†Christology of The Quadrants of the Cross†
Essay #19: Deeper Reflections on the Cross and the Spiritual Practices
So he [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (John 4:5-7)
A. The Psychospiritual Evolution of Humans from Eden to Earth
We have now taken time with both Jesus’s core centering practice and with examples of each of the four types of balancing practices which he taught to correct corresponding disharmonies in each of the four Quadrants of the Cross. It should be apparent from the foregoing that the cross itself is far more than a static religious symbol or even a symbol for Jesus’s life and ministry on the Earth. Rather it is a living guide to the very way of Jesus, the Way of Return to the Father while living life in this earthly realm. It is the key to unlocking the fourfold cosmic intersection of both the heavenly and earth planes and the fundamental psychospiritual planes of effort and surrender. The cross lives because the principles that it represents are alive in us and fully accessible. Moreover, they are operating all the time whether we are aware of them or not. The cost of not being aware of them is to abide in one or more of the disharmonies described by each of the Quadrants of the Cross or to drift unconsciously among these.
The priceless gift of learning the principles and practices of the Cross is to come to know oneself as a creature of the light, to receive that light, and thereby to co-inherit with Christ the power accrued to children of God. We could alternatively say that to receive the light is to come to know the principles of the cross, for the cross is but a reflection and representation of the structure of the very cosmos that was created from the light. Simply put, the light and the cosmos are the cross, and the cross is the cosmos as known to us from the earthly realm. The planes of the cross strictly speaking represent excursions of the Divine into this realm. Thus the heavenly realm depicted by the quadrants above the horizontal beam of the cross is not actually Heaven but rather the excursion or projection of Heaven or heavenly qualities into the realm of space and time. The earthly realm depicted by the quadrants below the horizontal beam is itself the very excursion of the divine into the realm of space and time, or we could say physicality itself. Put differently, it is the realm of physical objects as well as the plant and animal kingdoms in the aspect of their physicality only.
The cross also contains the Jesus point, the intersection of all the planes. This is at once the goal of all the practices of the cross and the summation of the knowledge of the cross. It is most telling and illuminating that the goal and center of the cross is not located fully in the heavenly realm but rather at the intersection of the heavenly and earthly planes, as well as at the intersection of the planes of effort and surrender. We have said it before and repeat it here again: God did not mean for humans to transcend their earthly existence and transition into Heaven while alive on this Earth. Rather, he singularly meant for us to manifest Heaven at the conjunction of Heaven and Earth. He meant for us to be an instrument to realize Heaven on Earth, and the calibration of that instrument is through the right attunement of effort and surrender at the junction of the other two planes. This manifestation is fully within the power of human beings, as Jesus indicated by famously saying that “the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Moreover, this is both a striking and lucid affirmation of our unique place in God’s universe. We stand at the junction of Heaven and Earth. Properly fitted at the Jesus point we have been ordained to inherit bounty from both kingdoms such that even the angels–as has sometimes been written–are envious of humans.
The physical realm is not to be despised as has been suggested in the classic theological and cosmological error of Augustine and many others since. Rather it is to be cherished, not in the wanton and wayward manner of abandonment to physical urges and inclinations but in the manner of the child of God who embraces physicality as a precious manifestation of God’s light, who takes it together with his spiritual gifts and sees in them a continuum of blessings. To take one to the exclusion of the other is to risk the denigration of both and to risk as well the kind of errors we have discovered in both spiritual and physical excesses in the Quadrants of the Cross. For humans, our physicality no less than our spirituality is a pathway to the divine. Together they represent something inestimably precious and uniquely given by God to us. Thus, at the Jesus point, in Christ, we find a wholly new order of being just as St. Paul foretold. When we transition out of this world we shall indeed experience new dimensions of life, but while here this unique balancing point is our most direct and fullest connection to God. This is why Jesus could say that with him we would find life to the fullest, and only with him. He came to exemplify for us this life at the conjunction of Heaven and Earth, of effort and surrender. He lived with physical zest and interest, took wine and dined exuberantly with friends. He kept his trust and connection with the Father all the while, finding even and especially in physical exuberance the joyful manifestation of God. Jesus contained and radiated the supreme fullness of spiritual light which comes from fully receiving that light from the Father. He was like a polished mirror for that light, occluding none of it, withholding none of it, tarnishing none of it, but sharing it freely with whomever had eyes to see or ears to hear.
