Essay #3: The Ten Principal Dimensions of the World of Excursion: The First Five
Here we describe the first five of the ten principal dimensions of the world of excursion. The ten dimensions are:
SPACE TIME INFINITY LOVE BEAUTY
COURAGE SORROW DEATH COMPASSION JOY
Of space and time we have already spoken extensively.
Infinity is the dimension of this world whereby it mirrors the other world through unfulfillment. As Oneness is in that world, so infinity is in this one, just as time here is mirrored by Eternity there. What we say is infinite is so only insofar as it is construed to be outside of God. We sometimes describe God as “the Infinite.” This is not strictly correct. In God there is no infinity only Oneness. There is no going on and on forever, for where would God go on and on forever towards either in space or time? When we say God is Eternity we do not, in fact, mean a going on forever and ever in time. Eternity is singular just as Oneness is singular. The closest we can come describing it is to call it an “eternal moment.” However, we are used to thinking of a moment as set against other moments in an endless stream of time. Time, space, and infinity are descriptors of our world and do not apply to God in himself. Of course, sentences like this must trip over themselves insofar as our world is nothing but the world of excursion into which God projected himself. So we might do best to frame this as a contrast between the world of excursion and the Godhead beyond this world.
Infinity is also that dimension of the world of excursion which makes for change, impermanence, dissatisfaction, suffering, longing, and incompletion. We cannot complete anything in a world shaped by infinity down to its smallest corner. When we compare all our efforts and accomplishments to the universe as a whole, they pale, they fade into insignificance. A person is born, a person lives, a person dies, a person is buried, a person is forgotten. Infinity is like a great cosmic wind which tears the flesh off our bones and sends the bones themselves clattering into a void. What the Buddhists call dukkha is infinity manifested as feeling. We can feel the unsatisfactoriness of the world. The child senses it from the moment she grabs her first fistful of sand on the beach and watches it run out between her fingers. There is no holding on. There is no containing it. There is no stopping it. The sands of time and space run on endlessly. We dance our lives away on bits of matter that are moving far faster than our dancing feet. The illusion we keep is that our estate is stable, that our lives are protected. The truth is that all that we own and all that we have is flying apart faster than we could even imagine. The whole history of creation and its future, too, are “but a watch in the night.” Infinity, in fact, represents the inevitability of our return to God. A simple thought experiment confirms this.
The ancient Greek atomists asked how it was that the motion of the original atoms began. Were they falling upon one another for ever and ever or was there a moment when something happened to initiate the motion? Aristotle correctly understood that motion in itself implies the necessity of what he called a prime mover. It is inconceivable that a motion should just have existed for ever and ever. There would be nothing to support it. Whatever motion we picked, we could ask, “What caused that one?” The answer would have to be “the one before it.” But because this same answer would have to be given about every motion, it just as clearly demonstrates that there is, in fact, no cause among all the motions. It shows vividly that all these motions cannot support themselves. The sum total of motion in the universe is and can be nothing other than an excursion that God has taken from within himself to create our world. It follows, then, that just as creation did not come out of itself but out of God, it has nowhere to go but back into God when it ends.
Infinity is thus as much the property of the nothingness of this world as of its very expanse. What it ultimately means is that we live like visitors here destined to return home once our brief time is over. There is a hidden cosmological meaning in the statement in the New Testament that “there was no room for them in the inn.” Jesus represents the outsider in us all: “I am in this world but not of it.” We come here like actors upon a stage to live out the drama of our lives. That stage is the dark cloth of infinity. It bends and weaves and stretches, frays, and is gone. We are forever falling through it to our destination. Our whole time here our life literally “hangs by a thread,” yet we do not know it.
The foregoing applies to the sum of matter and energy in precisely the same way. Matter and energy cannot sustain themselves. Nor could they create themselves. When we think about the original matter in the universe and ask, “Where did it come from?,” some of us want to answer, “It was just always already there.” This answer is, in fact, correct except that it applies to God and not to matter. It is an answer motivated by a subtle perception of the Creator inside his creation. For what about matter is being there (dasein)? Matter itself has no ability to be there, to be where it is, any more than to bring itself into being. Simply to insist that “matter was always there” either amounts to saying that there is absolutely no cause or support for it or that there is such a cause within itself. But what is this matter that it could be the cause of its own existence? Can this matter answer the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
If matter is taken as something apart from God, then it is utterly impotent and unable to sustain itself in existence. It would be utterly ripped apart by infinity, prevented, in fact, from existing in the first place. However, if matter is taken as that which sustains existence, as a principle of being, then it is really the Creator behind the matter that we are talking about. Matter in and of itself is nothing. Energy the same. It is only by being imagined to be something that matter and energy exist at all. God’s imagination took place against the background of infinity, against the face of the deep, which is infinity. “The deep” has no bottom and no end. It represents endless possibility in the world of excursion. Against this background, God said, “Let there be light.”
Light itself is the creative principle by which matter and energy were brought into being and made to exist, to stay here in some sense. Light opened the vessels of space and time within the dimension of infinity which, in a sense, preceded them. Light is not so much a dimension of our world as the instrument by which all the other dimensions were created. Hence it is present in all of the dimensions as a creative principle. Infinity, strictly speaking, is the possibility of the cloth of creation. It is the darkness that lies between the threads. The threads are analogous to space and time, and light is the flashing needle that draws space and time along and fashions the garment of creation in God’s hands. This warp and woof of creation are the space-time continuum of our world. And the overall pattern woven into the garment is the dimension of love.
The world of excursion is not made in some random way. We often forget this just as the fish in the ocean forget, or never were aware, that they are swimming in water. The garment of creation has been made to suit us. It is not some random size, shape, and color. It is a gift of the highest order. It fits. It lets us live, grow, and flourish. It inspires us, teaches us, corrects us, renews us, forgives us. It is a playground for our souls and a flight suit for the return of our souls to their Source. In every particle of creation down to the smallest the dimension of love is present. If we have eyes to see it, on every scrap of creation is written directions how to return it to God. A cosmic postal return address is stamped there.
