Creating the New Earth Together

Posts tagged ‘Garden of Eden’

The Two Trees of Eden

“Adam came into being from enormous power and wealth, but he was never worthy of you, for had he been worthy of you he would not have died.” —Jesus, from The Gospel of Thomas¹

ACCORDING TO THE BIBLICAL RECORD OF CREATION handed down to us in the Book of Genesis, among the many trees in the garden planted “eastward in Eden” were the “tree of life” and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Both trees grew “in the midst” of the garden.  Now, the garden is the heaven of consciousness, and the East is from whence our tomorrows come. A garden is where seeds are planted for tomorrow’s harvest. So this entire setting relates to the seeding of consciousness for tomorrow’s creations.

For the duration of this writing, let us think of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as being the double helix DNA molecule—in which case I will call it “the tree of the knowledge of good and evolve,” in so far as our flesh arises out of the unfolding evolutionary cycles of the genetic code as the DNA spiral turns to impart the sequence of genetic information to messenger molecules (mRNA) for the further generation of protein, the building blocks of the body temple.  The fruit of this tree becomes deadly only when we interfere with the evolving processes of life, which can only result in evil creations, distortions of the true design for living forms, which will not be sustained by life and live forever.  So, our DNA spiral very much resembles a tree with code sequences as leaves that, if even touched, much less altered, will result in death.  When left alone, they will continue to evolve according to the Divine Design of life and bring forth appropriate forms for a changing environment.  

Now, let us think of the “tree of life” in our bodies as being the sacred anatomy of our endocrine system, comprised of seven hormonal glands that are under the control and direction of Spirit, the incarnate angel, differentiated into seven vibrational frequencies that nourish them. These sacred parts of our physical anatomy serve as “lamps of fire” (as John of Revelation describes the “seven spirits before the throne of God” set in heaven) that shine the light of Love and Truth into the world through our living.  We can eat freely from the tree of life by giving expression to the spirits of Love, such as patience, thankfulness, compassion and joy, to name but a few.  

We could say that these “trees” are in the midst of the garden of our consciousness, as are our human capacities—remembering that our incarnating capacities are not limited to flesh and bone but include our energetic field that extends out to include, for example, the seven Chakras.  It is all encompassed by the heaven of our consciousness.

The two trees are planted eastward in Eden, indicating they have something to do with the future.  It is from the code sequences set in the DNA spiral that our future bodies roll out into the eternal present.  And it is by way of our seven endocrine glands that we continue to express the radiant energy of life itself through hormonal crystals, messengers of light.  It is truly a tree of life. 

All this to say there are endless and eternal cycles within cycles at work in the Creative Process of Life constantly bringing forth the world of Creation in which we live and have our being . . . and with our human intellects we can’t even begin to comprehend them, much less manage and control them, albeit we tinker with the idea, as well as with the genetic code sequence itself that determines the shape and functions of outer forms.

I am reminded of a warning man was given in the garden, repeated here by Eve to the serpent: “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die”— to which the serpent replied, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” He lied, and has been lying ever since—significantly and with dire consequences in our day with this rampant genetically-modified coronavirus and experimental and risky spike protein injection. 

We have dared to touch and manipulated the DNA tree to create a virus designed to attack human lung tissue and kill its host . . . and I ask, to what end, other than our own? It’s utter insanity.  

ROGUE CREATOR BEINGS?

There’s another story I would like to visit that may provide background and context for what I have presented above, and that is the possibility of rogue activity on the part of the creator being(s) who made the “clay man,” as a friend in England calls him. There are two creation events in the first and second chapters of the Book of Genesis respectively, as I’ve written about in a previous post. These two trees that grew in the midst of the garden eastward in Eden, put there by the “LORD God,” are mentioned only in the second chapter of Genesis—in which is also recorded this second creation event.  In this event the “LORD God” forms a man from clay and imbues him with life, whereby he becomes a “living soul.”  The stated purpose for creating this man is found in this passage: “and there was no man to till the ground.”  In other words, man was created to be a servant and manual laborer, a slave.

There has arisen a controversy over these two separate events, one in which God creates Man “in his own image and likeness” as the final touch to his magnificent and “completed” Creation, and a second event in which the LORD God—a group of God beings called Elohim—forms a single man from the dust of the ground.  This event is soon followed by the creation of woman from a rib taken out of the side of the man. 

SUMERIAN ORIGIN OF GENESIS

Now, this is no fairy tale made up by Moses when he wrote the Book of Genesis.  It is said that his creation story was based on ancient Sumerian scriptures, some of which were the retelling of mythical oral traditions and stories.  We can discern a lot from myths, as celebrated author and mythologist Joseph Campbell has elucidated, which are metaphors and stories that point to ancient historical events before a written language came into being and usage.  

Along this line, I want to share with you a letter I received from one of my blog followers and close friend, Donald White, in response to my previous post.  Here is his comment that speaks to this controversial rogue behavior, as well as the two creation events, and the conversation Eve had with the serpent which I cited above.

The Genesis story you’ve referred to here, as to whether God as a plurality: “Let US make man in OUR image…”, or “gods” (prior wise ancients, or advanced aliens) devised mankind through genetic manipulation, is perhaps the key to your conclusive consideration of what’s taking place in the evolutionary cycle we’re now experiencing.

Having studied extensively the Sumerian/Babylonian “Myth of Creation” from which 6th Century BC exiled Israelite, Judah, leaders formed their Genesis biblical story, I’m impressed by the quite detailed Creation stories of this early civilization.

Of course I’m referring to the extant Sumerian cuneiform texts that speak of this godly set of individuals, male and female, who were mankind’s creators and masters. They were referred to as the “Anunnaki,” a reference to the common father of the primary Sumerian god who was known as Anu.

As the story goes (as interpreted by Zechariah Sitchin) the two principal sons of Anu were Enki and Enlil who vied competitively for control of the world at that time, and both sons figured heavily in the Creation saga.  Enki was a great scientist and, with his medically-trained sister Ninharsag, the ‘mankind’ project was advanced as a way to lighten the work load of the Anunnaki as they developed their kingdom on earth. The project had received the “go-ahead” from a council of peers and particularly Lord Enlil who was the head Anunnaki leader.

What appears to be genetic manipulation was utilized by Lord Enki and Lady Ninharsag to alter the genes of our primate ancestor to ‘jump-start their evolutionary process. . . .  Mankind, after several notable failed genetic experiments, was born!

Following this story line (and contrary to the moralistic biblical tale), the “Fall of Mankind” wasn’t due to human misdeeds (Original Sin) but was due to a falling out between Lord Enki and his brother, Lord Enlil.  Apparently, Enki decided to improve the new human being so that procreation could commence amongst the fledgling human community. The ability “to Know” (procreate) caused a stir amongst the Enlilites who realized they could no longer control the burgeoning population of the new sentient being.

The human servants in the Mesopotamian “Garden of Eden” were then cast out of the elite Anunnaki community because, God forbid, they might learn all about how to build their own civilization!

A saying of the Master Jesus comes to mind: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them.”  This may be one of those things, which, even for many of us, are too much to bear, especially if beliefs prevent exploration and critical thinking.  Personally, I am interested in the possibility that those creator beings, advanced aliens—or rogue “fallen angels”—have reincarnated today and are bent on completing their unfinished genetic experimentation, perhaps even attempt to terminate the “mankind project.” Authors such as David Wilcock (THE SYNCHRONICITY KEY) and Graham Handcock (FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS) write about the reincarnation of historical figures, group-incarnations, and even simultaneous multiple incarnations.  

