IN THIS POST I share with you one of the most touching and profound words of Uranda I’ve ever read anywhere. Words that bring me to tears of joy and of unspeakable love that rises up from the depth of my soul for this One that I am, and we all are, privileged to call Master, Son of God, LORD of Lords and King of kings — and, as George Frederick Handel called Him in his Oratorio Masterpiece, Messiah, “Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
*~*~*~*
My thoughts turn to some of the words of the Master tonight: “Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” And we are, also, to overcome the world.
I was thinking that, in the conclusion of the activities of a blessed day such as this, we might well again give thought to the Master’s Prayer at the time of the conclusion of His Ministry. The conclusion of His Ministry was peculiarly the point where our Ministry begins. The time that has elapsed since has no meaning in that. He had been outlining the Principles of the One Vine and of the means by which we might let the Works of the Father manifest.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full… For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
He had also outlined the Principles with respect to the work of the Comforter or Spirit of Truth. He had pointed the Way to Life. It remained for those who should follow after to prove that Life, to experience it according to His Word. And then, in the conclusion of that Ministry, He gave a prayer—a prayer that is our beginning point.
“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee”. He was, of course, the manifestation of the Son of God, but He was returning to the Father and He had outlined the Plan by means of which the Son, the only begotten Son of God, should continue on earth. The interval of time that has elapsed before that Plan began to be of effect should be, in our consideration, forgotten, as it were, that it may be meaningless. The trials and the tribulations, the concepts, the efforts and the failures of that interval must not be allowed to have meaning in relationship to our function. From the standpoint of Reality, those things do not have meaning. The connecting thread, the unifying Current, is not less strong because of the passage of that time. Our attitude and our feeling and our function should be as if we had heard these words for the first time a few days ago, as if only a month ago He had stood with us upon the face of the earth, as if it were but yesterday that the vibrant sound of His Voice fell on our ears, as if we, in this flesh, had seen Him come forth Victoriously from the tomb, as if we had, in person, shared His final words of admonition and instruction, as if we had known that hour when He ascended to return no more until what He had begun should have been finished in the hearts and lives of men.
The human mind is so inclined to feel the distance of the intervening years, so that there is a loss in a consciousness of personal contact. The Son is the One Christ Body on earth, then and now. The meaning of the Word as He spoke it with respect to His own manifestation is not to be construed as the only meaning, for He spoke also of that Body that is—“Father, the hour is come”. His was the hour of departing; ours is the hour of beginning, of moving forward in fulfilment. The Father glorified the Son then. He is just as capable of glorifying the Son now. “The hour is come. Glorify thy Son”. Why? “That thy Son also may glorify thee”. The beginning and the end, or the end and the beginning, are the same.
He was here on earth. It seems but yesterday we heard Him speak. It seems but the passage of a moment since His prayer first ascended as sweet incense unto God. Time—these things transcend all time. It was but yesterday He gave the Promise. Today we let that Promise be fulfilled. We remember how our hearts were stirred at the sound of His Voice, and the passage of an hour or a day cannot quiet that stirring or end that surge of consciousness of the Power of God. It is now, in this hour, that the Spirit of His Word finds fulfilment in our hearts. It is now, in this hour, that we let His Promise be fulfilled. The excitements and the questionings, the fears and the doubts, have been stilled. We have ceased trying to make it be so, for in the vibrant Power of His Love we are not separate or apart and we know that the Father Himself loveth us because we have loved Him, because we do love Him Who has walked the earth before us, Who has revealed the Way, the Truth and the Life.
“The hour is come” for us to let the Father glorify His Son, that the Son may glorify the Father. We trembled, and were sad, that the hour had come when He should leave us, but we did not let such things prevent fulfilment of His Word lest what He did should be in vain. The hour of His going was the hour of our beginning, and it is so still, for though He went He has not departed, for His Spirit lingers in our hearts and His Word is as powerful as when it first fell from His lips, Words burned in letters of Fire upon our hearts, memorable occasions that could never pass from mind. Yesterday His hour came—today is our hour of fulfilment in beginning.
“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God”, and the Christ, the only begotten Son—then Jesus—now the One Christ Body Whom Thou hast sent. “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do”. How truly is that our point of beginning. How seldom on this earth has the word reverberated in truth—“I have finished the work”. We have seen in the world the feeble attempts at doing some bit of work—human beings, like children, building castles in the sand to admire in one moment and to destroy in the next, and then to delude themselves into feeling that they had accomplished something. And how they brag about the mansions they builded in the sand; but we consider other mansions, Mansions in the Father’s House.
“I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do”—and in season the Son shall again speak these words, but before those words may be truly spoken once more, there must truly be the beginning, the opening up, that comes through the surging Power of His Spirit as we hear again, in memory, His Word, “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.” That was but yesterday, surely. It is but a dream that some did not keep His Word. There must now be fulfilment which gives meaning to His faith when He spoke that Word, that when these words sound in memory, and stir within our hearts, they shall not be as a mockery, a symbol of the faith of the Son of God that found no answering heart on earth, but a symbol of the faith of the Son of God that finds fulfilment here and now in His Son on earth.
“And they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.” Yes, the intervening time when these words remained unfulfilled is surely but a dream. Twas only yesterday He spoke, and today His Word finds fulfilment. Today we prove His faith was not in vain.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled. And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” What was His joy? It was the joy of Oneness with the Father. It was the joy of Being the Son on earth. That is the joy that must be fulfilled in us, the joy of Oneness with the Father, the joy of Being the Son.
“And these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” That is His Word. His Word is true, and we let it be so in us in this hour, and forevermore, for as the Father sent Him into the world, even so has He sent us into the world.
“And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them”—“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them”. It is glory to be the Son on earth. “And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am”—not where I shall be, where I am.He, the Son of God, stood on earth in the hour of fulfilment. He had finished the work. That was where He was in the hour of fulfilment. And He said, “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am”—and so it is His Will that we should stand in that Oneness of the Son in the hour of fulfilment. “That they may behold my glory. Which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
Beloved LORD, we thank Thee that it is so, and we thank Thee for the Holy Privilege of sharing Thy Fulfilment on earth. In the Christ. Aum-en.
“He who had moved among men before and disappeared at will prior to that time—do you not think that, if His disciples had been holding steady, He could have disappeared in any moment He had chosen?”—Uranda
URANDA: On this beautiful day, which gives promise of a springtime not too far away, let us meditate for a moment upon some of the principles that our Master revealed in relationship to this phase of our own progress along the way. The Master said, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do,”and that work which the Father gave was finished before that experience that was made necessary to our LORD by human imposition in the trial and the crucifixion. The work the Father gave Him to do was completed before that trial and before the crucifixion, for we have the Word from His own lips: “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.”Why, then, was it necessary for Him to experience the mockery, the indignities of that trial, and the sufferings of the crucifixion? It was because man imposed those things upon our LORD. They were imposed by man’s rejection of the divine pattern.
The ill things that nullify the expression of the beautiful pattern of God’s design on earth are never God’s will. They are imposed by man’s rejection of that which God offers. The shame and the suffering, the indignities, are never the result of the divine pattern or of God’s will. They are the result of man’s denial and betrayal of his responsibilities, and they are imposed by that which man himself does. Very often those who consider themselves Christians, or who long to move along the spiritual path, are inclined to think: “If I had lived, if I had only had the privilege of living at that time when our Master Himself walked on earth, I would not have been among those who were scattered so quickly from that vast throng who were shouting, ‘Hosanna to the king.’ I would not have been like Peter, denying, or like Judas, betraying, nor like the others who followed afar off, for I would have appreciated my privilege and opportunity. And, cost what it might, I would have been among those who stood at the foot of the cross.” So many have felt that way—perhaps they would not express it in so many words.
Yet today, in this hour and in all the hours to come, we have the same privilege of remaining true, the same privilege of standing at the foot of the cross, the same privilege of proving the reality of our love and our trust. The passage of the centuries has not denied us any privilege that we might have had then, with the one exception of seeing the physical form through which our LORD was manifest. And He said of those who lived then, that for their sakes it was expedient that He should go away; and if it was expedient for them, there is nothing taken from us, because we do not have the privilege, as our minds might think of it, of seeing Him in physical form. It is expedient for us that He so arranged the divine pattern.
So, let us examine something of what happened and see if we can gain a deeper conviction of that which is necessary to ourselves, that we may come to a recognition that it is not what we feel out of the subconscious heart or mind, it is not what we feel externally, that is properly the directing force in our lives. It is what we see and recognize and realize with the conscious mind to be the truth of the matter, for the mind which is allowing the spirit of God to work in it is stronger than any feeling that can come surging up from the subconscious. It is stronger than any idea that may be buried somewhere in the subterranean phases of the mind. It is stronger than any current of feeling that may be imposed from the outside.