In quantum physics we learn about gravity as a universal principle of matter. Many attempts have been made at a Unified Field Theory relating gravity to what is already known about time, space, matter, and energy. The key to such a unification lies in the understanding of gravity as a manifestation of the dimension of love. God exerts a magnetic attraction over all creation. And all creation seeks God. Hence, the sum total of all gravitational effects is a magnetization towards a center. The world of excursion seeks its own center. It wants to collapse back upon itself, for such collapse amounts to a return to God, to reabsorption. Space and time, then, are not separate from gravity. They themselves are bent by gravity so that all that exists within them is channeled back toward the universal center. This explains a curious implication from Einstein’s own Theory of Relativity. If one were to pick a direction heading explicitly away from the center of the universe and travel along it for a very long time, one would eventually end up back where one started. This is because the space-time continuum–the garment of creation–is curved around the body of God. Yes, the background of creation is infinity, but God’s love shapes space and time into a kind of container that keeps us from entirely shredding ourselves on the teeth of infinity. Space and time themselves lead us back to God. And we can use them just as one uses a garment on a journey.
Used wisely and mindfully, the garment can help make the journey smooth by containing our body heat, our resources, and helping to keep us healthy and content. It can also inspire us to keep going and to be purposeful. Many people purchase and wear garments emblazoned with symbols and images reminding them of meaningful destinations. The garment God has made for us is not only woven according to a pattern which leads back to him–the pattern of love. It is also emblazoned with all manner of inspiring images and symbols, colors, designs, textures, and displays such that every inch of it is suffused with the dimension of beauty.
Beauty, then, is a part of the very fabric of creation, too. It lies at the center of the ten dimensions and is a kind of crowning achievement of the first four. Not for nothing were space and time made to rise out of the deep of infinity. From the very beginning, God saw his creation and declared that it was “very good.” This expresses his primordial affection for what he had created, his love for and in the world. It also expresses the dimension of beauty. The world itself sought from the beginning to return to God and, because of this, all the world was beautiful. Beauty is that dimension of creation which reflects both the longing for and the presence of God in the world. Love manifests as beauty constantly. These two dimensions dance in cosmic interchange. I love my beloved. Therefore, I see her as beautiful. It doesn’t matter how she looks in comparison to anybody else. It doesn’t matter how she ages. Such things are irrelevant. For beauty is the crowning achievement of love and itself inspires love, just as the creative product of an artist inspires further creativity.
Beauty is the song of thanksgiving and the song of the promise of fulfillment resounding through creation. It is the polar opposite of infinity even though it hangs on infinity’s door. It is the sweet treat that tames the grizzly bear upon which we unwittingly sleep. Beauty is food for the soul, and every soul craves it and cannot do without it. It empowers us at the very center of our bodies, dwelling together in the heart with love. This is why tiferet is placed in the center on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Tiferet, beauty, is a place where God’s light is reflected like rays of the sun. From the center it radiates out into the four limbs literally empowering them to keep moving, to continue carrying the soul on its journey.
More than any among us, the artist will stop at nothing to see her creation brought into the world. Artistic creation all around us reveals a power of immense proportions overcoming enormous obstacles to bring to something to bear. Entire cultures live on among us through the artistic creations they have left behind. We sense that immortality itself insofar as it is possible in a created world comes through art alone.
Beauty, then, lifts us up. It elevates us, inspires us, feeds us, cares for us, and makes life bearable. It gives love an immediate object. If not for beauty, our love for God would be but a torturesome burden to bear. Beauty is the manifestation of God in what we love. It is a here and now manifestation, bringing God close to us in the world of excursion. In beauty we find both the promise of returning to God and a kind of fulfillment foreshadowing that return. It is the fragrance and even a bit of the taste of what is to come. Beauty draws us forth, together with love, toward fulfillment of our journey. Love is the path. Beauty is the guide following the path. It is the guide’s job not only to show us the way but to inspire us to believe we can make the journey, even to rub balm into the sore places on our bodies and in our souls.
Essay #4: The Ten Principal Dimensions of the World of Excursion: The Second Five
Here we continue with a description of the remaining five principal dimensions of our universe, the ten principal dimensions being:
SPACE TIME INFINITY LOVE BEAUTY
COURAGE SORROW COMPASSION DEATH JOY
Courage is a dimension of this world insofar as love and beauty inspire fortitude to make the return to God. That sounds almost automatic. The actual case is that love and beauty draw one’s heart to God and open one’s imagination to divine influences. The dimensions of love and beauty do not, however, exist independently of the dimension of infinity, but within it, as also within space and time. On this side of singularity nothing is automatic. This is a world filled with influences and it is a world in which we must choose. Courage represents that dimension of our world which permits us to choose to actively return to God. It is that dimension which permits us to choose “to walk in his ways and do his mitzvot.” It is the dimension of free will.
To call it courage is not accidental but indicative of the fact that this entire universe is stamped with God’s influence. Nothing is neutral. We have free will in order to be courageous, not just so that we may choose whatever we wish. Alternatively, we could say it is our nature to be courageous, but we still have to activate that which is within our nature. Help abounds. The universe is made to fit us. Yet it is up to us to arise and dress ourselves in the garments which have been made for us. Were it not so we would not possess the creative principle with which the Creator endowed us by making us b’tzelem Elohim, that is, “in his image.” We would not be able to glorify him by freely worshipping him. We would instead be mere automatons mechanically drawn back to their source.
The Hebrew phrase, b’tzelem Elohim, strictly means “in the image of Gods.” It is strange grammar to use a plural noun for the Creator, who is absolute Oneness. Yet it reveals the true depth of the dimension of courage. God himself is cleaved by his Creation into multiplicity. This shocking statement, that we are made “in the image of Gods,” demonstrates unequivocally that it is God’s own creative principle that is established in our souls. Because God created us, he cannot say we are made in his image (singular). Once entered into time and space his image split and fractured like a beam of light impacting a crystal and refracted in all different directions. Oneness became us in time. Because of this multiplicity of souls in his creation, the Source was drawn into a pluralistic relationship with himself. Of course this is paradoxical because the Source is One. It is beyond our rational minds to grasp it fully, but our imagination can catch reflections of it. Hence, images are more helpful here than linear constructs.
Let us picture a diamond with many facets and light radiating out of all those facets and dancing on the walls of a room. Our souls are all those dancing beams of light. The diamond is God. The diamond is one, yet its facets are many, and each beam of light carries the image of the facet that emits it. All that was needed to make us was already in God before creation. In a sense, all the facets of the diamond were there, but before God created light, the facets were not illuminated. The fact of our creation illuminated those facets in God himself; we could just as well say “illuminated us to ourselves.” Hence, we are made in Our own image. What is ours in God has been made manifest in space and time as individual souls. That is why it was quite correct for Kant and others to talk about our phenomenal and our noumenal selves.
