Essay #22:  Retrospective on the Early and Middle Writings

We have come a long way on our journey.  From its bare beginnings in a meditation on light, to its full flowering in the Christology, this elucidation of our Way of Return has matured for us into something useful and beautiful.  Its best application will probably be attained in small discipleship groups where joint study, contemplation, and prayer can illuminate the path traced here for each of the individuals involved.  In the service of that endeavor we may be empowered by God’s grace in the future to produce a workbook or study guide.  For now, it may be helpful before we conclude this collection of writings, to look back once again at the key insights we have gained and gather them into a kind of retrospective.  To that end, let us attempt something of a comprehensive review of the main points of the Christology and the Way of Return.

Our hope is that by seeing all the spokes of the wheel together once more, the reality that the wheel frames may come still clearer into view.  For as we have said and implied in a variety of ways, the new order that we have spoken about, which Jesus realized in himself and came to impart, is beyond the limit border of any one way that we might choose to talk about it.  The many spokes which intersect the wheel find a hole at its center.  Without that space, the wheel could not function, but the space itself cannot strictly be called “part of the wheel.”  It extends beyond and is not limited by it.  Just so, the Spirit which empowers us extends beyond and cannot be limited or controlled by any of the spiritual practices we have delineated.  They remain, and will always remain, like fingers pointing to the moon.  It is up to us under the influence of God’s grace to look beyond the edges of even the tools that Christ provided and begin to discern the outlines of the new reality.  This shift in vision and perspective has been highly challenging to describe.  This is largely due, no doubt, to the fact that the Christology, as we have said, is a dynamic and not a static or passive system.  Its operation and realization depend on the active participation of the disciple rather than on her passive internalization of information.  The Christology, we could say, is the Quantum Theory of the Bible, involving the disciple in nothing less than the co-creation of the Kingdom much as Quantum Theory involves the observer in the properties of the object observed.

So this is where we once again study the finger or the spokes of the wheel until we gain the sense that there is something much bigger and grander looming out of focus behind them.  It is up to us not to dismiss the out-of-focus image as a non-reality, but rather to account for it by the newness and frailty of our vision–in this case the frailty of our newly recovered faculty of true knowing.  Yes, our job is to keep looking, practicing and delving into what Christ gave us until the new reality begins to assume somewhat clearer edges.  This is not an undertaking to be done only on one’s own but also in concert with others who can collectively refine the vision and begin to re-inhabit and repopulate the Kingdom.  The key factor in all of this is the very reality of what is being perceived.  If God were not for real, all this would be but an exercise of the imagination and fruitless.  The fact of the matter is, though, that God is real and will come to the aid of his people in this endeavor.  The universe, as Einstein theorized, is a closed universe.  Depart in any direction and you will eventually make it back to where you started–if only you had the longevity and the means to do so.  Moreover, the universe will eventually close in on itself and return to the singularity from which it began.  The Way of Return is the same.  There is no trajectory we can take that will lead us outside of God’s influence.  We are caught forever in the sphere of his universal concern for us.  Eventually, the realization of who he and we are will close in upon all of us and bring us home.  However, by his grace he has given us pathways to accelerate our rate of return here and now.  Like the good father who keeps watch for the return of his son who has gone off and become prodigal in his missteps, our Father in Heaven keeps watch for us, and his watchfulness issues into all manner of help, forgiveness, and possibilities.

Were he not real none of these benefits would accrue to us.  But as we step into the new life he has prepared for us, they do accrue.  We do begin to sense in ourselves what it means to be “coheirs with Christ.”  We do begin to know what St. Paul meant by “possessing everything” even though outwardly we may sometimes seem to have nothing.  Let us then look once again at the pointers we have collected through this long discourse.  Once more let us look at the signposts that remind us of our origin and collectively guide us back to the waters of True Life.  Having seen them all before, let us look at them now not as we first encountered them, not individually, but collectively.  Let us see them in the light of each other’s influence, like colors blended on a cathedral floor from many colored windows illuminated from above. This way we will not just circle back through what we have already traversed, but spiral above it in closer approach to the limit border of our understanding and press into that “ultra-space” of the the eye of the needle, that hole in God’s garment through which we may feel his touch and his pull upon us more keenly.  In the words of the poet, T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.¹

By this, of course, we mean to truly know the place.  For what glory it is–what true Glory to God–to truly come to know the order of things, to know the logos of the cosmos, to know the Maker of Heaven and Earth, to receive and know the Light by which all was made, and to know our rightful place in the scheme of things.  Yes, it is given to us to know all these things.  The world was not made so that darkness should forever hide the light of our knowing.