What you feel is beside the point. As long as the conscious mind continues to yield to the impulses that come from a distorted subconscious mind or heart, as long as it yields to the currents of feeling or action from without, it is saying, “I am not a guardian angel. I am not fortified by the spirit of God. I am a weak thing and I must of needs acknowledge the extent of my weakness and say that God cannot serve me because I am subject to all of these ill things.” He who says that betrays our LORD, as surely as Judas betrayed Him. He denies, as surely as Peter did, and he is not even following afar off. He is scattered into the darkness, hiding in the alleyways, lest someone see and say, “Are you not one of those who followed Him?”
Let us see what happened at the time of our Master. He had finished the work that God gave Him to do, but certain things were imposed upon Him. In either case, He was going away, as far as His physical form was concerned. But do you think He could cause His body to be changed more easily after all this humiliating experience than otherwise? He could have ascended without the suffering, the crucifixion and those days in the tomb. Man imposed that upon Him and made it necessary. Sometimes people ask a question and say, “But did not the prophets say He would have to die? Does not the Bible say there could be no salvation except as His blood was shed, etc.?” I grant you that after this experience was all over, certain ones developed some ideas with respect to it. And in the pattern of prophecy in the Old Testament you will find those things which recognized not only the possibility but the probability of the manner in which man would function. But because it worked out the way it did, the human interpretation has been on the basis of one idea only; and there has been a complete failure to recognize the fact that an alternate path, the ideal path, was foretold just as surely, as definitely, if man would have allowed it to have meaning.
That which was of God’s design was revealed by the prophets much more abundantly than those comparatively obscure texts that recognized the probability of what man would do. Because man did fail, the texts that relate to that possibility are picked out and held up as what was prophesied. And it is not so at all, because God’s provision of the pathway did not require that Jesus should die. It was human beings that condemned our LORD to the indignities of the trial, so-called, and to the sufferings of the cross. God did not require it. From God’s standpoint, it was not necessary, and I can take the book cover to cover and show you how the pattern was revealed there. Let us examine it.
The idea of the shedding of the blood, from the standpoint of the spear in the side and the nails in His hands and feet, is supposed to have had some particularly efficacious result—that God, being a hardhearted something-or-other, would not accept the salvation of a single man, woman, or child unless His own Son should physically bleed. Anyone who stops to consider that which is revealed of God in the Bible will recognize that that is so completely out of character that there is no reasonable excuse for any person believing it. It is completely out of character. The blood is the symbol of life. He had shed His blood, in the true sense, before He ever reached the agonies of Gethsemane or the sufferings of the cross. He had shed His life upon the earth. He had shed the currents of His life in the revelation of Deity. He had revealed the principles of life. He had given His life to the revelation of the things of God, and He Himself said before any of these things took place, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” There was a recognition that certain things were yet to be faced because of what man had imposed upon Him, but it was not the divine plan or purpose or necessary from the standpoint of God, as if He were a bloodthirsty being who demanded that blood be shed. No. That is not the character of God. It was not the plan or purpose of God. And the only reason why our Master accepted that outworking was because man imposed it upon Him.
Who imposed it upon Him particularly? Who among men? Herod or Pilate or the power of the Caesars? Oh, no. Who imposed it upon Him? His disciples were the ones who imposed that upon Him. It is true. They simply accepted the focalization of the world in the hour of stress, rather than remaining true to their focalization in Him. But consider if the hour of crisis had come and all twelve of the disciples had remained steady. There are those who say Judas, poor creature, was predestined to do it; someone had to do it in order for God’s plan to be fulfilled. Someone on earth had to be a traitor and betray our LORD! Oh, no. God is out of character the moment anyone begins to conceive such an idea. God never predestined anyone to be a traitor or to betray the things of God, let alone the Son of God! Judas did not have to betray Him. It was not necessary; it was not a part of the divine plan. It was a part of human failure.
Consider. If it had worked out according to that which God had made available to them, if according to God’s true plan there had been a following through—of course the Master knew, particularly toward the last, that they were not going to hold when the crisis came; but, even so—suppose Judas had not betrayed Him, suppose Peter had not been of that type who would deny Him, suppose twelve men had stood faithful and true to their LORD on earth—twelve men, not one wavering, not one breaking in the face of the crisis—then His Body on earth, the body of these twelve men who were supposed to be the key men of the Christ Body which should fill the earth, holding steady, would have allowed Him to carry out God’s plan. Not from the standpoint of continued work on earth in the sense of His doing it, but His doing it through the members of His Body—the very principles He had outlined to them such a few hours before, the principles and Laws that He had expounded to them over and over again through the three and a half years of His ministry with them. But if that Body, the focalization of the Body in twelve men, would have held the pattern, hundreds and thousands who had received blessings at His hand, who had cried “Hosanna to our king,” would have stood if the twelve disciples had stood. And there would have been a Body on earth.
He who had moved among men before and disappeared at will prior to that time—do you not think that, if His disciples had been holding steady, He could have disappeared in any moment He had chosen? Could humanity have heaped the indignities of the cross or mockery of the trial upon Him? No. Why did He accept that imposition? The Body that He had been building through the years of ministry died, scattered first—the scattering of the disciples. When they broke, when they slept in Gethsemane instead of watching with Him one little hour, when they slept, when He came to face the final pattern, of course the LORD would not have suffered as He did—even in Gethsemane—had this pattern been holding properly. Because already Judas had gone out to betray, His body had started to decay and die, the body of His disciples. That body of the disciples was scattered, brought to the point of death before His physical body as a man was brought to the point of the crucifixion.
If that body of twelve disciples had remained steady and true, no power on earth could have touched Him, because then the victory would have been assured without His going through what He did. The same truths would have been revealed in the outworking of the cycles of time, but there would have been a Body established—twelve key points, with others rallying around vibrationally. And if they had sought to touch Him, whether He would have used spiritual power to prevent it or whether He would have disappeared is beside the point. That would have been for Him to choose and it is not for me to speculate upon, but they could not have touched Him. That we know. If the body He had built, or undertaken to build—the Body of many members—had held true, His physical body would not have had to be on the cross. But on the cross of spiritual creative activity, the crossing between heaven and earth, there would have been a revelation of divine power that would have carried through effectively and saved man centuries of suffering, sorrow, misery and death. The Body would have been complete and this world would have been restored already.
It is not until after this plan had failed to carry through that we have the prophetic portrayal, for instance in Revelation, of that which should yet be done. Because in Isaiah, and many other places, there is mention made: “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” That is part of the prophecy of what was divinely ordained for the time when Jesus Christ should come on earth, that which could have been, but man prevented it. Man spoiled the pattern of God, so there was a divine reorganization and a re-projection of the same goal under a new pattern. Not all was lost, it is true. Our Master had finished the work. He had revealed Deity, established the truth on earth, set the pattern. And somewhere there would be those who would follow through, those who would not be so quick to betray for thirty pieces of silver or their own human desires.(Emphasis added)
I wonder how many of you know why Judas betrayed, what the working of his mind was. . . .
If you make people think they think, they will love you. If you make them think, they may hate you.
I LOVE TO THINK CRITICALLY. To be found wanting, and sometimes completely wrong, about what I have believed, especially for years. It helps to distance my sense of identity from my intellect . . . and my human ego, which has been rather large, and troublesome at times. I have a good mind and I enjoy using it correctly. It’s given me much pleasure and service. But I am not my mind.
I invite you to think with me for the length of this post about the current state of humanity . . . honestly . . . and about the way we’ve been going about creating our world. I will use Plato’s allegory of the Cave in order to demystify where we have been in our awareness up until today, when we appear to be emerging from our hypnotic sleep. I hope that you will enjoy the thinking process.
♦ ◊ ♦
MOST OF WHAT WE HAVE CREATED in our world has been patterned after reflections from out of the past cast upon our clouded mental lens and filed away in our subconscious mind. Much of it is reflected in the opaque substance of the veil separating human consciousness from Divine Consciousness, blocking inspiration from within.
