Creating the New Earth Together

Posts tagged ‘Jesus and Mary Magdalene’

THE GREAT TREE (Re-posted)

As my soul moved upward, I realized that I could no longer hear the voice of the world, as all had become as silence.” — Miryam, from The Gospel of the Beloved Companion¹

(I am republishing this post as an expansion on the theme in my previous post relative to the instruction of the Master Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel of Thomas, that in order to find the Kingdom, one must “abstain from the world.”)

IN THE GOSPEL OF THE BELOVED COMPANION, Miryam (Mary Magdalene), in the mournful wake of their Master’s ignominious crucifixion and unexpected resurrection from the tomb, comforts a gathering of his disciples and shares with them what the author believes is one of the most profound teachings of this entire Gospel. 

Can one, in this noisy world, ever come to a place where one can no longer hear the voice of the world?  My short answer is “Yes.” The following is the longer answer: 

♦ ◊ ♦

Miryam:  MY MASTER SPOKE THUS TO ME.  HE SAID, “MIRYAM, BLESSED ARE YOU WHO CAME INTO BEING BEFORE COMING INTO BEING, AND WH0SE EYES ARE SET UPON THE KINGDOM, WHO FROM THE BEGINNING HAS UNDERSTOOD AND FOLLOWED MY TEACHINGS. ONLY FROM THE TRUTH I TELL YOU, THERE IS A GREAT TREE WITHIN YOU THAT DOES NOT CHANGE, SUMMER OR WINTER, AND ITS LEAVES DO NOT FALL. WHOSOEVER LISTENS TO MY WORDS AND ASCENDS TO ITS CROWN WILL NOT TASTE DEATH, BUT KNOW THE TRUTH OF ETERNAL LIFE.”

THEN HE SHOWED ME A VISI0N IN WHICH I SAW A GREAT TREE THAT SEEMED TO REACH UNTO THE HEAVENS, AND AS I SAW THESE THINGS, HE SAID, “THE ROOTS OF THIS TREE ARE IN THE EARTH, WHICH IS YOUR BODY. THE TRUNK EXTENDS UPWARD THROUGH THE FIVE REGIONS OF HUMANITY TO THE CROWN, WHICH IS THE KINGDOM OF THE SPIRIT. 

Jesus: “THERE ARE EIGHT BOUGHS UPON THIS TREE AND EACH BOUGH BEARS ITS OWN FRUIT, WHICH YOU MUST EAT IN ALL FULLNESS. AS THE FRUIT OF THE TREE IN THE GARDEN CAUSED ADAM AND CHAV’VAH TO FALL INTO DARKNESS, SO THIS FRUIT WILL GRANT TO YOU THE LIGHT OF THE SPIRIT THAT IS ETERNAL LIFE. BETWEEN EACH BOUGH IS A GATE AND A GUARDIAN WHO CHALLENGES THE UNWORTHY WHO TRY TO PASS.

“THE LEAVES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TREE ARE THICK AND PLENTIFUL, S0 NO LIGHT PENETRATE5 TO ILLUMINATE THE WAY.  BUT FEAR NOT, FOR I AM THE WAY AND THE LIGHT, AND I TELL YOU THAT, AS ONE ASCENDS THE TREE, THE LEAVES THAT BLOCK ONE FROM THE LIGHT ARE FEWER, SO IT IS POSSIBLE TO SEE ALL MORE CLEARLY.  THOSE WHO SEEK TO ASCEND MUST FREE THEMSELVES OF THE WORLD. IF YOU DO NOT FREE YOURSELF FROM THE WORLD, YOU WILL DIE IN THE DARKNESS THAT IS THE ROOT OF THE TREE. BUT IF YOU FREE YOURSELF, YOU WILL RISE AND REACH THE LIGHT THAT IS ETERNAL LIFE.”

Miryam: AND AS HE SAID THESE THINGS, I FELT MY SOUL ASCEND AND SAW THE FIRST BOUGH THAT BEARS THE FRUIT OF LOVE AND COMPASSION, THE FOUNDATION OF ALL THINGS. AND I KNEW THAT BEFORE YOU CAN EAT OF THIS FRUIT AND GAIN ITS NOURISHMENT, YOU MUST BE FREE OF ALL JUDGMENT AND WRATH.  WHEN YOU HAVE FREED YOURSELF OF THESE BURDENS, YOU MUST EAT OF THE FRUIT AND SO GAIN THE LOVE AND COMPASSION THAT WILL ALLOW YOU TO PASS THE FIRST OF SEVEN GUARDIANS. AND I HEARD THE VOICE OF THE LORD OF WRATH CALLING TO ME, BUT I DENIED HIM AND HE HAD NO PART IN ME.  

 I SAW MY SOUL ASCENT AGAIN AND HE SHOWED ME THE SECOND GREAT BOUGH WEIGHED DOWN WITH THE FRUIT OF WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING.  AND I SAW THAT BEFORE YOU CAN TASTE OF ITS BOUNTY, YOU MUST BE FREE OF ALL IGNORANCE AND INTOLERANCE. ONLY THEN CAN YOU EAT OF THE FRUIT AND SO PASS UPWARD UNHINDERED THROUGH THE SECOND OF THE SEVEN GATES.  AND I HEARD THE VOICE OF IGNORANCE CALL TO ME, BUT I KNEW HIM NOT, AND SO MY SOUL DID THUS UNCHALLENGED.  

THEN MY MASTER SHOWED ME THE THIRD GREAT BOUGH, WHICH BEARS THE FRUIT OF HONOR AND HUMILITY.  ONLY WHEN FREE OF ALL DUPLICITY AND ARROGANCE MAY YOU PARTAKE OF ITS NOURISHMENT.  AND ARROGANCE CALLED TO ME, SAYING, “YOU ARE NOT WORTHY, GO BACK.” BUT MY SOUL WAS DEAF TO HIM, AND SO MOVED ONWARD AND UPWARD INTO INCREASING LIGHT.

AND THEN THERE CAME THE FOURTH BOUGH, BLOSSOMING WITH THE FRUIT OF STRENGTH AND COURAGE. AND I HEARD HIM TELL ME THAT TO EAT OF THIS FRUIT, YOU MUST HAVE FREED YOURSELF FROM THE WEAKNESS OF THE FLESH AND CONFRONTED AND CONQUERED THE ILLUSION OF YOUR FEARS.  AND THE MASTER OF THE WORLD STOOD BEFORE ME AND CLAIMED ME AS HIS OWN. BUT I DENIED HIM AND HE HAD NO PART OF ME.

ONLY THEN, MY MASTER TOLD ME, WHEN YOU HAVE REJECTED THE DECEIVER, CAN YOU PASS THROUGH THE HARDEST GATE OF ALL, TO ATTAIN THE FIFTH BOUGH AND THE FRUIT OF CLARITY AND TRUTH. ONLY THEN WILL YOU KNOW THE CLARITY AND TRUTH OF YOUR SOUL AND, KNOWING YOURSELF FOR THE FIRST TIME, UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE A CHILD OF THE LIVING SPIRIT.  AND AS MY SOUL MOVED UPWARD, I REALIZED THAT I COULD NO LONCER HEAR THE VOICE OF THE WORLD, AS ALL HAD BECOME AS SILENCE.

THEN IN THE LIGHT ABOVE, I SAW THE SIXTH BOUGH, THE ONE THAT BORE THE FRUIT OF POWER AND HEALING.  MY MASTER TOLD ME THAT WHEN YOU TRULY HAVE EATEN OF THE FRUIT OF THE CLARITY AND TRUTH OF YOURSELF, THEN COULD YOU PARTAKE OF THE FRUIT OF POWER AND HEALINC; THE POWER TO HEAL YOUR OWN SOUL AND THEREBY MAKE IT READY TO ASCEND TO THE SEVENTH BOUGH, WHERE IT WILL BE FILLED BY THE FRUITS OF LIGHT AND GOODNESS.

AND I SAW MY S0UL, NOW FREE OF ALL DARKNESS, ASCEND AGAIN TO BE FILLED WITH THE LIGHT AND G00DNE55 THAT IS THE SPIRIT.  AND I WAS FILLED WITH A FIERCE JOY AS MY S0UL TURNED TO FIRE AND FLEW UPWARDS IN THE FLAMES FROM WHENCE MY MASTER SHOWED ME THE EIGHTH AND FINAL BOUGH, UPON WHICH BURNED THE FRUIT OF THE GRACE AND BEAUTY OF THE SPIRIT.

AND I FELT MY S0UL AND ALL THAT I COULD SEE DISSOLVE AND VANISH IN A BRILLIANT LIGHT IN A LIKENESS UNTO THE SUN. AND IN THE LIGHT, I BEHELD A WOMAN OF EXTRAORDINARY BEAUTY, CLOTHED IN GARMENTS OF BRILLIANT WHITE.  THE FIGURE EXTENDED ITS ARMS, AND I FELT MY SOUL DRAWN INTO ITS EMBRACE, AND IN THAT MOMENT I WAS FREE FROM THE WORLD, AND I REALIZED THAT THE FETTER OF FORGETFULNESS WAS TEMPORARY. FROM NOW ON, I SHALL REST THROUGH THE COURSE OF THE TIME OF THE AGE IN SILENCE. 

AND THEN, AS IF FROM A GREAT DISTANCE, I HEARD THE VOICE OF MY MASTER TELL ME, “MIRYAM, WHOM I HAVE CALLED THE MIGDALAH, NOW YOU HAVE SEEN THE ALL, AND HAVE KNOWN THE TRUTH OF YOURSELF, THE TRUTH THAT IS I AM.  NOW YOU HAVE BECOME THE COMPLETION OF COMPLETIONS,” AND THUS THE VISION ENDED.

 THIS IS WHAT MY MASTER HAS TOLD AND SHOWN ME.  AND ONLY FROM THE TRUTH I TELL YOU, THAT ALL THAT I HAVE REVEALED TO YOU IS TRUE.

WHEN THE MIGDALAH HAD TOLD OF ALL THAT YESHUA HAD SAID AND DONE, SHE FELL SILENT, SINCE IT WAS IN THAT SILENCE THAT YESHUA HAD SPOKEN WITH HER AND REVEALED THESE TRUTHS.

♦ ◊ ♦

SEVEN STEPS TO THE TEMPLE OF LIGHT

Lloyd Arthur Meeker (Uranda) gave us Seven Steps to the Temple of Light.  They are Patience, Tranquility, Realization, Assurance, Radiance, Wisdom and Love.  He expands on their gifts and characteristics in a little booklet by the same name composed as a daily meditation and practice during a seven-day week for seven weeks, a meditative practice for anyone seeking a spiritual path to the realization of their own authentic Self in true identity.  (I have 3 copies I would love to give to someone.) 