We are supremely fortunate, then, to be, as St. Paul put it, “coheirs” in all of this with Christ. We have already been given, as it were, all of the bounty from our Father’s inheritance. But we are like those who toil out of ignorance that all of the riches they seek lie right at their feet. We came out of the Garden of Eden not literally but psychospiritually. The realms and elements of the cross have always been with us. Even immortality has never left us but has been usurped by a taste for physicality in separation from spiritual vibration–which has landed us squarely in a belief in death. Strange as it may seem, death is purely an illusion spawned by the very same mind state that ejected us from Eden in the first place: the mind state of separation and control, i.e., understanding.
One could perhaps say that it was a part of our predestined evolution as creatures to depart from Eden and engage in the “experiment” of analytical thinking and autonomous living. And one could add that it was also part of our destiny to emerge from that failed experiment with a fuller grasp of knowing–the mind state we had once taken for granted when we dwelt in Eden. In Eden, it could be said, we simply knew God and knew God’s bounty for us. Our knowing was immediate, direct, and without any separation from what was known. Yet once Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, their knowing became removed from its object. Now knowing had an object outside of itself to grasp, which is the defining feature of the new mind state of understanding.
We have already explored many of the downsides of understanding in earlier chapters as well as noting its benefits that attracted us. However, in terms of our psychospiritual evolution we are now in a position to see one of its greatest advantages, an unexpected plus that perhaps was the deepest reason we left Eden in the first place. In our original state of knowing, as we said, we just knew. When we ate from the Tree of Knowledge and began to understand, what we gained was the ability to stand apart from the object of our knowledge, even from ourselves, as it were. This gave rise to the ego whose inbred separation in particular from God has led to all manner of suffering for us, as we have demonstrated. It is the office of the ego to perceive and control everything that is separate from it, as we have seen. Yet at this particular juncture in our evolution, and with the practices of the cross at our disposal, it is now possible for us to exercise that office not from the vantage point of understanding alone but also from true knowledge to the extent that we can access it. In other words, it is now possible for us not merely to know, as we did in Eden, but to know that we know. That is, we now have for the first time in our psychospiritual evolution both the abilities to understand and to know. (There is a third mind state in between understanding and knowing, which is to believe, which we also have, and belief is a step from understanding towards knowing.) It was one thing for us to know in our state of innocence in Eden. It is altogether another thing for us to now be able to know that we know.
On the one hand, the arising of understanding derailed us from true knowing and cast us into a manner of living which has put us out of touch both with our own true power and with the Source of that power. Our faculty of knowing that Source has become rusty and we have more or less been unable to rise above the mind state of belief. Belief has many of the attributes of knowing. For one, it posits the source of our power as not merely our own egos. Yet it still bears the mark of understanding insofar as it posits that Source as to some degree separate from and different from ourselves.
We saw in the discussion of Essay #8 how quickly the ego becomes entangled in belief by separating out from God’s universal caring for us various kinds of particular caring, which it then attempts to orchestrate. This all hinged on the perception that we are in some fundamental sense separate from God. But this perception is false. To the extent that we have true knowledge or have recovered true knowing through the practices of the cross, we know that it is false. We may know it only “through a glass darkly,” as it were, due to the manner in which our faculty of true knowing has become atrophied, but we know it nonetheless. This gives us a tremendous advantage over our innocent ancestors who lived in Eden and “simply knew.” For they were always just outside the circle of the temptation of the Tree of Knowledge. While they knew, they did not know that they knew. Hence, one could say that that left them perpetually poised for a fall. We might also say that it oddly gave them no need or motivation to worship God. God was with them and provided for them, which they knew. But what they did not know–until they ate the apple–was what life looked like in separation from God, and what human agency would amount to under the veil of that separation and enmeshed in the seduction of egoic power. That eventually became a temptation for them which they could not resist.