Then let us first cry out together, “Yea, the time is nigh and the time is now for us to reclaim our heritage with Christ!”  Out in the streets let us proclaim, “We, children of God, extol His Glory now!  We, sons and daughters of the Elohim, affirm our rightful place in the universe as co-creators of Heaven on Earth!”

Then let us go about our business of breaking open the husks of ignorance.  Let us shower the soil of possibilities with the fulsome rain of His Love.  Let us tear down the paper barriers that have kept us, one and all, from the Bounty of Eden here on Earth.  Let us savor and rejoice in the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.  Let us dance together in the roads and sleep on high mountaintops.  Let us cavort with the spirits of the trees and worship Him on the banks of mighty rivers.  For we can walk with Him everywhere, knowing Him again in true knowledge which finds Him in every atom of our breath and every prompting of our heart.  We will discover Him in and about us, as if for the first time, as the sower and the reaper come together again in gladness, as the Father and his sons and daughters and christs rejoice in one another and in the Bounty that He hath made.

†Collected Principles of the Christology of Jesus, Son of God, for the Way of Return to the Father and the Realization of Heaven on Earth†

1. God is Love.

God’s caring is universal.  He loves every one of his creatures without exception, and his love can be felt and known by his creatures everywhere and at any time without exception.  The circumstances and context of his love varies.  Outwardly, and inwardly, too, creatures may meet with all kinds of calamities–with natural and manmade disasters–as well as with prosperity beyond their own effort and reckoning.  In every case, the deepest and most pervasive value is God’s love, be it known and recognized or not.  This is not merely an article of faith.  It is a sound and true principle of the universe, built into its very fabric, as it were.  We have devised all manners of distancing ourselves from this truth, but in true knowing it emerges as an ever clearer basis for living.

The worst disasters that befall one cannot unseat God’s love for him or her.  Even the most inexplicable horrors such as the untimely death of infants by so-called “natural disasters” cannot harm or shake it.  We who live on this side of the veil of creation where time and space and understanding reign have plenty that claims our attention here and casts long shadows of doubt.  But we quickly forget, the infants who meet those deaths do not remain with us.  They are snatched up instantly to another plane where all their travail is cast as nothing beside their claim to immortality and joy.  We suffer with the pangs and doubts; they do not.  And even we may pierce the veil with our recovering faculty of true knowing.  Why else would it be that often those still suffering among us with the most dire diseases take on more and more a glow of peace as they near the end of time?  Not all, but many find and report that the more their earthly and physical faculties shrink, the stronger and better becomes that which remains, or the clearer they become in apprehending it.

What it is, is the faculty of true knowing that gives access to the other side and to the unfailing penetration or excursion of the other side into our world.  The fundamental feeling and cognitive currency of that excursion is our perception of it as none other than divine love.  Beneath everything else, divine love is the bedrock.  It was at the foundation of our creation and was built in to the universe as the gravity that draws us home to our Source, to Oneness and Ultimate Joy. 

2. God is All-Powerful.

Why would we doubt that God who created the universe entirely would be unable to “explain the existence of evil” or “explain why bad things happen to good people?”  We seem to be less concerned for him to explain why good things happen to bad people.  It is always the bad things that seem to preoccupy our attention and hurl us into doubt about the very existence of God.