As a synopsis: through Patience we let our life unfold naturally without trying to push the River, and we are content to let the evolution of physical forms take their own measured time.  This relaxed condition in our physical body fosters stillness and Tranquility in the mind, allowing for a sharp focus of singular direction and purposeful action with unwavering resolve and determination. This singleness of mind lends power to our outer actions that can easily bring about a Realization of our creative endeavors, as well as facilitate our soul’s ascent to the higher levels. 

The fourth step is Assurance and clarification of our heart substance that allow us to know for certain our angelic presence in the world.  Being aware of our divine nature and fixing our polarity in Spirit and its expression, the Radiance and vitality of Life shines through our outer being, bringing with it a sense of the fitness of things, the gift of Wisdom at the sixth level.  The seventh and final step is simply to enter our Temple of Light, and let our soul be taken up into oneness with and consummation by the Spirit, who dwells in the eighth level, the level of the silent octave.  Here we are invited and beckoned to abide for the remainder of our life’s earthly sojourn, letting love radiate without concern for results. 

While our souls ascend up into our temples of light by these seven steps to meet and fuse with the Holy Spirit at the Crown above—which is the Divine Feminine, Mother God—our angelic being incarnates and descends from above into radiant expression of Light Divine, which is the Divine Masculine, Father God, facilitated by the seven sacred energy-transforming centers of our endocrine system. These endocrine glands provide high-frequency alchemical steps for descending energetically out of the invisible realm of Heaven and into the lower-frequency visible and material realm of Earth.  This defines our whole purpose for leaving the realms of Light and incarnating into the darker realms of physical life: to enlighten the world with our love and assist in bringing forth creation out of the darkness of the womb and into the light of a new day—judgement, shame and accusation notwithstanding.  

The Master Jesus reminded us of this purpose when he said “Let your light so shine that men may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in Heaven.” Let the will of the One in Heaven be done on Earth.  With this command, I leave you to meditate upon Miryam’s account of her encounter with “Jeshua” and the ascent of her soul to the crown of the Great Tree where it was consumed by the fire of the Holy Spirit of Love.  I welcome any thoughts you may wish to share. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved. 

Anthony 

tpal70@gmail.com

¹ THE GOSPEL OF THE BELOVED COMPANION – The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Translation and Commentary by Jehanne De Quillan. 

The Crown Portal to The Temple of Light

 

OVER THE LAST SEVERAL DAYS I’ve been dipping down into the bottomless pit of knowledge to explore the current activities in the world of medicine. Having spent more than half of my life in the healthcare field, I have a lingering sense of responsibility to help out friends who now look to me for guidance in these troubling pandemic times.  I assure you, the pit of knowledge is truly bottomless, filled with all sorts of conflicting opinions and tons of data one could spend hours and more studying and breaking down for easy assimilation and comprehension, a rather exhausting and futile undertaking . . . most of the time . . . and not always fruitless.

I waded through filthy waters full of deceit, lies, conspiracy, manipulation, censure, hype of all sorts, and sheer greed and avarice—though some of the water was clearer containing helpful information, insight and wisdom.

As I sit down to complete this week’s blog post, I feel a little used up mentally having just labored through several scientific interviews and medical news releases, and emerged from conversational interchanges on social media that deteriorated into argument and ridicule.  I had to delete the entire conversation in order to cut short the unravelling thread.  People are confused and fearful for their health and lives.

Yet this is the world into which we have chosen to incarnate and offer our services, a world mixed with the beautiful along with the ugly.  I embrace it all with love, forgiveness and compassion even as I put it out of mind now and return my attention to the place where I live and to which my soul longs to fully ascend.  Thank you for listening to my process. Now to my post.

◊ ♦ ◊ 

IN MY LAST POST, THE GREAT TREE, I shared a passage from the gospel of Mary Magdalene, or Miryam as her Master Jeshua called her.  She was his Beloved Companion, after all, and he loved her more than he loved any of his other disciples, for which they resented and envied her, and questioned him.  His answer was “Why can I love her more than I love you?”  It was because she returned his unconditional love sevenfold, understood and kept his teachings more than they did.  I think we all tend to love most those who understand us and love us unconditionally.

Because of her love for Jeshua, Miryam ascended to the level of “Apostle of apostles” and the “One who knew the All.”  Her soul ascended to the Crown at the Eighth Bough of the Great Tree and was utterly consumed by Spirit, represented and embodied by a woman clothed with the sun who dwells in this realm of eternal life. Miryam became the sun, and in her “responsive radiance” spent the remainder of her earthly journey in silence, because it was in the silence that her Master had spoken to her and revealed the truths inherent in the Great Tree. What a profound experience and sharing of her intimate relationship with Jeshua, her beloved Lord and Master.

THE TEMPLE OF LIGHT

I am profoundly and deeply moved, because I am very much aware of this Great Tree in my own body temple, and the presence of Spirit at the Crown, which Uranda described and designated “The Temple of Light,” and to which he assigned seven steps of ascent. 

Now, I’ve always thought of the seventh step, Love, as the destination of the ascent.  However, Love is a step, the final step, leading to the Temple of Light, the implication being that the destination of the seven steps is the eighth landing, so-to-speak, above the seventh step. From this step one may ascend, as Miryam did, to the “Eighth Bough,” and in so doing enter the Temple of Light.  When one does enter his or her Temple of Light, one is filled with the radiance of the Spirit, consumed by the Sun and embraced by the Woman clothed by the Sun: the Great Mother. So much profound symbolism in these passages.

I would like to share a grand perspective of our total Humanity and whole holy Being, followed by something very personal about my experience of Attunement with Love, a gift from God given to the world through Uranda.  I first spoke of this in my book SACRED ANATOMY sixteen years ago, so this isn’t the first time I share it.

◊  ♦ ◊

From SACRED ANATOMY:

      I mentioned life’s radiance as emanating from a point “within.”  We commonly think of our spirit as being within us, implying that I am inside my body.  But my experience has actually been that my body is inside me, in much the same way as the Earth, a relatively small deposit of cosmic rock with a molten core, is situated at the center of a vast magnetosphere.  This magnetosphere is known to flare outward and away from the Sun, like giant wings upon which our planet soars against the powerful and unrelenting currents of Solar Wind, eternally and irresistibly drawn toward its origin in the Sun but never quite able to come any closer to it.  Rather, the Sun comes to the Earth and to all the planets, engulfing them in its radiant light and solar winds.  In fact, if we take into consideration the entire outreach of the Sun’s rays, the planets are all contained within the Sun completely engulfed in its colossal magnetic force field as condensed particles of solar plasma.

  (Earth is surrounded by a system of magnetic fields, called the magnetosphere. The magnetosphere shields our home planet from harmful solar and cosmic particle radiation, but it can change shape in response to incoming space weather from the Sun.)  

This is also true of each one of us.   Our physical bodies have been described as “frozen light,” and are but a condensation of about a teaspoon of mineral ash expanded by air and water at the center of a rather large biosphere, which is said to extend some forty feet above, below and all around the physical body.   That biosphere is but the lower half of a larger force-field, symbolized by the figure 8.  The top half represents the invisible domain of spirit in the heaven and the lower represents the visible reflection in the earth of the perfect design of man in the heaven.  The two are joined together manifesting the oneness of heaven and earth.  This joining together may also be seen as a “double ring” marriage between the Beloved Lord or Lady with his or her triune human capacity for incarnation, which only death of the body can part them.

The Torus Energy Biosphere

      The upper spiritual half continually radiates the love of the Beloved to and through the lower physical half on the right side and draws upon it for response to the radiation up through the left side, ever lifting the body upward and keeping it upright and mobile.  Your body does not stand up solely on its feet.  It is, rather, suspended by a “skyhook” on a silver chord of pneumaplasm that connects it with the angel who dwells in the heavenly realm of spirit, the angel I am and we each one are. There is a compulsion in physical flesh to be drawn upward and inward toward the positive center of Being, just as the earth and all the planets are drawn toward the sun. I sense this focal point connecting the upper half with the lower to be located just above the head.

      Access to this point is through the heart, the fourth level of our sacred anatomy connecting the three above and the three below.  We move in the direction of our heart’s response. When the heart ponders the presence of the Beloved within long and longingly, sending unceasing, rich and passionate currents of love response upward to this One I AM, the body itself begins to feel the ebb and flow of these ascending and descending currents of energy.

      Perhaps I can attempt to describe the feeling in my heart toward this focal point of radiance above my head—of which I have become keenly aware during meditation and “self-attunement” as a spiritual practice—as clearly one of  being drawn and repelled at the same time. 

      On several occasions I have had the urge to ascend upward and somehow nestle inside the irresistibly warm and enfolding orb of this light, but could never seem to come any closer to it. 

Then, on one occasion, while it seemed as if I was finally about to disappear into this point of no apparent magnitude but definite position—where my heart had already ascended in utter ecstasy—this orb of condensed light suddenly descended and dispersed itself into and through my outer form, as a mighty rush of wind, filling my whole body both within and round about with light.

The MerKaBa

(This is the actual process and dynamic of ascension: the descension and full incarnation of the angel into the body temple, an experience that seems like an ascension. It is actually the descent of spirit down into the body temple transmuting it into a temple of light, symbolized by the six-pointed Star of David, also known as the MerKaBa.) 

The sheer rush of it caused my vocal chords to explode with the most awesomely haunting and penetrating sound I have ever heard, let along sung, and yet my lungs were not even engaged in this forceful release of whatever it was—the wind of spirit, I suppose.  It came from above my head as a real, palpable substance, and then seemingly exploded its vibrational essences through my vocal chords, giving them little if any choice but to release this sacred, transforming and transmuting sacred sound.

      In the instant this sound was released my whole outer being seemed to suddenly shift to a higher vibratory level and became completely engulfed inside a radiant sphere of substance that seemed to be made of pure light. I found myself suddenly in another dimension as though my body had ascended to the next vibratory level above the one in which we now function in these earth bodies. The strangest thing about this was that it seemed as though this sphere had been there all along and I had not noticed it. I had known about it but I had not experienced it until that moment when it revealed itself as this vibrational shift occurred and the atmosphere around my body became filled with the substance of Love, intensifying the force field. Then I became aware of it, suspended, as my body was, inside of it.  It seemed as though my feet were not touching the ground and I had the most powerful déja vu experience of my entire life. “This is where I belong,” I recall being assured in my heart. “This is Home.  This is who I am, this magnificent and powerful spirit enveloping and animating this human form.”  In the wake of that ecstatic moment was a deafening silence. 

      I did not want to leave that silent moment.  And I never shall leave it in consciousness for as long as I shall live, and I return to it often. I have had a couple of similar experiences since then—significantly enough while singing solo during worship services and therein focusing a creative current—but never quite as powerful as this first time. 

      I later came to understand that the first experience was that of a vibrational dam of resistance in my heart breaking, releasing a rush of current. After that initial surge of release, the experience became one of a natural and easy flow of spirit.  I recall how I had a challenge keeping my feet on the floor as I began to sing.  I had to deliberately look into the eyes of someone in the gathering—(another angel of sound)—in order to stay grounded.  I also recall feeling that this was the easiest and most natural experience I had ever known.  