We should take note that it was a temptation that arose for them external to themselves in the guise of the serpent. It was God who allowed the serpent to cross their path, so in this sense it was God himself who initiated their egress from Eden and their descent into understanding and the egoic world. Nevertheless, lest this claim seem sacrilegious, we are now able to grasp and to reflect on the benefits of that descent. For before it, we had no motivation to worship God. We knew, but did not know that we knew. Now we have indeed seen what human agency amounts to under the illusion and veil of separation from God. We have experienced both ourselves and our world under the unbridled influence of the understanding, and we have witnessed its destructiveness. Our long travail has left our former faculty of true knowing in disrepair and under the long shadows cast by the monolith which understanding has become in our world. Even so, though atrophied, our faculty of knowing has not disappeared. It is still with us. And now, thanks to the ability that understanding has given us, we can both know and know that we know. We can reflect on the fact that, thanks be to God, we were given and still possess a direct connection to our Source and his power.
In the face of the destruction that egoic understanding has wrought upon us and our world, we are able for the first time in our history to grasp the difference between understanding and knowing. Our forebears in Eden had no way to do this. At last knowing that we know, we know that we are now and have always been equipped with a faculty providing a direct link to our Source. The Eden that we left is still within us. The Kingdom of God is quite literally still within us as is the power to realize that Kingdom and to bring Heaven to Earth. This is the great arc of our evolution from Eden to Earth. It is the manifestation of God’s own will and God’s dream for us in the world of space and time that he created. Christ was sent and the cross given that we might take it up, as Jesus urged, and follow him in creating Heaven on Earth. The Kingdom was at hand in his time, and is at hand in ours. It is literally in our hands, imprinted in our souls, written into our DNA. As coheirs with Christ we are of the same genus as him, born as the same kind with him and the Father. We are, in creation, born not out of the flesh or blood of man alone but out of God’s will and Spirit. Thus, to the extent that we receive this heritage–to the extent that we receive, cherish, and utilize this light that has illumined us–we are fully capable of acting from it to bring Heaven to Earth. Never before in our evolution have we had this level of awareness of the blessing of God’s inheritance to us together with an appreciation of its power to restore our world to a Garden of Eden and to still more than Eden was.
B. The Congruence of All Practices in a Step Beyond
In the previous 5 essays we took up the practices of the Quadrants of the Cross and the core centering practice in the Lord’s Prayer as if they were 5 separate practices reflective of 5 different regions or places in respect to the Godhead. We needed to do this in order to present the practices as usable means to make the Way of Return. We needed to offer them as discrete handles or ladders, as it were, that one can utilize to shift direction and thereby regain one’s course back to the center and also to strengthen one’s grip on the center itself and one’s resiliency to “bounce back” there when shaken loose. In short, we needed to keep these practices discrete so that our understanding could grasp them and make use of them. We recall that it is the understanding’s job to connect us to things that are outside of us and to fashion explanations that connect one thing to another. In this case, we discussed how we could utilize each practice as a corrective measure to address specific errors or imbalances that keep us off center. This was about connecting or applying one thing to another. It was the province of our understanding to take in and grasp each of these explanations. By the end of the last chapter, however, we were already beginning to sense that these practices are, in fact, not altogether discrete. At one point, we used the image of spokes arranged around a wheel. The tension in the spokes on one side of the wheel balances that in the spokes on the other side of the wheel. The practices are rather more like those tensions than the spokes themselves. The spokes can be thought of independently from the wheel as a whole, but the tensions would altogether cease to exist if any of the spokes were removed and the tension collapsed on any one side. We have to imagine here a wheel with only 4 spokes, which would quickly collapse were any of them to be removed, not a bicycle wheel that can easily suffer having one or more spokes removed.