Our phenomenal selves are reflections of the noumenal in space and time. Because our noumenal self never leaves God–just as the facet never leaves the diamond–our phenomenal self reflects this noumenal unity with God. In space and time, however, this unity cannot be reflected precisely as unity, because if it were this would not be a world in space and time. It would be the Beyond. In space and time, noumenal unity with God is reflected as the dimension of courage. This is an inclination in our free choice to return to God. Again, our choice is free but it is not neutral. Once again, this is paradoxical. We can only say that because we share in God’s own creative principle, we have true freedom of choice. And because we are God as an excursion into this world of time and space, we are inclined to choose to be one with ourselves. If that inclination were strictly in God beyond space and time, there would be no such thing as courage. The dimension of courage does not exist in God because God is already one with himself. So it really makes no sense even to postulate that an inclination to return to himself could be within God. It only makes sense to speak of such a thing in a world of excursion, where God has expressed himself in time and space. Then the dimension of courage allows for God’s Oneness to be expressed as a function of free choice or free will.
With this understanding the perennial problem of free will versus determinism never arises. We can say that, yes, the soul has free will insofar as it exists in the world of excursion. We can also say that it is as inevitable that the soul will return to God as it is that God is one with himself. In this sense, it is predetermined. In light of free will we call courage an inclination to return to God. It is perhaps closer to the truth to say that this return is the flowering of free will itself. It is the direction all of Nature and the whole world takes in becoming itself, including our souls. This is what it means to say that courage is a dimension of our world. The problem of free will versus determinism is purely a creation of the rational mind which seeks to unravel the mystery of the soul using only the linear tools found in a universe of space and time. But we have found that even space and time are not linear! Neither is courage linear. The rational mind projects something it calls “linearity” indiscriminately. It has its uses. It can get us from here to the bus. It can tally our grocery bills. But in addressing questions of ultimate reality, linear thinking quickly begins to look like a failure of the imagination. Linear thinking inevitably trips over itself in trying to penetrate mysteries that lead out of dimensionality altogether. The imagination allows us a fuller approach to such mysteries without reducing them to rectilinear calculations.
We find that the dimension of courage contains all there is of good and evil. For what has the will to choose if not good or evil? Good is simply that which returns it to God. Evil is that which perpetuates separation. In God there is no good or evil just because there is no return or separation. There is only Oneness. However, in the world of excursion there is dimensionality and hence a relative closeness or distance from God. Nothing can be absolutely separate from God. Hence, there is no such thing as absolute evil. Nor can anything be absolutely close to God without being one with him. So there is no such thing as absolute goodness. These are purely relative terms. That being the case, no single thought, word, or deed can be called absolutely good or bad. Thoughts, words, and deeds are only good or bad insofar as they create closeness with or distance from God. Hence, the very same practices may be revered in one culture and decried in another. We must look beyond the practices themselves to their effects before we can gauge whether they are good or bad, and such an understanding usually requires nothing less than a total immersion in the culture in question. We cannot look through the window and make informed judgments. Yet this type of judgment is made everyday and with disastrous results. Such judgment itself leads to the harsh separation of peoples, and so it may be deemed evil in its effects.
This reflection should serve to make us remarkably tolerant of others. We ought to assume that our brothers’ and sisters’ deepest inclination is to return to God. We ought to look for this inclination in their choices instead of only seeing in them patterns and behaviors which are at odds with our own. We may find that if we chose to enter their inclination with them, the behavior we find so reprehensible would be less important to them than our gesture of unity.
The peacemaker, Danaan Parry, once told the story of how he boarded a train car in Japan where a very drunken, huge Japanese was waiting to accost any foreigner. “Get off my train, white devil!” he shouted at Danaan from the other end of the car. At first, Danaan saw only the behavior and prepared to engage it with a martial art. But an old, frail Japanese man saw the drunk as a brother and fellow traveler and was enabled by this rich imagining to get behind the behavior to the heart of things.
“What ya been drinkin’?” he asked the drunk while sticking out his hand and touching the man’s shoulder. At first the drunk threw down the hand and made menacing sounds. But the old man just put it back and repeated his question. “I drink on trains, too,” he confessed.
Before long the drunk was sitting in his lap balling his eyes out with the old man stroking his matted hair. Danaan watched from the back of the train, a muddle of awe and embarrassment.
Courage is not the Hee-Man thing it is so often trumped up to be in our culture. It has nothing to do with the use of force in and of itself. It is richly imaginal in the sense that it employs all the wit of the imagination in finding ways back to Unity. “What ya been drinkin’?” was vastly more imaginative and courageous than a debilitating kick to the stomach would have been. Sharing another’s pain and suffering is a skillful way both of choosing to return and of acknowledging another’s inclination to return. For it is precisely that inclination as it encounters obstacles that leads to their suffering in the first place. The fact that shared pain is indeed so often a route of return reveals to us the seventh dimension of the universe, sorrow.
Sorrow is a dimension of the world of excursion precisely because it is a world of excursion. It is a world trying to achieve unity with God. It is trying to return. Insofar as the entire world is magnetized toward God, it manifests the dimension of love. But insofar as the entire world has yet to return to God, it manifests sorrow. Thus, love and sorrow are joined in a kind of polarity similar to space and time. Love is the world drawn to God. Sorrow is the world not yet reunited with God.
Love and sorrow form a kind of plane which the dimension of courage intersects at a certain angle. It is inevitable that in making choices which return us to God we should richly encounter love and sorrow along the way. Sometimes courage is led more by love, sometimes by sorrow, sometimes by an admixture of both which leaves us feeling both thrilled and impaled. We are used to thinking that love leads us toward something we want. Sorrow no less has the ability to bring us home. In fact, love in this culture has become something of a bewitchment, a quality that gets attached to things rather than being understood as a fundamental orientation of the whole universe toward God. Sorrow, on the other hand, gets shunned. Hence, it has been left purer and actually more accessible as a dimension of divine generation. Love can bond a person to things of this world when one’s vision becomes entranced by the surfaces of things. Then one does not perceive the divine nature within all things and ceases to aspire to that nature. Such a love makes a person want to become like things rather than like God. A colossal advertising industry is bent on fostering just such a love. Sorrow, however, remains innocent of these afflictions. It reports unambiguously that one has not attained to God. The human condition prevents it. All our efforts leave us short. All we can do is live out our lives and await the moment of fulfillment. Sorrow would destroy us if it did not also inform us what we are so distant from. With every breath it reports our shortcomings; yet it also makes clearer Him by whom we measure how far we have fallen short. In this, sorrow reminds us of the property of space whereby we eventually return to the place we started no matter in what direction we initially set off. No matter how deep our sorrow, it is always measured with reference to Him who sets us free. No matter what direction it runs, it never loses sight of the star whose light guides us ultimately home.