MY TAKE ON ALL OF THIS

“Unworthy” Adam was created by the “LORD God” from clay, not in the image and likeness of God, and therefore not an immortal spiritual being.  Adam became a “living soul” when the  LORD God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life—by whatever creating process was thus employed.  Adam and Eve had another son to replace Abel who was slain by his brother Cane.  His name was Seth, from whom descended Noah, who was “perfect in his generations” and “found grace in the eyes of the LORD.”  This was a time when men “began to call upon the name of the LORD.”  It may well be that with Seth began a redemptive cycle with angels, spiritual Man, incarnating on earth in human beings, the “immortal and invisible images” of God the Supreme Being and Creator of the universe.

WE WRESTLE WITH POWERS AND PRINCIPALITIES

Be that as it may, we live in a day when angelic hosts are incarnate on planet Earth and men entertain angels unaware and wrestle unknowingly with powers and principalities.  As Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” 

Let me conclude this post by saying that the current events on planet Earth are being moved by a greater Power and Force than the powers of darkness, all in the design and seasons of the Lord, who can even use lies, deceit (aka “noble lies”)², and genetic manipulation to achieve his purposes.    As in the days of Noah, flesh has greatly multiplied upon the face of the earth and “the thoughts and imaginings of men’s hearts are only evil continually.”  A reduction of the human population by our own undoing, painful and uncomfortable as it is, can be seen as a “good” consequence of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

This generation, it is said, is reserved unto fire, the purifying fire of love.  Just look out at the events happening on Earth and see that this is so.  While wind-driven fires destroy forests and peoples’ homes and towns, and floods wash away peoples’ lives, at the same time a tidal wave of love is rising in the hearts of men and women everywhere.  An apocalypse of angelic light is underway bringing joy to a new world dawning as an old world passes away. 

It is a time of woe for the inhabitants of the earth and a time of rejoicing for those who dwell in the heavens.  Let us dwell in the heavens with compassion in our hearts for our fellow men, women and children who inhabit the earth, hundreds of thousands dying from multiple catastrophic events.  Those of us remaining now face an escalating climate crisis as the Earth moves on in its transmutation to a higher density, frequency and form.  Let love radiate without concern for what the future may bring, as it will be perfect in the eyes of the Creator. 

In my next post, “The Great Tree,” I will share a passage from The Gospel of the Beloved Companion by Jehanne De Quillan in which Jeshua shows Mary Magdalene a vision of a “great tree” which she proceeds to ascend up to its crown.  Until then,

Be love.  Be loved.

Anthony  (tpal70@gmail.com)

¹ The Gospel of Thomas, Translation & Annotation by Stevan Davies, Series Editor Andrew Harvey.

² A “noble lie” is one that is told to protect the general public from the truth about what actually occurred but is rather intended to deceive the public while protecting the liar.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Adam and Eve, Ancient knowledge, Angelic Identity, Apocalypse of Light, Ascension, Climate Change, Covid-19, Creation, Divine identity, Dr. Palombo's blog, Eden, Elohim, Endocrine system, Energy anatomy, Frequency Shifting, Garden of Paradise, Global Warming, Healing Tones Blog, Love, Origin of Man, Overpopulation, Restoring Eden, Sacred Anatomy, Transformation

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The Garden of Consciousness — “As Above So Below”

🎶 This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . . Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. 🎶

Fig trees provide an archway in our back yard paradise

Co-creation At Home

The picture of our back yard above stands as a living example of how easily creation can unfold out of our consciousness where there is partnering with Nature.  Our yard didn’t always look so paradisal. It was totally destroyed back in 2005 when Hurricane Rita came through and uprooted our great sycamore tree and other trees in our back yard.  It was a surreal disaster.

At first, restoring our yard seemed an insurmountable task. Being a man and physician, I suggested we have a professional landscaper come in and “fix it.” Bonnie, on the other hand, wanted us to restore it ourselves, which we did—and it was fun doing it as we both loved working with the situation just as it was and expressing our creativity into it, which eventually transformed it into the garden spot it is today.  We did bring one of our sons, Leo, into the setting who contributed his carpentry skills into repairing the damage to our home—along with much-appreciated loving enfoldment and emotional support. Thank you again, Leo.

It took more time than a landscaper would likely have taken, but then we would have missed out on the joy of creating it together as ideas came to us, taking one task at a time. Realizing and implementing those ideas was a large part of the fun and joy. Then, watching Mother Nature take what we had accomplished and put Her finishing touches on it, we saw our yard grow and blossom as only She knows how. And now we have the pleasure of enjoying our little piece of paradise right here at home.

Here’s what our back yard looked like after the storm debris was cleared off.

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s our back yard today!

The Garden of Eden and The Garden of Paradise

I’ve been meditating on the biblical Garden of Eden, variously thought to have been located somewhere on earth. However, Eden may be considered more a heavenly garden than an earthly one; an internal garden rather than an external one. Paradise may be thought of as an external garden—an earthly paradise, which still exists in the pristine wilderness of this planet.

I’ve come to see the Garden of Eden as a Garden of Consciousness in which the seeds of Paradise are sown by the Creator.  Out of the Heaven of Divine Consciousness Paradise is born on Earth. We see it all around us in the God-made world of Mother Nature.

On the same basis, out of human consciousness is born the mind-made world of mankind into which we are born and live out our lives.  It’s simply the way creation works: from invisible heaven to visible earth. “As above so below.”

Our sun rises in the East as our planet rotates towards the future. It’s where the Garden of Eden is planted—by the LORD God.  I think this is important for us to understand.  Our today’s come prepared for us by the Lord: “This is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” 

We know that Man did not plant the Garden of Eden.  The LORD God planted this Garden.  Man was placed in the Garden of Eden to dress and keep it— not to seed it with his own ideas as to how the Earth should be created and utilized. The CREATING IDEA for the Earth is in the MIND of the Creator, planted in the Garden of Eden, in the sacred soil of Divine Consciousness, as seed for the creation of the Earth and for all the plants, creatures and critters that live on the earth. I see the earth as the Garden of Paradise, the physical manifestation of the Garden of Eden.

Original Man was the creation of Elohim, a council of Divine Beings, as we saw in an  earlier post.  Man, created male and female in the image and likeness of God, was endowed by the Creator with the privilege, and the responsibility, of participating with God in creation by dressing and keeping the Garden.

It would serve us well to remember what this privilege actually entails—and what it doesn’t.  To start with, it does not entail the right to plunder Paradise for our own self-serving pleasure and enrichment.  That is what caused the Fall, and what has maintained the separation of human consciousness from Divine Consciousness. What it does entail is aptly contained in words penned by Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda): “Let love radiate without concern for results.”  In other words, I am responsible for maintaining an atmosphere of love in the Garden of Consciousness.

Spiritual Man was endowed with a consciousness of his own, which went with him when he left Eden and incarnated in physical man on earth—“fell into creation,” as one reader described it in a comment—and to this day he has cultivated it as a garden in which he plants his own seeds—the seeds of competition and discontent, of greed and envy, the seeds of war.  Basically the seeds that will bring forth the kind of world in which he wants to live with all the self-serving comforts and pleasures it can afford.  This world is not in harmony with the Natural world of Paradise, which the Creator maintains with minimal help from mankind.  It seems that man is determined to continue building his world on top of God’s world, slashing and burning it to make room to grow food for his belly, and drilling it to produce fuel for his machines. 

The usurper and self-appointed ruler of human consciousness is the self-active human mind, which has assumed its own identity, the “human ego,” which many an ambitious leader has inflated in order to exercise power and control over others and the world, especially the world of Nature, Gaia’s Paradise, the cornucopia of the resources for life on Earth.  Even now he is eyeing the pristine National Parks of America with intent to harvest their hidden treasures of oil and minerals, Gaia’s very blood and bones. He has no respect for the Earth, nor for life.