In the case of our “wheel,” which is the cross, the whole of it is suffused with tensions, currents, or gravity which lead back to the Godhead and also with gravity that tends to maintain one at the center. This gravity is the pressure of our true nature, as God created us to be, of one kind with him and uniquely suited to live an incarnate life. Thus, as we said above, he suffuses both our earthly and our heavenly nature. He blesses both, and it is his pleasure to sustain both. Any conflict between them arises not out of the Godhead itself but out of our own misunderstanding of God’s intentions, that is, out of a misalignment with the Godhead itself. As God himself said, “I am that I am.” The distinctions that we impose on the Godhead, such as “purely spiritual and not physical” are those that we project out of our own dissociation from one part of creation or another. It’s as if we were observers of our own lives imagining them to be projected onto a movie screen, and we fell in love with certain parts of what we saw–certain characters even–and hated others. But then we turned around and fell into thinking and believing that the projectionist must be of a certain temperament or nature to have shown us such things.
If we come to mistrust or despise our own physical nature, for example, then we come to believe that God could not possibly be physical. Of course, here is also where the temptation arises to dwell in the heavenly quadrants of the cross and distrust the earthly ones. Or vice versa, we could come to mistrust the heavenly quadrants through unfortunate experiences or just a lack of experiences with organized religion or spiritual practices in general. Then we would be tempted to dwell strictly in the earthly realm. What’s key to untangle all this is to realize that it is not the projectionist but ourselves who concoct these preferences. It is our own ego shaped by the forces of our past, and especially our past wounds. The projectionist–in this case God–is both physical and spiritual and also neither. In his “unprojected” state, God is neither spiritual nor physical but just “is.” God in himself is not entirely comprehensible or knowable by us. (This is referred to in some religions as the “transcendent God,” in Kabbalah, keter.) As projected into the world of time and space, however, God is both physical and spiritual. Or, more precisely, these are aspects of him that our understanding has become practiced in separating out. In simple reality, these are aspects of the same thing, so they are not, in fact, separate at all.
Similarly, we could talk about different facets of one and the same diamond, but it would be folly to talk about any particular facet as if it were truly separate from the diamond itself. Likewise, to return to our wheel analogy, we cannot strictly speak about the tension in any one spoke of the wheel as if it were something separate from the wheel itself. We can speak about different tensions only through the faculty–or perhaps “artifice” would be a better word–of our understanding. The tensions are altogether aspects of the one wheel as a whole, and they exist only in that whole and in relation to each other. Their very “being in relationship to each other” is something that is only possible in the world of space and time, that is, where God has created an excursion from himself. Within the Godhead itself there are no such relations, nor need there be. The singularity of the Godhead is above and beyond the need for such relations.
Relationships express, as it were, a lower plane of existence where everything is perpetually trying to re-enter the state of unrelated oneness. This describes us also to a tee. We are struggling constantly, at every moment–whether we are aware of it or not–to return to God who is our source. Our problem is that without the Quadrants of the Cross and its practices to guide us, we continually embark on very circuitous routes back to our source! It’s as if we were riding a bicycle with a wheel continually collapsing and thrashing us on the ground, and we hadn’t hardly a clue how to fix it so that we could get home.
Now, through Jesus Christ and the esoteric understanding of the cross, which he left us, we actually have the tools once more to repair ourselves and our world and make the journey home. That is why the cross is the ultimate tool for tikkun, the ancient Hebrew spiritual and religious practice of repair. Tikkun ha nefesh is repair of the soul. Tikkun ha olam is repair of the world. Both are fully possible and realizable through the Christology and the Quadrants of the Cross. But it would be an incomplete and ineffectual understanding to leave the impression that the practices we have discussed are to be approached merely as discrete tools. What we are now showing here is that these tools are but aspects of the One True God, and as such bear in common the magnetism and gravity that he exerts on us pulling us home.