We find in practice, then, that sorrow can be used like the night sky which holds the star of our avail. Rather than shunning it, we must learn to read it like skillful sailors. We must hold it as a call to reckoning, to looking over our charts, to being willing to be led. Used in this way, sorrow can be a passageway to m’asirah, to surrender, which is itself a part of courage. It can assist us in giving up the pretense whereby we believe our salvation depends entirely on our own efforts. It can thus be instrumental in helping to restore balance in the conditions illustrated by the Kabbalistic Trigram, conditions whereby our sails are trimmed and ready to receive the influx of God. From the depths of sorrow our little boat can be seized and guided by the friendliest winds provided we see those depths as fair measure of a dimension of our world created by God himself.
We might say a few more words linking courage to the Kabbalistic Trigram. The trigram itself gives the parameters under which we return to God. Or, as we have also said, it gives the parameters whereby the divine influence penetrates into our world. Right intention is supported by a combination of right effort and right surrender, to give a Buddhist flavor to it. Into the middle comes a chochmah, a burst of divine insight or influence, a ray of light. When effort is true, it admits surrender into itself. It bears the character of its opposite which sets it vibrating in some relation to the Universal Harmonic Coefficient. This vibration informs the intention, and the whole complex mirrors a cone of excursion and is thus ripe and ready for the divine influence.
Courage is the dimension in this world along which the three points of the triangle in the Kabbalistic Trigram line up correctly. On paper it looks like a triangle. It looks flat. But the richness of courage gives us some idea that what the Kabbalistic Trigram really refers to has tremendous subtlety and depth. It is not for nothing that those with great courage have been extolled beyond all others down through history. They are those for whom the very questions of good and evil were the meat of their struggle. That is, they struggled to align themselves and often their whole culture around them for a speedy return to God. They had not only to “pick their battles carefully;” they had to align themselves within those battles so that they did not err by becoming overzealous. It is no accident either that great heros are so often such models of humility. For courage contains both. It informs leadership as the fulfillment of service, and service as permeability to the needs of others in addition to oneself. Thus it keeps effort, ratzon, in balance with m’asirah, surrender. This is no simple thing to do! It takes a great soul to heave up a major intention and balance it properly on the pillars of ratzon and m’asirah. The weight which God gives to such a soul to move can seem enormously difficult, even cruel, to others. Yet we must remember what E=mc2 implies and Kabbalah teaches. The more massive the burden–the bigger the husks–the more light is trapped inside to be released and revealed. We did not come into this world to do the tasks of others, only ourselves. Hence, the raw material we have been given represents what God has assigned to us of the work to be done in this world to release the light.
We are like any workers anywhere. We must come to terms with learning to do our job. Becoming acquainted with courage is, from this point of view, rather like learning a craft or skill. Indeed, historically the art of war was regarded as such a craft. This is because war was seen as something richer than the brute use of force. The original meaning of “war” was confusion. It referred, albeit elliptically, to the confusion of the light inside the husks. The warrior’s job was to liberate the light from the husks. This required all the skill of someone who could balance effort and surrender against the weight of an enormous task or kavannah. We, each in our own way, must come to terms with doing battle at the scale at which it has been written into our lives. Struggle is not something to be gotten rid of, to be be sidestepped on the gilded planks of a life forged out of making a fortune. If we are not engaged in some kind of struggle, then that is a sure sign our lives have gone slack. We are not doing God’s work. Coming back into right relation with God, then, means engaging the world along the dimension of courage. Courage, of course, is not a thing outside of us. It is the dimension first felt as the intersection of our own internal resources with the task at hand. Then, as we encounter it more fully, it becomes the richly vibrating ax that splits the wood of creation exposing us both to our own awesome power and to the readiness of the universe to cleave to our blows.
Power like this is not merely our own. It comes from the light itself, from the attunement we attain to the light in balancing the elements within us as we have shown. It is the light of our souls aspiring to and drawing light from above. And then it is that light arising in us, filling us, and empowering us to do more than we thought we ever could when we used our tiny minds to think about this. Courage, more than anything, is a matter of direct experience rather than of thought. In the movie, “The Three Kings,” a timid soldier tells his sergeant he needs to feel more courageous before he can act. The sergeant correctly instructs him, “Take action and you’ll feel all the courage you need.” We gain access to the dimension of courage through engagement. Again, this is not blind engagement; it is not the mere use of force. What engagement means may properly be shown by the very position of courage among the other dimensions of this world. Courage is at the center of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life together with beauty. We saw that the central place of beauty enables it to radiate out and empower the four limbs to movement. Courage bows to beauty as to the most manifest divine influence that inspires action. The warrior perennially and forever goes to battle for the sake of the beautiful maiden he loves. The power place in him beneath his navel stirs and leads him forth. This is the place of ratzon, the power center. It is also the place where he bows and bends before his maiden professing his love. It is the hinge of m’asirah. It is equally to be engaged to bow before one’s love in profound surrender and to stride forth from her chamber and meet the foe outside. Indeed, the sadness the warrior feels in leaving his beloved counterbalances perfectly his zest for battle. It demonstrates once again how love and sorrow turn on the same axis and leads us back again to sorrow as a dimension of the universe.
Thus sorrow–and its counterpode, love–intersect courage as a feeling expression of a kind of skill. Sorrow is a reminder and a correction. It is skillful to feel sorrow appropriately. When sorrow inspires proper m’asirah, then it is courageous to do so. Far from the throw-away that our society would make of it, sorrow is an essential virtue in anyone who would recognize the unfinished quality of his work in the world. Tikkum olam, “the repair of the world,” it is said shall never be completed. What this means is that it shall never be completed by the work of creation alone. We can never return to God solely by our own efforts. To realize this is to feel sorrow. It is also to be led by sorrow to the Force in comparison with which we know our efforts must fall short. Sorrow keeps us humble; it aligns with m’asirah. Thus it rights us in our course. It has, as we said, a role in trimming our sails, opening us up to help, and thus giving us access to the friendliest wind we know, the brightest star in the heavens, and hope renewed that we shall come home at last. Empirically we see it all the time and may puzzle over it in quiet moments: how people in the midst of the deepest sorrow often seem more hopeful than they have ever been. They are aligned in such moments with a key dimension of the universe. Through it they feel the hopefulness of their return.