      This focal point of connection truly is, without a doubt in my mind and heart, our ordained place to live, and we must—we can and we will—all return to it one day.  It is definitely available for experience when the conditions are just right, and therein is the key.  We must be willing to create, or occasion, the right conditions in which this magical alchemy of ascension may occur, which only the spirit and substance of love can provide sent upward in utter abandon to one’s Lord.

      The spiritual practice of Attunement is one way of creating such space. This is the source of inspiration behind this writing.  This is the work, I believe, we have all come here to do—our Father’s business—and it will not be complete until we return to this vibrational place together as One Body of many members in agreement and accord with the One Archangelic Spirit whose body it is.

◊ ♦ ◊

I welcome any thoughts you may wish to share, either by email or in the comment section below. Until my next post, 

Be love.  Be loved.

Anthony  (tpal70@gmail.com)

 

THE GREAT TREE

As my soul moved upward, I realized that I could no longer hear the voice of the world, as all had become as silence.” — Miryam, from The Gospel of the Beloved Companion¹

In the Gospel of the Beloved Companion, Miryam (Mary Magdalene), in the mournful wake of their Master’s ignominious crucifixion, comforts a gathering of his disciples and shares with them what, in the author’s opinion, is one of the most profound teachings of this entire Gospel.   

MY MASTER SPOKE THUS TO ME.  HE SAID, “MIRYAM, BLESSED ARE YOU WHO CAME INTO BEING BEFORE COMING INTO BEING, AND WH0SE EYES ARE SET UPON THE KINGDOM, WHO FROM THE BEGINNING HAS UNDERSTOOD AND FOLLOWED MY TEACHINGS. ONLY FROM THE TRUTH I TELL YOU, THERE IS A GREAT TREE WITHIN YOU THAT DOES NOT CHANGE, SUMMER OR WINTER, AND ITS LEAVES DO NOT FALL. WHOSOEVER LISTENS TO MY WORDS AND ASCENDS TO ITS CROWN WILL NOT TASTE DEATH, BUT KNOW THE TRUTH OF ETERNAL LIFE.”

THEN HE SHOWED ME A VISI0N IN WHICH I SAW A GREAT TREE THAT SEEMED TO REACH UNTO THE HEAVENS, AND AS I SAW THESE THINGS, HE SAID, “THE ROOTS OF THIS TREE ARE IN THE EARTH, WHICH IS YOUR BODY. THE TRUNK EXTENDS UPWARD THROUGH THE FIVE REGIONS OF HUMANITY TO THE CROWN, WHICH IS THE KINGDOM OF THE SPIRIT. 

“THERE ARE EIGHT BOUGHS UPON THIS TREE AND EACH BOUGH BEARS ITS OWN FRUIT, WHICH YOU MUST EAT IN ALL FULLNESS. AS THE FRUIT OF THE TREE IN THE GARDEN CAUSED ADAM AND CHAV’VAH TO FALL INTO DARKNESS, SO THIS FRUIT WILL GRANT TO YOU THE LIGHT OF THE SPIRIT THAT IS ETERNAL LIFE. BETWEEN EACH BOUGH IS A GATE AND A GUARDIAN WHO CHALLENGES THE UNWORTHY WHO TRY TO PASS.

“THE LEAVES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TREE ARE THICK AND PLENTIFUL, S0 NO LIGHT PENETRATE5 TO ILLUMINATE THE WAY.  BUT FEAR NOT, FOR I AM THE WAY AND THE LIGHT, AND I TELL YOU THAT, AS ONE ASCENDS THE TREE, THE LEAVES THAT BLOCK ONE FROM THE LIGHT ARE FEWER, SO IT IS POSSIBLE TO SEE ALL MORE CLEARLY.  THOSE WHO SEEK TO ASCEND MUST FREE THEMSELVES OF THE WORLD. IF YOU DO NOT FREE YOURSELF FROM THE WORLD, YOU WILL DIE IN THE DARNESS THAT IS THE ROOT OF THE TREE. BUT IF YOU FREE YOURSELF, YOU WILL RISE AND REACH THE LIGHT THAT IS ETERNAL LIFE.”

AND AS HE SAID THESE THINGS, I FELT MY SOUL ASCEND AND SAW THE FIRST BOUGH THAT BEARS THE FRUIT OF LOVE AND COMPASSION, THE FOUNDATION OF ALL THINGS. AND I KNEW THAT BEFORE YOU CAN EAT OF THIS FRUIT AND GAIN ITS NOURISHMENT, YOU MUST BE FREE OF ALL JUDGMENT AND WRATH.  WHEN YOU HAVE FREED YOURSELF OF THESE BURDENS, YOU MUST EAT OF THE FRUIT AND SO GAIN THE LOVE AND COMPASSION THAT WILL ALLOW YOU TO PASS THE FIRST OF SEVEN GUARDIANS. AND I HEARD THE VOICE OF THE LORD OF WRATH CALLING TO ME, BUT I DENIED HIM AND HE HAD NO PART IN ME.  

 I SAW MY SOUL ASCENT AGAIN AND HE SHOWED ME THE SECOND GREAT BOUGH WEIGHED DOWN WITH THE FRUIT OF WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING.  AND I SAW THAT BEFORE YOU CAN TASTE OF ITS BOUNTY, YOU MUST BE FREE OF ALL IGNORANCE AND INTOLERANCE. ONLY THEN CAN YOU EAT OF THE FRUIT AND SO PASS UPWARD UNHINDERED THROUGH THE SECOND OF THE SEVEN GATES.  AND I HEARD THE VOICE OF IGNORANCE CALL TO ME, BUT I KNEW HIM NOT, AND SO MY SOUL DID THUS UNCHALLENGED.  

THEN MY MASTER SHOWED ME THE THIRD GREAT BOUGH, WHICH BEARS THE FRUIT OF HONOR AND HUMILITY.  ONLY WHEN FREE OF ALL DUPLICITY AND ARROGANCE MAY YOU PARTAKE OF ITS NOURISHMENT.  AND ARROGANCE CALLED TO ME, SAYING, “YOU ARE NOT WORTHY, GO BACK.” BUT MY SOUL WAS DEAF TO HIM, AND SO MOVED ONWARD AND UPWARD INTO INCREASING LIGHT.

AND THEN THERE CAME THE FOURTH BOUGH, BLOSSOMING WITH THE FRUIT OF STRENGTH AND COURAGE. AND I HEARD HIM TELL ME THAT TO EAT OF THIS FRUIT, YOU MUST HAVE FREED YOURSELF FROM THE WEAKNESS OF THE FLESH AND CONFRONTED AND CONQUERED THE ILLUSION OF YOUR FEARS.  AND THE MASTER OF THE WORLD STOOD BEFORE ME AND CLAIMED ME AS HIS OWN. BUT I DENIED HIM AND HE HAD NO PART OF ME.

ONLY THEN, MY MASTER TOLD ME, WHEN YOU HAVE REJECTED THE DECEIVER, CAN YOU PASS THROUGH THE HARDEST GATE OF ALL, TO ATTAIN THE FIFTH BOUGH AND THE FRUIT OF CLARITY AND TRUTH. ONLY THEN WILL YOU KNOW THE CLARITY AND TRUTH OF YOUR SOUL AND, KNOWING YOURSELF FOR THE FIRST TIME, UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE A CHILD OF THE LIVING SPIRIT.  AND AS MY SOUL MOVED UPWARD, I REALIZED THAT I COULD NO LONCER HEAR THE VOICE OF THE WORLD, AS ALL HAD BECOME AS SILENCE.

THEN IN THE LIGHT ABOVE, I SAW THE SIXTH BOUGH, THE ONE THAT BORE THE FRUIT OF POWER AND HEALING.  MY MASTER TOLD ME THAT WHEN YOU TRULY HAVE EATEN OF THE FRUIT OF THE CLARITY AND TRUTH OF YOURSELF, THEN COULD YOU PARTAKE OF THE FRUIT OF POWER AND HEALINC; THE POWER TO HEAL YOUR OWN SOUL AND THEREBY MAKE IT READY TO ASCEND TO THE SEVENTH BOUGH, WHERE IT WILL BE FILLED BY THE FRUITS OF LIGHT AND GOODNESS.

AND I SAW MY S0UL, NOW FREE OF ALL DARKNESS, ASCEND AGAIN TO BE FILLED WITH THE LIGHT AND G00DNE55 THAT IS THE SPIRIT.  AND I WAS FILLED WITH A FIERCE JOY AS MY S0UL TURNED TO FIRE AND FLEW UPWARDS IN THE FLAMES FROM WHENCE MY MASTER SHOWED ME THE EIGHTH AND FINAL BOUGH, UPON WHICH BURNED THE FRUIT OF THE GRACE AND BEAUTY OF THE SPIRIT.

AND I FELT MY S0UL AND ALL THAT I COULD SEE DISSOLVE AND VANISH IN A BRILLIANT LIGHT IN A LIKENESS UNTO THE SUN. AND IN THE LIGHT, I BEHELD A WOMAN OF EXTRAORDINARY BEAUTY, CLOTHED IN GARMENTS OF BRILLIANT WHITE.  THE FIGURE EXTENDED ITS ARMS, AND I FELT MY SOUL DRAWN INTO ITS EMBRACE, AND IN THAT MOMENT I WAS FREE FROM THE WORLD, AND I REALIZED THAT THE FETTER OF FORGETFULNESS WAS TEMPORARY. FROM NOW ON, I SHALL REST THROUGH THE COURSE OF THE TIME OF THE AGE IN SILENCE. 

AND THEN, AS IF FROM A GREAT DISTANCE, I HEARD THE VOICE OF MY MASTER TELL ME, “MIRYAM, WHOM I HAVE CALLED THE MIGDALAH, NOW YOU HAVE SEEN THE ALL, AND HAVE KNOWN THE TRUTH OF YOURSELF, THE TRUTH THAT IS I AM.  NOW YOU HAVE BECOME THE COMPLETION OF COMPLETIONS,” AND THUS THE VISION ENDED.

 THIS IS WHAT MY MASTER HAS TOLD AND SHOWN ME.  AND ONLY FROM THE TRUTH I TELL YOU, THAT ALL THAT I HAVE REVEALED TO YOU IS TRUE.

WHEN THE MIGDALAH HAD TOLD OF ALL THAT YESHUA HAD SAID AND DONE, SHE FELL SILENT, SINCE IT WAS IN THAT SILENCE THAT YESHUA HAD SPOKEN WITH HER AND REVEALED THESE TRUTHS.

This account of Mary Magdalene’s all-consuming ascent up to the crown of this “Great Tree” isn’t the only time in the scriptures where a feminine entity is mentioned in an ecstatic vision or encounter with the Spirit.  John in Revelation (12:1-4) describes a vision he was given of a woman in heaven: 

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.  And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. . . .  And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . .” 