We would be more correct to see ourselves once more as infants in a birth canal struggling to come through, rather than as engineers teasing apart the various practices of the cross in an effort to apply them “correctly.” The infant knows it has but one goal: to come through into the world. All its tensions, twists, and turns are in the service of that one goal. It does not stop and think, “Twist to the right! Now twist to the left! Now push with a foot!” It simply does what it needs to get through. The infant is just coming from the place of true knowledge, and it still has true knowledge–some would say “instinct”–to assist it. We, on the other hand, now “grown up” are at a much farther remove from true knowledge. We have been separated from it for some time by the force of our understanding. Therefore, it is through our understanding that we must be led back. But we must also see–and this is paramount–that the ladders which our understanding takes to help us regain the Godhead are just that: ladders. And what are ladders? They are aspects of the One True God that are abstracted, separated, and distinguished from him as if they were truly separate instruments, which they are not.
When we choose to surrender to the earth–for example, by doodling–to correct overmuch effort applied to spiritual pursuits, that surrendering or doodling is not really a thing separate and discrete from God, a “device” we command to produce the “result” of bringing us closer to God. We may have needed to present the various practices in such a guise so that we could understand them and utilize them in the current mind state we are in. However, within the ladders, or the spokes, or the practices–however, we call them–is always the One True God coming home to himself similar to the infant coming into this world. The One True God is ourselves in our own true undivided nature as projected into this world. Coming home does not mean leaving this world, for God intended us to be here. Rather, it means coming back to our own true nature while living in this world. It means manifesting and living in the kingdom of God that is at hand, and leaving for a later time transitioning to the kingdom that is not of this world. In a sense, by living the kingdom here we are living in this world but not of it, if by “of it” we mean the separation, disharmonies, egoistic attachments, strife, and misunderstandings that arise once the understanding and the ego are separated from true knowledge and true power.
In such a world, we may careen from one Quadrant of the Cross to another. We may become like pinballs on the deck of a game machine gone mad and out of control. However, with the practices we have uncovered, we are once more in a position to take control of the machine. More precisely, we can give control of it back to God. Thus we will be ready to re-enter the Garden of Eden and more than Eden.
Here it is critical to the success and holiness of our journey that we see all these practices for what they are, the movements and gestures of God himself in us to return us to our Source, which is himself. Without this awareness, the practices are liable to devolve into that which many such spiritual practices have become: ends in themselves. As such, they behave for us like the finger pointing to the moon which bewitches us into fixating on itself. We must not allow ourselves to dwell overmuch on the finger and miss out on the much bigger prize of the moon. We must see in all these practices the Father himself doing whatever he can to redirect and reclaim our attention. Doodling, for example, in itself is neither good nor bad but the Father makes it so in relation to himself. For one person it is good because it leads him closer. For another it is bad because it distracts her from the goal.
Within God within us is built in the very dynamism that twists us and turns us in our often wild attempts to return to him who made us. We were once very skillful at it, and then we became less so. We embarked on a journey to explore what life would be like if we turned to face the projection screen and attempted to organize all the various aspects of the projected images into “objects” (a word which itself has the idea of projection built into it) we could command and control. These included, of course, not merely aspects we understood as physical objects but also those we understood as mental, emotional, and spiritual objects. Once we had established our “playing field” and all the players on it, we set about starting the game of running a world by setting all manner of relationships in play. This was much like shooting many pinballs into play at once among a myriad of scoring gates, alarm bells, successes, thrills, and traps all threatened to be capped by a spectacular finish wherein the machine screeches to a halt under the flashing banner of “Tilt!” and robs us of all or most of our accumulated points.
This was, to put it mildly, not exactly a skillful approach to living. We had to experience it if only to get us to where we are now. As we said, before this excursus into the world governed by understanding, we only knew. We did not know that we know, and so we remained prey at least to the ignorance of not knowing that we know. Now we are capable once more of knowing, and also knowing that we know. This sets us apart from our forebears and, as it were, puts us in a position to make an “unassailable assault on Heaven.” During our prior time in Eden, we were with the Father, to be sure, but we were not immune to being separated from him. The influence of the serpent represented our vulnerability. Since that time, we have gotten to know the serpent very well. We have come to know what we did not know then, that by becoming separate from God through the artifice of the understanding, we look deeply into ourselves only to find God once more. We discover–as Einstein proved about the world in space and time–that no matter what direction we take, we come back to the source again. We discover through the most radical separation from God we could embark upon that there is only God to return to in the end, and, most importantly, right now.
