Essay #20:  Practicing the Presence IV:
Realizing the Kingdom in Everyday Life

Even after all we have said, there may still remain some doubt about how to apply the Christology so as to remain in God’s presence in everyday life. St. Paul said of our difficulties:

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.

Elsewhere he added:

I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

And as something of a rationale for our difficulties he said:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

This latter statement recalls the clay jars in the wedding at Cena, where they served likewise as symbols for our frail bodies and the life and light that God had poured into them.  As we have seen, Paul often spoke of how we are transformed in Christ and thereby equipped to meet our difficulties, even to the point of “having nothing, yet possessing everything.”

Our previous discussion of the Quadrants of the Cross should suffice for many to derive guidance for their lives in re-aligning with “the all-surpassing power that is from God.”  It should go far in helping to take practical steps to further the emergence of the Kingdom.  Yet some of us even now may be wondering what our next steps will be, how we can locate ourselves in the Quadrants of the Cross, and whether meaningful transformation can come through the practices that have been outlined.  For many, the difficulties of everyday life will continue to weigh heavily.  Solutions may not be readily apparent.  To some extent, the Way of Return may still not be fully illumined as a path made for human feet.

It might be helpful, therefore, if we were to show how the Christology can be applied to an array of common human errors or problems addressed at the most fundamental or practical level.  Our previous discussions may have been somewhat hampered by having to define the theoretical underpinnings of corrections made from within the Quadrants of the Cross.  Let us fix our attention here rather on the grisly nature of the problems themselves.  Let us endeavor to see whether and how the Christology can point us home even from the “mean streets” and “barrel bottoms” we commonly live in and struggle with.  Thus the Christology may become even more accessible as a tool for daily living and for the daily appropriation of the Kingdom.

In our early writings, in Essay #6, we encountered several fundamental human problems seen there as distortions to various principle dimensions of our created world under the influence of a dybbuk.  Here we are not so much interested in the operation of dybbuks as in the use of the Christology to correct such common problems.  When we recognized these distortions in our early writings we could only sketch their remedy in outline.  Only with the elucidation of the Quadrants of the Cross have we reached the point where we can address particular kinds of deviations directly and in detail.  Let us return, then, to the list of difficulties given in Essay #6 and show how we are now armed to approach them.  That list consisted of ugliness, jealousy, gloom, cruelty, and fear.  While it was not stated explicitly earlier, these are distortions to the principle dimensions of beauty, love, sorrow, compassion, and joy, respectively.  Let us look closely at each in turn and bring to bear the insights of the Quadrants of the Cross in order to point the way toward their correction and rebalancing.  This will serve to illustrate how the Christology can address even the most mundane difficulties we encounter.

A. The Perception of Ugliness

Ugliness is a distortion of beauty.  Beauty is that dimension of our world which reveals God’s unfailing presence in his creation.  As we said earlier, beauty is the manifestation of God in what we love.  Ugliness is not so much the lack of God’s presence as a distortion in human perception which prevents us from apprehending it.  Love is the path of our return to God written into every particle of the universe.  Beauty is like a guide for us tracing out and following the path so that we can trail behind.  We naturally love what we find beautiful.  Likewise, what we do not find beautiful we tend not to love, so beauty acts like the good shepherd steering us home along the right path that God has laid out for us.

When something appears ugly to us, this must amount to a distortion in our perception insofar as God declared all of his creation to be “good,” and what is good is beautiful.  Therefore, it behooves us to ask what kinds of distortions could play upon our perception in such a way that we might fail to apprehend some portion of creation as beautiful.

In discussing the so-called “problem of evil” in our early writings, we alluded to the mystery and even repugnance that attends the operation of dybbuks especially at the far end of the range of their influence.  That is to say, there have been many events in history such as murders, genocides, and acts of violence which almost no one would be prepared to call “beautiful” except those who would themselves be deemed to be out of their minds.  While we cannot pretend to fathom why God made a place for such things to occur in his creation, nor still less by what manner of invention such things could ever appear beautiful, we can nevertheless learn something valuable from such inscrutability.  We can learn the extent to which such ugliness itself is not remedied or solved by deviation from our proper place with Jesus at the center of the cross, but exacerbated by it.  Even at the center, it may not be given to us–and most probably will not be–to comprehend God’s will in the matter of the worst human tragedies.  Still, it is there that we may at least apprehend the most of what beauty has to show us, and find the most curative and protective remedies for that which we do continue to perceive as “ugly.”

If this is true, then, moreover, we should expect what the Quadrants of the Cross have taught us to apply here as well by way of offering us corrective practices to return to the center.  To wit, we have seen the variety of errors that draw us away from the center.  We know them to be excesses either in effort or surrender played out relatively moreso on the plane of the physical or the plane of the spiritual as aspects of life in our world.  Therefore, we are able to recall and to imagine how such errors might draw us off center and corrupt our perception of creation fostering a sense of “ugliness.” We can apply what we have learned by way of the corrective practices to restore in ourselves–to the extent that we are capable–a sense of the beauty of all creation.  A few examples might serve to illustrate this.

We do not have to look very far at all to find examples in our world where overmuch effort on the spiritual plane has thrust over creation distorting filters of hatred and abhorrence such that whole peoples and nations are perceived to be ugly, loathsome, and unworthy of seeing the light of day.  History, too, has been filled with such examples.  The Crusades and the Inquisition are among the most notorious within Christianity.  Those religious leaders who are beset with a zeal that knows no end prove to be those most capable of committing the worst crimes.  Or we could say that they are those who perceive the most ugliness in the world.  Similarly, those who submit to the aims and agendas of such leaders either by sharing their willfulness and zeal or by surrendering excessively to the same foster ugliness abroad and in themselves.  Both religious zeal and spiritual parasitism upset the balance of discernment and tolerance implicit in the Kabbalistic Trigram and the Christology.  They prevent us alike from seeing in another the same fervor to return to God that we find in ourselves and from feeling a kinship with the other born out of that sense of having a common destination and, indeed, a common origin.

On the physical plane, examples of excessive force or effort which engender ugliness are so readily available that we need not even mention any.  Likewise, the submission to such force, for example, in women who are unable to break away from their abusive partners, owns an ugliness all its own.  In the present example, it is not the women themselves who are ugly but the perceptions we have of them and, moreover, the perceptions they come to have of themselves.  And this is true in all other instances of surrender to brutality.

On both the spiritual and the physical planes, the way back from ugliness to beauty is the same.  What needs to be regained is a rightful balance between effort and surrender such that the true nature of creation is beheld once more.  Therefore, that nature itself is a guide.  Where we seem to see ugliness in another, that is a sure sign that we are meeting with a failure of imagination in ourselves.  Insofar as imagination is the faculty of the soul that reaches behind appearances to grasp the ultimate nature of things, we are stopping short of ultimate reality in some distortion thereof.  It is up to us, then, to discover what sort of illusion is captivating us and to seek to dispel it by uncovering the truth that it is masking.  The techniques for doing this will follow the practices we have already discovered in the Quadrants of the Cross.

If I find religious zeal in myself, for example, such that it demonizes another people, I will need to counterbalance this willfulness with surrender such that I open myself to perceiving commonalities with them I had refused to acknowledge.  This fosters tolerance.  It opens the door to compassion, and insofar as compassion is another major dimension of the world, to strengthening one dimension by means of another.¹   For feeling compassion towards another is a sure way of coming to appreciate their beauty more fully.

If it is my inclination to surrender to those who preach hatred and intolerance, then I will need to foster discernment in myself by the effort to sufficiently distance myself from the source of distortion such that I can “recover my own mind.”  Very often it takes courage to separate oneself from such dominant figures.  And what is courage other than the actualization of love and beauty in the return to God?  In other words, the very act of drawing back from corrupt leaders begins to reawaken in us the very qualities we need to guide us away from their toxic influences.  Courage–itself another major dimension of this world–sits at the center of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, signifying not only that it unifies and empowers other dimensions but that it does so by rebalancing the three factors of the Kabbalistic Trigram.  Or as we said earlier: 

            Courage is the dimension in this world along which the three points of the triangle in the Kabbalistic Trigram line up correctly.

Thus we can rely on courage to free us from distortions in the space-time fabric and to redirect us to the center of the cross.  Heading back to that center, I will once again find in myself and foster inclinations to remain tolerant, to investigate likenesses to those I formally hated and accused, and once again to perceive beauty and God’s image in them as I do in myself.

If my sin is to indulge in physical force to the point of ugliness, then my first step toward recovery may indeed be to find a scrap of forgiveness toward myself.  The inertia generated by such brutality is often very difficult to counter on one’s own.  Sometimes what’s needed is a tiny gap in the perceived effectiveness of such torture, which may come as a minute break in the internal self-torture which generates the external behavior.  Then that may lead to the further watershed of surrendering to another by way of asking for some help.  Once again, this can open the door to compassion, and that can further soften the grip of the illusion that brute force keeps one under.  We see once more the effectiveness of the application of the Quadrants of the Cross to such a knotty, difficult, real-world problem.

In the case of one having been subjected to the excessive use of effort or force, her way back to center is similar to that of the acolyte of misplaced belief.  Either she must rely on the courage of another to free her, or she must find courage in herself.  In either case, what’s called for is an influx of new effort to counterbalance the disproportionate surrender that has been forced upon her in the past.  What’s important to note from this case is that we are able to be for one another that which is missing and needed in order to reestablish balance and recentering on the cross.  We can be it or, more precisely, we can be the model or exemplar of it in order to help reawaken it in the other.  This itself would not be possible if not for our common nature, which again demonstrates the oneness in us that both draws us together and draws us to the same Source.  For the person oppressed by long stretches of violence, it may just be a fledgling perception of another as a likeness of themselves–that is, a highly effortful attempt at keeping fear at bay long enough to see a friend–that gives a glimpse of Reality and of the way home.

Jesus himself was such a friend to many.  In fact, he encouraged his disciples to regard him as a friend above all else.  For it is as friend and not as leader or even as disciple that we can be of most use to one another.  In friendship we retain our ability to advise and guide one another–as well as our ability to follow–without risking the discernment of our oneness, which can become diluted or dissolved in the bowels of hierarchy.  Thus the centering principle of the Quadrants of the Cross comes to into play here as well in this very real-world example.  It teaches us that if we remain at the center with Jesus we should like him be able to cross many boundaries and be of help to many.  His “secret” was that he saw beauty where others saw only ugliness.  He saw it in harlots and tax collectors, in rich and poor, in the sighted and the blind, in the strong and the lame, in Jews and Gentiles, in the living and in the dead, in the city streets and in the barren hills,–he saw beauty everywhere.  For Jesus, beauty was that reflection of the Father in creation, which led him to perform his acts of love.  Everything Jesus did for another person was restorative of their beauty.  His every act left them more beautiful than they were before, which is to say, in greater likeness to the Father.  Let us consider what we would say if we were to condense the Lord’s Prayer into one request.  The prayer asks for God’s will to done upon us.  It asks that we should be fed, washed of sin, let go from grudges, freed from temptation, and delivered from taint.  Would not the summation of all that be this?:

Father, please make us more beautiful.