For example, here in the USA we love our freedom and our democracy that grants us that freedom . . . and we have historically sought to destroy (as in kill) anyone who threatens, or whom we think threatens, that freedom or our democracy. It’s just the way we’ve always done it. History doesn’t repeat itself. We keep reenacting history and stuffing the expansive nature of life into historical molds. Uranda spoke to this “mould” acceptance several decades ago:
Human beings have banded together to accept a mould into which all shall be crowded to smother a consciousness of those powerful inner drives. Society has tried to crowd the individual into an arbitrary mould; and to whatever degree one accepts that mould, he is “good.” To whatever degree one resists that, he is “bad.” Doing bad things is almost always the result of a misapplication of the principles of living in the early life of the individual, which has set up a pattern of internal conflict. We need to emerge out of the prison that has been established by these arbitrary moulds. In the world of humanity it is conceived that the only safe place for any good person is in “prison.”
The Master Jesus saw this condition in his day and sought to free the people from their culture of hate for the suppressive and persecuting Romans. His teaching to “Love your enemies; do good to those that hate you” did nothing for his popularity. On the contrary, he was hated by the Scribes and Pharisees who kept the faithful imprisoned by the Law of Moses: “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you teach the Law of Moses, but you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.” We have our own Scribes and Pharisees today continuing to keep the faithful from entering the kingdom of heaven before death takes them Home, and refraining from entering themselves. Religion is big business — as are wars . . . and the politics of both.
WARS CAST THEIR SHADOWS OF FEAR AND HATRED
As my friend on the other side of the pond reminded me, the English still hate and fear the “Hun”— a derogatory term for the Germans in WWI who crushed neutral nations and imposed brutal rule upon conquered peoples. More recently the British suffered the destruction of much of England by Hitler’s German forces. Hatred and fear of tyrants in neighboring countries continue to ignite and fuel confrontations and wars. The past tends to condition our perception and the way we handle our affairs in the present, as well as our expectancy of the future, clouding inspired vision of new possibilities and ways forward without fear and hatred, and absolutely without war.
The saving and redeeming grace is that what separates also connects. Cleaning up our mental lens, both conscious and subconscious . . . and purifying the veil of our hearts connecting us with the Divine . . . is the only way to see what IS rather than what we have been taught and deeply programmed to BELIEVE. Love alone casts out fear and purifies the heart.
Our future arises from out of what we do now; the seeds we plant in the soil of the present moment. We chose to pattern it after the way things have always been. It’s time we let go of the past entirely . . . and let the dead bury the dead.
Waking up out of our hypnotic stupor, we may be bedazzled by the beauty that’s always been there under our noses, so-to-speak, but covered over by our dark projections.
The following story came to me today as I read from blogs that I follow. I won’t reveal whose blog this came from so as not to arouse any bias that might get in the way of seeing and realizing what is being implied by this allegory. Suffice it to say he’s a very reliable and trustworthy blogger. It’s an old story that still holds sway in today’s world. It demonstrates, for one thing, the wise saw that says it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled. Here’s the story.
♦ ◊ ♦
PLATO’S CAVE
About 2,400 years ago, the Athenian philosopher Plato(student of Socrates, mentor of Aristotle) described the Allegory of the Cave, writing while using the voice of his martyred mentor Socrates. Socrates is most famous for his powerful logical approach for avoiding hubris, beginning all philosophical and logical quests for truth with the position that “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”.
In his political masterwork “The Republic”, Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave to justify his core political thesis that the ideal ruler is the “Philosopher King”, essentially a wise philosopher-dictator who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are collectively wise enough to choose a good master. Modern readers can immediately detect the conflict of interest which lies at the heart of this Platonic ideal, that being that Plato (and by inference Socrates) are basically nominating themselves as authoritarian rulers over Athens. Personally, I find the logic that the Cave allegory justifies the philosopher-dictator as the ideal leader both a bit contrived and circular. However, I suggest that the Allegory of the Cave is a profound and immortal insight into a fundamental aspect of human society which is at the center of the observations of both 20th century political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt as well as her 21st century intellectual successor Dr. Mattias Desmet.
The Cave is essentially a metaphorical thought experiment which uses a literary device similar to those employed in Aesop’s Fables, in which stories of talking animals are used to bypass the human mental defense mechanisms that can make it so hard for each of us to accept observations and critiques concerning fundamental behaviors. The Cave relates a fundamental, prototypic human myth. It tells the story of the inevitable coupling of human discovery with the tribal rejection which all true innovative pioneers, all dissenters, all paradigm shifters know far too well.
The setting for the Allegory of the Cave is a hypothetical dark cavern inhabited by a group of prisoners who are all bound hand and foot facing the same wall. The prisoners have been there since birth; they have grown up together, and this is the only reality that they know. Behind them is a burning fire maintained by the rulers of the cave. The rulers have different objects and puppets which they hold up so that the prisoners can see the shadows cast by the objects as they interrupt the light of the fire, and the rulers make sounds and generate echoes for the prisoners to hear. These rulers of the cave are the puppet masters, able to control the reality which the prisoners are able to experience. As these shadows and sounds are all that the prisoners have experienced since birth, they do not question and do not know anything different from this shadow reality. They think that this is what life is, a reality of shadow, sound and echo.
The prisoners compose and share names for the shadows, develop competitions to determine who is best able to guess which shadow will turn up next, and give each other awards and praise for the ones with the most accurate predictions. From their standpoint, this is life.
One day, one of the prisoners gets loose. His chains break, and in a confused state he stands for the first time, looks around, and sees the fire. Lying on the ground next to the fire he sees the puppets and objects which correspond to the shadows on the wall. In a great leap of insight, he concludes that the shadows came from these objects, and that the puppets and fire represent a greater reality than that which he had previously known.
Feeling empowered and energized like never before, he begins to explore the cave, finds his way to the entrance, and leaves the shadowy fire-lit confines. The bright sun burns his eyes causing great pain, so he shields them with his hands. Gradually his eyes adjust to this new environment. He drops his hands and opens his eyes fully, seeing for the first time the greater world outside the cave. He sees color, sun, trees, animals, grass, mountains, and has yet another epiphany that he has become able to see the true nature of the world for the first time. The shadows had been mere surrogates of this greater truth. There was much more to life than he had ever imagined. Filled with joy over this new experience, he feels a wave of gratitude and awe as awareness dawns that he has become able to directly perceive the true nature of the real world.
Then he remembers his fellow prisoners, the people he had shared his entire life with. He pities them for being trapped in their limited understanding of reality, for their ignorance of the larger real truth which they are neither able to experience nor perceive. Overwhelmed with waves of pity, empathy, and anger at the puppet masters who have imprisoned and manipulated the reality of those that he has grown up and spent his entire life with, he returns to the cave determined to share what he has learned and help the prisoners see the larger reality, and to help free them from their bondage by the puppet masters.
The freed prisoner returns to the cave and his friends, hoping to enlighten and free them from their chains. But they cannot understand what he is saying and trying to do. He tries to explain the greater reality that he has seen and experienced, but they cannot even begin to understand what he is trying to describe. Imprisonment in the cave is the only reality they have ever known, and they cannot understand anything else. They notice that the eyes of the freed prisoner have changed due to exposure to the sun, and that he now has trouble seeing, naming and interpreting the shadows. They laugh at him, and all concerned agree that leaving the cave is a waste of time. They then threaten to kill both the escaped prisoner as well as anyone else who dares to break their bonds and leave the cave.
♦ ◊ ♦
Human beings defend their beliefs, often with their life blood . . . and with the life blood of their fellow man. We as a race have yet to unshackle ourselves and come out of Plato’s cave? We are still held prisoners of our past . . . and we appear to feel safe and comfortable in our state of deception . . . too comfortable. Thankfully, some of us have felt uncomfortable with our comfort, as many have awakened . . . or been awakened by one global crisis or another, and the politics thereof . . . and masses of protesters are begging and eager for the leaders of our nations to stop making war with one another . . . and to please do something about banning assault rifles on the streets again, as they were banned between 1994 and 2004, thank you then President Bill Clinton! And that’s all I’ve got to say about that!
Returning to the first line of this post, without critical thinking and extensive research, one is not likely to see the profiteering and manipulative politics churning beneath the deceiving surface play of events. One has to turn away from the news media and peer through the smoke screens to see the puppeteers controlling what we see and hear about what’s going on in the world . . . the cave wall. Then throw off the shackles and leave the cave, without taking up battle with the puppeteers. Bask in the sunlight and breathe the fresh air of the beautiful world of Mother Nature. As one enlightened soul commented on Facebook on the R.E.M song lyrics “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. . .“Mostly I have such a deep appreciation of Life with all of its sides. Gratitude seems to give me a door to bring love to the scene.” Now that’s what’s real . . . and peacefully comforting.Until my next post,
“Whoever has come to know the world has found a corpse. And whoever has found (this) corpse, of him the world is not worthy. . . . If you do not abstain from the world, you will not find the kingdom.” —Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas
♦ ◊ ♦
The world is a corpse . . . so said the Master, the “Prince of Peace.” Not the planet, just the world of man’s making. Especially the world we’ve constructed of concrete, iron and plastic — of consumptive commercial enterprise, political polarization and division; of poverty, greed and avarice; of mass starvation and hysteria; of war and genocide. That world is dead and is only sustained by the life-energy men and women pour into it, draining away their own life substance, their God-given birthright.