The essence of all practices is to realize that it is God and not the practices we are interested in. It is to realize that identification with the practices is but yet another version of identifying with one or another of the projected images on the screen of our life. The images, or the objects we make out of them, careen about and we with them as we hold on tight for the ride. The secret practice within all the practices is to let them go as quickly as possible. It is to see them as ladders that we can let fall away or kick away once they have served their purpose of helping us to achieve our goal. And our goal, as we have said repeatedly, is to dwell in Him, to come from Him.
If God were not to be found within the practices of the cross, that would be one thing. Then we might be justified in continuing to merrily entertain ourselves at the pinball game of life by dabbling in this practice or that, much like playing with the bumpers, and the flippers, and the tilt levers and what have you. That God is to be found in the practices and does live changes the game entirely. It changes it from a mere amusement to the promise of fulfillment on a level that the grandest pinball machine is only a faint dream of. Because we are in this world, have taken the pathway of understanding, and are weak in true knowledge, we have to play the game. But with the tools of the Christology we can now play not just to keep on playing but to stop playing altogether and instead to attain to a life that is fed from a different well entirely. Or we could say that we continue to play but now play with a level of skill that ensures getting the highest score all the time.
This might seem like a boring prospect, and it would be if all of life had to be played at the level represented by the pinball deck with its fixation in virtually 2 dimensions. The fact of God’s presence within the Christology means, however, that through it life opens up into a set of dimensions vastly exceeding the narrowness of the world of understanding. We explored some of those dimensions in our early writings. With the Christology now revealed and illuminated, we can begin to see more of what true knowledge, true power, and true love might mean for us. Even so, the full dimensions of the Kingdom on Earth will exceed even our wildest dreams and the best efforts of our imagination. We can borrow from quantum physics again the notion of the limit border. The Kingdom will arise, as it were, on the other side of the limit border of the understanding. It will not be merely an enhanced or supercharged version of the world as we know it; nothing like a Buck Rogers or Star Trek episode might depict. Rather, it will be a full step beyond. It will be something altogether more wonderful, which we cannot fully anticipate. Yet Jesus, in his own way, gave some hint of it at the Well of Jacob.
C. Jesus’s Vision of the Kingdom at the Well of Jacob
To hear it from Jesus, it is our destiny to return to the Well of True Knowing and draw its waters, which he spoke of while at the Well of Jacob. As wonderful and useful as the practices of the Christology of the cross are, we are not supposed to remain caught on the wheel of those practices or of any other. We are meant to transcend them, which Jesus symbolized as drinking from the well itself. Our engagement in the practices is what Christ meant by offering him drink first. We recall that he asked the Samaritan woman he met there to first give him a drink. He knew that she and we need to do our part and participate in our liberation from the ways of the world. That is what the practices of the cross are all about. As we earlier remarked, it was actually part of God’s grace that he should make way for us to leave Eden and embark on our journey into this world. Likewise, by grace he sent Jesus Christ to redeem us by engaging us in the practices of the cross which lead us home. Our participation is the way we give him drink.
Once we do that, however, he is ready and willing to offer us something of a competely different order, a drink in answer to our own which yet opens us to an entirely new life. “You give me drink,” we can imagine him saying, “and I will come into you still more fully bearing the waters of eternal life, and you will thirst no more.” The Well of Jacob thus becomes the symbol for the Well of True Knowing whose waters bear us back to Eden where we may drink of the Tree of Life at last.
Our place beside Jesus at the well may be likened to life in the perfect ecotone with God.1 An ecotone is a zone where two biological environments or habitats merge into a third unique environment. Our ecotone is the place where we come to God with our offering and our thirst. There God meets us with life-giving water that quenches our thirst and washes us clean from the stains of our past. It is a zone of unanticipated richness, much like the ecotones of the Earth give rise to unique and unfamiliar species that live in them alone. For us, our interface with God in true knowing is such a place. And the species it gives rise to are compassion, love, gentleness, and kindness of rare and exotic purity. Only they have been rare. It is God’s will that they be rare no more. It is God’s will that they take over the Earth as fair weather and sunshine would come in after a bad storm, as the smells emanating from a good friend’s kitchen would embrace the whole countryside and fill us with the promise of a fine meal and the cherished fellowship we find in her company.