Indeed, if beauty is likeness to the Father, then it is precisely what the Lord’s Prayer is all about.  It is the powerful dimension both at the center of the cross and of the Tree of Life (the Etz Chayim)  that brings all the other dimensions harmoniously together.  For us it is a pole and a guide by which to align willfulness and surrender in ourselves.  To the extent that we perceive it more clearly and more extensively, to that extent can we know that the alignment in ourselves is according to the Divine Plan or logos.  To the extent that we seem to see ugliness, we must know that we have yet some illusion, some distortion to uncover in our perception.  And we can look to the insights and practices of the Christology, as we have done here–even amidst the most earthy problems–to help us correct our vision and our course.²

B. The Feeling of Jealousy 

Jealousy is a distortion to the dimension of love.  The universe has been crafted out of love, which means that inherent in its design are properties which lead us back to one Source, our Creator God.  All the elements of the universe have been made to remind us of God and to lead us back to him.  Likewise, these same elements remind us that he is forever drawing us inward towards himself.  Not only has he created our world and everything in it, he is the Goal toward which everything, including all of us, aspire.  This means he is not only the source of all of our aspiration and desire, he is also the fulfillment of that desire.  And God alone is the perfect fulfillment.  To the extent that we place our hope and trust in him, to that extend can we expect to attain perfect fulfillment.  As Jesus promised, “I alone will give you drink such that you will thirst no more.”  He was speaking for the Father.

In love we remain aligned with the creative principle that assures us of complete fulfillment in the Creator.  To the degree that we act out of love, we serve God’s Kingdom on Earth, which is a world of bounty, a world of plenty in which no human being shall lack for any fundamental need or ingredient of happiness.  However, as we said in a previous essay (see Essay #3), to act out of love and in pursuit of beauty is not automatic.  In a universe woven above the depths of infinity, such action is not determined, even though it is inevitable from the viewpoint of the End of Days.  It rather remains a choice and an object of free will.  The dimension of the universe that draws us to make this choice is courage.  Courage entails a high degree of trust that the world is indeed “wired” with love and beauty.  It is a trust that “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” as Jesus promised.  It also entails a high level of dedication to the realization of love and beauty.  Its trust in a world completely suffused with love and beauty–or, more precisely, where love and beauty are completely unmasked–goes hand in hand with its dedication to bring such a world into being.  In courage, the intention of the Kingdom is perfectly energized and supported by effort and surrender.  Moreover, love retains its pure nature as a centripetal force.  The love that one has for others and also for things is not separate from the love that one has for God but the same.  What allows this, in particular, is the unconditional trust one has in God both as the ultimate Fulfillment and also as the fulfillment of human need and desire on the earthly plane.  For as long as one has such trust there is no rationale or motivation for loving another person or any thing more than God.

When courage begins to disappear, however, the actualizing dimension behind love and beauty becomes occluded and the two come to appear weaker.  The force drawing us homeward, which is God’s love, may come to seem doubtful.  Beauty itself may begin to seem to be in shorter supply if not dwindling.  In the face of these anomalies or illusions, the mirage of a vacuum may appear, and in place of God’s boundless love may arise the purely human substitute of the feeling of jealousy.  What jealousy is, is a force analogous to God’s love except that it draws the objects of love to one’s own ego rather than to God.  As long as God’s love is known to be paramount, then everything else that one loves is known to be a part of God’s providence and is loved the same as him.  However, when God’s providence is forgotten and becomes in doubt, then that which surrounds one no longer has a trustworthy, bountiful, and inexhaustible source.  It appears to stand by itself.  It seems vulnerable.  And because the source of its sustenance and replenishment is hidden, it also seems to be in short supply.  Under such circumstances, love has nowhere to go but toward things and other people, except that now these things and people are the same ones that everybody else is in love with.  Detached from God, they appear to be limited.  No longer the manifestation of the Unlimited and the harbinger of limitless acts of care projected into our limited world, they are perceived only as shrinking vessels of space and time, for that is what all things would become were they detached from God.

Under the influence of such a distorted perception, love collapses back upon itself unable to attain to the Godhead.  It becomes jealousy, which is a love of all of the things and persons that one’s neighbor also loves, except that it loves them to the exclusion of one’s neighbor.  Jealousy is like love except that it lacks love’s spaciousness, hence also its generosity.  Instead it is covetous, fearful, suspicious, untrusting, secretive, scheming, impulsive, and given to violence.  God’s grace keeps love pliable and open-hearted in keen discernment.  When God’s grace is forgotten and replaced by false notions of source and supply, there arise further illusions–all of which lead to the proliferation of jealousy in human cultures.

On the spiritual plane, jealousy creates leaders who willfully distort religious truths and bend biblical facts in order to keep a cadre of followers or a congregation.  For followers become the currency of personal adulation in a world where God’s love is no longer felt as the pathway leading to super-personal Truth.  The mission of priests and pastors, which should be to lead congregants beyond themselves towards Eternal Truth, then becomes a tour de force to reshape the biblical edifice into a monument to their own personalities.  We already encountered this in Essay #17, where we concluded that in repentance the false guru

            would insist that her disciple arise and go build his house on the rock that is God alone instead of taking for his foundation the guru’s own ego, let alone what may be her addictive personality, her cultish ways, and what have you. 

This points the way to newfound surrender as the remedy for the guru’s excessive willfulness and jealousy.  In this case, surrender would amount to an uprising of her courage, a soulful prostration before God, and a rediscovery of God’s boundless love in contradistinction to the niggardly passions of her personality or ego.

Political leaders can be as much guilty of this kind of self-adulation as spiritual ones.  Their aims and agendas often start with spiritual or quasi-spiritual intentions, of which one example was the intention of union as understood by Jefferson and the original founders of our nation.  Union included self-governance by a body of equals whose trust in the enlightenment of the collective trumped the notion that any one person had more to offer than the group as a whole.  To those who believed in union, it was seen as disruptive and repugnant that any people should bow to one figure as their king, much less to an oligarchy of individuals aligned by some principle of superiority or wealth.  Union devolved from a biblical understanding of man and was something of a spiritual ideal.  Nevertheless, Jefferson and others would have claimed it was supremely practical, in fact the most direct path to achieving a happy and healthy nation.

In the face of the divisiveness, cat fights, and wholesale disregard for truth that dominates the political climate of today, union can gain no foothold.  In fact, it hasn’t had a foothold in this country for a very long time.  What has presided for decades has been a jealousy among politicians growing ever hotter and more volatile.  Now we are witnessing it erupting not merely between the major parties, but within them in such a way as to render them utterly dysfunctional and disorganized, the very opposite of a union.  It is no wonder that political progress, or the true business of statesmanship, has slowed considerably in this country.  The business of statesmanship was envisioned by the founding fathers as governance by all for the provision of all as a body of equals.  Today we stand before the largest divide between rich and poor that this nation has ever known, and it is widening still.  Both power and wealth have become concentrated in the hands of a relative few so that union is no more accessible to most citizens than a trip to the moon.  However, it is not to the moon that most of us desire to go.  Rather, what’s lacking for most is the sense of a bright future, the feeling that anybody cares, and the belief that somebody could still write and sing a spiritual that begins:

            Ain’t nobody gettin’ to heaven ‘less we all gettin’ to heaven. 

Avarice, greed, and jealousy go together, for all spring from the same root.  They arise when God’s true love has become occluded and his promise to the world forgotten.  Then either untoward willfulness springs into the vacuum, with the effects we have described, or untoward surrender does with the kind of jealous fawning that defines the true sycophant.  Whether jealousy operates more on the spiritual plane or on the physical is determined less by differences in the feeling itself than by differences among the objects of its craving.  Where a lust for religious or political power has replaced God’s love, then jealousy operates on a spiritual or quasi-spiritual plane.  Where material wealth and/or sensual satisfaction are the objects of desire, then jealousy operates more on the physical plane.  However, it is the nature of jealousy itself for the various types of objects to overlap, since the unbridled character of its desire is to place more and more claims over a broader and broader array of objects.  Where God’s providence rules, then moderation is the order of the day.  Where the perception of lack and limit has replaced it, then immoderation, gluttony, hoarding, and competitiveness eke out a living with jealousy as their unmerciful boss.

The way back to sanity through all this is to take heed once more of the Quadrants of the Cross and to apply its lessons.  If one is thoroughly immersed in jealous efforts to outdo–or worse, to subdue–her neighbors, her co-workers, her club members, or her congregants, then she needs to find ways to consciously surrender to those very same persons, whether spiritually or physically depends on the particular case.  This cannot be done without recovering in some small measure at least her trust that by giving away she shall not lose.  And this cannot be fathomed without, in turn, recovering at least some of her trust that that the universe shall provide compensation out of itself to prevent or correct her loss.  This, of course, is the whole point of the practice.  Surrender in itself is not a mere mental construct or theoretical ideal.  It is a gesture of willingness to participate in the order of things, in the design that God has built into the world.  Thus it is both a call for help and a summons to forces that wish to help, that indeed are all too ready to come to one’s aid as soon as space is made for them in the car.  To issue such a call and to expect it to be answered is once again to participate in a world designed with love.  This is where we begin to discover, once again, that the more we give, the more we have to give.  This is partly because one’s perceptions of love and of beauty reawaken together, and one becomes struck by the immense beauty of all the small things and how they seem to add immeasurably to one’s treasure.

For the sycophant, the way home is to take courage and come to terms with the inability of the jealous ruler, boss, pastor, or even partner to provide for one’s needs.  In the end, it is better to go homeless than to make a home on the temple steps in anticipation of some human kindness that will never be forthcoming.  For merely human kindness–like merely human love–is fickle, fleeting, and undependable.  The sycophant often needs to encounter such disappointment before hitting the “rock bottom” of his own misplaced hankerings.  Perhaps in rebounding he will rediscover in himself his ability to exist apart and to separate from those he has made it his habit to fawn over.  However he comes by it, he needs to apply some effort that has been missing in order to draw himself back up into a posture where the universe can come to his aid again.  A slack sail is unable to catch any wind and move a boat.  With his sail raised the former sycophant can begin to feel the true currents of God’s breath once more and start to sense the direction from which they are coming.  This, of course, is what is symbolized by the center of the cross.  At that place of balance between effort and surrender the dimensions of the universe can be perceived in their truest nature.  There one apprehends again that jealousy is a completely unnecessary emotion.  Under the vision of God’s deep love for the world and his unfailing intention to provide for all our needs, one perceives both the clear possibility of bountiful fulfillment for all who live on Earth and the actual means necessary to bring it about.  Return to the center is not automatic, but help awaits those who arise in courage to take their first steps. 

It is here that the rich are both particularly cursed and particularly blessed.  They are cursed because the wide range of their ownership tends to rival and to distract them from the bounty that God has provided for all.  The very effort of ownership and the management of holdings tends to draw attention away from surrender and to encourage forgetfulness of the crucial role it plays in maintaining the balance which most contributes towards the realizing of good intentions.  Instead, the wealthy come to believe that their effort plays more of a part than it really does in their good fortune.  They tend to deify it, which quickly leads to the deification of their own egos in preference over God.  By this slide also, divine intention is set aside in favor of their own more limited human intentions.  They cease to trust and to believe in the possibility of the realization of divine intention in the Kingdom on Earth, just as their own effort swells and becomes, paradoxically, disempowered and unable to contribute towards divine intention.  It becomes more suited by their own tailoring for the realization of their own selfish goals.  This is why Jesus said that “it is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”  The swelled efforts of the rich, the mass of their possessions, and their bloated addiction to worldly wealth (itself a kind of excess of surrender as we saw above in Essay #18) all prevent them from passing through the eye.  Were even a few hairs of their head able to pass through it, then God might grab hold and pull them from the other side.  Of course, for some, a few hairs do push through and the loss of even those hairs may be enough to awaken them to the world beyond.