Do I paint a too painfully accurate picture?  And do you detect a righteous tone in my words?  Perhaps it is because I do have a bit of righteous anger in my heart, tempered only by compassion for the deceived masses of humanity, as I look at what has become of mankind on Earth, and what a miserable and desperate condition we’ve created in human consciousness, out of which only misery and desperation can be born.  I use the word “righteous” in its literal sense of “right-use-ness,” of which there’s been a gross lack.  Little wonder Man ejected himself from the Garden of Eden, out of God’s Heaven, and separated himself from Divine Consciousness by his commandeering of the Creating Process.  

And now we want to get back into Eden?  We can’t “get back” into Eden, at least not as we are in our fallen state of consciousness.  We have to welcome the Edenic state into our consciousness, then co-create Paradise out of that heaven.  Anything we might endeavor to do to create a Paradise on Earth is a waste of precious energy and resource without first letting Eden, Heaven, be restored to human consciousness.  The mind’s bright ideas haven’t worked in the past and there is no reason to think they will work now.  They only make living conditions on the planet worse. 

Mankind may be like Man, but mankind is not Man.  Original Man is a spiritual being made in the image and likeness of God, who is Spirit, presently and temporarily incarnate in human form.  What we call “mankind” is a substitute for Man, a temporary creation “formed” from the dust of the ground, nevertheless used by an all-wise and merciful God as a means of incarnating on Earth in order to steer the evolutionary process of Restoration.

This is what I see underway on Earth in our day—has  been since the Fall.  It has taken this long for the evolution of human consciousness to reach a level of transformation that is sufficiently enlightened to accommodate the conscious emergence and revelation of incarnate angelic hosts through the bodies of as many human beings as are willing and transmute them in an apocalypse of Light.

It has also taken this long—after at least two failed opportunities—for the vibratory conditions in the energetic field of our planet and solar system, as well as cosmic factors in our relation, for example, to the constellations of Orion and The Pleiades, and our position in the energy belts of our Milky Way Galaxy, for the Restoration to be at all possible.  We are here, along with countless heavenly hosts, to steward this process so that Man can be restored to God and return to the Garden of Eden, where we will co-create with God a Garden of Paradise for and on the New Earth. It is why we incarnated. We are the appointed ones to get the job done.

I sense that time is at hand.  As I sat out with Bonnie in our paradisal back yard this evening, I felt a powerful wave of peace move through my body, moving across the entire globe.  I feel it even now as I write. Something of cosmic proportion is happening in the solar system, in the earth and in the body of Humanity. A New Heaven is descending upon human consciousness—the Heaven of Divine Consciousness—and already sown in its fecund soil are the vibrational seeds that hold sacred the patterns of design and control for the New Earth, along with instructions on how we are to go about co-creating Paradise here on earth.

In order to make room for the “New Jerusalem” descending from God out of Heaven, we must unclutter our consciousness of all the accoutrements and pabulum of the mind-made world to prepare our hearts to receive it.  John the Beloved describes it as “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God our of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” In other words, as one who is loved with all of one’s heart, all of one’s mind, and all of one’s strength.

Shining the Light of Love

At the moment we are facing “darkness upon the face of the deep.” Just as darkness was upon the face of the deep in the Beginning, so is the New Earth emerging in a shroud of darkness. Darkness is the condition in which the seeds of change gestate and develop, out of sight and mental observation that typically leads to judgment and temptation to interfere.  I suspect that as the New Heaven gives birth to the New Earth, it will be unlike anything we’ve ever imagined or expected.  I pray we will not fall for the temptation to judge it as it evolves and interfere with the Creating Process, but let it be what it is and simply shine our “little light” into the darkness.  All creating cycles move toward oneness, from love—and already I see the Light of a New Dawn shining in the darkness; shining through emissaries of Light Divine throughout the world, angels coming forth in expression.

Let love radiate without concern for results.  As we are faithful to this one important and pivotal role, we can be assured that there will be results, and we will be surprised and greatly blessed, as will the Earth. 

Paradise, as I said, is still materializing on Earth. There are still parts of the planet that have not been consumed by man and left barren.  Therefore there is a harmonious chord of synergy between Heaven and Nature manifesting beauty and sustainability with which we may partner, synchronize our life styles, alter the course of devolution and extinction of our species, and halt the total destruction of Paradise.  As we attune to the harmonious music of Mother Nature and dance to her rhythms and seasons, She welcomes us back and gladly accommodates our metamorphosis and restoration to the Creator of the heavens and the earth.  She awaits our return, and the return of her Beloved Creator to her Garden.

We are not alone in the process of transformation.  The entire Universe is with us as we turn around—the literal meaning of repent-–from our downward spiral to a dying exit from this earthly plane and start our journey back to Eden and an upward spiral that takes us back Home by way of ascension. No one need suffer or perish. We are loved more than we will ever know by the One who desires nothing more than to come into His Garden here on Earth, filled with peace and the fine substance of love. Love for this One with our all, and love for one another as our Self, is the only true way our personal and collective garden of consciousness can be prepared to receive the New Heaven for the New Earth.

I welcome any thoughts you may have. Until we meet again on this blog,  

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

Category:

As Above So Below, Conscious Evolution, Creation, Dr. Palombo's blog, Eden, Elohim, Evolution, Garden of Paradise, Healing Tones Blog, Heaven, Heaven and nature, Kingdom of Heaven, Love, Loving God, Man and nature, New Earth, Origin of Man, Paradise Remembered, Transformation, Transmutation

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Getting Back to Eden, part 5: The Process of Transformation 2

 

Is it not written in your law, ‘I have said, “You are gods”?’  —Yeshua 

Paradigm shifts have occurred in our consciousness rather frequently over the course of the last several decades, and innovations have emerged in the ways we do things.  In the way we relate to God, for example, we’ve gone from church affiliation and attendance to spiritual transformation by way of “paths” to enlightenment and Self realization; from being mere humans to angels incarnate in bodies that are temples of a living God; from awareness as humans seeking an experience of God to that of God seeking a fuller experience of our humanity, as expressed in the saying “I am God being Human.”

In the field of healthcare, we’ve gone from the medical model of treating the symptoms of disease to the holistic model of treating the whole person and addressing the cause; from physical medicine to “energy medicine,” embracing esoteric energy healing modalities; from running costly and invasive diagnostic tests to honoring the body’s innate intelligence and wisdom by reading its energy fields and meridian circuits via muscle-testing for first hand information from the body itself about its condition and need for intervention and/or nutritional support; and from reactive passive healthcare to proactive preventive wellness care. We’ve even found a way via bio-energetic inquiry to discern and treat the cause of dis-ease at the emotional and subconscious levels with “Neuro-Linguistic Programing,” an approach too innovative and subtle for the reductionist “fix the problem from outside-in” mindset. Ultimately, we’ve dared to transplant organs from one body to another, even clone living forms via genetic engineering and test-tube creation.

In the tech world we’ve gone from naturally endowed intelligence to artificial intelligence; from building structures with bricks and mortar to constructing matter at the atomic level with nanotechnology; from assembly-line manual labor to robotics; from land lines to cell phones, from writing letters to sending emails, and now texts; and from attending seminars and conferences to teleconferencing in virtual “face time” space. We’ve gone from doing research in a library to “Googling” just about anything we want to know.

In science and physics we’ve seen leaps upward and out into the macrocosm of space and downward into the microcosm of quantum physics. We’ve “progressed” from mechanical and chemical engineering to genetic engineering of plants, foods, and, God help us, our own species.

In a word, we’ve evolved in our consciousness — and in our identity — as well as in our expression and functions, from being “creatures of circumstance” to creators; from being “mere humans” to becoming gods in our own right.

Transformation, the changing of the outer form of things, has been the main event of the last sixty years. And now with this coronavirus pandemic, social distancing has isolated us from one another—coupled by job and economic disruptions, world-wide social transformation is underway. The last 40 years of the 20th Century were particularly marked by transformation, preparing us for radical changes in the new millennium. The most important and pivotal transformation underway is a spiritual one, more like a transmutation of our identity from human to divine.