War is such a waste of life energy and natural resources. Those who declare and conduct wars lose their lives just as surely as those who die on the battlefields. And those who seek to profit from manipulating the masses and selling them false security are foolishly and deceivingly selling dishonest goods. The lie of the serpent has always been a futile endeavor to be honest with dishonest good. One cannot give what one doesn’t have oneself. One cannot sell peace to a world at war with itself who does not own peace oneself. Nor can one revive a corpse who has not the power to infuse flesh with life. Best to put one’s efforts toward bringing forth a new world. (The 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi . . . Life Out of Balance and needing a new beginning . . . comes to mind.) A world out of balance is destined to topple.
LIFE IS A GIFT AND A MIRACLE
I resonate with the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. This saying by Jesus is powerfully resonating in my heart and mind as I approach writing this post:
“If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. But if the spirit (came into being) because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has taken up residence in this poverty.”
I marvel at how wonderous and mysterious is my own sustained incarnation after eighty-two years, and how this flesh body still pulsates with the breath of life. I marvel at how my mind arises from my body to meet and share the Consciousness of God descending from Heaven above, a gift that connects me with my Creator making my personal world one, as heaven and earth are one. This saying of Jesus brings sadness and hope into my heart:
“I stood in the middle of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found all of them drunk. None of them did I find thirsty. And my soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their heart, and they cannot see; for they came into the world empty, (and) they also seek to depart from the world empty. But now they are drunk. (But) when they shake off their wine, then they will change their mind.”
Will we change our minds and our hearts? My hope is likely in vain. That was some twenty-two hundred years ago; not very long when one considers the length of a human lifespan — in terms of generations, perhaps as little as sixty-five or seventy. How much do you think the world has changed in such a short period of time? Do you think the Master’s words still apply to this generation? He is on record as having said “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will not pass away.” I believe the man-made world is just as dead today as it was then. That said, still . . .
“The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”
The “ordinances” for the earth and its fullness are established upon the sea of Divine Consciousness, the Heaven for the unfolding of Earth’s journey through the Cosmos. Our part is to set them in the earth, to materialize creation. The true creator stays with his creation throughout the cycles of its existence, and according to astronomical predictions, this planet has several more billion years ahead of it . . . but not necessarily as it now is or has been. Change is definitely afoot for the earth and for earthlings.
I’m preaching to the choir here, of course, just sharing the thoughts and meditations of my heart that started flowing in upon seeking, asking and knocking on the door of Heaven. The rest of Psalm 24 wants to be shared here as well, perhaps as the focus for this post.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.
Who was Jacobthat his face would be sought by this generation? He was, of course, the Father of the Nation of Israel, having received the blessing of Abraham, the father of his father Isaac, from whom he stole his brother Esau’s birthright and their father’s blessing. (The commentary and open forum the link above will take you to is insightful and worthy of your time.) The overarching answer to that question, of course, lies in the Akashic records of the several incarnations of the LORD of lords, who was incarnate in the man Jesus — and that information lies in the realm of knowledge of a much higher order — which is not unavailable to us today. According to the words of this psalm, the Lord was incarnate in Jacob as well.
We are in the Day of the “Second Coming” of the Christ , who was incarnate in a number of great beings of renown whose timely and appointed appearances are all part of the restoration of Man to his original state of oneness with the Creator. The significance of Jacob’s “face” lies in the manner in which Jacob “wrestled with God” and therein proved his worthiness and stature of spirit to bring forth a nation¹ . . . and thereby initiate a cycle of restoration of Man to his rightful state of co-creator with God. The story in the last chapters of Genesis — along with the dramatic episode of their wandering in the desert for forty-years as told in Exodus — are remarkable stories telling of the hardships the Nation of Israel suffered as the LORD God purified and chastened his children and proved them in the fire of love and truth. From out of all they went through emerged the opportunity for life to be restored to the body of Man, the Body of God on Earth. That restoration failed with Israel, and failed again with the re-initiation by the Lord of Love himself.
This generation once again seeks the face of Jacob through whom the first opportunity of Man’s restoration was initiated . . . only that face today is the face of the Prince of Peace. For it is peace the peoples of planet Earth now seek and for which we all yearn. We will bring peace to the world when we look into the face of one another and see the face of God . . . and love what we see . . . what the pure of heart see. In a sense, we have to wrestle with our traditional concept of who and what God is, just as Abraham wrestled with the angel of God over the tradition which required the sacrifice of his firstborn, Isaac, to Jehovah. With that denial of tradition, Abraham brought to a close the era of human sacrifice. Today we sacrifice human lives in the marketplace of Wall Street and in the battlefields of warring nations. To find peace we need to wrestle with and overcome our own addiction to war and to that which we seek to gain by waging war . . . war of any and all kinds.
♦ ◊ ♦
(The painting of the face of Jesus at the top, “The Prince of Peace,” was done by Akiane Kramarik at the age of 8. According to her story, she felt asked and compelled from within her spirt to paint it. If you click on her name you can listen to her amazing story. She also painted this one.)
I’ve come to love this One, Jesus (aka Jeshua), in whom the Christ incarnated to bring love into the world and thereby initiate the final cycle of redemption and restoration of Man to his true state of oneness with His Heavenly Father, a oneness which he proclaimed for himself and exemplified to his disciples and to the world during his life and brief public ministry. I’ve come to know him as my Self, as the One I Am, for I am, and you are, as much a son or a daughter of the Father as He is. We are in the days of his “Second Coming,” this time through the hearts of human beings — and as the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of the heaven of consciousness. These final words of Psalm 24 describe what we all must do to welcome His coming and complete the cycle of restoration that He initiated two-thousand year ago.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.Who is this King of glory?The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
♦ ◊ ♦
I leave you to ponder these words and those of this blog post, which I’m feeling may well be my last post on Healing Tones. Thank you for sharing the thoughts and meditations of my heart. May God bless and keep you safe from harm in the loving arms of The Prince of Peace. Aumen
Be love. Be loved
Anthony
tpal70@gmail.com
¹ “Jacob wrestles with God before going to meet his brother. What do we make of it? Obviously God could beat Jacob in a wrestling match so it seems that it may be that Jacob was having doubts or that God needed to test him. The NJBC says, “Jacob is truly a man of blessing, but this time he wrestles for it and receives it from God (in contrast to his cheating Esau in order to receive Isaac’s blessing.” Jacob has just prayed to God and laid his thoughts bare. Now he has wrestled with him and won. Now Jacob is ready to become the father of Israel. As Orual asked in C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till we have faces, “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?” Also, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?’” Jacob now has a face and is ready to become the father of a great nation. First he must make things right with his own brother. Jacob may have been struck by earnest doubts in the face of possible bloodshed and death but this meeting was too important for covenantal history. God had to intervene.” (The BioLogos Forum)
“I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” — Islamic Tradition
CHRISTMAS IS A YEARLY CELEBRATION of the incarnation of God’s only son, the Lord of Love and Prince of Peace, on Earth. I would like to share with you an insightful view and perspective of the incarnation of Jesus as a fully humanized being, taken from Cynthia Bourgeault’s beautifully written and profoundly insightful book THE WISDOM JESUS. Its author is an Episcopal priest who has written several books exploring Jesus’ life as a mystical teaching and sacrament.
Having emerged from a Catholic upbringing myself, and having spent seven years in Catholic Seminary, I do enjoy sharing this author’s vision of what Christianity could be simply by adopting a more metaphysical view and understanding of it core truth and of the One whose birth we celebrate this week. Cynthia takes us from where we’ve been in our religious path of worshiping God, to where we are now at the threshold of opportunity for a radical shift in our attitude and consciousness, and forward to how we could easily move into a more spirit and love based path to knowing God. I will share selections from her book in two or more blog posts. I hope you will enjoy her as much as I do.
♦ ◊ ♦
THE INCARMATION
IN THE FIRST PART of this book we explored Jesus’s teachings as a comprehensive spiritual path. In this second part we will be shifting our focus to consider Jesus’s life itself as a teaching. By “a teaching” I mean a model, of course; all authentic teachers walk the talk. But more than just a model, I want to consider his life as a sacrament — that is, as a spiritual force in its own right. The traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” But what to my mind this definition does not make sufficiently clear is that a sacrament does not merely symbolize a spiritual reality; it lives that reality into existence.