This is where the rich have it to be particularly blessed.  For they have more to give and more to contribute to the formation of the Kingdom than most other people will ever have.  Much of the means to bring the Kingdom about is stored away as potency with the rich.  If actualized, their wealth and power contain within them the gateway to the Kingdom.  If brought into corrective balance with surrender by the release of their holdings for the benefit of the less fortunate, the efforts of the wealthy can energize and activate whole regions of the Kingdom.  What’s more, their own personal intentions will be upleveled to those of God, which finding fulfillment will be reflected back to them in riches beyond their wildest imaginings in toying with their former finances.  Here is truly a revolution waiting to be unleashed upon mankind.  It is not a violent revolution.  Rather it has the potential to forestall and to prevent a violent revolution, which may be its alternative.  It is a revolution where courage opens the doors of small kingdoms and love that has been locked away is let flowing again.  It is a revolution where the light of honor sought by former hoarders of wealth is discovered not to come from gold but from God to whom all honor is due, yet who shares honor freely with others.  In this sense, then, God has blessed the rich handsomely because of the honor that can yet accrue to them when they release their possessions like the white doves that have yet to fly over the Kingdom.

C.  The Sense of Gloom

In Essay #6, we defined sorrow as the dimension of this world as a world of excursion, that is, as not yet reunited with God.  While sorrow is a measure of our distance from the Source, it is also an affirmation of Him from whom we measure that distance.  In other words, it serves as a positive guide for our return even while it reminds us of the incompleteness of our journey.

Gloom, on the other hand, is a sense of incompleteness that offers no hope or measure of fulfillment.  In sorrow we still sense the beacon that draws us onward, but in gloom we are as a vessel caught at sea in an impenetrable cloud.  We have no sense of direction and no foreshadowing that we will ever make the shore.  Gloom, therefore, is a distortion to the dimension of sorrow.  It is a sense of distance without knowing distance from what.  It is a feeling of lack without any knowledge of that which one lacks of.  It is not total darkness but a pervading shade of grey such that neither the light nor the dark can be fully made out.  It is most akin to what some theologians call “limbo,” which is a state of in-betweenness particularly vexing to the soul and confusing to the mind.  In limbo we wish for either heaven or hell but are denied either.  We wait without knowing the end of our waiting or what the conditions might be that foretell its end.

Fortunately on Earth there is no such thing as perfect gloom, if only because life here eventually comes to an end.  Also, it is God’s intention that all of the dimensions of this world should be reminders and guides on our journey.  Were it not so, then he might have created a world where gloom moved upon the face of the deep instead of light, but he did not.  Gloom arises as a temporary condition by way of distortions to the established dimensions but not as a dimension of the world itself.  Gloom, therefore, is relative to the other dimensions–particularly to sorrow–not absolute.  This gives us the key how to address and unlock it.

If gloom is relative especially to sorrow, then by finding our way within gloom back to sorrow, we should be able to recover a reference point over which gloom will have no power to conceal or dispel.  This may seem counter-intuitive initially because one’s first thought might be to try to dispel gloom with gladness or joy.  While it is not impossible to do so, because joy is a polar step away from sorrow this requires a much longer stretch.  Many cannot make it.  Those caught in gloom may have great trouble perceiving the pole of joy as something other than a grand illusion, like the North Star and constellations veiled in mist and made into something hardly discernable from the chimeras of one’s own mind.  Sorrow, however, remains closer and more accessible.  In fact, sorrow is but a short step from gloom.

What it takes to recover sorrow from gloom may be gleaned, as before, by reference to the Quadrants of the Cross and instruction from the Kabbalistic Trigram.  Gloom is always a risk whenever we stumble into one of the quadrants due either to a deficit or surfeit of effort or surrender on the spiritual or physical planes.  It tends to arise in us especially when we are met dramatically with the inefficacy of the approach we have taken to realize our intentions.  The higher our intentions and the less adequate our method, the more likely it is that we will end up in gloom.  Disappointment may lead to confusion followed by disorientation, hopelessness, and gloom.  The stronger our absorption in the schemes of our own ego, the weaker other reference points may be for us once the ego is shown to have no substance and collapses.  The prevailing mind state of understanding may be rejected in disgust, but what is there to take its place?  For one who is little practiced in faith, let alone in knowing, there may be nothing for the mind but vacuity and a corresponding listlessness for the heart–which together are gloom.

Gloom arises when one has lost her way, slipped on the ice, as it were, and found herself remote and distant from all she thought she knew.  From this we can just begin to discern what would be the first step in recovery from gloom.  The key is in the prevalent perception of distance and nothing more.  Yet that will suffice.  At first one only senses distance.  No shore and no markers of it can be seen.  The feeling of emptiness may be intense and the mind can offer no reference points through the understanding to dispel it.  However, there is one thing.  There is the fact that distance itself bears within it the indelible stamp of Him who made it.  Because God tamed infinity by making this a universe in space and time, distance of any kind bears his limiting stamp and is not allowed to trail off into the dungeons of infinity.  Distance itself carries its beacon within itself, as it were.  One lost in gloom may at first be too disoriented to see it, but the beacon is there nonetheless.  What is needed to activate perception is perhaps just a little of that quality the lack of which brought about the slip in the first place.  For example, an excess of willfulness needs a bit of surrender to tame it and thus to realign the person’s spirit with reality to be able to see it more clearly.

Imagine, for example, that a young man has inherited a considerable fortune from his father.  He steps in to take over the family business upon his father’s retirement but proves to have none of the same business acumen.  In a few short years he watches the business shrink.  At the same time, his father is beset with dementia and unable to help him.  In a desperate step he risks what remains of his business capital to launch a new venture only to watch it fail rapidly and for the business to follow it into an irreversible slide into bankruptcy.  Everything is lost, including his own personal fortune.  He sinks into depression, starts to drink, and in a fortnight is lost in what seems to be an implacable gloom.  What understanding he thought he had of business and of money management has disappointed and now utterly deserted him.  His seemingly bright future proved hollow despite even the monumental efforts and good intentions he put behind it.  He is completely confused about how this could happen, totally disoriented, and seemingly fallen into an unfamiliar world of emptiness with no signposts to guide him.  He contemplates suicide but doubts he has the strength to carry it through.  Thus he feels caught in limbo, and sees himself as a wretch with no history to draw from and no future to rely on.  There seems to him to be absolutely nothing upon which he can successfully exercise his will.  And much to his surprise, once he clearly settles on that he unexpectedly perceives something he formerly had no idea was even there.

For the very concept that there is nothing upon which one can absolutely and assuredly exercise his will–instead of exposing one to the full depths of infinity and oblivion–in this universe reveals a different structure and dimension of reality.  It reveals a quality both of perception and the world whereby that which one cannot control is yet controlled by something.  This may occur to our failed businessman as the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing, when surely it would be easier for there to be nothing?”  The answer that comes ringing back out of the gloom is that someone or something must have exerted the effort to have created it.  Otherwise, the whole of the universe would just be inconceivable and impossible to account for.  It may be that such a man as this is totally at the mercy of the world, but his newfound awareness of the world as having been created casts a whole new light on his position.  Instead of seeing himself as merely lost, he comes to see himself as fully surrendered.  He is prostrated and surrendered before that over which he has no control, but he no longer sees himself as lost.  Having regained even a tiny bit of the element of surrender as an antidote to his formerly blinding efforts, his perception begins to open, and the new light he perceives is the far distant light of the Creator penetrating even here.  Even into the midst of this very dense gloom, the Creator’s light does penetrate.

It can do so because, in a certain sense, it does not really have very far to go.  The distance is more a factor of the man’s diminished perception than of the Creator’s weakness to appear in some parts of the world.  In fact, the Creator’s light suffuses every part of the world.  It is contained in every particle of creation, so it really has no distance to travel in order to reach any particular being or thing.  For the man, however, still only weakly able to discern the light, his weak perception is construed as distance from the Source.  He is reoriented to it at last but considers it far away, distant, and difficult to attain.  Even so, he is no longer in the midst of gloom.  By his realization of the Source through his rediscovered surrender he has transitioned out of gloom and into sorrow.  He has at least experienced the correction of that distortion of the dimension of sorrow whereby it is made into gloom.  And having recovered sorrow, he is in fact in a better position to make further progress along the dimensions of the world and continue his journey home.  He may take with him the repentence³ that showed surrender in a new light and see in it a helper and friend.  It would serve him well to do so and hasten his progress along the Way of Return.

There are many other paths from which one could fall into gloom, some spiritual and some more on the physical plane.  From some of these falls the way to sorrow and to recovery will come through surrender as in the above example, and from others it will come from effort.  One could come to gloom after a long period of surrender to some form of abuse or to a chronic illness, for instance.  Given what we have already discussed, it is a short stretch to imagine that she could return to sorrow by a reflection upon surrender similar to that of our businessman above.  However, for her, given that she is already well-acquainted with surrender, it would be the re-discovery of effort in the form of God’s will to have created the world that would stand out as the key leading back to sorrow.  For that effort is the pole against which her own surrender becomes redefined in her epiphany.  Gloom entails forgetfulness that one is always in relationship to God.  That is why it includes the feeling of being profoundly lost.  We lose our way precisely when we inflate either effort or surrender to the point that it blocks our view of the other pole.  This so de-energizes divine intention or aspiration in us that we forget God.  In a sense we could say that we must “leave room for God” in both our effort and in our surrender.  We “make room” in either by balancing it with the other.  This creates a tension, spaciousness, and energy across both that indeed leaves room for God and for his intention to arise in us as the feeling of aspiration. 

It is a wonderful thing that God is not to be excluded even from our deepest sorrow, and from the foregoing we can understand why.  He thrives on being in relationship with us.  It is his nature to be our North Star.  Hence he has made it so that gloom is like changing weather rather than a fixed feature of our landscape.  He is continuously using his breath to blow away the clouds and the mist of gloom.  He has planted in every direction–in our hearts, in our minds, and in the world–reminders of himself as that which all things emulate and are trying to achieve.  In even our darkest hours we can acknowledge the glimmer that will not be fully dimmed.  We may be hauled to the point of great affliction or even death.  We may be overcome by the feeling of foresakenness.  Yet, even then, we may cry out to God as Jesus did, as the ultimate measure of all foresakenness and him by whom it must be resolved in the end.

D.  The Act of Cruelty 

Cruelty is a distortion to the dimension of compassion in our world.  In Book I, we saw that “compassion” meant the experience of sharing another’s pain such that our unity becomes manifest.  We also saw that in order for that unity to become manifest to us it was key for us to apprehend the circumstances and events leading to suffering as the occasions for suffering and not its cause.  This meant that we come to view them as features or aspects of human life which encircle the divine essence in each of us and foster the illusion of multiplicity.  We could just as well say that such circumstances foster the illusion of irreconcilable differences.   As long as we remain focused on the circumstances as causes, then by extension those causes become attached to the perpetrators from whose will and power those causes emerge.  Of course, from a certain point of view, this will always be true.  There will always be perpetrators of causes of suffering for other people.  From a purely human point of view, this is true.