SIGNIFICANCE AND HISTORY OF THE NUMBER 40  

It seems the number 40 carries the energy of change in numerology.  A Facebook friend posted this recently: “The Latin root of the word ‘quarantine’ is ‘forty.’ The official lock-down started March 23 and will likely end May 1st. That is EXACTLY 40 days.” She cited biblical events, such as the 40 days Moses stayed on Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments and the 40 days of his wandering in the wilderness with the children of Israel; and Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days.  The optimum number of weeks for human gestation is 40, and the rest period for a woman after giving birth is 40 days.  Essentially it is the time needed for preparing a person, or people, to make a fundamental change, to let go of things we no longer need to live fully and move forward into a new beginning in a New Earth. 

TRANSFORMATION

Richard Heinberg sheds light on the process of transformation in MEMORIES AND VISIONS OF PARADISE, characterizing the personal transformation of Jesus and the Buddha as “opening a door between worlds.”

The process of transformation need not be arduous. Indeed, in some respects it is more play than work — though not the competitive, win/lose play of civilized adults, but more the spontaneous, mutually trusting, experimental, and ecstatic play of young children and wild animals. As psychologist O. Fred Donaldson puts it, “Play is nature’s way of triumphing over culture.”  If Paradise is our natural state of being, then the deepest and most compelling force at the core of the collective unconscious is one that is always urging us toward that state of equilibrium. As we deliberately work toward a future characterized by respect and care for Nature and toward the nurturing of love, forgiveness, compassion, and celebration in ourselves and in one another, our conscious efforts resonate with the pattern at the core of our being. Heaven and Nature rush to return to a condition of balance and accord.

It is also true that as we move in the transformational process, we are working against social conditioning that continually tends to divide us both from one another and from the very ground of our own being. Hence, the need for the spiritual quest, which in all its guises is essentially a process of cutting through the crust of ego that prevents us from experiencing and revealing our own innate paradisal character.

This quest is neither new nor unprecedented. It is neither more nor less than the archetypal hero’s journey, identified by Joseph Campbell as being central to every mythic tradition. Every culture remembers exemplary men and women who have accomplished inter­nal transformations, and who have left instructions by which others can do the same. While the details of the instructions may differ, all spiritual exemplars agree on the broad outline of the process. It consists, first, of a withdrawal from the world-as-it-is, and a deliberate act of purification. This is followed by a period of integration within the system of universal spiritual values. The process culminates in a final realization of unity with the ultimate Principle of all that is. While the details of the process are individual, the essential outline of the journey is always the same, as is the goal: Paradise — the realization of oneness with Heaven and Nature.

The heroic quest is fundamentally a symbolic journey, representing the progressive unfoldment of the hero’s transcendent character and destiny. Jesus and the Buddha are figures who accomplished the profound inner transformation by which a door was opened between worlds, and human society was led to a partially or temporarily restored condition. Ultimately, the records of their lives are metaphors for what must occur in the experience of anyone who takes up the quest.

In every hero myth, the first stage in the journey consists simply of hearing and responding to a call. The hero or heroine must realize that the world is in need of healing, and that his or her own actions will make a difference to others. For the Buddha, the call came when he was thirty years of age and first saw sickness, old age, and death. He was so profoundly moved by the suffering he saw that he stole away from his sleeping wife and child to seek the key to liberation from the universal human condition. For Jesus, the first awareness of the call came when he was only twelve years old. He left his parents and spent three days in the temple among the doctors, discussing theology. When his worried parents finally found him, he said simply, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

As we lift our attention above our conditioned wants and fears long enough to become aware of the purposes of a greater Whole, we suddenly see the possibility that our lives could have significance beyond comfort and self-satisfaction. The call may be faintly sensed, or it may blare. In either case, a conscious decision must be made to either listen or shut it out. To ignore the call is to die to the purposes of life. But to listen and to accept the challenge of the quest requires a willingness to leave behind the ruts established for us by heredity and environment, and to explore unfamiliar territory. We cannot enter Paradise without leaving behind our present cultural or psychic envi­ronment.

The second stage of the quest involves coming to terms with a dragon, demon, or enemy. Seeing suffering, we seek its cause, and causes of human suffering are legion. At the beginning of this stage we may see a dragon that is external to ourselves — an immediate source of injustice and cruelty. We may decide that the dragon is embodied in a philosophy we detest, or in a person whose actions seem to cause others pain. Many people become fixed in this phase of the quest and never proceed further. Their lives are spent battling the demons of the world, which, even when apparently slain, seem to grow new heads and return to torment them again.

As long as we continue battling external demons, we are incapable of fully bringing peace to our world. Eventually, if we remain true to the call — if we continue to listen — we will come to understand that the real dragon is within us: all the problems of our world have been produced by tendencies present in ourselves. Until and unless our internal dragons can be dealt with, even the most valorous external battle cannot fully bear fruit. Some of the great heroes in religious literature seem to have realized this from the beginning. Both Jesus and the Buddha, for example, knew from the outset that the victory they sought was a triumph over their own lower natures. Gandhi, on the other hand, began his career with the belief that the dragon consisted entirely of governmentally enforced racism; only gradually did he come to see his own attitudes and behavior as the battleground for the forces of good and evil.

Once the dragon is recognized as being an internal force, a different kind of battle begins. This stage of the process, in which the hero is wrestling with his own inner demons, doesn’t seem especially paradisal. It involves the exposure of one’s weaknesses and the surrender of personal attachments. Paradoxically, it seems, one can only get to Paradise by being willing to go through hell. But this conflict, too, must come to an end. The resolution of the battle with the inner demon is represented in the story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Before Jesus began his public ministry, and after he had fasted in the wilderness for forty days, the Devil appeared to him. The Devil first offered Jesus bread, symbolizing personal fulfillment at the physical level; then he challenged Jesus’ authority; and finally he offered the kingdoms of the world, “if thou will fall down and worship me.” But Jesus, refusing physical desire, the need to prove himself, and personal ambition as motives for his behavior, replied, “Get thee hence, Satan!” For him, the demon was gone.

A similar story of the Buddha says that while he was sitting under the Bodhi tree, immediately before attaining enlightenment, he was tempted by the god-demon Mara. Amid both violence and offers of pleasure and power, he simply sat and remained calm, “like a lion seated in the midst of oxen.” Mara and his armies, frustrated, left in defeat.

The dragon or demon can be fully tamed only through consistent inner work over a period of years. Yet, there is an instantaneous quality to the essential transformation that eventually comes: at any time a sudden change of state may occur and Paradise will be present, if only for a moment. The hero tames the dragon not by fighting it, but by refusing to fight it — by facing it, courageously holding steady, and expressing the character of innocence and love. Suddenly, the hero realizes that Paradise has been there all along, unnoticed.

Even after the hero has momentarily achieved paradisal awareness, he must still learn to sustain and communicate that state. From this point on, he is certain that he has known the true and natural condition of human consciousness — the pearl of great price, for which the wise person will sell everything (Matthew 13:46).

After having developed the ability to consistently maintain paradisal consciousness, the hero returns to the mundane world with a healing balm. Having found Heaven, he must share it — which means sharing himself, his state of being. For the individual, the return is the culmination of the journey, but the quest is not complete until the world has been restored.

Richard is interviewed briefly in Michael Moore’s recently released film PLANET OF THE HUMANS, an hour-and-forty-minute documentary update on the present state of our world and our ill-placed hope in biomass, wind turbans and solar panels — well worth your time watching.

Hello Octogenerians! 