The Samaritan woman is us on our journey. Jesus knows she has had 5 husbands and who they have been. In the esotericism of the cross itself, the woman has had intercourse with the practices of the four Quadrants of the Cross and the practice at the one center. She has had intercourse with them and yet she has come to the Well of Jacob, where Jesus sits, to drink. What has she been missing? Why is her water jar still empty? And why does she set it down and run away when Jesus invites her to give him drink and to be filled with the waters of eternal life?
The woman runs because, like ourselves, she is loath to stop playing the game of life at the level of the game itself. This is the seduction of the understanding, that is, to want to see the objects of the game as all that is rather than as projections and symbols of a Source far greater that has created them and lives within them. The final step from understanding to true knowledge is not a comfortable one. Though something of the faculty of true knowing still remains in us, it has become atrophied, and its reawakening can be both powerful and unfamiliar.2
Jesus is seated at the well as if promising to help with the transition to true knowing. “Come into the ecotone with me and with the Father,” we imagine him beckoning. “Reach out your hand to me and you will touch the smoothness of the water I pour. Your rough palms will soften and feed your lips with the gift of eternal life. Filled with the Spirit, you will worship God in Spirit and as I tell you now, in truth.”
The woman does not heed him. Bewitched still by her understanding and unable to dip further into true knowledge which surpasses it, she runs back to her village to the others who are guaranteed to reaffirm for her the world of understanding.3 Her empty water jar remains behind, a tragic symbol of the shell life becomes without the infilling of the water and wine of the Spirit, which is the Living God. As if to add still another level of irony, Jesus’s disciples return to him at that time and bother him that he should have something to eat. He deftly tells them that he has food aplenty that they know not of. Then he adds that they themselves reap a harvest they have not sown, by way of emphasizing that the Living God is the one source for all.
“Don’t you have a saying,” Jesus asks them, ” ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together” (John 4:35-36).
Here again Jesus uses imagery that may be taken to symbolize the Quadrants of the Cross. The four months before the harvest symbolize the four quadrants. Taken together, they are four steps removed from the harvest, which is the point Jesus himself exemplifies on the cross. Precisely because he is in their midst right then, “drawing a wage and harvesting a crop for eternal life,” the four quadrants are like fields “ripe for a harvest.” For as Jesus told the woman, “I am he,”–in her words, “the Messiah who will explain everything to us.” Indeed, he urges his disciples to open their eyes and look at the fields. He urges them to reap “so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together” in the Kingdom come.
God has been waiting patiently–and is still waiting–for us to reap the harvest that he has planted. He planted us in Eden and we grew up and went forth on our journey from the Tree of Knowledge out into the world of understanding, separation, false power, misery, and dysfunction. We have–despite all of that–continued to grow in this world. We have grown in the one quality we did not possess in Eden: self-reflection. Through understanding, despite its liabilities, we have grown in self-reflection. We have grown to begin to see the God of the universe reflected in us, and to know him once more. And we have grown to see firsthand, and by our own choosing, what a world looks like that is run and driven by our own egos under the false impression that they are separate from God.
It is time, and the time is draws nigh, for us to reclaim ourselves and all our planet from this disaster. It is time for us to heed the call that the harvest is ripe now. The Living God stands ever ready to assist us. His guidance is unfailing. He sent his son, Jesus, with the Christology as a great gift to us, to “explain everything to us” and to carry us through understanding to the shore and to the edge of the well of deep knowing. He sent him to do still more for us by exchanging the gift for the even dearer waters of the well itself. He wants to hold nothing back from us. Indeed, he has given it to his son to lead us back into Eden and beyond. There the Tree of Life still awaits us. It is given to us to harvest that, too, so that the sower and the reaper may finally be glad together–together again and fully happy in each other.