However, we begin to make progress once we realize that that very human point of view resulted from the conditions imposed on us by the space-time matrix in which we came to live.  We may recall that we chose to come here.  In the guise of Adam and Eve, we chose to leave Eden, where we lived with God in a state of knowing, and to enter a world defined by understanding, the hallmark of which is the division of things into parts and the comprehension of their relationships by analysis.  Understanding thrives on separation.  It sees separation everywhere.  It is indeed through separation,–that is, through analysis–that understanding seeks to comprehend the whole.  What it fails to realize, however, is that analysis crosses an irreversible threshold.  The separation of the whole into its parts can indeed facilitate reasoning out and even predicting relationships between the parts, including their behavior toward one another and in various combinations.  However,–and this is key–analysis cannot penetrate to the inner nature or essence of things.  This is because analysis depends on separation, but the apprehension of the essence of things depends on oneness.  Understanding is the power or faculty behind analysis, but it does not give access to oneness.  The power or faculty which does that is knowing or what we have called “true knowing.” 

The human viewpoint that there are perpetrators who have caused great suffering upon their victims and that those perpetrators deserve to have the same or worse suffering levied upon them is a viewpoint born out of understanding.  The perpetrators and their victims are seen as separate.  When those victims rise up and become perpetrators of acts of violence and cruelty upon those who harmed them, those perpetrators are also seen as separate from their victims, and the circumstances surrounding their retribution are seen as “different” from those which led the first perpetrators to commit their acts of cruelty.  And on and on it goes.  One side produces its justification, which the other decries.  Then violence shifts sides, and new justifications for it follow, with new denouncements from the other side.  This is not to say that all justifications for violence are equally spurious or equally valid.  It is, however, to suggest that as long as the human viewpoint is maintained and understanding is our only faculty, then perpetrators and victims will continue to break out across the world and “spurious” and “valid” will continue to be applied to justifications for violence and cruelty until the end of time.  This is also to say that the problem of human violence cannot be solved at the level of the violence itself.  That is, it cannot be solved as long as we continue to look for causes among the circumstances, histories, and events that pertain to the people involved.   As we said in Book I, these are indeed the occasions for violence.  However, the ultimate cause of human violence, acts of cruelty, and much other suffering–to the extent that we can speak of a cause–is the very condition of our separation or multiplicity in space and time.  It is exactly that which we have to look beyond if we are to discover the real solution to the problem of violence.

This is where the faculty of knowing comes in.  Through knowing we have access to the essences of things, including ourselves.  We are able to know–but not to understand–that the essence that is in me is the same essence that is in you because both essences are of God.  An illustration may help to convey this.⁴ Imagine two sponges immersed in an ocean of water.  The ocean itself is analogous to God.  The water that is in the first sponge is analogous to my essence.  The water that is in the second sponge is analogous to your essence.  The sponges themselves represent our bodies in space and time.  If we focus on the sponges then what is most evident is their separation.  However, if we focus only on the water, then it becomes impossible to tell where the water in one sponge ends and that in the next one begins.  The distinctions in space and time which separate them out disappear, and what’s left is one common essence, or just oneness.  Seeing the water this way is akin to knowing.

As long as we are focused on the differences between people, then that is what we will continue to perceive.  The world is how we perceive it.  However, if we choose to look beyond those differences and to energize the faculty in us which gives access to oneness, then we will perceive oneness where before we only saw difference.  Even so, not all perception is equal.  Otherwise it would be the case that there was no more truth to the perception that persons and peoples have irreconcilable differences than to the perception that they are one.  However, thanks be to God, one of those perceptions is indeed far truer than the other.  It is far truer to say that all people are one than to say that there are differences between people.  Once again, we are free to maintain and to describe such differences.  But from a higher perspective, it becomes clear that the perception which gives rise to such differences is limited relative to that which reveals oneness.  From this perspective, it becomes clear that the truer perception–that of oneness– contains and accounts for the possibility of separation and multiplicity, but the reverse is not so.

It is possible to account for division and separation from the perception of oneness which knowing offers, but it is not possible to account for oneness from the perception of separation which understanding offers.  This is why an irreversible barrier exists between understanding and knowing, between analysis and oneness.  In terms of our earlier illustration, it is possible to account for the water in the two sponges if you know about the water in the ocean that flows through them.  However, it is impossible to account for or to know the ocean if all you understand is the water in the two sponges.

In yet other words, knowing is superior to understanding because knowing can encompass itself and understanding, whereas understanding can encompass only itself.  Understanding can enable knowing to reflect back upon itself as if it were separate from itself–so that we know that we know–but only the power of knowing grasps what that means.  Because knowing apprehends oneness, and the ultimate Oneness, who is God, knowing that we know is tantamount to apprehending oneness with ourselves, which is the same as apprehending Oneness with ourselves.  Understanding, by contrast, without the benefit of knowing, is condemned to wander ceaselessly through the world of separation, multiplicity, and difference.  It would indeed do so–with us as its very captives–if God had not made knowing a superior faculty and had not made it so that even the world of space and time were designed to remind us of our higher faculty and origin.  In regard to our foregoing discussion, full awareness of this spells an end, as it were, to our reliance on understanding to the detriment of knowing.  It returns us to the knowledge of our ultimate oneness with God and so affords meaning, purpose, and promise to our evolutionary journey back to our Maker.  On Earth, it corrects perceptions of separation, difference, and enmity between peoples–perceptions based on understanding alone–and replaces them with perceptions of sameness.

Even so, as we have already implied, the passage from understanding to knowing and, ultimately, to knowing that we know is not automatic.  It may be our destiny, but it is not automatic.  In terms of our foregoing discussion, the passage from the cruelty spawned by an understanding of differences to compassion feeding a perception of oneness is theoretically possible along the lines we have explained.  But, despite that, cruelty remains.  Acts of cruelty continue to be a major problem both in our personal lives and in our society at large.  We have to wonder why.  We have to show just how compassion is lost or suppressed and how it can become restored in the face even of grisly and entrenched hatreds and cruelties.  We need to see just what light the Christology may shed on some of the most common evils we face in our world.

We were saying earlier that acts of cruelty amount to distortions of the dimension of compassion.  Compassion is, first of all, shared suffering.  Then once we share the suffering of another and “feel it with them,” we are moved to see them as ourselves.  Compassion is thus also identification with the sufferer.   At first this may be understood to be metaphorical, but if we persist, we come to know it as the truth.  That is, shared pain has a way of breaking down our so-called “barriers” and of reawakening in us that which is deeper and truer than the mere circumstances of our difference.  Once we begin to grasp and to know our oneness as the truest thing about us, then, from this viewpoint, any differences between us can no longer appear as true causes of anything.  If what is true is our oneness, then differences amount to occasions for the operation of space and time.  Multiplicity itself is nothing but a refraction of the one essence of God through the lenses of space and time.  On the near side of those lenses, there is only oneness.  On the far side there arises the perception of differences, real only in relation to the perception which creates them.

Such perception creates the occasion for differences, and differences–including different circumstances, backgrounds, histories, and beliefs–create the occasion for cruelty and violence.  It would be wrong to say that differences cause violence.  It would be wrong, for example, to say that what your people did to my people,–that that made the difference and was the cause of the violence between us.  If we were separate in our deepest nature, then that might be true.  However, once we see one another at the deepest level of our oneness, then it makes no sense whatsoever to say that “what we did to ourselves created a difference that caused us to be violent against ourselves.”  Where there is oneness, there simply cannot exist a true difference.  There is only sameness.  And from the viewpoint of sameness the very rationale for any violence or cruelty based on differences totally vanishes.  In fact, it never existed in the first place!  The only reason that acts of cruelty and violence arise is a refraction of the true nature of reality when it is seen through the lenses of a lower-level and distorted perception.

Compassion corrects this perception precisely because it awakens knowing in us.  Like all the other dimensions of our world it was designed by God to lead us back to himself.  Through the experience of sharing each other’s pain, it reminds us of our unity, which we grasp through the re-awakening of true knowing.  Then once we feel the unity between us, that sense of conjoined spirit opens us beyond the edges of our individuality–beyond the edges of our “sponge,” as it were–to perceive the Great Spirit and Unity that is the source of all.

It is just where we fall prey to perceptions of difference that self-awareness declines and cruelty becomes thinkable as a means to realize one’s intentions.  By “self-awareness” is meant here not the kind of “wholesome individuality” promulgated by pop psychology but the actual awareness of oneness possible in true knowing.  Reflecting on the Quadrants of the Cross will show us how this very sense of unity is lost and where acts of cruelty begin.  It will also show us how awareness can be restored so that behavior is set right and peace returns as the order of the day.

Where there is oneness, then there is also a perfect harmony and balance between effort, intention, and surrender.⁵ Both within and between individuals there exists this harmony.  That is to say, the elements of the Kabbalistic Trigram are balanced within oneself and between persons those various elements exist in harmony.  For example, my intensions complement rather than conflict with your intentions, and all intentions are subsumed under God’s single intention to manifest the Kingdom.  Likewise, my efforts do not run afoul of yours.  Nor does that which I trust in or surrender to cause offense or delay your progress in any way.  There may be instances where one person’s effort is counter-balanced by another’s yielding, but taken together they do not overstep or offend, but rather contribute to a common intention.  In the creation of the Kingdom–and in its maintenance also–there will likely be a myriad of efforts required as well as countless opportunities for trust and surrender.  And there will be a great many wonderful intentions being brought to fruition.  As long as effort, intention, and surrender remain in harmony within and between individuals, then the channel for knowing will be kept open in all, and chochmah will guide the realization of the Kingdom.

Where breakdowns occur is just where one or another of these elements falls out of balance, and it is precisely there that perceptions of differences between individuals and between peoples arise.  Of course, as soon as there are differences, then the understanding is wont to swing into action and all manner of explanations, justifications, and predictions can arise.

Where effort becomes excessive on the spiritual plane, then this often leads to arrogance and to an inability to identify with those to whom one fashions oneself as superior.  Rivalries break out.  In place of compassion, one finds pity, and where pity is displaced, one finds condescension, derision, and finally, hatred.  With excessive effort on the physical plane, one meets all these again combined with the inclination to regard other persons not as spiritual beings but as simple means to an end.  Persons may be treated like cogs in a machine and their benefits regarded much like resources such as fuel, oil, and grease,–to be expended in the smallest and most cost-efficient amounts possible.  The moguls of such machines will no more be able to identify with their workers than a Mercedes owner would with a master cylinder.  On the contrary, such an owner is not likely even to know what a master cylinder is let alone to appreciate its contribution to his vehicle.  Were his brakes to fail and he to narrowly escape death as a result, that might awaken his interest enough in his braking system that he would come to know and appreciate the function of a master cylinder.  But short of such a calamity, he would likely only to continue to make use of it in total oblivion of its worth or value.  That is, unless it happened to show up as a line item on a repair bill.  Likewise, the corporate mogul is unlikely to know anything more about his workers than how much they produce for him and what they cost.  Yet in addition to the inflated ego of the over-zealous spiritual figure, he is likely also to suffer from a highly inflated wallet.