On a more personal note, I will join the elder generation of octogenerians and complete my 80th trip around the sun on May 20, 2020. There’s got to be a few 40’s in those numbers, as I have certainly gone through many changes in those eighty years. I have been greatly blessed by many life-long friends and clients over the years.  I thank you for following my blogs and sharing them with your friends.  Feel free to share your thoughts by email. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved

Anthony   

tpal70@gmail.com

 

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Getting Back to Paradise, part 2: Reading the Transition Signals

Apocalypse of light

“The peasant doesn’t cross himself until he hears the thunder.”

In bringing this series to a conclusion with this and my next two blog posts, I will share excerpts from the closing chapters of Richard Heinberg’s MEMORIES and VISIONS of PARADISE.  But before I do, I would like to share some uplifting words my friend and favorite poet Don Hynes sent to me a few days ago, as they resonate with the theme of my current considerations.

THE PROGRESSION

After the fall, which was a planetary solar progression as much as human, moving through a cloud where our current reality became possible, the Atlantean manipulations were fatal death-like steps for humanity and the planet. The trauma of those nightmares is in the genetic memory of the human race and the trajectory of that epoch was downward, from the downfall of the Lemurian priesthood through Atlantean science-abused wars to the caveman, cannibalism and the following centuries of darkness and struggle. 

We are now passing through a very similar time of genetic manipulation, of atomic and biological warfare, and are in a subconscious way re-experiencing the ancient trauma along with the current horror. However, despite the obvious implications that our current trajectory is likewise downward, thinking of this as an historic and metaphorical “V,” my sense is that we are currently passing out of the cloud where our current reality became possible, as Uranda and many mystics forecast, into the clear sky and open heaven of the seven dimensional reality. We are on the upward stroke of the V, not the downward, and so my/our word to the people is FEAR NOT as we pass through this time of collective Gethsemane in our return to the Garden.

We Pass Through Nightmares
 
There are places we enter
at the peril of our planet,
dark chambers 
where manipulation 
of life itself becomes
the deadly fascination.
What was once horror,
now scientific reality,
barely stirs
our deadened senses,
”because we can”
the blanketing rationale
for behaviors unspeakable.
We’ve been here before
and it ended badly.
Contrary to the logic
of linear progression
we pass through nightmares,
remembering and feeling
what was once left behind
and now rushes past
as we ride the currents
of disease and terror,
of compassion beyond measure
into our new place
in the universe.  —Don Hynes

 

Don’s words are a clarion call to sanity and for an about-face retreat from our mad drive toward extinction — touchstone words to keep on hand as the transitional pressure gets more and more compressed, as it will.  The birthing of a new world is in process and the contractions are beginning to be closer and more intense.  It’s time to breathe deeply and exhale expectantly as we labor in love for the truth of life on our home among the stars. 

READING THE SIGNALS

Richard Heinberg has been very active in the environmental movement since the 1980’s. He has written several books on climate and clean energy issues, including The Party is Over: Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies —  AFTERBURN: Society Beyond Fossil Fuel — Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy — and his latest work The End of Growth, in which he examines how the expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits. 

In the following excerpt, Richard takes a hard and sobering look at the shadows cast by coming events, the symptoms of mankind’s abuse of the earth’s generosity.  Keep in mind that this was written some forty years ago.  Since then climate and energy issues have gained greater attention as the environment continues to deteriorate further and time runs out on the implementation of viable solutions. His and other authors’ warnings having gone unheeded, Richard’s optimism about our future has diminished considerably. 

(For a rather sobering update on where we have come over the last several decades, you may wish to view — at a later time — Michael Moore’s recently-released film PLANET OF THE HUMANS, an hour-and-forty-minute documentary on the present state of our world and our ill-placed hope in biomass, wind turbans and solar panels; well worth watching.)

And now, without further ado, here’s an excerpt from chapter 12, “To Get Back to the Garden.“

Warnings from the Collective Unconscious

When we diverge from the way we were designed to function, Nature sends warning signals. For example, when we eat foods we are unable to digest, our stomachs rebel; when we use our limbs in ways in which they were not designed to be used, our muscles and bones protest. When we do such things habitually over time, we are likely to receive not only external signals in the form of pain, accidents, or disease, but we may also receive internal signals. Such signals may take the form of nightmares and premonitions through which the body’s own unconscious wisdom attempts to alert us and to influence our behavior.

If this is true for us individually, perhaps it is also true for human­ kind collectively — that is, if humanity is ignoring an innate paradisal design (by envisioning and working toward a world characterized by artificiality, separateness, and the suppression of Nature), then we should expect to be receiving both external and internal warnings. On the collective level, such external warning signs might take the form of war, environmental degradation, famine, or plague; internal warn­ing signs might appear as widely occurring visions of apocalyptic events.

As Norman Cohn showed in The Pursuit of the Millennium, apoca­lyptic visions have tended to appear in profusion during historical periods of political and religious oppression, social upheaval, war, and pestilence. The Hebrew prophets lived in an age of defeat and captiv­ity; Jesus lived at the height of the decadent and oppressive Roman Empire; and medieval millenarian movements seemed always to flour­ish in places and times of unusual hardship. We see the same associa­tion of apocalyptic vision with societal stress among tribal peoples: in North America, Africa, and the Pacific islands, new spiritual movements that have arisen during the last century in response to the onslaught of civilization have invariably been prophetic and millenarian in character. 

There are many reasons for thinking that contemporary Western civilization is approaching a period of maximum divergence from the paradisal ideal. Instead of simplicity, innocence, and the ability to work in harmony with natural processes, industrial civilization values sophistication, abstraction, the concentration of wealth, and the complete subjugation of Nature. These values have not appeared suddenly or recently; rather, they can be traced back to the beginnings of civilization itself. But we do seem to be witnessing the culmination of their influence. And as we actualize the ultimate implications of long-term trends leading toward the centralization of social power, the technological domination of Nature, and the fragmentation of human consciousness, we find ourselves on what appears to be a collision course with a deeper reality.

We see external warning signals appearing everywhere around us. We hear, for example, of the death of thousands of lakes and forests from the effects of acid rain. As the thinning of the ozone layer creates an epidemic of skin cancer, we simultaneously discover that a greenhouse effect — created by the carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels — is altering global weather patterns. We hear of the disappearance of tens of thousands of species as the result of the clear-cutting of rain forests, and of the loss of millions of tons of irreplaceable topsoil due to modern mechanized agricultural practices. These and other warning signals portend catastrophes of truly apocalyptic dimensions, catastrophes that can be averted only if immediate steps are taken to change our fundamental relationship with the natural environment. 

At the same time, we are seeing an unprecedented eruption of what could be interpreted as internal, psychic warning signals. The past two decades have seen burgeoning numbers of people turn to millenarian fundamentalism for a sense of meaning and purpose. Christian fundamentalists look toward the imminent end of the world, the destruction of unbelievers, and the restoration of an earthly Para­dise characterized by all the qualities of the original Eden — peace, happiness, and, above all, the opportunity to dwell in the immediate presence of the Lord.

But while fundamentalist millenarianism draws upon apocalyptic scriptural visions from eras past, we are also surrounded by fresh and original prophetic utterances. The classic apocalyptic scenario — a final battle between the forces of good and evil, followed by the advent of a restored condition of peace and beatitude — appears, for example, in numerous science-fiction plots and in the psychic predictions of Edgar Cayce and the “channelers” of the 1980s. Moreover, near-death experiences are making their own contribution to what amounts to a contemporary explosion of apocalyptic prophecy. 