We doubt because space and time beguile us.  They were meant to.  They go along with choosing to live in a world dissected and traversed by understanding, and it was given to us to make the choice to do so.  A key element of that choice was to choose to claim our own power, independent of God.  The contradiction in that could not be apparent to us at the start precisely because we had no self-awareness.  We had to choose to understand in order to grow in self-awareness and ultimately to come to perceive none other than God’s power in ourselves.

That is precisely where all of our doubts “fall back” as it were like rays of light once the trick mirrors are removed or the curtain comes loose at the rear of the circus tent and the trick camera is seen.  They fall back as we come to see that our own perception of the world is limited as is our power over it.  Our own personal power is limited, or rather, futile.  True power accrues to us from God alone, which means that it is his will that shall be done, not our own.  Likewise, and this is key, as God’s power is not our own to wield neither is it ours to own the outcomes and implications of the events that arise from it.  This is what we meant when we said earlier that the world is not governed by the Principle of Causality but only seems to be.  Our ego stakes its claim to power just as our mind stakes its claim to a complete knowledge of the world through the understanding.  But just as God’s power extends vastly beyond the edges of our own ego, so also does his knowledge of the ultimate purpose and meaning of events extend far beyond our understanding’s ability to grasp.  We may know it only through a glass darkly, but the Principle of Expansion expresses the fullness of God’s will and his excursion into the world in such a way that no one will be left behind, no one’s salvation shall be left unfinished, and no one shall fail to make his return to the Father.

Stuck in understanding we have every reason–given our limited view of things–to believe in evil as something other than a temporary separation from God, as something with a permanent and fixed nature of its own.   Immersed in recollection and true knowing, we remember that which shows our view to be limited.  We find once again the path to true healing, which allows us to relinquish the ego’s pretense to grasp and control everything in favor of that guidance which comes to us from a higher hand.  As Adam Smith taught, when that invisible hand rules in us then everything shall come out right.  When we put first the Kingdom of God according to his will, then even all the rest of the physical things we fret about shall be added to us.  And much of that which we stew over as inexplicable evil shall simply disappear. 

3. God is the Creator of All That Is, and It is Good.

The world of space and time was fashioned out of his very being.  Light was the instrument he used to create it, and light gives clue to his inner nature.  We marvel at the speed of light and even more so at the property of that speed to not be relative to anything else.  The very principle of creation has made it so that God’s will shall not be relative to anything else but absolute.  Thus could God conclude that everything that he had made was “good.”  For all of it was and would always be in perfect accordance with his own will.

The Maker of Heaven and Earth would never need to shrink back from his creation in horror.  God destroyed Sodom and Gemorrah but at one time spared Ninevah, which Jonah who had been sent to redeem it still thought should be destroyed.  Our understanding plays along the edges of the shadows where it thinks it can make out causes and patterns.  But God’s will is like the flash of a sword that strikes from the shadows and sets everything its own way.  Of what can we be assured by the understanding alone?  Yet there is that in us which surpasses understanding in ever increasing discernment of the indivisibility of God’s goodness in the world. We can be grateful that God’s way is the way of ultimate love and kindness and that his will imparted goodness into everything he created.  We can be grateful that the Way of Return is the way back to our own inherent goodness and to the discovery of goodness is all our fellow human beings. 

4. God Made Us in His Image and For a Special Purpose: He Ordained that We Would Leave Eden and Return to Him Once Again.

He first made us for his own pleasure in the Garden of Eden.  We were a look-a-like to him and a source of joy.  Then God took even further mercy upon us than by creating us.  He who had been ever present to us removed himself from us so that we might come still more unto ourselves.  He stepped back and gave us feet to step forward and use as our own the power he had given us.  He sent the serpent to Eve to become an awareness to her of the life of a creature who had no feet even as he made the serpent aware, too, that it was eating dust.  Into that newfound yearning for a journey, God also delivered through the serpent the means to carry it out.  He put into Eve the desire to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, which he also had planted at her feet.  Together Adam and Eve both ate from the tree, were dressed for their journey, and left Eden with the new faculty of understanding which issued from the fruit that God had made.  God knew that this would be a difficult journey for them, and for him also, as both would have to be separated from the other, which could only be accomplished by God remaking them and creating a whole new world for them to inhabit.  Henceforth we read about the world outside of Eden, where Adam was sent “to till the ground from which he was taken.”