Of course, where some people are treated as inferior to others, that is where cruelty begins and violence is bred.  It is especially instructive to note the slide away from knowing that is evident in the foregoing.  The mistreatment of workers occurs in the absence of knowing them.  Pity for parishioners becomes possible only through the insulation of the office of the priesthood, for example, when that is taken as a justification for no longer rubbing elbows with the poor and the oppressed.   For when one touches them, one is touched by them, and the sense of separation between thee and me dwindles and becomes ever thinner.  This is the real reason why executive offices are placed as high in their ivory towers as possible, either literally or figuratively.  Real contact with the rank and file would stir feelings of kinship and a growing appreciation for the sameness of their needs and desires with one’s own,–not just the similarity of their needs but the identical sameness.  In order to have his mansion, the chief executive almost has to maintain an insularity towards his less fortunate workers.  For in knowing them, he would most certainly discover himself and find their misfortunes no more tolerable than if they were happening to himself, which by a higher reality they are.

It is evident, then, that perpetrations of cruelty become possible only where self-awareness is lacking.  Excessive force or effort disturbs self-awareness by unbalancing the elements of the Kabbalistic Trigram which make for enlightenment when they are kept in balance.  Likewise, excessive surrender can upset this balance, and it, too, can foster cruelty.  The failure to take action, for example, where action is needed to prevent harm is a form of surrender that draws one out of identification with others, dilutes or disfigures compassion, and opens a vacuum into which cruelty may erupt.  A particular instance of this would be the failure of a teacher or other adult to interrupt the bullying of one student by another.  How many young persons have been deeply scarred in just this manner when an adult who should have known better did nothing to prevent the harm?

In all instances alike where either effort or surrender are drawn into excess, the conditions for knowing, and hence for compassion, are put into jeopardy.  Once we descend from self-knowledge into the illusion that those we interact with are separate from and different from ourselves, than cruelty becomes thinkable as a means to an end.  However, Jesus taught us correctly when he instructed us to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”  Far from a mere simile or metaphor, this was Jesus’s reflection to us of the profound reality of our being.  It is a principle not only of being but of doing.  In fact, by revealing to us who we really are, Jesus provides us with the clearest and most compelling guide for our actions.  This is the farthest thing from a code of conduct that says to do certain things just because they are right and regardless of how they affect us, ourselves.  Such codes lack the one kind of persuasive force that is more effective than any other.  That is self-interest.  Self-interest is not a bad thing.  In fact, from the highest vantage point we can attain, self-interest is the only thing.  The problem of human violence is not that it stems from self-interest.  The problem is exactly the opposite, that those who perpetrate violence and cruelty lack the self-awareness which reveals that violence and cruelty are never in one’s own self-interest.  They are, in essence, a violation of oneself, a distortion of oneself, and a diminishment of oneself.  The latter is especially important to take note of.

Contrary to the belief of the wealthy oppressor, the misuse of others to the material advantage of oneself amounts to a diminishment of oneself.  That it is a diminishment spiritually may already be clear from what has come before.  But we may add that the kinds of isolationism, protectionism, and paranoia which material wealth commonly engenders make trust difficult, hamper friendships, strain family ties, and, in general, create a variety of psychological difficulties.  What is less obvious is that the keeping of wealth by means of the misuse or disadvantage of others actually results in the diminishment of the material wealth of those who have it.

The reasons for this are twofold.  First, the bounty that God intended for us in the realization of the Kingdom on this planet is far, far greater than that controlled and commanded by even the greatest nations on earth, let alone than that which billionaires are in possession of.  This bounty, if fully realized judging by what this planet is fully capable of offering, would far exceed the holdings of the richest Midas even if distributed equally among all the Earth’s inhabitants.⁶  Yet even if that were in doubt, the second reason is even more compelling.  The very inequities between the rich and poor have established circumstances under which the rich must use a considerable portion of their resources to maintain and guard the same.  We are not talking here only about expensive security systems, body guards, lawyers, accountants, trustees, and what have you.  We are talking about the considerable need that excessive wealth creates to insulate itself from the vacuum that awaits it just beyond the doors of its estate.  In other words, whatever wealth one might like to keep, that much must be insulated by many times more because of just the conditions created by having it in the first place.  Those conditions include the possibility of financial instability in society as a whole due in no small part to the ever-increasing needs of the poor and the marginalized and the strain they place on national resources.  They also include the possibility of further destabilizations due to direct uprisings of the poor in rebellion against their station.  And finally, they include the possibility of the precipitous devaluation of currency due to a host of market factors, such as, for example, the increasing reliance on cheap import goods by more and more people with the resulting devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies.  These are all ills which wealth breeds outside of itself, which it is not in control of.  Therefore, its only recourse is to protect itself by amassing more and more layers under its belt.  However, there is another solution.  There is a more effective approach which deals with the problem by addressing its source rather than just protecting against its symptoms.  This solution is for the wealthy to redistribute their wealth in such a way as to directly serve the needs of the poor and unfortunate.

The advantages of this solution are seminal.  First, it would go very far in beginning to heal the psychological wounds of the rich due to such factors as isolationism and paranoia, which we have mentioned.  Such an act of surrender and trust would not only rekindle love among the poorer classes for their wealthier brethren, it would counter-balance the excessive material efforts of the rich in such a way as to foster greater enlightenment among them.  Such enlightenment would include increased self-awareness whereby the rich would identify more closely with the less fortunate members of society.  The love rising from the lower classes met by such increased acceptance and generosity from the classes above would foster an equalization in society.  The streets would become safer.  Social relief programs would become less needed.  And the rich, for their part, would sleep easier knowing that they had made many friends in all classes of society.

Second, the very oppressive need to insulate wealth by more wealth would rapidly begin to disappear.  As the needs and desires of the lower classes were “filled in,” the financially destabilizing vacuums there would recede.  All kinds of markers of financial stability in society would improve.  Domestic purchasing power would increase giving rise to increases in domestic manufacturing and American jobs.  The wealth of the wealthy would become far greater and stronger if only for not being threatened any longer by destabilizing forces from which it formerly required insulation.  So the very giving away of wealth it turns out, paradoxically perhaps, would strengthen what remains of it.

What’s more, however, is that the wealthy themselves would no longer feel the need for so much wealth.  When the fundamental satisfaction of friendship and unity with oneself is withdrawn, then there is an inclination to seek satisfaction elsewhere, such as from things.  But when reunification with, shall we say, formerly estranged parts of oneself becomes possible,–when friendships and relationships that were formerly missing become not only possible once more but safe, then whole new vistas of satisfaction come into view.  By comparison, things–including money–become less satisfying.  They are no longer taken as substitutes for the “real deal.”

All in all, this should be enough to demonstrate that it is in the self-interest of the rich to give away their wealth.  It is, in fact, the way for them to become reunited with themselves, healed from the ills of self-estrangement, and benefactors to those with whom they would become reunited not only in compassion, but in the full flowering of oneness in the Kingdom under their generosity.  This is what it could truly mean for white doves to fly over the Kingdom at last,–for the wealthy and for everyone to see and to celebrate the liberation of those heavenly intentions soaring overhead and upwards into the very lap of God.

It should be no secret that it will require courage of the wealthy to let go of their wealth.  But the first steps of trust and surrender will engender further balance and harmony among the elements of the Kabbalistic Trigram, which will themselves foster enlightenment and point the way through further difficulties.  This is true not only for the rich but for anyone who has become unbalanced and compromised in self-knowledge by exerting overmuch effort upon physical things.  Surrender of that which has become an obsession and trust in those whom one has marginalized as lesser are steps learned from the Christology which lead to healing universally for anyone who has sinned in this way.

We noted earlier in this discussion that there are also those who have erred by a lack of effort, and by such a lack have fostered or permitted cruelty.  Some such have done so by failing to intervene to stop cruelty or prevent its occurrence.  Others have shrunk from involvement in groups or coalitions dedicated to such interventions even when they had good reasons to become involved.  Still others have simply backed away from incidents of cruelty so that they keep from even knowing about them.  To all these, and especially the last, we have to ask:  How long can you keep from knowing yourself?  For the perpetration of cruelty against anyone amounts to self-alienation from the point of view of true knowing.  That is, it amounts to a separation of oneself from oneself both in perception and in being.  For as we have repeatedly pointed out, things are as they are perceived.  For us to see ourselves as fractured, differentiated, and antagonized–even if it is not ultimately true–diminishes us.  It distorts the dimensions of our world and it diminishes our being in space and time.

Here the first step toward healing would likely be the courageous gesture of making the effort to feel some compassion towards the afflicted.  For this would begin to restore right perception of that worldly dimension of which cruelty is a distortion.  By the Christology, we make effort where surrender has been excessive in order to restore us to the balance where we can once again act out of wisdom.

Taking action in this case would, of course, necessitate learning something about the afflicted to begin with.  We cannot feel compassion towards those we know nothing about.   Our initial acquaintance, however–because it intersects the Law of Oneness⁷–would be more than enough to begin to stir some compassion in us from the outset.  It is absolutely amazing the extent to which people who hate each other avoid or are prevented from learning almost anything truthful about each other.  They may claim to know a lot.  But what they usually refer to are all manner of lies and propaganda regurgitated mouth to mouth by members of their own hate group or circulated by biased and untruthful news agencies.  Time and time again it has been shown that when small numbers are gathered together from opposing groups and given space and time to become authentically acquainted, what emerges is shared pain.  At first it is just pain as the old wounds stir and boil in an attempt to find healing through the annihilation of the other.  At some point, however,–when enough of the raw energy has boiled down–the curious insight begins to surface that everyone has been complaining about the same pain.  The stories have been sounding familiar, but at that point a silence emerges in which the characters all start to look the same.  The uncanny feeling arises that all that separates them are the particular occurrences of the suffering itself.  Within those occurrences, the suffering appears identical.  This is the point at which pain becomes shared pain and cruelty dissolves revealing the undistorted dimension of compassion behind it.  The deeper the compassion, the more it elicits true knowing, and the more clearly I see a reflection of myself in the face of another.

Thus the mere effort to become acquainted with my enemy naturally issues into effort to feel compassion for him, and effort to feel compassion naturally draws us into closer acquaintance.  It turns out that separation–far from being the solution to the problem of violence between us–is our only real enemy.  Bring us together and let our deepest truth find its way into the room, and what we will discover is ourselves.  This is ourselves seen from the viewpoint of the sameness of our suffering and eventually also from the oneness of our essence.  For it is not a far distance from recognizing myself in you to recognizing the selfsame essence in both of us, and from there to recognizing in the unity of us the Unity of Him who is our Essence and Source.

The previous discussion shows that it is possible using the Christology to identify just that twist by which the knowledge of our unity is distorted into a perception of differences and an occasion for hatred and cruelty to arise.  We were able to follow examples of individual distortions into the quadrant of excessive effort on the spiritual plane, the quadrant of excessive effort on the physical plane, and the quadrant of overmuch surrender on one or both planes.  In each instance we looked at some of the characteristics of the distortion in detail.  We were able to identify many of the untruths upon which the distortions were based and to set those against the truth of our oneness.  In each case, we were able to depose the falsehoods and thus to unblock the way to the restoration of compassion and oneness.  The varieties of brutality are many and varied in this world.  Perhaps this will be enough, however, to give a clearer idea of what they have in common and the usefulness of the Christology in addressing them from its center.

At the center of the Quadrants of the Cross is a place of balance, self-awareness, enlightenment, and peace.  It is the place in this world where we apprehend oneness in ourselves and each other.  It is a place of knowing, where acts of cruelty become unthinkable.  This is precisely why Jesus, from that place of knowing, said about those who had been cruel to him:

  Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. 