Jesus’s life, considered from this standpoint, is a sacrament: a mystery that draws us deeply into itself and, when rightly approached, conveys an actual spiritual energy empowering us to follow the path that his teachings have laid out. This sacramental life of Jesus rests on four cornerstones which are both historical events and cosmic realities: his incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension. Together they compose the foundation of the Christian mystical and devotional life, and to open oneself fully to the meaning of these great mysteries is to be able to read the inner roadmap of the Christian path. In the next four chapters we will be exploring each of these mysteries in turn. My hope is to move beyond the usual theological and critical-historical explanations in order to follow the living mystical thread that will allow us to appropriate each one of these mysteries as food for the journey.
Since the ground we will be traversing is also the sometimes prickly shared territory of Christian liturgy and sacramental theology, let me remind you once again of my own background here, so that you will know where I am speaking from. While I wear the collar of an Episcopal priest, most of my lived liturgical life has been within the wider stream of Benedictine monasticism, primarily Western and Roman Catholic (although the Episcopal liturgy is in most respects identical), and it is from this perspective (as well as my earlier training as a medievalist) that I will primarily be speaking when I describe the ritual celebrations that unfold these great mysteries. I am less familiar with the Orthodox traditions (except through my exposure to the Christian inner tradition), but at ease within the Celtic and Oriental Orthodox spiritual streams, whose extraordinary insights I will draw on at appropriate moments. As Meister Eckhart once observed, “There is no being except in a mode of being,” and the Western Catholic mode of being is the stream in which I have primarily come to know what I know. With that disclaimer in place, let us see what we can discover about the first great mystery, the incarnation.
“For God So Loved the World . . . .”
I remember being struck many years ago by an insight from the contemporary mystic Bernadette Roberts that crucifixion wasn’t really the hard thing for Jesus; the hard thing was incarnation.” Crucifixion and what followed from it — his death and resurrection — were simply the pathway along which infinite consciousness could return to its natural state. What was really hard for infinite consciousness was to come into the finite world in the first place. With nothing to gain from the human adventure — nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, and a dangerously unboundaried heart that left him defenseless against the hard edges of this world — Jesus came anyway: that, claims Bernadette Roberts, was the real crucifixion! As we saw earlier, Paul grasped that same point in his beautiful hymn in Philippians 2:9-16. The first self-emptying that Jesus goes through is the self-emptying that lands him in bodily form on this planet, a human being. There is definitely something spiritually counterintuitive about this business of incarnation, and to really get what’s at stake in this mystery is for me the acid test as to whether you understand what Christianity is all about.
Unfortunately, this understanding is hard to come by: not only outside of Christianity, but inside it as well. Make no mistake, Christianity is intensely a religion of incarnation. Millions of people caught up in mass hysteria during the Christmas season can’t all be wrong! But even the sentimental excesses of the season only go to reinforce the point. There is a deeper truth at work here that stirs us in spite of ourselves. Who among us has not awakened in the wee hours of Christmas morning to catch the live broadcast of the Ceremony of Lessons and Carols from Westminster Abbey and thrilled to the sonorous reading of those immortal words from the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us”? There is a deep soul-truth here that both contains and redeems our frantic efforts to penetrate its meaning at a more superficial level.
If you were to imagine the great world religions like the colors of a rainbow, each one witnessing in a particular way to some essential aspect of the divine fullness, Christianity would unquestionably hold down the corner of incarnation — by which I mean the vision of God in full solidarity with the created world, fully at home within the conditions of finitude, so that form itself poses no impediment to divinity. There is another beautiful phrase in John’s gospel proclaiming: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (John 3:16). At its mystical best, Christianity reverberates with the warmth of this assurance: with the conviction that creation is good, that God is for us, and that what ultimately gets worked out in the sacred mystery of Jesus’s passage through the human realm is a profound testament to love.
Who Screwed Up?
Unfortunately, Christianity as a religion has never had a sufficient metaphysical understanding of its own core truth. The message gets obscured by its primary interpretive vehicle: the theology of fall and redemption. Virtually all Christian teaching begins from the supposition that Jesus’s incarnation is brought about by the fall of Adam and happens in response to it. “As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive” is the classic Pauline formulation of this idea (I Corinthians 15:20). The primordial parents Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and plunged the world into chaos; Jesus came to rescue it. Thus, incarnation is framed from the start within the context of God’s response to a mistake that should never have happened in the first place. This assumption, in turn, deeply colors our understanding of the phrase, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” It sounds like: “God didn’t give up on us; God bailed us out.”
In a more mystical nuancing of this same basic idea, we encounter the theology of “0 felix culpa”~”O happy fault”~ to quote the first line of a traditional Gregorian Advent hymn which expresses this theology particularly clearly. Rather than blaming Adam and Eve, this line of argument claims, we ought to be grateful for them because their mistake set in motion the chain of events through which Christ would fully reveal himself to this world. Without that initial fall there would have been no need for the redemption. In the most subtle versions of this teaching (as in Karl Barth’s Christ and Adam) linear cause and effect are reversed, and we see Adam and Eve falling into this space/time continuum out of God’s “prior” decision (that is, already made in eternity) to reveal himself in human form. Rather than being the cause of the fall, Adam and Eve become the instruments of the ultimate divine self-communication. This is a much more affirmative teaching, which brings the theology of fall and redemption to its most mature expression.
But I would like to push the metaphysical envelope still further and see if we can approach the mystery of the incarnation through a conceptual framework that does not rely on fall and redemption at all but unfolds along an entirely different line of understanding. Instead of a cosmic course-correction, this other approach envisions the steady and increasingly intimate revelation of divine love along a trajectory that was there from the beginning. The best expression of this idea is actually contained in a beautiful saying from Islamic tradition (although its roots go down into perennial wisdom ground): “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality — beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative — projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love. And remember that “realize” has two meanings: “to recognize” and “to make real.” The act of loving brings hidden potential to full expression, and the more intimate and costly the self-giving, the more precious the quality of love revealed. This subtle and beautiful understanding of creation will also, as we shall see, have something very important to show us about our true work as human beings.
♦ ◊ ♦
We are each one an incarnation of Divine Being. Our personal incarnations were stressful and limiting, descending from the peaceful Realms of Light and landing in the dark wet terrain of busy embryonic cellular activity; from flying freely in the air of spirit to crawling on our bellies until our toddling forms learn to walk and run. How we yearn for the freedom we knew before incarnating. I remember very vivid dreams of flying above the ground at breakneck speed in my youthful years. Who hasn’t had such dreams? And I can relate to the thrill a jet pilot must enjoy flying through the air at supersonic speed. One has to be fit and well trained to fly a jet. Likewise our human capacities need compassionate care and vital nourishment in order to be fully fit and available in accommodating the incarnate divine beings we are.
Yet here we are, fully awake and learning how to navigate a multidimensional universe of energy-shaped-and-driven hard and complex materiality only God comprehends. Being incarnate gods ourselves, we have been gifted the privilege of sharing in Divine Consciousness and comprehending reality that is incomprehensible to the human intellect—for the darkness cannot comprehend the Light in the same way that Light comprehends the darkness. We incarnate to bring Light into the dark corners of Creation to bring forth a heavenly world here on Earth where we are. This gives us great cause for celebrating, at Christmas time and throughout the year.
I celebrate you, dear reader, this Christmas, along with my own Divine incarnation—and my gift to you and myself is unconditional love and acceptance. May the joy of Love fill you full to overflowing during this Holiday Season. Until my next post — which will be published this coming Wednesday,
Be love. Be loved.
Anthony (tpal70@gmail.com)
Credits: Artistic drawing by Rose Meeker, author of MAGIC AT OUR HAND – Releasing Our Lives into Order and Beauty
“I have thrown fire on the world. Look! I watch it until it blazes.” —Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas
◊♦◊
IN MY PREVIOUS POST I spoke of a restoration process underway since the Fall, so far made in two approaches. The first one was initiated with Abraham and the nation of Israel. The second approach, from the physical plane as was the first, was initiated with King Solomon. Both failed to bring mankind back into the Garden state and alignment with the governance of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The third and forth approaches were from the mental and spiritual planes respectively and was initiated by the Master Jesus Christ, the incarnate Lord of Love. Both of these approaches failed as well due to the hardness of men’s hearts and failure to comprehend his dual command to love the Lord God above all and one’s neighbor as oneself, which embodies the essence of his life and teachings.