As mentioned above, sorrow frequently also connects us to one another. In this capacity, it intersects the dimension of compassion. Here sorrow in the form of shared pain leads back to Unity in yet another way. When I identify with the pain of another, a unification and a bonding occurs between us that transcends all superficial differences. We connect at our core, for there is the very sorrow of knowing and not knowing the Lord. This shared suffering disarms us to our core and in so doing reveals us at great depth to one another. At this depth of knowing another, I begin to see the other as myself. Beneath superficial differences, the same essence is there in everyone. Thus suffering with another is the same as suffering with myself. I suffer with another as I would suffer with myself. This is precisely the meaning of compassion: “to suffer with.”
Thus the Divine Unity becomes manifest in the midst of our sorrow. Moreover, as we taste this Unity through compassion, it eases our burden. We come to know Divine Unity such that together our burden is made more bearable.
This is the peculiar miracle of compassion: that it makes easier together what is less bearable alone. In compassion we shed what keeps us from the Divine in one another and in ourselves. Compassion as a dimension brings in the relational aspect of creation. That we are created b’tzelem Elohim means not only that we are multiple facets of God, but that we are multiple facets of One God. Elohim is plural but it refers to One. Compassion as a dimension reflects this unity in plurality. We are many. We are also one. We, each of us, bears his own burden. Yet your burden is not different from my own. The less I identify with the particular circumstances of my suffering, the more I come to see it as the same stuff out of which your suffering in made. Said differently, the more I come to see suffering and the sorrow that goes with it as dimensions intrinsic to the structure of this world, the less I view the particular circumstances of my suffering as causal. Then the circumstances come to appear as the occasion of my suffering, but not its cause. This distinction has enormous implications as we already began to see above in discussing courage.
For when I detach myself from the occasion of my suffering, then my suffering and your suffering are no different. They are just suffering. Suddenly, my ego disappears from the picture and I recognize in you the same suffering essence that I find in me. Thus suffering is encompassed by the dimension of compassion, and the same encompassing circle contains your essence and mine as the same essence. Our oneness is revealed through our shared pain, provided of course that we are not drawn back out into plurality by perceiving the differences in the occasion of our suffering as truly causal. This is much easier said than done. Above we remarked on our tendency to see others only through their patterns and behaviors which are at odds with our own. These include the patterns and behaviors which set the stage for suffering. We tend to focus on certain behaviors in others and say things like, “That makes me crazy.” Or, “That causes me pain.” This often looks like, “What your people did to my people…and what we did or will do to you in return.” As long as we do this, we essentially empower the behaviors to become causes of suffering. They are not inherently causes, but we remember from what has come before that perception creates reality.
How we perceive the world determines how the world is. We can just as well choose to perceive the behaviors that your people did to my people and my people did to your people as the same behaviors. Seen in this way, they cease to be causes of suffering, but only the occasions for it. The only real cause of anything is the Divine Unity. Once I let go of seeing behaviors as causes, then I make room in my perception for the One True Cause. I begin to come to see this world as the occasion for plurality, for multiplicity, and I also begin to see the Essential Unity within multiplicity. Not only that. I begin to feel and to be drawn back into that Unity. For compassion is anything but dryly intellectual. To be sure, it is a way of seeing the world, or it is the world seen through one of its dimensions. However, the sense of touch gives a much better impression here than the sense of sight.
To gain access to the world through touch I am made to encounter it a little at a time. Differences generally emerge much more slowly through touch than through sight and in much smaller increments. Here is a smooth texture. Here is a rough texture. Here is another rough texture. Perhaps the first rough texture is the beard of an Israeli and the second rough texture is the beard of a Palestinian. What are these but different occasions of rough texture? Here we are as far away from the conclusion that one person’s behavior causes the other’s suffering as the moon is from the sun. Seen from the perspective of Unity, the circumstances of one another’s suffering are just like these occasions of touch. They are handfuls of the same thing separated only by space and time. They are the same Divine Essence separated from itself by the dimensions that make for multiplicity, for a world of excursion. We are not that separateness. Ultimately, that separateness is a product of our perception, not any fixed reality in the world which our perception perceives. There is no such fixed reality. Hence, perception which produces separation is at odds with Ultimate Reality. That is to say, it is at odds with the return to God. It sees this world as eternal rather than the One who made it.
Right perception could be termed “imagination.” Imagination is a tool or faculty of the soul which reveals deep truths. It penetrates into the structure of the universe. It sees beneath the surfaces of duplicity that abound in this world into the interior of Oneness that connects and unifies all things. Hence, the perception of differences between peoples as the causes of suffering amounts to a gargantuan failure of the imagination. As Graham Green so aptly said, “All enmity, all hatred between individuals amounts to a failure of the imagination.” It is a failure to see unity within diversity, to find in that unity a shared feeling that leads me to say of my enemy, “I am pointing to myself.” What’s more, this feeling also transforms differences. It uplevels them into occasions of celebration for God’s manifestation in the world. Once I come to understand the inclination towards God that is concealed within the differences I perceive in my enemy, the differences once again lose their causal value as determinants of suffering. They become occasions for suffering just as they are occasions for celebrating God’s presence in the world.
That they can be both at once just amounts to saying that all our efforts only approximate to God. No effort in and of itself is sufficient to attain to God. This is precisely why the element of m’asirah, surrender, is essential to invoke the Divine. For me to see within the rough and often failed efforts of my enemy to the divine inclination on the interior requires of me m’asirah. It requires enough humility and largeness of mind for me to be able to give up my position. I stop perceiving my own efforts as tantamount to my return to God, and I stop seeing my enemy’s efforts as the ones that will prevent my return. I see them both for what they are: occasions for suffering and occasions for celebrating God’s presence in the world, quintessentially human occasions. And I recognize the same divine inclination in each. Amidst all the roughness and challenge of existence in this world, I feel compassion toward my enemy.
It is no accident that compassion intersects courage at just the place where effort and surrender are in balance. When that balance obtains, the warrior no longer sees his adversary as separate from himself. Courage gives him deeper insight. Adversary becomes partner. Even when locked in mortal combat, there remains a sense of oneness and a tragic sense that death itself has become the only way back to God. Here compassion shows itself as a higher dimension than death. Our identification with one another prevails even as that other becomes for us the Agent of Death.