E.  The Experience of Fear

Fear is a distortion of the dimension of joy.  If joy is that which we have a right to experience as fulfillment in Him who made us, then fear is a distortion of the same by a powerful twist in the universal structure.  Fear is that which hides the inevitability of our fulfillment.  As astonishing as it is to say, our destiny is joy.  Our destiny is fulfillment in God alone.  On Earth, we cannot fully know what this means because our world is also suffused with the dimension of sorrow.  But sorrow is not the opposite of joy.  Sorrow contains joy in itself as the Pole Star which is contained by the night sky.  The night sky is not the opposite of the Pole Star but the inky blanket against which that star glistens like a diamond of hope.  In such a way sorrow contains joy as the dimension of its excursion into space and time.  God’s own nature is something beyond what we can experience in the world of space and time.  It is beyond earthly joy.  Within the world of space and time, his nature appears as ecstasy,–that is, as that which leads or points beyond this world.  The very word ecstasy comes from the Greek proposition ek and the word stasis.  Ek means “out of” and stasis means “stationariness.”  If we think of stationariness as confinement to a horizontal plane, then ecstasy is movement up and out of that plane or at least the foreshadowing of it.  Joy is both the foreshadowing of movement beyond the world of space and time and such movement itself, however incomplete.  That is why we addressed joy as the last of the major dimensions of the world in Book I and said that it is not fully of this world.  

Joy, in fact, can take us out of this world.  There are those devotees, seen primarily in India, who are called “masts,” who have entered such a state of joy or bliss that they have become unable to function in this world.  Some literally will not get up or bathe.  If not for being “rescued” by their gurus or other spiritual adepts, masts would remain in a state of joy and stay disconnected from this world.  In such a state–paradoxically–they might be unable to continue on their own spiritual path or to be of service to others.  Hence, for example, the great guru, Meher Baba, traveled all over India freeing masts from their state of “enchantment” so that they could return to the spiritual path. 

The mind state of masts, while it is not the same as madness, may be akin to it in keeping them from taking their proper place in the world.  The point of rescuing a mast is to restore him to that proper place.  As we have pointed out in earlier chapters, God intended for us to be in this world in order that we could complete the evolutionary journey to self-awareness that leads us back to him.  Even so, he sent Jesus Christ to teach us how to be in this world but not of it, so that we are living according to the principles or dimensions of the Kingdom, which have been projected into this world from the next.  Masts live primarily within the dimension of joy to the exclusion of all others, so they appear to be headed out of this world, which indeed they are.  All the same, some of them report the experience of anguish,–which we may interpret as sorrow–for not yet being able to fully consummate or fulfill their love for God and God’s love for them.  From this we may infer that the dimension of love is also primary for masts.  For ourselves, joy is the fulfillment of love which normally does not take us out of this world, at least not for very long.  Nor does it normally leave us unable to function in the world so as to serve and care for ourselves and others.

Just as beauty leads us along the path of love, joy promises and offers fulfillment in the beautiful as the object of love.  We pursue beauty because we love it, and we pursue it because we seek fulfillment in it.  The ultimate fulfillment is to merge with the object of our love, to become one with the beautiful.  In this world, we can and do experience such fulfillment to a degree.  We are able to merge with our beloved for a time, and to experience that time as “dilated” so that it seems short but swallows many hours measured outside our door in a differently shaped universe.  We do directly experience how the dimension of joy “bends back” the others so as to open an exit from this world.  But, normally at least, we do not take that exit.  With some regret perhaps, we return to live within the dimensions of space and time.

In the context of our dimensional world, then, joy serves to prove to us that it is possible to live “in this world but not of it.”  While we do experience joy in this world–and, indeed, often in response to it–we sense in joy perhaps more than in any other dimension its likeness to God’s own nature and, hence, its origin and opening in another world.  Whatever satisfaction we might find in the things of this world would be contained by the very limits of those things in space and time were it not for joy.  For example, if I received satisfaction from a new car, my satisfaction would deteriorate as the car aged and disappear altogether once the car reached the limit of its usefulness and had to be retired.  Joy, however, does not work like this.  It is quite possible that my joy over the vehicle may increase over time, even as its smell of newness fades into the background, its upholstery wears, and it develops mechanical issues which need attending to.  This is because joy over material things extends beyond those things.  It lives in the memories that we accumulate having used them, in the appreciation that we feel for what they make possible, and in the gratitude that we continue to feel long past the day that they ceased being useful.  The faculties of memory, appreciation, and gratitude–among others–draw or reveal a connection between material things and the larger tapestry of our lives.  Material things fit into that tapestry.  Such a fit itself calls attention to a world made for us in such a way that we can use it, shape it, and take advantage of the material things we both find and fashion in it.  Hence, the material things themselves are not the start and finish of our satisfaction.  Our joy extends,–seamlessly, as it were–beyond them to the interconnections around them and ultimately to the entire fabric of our lives woven for us by an unseen Master and laid out like the glorious raiment of a Turkish seamstress at a seemingly endless bazaar.

Joy points our attention beyond the things of this world even as we find satisfaction in them.  In a sense, it allows us to tolerate the conditions of space and time in which we find things.  For as we have just explained, without joy we would be limited by those things in such a way that we would always be hunting for fresh possessions to inspire us with joy.  To some extent this is indeed how we live.  For we have come to believe that material things are our primary source of satisfaction much to the neglect of the larger tapestry of life that enfolds us.  Hence, we not only miss much of the joy that larger tapestry has to offer, we have gotten parts of it all knotted up to the extent that we have placed far too much emphasis on them to the exclusion of others.

Joy ought to let us experience material things as benefits or gifts in the context of our relationships to each other and our commitments to one another in the Kingdom.  As we saw in the previous chapter, the recovery of relationships trumps the accumulation of material wealth.  Moreover, it resets priorities and equalizes forces in society so that material wealth does not have to swell to protect itself.  There can really be no joy in material wealth beyond that which one can use and interact with directly.  That is to say, all the “extra layers” of wealth that one keeps just to protect the core of what one owns cannot really be enjoyed.

For example, I may keep a fleet of 500 cars “just in case” the one I am driving and 498 of them all break down.  But what is the likelihood either of that or of my ever driving, let alone coming to intimately know, all 500 of the cars I own?  It is probably rather small.  What if I lived instead in a neighborhood full of friends who would lend me a car in a heartbeat if I needed one?  Then I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to house and maintain a fleet of cars most of which I would never drive.  By getting rid of those cars I would directly or indirectly contribute to an economy in which more persons who needed to could afford to own cars.  And I would have access to those cars without having to expend the money or the worry to own and maintain them.  This, of course, is an image of life in the Kingdom.

What we have created, however, is a society in which material things are not seen as benefits or gifts in a larger context but as ends in themselves.  The joy that emerges in such a context from faculties like memory, appreciation, and gratitude is replaced in a materialistic society by self-satisfaction through rabid indulgence.  Material things are seen less as a means to knit, support, enhance, and savor relationships than as containers of a much narrower kind of gratification.  In other words, they are seen narrowly through an aberrant and distorted perception of space and time, so that they are perceived less as gateways to expansive joy and more as limiters of joy.  Each is taken as an end in itself to supply all the gratification it contains until the limit of it is reached.  Then the thing is discarded like an empty container.

As with anything perceived to be limited, satisfaction in the form of material goods becomes the object of craving and hoarding.  It leads to over-indulgence.  What’s more, it becomes the generator of fear.  The force that drives craving, hoarding, over-indulgence–and also greed, avarice, jealousy, hatred, and violence–is fear.  For as we saw above in our discussion of jealousy, when things and people are detached from the larger context of the Unlimited they begin to be seen as shrinking vessels in space and time.  And the very perception that satisfaction in those things is shrinking, or could shrink, with them generates fear.

Fear is a distortion of joy, because in true joy we have the sense that the satisfaction we find in things and other people is not limited to them but expansive from them.  A parent does not love her child only for one quality that he has, or for one accomplishment, but also for many qualities he may have the potential to develop, and for accomplishments he may someday be capable of.  Similarly, in true joy we find satisfaction not just narrowly in the gratification a thing may offer us in the moment, but also in much else that it reminds us of, much else that we may appreciate through it (such as those who made it or made it possible), and much that we may become hopeful of because of it.  True joy ultimately leads us beyond the thing to gratitude for all things and for the Source of all things just as it was out of God’s joyful nature that all creation flowed and was seen by him to be “good.”  It could not have been good had it not been imbued with his very nature and thereby been suffused with that which would always remind one of Himself. 

Fear, then, distorts joy by altering our perception of it as something expansive.  It is both the feeling and the perception of limitedness, scarcity, poverty, and want.  Fear is not the fear of anything unless that thing is perceived as capable of  limiting or taking something valuable from us.  That something may be our physical well-being.  It may be our sense of control.  It may be the pleasure of eating an apple or the hope of receiving a paycheck.  Whatever it is, it is a thing of value in which we find or would find satisfaction, and the thing we fear is the very limit or constriction itself which would rob us of the satisfaction in question.  Where there is fear, I do not expect to have joy.  Rather, I expect a shortage of it.  Therefore, my natural response–which is the extension of fear–is to act so as to amass those things of which I fear a shortage.  In other words, it is to covet those things which appear to be in short supply, to become jealous of my neighbor in competing for those things, and to become greedy in collecting and amassing them.

Ultimately, fear exacts violence towards those things or people perceived to be a threat to my satisfaction.  In a world perceived to be replete with everything one could ever reasonably want or need, there would be no fear.  For there would never be any motivation to take from or steal from one’s neighbor.  There would, however, be a motivation to provide for one’s neighbor out of the bounty that one had in order to draw from the limitless well of satisfaction that comes from loving and serving one’s neighbor.

In terms of the Kabbalistic Trigram and the Christology, fear arises when either overmuch or too little effort is applied toward the satisfaction of one’s desires.  When too much effort is exerted there is generated a sense of self-reliance and a belief in the efficacy of one’s own powers.  These never being as effective as they are believed to be, a vacuum of outcomes is created such as further encourages the outlay of effort.  Thus even as things spiral further and further out of control, the effort to exert control spirals upwards with them, only not to God but to a kind of mountaintop citadel (corporate penthouse?) where finally it is sheer motion and momentum that one comes to rely on as one’s protectors.  That is, virtually every outcome is feared as it contains at least one element that must be protected against and usually many more.

The end result is indeed a kind of corporate paranoia that mobilizes whole divisions to outanticipate, outthink, outmaneuver, outlie, outspend, and outkill whatever or whomever is perceived to be a competitor.  In the presence of such frenzy, it should not surprise us that individual wee workers would be just as expendable–if not much more so–as the competitors marked for extermination.  In this scenario worker satisfaction is indeed shrunk to as small a vessel of space and time as possible since it is viewed as a cost and a kind of competition in its own right set against the only satisfaction that matters,–that is, the selfish indulgence of him or those who reside in the citadel and issue the orders by which everything below is made to run.  This scenario is an extreme and does not often occur in such a highly toxic form.  However, it clearly shows what is possible when human effort becomes unbridled in the pursuit of pleasures.