Shortly after this, the dragon and “accuser of our brethren” is cast out of heaven and down to the earth having “great wrath” knowing that he “hath but a short time to live.”  The woman fled to the wilderness where she gave birth to her “man child” which was “caught up unto God.” This entire chapter is filled with metaphors and prophecy, a thrill of the spirit to read.

This child is the Christ Spirit of Love, which the dragon of the human mind out from under the dominion of God ever seeks to negate and prevent from being born through the hearts of men and women, knowing that love casts out fear, the means of controlling the masses. Fearless children are not so inhibited by shame and judgment, but let their lights shine openly, and without being told or taught, showing that the joyful expression of the spirit of love—of kindness, of joy and generosity—are natural to us all. 

Seven Steps to the Temple of Light

Lloyd Arthur Meeker (Uranda) gave us Seven Steps to the Temple of Light.  They are Patience, Tranquility, Realization, Assurance, Radiance, Wisdom and Love.  He expands on their gifts and characteristics in a little booklet by the same name composed as a daily meditation and practice during a seven-day week for seven weeks, a meditative practice for anyone seeking a spiritual path to the realization of their own authentic Self in true identity.  (I have 3 copies I would love to give to someone.) 

As a synopsis: through Patience we let our life unfold naturally without trying to push the River, and we are content to let the evolution of physical forms take their own measured time.  This relaxed condition in our physical body fosters a Tranquility in the mind, allowing for a sharp focus of singular direction and purposeful action with unwavering resolve and determination.  This singleness of mind lends power to our outer actions that can easily bring about a Realization of our creative endeavors, as well as facilitate our soul’s ascent to the higher levels. 

The fourth step is Assurance and clarification of our heart substance that allow us to know for certain our angelic presence in the world.  Being aware of our divine nature and fixing our polarity in Spirit and its expression, the Radiance and vitality of Life shines through our outer being, bringing with it a sense of the fitness of things, the gift of Wisdom at the sixth level.  The seventh and final step is simply to enter our Temple of Light, and let our soul be taken up into oneness with and consummation by the Spirit, who dwells in the eighth level, the level of the silent octave.  Here we are invited and beckoned to abide for the remainder of our life’s earthly sojourn, letting love radiate without concern for results. 

While our souls ascend up into our temples of light by these seven steps to meet and fuse with the Holy Spirit at the Crown above—which is the Divine Feminine, Mother God—our angelic being incarnates and descends from above, down, inside and out into radiant expression of Light Divine, which is the Divine Masculine, Father God, facilitated by the seven sacred energy-transforming centers of our endocrine system, which is comprised of seven hormone-secreting glands.  These glands provide our high-frequency angelic being alchemical steps for descending energetically out of the invisible realm of Heaven and into the lower-frequency visible and material realm of Earth.  This defines our whole purpose for leaving the realms of Light and incarnating into the darker realms of physical life: to enlighten the world with our love and assist in bringing forth creation out of the darkness of the womb and into the light of a new day—judgement, shame and accusation notwithstanding.  

The Master Jesus reminded us of this purpose when he said “Let your light so shine that men may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in Heaven.” Let the will of the One in Heaven be done on Earth.  With this command, I leave you to meditate upon Miryam’s account of her encounter with “Jeshua” and the ascent of her soul to the crown of the Great Tree where it was consumed by the fire of the Spirit of Love. 

I welcome any thoughts you may wish to share. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved. 

Anthony  (tpal70@gmail.com)

¹ THE GOSPEL OF THE BELOVED COMPANION – The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Translation and Commentary by Jehanne De Quillan. 

Kenosis: The Path of Self-Emptying Love

IN THIS SERIES, I will explore the path of “Kenotic Love” as seen through the passionate heart and Christened mind of one of my favorite authors, Episcopal prelate Cynthia Bourgeault, who has rekindled in my heart an ecstatic love for the Man whom Mary Magdalene called “Rabboni”— and who knew her as his Beloved Companion — the romantic story about which I wrote a post back in August, 2018,  The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, which would be a timely read in this day of the rising Divine Feminine. Also my October post Fifth Way Love, A Romantic Path to Transformation.

In this post I will share excerpts from Cynthia’s book THE Wisdom Jesus — Transforming Heart and Mind.  This passage speaks to Jesus’s character and his message to humankind.  Christianity does not teach the Kenotic path that Jesus literally went down.

JUSUS  

There has always been a strong tendency among Christians to turn him into a priest —“our great high priest,” in the powerful metaphor of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews. The image of Christos Pantokrator (“Lord of All Creation”) dressed in splendid sacramental robes has dominated the iconography of both Eastern and Western Christendom. But Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple hierarchy in Jeru­salem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual obser­vances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impend­ing political catastrophe in an attempt to redirect their hearts to God.

Jesus was not interested in the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah continuously being thrust upon him. His message was not one of repentance and return to the covenant. Rather, he stayed close to the perennial ground of wisdom: the transformation of human consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mir­ror Divine Being itself? These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire field of Jesus’s concern. If you look for a comparable category today, the closest analogy would probably be the Sufi sheik who wields the threefold functions of wisdom teacher, spiritual elder, and channel for the direct transmission of blessing (baraka), in a fashion closely parallel to Jesus’s himself. The sheik is a distinctly Near Eastern category, and it probably best preserves the mantle that Jesus himself once wore. . . .

In order to go up one must first go all the way down.  For flesh to rise, spirit must first descend.  To ascend, one must fully incarnate.  I love how deeply Cynthia understands the kenotic path Jesus took.  

THE PATH OF KENOTIC LOVE

SO FAR WE have been looking at Jesus as typical of the wisdom tradition from which he comes. An enlightened master recognized by his followers as the Ihidaya, or the Single One, he teaches the art of metanoia, or “going into the larger mind.” Underlying all his teaching is a clarion call to a radical shift in consciousness: away from the alienation and polarization of the egoic operating system and into the unified field of divine abundance that can be perceived only through the heart. But how does one make this shift in consciousness? It’s one thing to admire it from a distance, but quite another to create it within oneself.

This is where spiritual praxis comes into play. “Praxis” means the path, the actual practice you follow to bring about the result that you’re yearning for. I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same cen­ter—the emergence of this larger, non dual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes. While Jesus is typical of the wisdom tradition in his vision of what a whole and unified human being looks like, the route he lays out for getting there is very different from anything that had ever been seen on the planet up to that point. It is still radical in our own time and definitely the “road less taken” among the various schools of human transformation. I will fill in the pieces of this assertion as I go along, but my hunch is that a good many of the difficulties we sometimes run into trying to make our Christianity work stem from the fact that right from the start people missed how different Jesus’s approach really was. By trying to contain this new wine in old wineskins, they inadver­tently missed its own distinct flavor. In Jesus everything hangs together around a single center of gravity, and you need to know what this center is before you can sense the subtle but cohesive power of the path he is laying out.

What name might we give to this center? The apostle Paul suggests the word kenosis. In Greek the verb kenosein means “to let go,” or “to empty oneself,” and this is the word Paul chooses at the key moment in his celebrated teaching in Philippians 2:9-16 in order to describe what “the mind of Christ” is all about. Here is what he has to say:

Though his state was that of God, yet he did not deem equality with God something he should cling to.

Rather, he emptied himself, and assuming the state of a slave, he was born in human likeness.

He, being known as one of us,
humbled himself, obedient unto death,
even death on the cross.

For this, God raised him on high
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every other name.

So that at the name of Jesus,
every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

And so every tongue should proclaim
“Jesus Christ is Lord!” to God the Father’s glory.’

In this beautiful hymn, Paul recognizes that Jesus had only one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied himself and descended into human form.  And he emptied himself still further (“even unto death on the cross”) and fell through the bottom to return to the realms of dominion and glory. In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, of the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher.

What makes this mode so interesting is that it’s almost com­pletely spiritually counterintuitive. For the vast majority of the world’s spiritual seekers, the way to God is “up.” Deeply embed­ded in our religious and spiritual traditions—and most likely in the human collective unconscious itself—is a kind of compass that tells us that the spiritual journey is an ascent, not a descent. Most students of the wisdom tradition consider this upward ori­entation to be one of the foundational attributes of sophia peren­nis itself, its origins no doubt archetypal.  While my own work with the wisdom Jesus has led me to disagree, it is hard to deny that the idea of spiritual ascent has been around for a long, long time. In biblical tradition, the image of the spiritual ladder goes all the way back to the headwaters of the Old Testament, with the story of Jacob’s dream of the ladder going up to heaven. It is probably five thousand years old. Christian monastic tra­dition returned to this image and developed it still further, as essentially the roadmap for the spiritual journey. The seventh century teacher John Climacus (“John of the Ladder”) even took his monastic name from this powerful image, and through his influential teachings it became the underlying philosophy of monastic practices such as lectio divina and psalmody.

Ascent mysticism was very much in the air in Jesus’s time as well. Earlier in this book I spoke of the Essene community, that apocalyptic Jewish sect whose visionary mysticism and ascetic practices were probably the most immediate formative influ­ence on Jesus. At the heart of the Essene understanding was a particular strain of spiritual yearning known as merkevah mysti­cism. Merkevah means “chariot,” an allusion to the Old Testa­ment story of the prophet Elijah being taken up to heaven in a chariot. This dramatic episode offered a vivid image of ascent to God, which the Essenes saw as applying both individually and for the entire people of Israel. “The end of the world was at hand,” and all eyes were gazing intently upward as Jesus took birth on
the earth.

To rise requires energy, in the spiritual realm as well as the physical one. And thus, the vast majority of the world’s spiritual technologies work on some variation of the principle of “conservation of energy.” Within each person there is seen to reside a sacred energy of being (sometimes known as the “chi,” or prana, the life force). This energy, in itself infinite, is measured out to each person in a finite amount and bestowed as our basic working capital when we arrive on this planet. The great spiritual tradi­tions have always taught that if we can contain this energy rather than letting it leach away—if we can concentrate it, develop it, make it more intentional and powerful—then this concentrated energy will allow us to climb that ladder of spiritual ascent. 

This ancient and universal strategy is really at the basis of all genuine asceticism (that is, asceticism in the service of conscious transformation, not as a means of penance or self-mortification). And there is good reason for this: the strategy works. Through the disciplines of prayer, meditation, fasting, and inner witness­ing the seeker learns how to purify and concentrate this inner reserve and to avoid squandering it in physical or emotional lust, petty reactions, and ego gratification. As self-mastery is gradu­ally attained, the spiritual energy concentrated within becomes strong enough and clear enough to sustain contact with those increasingly higher and more intense frequencies of the divine life, until at last one converges upon that unitive point. It’s a coherent and powerful path of inner transformation. But it’s not the only path.

There’s another route to center: a more reckless path and extravagant path, which is attained not through storing up that energy or concentrating the life force, but through throwing it all away-or giving it all away. The unitive point is reached not through the concentration of being but through the free squan­dering of it; not through acquisition or attainment but through self-emptying; not through “up” but through “down.” This is the way of kenosis, the revolutionary path that Jesus introduced into the consciousness of the West.
(to be continued)

THE PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS

I will leave you to ponder this original prayer of St. Francis, believed to be written by a French Franciscan and based on a little known admonition Francis wrote to his friars, according to James Twyman. 