This instance of a warrior’s death gives us some insight into death as a dimension of our world. Death becomes heroic precisely when it is felt to be subsumed under the dimension of compassion. Death without compassion is murder. In some sense, that is not death. For death is more than an untimely terminus. This is what the poet Rilke teaches when he tells us:
Think: the hero lasts on, and even his downfall
was a pretext for existing, a final birth.1
The hero lasts on because his death is felt to be the culmination of his living. It is as if his death turns his life inside out exposing for us all of its richness and meaning and anchoring it in the Beyond. The hero lasts on in us because we identify with him through the compassion we feel for him. He was great but remained vulnerable, and his vulnerability was a form of m’asirah. This draws us in. It draws us back behind the occasion of the hero’s death into the divine inclination which inspired his life. Thus his death becomes a final birth both forwards and backwards. It is a birth backwards because its anchoring in the Beyond makes it a pretext for existing; that is, its anchoring or telos reflexively informs the life that came before it. Death into God makes life holy. For exactly that reason Christ said, “I die daily.” To die daily is to live one’s life each day as an expression of divine intention: of love, beauty, courage, and all the dimensions of the universe insofar as they all lead back to God. It is to live awarely in accord with those dimensions such that one consciously participates in the return to God. Moreover, one does this under the dimension of compassion, that is, both for one’s own soul and for the souls of all others one knows to be not different from oneself. It is through the hero’s conscious alignment with all the dimensions, including his unwavering compassion, that his death becomes a birth backwards of divine influence into the world. He remains united with his enemy even if he seeks to slay him. Thus he remains vulnerable. His reward is a death which brings him tremendous honor even in the eyes of the enemy. It draws all hearts to him, including our own, separated as we may be in time. We want to sing of him always. We want to be like him. For he models for us how to so attune our lives to God that life itself becomes a single instrument opening a passageway to the Beyond.
Life lived like this mirrors a cone of excursion, and aspiration towards God becomes virtually indistinguishable from the influence of God’s own love. This is why Rilke also says:
But all the living
Mistakenly draw too sharp distinctions.
Angels (one says) often are not sure if they
move among living or dead. The eternal torrent
hurls all ages along through both realms
forever, and sounds above them in both.
Death is a birth forwards in that it is a birth out of this world and into the next. Forwards of course only applies to the way death is perceived in this world in relation to the next. There is no forwards in the Beyond, only Eternity, only Oneness. Nevertheless, as birth forwards is how we chiefly see death. Or we see it as terminus, as end. Rilke teaches us, however, that a higher vantage point shows death to be no such rigid demarcation. From the vantage point of angels, life and death are joined by a single torrent. The same Force that draws us out of this life draws us into it, that brings us to Perfection in itself inspires us to imitate it in fullness of expression. Hence, life itself–indeed, all of creation–is a riot of dimensions hungry to draw into themselves any and every scrap of divine likeness and influence.
The hero looms large in our consciousness because he unifies life and death in this manner. He shares something of the vision of angels in that he senses in death the completion of his life, not just the end of it. Yet his greatness lies even moreso in his compassion. The angels are often not sure where they are, but the hero knows. He knows he dwells among men. He sees clearly what time and space do to men, how love affects them, how sorrow disquiets them. He knows that he lives in this world of dimensions and fully feels the weight of having to reckon with them. He does not see himself apart from or above other men, only acting on their behalf. He almost literally carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and, through compassion, lightens the burden for other men. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to die upon the cross for their salvation means that one came who by his life and death unified all the dimensions into a vehicle for the final ascent. The cross signifies all the dimensions, and death upon the cross together with ascension from it amounts to a cone of excursion. Insofar as we live like Christ we are the only son, for there is none who falls outside of our compassion. All children, all sons and daughters, are one son. And we are fervent and single-minded in living our purpose back to God.
Death understood this way becomes an unstoppable organizing principle for life. The art of living and the art of dying appear one in the same. Death is the summation of divine influences, the intersection of all the prior dimensions of the world, the point where all these dimensions bend back upon themselves into an opening to God. Living in accord with the divine influence inherent in each dimension is thus living into death. The hero, sensing to the utmost the divine vibration inherent in each dimension of his life, does not hesitate to embrace death when it comes. His virtue lies not with the angel’s higher vision. It lies in his having perfected his human senses to the point of their being able to perceive the Divine in this world. He perceives–and hence creates–the conditions for divine influence to operate in this world. His vision, his imagination, quite literally transforms our world. When death comes he sees it as an extension of his work in the world not something of a different kind. That is why he can embrace it, not because he has some secret understanding of what awaits us on the other side:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
The hero’s wisdom is a purely human wisdom. Of course, it is so perfectly human that it is hard to tell it from divine. Even so, it remains accessible to us. It becomes the stuff of fairy tales and the stories we tell our children from their earliest age. We understand at some level of awareness that the art of dying must be practiced often and early if it is to have the affect on living that we want for our children.
In contradistinction to death lies the terminus of physical life. Life may be terminated for many reasons: accidents, murder, illness, suicide, internal organ failure, and “natural disasters,” to name a few. Yet it is written, “There is but one death out of this life.” And also: “I am the light and the way. None come to the Father except through me.” Said in other terms, once the vibration of the Universal Harmonic Coefficient is achieved, one exits this life, one is joined with God for good. It is not Christ the person that joins one with God but Christ consciousness, consciousness at a vibration which elevates it to God. Death is, crudely speaking, a state of consciousness which allows it to be joined permanently with God. It is a level of frequency at which reabsorption occurs. There is then no return to the physical, no reincarnation of the soul into this world. Many endings of life can and do occur to a soul along its journey. And a soul is reincarnated many times. Along the way also it experiences moments of absorption. Known in the yogic tradition as samadhi, these are foreshadowings of final union, but they cannot sustain absorption. The husks into which the soul has incarnated are too heavy. They eventually slow down the vibrations of consciousness and draw it back into this world.
