jesus is reported to have been alive in A.D. 45, twelve years after his crucifixion. When this tidbit of historical information came into Michael Baigent’s hands in the form of a letter from an undivulged source, he immediately set out to find “incontrovertible evidence that Jesus survived and was living long afterwards.” But his efforts were to no avail.

Then there’s the Stations of the Cross plaque still on the wall of the church at Rennes le Chateau.

“. . . an image that reveals something very heretical indeed. . . .  One image, for example, shows a woman with a child standing beside Jesus; the child is wearing a Scottish tartan robe. . . . But the most curious of all is Station 14. This is traditionally the last of the series illustrating Jesus being placed in the tomb prior to the resurrection. At Rennes le Chateau the image shows the tomb and, immediately in front of it, three figures carrying the body of Christ. But the painted background reveals the time as night. In the sky beyond the figures, the full moon has risen.”

This indicates that the Passover had begun — and no Jew would have handled a dead body after the Passover had begun as it would make him ritually unclean. The scene also suggests that the body of Jesus was not being placed in a tomb but was being carried out secretly under the cover of night.

The significance of this story lies in the fact that the priest of Rennes le Chateau, Abbe Sauniere, discovered the story of Jesus’ survival in documents he found while renovating the church in the early 1890’s. His bishop, upon seeing the documents, sent him to Paris to meet with experts at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he spent three weeks. He returned with access to considerable wealth, sufficient to completely renovate the church and build a road to the village up the hill. The implication is that his silence was bought.

It is important to note that the Stations of The Cross at Rennes le Chateau were painted under the direct supervision of Abbe Sauniere. He appears to be telling us that he knows — or a least believes — that Jesus survived the crucifixion.

As a final note to close this post, I will tell you about a most interesting event Michael Baigent discloses in this chapter. In researching the origin of the letter he had received mentioned above, he came upon Canon Alfred Lilley (1860–1948) who was Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral in Oxford, England. He was an expert in medieval French and was often consulted on difficult translation work.  He was invited to Paris to the Seminary of Saint Sulpice to assist in the translation of a “strange document (or documents).” The scholars working on the translation asked for help because of the outrageous nature of the text which they thought that perhaps they were misunderstanding. His friend, a Rev. Bartlett, who had invited him to go to Paris, reports on the outcome:

“They didn’t know that it was close to the bone . . . . Lilley said that they wouldn’t have a long and happy life if certain people knew about it. It was a very delicate matter. Lilley laughed over what was going to happen when the French priest told anyone about it. He didn’t know what happened to them [the documents], but he thought that they had changed hands for a large sum of money and had ended up in Rome.” In fact, Lilley thought that the Church would ultimately destroy these documents.

Lilley was quite certain that these documents were authentic. They were extraordinary and upset many of our ideas about the Church. Contact with the material, he said, led to an unorthodoxy. . . .  “By the end of his life,” Bartlett explained, ” Lilley had come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the Gospels that one could be certain about. He had lost all conviction of truth.”

A group of “Modernists” that included Lilley wanted to “revise the dogmatic assertions of the church teachings in the light of the discoveries made by science, archaeology, and critical scholarship.” Baigent concludes with this observation.

Many theologians were realizing that their confidence in the historical validity of New Testament stories was misplaced. For example, William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was once asked to write on the life of Jesus. He declined, saying that there was not nearly enough solid evidence to write anything at all about him.”

I will leave it there for now. Until my next post Easter Sunday morning, then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

 

 

 

 

 

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