This is the world of the Earth, of space and time, which we have known our whole lives long.  It is the stage for our journey, the same journey we have been making since the olden days of our forebears.  That is, until God showed compassion for us and sent Jesus Christ on a mission to deliver to us the means for our return.  Once more the light of God’s sword or scepter flashed and his mercy flowed to deliver us back to himself in the enhanced state we had come to through our journey.  Long enough had we delved into the far corners of the world of understanding.  Long enough had we lived under the potion that first fell to our lips and awakened in us the torrents of the ego.  Long enough had our Father tolerated a yearning for himself he had allowed to be poured out into the realm of space and time in order that we might have the freedom to find him in ourselves.  In Jesus came the flash, the mirror held up in which we could see and remember at last the light that had created us coming into the world.  In Jesus were both “the light and the way” that led back home again to the Source of that light.  In Jesus were both the symbol and the methodology of the Way of Return that folds understanding back into self-awareness and edifies self-awareness into God-awareness and reunion with Him.

In Genesis, the Elohim acknowledged that “man had become like one of Us.”  They feared “lest he put out his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever.”  They feared it–or rather they, that is, God–did not will it because it would not have been seemly for a part of God to live forever without knowing it was God.  In fact, it is impossible for God to permanently withdraw self-awareness from any part of himself.  So the unfolding of his will was rather that he should continue “to be at work in us, enabling us to will and to work for his good pleasure.”  Our purpose thereafter, as it was in Eden, was to be for God’s pleasure.  Now, having lasted on the journey of self-awareness, it is for us to find him fully in ourselves once again, and knowing that this is so, to be fit and worthy of Life Eternal finally and at last.

5. God Sent Jesus as Messiah for Us, to Explain All Things and Lead Us Home: Through Jesus he Imparted to Us the Tools of the Quadrants of the Cross to Aid Us in the Final Stage of our Journey.

Jesus came, first and foremost, to model for us how a human being talks, appears, thinks, and acts who has realized God fully in himself.  He did not come to save us in the sense of taking us back to Heaven in the ragged and “un-self-aware” state in which we left.  Rather he came to point the way toward increased self-awareness, self-purification from the illusions of the ego, and re-immersion into the mind state of true knowing and identification with the Godhead.  He came to save us the way a true friend comes to save one he loves who has gone astray and needs to be gently or forcefully prodded back onto the road to recovery.  He came not as one without faith in our ability to help ourselves, not as one distraught and disgusted with all mankind, but as one ever hopeful in our ability to arise, shake off the dust of our mistaken adventures, and strike off behind him in pursuit of new knowledge.

Jesus spoke in parables and with hidden meanings in order that “those who might have ears to listen would hear.”  His deeper meanings would always require the listener to stretch and to stretch greatly to acquire them.  Jesus was not about “tossing pearls before swine.”  He knew the priceless value of what he was teaching.  He knew it could give access to the Divine.  He also knew that in order for it to be effective, the listener had to be going about refining himself into the kind of vessel that could receive and contain the good news.  A leaky bucket wouldn’t do nor would an old and leaky wineskin.

The cross by which the Jews and the Romans together did away with Jesus as a human being became the ultimate symbol for practicing the Way of Return.  Under the unlimited will of the Father of Creation, that symbol of the most horrible death became the consummate tool for the reclamation of life in the fullest.  Jesus taught the practices of the Quadrants of the Cross before he died.  The transformation of the cross into a symbol for life occurred before its use as an instrument of death.  Thus its esoteric use by Jesus as a reclaimed symbol for life amounts to a total inversion of the chronology of events and demonstrates that God’s will may be freely exercised, however he pleases.   It further demonstrates–rather ironically– that eternal life in the cross trumps any temporal use of it to procure a death.