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.

Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor disturbance.

Where there is poverty (simplicity) with gladness, there is neither covetousness nor greed.

Where there is quiet and meditation, there is neither concern nor wandering.

Where there is love of God to guard the house (cf. Lk. 11:21), there the enemy cannot gain entry.

Where there is mercy and discernment, there is neither excess nor severity.

I am deeply thankful to God for life, for health, for serenity of mind and peace of heart.  I am particularly thankful at this time of harvest when we celebrate Thanksgiving for the abundance of Mother Nature as she clothes the trees with new leaves in the wake of devastating hurricanes.  I am profoundly thankful for my companion in life, Bonnie Lee, and for all our family on the West Coast.  Thank you, Lord, for the gift of their presence in our life and in our world.  To my readers and blog followers, a heartful appreciation for traveling with me these past several rich years of sharing the meditations of my heart.  I always enjoy your responses.  Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved. Be Thankful

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

“Who Am I?”

“Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.” Jacob Bronowski

In the PBS concert presentation of Les Miserables earlier this past Summer, Jean Valjean seeks an answer to the ancient question: “Who am I?”– to which Marius, the young man whose life he had just saved, responds “You are Jean Valjean.” But that answer doesn’t seem to satisfy Jean Valjean’s deeper query, as he keeps repeating “Who am I?”– as though asking “Who is this man I’ve become? What fate has brought me to this end? What have I done in past lives? What karma have I brought with me to this life? Why am I here now? WHO AM I?”

These questions stir deep currents in my soul. I will speak candidly here. Whether or not these were Jean Valjean’s deeper queries, they are mine today.  Oh, I can give answers to them, answers that I’ve learned during my spiritual awakening, but they somehow do not satisfy the deeper query of the mind — and it is the mind that is asking.

know who I AM.  My mind, on the other hand, has its uncertainties, as though it has a separate identity and history from who I Am — even a collective one.  After all, my personal intellect will evaporate with my physical body’s last breath. However, the Body of Mankind is still around after all these thousands of years, and the collective Mind, which we all share, is still alive and active in this world, having acquired its own separate identity as the “human ego.” 

But why are these questions visiting my mind now in this day and time — and they do seem personal. Is it my Catholic upbringing that has made it so easily susceptible to guilt and blame when things fall apart? Whence is this guilt that lingers in my mind — and in my heart? Has my mind poisoned my heart with guilt and blame?  Why the feelings of guilt over ancient failures and catastrophes, as though I was there and responsible for them? Was I there?!  Is this voice in my head the voice of the collective Mind awakening from its coma wondering what’s been going on all these eons of time while it slumbered in amnesia, and now asking “WHO AM I?” 

Lucifer — Light Bearer — Morning Star

The archaic word “Lucifer” has been with me for several decades, much like an archetypal presence, ever since I heard my spiritual mentor speak of the return of this “fallen angel” to its rightful place in Heaven as the “Light Bearer.” I have thought long and hard about this over the years, as something within me identifies with Lucifer.  My role in life seems to be associated somehow with Lucifer? Am I simply one of many incarnate angels whose role it is to be a Light Bearer in this world? 

Here is a passage from the Gospel of John that poses a question for me:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

Was the Evangelist John a Lucifer?

I’ll take this a step further and ask: Why is Lucifer also the name given to the Devil and Satan? And how can Satan, who is also called the “Prince of darkness” be a bearer of Light?  The prophet Isaiah had some words to say about Lucifer:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” For thou hast said in thine heart, “I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.”   

Yet, thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying: “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?” (Isaiah 14:12-17)

This sounds more like a celestial event involving comets and planets than a biblical one involving angels and men — given the cataclysmic upheavals in our planet’s ancient history where, in one episode, the planet Venus, for instance, was given the name “Baal Zevuv” (which later became Beelzebub), and “Lucifer,” the “Morning Star,” due to her brightness in the early morning sky before she was “cut down to the ground” to become a comet for several terrifying decades until she was restored to the status of planet.

This all makes it obvious that one cannot take biblical accounts literally, as men in those days didn’t know what to make of the cataclysmic events occurring in the heavens and on the earth. So they made up stories to pass on to their offspring . . . and to record in the history books, which the Bible is, “The Story of Man.” 

The word Lucifer was not always associated with the Devil and Satan.  In one of the Gnostic Gospels, for example, Jesus calls Mary Magdalene “Mary Lucifer” because of her brightness of spirit, her mental acuity,  and her passionate love for him.  He was the Light of the world and she his “Beloved Companion” in their shared mission, his Light-bearer, the “Apostle of apostles.” She knew and understood him while the other disciples only believed in Him — except for John the Beloved, who also knew and loved him. They both shared a conscious awareness of his mission and purpose, his divinity, as well as their own.

Who and what is Lucifer?

Here’s my take: Lucifer in Heaven was a bearer of the Light of Truth, and after his fall from grace, from Heaven, he became the Devil and Satan, the “Prince of darkness” and “the Prince of this world.” If this is so, Satan is no longer in Heaven but on Earth; no longer an invisible but a rather visible entity on the material plane of this world, which we should be able to see. I believe we do — and not in the television series.

Where is this Satan, then? Is he embodied by Donald Trump, perhaps? Some may think so. Maybe by the Koch brothers and the Cabal that rule the world economy from Wall Street and the World Bank? Is he in Russia as Vladimir Putin, or more likely in the murderous dictator of Syria, Bashar Hafez al-Assad — who, by the way, was born in Damascus on September 11, 1965. Did Assad bring down the World Trade Center to celebrate his 36th birthday? The number 36 can be interpolated as three sixes — 666, the “number of the beast, which is also the number of a man.” The number 666 is also the address of the Jared Kushner Tower on Fifth Avenue, which was recently bailed out by Qatar in Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lives in decadence. Perhaps he is the “Prince of this world.” Maybe the Devil is all of the above. So many “evil men” at which to point the finger.

Here’s something significant:  The Hebrew for the blamer is shatan, or obstacle; the Greek for divider is diabolos. Hmm….  

I don’t believe the Devil is anyone or anywhere “out there.” I believe that we humans are devils when we cast blame and pass judgement on one another, and are hateful and cruel toward ourselves and one another.

(I just learned today that human trafficking is the number one illegal money maker, a near forty-billion-dollar-a-year business globally — with illegal drug sales second and gun sales third.)

In my early years, while studying for the Catholic priesthood, my father used to advise me not to try and save the Devil, as he was lost forever. As I awakened spiritually, I began to understand more about who the Devil is, and I found myself doing exactly the contrary. This has been a central part of my life’s mission and purpose: saving Lucifer from perdition by inviting my own mind, drawn by its love for the beauty of Truth, to ascend to its appointed place in Heaven as the Light Bearer it was designed to be. This is my whole purpose for writing: to shine Light on the path of our sojourn through this “valley of the shadow of death.” 

I see light shining in this valley as more and more angels incarnate, emissaries of Light, are using their minds to shine the Light of Truth into the consciousness of mankind, enlightening us about our true state and that of our world — but also about our humanity and our true identity:  Be Your Humanity: Know Your Divinity

Life in this chaotic world is beginning to be brightened a bit because Lucifer is being restored to its heavenly role as Light Bearer . . . shining Light as well on our self-active past: 

The Ascent of Man such celebrated “great minds” as Dr. Jacob Bronowski, and Sir David Attenborough on Overpopulation, speak of is more about the awakening of the mind to its reckless past and to the stark realities of existence on a rather small planet that has limited accommodations for its voracious appetite for more of everything, including people. It is precisely man’s “marvelous plasticity of mind,” along with his wild and evil imagination, that are responsible for the dire straits in which we find ourselves today. 

I believe the so-called “Devil” is simply the self-active mind of man, and that Lucifer is the Truth-active Mind of Man, neither of which has a separate identity from who I AM.  For it is with our minds that we shine the Light of Truth in this darkened world full of hate and lies.  The mind is a wonderful capacity when used as a lens to refocus the Light of Truth from within and not as a reservoir of “knowledge” that, given its rather thin substance, can easily become overwhelmed and fragile with too much information and so-called “knowledge.” And its rightful place is not up front leading the way with its bright ideas and empty promises, but behind us, with our Spirit, the Light of Love that we are, leading forth in our lives.  This is the truth of our humanity and our identity, a truth we must come to love and cherish in our hearts.   

I’ll leave you to ponder these words of Lloyd A. Meeker (Uranda):

The Truth, through the mind, through the working of intelligence, provides the design, the factors of form in concept or belief; and Love, through the heart, animates that which is accepted by the mind. And the physical body receives that which is so established, for the body as such has no choice but to receive that which is imposed upon it. . . .

Human beings accept certain things in the sense of intellectual beliefs, but that which is animated in the actual expression of their lives takes form on the basis of resentment ideas, fear ideas, rebellion ideas, or hate ideas. The real feeling manifests in the range of something which carries a critical, condemnatory or destructive attitude, and that which is of the Divine Design, even though it be seen, is not animated in the individual life because there is no particular feeling in regard to it. . . .  

Illumination comes when the mind accepts the Truth idea, and the Dominion idea, in a manner which allows the heart to animate the Dominion, Kingdom idea. Any constructive idea which becomes animated through the heart brings some degree of Illumination—vividness of comprehension and appreciation; for Illumination is simply comprehension coupled with due appreciation. By reason of appreciation there is the acceptance of value.  (Uranda)

I  will continue with the series on the spiritual significance of the Thyroid gland in my next post.  Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com

“Fifth Way” Love: A Romantic Path to Transformation

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

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

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

THE SPIRITUAL KISS THAT BEGETS

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

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

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

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

“FIFTH WAY LOVE”:  AN EROTIC PATH TO TRANSFORMATION

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

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

THE “SONG OF SONGS”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN UNLIKELY BIBLICAL TEXT

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

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

KENOTIC LOVE

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

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

KENOSIS IN THE FIFTH WAY

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

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

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

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

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

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony     (tpal70@gmail.com)

The Imaginal Realm: “As Above So Below”

I just finished listening to an interview with Dr. Becca Tarnas on the blog Rune Soup. She and George, the moderator, have a most interesting conversation on the topic of the “Imaginal Realm.”  If you have an hour or so to spare, have a listen. In the interview Dr. Tarnas focuses on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Carl Jung’s “Red Book” as examples of  authors who cross over into the “imaginal realm” from which they tell stories that convey messages for our time and civilization.  I would like to delve into this topic a bit in this blog post.

In her evocative and controversial book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene – The Woman at the Heart of Christianity, author and Episcopal prelate Cynthia Bourgeault makes a distinction between the “imaginal realm” and imagination which I feel deserves in-depth consideration. The context of this consideration is the vision Mary Magdalene has of Jesus just after his resurrection when she reportedly mistakes him for the gardener.  In her gospel, Mary Magdalene tells the apostles of Jesus’ resurrection and goes on to describe her remarkable experience with him. 