While conducting his NDE studies, Kenneth Ring began to hear reports of prophetic visions (PVs) of humanity’s future, and he de­cided to collect and compare them. Ring found that PVs seem to occur most frequently during core NDEs, and that there is an “impressive similarity” among the visions. In Heading toward Omega, Ring summa­rizes the common elements of the classic PV:

There is, first of all, a sense of having total knowledge, but specifically one is aware of seeing the entirety of the earth’s evolution and history, from the beginning to the end of time. The future scenario, however, is usually of short duration, seldom extending much beyond the beginning of the twenty-first century. The individuals report that in this decade there will be an increasing incidence of earthquakes, volcanic activity, and generally massive geophysical changes. There will be resultant disturbances in weather patterns and food supplies. The world economic system will collapse, and the possibility of nuclear war or accident is very great (respondents are not agreed on whether a nuclear catastrophe will occur). All of these events are transi­tional rather than ultimate, however, and they will be followed by a new era in human history marked by human brotherhood, universal love, and world peace. Though many will die, the earth will live.

Ring then quotes several PV reports. The following is from a woman whose near-death experience occurred in 1967: 

The vision of the future I received during my near-death experi­ence was one of tremendous upheaval in the world as a result of our general ignorance of the “true” reality. I was informed that mankind was breaking the laws of the universe and as a result of this would suffer. This suffering was not due to the vengeance of an indignant God but rather like the pain one might suffer as a result of arrogantly defying the law of gravity. It was to be an inevitable educational cleansing of the earth that would creep up on its inhabitants, who would try to hide blindly in the institutions of law, science, and religion. Mankind, I was told, was being consumed by the cancers of arrogance, materialism, racism, chauvinism, and separatist thinking. I saw sense turning to nonsense, and calamity, in the end, turning to providence.  

At the end of this general period of transition, mankind was to be “born anew,” with a new sense of its place in the universe.  The birth process, however, as in all the kingdoms, was exqui­sitely painful. Mankind would emerge humbled yet educated, peaceful, and, at last, unified.

Ring attempted to find a rational explanation for the remarkably consistent patterns of imagery in the PVs he had collected. Could these experiences be projections of unconscious fears? Or, perhaps, do individuals who perceive themselves as dying somehow generalize the experience as being “the death of the world”? Ring found both of these explanations unconvincing: Why not a greater variety of global-future scenarios? The PVs are just too consistent to be personal projections.  Could they, then, be eruptions of unconscious Jungian archetypes?

Ring found this explanation more plausible, but he was still uncom­fortable with the specificity and paranormal character of PVs. After examining all of the explanations he could devise, Ring found himself left with the interpretation the NDErs themselves insist upon: that PV’s are in fact exactly what they seem to be: inspired prophe­cies of future events.  

If this is the case, why is humanity propelling itself toward a cataclysmic day of reckoning? Ring invokes a sobering metaphor: he suggests that humanity is approaching — and subconsciously preparing for — a collective near-death experience. As we noted earlier, NDErs almost invariably undergo a sudden and radical restructuring of values. A typical comment is this: “My interest in material wealth and greed for possessions was replaced by a thirst for spiritual understanding and a passionate desire to see world conditions improve.”

Throughout history, moral reformers have sought to inspire hu­manity to change its collective values and to regain its sense of the sacred. Despite occasional and temporary successes, such exhortations have generally been ignored. We seem convinced that greed and aggression are constants, restrainable only by the force of law. But Ring’s hypothesis implies that human nature, when it comes face to face with annihilation, may dissolve to reveal a deeper and more profound nature, one that has been hidden for millennia behind the veil of the human ego. 

The Russians have a saying: “The peasant doesn’t cross himself until he hears the thunder.” That is, people tend to make basic changes in attitude and behavior only when their backs are to the wall. This observation seems as true for society as a whole as it is for individuals. Often, only a crisis will awaken us to the results of a destructive habit. In the case of late-twentieth-century humanity, the habitual behavior (and the potential awakening) is at a critical level and underlies all of our social, economic, scientific, and political realities. This crisis amounts to far more than just a serious inconvenience, or even a catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression or the two world wars. Religious prophets and scientific futurists alike envision what amounts to the end of our entire way of life, and, conceivably — in the event of an all-out nuclear conflict or the irreversible destruction of the environment — the death of the human race itself. 

We recall the prophecies of the tribal peoples concerning a Great Purification, which will cleanse the world of human depravity but will also reunite Heaven and Earth, ushering in a new age of spirituality and light. Is this what we are all unconsciously laboring to bring about?

Yes — and with a large “critical mass” of humanity, that labor is conscious and deliberate, done with joy and a sense of mission and purpose; truly a labor of love.  Apocalypse means revelation.  Every death is an apocalypse of light — only the light is revealed in the invisible realms. What is needed is an apocalypse of light in the visible realms — as above so below — on earth as it is in heaven.  I see this occurring as this pandemic brings out the best of the human spirit. May it continue long after the crisis is over. 

I leave you with this tidbit of common-sense wisdom: “Like the proverbial bar of soap when squeezed, looking downward we go down; looking upward we go up.”  So, remember to look up when the squeeze is on.  Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved    

Anthony

I think you will find solace in this video clip.  “Death is not an end-point. It’s a transformation moment.” 

 

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Paradise Remembered, part 3: The Origin of Man

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth.”

Grace Van Duzen portrays Man as being first spirit, later to be clothed with form. Spiritual Man clothed with an earthen body—God incarnate on earth—to continue God’s work of creation as a steward of the creative process and keeper of the Garden. That’s the biblical story of Man’s origins.

Grace tells her “Story of Man” in THE BOOK OF GRACE from a cosmic view: 

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth. . . .  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” 

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. . . .

“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

At the conclusion of each creative Day, God saw that “it was good.” After the creation of Man the comment was that He saw every thing that he had made, and. . . it was very good.

On the Sixth Day, then, we have Man (and Woman), a perfect creation. In the sixth cycle divine Being was clothed in earth substance, in position to let God perform His cosmic creative acts on this planet through His earthly image and likeness—the means whereby the invisible things of heaven could be brought forth on Earth.

Dominion over every living thing is the result of obedience to the command to multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, which indicates a state where perfect control is operative in the act of multiplying, which involves sexual activity at all vibratory levels. 

The opposite has occurred, with overpopulation the primary cause of hellish distortions rampant in every corner of this planet which was created to be a paradise. The results of aberrant function in the most vital area of man’s creative activity, the limiting of that act of creation to the physical level, are taking their toll in increasingly massive numbers.

According to this command, dominion over all creatures and kingdoms of the earth is entirely dependent upon control in this central function of life. Multiplication is an essential aspect of all creation, the “seed within itself,” and without the control that causes the design in the heaven to take material form, the result is self-destruction, tragically obvious in man’s present function on this planet.

The fact that Man, male and female, was created with the faculties to extend the control and guidance of a wise and loving God to all the kingdoms of the earth causes one to look at the situation in today’s world, of misery and violence. Something went wrong! Man is afraid, not only of many creatures of the earth but of his own shadow; there is not much dominion in evi­dence. The drastic change in the being designed to control the earth and its creatures inevitably included that over which he was to have dominion. Animals took on the nature of their “fallen” god. It can also be seen how quickly a “creature” will return to the state of “grace” when in the presence of a human being expressing the Spirit of God.

The Being that incarnates into this planet at the present time assumes a much denser sub­stance than that in which man was first created. A finely tuned body, clothed with the highest vibrational substance natural to this part of the cosmos, would be equipped to travel vibra­tionally wherever the Spirit directed. Could this be the origin, deeply buried in the subcon­scious mind of man, of the concept of angels, radiantly robed in white, with wings that enable them to fly? It is an image that has persisted throughout the ages, and I was awed when I became aware, some years ago, that someone had perceived, in the aura of another’s body, the outline of a shape that resembled wings, extending from the area of the shoulder blades. I am not suggesting that the physical form of man’s imaginary wings would be the vehicle for his transportation, but the essence of the design is present, regardless of all that has been done, and cannot be dissolved by fallen human beings. It is still present.