When too little effort is applied towards realizing one’s joys, fear may also arise.  For the person who is starved of joys and satisfactions easily becomes prey to fear in the presence of any of them.  How long will they last?  Upon what or whom do they depend?  And what might I do that would abolish them or prevent them from coming my way in the future?  These are typical of the questions one asks when he has become chronically impotent to beget any of the precursors to joy.  Even if joy is not entirely within our power to produce, still it remains to us to exert effort to produce patterns and conditions in our lives which are conducive to joy.  We spoke in Book I, for example, about rituals and routines.  These are examples of certain aspects of our lives over which we can exert some effort and do have some control.  Moreover, we can conduct them so as to encourage, if not to guarantee, opportunities for fulfillment and for joy.  If one keeps to a routine of compiling a shopping list and making regular trips to the grocery store, for instance, one is more likely to have on hand the foods that one needs and desires than if one never keeps such a list and visits the store only when hunger strikes.  As smart shoppers quickly learn, shopping under the influence of an empty stomach leads to unhealthy purchases, overbuying, food spoilage, and a drain on resources that make frustration more likely than satisfaction.  This is but a simple example.

On a larger scale, one who is not used to contributing effort towards her own joys may become unduly dependent on others.  She may come to see such dependency as “the order of the day” and herself become a victim of this world view in the hands of the powerful.  It was not for nothing that the founding fathers of our country included among its guiding principles a guarantee of the right of everyone to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Where the right to that pursuit is taken away and what is substituted is something like obedience to another, the very foundation of human society is put at risk.  For there is always a fault line breaking or brewing when any of its members are made to serve others at the expense of their own ability to pursue joy.  Joy being a fundamental dimension of the world, it cannot be suppressed or distorted without there being serious consequences.  Insofar as joy makes tolerable living within space and time by the example and the promise of fulfillment, its diminishment is bound to have serious repercussions by making the same intolerable.   Individual instances of suffering and misfortune can be tolerated for a long time where the promise of liberation remains alive.  And the life of even small joys can bring enough of a reminder of joy to come to forestall rebellion for a while.  But when even that life is extinguished, and living itself seems to be squeezed into a smaller and smaller box airless of any joy, then the human heart finds that it has nothing to lose in rebellion.

Rather, without rebellion, everything is already lost.  Even death itself–as we noticed in Essay #6–does not extend beyond joy in its governance upon life.  In fact, a human would rather be dead than joyless.  There is no alternative but to rebel in an attempt to recover joy.  Of this, the most crafty despots have not been unaware.  Even the Czar distributed bread and trinkets to his serfs to give them a little happiness and thus to keep them contained.

However, the lesson for true statesmen–and for anyone in a position of power–must reach far beyond containment.  Whereas the downtrodden need to know that it is not only their ability but their right to rise up and reclaim their happiness, the powerful need to know that it is in their own self-interest to help them do so.  A society gripped by fear turns the citadel of the rich into a prison even as it makes unsafe the streets where the poor live.  As we already saw in our discussion of cruelty, the rich by such insulation arrive at self-alienation.  Thus their salvation lies with the poor and the oppressed, to once again make them their brothers and sisters, and more than their brothers and sisters.

For those who have lost their will to fear in the course of trying to navigate their joys and sorrows, there is good reason to have hope.  For one thing, such persons often do manage to keep alive small–sometimes ridiculously small–joys that almost no one notices.  They may water and care for a flower that to anybody else would be a weed.  Or if they happen to have a room, they may give the floor of that room to another person as happily as if they were in charge of the Hilton Hotel.  Because joy is everywhere and in everything, it does not have to be writ large to be able to touch the human heart.  And because even the smallest joy points beyond itself to joy that is unimaginably great, even the smallest is able to fill, and not merely to touch, the heart.  The poor are actually much better apprised of this fact than the rich.  For the rich are typically so distracted by the sheer frenzy of their activities and all that they have set in motion to maintain themselves that they barely notice the minute textures of joy over which the poor are experts.  This is yet another reason why the rich need to reclaim the poor as their brothers:  they need them as teachers.  However, for the poor themselves the little joys can be an assurance of more to come.  Even they are proof positive of the true order of things and of God’s indelible presence in the world.

Finally, there is that group of us who are neither rich nor poor.  We own neither so much as the rich nor so little as the poor.  The trouble for us is that we are likely to be straining to become more like the rich while avoiding the pitfalls that can make us poor.  On the one hand, we may become fearful out of our efforts to climb the ladder of success and attain that last rung which boosts us over into the class of the wealthy.  Such a struggle to realize the “American Dream” is usually a fiction which keeps us locked in excessive effort.  It results in over work, impossibly full schedules, a frenzy of activity, and an inability to slow down long enough to even smell the roses, let alone take restorative vacations.  Under such conditions, issues of ill-health are likely to arise increasing the already present sense of desperation.  Joy may become diminished or virtually extinguished.  It is replaced by the fear that great effort must continue to be exerted at all costs to avoid the ultimate cost of losing the very opportunity for advancement.   Of course such fear robs us of many of the same joys fear steals from the wealthy.  We lack time to savor and to enjoy relationships.  We cease any longer to find joy in small things overwhelmed as we are with the preoccupation to obtain the “big” things and score the big breakthroughs.

In the case of us middle class, however, we are also subject to the fears of the poor.  This is because no matter how much effort we may exert in our pursuit of wealth, our very class defines us as, in some measure, still surrendered to poverty.  Unless and until we are able to amass the same protective layers of wealth that the rich have covered themselves with, we are still relatively few steps away from poverty.  This means that we are still, to some extent, in the grip of those thoughts and conditions which generate fear for the poor.  That is, something or someone may step in and prevent us from getting our next foothold on the ladder (for the poor it is their first foothold).  Whatever is in us that has so far failed to attain the American Dream–however we view it–that part of us is effectively stuck in a posture of surrender from which we are tirelessly trying to extricate ourselves.  From this point of view we see any and all surrender as excessive.  Hence, we are prone to the same fears that the poor have insofar as they also feel overcome by surrender to forces and people who are far beyond their influence, let alone control.  Thus those of us in the middle class are likely to be hemmed in by fears on all sides, that is from fears stemming both from excessive effort to attain status and wealth, and from excessive surrender felt as a lurking sense of inadequate power, under-achievement, and unfulfilled dreams.

With reference to the Quadrants of the Cross, we can discern that for the middle class the return to joy, on one hand, follows the path from excessive effort to amass wealth back down to gratitude.  On the other hand, it follows the path from excessive surrender to a sense of inadequacy upwards to confidence.  For gratitude arises where effort is properly tempered with surrender so that one’s own efforts no longer appear as the sole source of prosperity.  Instead, that source is known to be God alone and God acting through grace to lend power and efficacy to efforts of our own.  Confidence, in turn, arises where surrender is balanced by the knowledge that God does, indeed, supplant and empower our efforts.  It is bred where true knowledge reveals the veracity of hope, that is, that God hears our prayers and often answers our smallest efforts with outcomes which stretch far beyond them and elude the limiting calculus that can keep us feeling confined to our station or confined to our bed.  Thus the corrective balances revealed in the Quadrants of the Cross point the way to the liberation of the middle class, too.  

The middle class, in fact, occupy a special place insofar as they know both the oppression of the wealthy and the fear of the poor.  In other words, they live in the “pressure cooker” heated from below by the hellish fear of joining the ranks of the poor and pressurized from above by the domination of the rich.  In a way the poor are less under the domination of the rich than the middle class, for they have less to lose.  Paradoxically, the closer that one emulates the rich by amassing wealth, the more pressure one feels from above both in terms of exclusion and conformity. 

The wealthy tend not to admit others to their ranks with open arms.  The closer one approaches their cordons, the clearer it becomes how much more effort still will be required to traverse whatever distance remains.  As we already observed above, the principle of ownership begins to apply whereby the more one owns to the exclusion of others, the more layers of additional wealth are needed to protect it.  This need is generated partly by the distortions in perception that go along with amassing wealth, which generate fears for its safety.  It is partly generated, as we also saw, by very real economic instabilities introduced into society whenever there are “haves” and “have nots.”  In any event, the result for the advancing middle classman is to feel the weight of the tremendous effort it takes to climb out of his class multiplied by the additional effort of having to protect whatever gains he makes.  The protectionist efforts of the rich above him have the “trickle down” effect of magnifying his own need to protect his gains.  Their insularity and exclusion from those below them increases his difficulties the farther he climbs up the ladder of success.  What seems from far below to be a tantalizing dream about the average American who only needs to work hard and stick with it in order to become wealthy and free from all his troubles, looks more like a nightmare the higher one actually ascends.  It turns out the rungs are not evenly spaced.  Due to a trompe l’oeil, they look even from below, but the climbing reveals a different picture.  It begins to require more and more time, more and more effort, and greater and greater compromises in the attention one has for anything but money and gain.  Activity becomes frenetic.  Relationships become diluted.  Psychological stresses abound.  The middle classman begins to suffer many of the burdens of wealth just from his pursuit of it, without actually fully attaining it.  So the pressure of exclusion from above becomes withering.  Yet it is not all.

There is also the pressure of conformity.  That is, one’s very advance along the way to wealth meets with requirements to conform to the ways of the wealthy.  There arise pressures to dress a certain way, to talk a certain way, and, above all, to behave a certain way.  The rules of membership in the owning class are not always or often explicit, but they are as present as the wallpaper.  The wannabe or newbie may come under particular pressure to demonstrate conformity not only in terms of his decorum and deference to his “superiors,” but in his expressed political views and especially in his attitude towards those less fortunate than himself.

In regard to that attitude, the rule or policy of exclusion will almost certainly be made to play out, insofar as he will find it necessary in order to stick to his path to cultivate distance and alienation within himself towards those of the lower classes with whom he once more closely identified (even if this were not already encouraged from above).  Otherwise the whole project of upward mobility would become threatened by the desire for sharing, itself a corollary of the dimension of compassion.  Compassion is an enemy of the wealthy because it ultimately leads to the recollection of oneness through true knowing.  Therefore it has to be defended against through the inculcation of attitudes of alienation and derision towards the poor, and the middle class as well.  The poor, by contrast, feel the pressure of exclusion from the rich to a much lesser degree if only because they are much farther from its source.  They are excluded from having wealth, to be sure.  But because they have little ability to pursue the American Dream, they stay largely clear of the nightmares of those who attempt to climb out of their station.  Instead, as we noted, they continue to dream of “little joys” and to engage in many of the “lesser” activities and relationships that the middle class sacrifice in their climb “up the ladder.”  Nor do the poor have the slightest interest in conforming to the ways of the rich.  To them the affected mannerism of the wealthy often has the look of “dis-ease” or of possession by some kind of devil, as indeed it may be.

The news for the middle class, however, is not all bad.  To the contrary, it is very good news.  As we said before, the very nature of their station affords them insight into both the difficulties of the poor and those of the rich and their corrections.  That is, the middle class have a closer reach both to gratitude and to confidence than either the rich or the poor.   Thus not only are they able, potentially, to correct errors in themselves, they are able to help the classes above and below them to do so also, thereby becoming arbiters of the great social and economic healing that must occur for the Kingdom to issue upon the Earth.