I saw the Master in a vision and I said to him, “Lord I see you now in a vision.” And he answered me, “You are blessed, Mary, since the sight of me does not disturb you. For where is the nous [the heart] lies the treasure.” Then I said to him: “Lord, when someone meets you in a Moment of vision, is it through the soul [psyche] that they see, or is it through the Spirit [Pneuma] ?”

The Teacher answered: “It is neither through the soul nor the spirit , but the nous between the two that sees the vision….”

The “nous” is the heart, or the “eye of the heart.” It’s our capacity to discern spiritual or vibrational essences. It’s the space between the infinite and the finite, between pure spirit and gross matter – and it is said to belong to Spirit, generated as it is by Spirit for communicating with the physical world and for conveying “images” for the manifestation of “analogues”– the manifest forms.

From Cynthia’s book:

Most of us, reared in the scientific objectivism of our times, tend to think of visions as “subjective.” They belong to the realm of the personal and interior and, while perhaps illuminating the workings of an individual psyche, do not conform to anything in external reality. These, in fact, were precisely the criticisms that began to be raised during the third and fourth centuries, when visionary revelation was rejected as an authentic mode of knowing within the church. But in the original wisdom anthropologies . . . visionary knowledge is not an “experience,” let alone a private or subjective one; it is “of an ontological reality entirely superior to mere possibility” It emanates from an actual realm, a realm that is in fact more subtle and endowed with real Being than our own. In fact, in the reversal of our usual sense of things, it is the place of origin from which what we usually refer to as “reality” is merely the shadow projected into space and time.

Many centuries later, when this implicit anthropology came to maturity in the work of some remarkable Near Eastern Is­lamic mystics, this realm would be given the title “the imaginal realm.” Imaginal does not mean “imaginary”—that is, fictitious or subjective. It means the realm in which the images—the eternal prototypes—reveal themselves in their full authenticity. Remember how, in dialogue I, Jesus introduced the notion of “image” as a kind of primordial template? The imaginal is the realm from which these images emanate. . . . “that in-between zone where spirits become embodied and bod­ies become spiritualized.”

“Pneumaplasm”

The word “pneumaplasm” was coined by Lloyd Meeker (Uranda) eighty some years ago to represent this substance through which Spirit communicates with the material world.  Uranda was the founder of the Attunement service now being offered by attunement practitioners the world over.  I have incorporated sacred sound in my personal attunement service and have written a book about this sacred technology. I would like to share an excerpt from my book, Attunnement With Sacred Sound, from the section “Cellular Replication in a Musical Matrix of Light.”

“Image” and “Analogue” — “As Above so Below”

“From a mystical and metaphysical perspective, the Hermetic teaching ‘as above so below’ is restated by the great mystic Jesus who left a profound teaching himself with his disciples in a stream of dialogue that was recorded in both the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas, manuscripts that were discovered as early as 1896 (the Magdalene text) and as late as the mid twentieth century [1945] when Nag Hammadi material was discovered. In both of these Gospels, Jesus speaks about an ‘Image.’

“In her powerfully compelling and provocative book, The Meaning of MARY MAGADALENE—Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, Episcopal priest and author Cynthia Bourgeault shares teachings of the Master Jesus from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene that transgress lines of traditional orthodoxy. I will excerpt several passages from the fourth chapter of her book that are pertinent to this discussion, starting with a dialogue around ‘image’ and ‘analogue.’

Within the particular metaphysical stream that Jesus seems to be working in, image corresponds to that primordial template mentioned earlier—“the origin” of each created form. Very cautiously, you might label it an archetype. At first glance you may be tempted to transpose this teaching into Platonic categories and assume that Jesus is talking about the “ideal form” of a thing. But be cautious in doing so, for there is a distinctly different dynamism at work here. For Jesus, the “image” is not merely a static blueprint, a preexistent prototype that its earthly analogue mechanically reflects. Between image and analogue there is a dynamic reciprocity as they simultaneously articulate the same reality in two different realms. Image and analogue are in continuously creative tension receiving and fulfilling each other, and it is in the energy exchange that their indivisible wholeness is made manifest.

Images do not arise in this realm, however (their origin is several cosmoses more subtle), and trouble begins when this fundamental cosmic law is forgotten. . . .

“I like her use of the word ‘analogue’ here, which means similar in function but not in origin and structure, as it represents accurately the relationship between Man and his Creator, in whose image and likeness we are made in order to function as creators ourselves. In our energy and attunement work you might say that we seek to facilitate a clarifying, balancing and intensification of this ‘energy exchange’ between image and analogue with the intention that the oneness between them may be made manifest in the person’s experience of life, as well as in our own. . . .

“In ‘Dialogue One,’ a disciple asks Jesus about matter and whether it will ‘survive.'”[This inquisitiveness on the part of the disciple, taking place as this dialogue does in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, makes perfect sense. “Are you really here in the flesh or simply in a vision?” Or, more to the point, “Did the matter of your body live on after death?” the student asks.] 

“Jesus answered: ‘All of nature with its forms and creatures exist together and are interwoven with each other. They will be resolved back, however, to their own proper origin, for the compositions of matter return to the original roots of their nature. Those who have ears, let them hear this.’

“Cynthia Bourgeault expands on this:

But by this . . . he does not mean they dissolve into their component atoms, quarks and/or humors. Instead, they return to an original template—or ‘image’— whose place of arising is in another realm.

“The dialogue suddenly turns into an inquiry about sin and its origin, into which Jesus offers a remarkably clarifying perspective.

Sin as such does not exist. You only bring it into manifestation when you act in ways that are adulterous in nature. It is for this reason that the Good has come among you pursuing its own essence within nature in order to reunite everything to its origin. This is also the reason for sickness and death, because you embrace what deceives you. Consider these matters, then, with your spiritual intellect. Attachment to matter gives birth to passion without an Image of itself because it is drawn from that which is contrary to its higher nature. The result is that confusion and disturbance resonates throughout one’s whole being. It is for this reason that I told you to find contentment at the level of the heart, and if you are discouraged, take heart in the presence of the Image of your true nature. Those with ears, let them hear this.

“A ‘Vertical Axis’

“Cynthia Bourgeault offers that ‘within his particular frame of reference, acting in ways that are ‘adulterous in nature’ will prove to have very specific meaning. It signifies a failure to stay aligned with origin; with that mysterious ‘root’ (or template) of one’s nature he has already alluded to, which, while arising beyond this realm, seeks its full expression here.” . . . [Jesus] quickly assures his students that this world is valuable and precious; indeed, this is the very reason the Good has come among them in the first place—“pursuing its own essence within nature . . . in order to reunite everything to its origin.’ There is important integrative work to be done here. But it all depends upon keeping a right alignment along what wisdom tradition typically refers to as the ‘vertical axis’: the invisible spiritual continuum that joins the realms together. Nearly sixteen centuries later, the German mystic Jacob Boehme would express this cosmological insight with poetic precision and beauty:

‘For you must realize that earth unfolds its properties and powers in union with Heaven aloft above us, and there is one Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all.’

“The author then offers these words of truth and wisdom derived from Jesus’ teaching: 

When the realms are in spontaneous resonance—’One Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all’—the music of the spheres bursts forth. When they are not, disease and disharmony inevitably ensue. As he quickly points out (again, with a contemporary feeling to the teaching), ‘Confusion and disturbance resonate throughout one’s whole being,’ and sickness and death are the inevitable result.

“The heart realm is the ‘secret place’ in which we commune with God; the capacity for spiritual discernment and understanding. It is precisely this ‘vertical axis’ around which we must wrap our hearts in order to attune to the vibration of the Lord of Love, from whence all power to heal and uplift derives. I bring these excerpts into this writing for the profoundly clear light they shine on the core essence and purpose of attunement and energy work, as well as for the perspective and insight they offer into the dynamism at work between inner Reality and outer form—continually giving to and receiving from each other the spiritual energies that generate the pneumaplasmic substance that connects spirit with form and makes possible their manifest wholeness and oneness. I was deeply moved when I first read this chapter, as I was profoundly uplifted—and continue to be—reading and re-reading Cynthia’s book.”

The imaginal realm is precisely the realm that we, as healers and co-creators, must become intimate with in bringing down into the earth the true patterns of life which alone can restore order and harmony to our world. As we make visible the invisible Reality imaged for us in this heaven, our Earth is restored.  

I will leave this consideration at that and continue the discussion in my next post, in which I will open up a consideration of the masculine and feminine energies at work in our human capacities and throughout the “creating universe,” as Walter Russell describes the world in which we live and have our being. Until then, 

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

I invite you to read my Health Light Newsletter at LiftingTones.com.

Gnosis: A Return to Our Roots

(Preface: As much as I’ve tried to shorten this post, no part of it could be omitted without a loss to its impact and meaning, as well as the spirit of the authors of the excerpts. I think you will agree after reading it.)

GNOSIS is the experience and knowledge of spiritual truths. In essence and in practice during the Early Christian era, it was the experience of knowing God within.  The experience of Spirit. Of Divinity. 

According to the Gnostic Gospels, which included the gospels of Thomas and Philip, Jesus had given “secret knowledge” to some of his apostles of the way to ascend the “Tree of Life” and come to know Spirit as one’s Self.  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in which she describes her personal ascension up to the “crown” of this tree that Jesus said had its roots in her body, does not belong to the collection of thirteen Gnostic Gospels that were discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. The Gospel of Mary was discovered earlier in 1896, also in upper Egypt. It stands alone as a testament to the true experience of Gnosis. 

The Son of Humanity

I will conclude this series with a passage from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup, followed by the author’s commentary. It begins with a question posed by the apostle Peter about the nature of matter:

[ . . . ]What is matter? Will it last forever? 

The Teacher answered: “All that is born, all that is created, all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other. All that is composed shall be decomposed; everything returns to its roots; matter returns to the origins of matter. Those who have ears, let them hear.”

Peter said to him: “Since you have become the interpreter of the elements and the events of the world, tell us: What is the sin of the world?”

 The Teacher answered: “There is no sin. It is you who make sin exist, when you act according to the habits of your corrupted nature; this is where sin lies. This is why the Good has come into your midst. It acts together with the elements of your nature so as to reunite it with its roots.”

 Then he continued: “This is why you become sick, and why you die: it is the result of your actions; what you do takes you further away. Those who have ears, let them hear.

I will let the author give his commentary on this passage first, because he offers such profound insight into the dishonest human condition and into the path the “Son of Humanity”set before us for our return to our “roots” in Source. 

Lack calls for fullness. Thirst calls for the Source. The Good has come into our midst because the nature of matter involves lack. Humans as we know them are beings who feel a lack of Being. The process of corruption begins with their own identification with this lack. They then confuse themselves with the matter of which their bodies are composed, which ultimately leads to an experience of their own vanity and emptiness. Thus they may finally become open to that which can fill them.