CREATION IN MYTHS

Richard Heinberg tells the creation story as memorialized in myths.  Myths paint a much more colorful and imaginative picture. According to myths about “The First Time,” man’s abode was the heavens, the sky, in which we moved about like birds in the air—spiritual beings made by God—before diving into the water-covered planet Earth. That’s one scenario of Man’s origins. There’s a second scenario that has man emerging from Mother Earth—physical man formed by “the makers.” Heinberg cites both in Memories and Visions of Paradise:

The Earth Diver

Earth Diver myths tell the creation story from the perspective of a representative from the upper world who dives into the primordial chaos to bring forth the first seed of order. The Earth Diver myth tells of how a divine being (usually an animal) descends into the water to bring up bits of mud, which grow to form the whole Earth or even the entire Universe. Earth Diver myths are common among the northern North American tribes, whose cosmologies feature an original upper world inhabited by the immortal Elders and an unformed chaos of water below.

The symbolism in Earth Diver myths is often whimsical: the Diver is often pictured as a muskrat, a duck, or a turtle. Yet the underlying meaning of the myths is nonetheless profound. Water is the unformed reality out of which matter appears, and the descent into the abyss is analogous to baptism, in that it is at once a cleansing and a creative act. “In the beginning there was nothing but water,” says a Huron myth.

Similarly, the Hindu Vishnu Purana tells of an original chaos of waters:

He, the Lord, concluding that within the waters lay the earth, and being desirous to raise it up …. He, the supporter of spiritual and material being, plunged into the ocean.

The Emergence

The Emergence myth centers around the symbolism of Mother Earth, from which human beings emerge through various stages or levels of underworld. Emergence myths are found among the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, and Pawnee Native Americans, and certain groups in the South Pacific islands. In the Emergence myth the Earth is the fertile source of being, containing within herself the essences and potencies of all life. The lower world is described not as a hell, but as a previous mode of existence, a womblike paradise. Neither is the underworld considered to be a literal subterranean cavern, but rather a place “where at death we will all return,” another plane of existence “under”—that is, underlying-the perceptible physical world. Sun or Corn is often the agent of transformation and quickening, leading the First People up into the light. “Before the World was we were all within the Earth,” begins a Pawnee myth; “Mother corn caused movement. She gave life.”!’

In part, the Emergence myth is a metaphor for the journey from a spiritual plane of existence into manifestation in the material world. But the myth also epitomizes the role of the feminine in Creation: it is a symbol and a memory of the primordial Mother, the Earth herself, as she originally was—fresh, new, fertile, the source of all form, the receptacle of all seeds, the nurturer of all life. The tale is told from the perspective of the Creation, emerging from the womb of Earth Mother. . . .

Among nearly all of the variants on the creation-from-clay story, the breath of life is a common feature. For example, according to a Hawaiian myth, Kane and Ku breathed into the nostrils and Lono into the mouth of a clay image, which thereupon became a living being. In an Australian Creation story, Bunjil, the All-Father of the southeast­ern tribes, is said to have made two clay images, male and female, which he shaped onto pieces of bark. He looked at them, was pleased, and danced around them for joy. Finally he lay down on them and blew into their mouths, noses, and navels, after which they stirred and arose. Likewise, the natives of the Kei islands of Indonesia say that their ancestors were fashioned out of clay by the Creator, Dooadlera, who breathed life into the earthen figures. . . .

In many languages, the words for “spirit” and “breath” are identi­cal. Creation-from-clay myths imply that the breath within us—the essence of our being, our life—is a divine gift, a spark of deity. “I am Osiris,” declares the God of ancient Egypt. “I enter in and reappear through you, I decay in you, I grow in you.” The fundamental message of the Hindu Upanishads, similarly, is that Atman (the individual’s innermost Self) is identical with Brahman (the ultimate Cause of All-That-Is). Tat tvam asi—“That thou art”—perhaps the most famous phrase in Sanskrit, is a proclamation of this underlying oneness of God and man, a oneness that ultimately extends to all creation:  

You are everything … O self of all beings!

From the Creator (Brahma) to the blade of grass all is your body, visible and invisible, divided by space and time. . . .

O Transcendent Self! We bow to you as the Cause of causes, the principal shape beyond compare, beyond Nature (pradhana) and Intellect ….

We bow to you, the birthless, the indestructible, You are the ever-present within all things, as the intrinsic principle of all.

We bow to you, resplendent Indweller (Vasudeva)!
the seed of all that is! 

While the story of the animation of clay by an all-powerful Crea­tor describes the union of spirit and matter from creation’s standpoint (matter receiving the breath of spirit), the story of the descent of spirit beings to Earth, sometimes described as their taking on coats of flesh, describes the same process from the heavenly view of the Creator. According to the Molama clan of the Zulu, their remotest ancestors were a man and woman who came down from the sky and alighted on a certain hill. A similar idea is met with among the Wakuluwe, who live between lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika; they say that the first human couple came down from Heaven and produced their offspring from parts of their bodies.

Heinberg waxes eloquent in this summation:

In the beginning there is One—a preexisting Intelligence, alone and limitless. The One, in which the polarities of existence are united in perfect harmony, exerts a conscious act of will and becomes Two—masculine and feminine, active and receptive, Heaven and Earth. The Two work as equal partners in initiating the cyclic cosmic pulsations from which all life emanates.

The reciprocal—one could say sexual—interplay of the Two gen­erates a multiplicity of divine beings, whose further activity, based in the same creative principles, results in the appearance of a manifest Universe of infinite scope and detail. The divine beings plunge into the watery abyss of chaos and return with the first seeds of physical form. Attaching themselves to these nuclei of substance, they continue to gather material about themselves and gradually emerge from the inner, invisible realms of eternity into the visible, tangible world of space and time.

Through this grand process, the One Intelligence differentiates itself into a myriad of self-conscious beings incarnate in material form. And thus there is generated a Universe of limitless diversity, of which each minute part is grounded in a single ultimate Reality.

As I bring these things forward, a question in the back of my mind asks “Why is this brought to me now at a time when the entire world is in the throes of a pandemic of historic proportion?” Actually, I started this series before the Coronavirus made its public appearance.  Perhaps its value lies in remembering that we are immortal beings incarnate in mortal flesh bodies. That design hasn’t changed. God incarnates yet on Earth through Man. The question might be “When are we going to return to our divine commission as keepers of the Garden of Paradise?” 

I will continue with this series in my next post. Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com 

Category:

Creation, Divine identity, Eden, Evolution, Golden Age, Healing Tones Blog, Man and nature, The Paradise Myth

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Paradise Remembered, part 2: The Garden of Eden

“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he placed the man whom he had formed.” (Genesis 2:8)

Most of us today are awake sufficiently and quite able to bear the “many things” the Master Jesus had to share with his disciples but could not due to their limitations of consciousness.  After all, we’ve experienced more than two-thousand years of awakening in consciousness and spiritual maturity since then. What I’m about to share, then, concerning Man’s origins should not disturb anyone, and may even free some from limiting beliefs. Just for one, that it was Eve, tempted by the “serpent,” who then tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden to disobey God’s command that they not partake of “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” thereby initiating the “Fall” that resulted in the loss of Paradise for them and their progeny.

Contrary to this belief, it was Adam, Divine Man, created in the image and likeness of God, a son of God, enamored by the beauty of the forms they had co-created with God, who acted contrary to the Law governing Creation by reversing his polarity with the Creator and polarizing his outer mind in Eve and in Creation itself, and then proceeding to judge the forms, no doubt with Eve’s full participation, as the forms were evolving toward becoming good and complete.  (I take writer’s license here in spelling the word “evil” as “evol,” as it is a habit we humans seem to have inherited of judging and interfering with the Creative Process, thereby creating something evil.)  And their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked, which apparently they didn’t think was a good thing, seeing as how they covered their nakedness with leaves. I’ll pick up on this later on.  First I would like to give thought to the two different versions of the creation of Man as recorded in the first and second chapters of Genesis. 