All this explains handily why the early church fathers, including Paul, were so given to saying that we needed to partake of Jesus’s death in order to share in his life as well.  Though there were many misinterpretations of this principle–including especially the mortification of the flesh–the basic notion was inspired.  Death to our old self seen as the egoic self driven only by understanding is what is meant here at the deepest level.  This is not death in the sense of permanent loss–not at all.  Rather it is the kind of death that puts one thing at the service of another thing–another grander being–such as when the understory of a forest dies in order to provide food for the trees.  How much grander still is the death of our understanding as an unbridled and therefore intoxicating mind state.  How much grander still is the death of our ego as a power on the loose like some fearful Sasquatch wandering through the countryside in intoxicated fits of control, anger, and demolition.  The Kingdom, Power, and the Glory of God begin to emerge in us as we walk again with Him, come from Him in our very loins, and stand as witnesses to the emergence of true knowledge or chochmah in our minds and hearts.  With the death of understanding comes the birth of true knowledge.  With the death of the ego comes life anew in the Godhead.  

6. The Kingdom of God is at Hand Now and Has Always Been at Hand.

The Kabbalistic Trigram represents on a human level, as it were, the shape of God’s birthplace into the world.² When human intention is set so that it moves as if out of God’s own breath and creative power, then it becomes true divine aspiration.  When human effort is expended so that it is completely suffused with such aspiration, then it becomes true God-like dedication.  When human surrender becomes a pathway for the guidance of the Unseen, then it becomes transformed into true trust of the Friend.

Pure aspiration, dedication, and trust are like the musical attunement giving off a perfect chord.  The vibration which appears at its center unifies and uplifts the three notes into something of a higher order both of being and of power.  Not complete in itself, the chord yet summons unto itself something still greater by force of the property of resonance or likeness.³ Into the midst of this likeness comes that of which it is a likeness.  Chochmah, which means “waiting for what,” is exactly “the what” we have been waiting for.  It is the emergence at the center of the trigram of the feeling, vision, and habitation of the Kingdom.  It is both the wisdom to bring it into existence and the full confidence and knowledge that it has already come.

This emergence is at the center of the cross also, and it is in the depths of the Well of Knowing.  These are but symbols of the reality at hand now and always at hand.  The key to it lies not in the symbols but in ourselves, and in using the symbols and the practices precisely so as to bring about that resonance in us which summons the Godhead ringing and pealing, or quiet and enduring, ever encouraging, into our midst.

The full nature of the Kingdom is beyond what we can fully grasp or imagine until it comes about.  Even so, this does not mean it is but a remote ideal to be vaguely attempted on a Sunday at church.  It is both the next world and also meant to be this one as we wind down in our journey and find our way back to God.  In the end, He will claim us.  He will now or later remove the veil that separates us and bring us home to himself.  Perhaps the Earthly realm he created will not become so suffused with his presence in our awareness.  Perhaps we will at last need that dreaded “day of reckoning” to lift us from our stupor and remind us who we really are.  Yet our God is an awesome God.  In our day he sent us Jesus Christ to lead us home “ahead of our time.”  Forever kind, he counts mercy above justice.  He gives it to us even now to claim our inheritance with Christ, put down the things that distract and separate us, and take up our cross for the sake of his Glory.

 

Notes:

1. From T.S. Eliott, “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, Harcourt, 1943.

2. Here we should mention yet another esoteric symbol, the Magen David or Star of David. This symbol consists of 2 overlapping triangles set at 180 degrees to one another.  Interestingly, this was never a uniquely Jewish symbol, and its appearance in Judaism seems to have post-dated its appearance in medieval Christian churches by centuries.  Some scholars consider its adoption in Judaism was an attempt to claim a symbol parallel to the cross.  This suggests at least an unconscious symbiosis, and indeed, the Star was early on assigned Kabbalistic significance by prominent Jewish rabbis.