This post is about the third approach which led to a fourth for him personally, opening the Way to restoration and ascension for all of mankind. The following is from my book SACRED ANATOMY.
◊♦◊
The Way of the Master
There was a Man sent from God—an incarnate God Being—who returned to Heaven with his human capacities restored to their glorified state. His name was Jesus and he was called “Master” by those who loved and followed him closely.
Putting these cycles of restoration in a certain perspective, Uranda called them “Sacred Schools” in that they were periods of spiritual education, a time when human beings were taught by great spirits and masters how to function spiritually in each level of ascent as the restoration continued to unfold. Jesus initiated the second cycle, at the level of the mental plane, and opened the door to the third, the level of the expression of Spirit, with his two Great Commandments of Love. But those to whom he brought the Way back into the “kingdom of heaven” either didn’t comprehend him or rejected him out of hand and sought to erase him from the face of the Earth by destroying his personal temple. This time it was men who failed to defeat the Divine Design for restoration, as it was beyond their reach.
Jesus dealt with human consciousness from the “mental plane approach.” He offered tranquility, a quality of the Spirit of the Single Eye in the second plane of being, to minds frantically busy with the letter of the law and the prophets. “Peace, be still,” were words he often spoke before preaching and ministering to his disciples. He took issue with the Scribes and Pharisees, for example, which he blatantly characterized as “hypocrites” and “whited sepulchers full of dead men’s bones” for the way they allowed the letter of the law to overshadow the “spirit that giveth life.”
He came to fulfill the law and the prophets, not to impose them upon the faithful in order to “lord it over them.” Above all, he met and dealt forthrightly and in singleness of purpose with his own human mind and restored order and beauty to his house of Being. “Get thee behind me, Satan” were his words of rebuke more than once to his own human mind and through it to the collective mind in the larger body of mankind.
He brought one law, the law of love, to replace the many laws that were on the books and enforced in order to keep the people subdued and under control. That law was stated as two Great Commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all of thy heart and all of thy mind and with all of thy strength,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In giving this one law of love, He began opening the third level of consciousness and plane of being, the spiritual-expression plane approach, which is made from the level of the heart. It is simply the expression of the spirit of God in living, which brings a realization of the presence of God in one’s temple and an outpouring of blessing into one’s world. We have seen how this level is the domain of the Spirit of Blessing.
“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,” He taught, and in so teaching began to open the way leading up into the fourth level of consciousness, which is the plane of being connecting heaven and earth and the level of awareness of divine identity. The Spirit of Purification reins here to bring clarity to the heaven.
In order to enter this level of consciousness, where one knows with assurance one’s own divine presence in the world, the heart must be purified by the continual and consistent outpouring of the Holy Spirit of Love. It is the only way—and the Master Jesus went that way, even though no one at the time was willing to go with Him. “I am the way, the truth and the life,” He proclaimed and then proceeded to exemplify for all who had ears to hear and eyes to see.
Here was the Lord of Love himself incarnate on earth attempting to gather human beings back under his wings, “as a hen with her brood,” but they “would not.” The gospels say Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem. It was not for himself that he wept but for what he saw human beings were doing to themselves. He came to initiate the process by which human beings could come out of the state of dying souls and back into the state of original innocence as living souls, only he was met by all sorts of resistance and considerable opposition.
When it became apparent to him that he was not going to be allowed to initiate that process for the whole body of mankind through His personal hedge of followers, he accepted the responsibility himself of ascending to the third and fourth planes of being. But he did not stop here. There had already been too much failure in the past. He went all the way through the remaining three levels of being: the fifth which is that of radiance under the domain of the Spirit of Life, the sixth which is that of wisdom under the domain of the Spirit of Truth, or the Womb, and finally the seventh, the dwelling place of the Spirit of Love, with his transfiguration, resurrection and ascension into heaven.
He stepped from earth back into heaven from whence he had come—and from whence we all have come—giving the simple and apparently achievable instruction to simply follow him: “He that believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.” (John 14:12)
Going unto the Father is the first step and the last that leads to union with God and glorious transfiguration. He established agreement on earth with His Father in heaven, and where two agree on earth as touching anything “in my name” (in the vibration of love), it shall be done of them by the Father in heaven. He was able to step, body, soul and spirit, back into the realms of light by reason of the working of this law of love, and the process of ascension manifested in His humanity.
Each one of these steps of ascent, from one level of consciousness to the next, manifested changes in his outer form. They each had their impact on Him physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Throughout this process he experienced amazing feats of all sorts: levitation, transfiguration, command of the wind, mental telepathy, long distance healing power, a potently radiant and highly charged personal atmosphere that when but touched by those around him in faith, wrought healing, power to raise the dead, and many other miracles of transformation. The greatest transformation was that of his own consciousness to the clear, absolute realization that “I and my Father are one.” He attained to the vibration of the Father, who is love, as he himself had long since earned the title of “Lord of Love.”
Probably the toughest of all the outer manifestations of change to move through was his betrayal and subsequent crucifixion. Yet move through it he did, maintaining His connection with his Father and thereby maintaining the continuity of the cycle he had initiated which took him step by step back into the Realms of Light from whence he had come. He surely saw that experience as a door through which he had to pass in order to go the Way he had chosen. Death with its seeming finality was to him but the shadow side of eternal life itself, and not just for his spirit but for his own body temple as well.
The door that leads into the light is always hidden in the shadow, because it is closed. He opened that door and found resurrection and ascension on the other side, and he opened it with unconditional love for and forgiveness of those who had put him on the cross. His heart was utterly purified in the fire of love he shared with his Heavenly Father, and which he sought unceasingly to share with his disciples and the world which his Father so loved and had sent him to save. His outer form was transformed by the Spirit of Purification as He moved through the fourth plane of being on his way up in the ascension process. Indeed, he became the Spirit of Purification himself at the fourth level of being, the crossover point between spirit and form, and burned his way through the thick veil of the impure heart of humanity.
In a service entitled “The Way of the Master,” Martin Cecil describes these events in a remarkably clear and thought-provoking presentation. He refers to a “tone” sounded:
What a task! What an unbelievable undertaking, and yet He did it, in spite of everything . . . He established what we have called the true tone of life for man, an actual vibratory radiation that has been sounding on earth all down the centuries . . . . It was set of course not by a man as such but by the Lord through a man. That trumpet tone has been sounding without diminishing for nineteen centuries . . . .
When He did proceed through the creative cycle in His own personal experience on earth He did what He might to assist those who were present with Him to come along into an experience of greater understanding, but they didn’t get very far. You may recall, in the Gospel of John, Philip and Thomas, two of the disciples, had no faintest idea as to what it was that our Master was talking about. He’d been speaking: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” And He said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” That’s the way He was going, moving through these successive levels of consciousness in the creative cycle, the ascending cycle, thereby preparing the way. Nobody was going with Him at that time. The disciples were completely at sea. They enjoyed being with Him, they loved Him, but they didn’t know what was happening and apparently no one has known since. Some beliefs have been generated, some ideas have been produced, and there may have been a little truth back of some of these things. But only now, when it begins to surface and come within the range of present human experience, does it once more become meaningful. It becomes meaningful to the extent that it is experienced; not to the extent that it is thought about or discussed, or to the extent that doctrines are established; it means something only on the basis of actual experience. So because there begins to be some actual experience it begins to be meaningful . . . . (Excerpted from Third Sacred School, Vol. 2, Chapter 28)
It is the experience that this One Divine Man undertook himself that has established what the body of mankind is to experience and has experienced since he set this tone and sounded it all the way through the seven levels of being as he ascended with his body temple restored to its glorified state. This is the path that all of mankind has been invited to take and that we each must travel if we are to experience fully the salvation which he brought, the path leading well beyond worship of God to resurrection and ascension in sacred union with God. Until the reality of such union is actually known, man shall continue his search for Eden outside himself and worship God at the foot of altars made of wood and stone — but not for long. ♦
◊♦◊
The purpose of restoration relates primarily to the return of this world, the earth and the fulness thereof, to the One whose world it is, through Man restored. In my next post, “The Transmutation of Planet Earth,” I will give in-depth and specific consideration to the divine design by which the Earth is restored to the One who is responsible for it. Until then,
“It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Generosity of spirit is innate with everyone. We are born to be givers. This pandemic, along with hurricanes and wildfires, is bringing out the spirit of giving in us all, heralding in a new day and shaping a new world. When I see it acted out in movies and news stories, I tear up with joy and longing for the return of generosity to our world. A passage from my poet friend Don Hynes expresses what I feel today:
The old earth claws for purchase
but the turning is profound,
reaching from the furthest stars
to the roots of trees,
a new heaven poised beyond
the horizon, beginning even now
to shape the world anew.