In chapter one, on the sixth day of Creation, God created Man.

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth. . . .  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” 

Now, a “day” of Creation was a lot longer than an Earth day of 24 hours. Some 25,872 years longer, as author and biblical historian Grace Van Duzen explains in her epic work and legacy, THE BOOK OF GRACE — A Cosmic View of the Bible:

Cycles of time have been recognized, such as an “age,” consisting of 2,156 years; a “solar age” of 25,872 years; and a “universal age” of 310,464 years. The solar age is made up of 12 ages, and the universal age of 12 solar ages. It is the solar age that is referred to in the Book of Genesis as a “day,” with the seven days of Creation totaling 181,104 years. 

The word us in this passage indicates that God, the Creator, was not a single entity but more like a conclave of Creator Beings. Grace offers a more precise explanation:

The word us in this text, “Let us make man in our image,” is derived from the word Elohim, plural of the ancient word for God, El—a designated number of God Beings under the focus of One, El.  A term used later, and consistently, in the Bible story, will be LORD of Lords, referring to this same Being. Elohim was a group, or body of divine Beings who created a body of human beings, for the purpose of indwelling in physical form to continue God’s work on this planet, His image and likeness. Other derivations of the word El have come through varying religions, as for example, Allah, designating the supreme God or ultimate point of focus for the universe.  

In chapter two of Genesis, we find this version of the same creation of Man, male and female: 

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made, and he rested. . . . 

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in  the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. . . .

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2: 1-7)

A question one might rightly ask, then, is “Why was there a need for a ‘man’ to till the ground if the Garden of Eden yielded up food for foraging literally upon demand?” What’s going on here?

We find a fascinating answer to this question in Grace Van Duzen’s book, and further historical details in Richard Heinberg’s.  So, between these two authors, I think we will come away with a deeper and more vital understanding of our origins in Genesis, and what caused the “Fall” and the expulsion of our first parents from the Garden of Eden. This will take several posts, so stay with me.

The Garden of Eating

So many legends and myths tell of a time when Man lived in a Garden of Eden before agricultural practices of tilling the ground to plant seeds for food became vogue.  Food was plentiful in the Garden.  And yet, reading the second version of the creation of Man from the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, supposedly written by Moses, one is left asking, “Why was a ‘man’ needed to till the ground?”   

Here are a few excerpts from Heinberg. (I will share excerpts from Grace’s book in the next post):

Somewhere down in the underworld we were created by the Great Spirit, the Creator. We were created first one, then two, then three. We were created equal, in oneness living in a spiritual way, where life is everlasting. We were happy and at peace with our fellow men.  All things were plentiful, provided by our Mother Earth upon which we were placed. We did not need to plant or work to get food. Illness and troubles were unknown.  (Hopi Elder Dam Katchongva)

Under the subheading The Golden Race there is this: 

The third-century B.C. Neoplatonist Porphyry said that the Greek philosopher Dicaearchus, of the late fourth century B.C., spoke of

men of the earliest age, who were akin to the gods and were by nature the best men and lived the best life, so that they are regarded as a golden race in comparison with the men of the present time … of these primeval men he says that they took the life of no animal. … Dicaearchus tells us of what sort the life of that Age of Cronus was: if it is to be taken as having really existed and not as an idle tale, when the too mythical parts of the story are eliminated it may by the use of reason be reduced to a natural sense. For all things then presumably grew spontaneously, since the men of that time themselves produced nothing, having invented neither agriculture nor any other art. It was for this reason that they lived a life of leisure, without care or toil, and also—if the doctrine of the most eminent medical men is to be accepted-without disease …. And there were no wars or feuds between them; for there existed among them no objects of competition of such value as to give anyone a motive to seek to obtain them by those means. Thus it was that their whole life was one of leisure, of freedom from care about the satisfaction of their needs, of health and peace and friendship. Consequently this manner of life of theirs naturally came to be longed for by men of later times who, because of the greatness of their desires, had become subject to many evils …. All this, says Dicaearchus, is not asserted merely by us, but by those who have thoroughly investigated the history of early times.

The classical Roman authors Ovid, Cratinus, Pausanias, Tibullus, Virgil, and Seneca expanded freely on Hesiod’s story of the original golden race, always emphasizing those qualities that characterize the benefits of the simple, primitive life—freedom, self-sufficiency, and lack of dependence on technology and complex social organization. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was for centuries standard fare in all Euro­pean schools, and his description of the Golden Age in Book I became the definitive form of the myth for the Middle Ages and the Renais­sance: 

The first age was golden. In it faith and righteousness were cherished by men of their own free will without judges or laws. Penalties and fears there were none, nor were threatening words inscribed on unchanging bronze; nor did the suppliant crowd fear the words of its judge, but they were safe without protectors. Not yet did the pine cut from its mountain tops descend into the flowing waters to visit foreign lands, nor did deep trenches gird the town, nor were there straight trumpets, nor horns of twisted brass, nor helmets, nor swords. Without the use of soldiers the peoples in safety enjoyed their sweet repose. Earth herself, unbur­dened and untouched by the hoe and unwounded by the plough­share, gave all things freely …. Spring was eternal … untilled the earth bore its fruits and the unploughed field grew hoary with heavy ears of wheat.

Elsewhere, Ovid speaks of the peaceful amity of Nature herself, before the degeneration of humankind. “That ancient age,” he writes, to which we have given the name of Golden, was blessed with the fruit of trees and the herbs which the soil brings forth, and it did not pollute its mouth with gore. Then the birds in safety winged their way through the air and the hare fearlessly wan­dered through the fields, nor was the fish caught through its witlessness. There were no snares, and none feared treachery, but all was full of peace.

Under the subheading Paradise of the East there is this Indian legend in the Vaya Purana:

In the Krita age human beings appropriated food which was produced from the essence of the earth …. They were character­ized neither by righteousness nor unrighteousness; they were marked by no distinctions. They were produced each with authority over himself. They suffered no impediments, no susceptibilities to the pairs of opposites (like pleasure and pain, cold and heat), and no fatigue. They frequented the mountains and seas, and did not dwell in houses. They never sorrowed, were full of the quality of goodness, and supremely happy; they moved about at will and lived in continual delight …. Produced from the essence of the earth, the things which those people desired sprang up from the earth everywhere and always, when thought of. That perfection of theirs both produced strength and beauty and annihilated disease. With bodies which needed no decora­tion, they enjoyed perpetual youth …. Then truth, content­ment, patience, satisfaction, happiness and self-command prevailed …. There existed among them no such things as gain or loss, friendship or enmity, liking or dislike.”

In China, we again find the Paradise myth flavored somewhat according to local cultural sensibilities, but nevertheless characterizing humankind’s earliest condition as one of ease, plenty, and free­dom. Taoist philosophy, profoundly and often sardonically primitivist, has permeated Chinese thought for at least the last two and a half millennia. According to the earliest Taoist sages, Lao Tzu and Chuang
Tzu, it is Nature herself who is wise, and the intelligent man knows better than to impose on her creative rhythms. “Profound intelli­gence,” according to Lao Tzu, “is that penetrating and pervading power to restore all things to their original harmony.” (Emphasis mine)

I will take up from this last paragraph in my next post—and share some of  Grace Van Duzen’s perspectives from THE BOOK OF GRACE. Until then, 

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com 

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Creation, Dr. Palombo's blog, Eden, Elohim, Evolution, Garden of Paradise, Golden Age, Golden Race, Man and nature, Mythology

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