Through many incarnations we learn better and better how to shed these husks by shattering them and releasing the light inside. Our consciousness progressively increases in vibration provided we do this work. The hero is one who has learned how to release huge amounts of light from the husks he encounters in his life. And it is part of his attraction of divine influence into the world that bigger and bigger challenges are brought his way. Without such, he would have no counterfoil against which to strengthen his skill and his vibration. He would be tantamount to a weight lifter who could not exceed his limit because he had no heavier weights to practice with. Through such practice the hero or adept eventually reaches the point where he can free himself from having to reincarnate in this world. To quote Robert Browning once again in Prospice, “The worst turns the best to the brave.” Then the hero’s death is a true death rather than a mere ending of a physical incarnation. If, however, he chooses to return to this world, then his reentry into this world is not properly called a reincarnation but a resurrection. A resurrection is something that occurs after death. A reincarnation occurs only before death. A savior or bodhisattva is a being who chooses resurrection over absorption into God. Thus he is God’s direct emissary in the world, an impeccable expression of the Divine Essence sent to assist us in our return.
Christ was a bodhisattva who showed by supreme example how to die into the Father. The hero who dies is typically held in greater esteem than the hero who lives. Hector, for example, seems greater to us in death than victorious Achilles despite the latter’s divine lineage. This is because all of life amounts to a learning how to die. Those who teach the full lesson are the ones who garner our highest regard.
Death is the dimension of our world where the divine influence is lived as a birth backwards through life just as an an anticipated event affects all that comes before the event actually occurs. To this we now contrast joy, which is the dimension though which the divine influence is felt as if absorption has already occurred. Joy is similar to beauty insofar as beauty is a direct reflection of the divine presence into the world. Joy, however, is more than a reflection. It is a direct experience of absorption mediated through the world of space and time. The perception of beauty is like looking at a beautiful hand. The experience of joy is like feeling that hand as your own. Joy offers a more intimate experience of the Divine. In fact, the dimension of joy offers us our most direct and unmediated experience of God. Experiences in the world of excursion are always mediated. They are mediated by the dimensions that define this world. Joy, however, has been made to be most like the Divine in its own essence. To joy God imparted more of his likeness than to the other dimensions. In this sense, joy represents the crown upon all the other dimensions. It is the one to which we are commanded to aspire to most. In the Talmud we are told that we will first be judged by the joy which we failed to attain in this life. This clearly conveys what is the highest duty and fulfillment of a human life.
That joy is placed after death in the order of dimensions shows, roughly speaking, that it is imparted with the divine quality we will experience on the other side. True joy takes us out of time and space more “quickly” than the experience of any other dimension. Love, for example, wants to take us out of time and space. The extent to which it actually does so is, strictly speaking, the extent to which it finds fulfillment in joy. Something similar may be said about beauty. As we implied before, whatever has more of the Divine Essence in it is that into which whatever has less essence inevitably seeks to become absorbed. We encountered this in our earlier discussion of Black Holes. In the case of joy, because it has in itself more of the Divine Essence than any of the other dimensions, all the other ones seek absorption or fulfillment in it. For this reason, too, joy is the crown upon the other dimensions.
When we speak of joy we are not talking about incidental pleasures, though by affiliation these bear some likeness to joy. Incidental pleasures are purely relational feelings. They depend on the presence of some object of affection. One is happy, for example, because one owns a boat or a certain house. If the boat runs aground or the house burns down one’s happiness vanishes with the object. It is impossible to be pleased with a shipwreck or a burned up house! Joy, however, is not like this. Rilke reflects this when he says:
Is it not time that our loving
freed us from our beloved and we, trembling, endured;
as the arrow endures the string that, gathered to leap forth
it may be more than itself. For staying is nowhere.
He uses the word “love,” but love finds fulfillment in joy. What he says makes still more sense if we substitute joy. For love does contain a relational element. It is a striving towards that which brings ultimate fulfillment. But joy is the feeling of fulfillment. To become freed from the beloved is to take the beloved so deeply into us that there is nothing of them left outside. Thus the arrow becomes “more than itself” by absorbing the energy of the string and carrying it into solo flight. “Staying is nowhere” insofar as tension is unresolved while the arrow just sits against the string. Such a universe cannot last.
Likewise, lovers who are prevented from achieving physical union must discover other ways to take one another inside themselves. Alas, even in unrequited love the sanity of the lover depends on his or her being able to grant their love fulfillment through some imaginal rendering of the beloved within themselves. This may, and often does, take the form of the conception of art, literature, or music. Countless works of art have been inspired by “unfulfilled” love. This is of course a misnomer. It is precisely the fulfillment of the love that results in the works of art. We are perhaps more impressed by that part of love that does not get fulfilled. This is the artist’s raw material, so to speak, which may take a lifetime to consume. However, let us not overlook the artwork itself, often a source at least of incidental pleasure for millions of people. At its best, though, art rises above that. It inspires in the beholder a feeling which is more than relational. It points beyond itself to something higher and truer, and in identifying with that something–rather than merely relating to the art–we experience joy.
This is perhaps part of what Picasso meant when he said: “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” It is an ancient Greek ideal traceable to Plato. For Plato, all art was an imitation or reflection of a much purer form or idea. We find that what the artist instills in his work is beauty, and that beauty suggests joy to us as its natural fulfillment. Beauty is a dimension much more closely aligned with things, while joy is a dimension “just barely soluble,” so to speak in the liquid of this world. We could also say that joy has greater centrifugal force. Such expressions, in any case, are only metaphors for what must be internally sensed and felt.
Joy in its essence is an identification with the Divine. Great art in some sense always carries us beyond ourselves. It enlarges us. It is ultimately symbolic in the way that all symbols point beyond themselves. The symbol, taken literally, is a lie. What it stirs in us, however, is the feeling of truth. The truth of the ultimate Unity is demonstrated in the feeling of joy. It is not theoretical; it is proven. Anyone who has ever stood in the presence of his b’sheret knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that God is real. For what the b’sheret stirs in him is nothing less than the taste of the Divine. From that moment on there is almost a sense that nothing matters. The degree of fulfillment is so great that one is practically drawn out of the dimensional world altogether and into Eternity itself. Of course, the other dimensions prevent that. Joy itself, as we said, leads easily across the boundary of creation back into God, but space and time, for example, do not. They are much more rigid containers of our world. The joy of the b’sheret dilates space and time to the utmost and in sexual loving sometimes even penetrates them to the body of God. However, it usually does not take us permanently out of this world. At some point we usually awaken once again to the walls of our love chamber.
The nature of joy creates a unique difficulty for us in our world. Insofar as it is a taste of ultimate fulfillment, it threatens to shut us down, that is, to bring an end to all our striving in this world. Once we taste holy pleasure we are loath to return to our interpreted world, the world in which the Divine Essence is mediated through the ten dimensions. Facing the walls of our room once again, we are tempted to cry out, to plead with someone, anyone to get us out of here.