This passage from Cynthia Bourgeault’s THE WISDOM JESUS touched a place in my heart of deep sadness for the state of the world mingled with profound love for this Man she honors and celebrates so exquisitely personal. How little we know of his colorful character from the Four Gospels. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene give us a taste of his more candid expressions, some rather blunt and thought provoking: “Whoever is near me is near the fire. Whoever is far from me (the fire) is far from the Kingdom.” He was no gentle lamb, nor a “sweet Jesus.” His generosity of spirit still shines through his words and deeds recorded in the New Testament, all of which were written down four to five decades after his departure, all from oral traditions. Yet they inspire and compel us to be better and do better than we have been and done heretofore—even to be ablaze with love as he was. Cynthia introduces this passage with poetry by Rumi:
Yet in the midst of suffering, Love proceeds like a millstone, hard-surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self-interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
The Jesus Trajectory
The words above were written by the great Sufi mystic Jalalludin Rumi. But better than almost anything in Christian scripture, they closely describe the trajectory that Jesus himself followed in life. He certainly called us to dying to self, but his idea of dying to self was not through inner renunciation or guarding the purity of his being but through radically squandering everything he had and was. John the Baptist’s disciples were horrified because he banqueted, drank, and danced. The Pharisees were horrified because he healed on the Sabbath and kept company with women and disreputables, people known to be impure. Boundaries meant nothing to him; he walked right through them.
What seemed disconcerting to nearly everybody was the messy, freewheeling largeness of his spirit. Abundance and a generosity bordering on extravagant seemed to be the signatures of both his teaching and his personal style. We have already noted this in two of his parables, where the thing that sticks in people’s craws is in each case the display of a generosity beyond comprehension that it can only be perceived as unfair. But as we look further, that extravagance is everywhere. When he feeds the multitudes at the Sea of Galilee, there is not merely enough to go around; the leftovers fill twelve baskets. When a woman anoints him with expensive ointment and the disciples grumble about the waste, he affirms, “Truly, I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Matthew 26:I3). He seems not to count the cost; in fact, he specifically forbids counting the cost. “Do not store up treasures on earth,” he teaches; “do not strive or be afraid—for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke I2:32). All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness, so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling.
It is a path he himself walked to the very end. In the garden of Gethsemane, with his betrayers and accusers massing at the gates, he struggled and anguished but remained true to his course. Do not hoard, do not cling—not even to life itself. Let it go, let it be-“Not my will but yours be done, 0 Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Thus he came and thus he went, giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering himself, “gambling away every gift God bestows.” It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us. There is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing. You let it go. You go through life like a knife goes through a done cake, picking up nothing, clinging to nothing, sticking to nothing. And grounded in that fundamental chastity of your being, you can then throw yourself out, pour yourself out, being able to give it all back, even giving back life itself. That’s the kenotic path in a nutshell. Very, very simple. It only costs everything.
Now, I wouldn’t say that Jesus was the first or the only teacher in the world ever to have opted for this more reckless and extravagant path, the kenotic way to full union. But it does seem that this was the first time such a teaching had ever been seen in the Near Eastern world, and along with its newness also came confusion. It was a concept so far ahead of its time that even Jesus’s closest disciples couldn’t quite stay with it. They’d catch it and they’d lose it. Paul catches it exactly in his beautiful kenotic hymn, then loses it in the long lists of rules and moral proscriptions that dominate his epistles. And as the church took shape as an institution, it could not exceed the wingspan of its first apostolic teachers; what they themselves did not fully understand, they could not hope to accurately transmit. Thus, as we will see in the next chapter, right from the start the radical simplicity of Jesus’s kenotic path tends to get roped back into the older and more familiar ascetic models, with a subtle but distinct dissonance that we will be keeping our eyes on.
“It only costs everything.” Cynthia’s words in this passage take me back half a century to the awakening phase of my spiritual transformation. I was in my late twenties, just starting up my chiropractic practice in Denham Springs, Louisiana, eager to give my gift to the world and hungry for patients to serve. The going rate for an office visit back then was $15, up from $5 a decade earlier. Even with such a low fee, however, I felt restricted and handcuffed by the tradition of a “fee for services.” What price can one place on health? On life itself? Health is priceless and life is a gift freely given by God to all human beings. It didn’t feel honest for me to place a price tag on my services, so I dropped my fees altogether and placed my services on a “giving basis.” This launched me into the most rewarding and enjoyable fourteen years of my entire career. (This was before the widely available use of credit cards and insurance coverage of Chiropractic care.)
This way of serving wasn’t original with me but was already being successfully modeled by Dr. William H. Bahan and his brother, Dr. Walter Bahan, up in Derry, NH, who were seeing upwards of a hundred patients a day. I began attending his seminars and discovering that there were a number of chiropractors practicing on a giving basis. Six years into this new way of serving—called “GPC” for God Patient Chiropractor—I wrote an article for ONTOLOGICAL THOUGHT, a journal of The Ontological Society, while attending an Art of Living Class conducted by the Universal Institute of Applied Ontology (the art of being). The article is entitled “How Do You Live, Doctor?” I’ll share it in my next post. Until then,
“Jesus said: Whoever has found the world and become rich should renounce the world . . . . The world is not worthy of one who finds himself.” — From The Gospel of Thomas
THE GIFT IS LOVE
Continuing with Cynthia Bourgeault’s insight into Jesus’s chosen kenotic path, I will forgo any introductory comments so as not to clutter the space with thoughts other than those presented in this excerpt from her book THE WISDOM JESUS:
A Pointless Sacrifice?
To flesh out a bit further what this path actually looks like, forgive me if I make a sudden leap into the world of modern literature. Kenosis does not lend itself easily to spiritual theorizing. By far its most powerful and moving enactments have come in the form of story and drama.
One of the most precise descriptions of this path, believe it or not, is the familiar and well-loved story “The Gift of the Magi” by the American author O. Henry. You probably remember the tale. Della and James are newlyweds; they’re madly in love with each other. They are also poor as church mice, and their first Christmas together finds them without sufficient funds to buy each other gifts. But each of these lovers does have one prize possession. James owns a gold watch given to him by his grandfather; Della has stunning auburn hair falling all the way to her waist. Unbeknownst to Della, James pawns his gold watch in order to buy her beautiful silver combs for her hair. Unbeknownst to James, Della cuts and sells her hair in order to buy him a gold watch chain. On Christmas eve the two of them stare bewilderedly at their completely useless gifts. It has been a pointless sacrifice—pointless, that is, unless love itself is “the gift of the magi.”
And of course, this is exactly what O. Henry is getting at. In the voluntary relinquishing of their most cherished possessions, they make manifest what love really looks like; they give tangible shape to the bond that holds them together. That’s what kenosis is all about.
Another profoundly kenotic parable of our times is the tale that forms the 1987 movie Babette’s Feast, adapted from a short story by Isak Dinesen. As the drama unfolds we discover that its heroine, Babette, had until recently been one of the most celebrated chefs in Paris, but during the political riots of 1871 she loses everything—restaurant, livelihood, and family. She flees for her life to rural Denmark and is taken in by two aging sisters who have given their lives to religious work, trying to hold together the spiritual community that their father founded. When Babette arrives, the remaining believers have grown old and weary, lost in petty bickering. Babette tries as best she can to lift their spirits, but nothing seems to be turning the situation around. Out of the blue a letter arrives informing her that she has won three million francs in a lottery back in Paris, and then and there she decides to treat these Danish peasants to a proper French dinner. She imports all the necessary ingredients: not only exotic gourmet delicacies for the seven-course meal itself (each with its appropriate wines, champagnes, and liqueurs) but the china dinnerware, silver cutlery, damask table cloths, and crystal glassware. The film zeroes in on the banquet table as the astonished Danish peasants are suddenly faced with this extravagant abundance. At first they are frightened and suspicious, but little by little the mood mellows as they slowly relax into gratitude and forgiveness. The last scene of that banquet night has them all stumbling, a bit drunk but very happy, out into the village square, where they form a circle around the fountain (a vivid image in its own right) and begin to sing and dance together. After all these years they have finally touched the wellspring, and their hearts are overflowing. Then someone says to Babette, “Well, I guess you’ll be leaving us soon, won’t you, now that you’re a rich woman?” She says, “Rich? I’m not rich. I spent every penny I had on that banquet, three million francs.”