With Jesus is truly “the peace that surpasses the understanding.” It is the peace that comes from drinking water at the Well of Knowing, the water of true knowledge that quenches thirst forevermore, as Jesus tells us. Here we drink the water of the Godhead, ripened into the wine of God-awareness in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus the wedding feast comes to full fruition at the Well of Betrothal, where Jacob was betrothed to Rachel, his true beloved. So does the Father betroth himself to us at the very same well. Through Jesus Christ, his son, he offers us to drink from himself the gift of eternal peace and through it to begin to taste the gift of eternal life, the fruit of the Tree of Life he planted for us in Eden long, long ago.
Though Jesus does not quite say it, we imagine that when we taste this wine we will break out singing, “Oh death, where is thy sting?” We will enter into that secret chamber of the soul which the great poet, Hafiz, spoke about, wherein is kept the secret “that life is far, far too sacred ever to be extinguished.”
Truly, we will walk in this world, but be not fully of it. We will become a channel for the coming of the kingdom of Heaven made manifest on Earth as well. We will ring out with the cry, “God’s will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven!” We will know it to be not just a possibility, not merely an article of faith, but a reality of God’s design for the very cosmos we inhabit. We will see it then not as the shadowy hope ever darkened and covered over by our doubts and fears, but as the very light of our being, the light of the world, and the illuminated road ahead. We will know what it means to drink at last the finer wine of the Godhead at the end of the feast. We will be reborn out of thirst, reborn out of lack, reborn out of suffering wrought from all manner of self-deception. At last borne by the Spirit on the waters of true knowing into a new order, we will worship the Father as he most wants to be worshipped, that is, in the Spirit and in truth.
This new order is what St. Paul says we come to in Jesus Christ:
From now on, therefore, we regard no one [merely] according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old order has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:16-17)
All this, to continue in Paul’s words, is so that “just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life:”
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world [and its people] to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:18-19)
What good news is this, that in God and Jesus we can be freed from the effects of our trespasses and missteps of the past! In true knowledge borne of the Spirit we can both see the folly of our former ways and be reconciled to God through his grace and compassion.
In this new condition we may consider ourselves “as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10). For to dwell this way “in the mind of Christ” is “to set the mind on the Spirit for life and peace” (Romans 8:6):
Let the same mind be in you that you found in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross… for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:5-8, 13)
Through Christ, and through the cross he gave us, the good news is that God has come to work in us “for his good pleasure.” Our reconciliation to him will be the gladness of the sower and reaper brought together again. God has sown for us all that we need. The seeds of our deliverance were planted at the beginning of time. And the time is nigh, and the time is come for us to reap the harvest of our inheritance and rejoin him in the Spirit of Christ.
As St. Paul reassured us, “The Lord is near!”:
The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:5-7)
Now Jesus is calling us saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” He waits for us at the Well of Knowing still. He keeps faith in us still and is ready to give us drink.
Notes:
1. For this metaphor we are indebted to Ms. T. Mather for her unpublished sermon on John 4:3-30.
2. We are reminded in this context of the so-called “kundalini experiences” of practitioners of yoga and meditation and the difficulties such experiences can entail at their extremes.
3. The resistance to advancing beyond understanding to a higher state of consciousness exemplified here by the Samaritan woman is described in many mystical traditions. In the Yaqui Indian tradition of Mexico, for example, complacent understanding is known as the tonal. By contrast, the nagual is a level of reality or perception which extends uncomfortably outward beyond where the tonal ends. It was said to be the mission of the Yaqui warrior to befriend the nagual in such a way as to bring it little by little back into the tonal and thus to expand everyone’s consciousness.
The great gift of Jesus to us was the imparting of the Christology of the Cross as a systematic methodology enabling us to, so to speak, bring a harvest from the nagual into the tonal, thus transforming our world into a Kingdom worthy of the name Eden once again. Seen in this light, Jesus represents not only the fulfillment of a Christian ideal but the fulfillment of an archetypal yearning at the heart of humanity and found in all of its religious and spiritual traditions.
Karunandaji's Mind 