We find Rilke pondering:
So I withhold myself and keep back the lure
of my dark sobbing. Oh, who is there
to prevail upon? Neither Angels nor men,
and already the ingenious beasts are aware
that we are not reliably at home
in our interpreted world…
Strange, not to go on with one’s wishes. Strange
to see all relations go loosely
fluttering in space. And it is tiresome to be dead
and full of retrieving, so that one must sense
traces of eternity by degrees.
There is no one to turn to. God himself has put us here and here we must live out our return to him. Joy is very close to death as a dimension of this world. It leads through death and beyond, as we have said. Hence, by experiencing holy pleasure we become, in a sense, dead. We are dead but still “full of retrieving,” which is to say, still stuck in this world. We come to the very disturbing state in which we taste Unity in joy and are still faced with having to recover eternity by degrees. There are many cases in which this state of mind makes for mental illness. A person loses his bearings and experiences all former relations as “fluttering in space,” unattached, untethered to anything at all. Faced with this, it is impossible to know where to start. All steps in every direction seem the same, all actions equally meaningful, which makes them meaningless.
It is not for nothing, then, that God makes us toil in this world. To withhold holy pleasure from us is an act of mercy, for too much of it would incapacitate us for our journey home.
There remains for us perhaps
a tree standing somewhere on its slope, that we may
see again each day; yesterday’s walk remains
and the spoiled affection of a habit
which liked being with us, and so stayed and never departed.
The elements of our interpreted world themselves draw us back, especially the elements of Nature. Within ourselves we find habits associated with this world that express our inbred relationship to it. Through such habits we develop a kind of affection both for the world and for the way we are in it. These are the ways we are used to it. The world fits us. Our toil fits us. Within the elements of Nature, in particular, we find a kind of comfort reflective of the Divine Presence. The tree we encounter daily on our walk home suddenly reveals itself as a miracle of creation, a living being. Through relationship with the things of our interpreted world we sense sameness. Thus each thing reminds us of the Divine Unity.
Do you still not understand? Fling the emptiness out from your arms
into the spaces we breathe: maybe the birds will
feel the thinner air with a more inward flight.
The emptiness we feel returning from divine joy may become dispersed through creation itself. After a time, we may remember that this emptiness itself allows all things to return to God. This is similar to discovering that sorrow contains within itself the source of satisfaction by which it is measured. We start seeing “the other side of emptiness,” which is fullness. We begin to become more sensitive to the miracles going on all the time within creation. Our perception deepens and enriches all things around us. The birds themselves may gain from it “a more inward flight.” Indeed, it is quite literally true that when we come to perceive something such as Nature as precious and helpful, then we tend to become better stewards of that thing enabling its own inward nature to deepen and grow.
It remains to ponder why God let himself be known to us at all as joy. Could he not have brought about our return simply through the action of the dimensions of love and beauty? Could he not have let us simply long for him? The answer is that joy was already part of God’s intention to make us b’tzelem Elohim, and joy is as necessary a part of our return as any other of the ten dimensions. After all, the goal of the return is fulfillment in God, and just as creation reflects so many other aspects of the Divine, it must also reflect this one. Joy is the completion of the return to God reflected back into creation. Insofar as the world of excursion is a world into which God himself is projected, it cannot be missing any of his aspects. The total Unity of all things prevents that. Hence joy represents in our world how God is the satisfaction of the Selfsame in the Selfsame. The deeper our joy, the less we experience relation and distinction, the more we experience total identification with the person or thing that brings us joy. We are merged in joy.
Insofar as joy is completion, it is our significant challenge to be joyful and remain enroute to return. Yet we are commanded to become filled with joy. In the end we are required both to become joyful and to follow our path of toil and unfolding in our return to God. This contradiction points ultimately to the bodhisattva who actually attains to a level where no more toil is necessary but chooses it nonetheless. What can be the meaning of this? It is nothing less than the answer to the mystery of creation itself. For in the beginning, God created the world out of himself without having to. There was no incompleteness in God prior to creation. At the end, this is mirrored by the appearance of the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is one who helps to “fold creation back into God.” In essence, the bodhisattva is God himself stepping onto the plane of creation to complete and reverse the creative act which brought about the universe in the first place.2 For the bodhisattva toil is not necessary any more than it was necessary for God to create the world. Nor does toil disturb the fulfillment of the bodhisattva. He remains unruffled by anything, forever joyful.
The example of the bodhisattva teaches us that it is part of our own journey to learn how to perform the divine excursion and return ourselves. On a human scale, this means to learn to be joyful at all times while performing what repair (tikkun) still remains to be done in the world. Ultimately, this is for us to come to see ourselves as both the Creator and the created, the Source and the world of excursion returning to him. It means for us to come to know all that is unfolding as not different from the satisfaction of the Selfsame in the Selfsame. It is to see creation largely enough so that we know it to be one with the joy of the Source. This is the ultimate and everlasting meaning of the Biblical phrase:
And God beheld creation and saw that it was very good.
Notes:
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies: The First Elegy, translated by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson, Harper & Row, 1972.
2. This solves a problem that could arise from the conditions of reabsorption into the Divine, as explained earlier. It was stated that reabsorption into God would become “inevitable” for anyone whose consciousness attained the vibratory frequency of light, the Universal Harmonic Coefficient:
once the vibration of the Universal Harmonic Coefficient is achieved, one exits this life, one is joined with God for good.
Strictly speaking this is true, but it is true within the world of space and time only. The same is true for any object of this world that approaches too closely to a Black Hole. Once it crosses the limit border, it is captured by the Black Hole, absorbed, and cannot return. The laws of this world, however, do not apply from within the singularity, that is, from within the Oneness. In the case of the consciousness which has crossed over into the presence of God, we could say it then becomes the will of the Elohim for that consciousness to be resurrected and return to Earth. Thus from God’s point of view, the return of the bodhisattva to Earth is no more impossible than, say, the creation of the world in the first place.
We only need add that our use of the name Elohim is not meant to imply that within God himself there is reflection and discussion among parts or members of himself as we understand such things in space and time. God himself is One, and in him all has already been accomplished for eternity. But because the bodhisattva reappears in this world, he once again becomes a part of the plurality that is God in the world of space and time, part of the Elohim. Hence, it seems logical for us to say, for example, that he “chose” to return here as if his will was something separate from God’s own, which in essence it is not.
Karunandaji's Mind 