The Original Sin of Adam was a fall from identity with Spirit to identity with form that left us with a feeling of profound lack which gave rise to a deep desire and longing for redemption, ironically creating a void for a Savior to fill. “Blessed fault of Adam, that gave us such a Redeemer,” the traditional chant for the Easter Vigil says. “What is it that transforms matter, adama, a lump of clay, into Adam, the true human being capable of this essence of desire,” the author asks. What can we do now to make room in our hearts for Spirit to come and fill the emptiness there?

Meister Eckhart, a Christian whose metaphysics was very close to the Gospel of Mary, said it more simply: “If you do nothing, truly nothing, God cannot help but come into you.” Unfortunately, in those who are full of themselves, there is no place for the Other. This is why he added, “If you leave, God can enter.”

This means that we must leave the illusion of taking ourselves to be something, some thing, an object that exists in time. We must return to our true being as Subject, living in wonder at its manifestation in those transient objects that it calls its world, its body, its emotions, its personality.

When we leave behind the illusion of belief in a permanent thing, the Good can then come into our midst. In the heart of this finally accepted impermanence shines the presence of this unborn, unmade, uncreated “Nothing that can be found in the All of which It is the cause.” This is the clear light unimpeded by the opacity of all the things with which we are identified. In the midst of the heavy, the light is revealed.

According to the Gospel of Mary, the Teacher came in order to help free us from the ignorance that is identification (corruption). For he is the very countenance, the incarnation, and the practice of this Good.

The Good is the manifestation of the famous triad of the ancient philosophers: goodness, truth, and beauty. The Good in this sense does not have evil as its opposite, for it means the unity of these three, the One that embraces the multiplicity of all qualities through which it is expressed.

What does goodness become when separated from light, consciousness, and truth? A softness that is the gateway to hypocrisy and compromise.

What does truth become when separated from goodness, love, and beauty? A hardness that is the gateway to fanaticism and persecution.

What does beauty become when separated from truth and goodness? Art for art’s sake, an aestheticism that is the gateway to a brilliance that clarifies nothing.

Beyond the realm of opposites, the Good is the One, the doorway to Being. This Being can only manifest in a heart, body, and mind that have been emptied of all illusion, meaning all inflation and presumption; for it cannot fit into the straitjacket that they offer.

“This is why the Good has come into your midst. It acts together with the elements of your nature so as to reunite it with its roots. “

The radiance of Presence has come to us, and “we have seen its glory,” or its kavod, as the Hebrews called it — the glory of the Son, “full of grace and truth,” which is also that of the Father, or Source.” [The author’s footnote: “The Metaphor of Mother could just as well be used for the Source.”]

By planting the seeds of his knowledge (the sperma Theou, in Greek) in the elements of our nature, the Teacher restores us to our own true heritage and ushers us back to endless resonance with our uncreated Source, the “Father whom none has ever seen, and none can know,” but who is revealed to us through the monogenetic Son, the Good that unites the ancient philosopher’s triad. This invites us to live a life of glory, a life of love and consciousness, just as he did.

This reunion with our roots is not a mere event in time, but an ever-renewed relation with the Source engendering us in every instant. It is our ignorance that creates our distance from it, and this distance involves all sorts of sickness and suffering. By an ever-new act of knowledge that is both metanoia (in Greek, passing beyond the known, beyond the mind and memories of which we are composed) and teshuva (Hebrew for the act of return, a turning about of our consciousness from our externalized, objectified being toward our inner Being), [the literal meaning of the word “repent”] we act from the deepest heart of our lack, from the intimate space of our desire of desires. This is the space where we receive the inspiration of the Teacher and his teaching.

 Then he continued:

 “This is why you become sick, and why you die: it is the result of your actions;  what you do takes you further away.  Those who have ears, let them hear.”

Having spoken of matter and its impermanence, and of attachment and identification with this impermanence, the Teacher now shows the consequences of ignorance and attachment.

Sickness, suffering, and death are the consequences of our acts. There is no one to blame for this, and it is vain to complain and expostulate about the evil nature of matter, the world, and humanity. There is no room here for hatred of the world, for it has been clearly stated that there is no sin, no evil. Evil and sin arise from the blamer in ourselves.

(The “blamer” in Hebrew is the shatan, which means “obstacle.” In Greek the word is diabolos, which means “divider.”  I find this most interesting and revealing of what is actually happening in ourselves as we point a finger of blame away from ourselves.  

Attunement with Source

In a word, the Teacher came to offer attunement to the Body of Humanity through the open hearts and resonant substance of his disciples in order to reunite the flesh Body of Humanity with its roots in Source by drawing forth the Spirit of Love, the Father, from within them.  His own incarnation as the “Son of Humanity” set a precedent for the whole of Mankind. 

But he didn’t do it alone. Mary Magdalene, who brought the Divine Feminine into their shared mission of redemption, was his companion. Together they restored the sacred union between Man and Woman and their union with the Father.  They shared the ultimate Attunement with Love.

The revelation of Love, the Father within, through Humanity was his expressed purpose for incarnating. He was on fire with this purpose, as was his companion. It is our purpose as well.  This excerpt from a talk given by Lord Martin Exeter, who was my spiritual mentor for twenty years, speaks passionately to this purpose: 

Until God’s Love comes into the individual and sets the individual on fire, the physical substance of his body, the substance of his whole outer being, remains subject to the destructive burning of the fire. It is only as he is actually set on fire, while he is living here on earth, that there may be a purification and transmutation into a state of being in attunement with the core of Being – which is God’s Love – so that the form is not destroyed. We can recognize these basic principles. Only as there is lust, so that the individual lets himself be set on fire by God’s Love, can he be consumed by God’s Love instead of destroyed by God’s Love. Being consumed by God’s Love there is no loss, because every level of Being is supposed to be the means by which there may be a manifest revelation of God’s Love, and this level where we are was so designed by God not to be destroyed by God’s Love but, being consumed by God’s Love, to reveal it….

…The body of Truth is lust, that all-consuming hunger and thirst, that depth of feeling, that longing, that which springs from the intensity of aloneness, an opening of the heart to God without reservation, without holding back anything, in a surge, a constant surge of passionate lust. And until we do open ourselves so, we cannot know the reality of God’s Love as it is; we can only know it as a painful fire, whereas in fact God’s Love, received into the true body, is the resurrection and the life of the body.

I think this well encapsulates who Mary Magdalene was and the pivotal role she played with her Beloved Lord that made Jesus’ mission on earth at all possible. She gave him her all, an open heart through which he could enter and plant the seed of Love in the Body of Humanity.  She was the true founder of Christianity — “The Woman at the Heart of Christianity,” as Cynthia Bourgeault identifies her in the subtitle of her profound book, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene.  

There is much more that I could share from the pages of these three books However, I feel complete in this series. If you feel inspired, and in the least bit inclined, to obtain copies of these thought-provoking books, I certainly encourage you to do so. Until my next post,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

All of the books and many more are available at Amazon.com/books 

Who and What Was Mary Magdalene?

Catholic theologian Saint Augustine called Mary Magdalene the “Apostle of apostles.” His basis for such an esteemed title was St. John’s Gospel text (19:25) in which Mary is said to be the first one to see Jesus resurrected from the tomb and the one appointed by Jesus to bring the good news of his resurrection to the other apostles. She was, in truth, the Beloved Companion of Yeshua/Jesus, whom he had named the “Migdalah”(which means tower of courage and strength).

In 591 AD, however, the Beloved Companion of Jesus was reduced in status and dignity to that of a prostitute by Pope Gregory I in Homily 33, according to Jean-Yves Leloup, author of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  In his homily, Gregory “declared that she and the unnamed woman in Luke 7 are, in fact, one and the same , and that the faithful should hold Mary as the penitent whore.” To the faithful of the Christian world, this is who Mary Magdalene was: the woman out of whom Jesus cast “seven demons”– and whom he rescued from being stoned to death as a “sinner,” saying to those who would stone her, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

About this word “sinner” Leloup writes:

“It is interesting to note that the Greek word interpreted as ‘sinner’ in the verse of Luke to which Pope Gregory referred was barmartolos, which can be translated several ways. From the Jewish perspective, it could mean one who has transgressed Jewish law. It might also mean someone who, perhaps, did not pay his or her taxes. [This is more likely the case in this incident with Mary Magdalene, who is often painted by artists with red or golden hair, suggesting a fiery woman with a passion for truth and a disdain for the laws of men.] The word itself does not imply a streetwalker or a prostitute. The Greek word for harlot, porin, which is used elsewhere in Luke, is not the word used for the sinful woman who weeps at Jesus’ feet. In fact, there is no direct reference to her – or to Mary – as a prostitute anywhere in the Gospels.” 

It was not until 1969 that the Catholic Church admitted its error and officially repealed Pope Gregory’s labeling of Mary as a whore. This retraction did nothing, however, to alter the public teachings of all Christian denominations that Mary Magdalene was a penitent sinner.  Jean Yves writes:

“Unfortunately, the fact that Mary Magdalene is freed from the possession of seven demons has resulted in greater focus on the perceived stigma of her past as interpreted in Homily 33 than on her cleansed state after this healing. . . . Like a small erratum buried in the back pages of a newspaper, the Church’s correction goes unnoticed while the initial and incorrect article continues to influence readers.”   

The Woman with the Alabaster Jar

Mary Magdalene, often depicted by artists holding an alabaster jar in one hand and a skull in the other, is the same as Mary of Bethany who is said to have anointed the head of Jesus with expensive oils during the Last Supper. The author of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene compares her to a priestess of Isis:

In addition, the presence of Mary at the Crucifixion and at the tomb, beyond illustrating her love for Jesus, also indicates her comfort and famil­iarity with death. The many artistic depictions of Magdalene with a skull may suggest that this has long been seen as part of her identity. In fact, Gol­gotha, the hill where Jesus was crucified, means “place of the skull.” Perhaps visionary artists of the past, in their representations, were implying that Magdalene understands the thresholds of death. Her appearances with special oils to use in anointing Jesus Christ place her in the tradition of priests and priestesses of Isis, whose unguents were used to achieve the transition over the threshold of death while retaining consciousness. 

Jesus accepts and encourages this anointing, explaining to the other disciples that she “helps prepare me for my burial.” This statement implies Jesus’ knowledge that Mary is aware of what is happening at a deeper level than the other disciples. We can ask ourselves, “By what authority does she anoint him?” But we cannot ignore the fact that the very word christ means “anointed one.” How can it be that Christians have pushed into a dark corner the female minister of the rite of anointing?

After one anointing of Christ by Mary, in Mark 14: 9, Jesus remarks, “Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, what she has done here will be told in remembrance of her.” How is it, then, that all Christians do not remember and revere this memorial, so clearly marked by their teacher? Why do most people know her as the reformed prostitute, rather than as what seems more likely-a ministering priestess with a deep understanding of the thresh­olds of the spirit world?