Within the Kabbalistic framework of the present work the Star of David assumes unique significance not as a rival but as a perfect companion to the cross.  Thus the early symbiosis is brought to explicit awareness.  For both the cross and the Star symbolically express key aspects of God’s excursion into the world of space and time, and each provide an esoteric “key” to the Way of Return.  For the cross this lies in its interpretation as the intersection of the planes of effort, surrender, Heaven, and Earth, and in our realignment with each of those planes to remain at the center.  For the Star, this lies in seeing it as a symbol of the refraction of God’s excursion into the world of space and time as light.  That is, God’s initial entrance into this world was close to his own nature in vibration and purity.  However, as his light spread in the world, it was bent, refracted, and even slowed as it traveled through the envelope or medium of space-time, which light itself had created from within itself.

As we noted in Book I, the speed of light could not be altered relative to any other moving object.  God’s will remained virtually instantaneous throughout his creation.  Yet within the objects created and sustained by that will, God’s vibration could be and was indeed slowed.  The pure harmonic vibration with which he entered the world–or we could say “pure unfiltered enlightemnent”–was slowed within the very medium which it had created and, more specifically, by the objects themselves which had come to exist in that medium.  For one, relatively dense inanimate objects such as rocks and stones did not vibrate at the original pitch of God’s light.  For another, the consciousness of creatures–while of a much finer and more spiritual nature than stones–was not, even in the beginning, a match for God’s own emanation.  As the Genesis story implies, Adam and Eve were beset from the beginning by a downward inclination in their nature.  It would take an egress from Eden and a long arduous journey right up to and including our own time for them to come to terms with their diminished vibration and begin to see the light of liberation and return dawn in them once more.

The Star represents in its two skewed triangles this “falling out of alignment” with God as the original emanation.  If the Kabbalistic trigram teaches us what alignment in ourselves looks like so as to maximize our receptivity to God’s purest vibration and communication, the Star shows us what misalignment looks like under the refractive influences of this world.  If we wear and bear the cross to remind us to align within ourselves the forces of Heaven and Earth, effort and surrender, then we can wear the Star to remind us that such alignment returns our space-time continuum into the very birth canal which gave rise to it in the first place.  In other words, it leads back into the cone of excursion through which we and everything else came into being.  It doesn’t matter if we speak of one or of multiple cones of excursion.  The point is the same.  The Star symbolizes the turning back towards the Source that puts us in proper orientation to receive Him, somewhat like an antenna which must be turned just-so to receive its frequency, but much more vividly like the guest who has been bathed and groomed, anointed and made ready for the feast that has been prepared for him.

The very same gravity pulls through the Star as through the cross.  While the Christology of the Cross gives entrance into the dynamics of realigment and specific spiritual practices which leverage those dynamics to bring it about, the Star elegantly demonstrates de-tunement.  Moreover, it shows through sheer simplicity what eludes the most complex theologies:  that the triangle turned as far as possible out of alignment with God is the self-same God, for both are triangles!  A triangle is a triangle, and the two cannot be told apart except for their relation or juxtaposition to one another.  Thus even in our created and most tarnished state, even in our greatest distance from the Source, our blackest ignorance, we are but a reflection of Him at a higher level and a farther remove.  Twist it as we might, the triangle–the fabric–of our creation remains spun out of God himself.  There is no way to spin or twist the triangles of the Star of David so that they should no more be triangles.  They are united in their very nature–and so are we and God the Father–though we may refract Him to an incredible degree through the corruption of our hearts and the errors of our ways.

Thus, the Star like the cross emerges as a supremely hopeful symbol.  The cross presages our return to the Father through the guidance of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.  The Star foretells that the egress through which we made our way into the world has not closed.  The light that came in was not cut off and could not be cut off from its Source.  Though caught in the refracting densities and obstacles of this world, though locked away in the “husks” of our own darkness and ignorance, that light shall emerge and shine brightly once more.  The wheel of creation has only one way to turn.  The light has only one place to go.  The triangle of aspiration, dedication, and trust will one day come congruent upon the Holy Triangle of the Godhead in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  We shall come home, as shall all of creation, and the story being told here shall find completion and fulfillment in that most Holy of Holies.

3. In the ancient mystical tradition of Hermeticism this property was also known as the property of analogy.