Again we see the same leitmotif as in the O. Henry story. An extravagant sacrifice is in one sense wasted, because these poor peasants cannot really comprehend the magnitude of the gift, and by morning, when they’ve sobered up, they will probably have lost most of its beneficial effect. But no matter; the banquet table is set before them anyway. In her no-holds-barred generosity Babette offers these broken, dispirited souls a taste of reassurance that their long years of faithfulness have not been in vain. She mirrors to them what God is like, what love is like, what true humanness is like. And she does it precisely by throwing away her entire escape route in a single act of extravagant abundance, extravagant beyond the bounds of earth (and therefore invoking the presence of heaven). That’s the kenotic path.
Theologians have sometimes commented that if the goal of ascent mysticism is to bring about union through convergence at the point of origin, the effect of the kenotic path seems to be. self-disclosure and new manifestation. The act of self-giving brings new realms into being. It shows what God is like in new and different ways. Some of the most intuitive theologians of our times say that this is how the world was created in the first place—because, in the words of Karl Rahner, “God is the prodigal who squanders himself.” The act of self-giving is simultaneously an act of self-communication; it allows something that was coiled and latent to manifest outwardly. “Letting go” (as in non-clinging, or self-emptying) is but a hair’s breadth away from “letting be,” and our Judeo-Christian tradition remembers that it is through God’s original “Let there be . . . ” that our visible world tumbled into existence.
I love Cynthia’s authentic thinking and writing outside the box of conventional belief. She presents a theology that I, as a former Catholic seminary student, can easily accept and understand at a heart level. In my own published writings and blogging, I have ascribed to “ascent mysticism” as the path of ascension to the “point of origin” we think to be up in some Heaven, a point that Jesus himself taught is within. When he reportedly ascended into Heaven, did he go up or within?
There is a passage in my SACRED ANATOMY book where I contemplate this paradoxical dynamic. The word “up” can be both dimensional and non-dimensional, or vibrational, as in moving up to a higher frequency. The same is true of the word “down.” The biblical account of Jesus’s ascension indicates that he ascended into “the clouds of heaven.”
For example, I mentioned the “clouds of heaven.” Jesus was seen by his disciples as ascending into the clouds above their heads. These clouds may have been the conditions in their own (transforming) collective consciousness through which the Lord of Love was making his royal exit from the earthly planes back into the higher planes of being from which he had come, and from which we all come—the “kingdom of heaven” which he had told them more than once “is within you.” This could also be the inference made by the two men in white apparel whom they reportedly saw standing with him and whom they heard say to them: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” This may well be a classic case where the dimensional state simply did not comprehend the non-dimensional. The darkness did not comprehend the light. The lower planes simply cannot comprehend the higher. But the one who stands in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, the seven planes of being, in the fourth dimension has both physical and spiritual eyes and can see and comprehend the non-dimensional as clearly and easily as the dimensional.
I can appreciate Cynthia’s inference that Jesus descended down all the way—actually “into hell” according to the biblical text—in order to encompass and include all the dimensions of the vast spectrum of Creation in both heaven and earth, in the cycles of restoration, which he was very intentionally in the process of initiating. In so doing he opened the gates to the Garden of Paradise here on Earth. As Cynthia states so well in the next excerpt from this chapter, which I will publish in my next post:
It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Until my next post, be love, be loved and be blessed.
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 Sufisheik 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,
“Jars of spring water are not enough anymore. Take us down to the river.” –Rumi
I will conclude this series of considerations of the Jesus of faith versus the Jesus of history with Michael Baigent’s own words summarizing the journey we have taken through his provocative book The Jesus Papers — Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History, words and thoughts that I fully embrace as resonant with my own spirit of understanding of the life and ministry of Jesus.
Here are Baigent’s final words from his book:
DURING THE COURSE of writing this book, I have sought out knowledge of a very special context – that of Egypt and Judaea in the first century of the modern era, a period about which there are few facts that we can be certain of. We have seen how the context can be controlled and forced to support a story that simply can’t be true. The Jesus of history cannot have been as the theology of the Jesus of faith presents him.
During the course of our journey, we have discovered that Jesus rejected the political activity of his Zealot supporters. This is a crucially important piece of information that has been missed. We have seen too that there is no evidence that he died on the cross; in fact, what evidence survives suggests otherwise. And if he didn’t die on the cross, where does that leave the resurrection? His divinity? His equality in the Holy Trinity? These claims all disintegrate once the spin stops.
We have discovered that all these assertions about Jesus came much later, the result of a glossy gift-wrapping of some historical events that were deliberately distorted in order to serve a strict theological agenda, one that maintains to the present day a number of extremely odd and eccentric notions. Foremost among these is the belief that only men were Christ’s closest disciples and so women cannot serve as priests, bishops, or popes. With this discovery, the male domination of the apostolic succession crumbles away, along with the Rome-centered concept of the succession itself.
And crucially, we have also discovered that there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus intended to be worshiped as a god. On the contrary, his teachings indicate that he wanted each person to have the opportunity to travel to the Far-World to find the Divine for himself or herself — or as he put it, to travel to the kingdom of heaven and be filled with the “Spirit of God.”
Where did Jesus learn all this? Not in Galilee, we have concluded, but much more likely in Egypt, where the Jewish community appears to have been more diverse than the Jewish community in Palestine and to have nurtured a more mystical approach to religion.
Furthermore, nothing in our findings suggests that Jesus ever planned to start a religion, let alone encourage others to write down his words and organize them into an official collection of sayings. In fact, quite the reverse is more likely I suspect that he wouldn’t have minded at all if people forgot him; what was more important to him was that people should not forget the way to the kingdom of heaven, a notion not restricted to Christianity and Judaism: “To be ignorant of the divine is the ultimate vice,” proclaim the texts attributed to the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus.
It should be clear now that history is malleable: we have our facts, but we never have enough of them to be able to put our hands on our hearts and say, in all honesty, that we know for certain what happened. All history is a myth, a story created to make some sense out of the few events we can know. The past is a hypothesis erected to explain and justify the present.
In some ways this does not matter, for myths exist to communicate meaning, not history. But in this scientific age we want to know that the myths we live by are, if not true, at least based upon some approximation of the truth. We want to know that Jesus was really crucified, that Caesar was truly murdered by Brutus, that Paul did have a mystical experience on his way to Damascus. All these events are plausible, and there is no intrinsic reason why they might not be true.
But what do we do with beliefs such as Jesus walking on water? Jesus having been raised from the dead? Peter founding the Roman Church with infallible popes? None of these beliefs is plausible, and there is no intrinsic reason why any of them should be true. Yet there are many who equally believe both sets of assertions.
Our modern world is dominated by the “religions of the book” Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We can see that to base truth upon a written word makes it vulnerable to all the problems of interpretation and translation, to say nothing of religious distortion. The danger is that books foster a dependence upon belief rather than knowledge; if there has been one underlying theme of our journey, it has been that we need to travel the road for ourselves and experience its hardships, pleasures, and insights directly rather than secondhand or vicariously. (Bold emphasis mine)
And with that plea I must bring our journey to an end, not because there is no further to travel, for of course there is, but because we have traveled much already and it is now time to pause and reflect on just how far we have come.
As we halt, it only remains to quote the great Persian Sufi Jelaluddin Rumi, who, cutting straight to the heart of the matter, as was always his way, cried out to all who would listen: “Jars of spring water are not enough anymore. Take us down to the river!'”
To drink from the river is our birthright. Let no one deny us that freedom!
There is no argument that the impact upon the entire world of humankind that the presence and ministry of this one man made is nothing short of a profound transformation and elevation of the human spirit and of human consciousness. I know this is true for me personally. Just to think of him and to read his words in my red-letter Bible stirs my soul and quickens my spirit. Jesus is alive today in the heart of humanity as truly as he was alive and physically present on earth two-thousand years ago.
I’ll leave you with this five-minute video clip by Dr. Bruce Lipton on how our beliefs direct our lives 95% of the time and how religious beliefs are programs and not reality. Believing in God is not the same as knowing God. To know God is to go beyond belief and to know your Self. That is the only reality we can know for certain: that I AM.
In my next post I will consider the Aramaic Prayer of Jesus and the direct access to Father and Mother God available to all human beings on Earth. Until then,
Be love. Be loved.
Anthony
Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com. Current post: Humble Honey Kills Bacteria.
What a task! What an unbelievable undertaking, and yet He did it, in spite of everything . . . He established what we have called the true tone of life for man, an actual vibratory radiation that has been sounding on earth all down the centuries . . . . It was set of course not by a man as such but by the Lord through a man. That trumpet tone has been sounding without diminishing for nineteen centuries . . . .
Healing Tones 