The very same misalignments of the elements of the Kabbalistic trigram that can be found in individuals act themselves out between and among the larger classes in society.  To those individuals, therefore, who are able to find correction in themselves for the bulk of these ills, to them will be granted special insights and abilities to help society as a whole heal.  With regard to ills pertaining to wealth and poverty, these individuals would be in the middle class.  For them, personal healing will mean the end of their reliance on merely human power.  Looking once again to God, rather than to themselves and those above them, as the true sources of supply, they will recover gratitude.  Internally, they will live from God consciousness rather than from ego consciousness.  Gone outwardly will be the kind of effort that ensnares them in relentless upward mobility.  Gone will be the narrowness of vision which keeps from sight the many brothers and sisters for whom they might feel compassion and henceforth rejoin in oneness.  Instead, oneness will become the order of the day.  Both from this deeper knowing of the common essence of humanity and from knowledge of God’s providence, they will regain confidence as well.  Inwardly, no longer will they feel the flames of fear arising from the poor as if they lived in hell.  Instead they will perceive and feel the warmth of brotherhood, that is, from and for those who are just like them.  And outwardly, they will assist those brothers and sisters to recover confidence of their own and to rise up in expectation and participation in the Kingdom.

With regard to the wealthy, the enlightened middle class will not rise up in arms against them, nor will they encourage others to do so.  This is not the way of the Kingdom.  Rather, the middle class will strive to demonstrate to their wealthier brethren “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal” (Matthew 6:20).  That is, they will lead them to gratitude, which opens a store of treasure greater than any Midas could touch and which transforms the heart from a repository of greed, suspicion, and displeasure into a chalice filled with the divine qualities of love, generosity, peace, and above all, and true happiness and joy.  Here the middle class must lead by example and give up any pretensions to wealth of the kind portrayed in the American Dream.  This is by no means to recommend an act of asceticism or a posture of complacency with regard to all things material.  Rather it is to acknowledge the fundamental principle of which Christ spoke when he said:

  Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.  (Matthew 6:33). 

In seeking and living in the Kingdom, the middle class will attain a balance of intention, effort, and surrender far from oppressive and debilitating efforts and also from numbing complacency and compliance. Thus they will manifest riches in themselves more compelling than the brute strength of arms and brighter and more alluring than all the gold Midas could create.  In this way, they will bring the rich along like brothers into their ranks.  And having found their way home again to genuine treasure, the wealthy will want nothing more than to redistribute their holdings in fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy.

Thus resolving in themselves the sins of both the rich and the poor, the middle class can show both groups how it is possible to surmount all obstacles to oneness and unite both in the realization of the Kingdom within and without.  Many political leaders have correctly intuited that the hope of their nation lay with the middle class.  However, few have envisioned that it is by the absorption and dissolution of all other classes into itself that the middle class restores oneness while ceasing altogether to exist as such.  For the distinctions of class–from the viewpoint of oneness–are those known in philosophy as “distinctions without a difference.”  That is, they are invented, fictitious, and without true power to keep a single person from her birthright of joy in another. 

In sum, what the Christology teaches is that God took pleasure in creating the world, and especially in creating Man and Woman.  When he sent Adam and Eve, by their own choosing, out of Eden, he created a world in which they could survive “by the sweat of their brow.”  In other words, he made it so their own efforts would count for something in this new world of theirs.  At the same time, he populated the world with all manner of plants, minerals, and beasts, which he gave to mankind to be stewards over on the Earth.  A steward is one who is in charge of whatever or whomever has been placed in his service.  In this regard, then, God gave humans that which would serve and sustain them.  He made it so surrender to that bounty was equally a part of their sustenance.  Furthermore, he made it so that neither effort nor surrender should have to be taken to an extreme for humans to survive, but rather so that a balance between them would suffice.  Into the midst of such a balance he offered them the ability to maintain a homeward or divine intention.  He imbued their world with all manner of likenesses to and reminders of himself such that they would remember why they came to Earth in the first place and discover the Way of Return amidst all that Earth had to provide.  By way of still further help, God made it so that when they did put forth effort tempered appropriately with surrender and not allowed to grow into a disfiguring merely human power, and when they did discern and adopt the divine intention so beautifully etched into all creation,–then God by his grace sent them chochmah, or “enlightenment” to guide them through their troubles and their difficulties.  This is a world in which there need be no fear, for

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
            I will fear no evil;
            For You are with me;
            Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)

As we noted earlier, God’s rod represents effort which he gave to human beings as an aid to toiling over and governing the land.  God’s staff represents that same tool in the aspect of surrender, that is, as something leaned on in a mode of rest, receptivity, trust, and expectation.

Into the midst of this God gave wisdom such that everything that was allotted to humans on Earth would suffice for them, and more than suffice.  He gave wisdom to know how to use the Earth’s resources to meet all human needs and all reasonable desires.  And he gave insight into the rule of law and even more so into the governance of the soul and the finer points of relationships so that harmony could be maintained across groups of those elements represented by the Kabbalistic Trigram as well as within each group as expressed in a person.  Truly God gave us all from the very beginning of our time on Earth to create a Kingdom here modeled on the Kingdom of Heaven.  Such was God’s love for us.  Such was his generosity that his Kingdom has been at hand since the beginning of days.   Even so, when we did not discern it, when we had lost track of the signs and symbols which declared it everywhere, God sent Jesus Christ to teach us and to remind us where to look.  Jesus did not bring the Kingdom.  He did not usher it in or award it to some and deny it to others.  He came to teach by lesson and by example what it means to live in the Kingdom and to hold out hope that it can be so even now.

At the center of the cross is a place with Jesus that is without fear.  It is without fear because it is beyond where fear can reach.  It is a place where true knowing gives access to the reality of joy both as God’s own nature (to the extent we can grasp it) and as a principle of all of creation.  From that place truly we can

[S]ee a World in a Grain of Sand
                And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
                Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
                And Eternity in an hour.⁸  

That is, we can see in the smallest thing the potential for the greatest joy imaginable.  We can sense the connection in that thing between this world and the next.  We can discern in that which can fit into our palm the true measure and bounty of all that God made to fit our hands, to serve us, to provide for us, and to keep us from want.  And we can relish that all the hours we spend here may feel like Eternity,–not in us judging them as too long and too difficult, but exactly the opposite, that is, in coming to relish them so much that we would have them last for eternity, were that not already promised to us in the world to come. 

If we have drifted from the center into the Quadrants of the Cross, where fear arises, we can return.  We can let go of the strangle hold we have placed upon all that gives us joy.  We can regain our vision of the great joy in small things and thus be reminded that greatness accrues to surrender as well as to effort.  Thus we will rediscover that God’s original design for our world was better than own, and we will come to relinquish effort which is not only unnecessary for satisfaction but occlusive of joy.

If we have forgotten that joy is our birthright and deep in our nature even if we have managed to retain some “little” joys, then we can be reminded by those joys of what little is capable of, for Jesus said:

  The meek shall inherit the earth.  (Matthew 5:5) 

Out of our meekness can arise not arrogance but the stride of one to whom God gave the whole Earth, a stride not in submission to other humans but one in cooperation and collaboration with them in building a world replete with joy for all.  For this is the true nature of the world.  Hence, realizing the Kingdom on Earth may have more to do with removing impediments to its realization than about building it anew.  Be that as it may, there is a balance of effort and surrender to be regained, and a divine intention to be discerned among the dimensions of this world.  Then it will be a matter not of “wiping fear off the face of the Earth” but of joy returning–by God’s grace joy returning–and fear quietly receding until one day it will seem as though it had never been.

 

These, then,–in ugliness, jealousy, gloom, cruelty, and fear are five distortions to principle dimensions of the created universe.  They are not exhaustive.  There are other kinds of distortions.  However, perhaps these may serve to illustrate how the Christology of the Quadrants of the Cross may be brought to bear to correct them.   Perhaps we have said enough also to lend insight how to correct other distortions wherever they arise and thus to make more accessible the application of the Christology to the variety of common challenges to the Kingdom we each face daily in our world.

 

Notes:

1. This is actually an instance of the application of the Law of Analogy.

2. One might argue that there are plenty of instances of ugliness in the world that have nothing to do with either interpersonal force or surrender. Take, for example, cases of obesity or profound physical or mental birth defects.  It may apppear that such cases lack a strong interpersonal influence or quality.  Nevertheless, it takes at least a second person, or the subject seeing themselves as a second person, in order for the perception of ugliness to arise.  In the case of a person with birth defects, we must ask, “Where does their ugliness lie?”  Is it inherent in their physical features or in the sounds they make?  Or does it rather lie in certain hidden assumptions or judgments that we make about them?  Would one of those judgments perhaps be that were we to become like them it could only have been the product of some abominable force that would have upset us from our current station and robbed us of our precious faculties?  Or if not that, then it would have had to have been some abysmal surrender of our possession of those faculties, abilities, and physical and mental characteristics that would have done it.  The perception of ugliness in the “disabled” is thus revealed to have more to do with the thinking of the so-called “able-bodied” person than it has to do with the actual condition of the other.  In fact, most able-bodied persons haven’t the slightest idea of what life is like for the other person.  Their assumptions are formed almost entirely from their own constellation of fears, desires, attachments, and aversions–all stuff formed out of various imbalances between will and surrender orchestrated and maintained by a voracious ego.  As with any other persons we deem “different” from ourselves, those born different begin to look more like ourselves to the extent that we replace our egoic self with our Godself,–or we could say, our individual conscousness with Christ consciousness.

In the case of the obese person, the perception of ugliness in another arises from sources similar to those we have discussed above.  If the obese person sees himself as ugly, then the important question is what malignment of God’s image in him has led to this distortion in his perception of reality?  In this regard, it is well-known to psychologists who investigate such matters that over-indulgence in food often serves as a substitute for lack of control in other areas of a person’s life.  For example, inability to control and/or resist the abusive habits of a parent, spouse, or sibling can lead to over-eating.  By taking control of food–which offers no resistance–they reenact failed efforts to gain control over abuses elsewhere in their lives.  Thus overeating may be viewed as the exertion of force unbalanced by surrender.  Interestingly, it may also be seen as a kind of surrender (to food) over which the person has no ability to exert any control (i.e., force) whatsoever.  Either way, the person’s self-perception of ugliness has nothing to do with their inherent beauty and likeness to God.  It has to do with how the elements of effort and surrender have become unbalanced and thus drawn them somewhere out into the Quadrants of the Cross where the imbalance is being perpetuated.  As we are suggesting here, and have discussed in earlier chapters as well, the malignment of God’s image typically occurs early in a person’s life and results when a lie about that image is transferred from some governing authority (such as a parent).  The lie is akin to toxic DNA being passed from generation to generation and itself has to do with gross misinformation about true power and hence with the proper alignment of intention, effort, and surrender.

3. By “repentence” we mean re-thinking or reorientation, which are closer to the root meaning of the word than the more common interpretation of turning away from sin.

4.The following illustration is from Albert LaChance, op. cit.., pp. 41-42.

5. Where there is absolute Oneness, that is, within God, there is no division at all between effort, intention, and surrender. In the world of space and time–that is, where they are drawn apart and made separated by the very dimensions of the created world–we can speak of a perfect harmony between these three as well as of degrees of harmony or discord between them.

6. As we shortly see, however, in the ideal conditions of the Kingdom, no one–not even the formerly wealthy–will feel the need to claim such riches for themselves, for other kinds of treasure will overshadow them.

7. What this means is that is that I begin to encounter myself from the standpoint of pure knowing as soon as I begin to become acquainted with another.

8. From William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” The Pickering Manuscript, 1866.