In the legends and stories told about Mary Magdalene there can be found some hint of what she may represent to us today: As one who was cleansed from sin; who remains with Christ throughout his death on the cross; and who first witnesses, understands, and believes Christ’s resur­rection, she represents a human being who is open and available to true “inner knowing,” who can “see” in deeper, clearer ways through a unique spiritual connection to both earthly death and the Divine. 

Honored in Southern France

In Southern France Mary Magdalene is honored and celebrated as the Madonna in what historically is known as the “Magdalene tradition.” There is evidence that Mary Magdalene traveled to and settled in Southern France after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus – and after her ordeal with Peter and the apostles who rejected her as the Apostle of apostles, the one and only one, other than John the Beloved, who knew oneness with her Lord and Master and who moved closely with him into the experience of gnosis, “the priceless wisdom of ‘direct knowing.'”

This is the true and original meaning of Gnosticism before it devolved into a cultish community: the direct knowing of Spirit within and as one’s Self without the mediation of an ordained priesthood – which is why the early Christian Church founded by Constantine and a group of bishops condemned them and sought to eradicate them altogether.  Those bishops who disagreed with Constantine about what gospel texts were to be included in, and excluded from, the New Testament Bible were exiled “on the spot.” Thankfully, some of these excluded gospel texts were preserved from the book burnings, later to be found and brought to light, notably in our time.  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas are two of the most noted gospels that were discovered and became the sources of contemporary authors’ books, such as Jean-Yves Leloup, Jehanne De Quillan (author of The Gospel of the Beloved Companion), and several others.

I particularly like the way in which this sentence is phrased by the authors of the Preface of her book, acknowledging the vibrational significance of Mary Magdalene’s return to consciousness and awareness at this time:

We consider her reemergence and renewed awareness of her importance as an essential remembering of the Feminine.” 

As surely as Jesus’ spirit is considered to be present with us today, so is that of his Beloved Companion present and actively guiding the rise of the Feminine.  It’s what seems powerfully evident anyway.

I will conclude this consideration of Mary Magdalene in my next post – which will be an in depth look at the true meaning of Gnosis and the obscured message inherent in the companionship of Jesus and Mary Magdalene – the core mission and purpose for the incarnation of the Divine in the Son of Humanity.  Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

I invite you to read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LitingTones.com.

 

 

 

 

And the “Rock” Comes Tumbling Down

 

It was inevitable. Founded, not on the solid rock of Truth, but on the quicksand of fabricated lies and deception, along with redactions of scriptures, the Church of Rome is teetering on the edge of utter collapse – its existential crisis being triggered by cumulative disclosures of the irreparable harm its clergy has inflicted upon innocent children over the decades. 

(Note: a redaction is done when a scribe or editor replaces what is written with what he/she understands it to say rather than what it actually says; to slant or frame its meaning or simply remove the text before publication or release.)

Suppression of women at the core

The suppression of women is at the core of this crisis. By denying and suppressing women – and thereby the Divine Feminine – which it has done since its inception – the Catholic Church has denied and shut out the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit of God is the Divine Feminine, as we considered with excerpts from The Gospel of the Beloved Companion in my previous post

I wrote about this current “breaking news” and disclosure of the criminal activity on the part of Catholic clergy and the cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy, all the way up to the “Holy See” in the Vatican, back in the 1990’s when I was creating the first draft of my book Sacred Anatomy.  Under the chapter heading “Sacred Sex” and subheading “The Holy Grail” I wrote:

The suppression of the mysteries of feminine sexuality may well be at the root of the scandalous turbulence we are witnessing today in the Catholic Church relative to pedophile priests. Thwarting the natural design and purposes of life for human beings can only lead to distortions in behavior. The Divine Feminine cannot be left out of human experience without repercussions. She will find her way into human relationships at the most intimate levels without respect to gender, and those who attempt to deny Her will find themselves seeking union with Her in the shadows of deviant behavior with the same irresistible passion that drives them to seek union with the Divine, for She is divine.

Historically, the Feminine Principle was once the centerpiece of much controversy and, as we have noted, persecution–strangely enough focused in a hatred and fear of midwives who posed a threat to the status quo of civilized decency because of their knowledge and skills in minimizing the pain in childbirth, when painful childbirth was taught by the Church to be the punishment for original sin. During the early centuries of the Christian era, women’s sexuality was regarded with fear. Knowledge of the secrets of the Feminine was considered to be so fiercely powerful that it posed a unique threat to Christian thinking and to the authority of the Church itself. This gave rise to the atrocities perpetrated by the Church against the Cathars during the Albegensian Crusades in thirteenth century France when over a hundred thousand, mostly women, were massacred.

Quest for the “Holy Grail”- The Divine Feminine

Like in the Arthurian Legend of the quest for the Holy Grail, in my opinion it is their own Divine Feminine, suppressed by their imposed vow of celibacy, that these pedophile priests seek to reclaim and have union with, a quality so expressive in young boys and girls. I myself was cuddled and molested by a priest when I was an altar-boy. My impression even then was that this Dutchman needed to be married and have children to love and wrestle with on the floor – or shower with, as one priest, my spiritual advisor no less, had me do while in seminary. I was fourteen then, and sexually fondled my very first day in seminary by a church deacon, who was directly relocated after I reported the incident to the Rector.  Weird stuff I thought back then. Not so weird as I see it today. The feminine and masculine energies belong together and function naturally when allowed to be together as equal partners in co-creation. Finding these dual energies in ourselves as individuals and allowing them to emerge and balance one another is a worthy spiritual path to take toward true Self emergence. To ignore this essential aspect of our Humanity can only lead to an eruption and take over of the shadow side of our human nature.  

Dissolution the only solution  

There is one solution to the Catholic Church’s crisis that could avert its demise: dissolve the dishonest foundation upon which it was built — the patriarchal “rock” of Peter, the apostle who openly despised women.  This could easily be done by the Church recognizing Mary Magdalene as the Apostle of apostles and the Beloved Companion of Jesus and sanction the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas by including them in the Codex of Holy Scripture – then by eliminating the Acts of the Apostles and all of Paul’s letters and gospels, basically eradicate Paulism altogether, which is what Christianity is in reality. 

The next step would be to allow priests to marry and have a family, just as the Episcopal Church does, and allow women to become priests.  Canon Law would have to be abolished along with all the laws that the Church has held over the heads of the faithful, including its dogmas relating to “original sin,” not mentioned once by Jesus, not even in passing as he admonished us to humble ourselves and become like little children in order to enter the Kingdom of the Spirit. He didn’t say “Oh, by the way, they have to be baptized to wash away original sin so they don’t end up in Limbo.” No, all that came with the Council of Nicea along with the doctrines of mortal and venial sin, punishment in hell and reward in heaven, along with its “Apostles Creed.” That all has to be abolished – in my humble opinion and righteous judgement anyway. 

In essence, the Church of Rome must undo itself as a legitimate entity sanctioned by God and established by Jesus.  The Vatican must be dissolved and liquidated, its enormous wealth distributed among the poor and those innocent ones its clergy has violated.  Following the undoing of the Roman Church, Christianity and all of its denominations need to be purged of all its fabricated doctrines and fear-based theology then renewed by adopting the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas as providing the true accounting of the life of Yeshua/Jesus and his message of love and compassion to the world. 

The Church of Rome, not of Jesus 

Christianity was established as the religion of Rome by the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea in the fourth century AD, which laid down the infalible laws by which all professing Christians were to be governed.  This in contrast to the one law that was given by Jesus to his apostles: the commandment to Love the Lord our God with all and each other as our self. In fact, Jesus instructed them to make no laws other than the one He had given them.

Tell others of what you have seen, but do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you; and do not give a law like the lawgiver, lest you be constrained by it. (The Gospel of the Beloved Companion).

Such a sensible guideline and simple instruction he gave to those simple men and women as they set out to tell the world about what they had heard and seen.

What really went down after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus

What happened after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is alluded to in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This excerpt follows on the heels of my previous post wherein I share Mary Magdalene’s account of what Yeshua/Jesus showed her in a vision of a great tree whose roots he said are in the earth of her body and whose trunk extended upward through the “five regions of Humanity to the crown which is the Kingdom of the Spirit.” This tree had eight boughs and eight gates, upon which she ascended and through which she entered respectively, eventually finding herself at the crown where she beheld the Spirit in the form of “a woman of extraordinary beauty, clothed in garments of brilliant white,” who embraced her and freed her soul from the world.

Sounds like a description of the Tree of Life embodied by the Seven Endocrine Glands and the seven chakras – of which there are thought to be eight or more. You can read what happened after that in my previous post

This is how the disciples reacted to what Mary Magdalene had told them of her encounter with their Rabbi:

Many of the disciples did not understand what she had said, and grumbled against her amongst themselves. Andreas therefore answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Rabbi said this, for these teachings are certainly strange and complicated ideas.”

Shimon Kefa (Peter) answered and spoke concerning these same things. He questioned them about Yeshua and said, “Did he really speak privately with this woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”

Then the Migdalah [Mary Magdalene] wept and said to Shimon Kefa, “My brother Shimon Kifa, Think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about Yeshua? Only from the truth again I tell you that what I have said is the truth.”

And Levi answered and said to Shimon Kifa, “Shimon Kifa, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against this woman like the adversaries. But if the Rabbi made her worthy, who are we indeed to reject her? Surely as his companion, Yeshua knew her better than all others. That is why he loved her more than us.

Rather, let us be ashamed and do as she says. Let us put on perfect Humanity and acquire it as she has done, and separate as he commanded us and preach the testimony of the Son of Humanity, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond that which he gave us.”

Here’s the clincher:

And when they heard this, they were divided, and argued amongst themselves. And therefore they began to leave separately, and go forth to proclaim and to teach what they understood of the words of the Rabbi.

“…what they understood…” and not what Mary Magdalene told them what Jesus had said. In other words, they refused to listen to a woman, even the very companion of their Master, who alone witnessed his resurrection from the dead and spoke to him “privately.” That was just too much humility for their male egos to yield to and take on.  And that moment was the beginning of the end of Christianity before it ever became the religion of Rome. It was doomed to failure.  And we are witnesses to that failure today, God help us. 

I will close with these words of the author of The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, Jehanne De Quillan – yes, a woman, no less and fittingly so:

My question is this: when will orthodox Christianity grow up? Surely it is time to put aside these antiquated, man-made principles, and start to look for the real treasure that Yeshua left us two thousand years ago–the Kingdom of God that lies within each one of us–a treasure that requires no pope, bishop, priest, pastor, or preacher for us to discover the treasure he defined in a single saying:

“…BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM…” 

Be love. Be loved.

Anthony

Read my HealthLight newsletter online at LiftingTones.com

For a copy of Sacred Anatomy, and/or for my recently published Third and Revised Edition of Attunement with Sacred Sound, simply email your request to me at tpal70@gmail.com.

Tag Cloud