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the Way of the Fool
the conscious development of our human character,
and the future* of Christianity - both to be born
out of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis
by Joel A. Wendt
* Regarding the future of Christianity,
here is John 16: 12-15 "I have much more to say to you, but you can't bear it
just yet. But when the other comes, the breath of truth, he will
guide you in the ways of all truth, because he will not speak on his
own, but will speak what he hears and announce to you what's coming.
He will glorify me, because he will take of what is mine and
announce it to you. Everything the Father has is mine: that's why
I said he will take of what is mine and announce it to you"
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Mary Kelly Sutton, MD (anthroposophical doctor and dear friend), without whose support, generosity and hours of conversation, it could not have been written.
Acknowledgments
The list is long, and for this reason you
will find it at the end of this book - one caveat, however: the text
has not been edited by a professional, and is therefore no doubt filled
with matters that might make other writers, editors, teachers of
English and anyone connected with good writing, cringe. For this
torture of the editorially gifted, I apologize.
Table of Contents
Introduction.
Moral Grace
- the theme (song) of the central mystery of the modern age -
first stanza: Shepherds and Kings - a Temporary parting of Ways -
second stanza: the Evolution of Consciousness - the meaning of the historical differences between the time of the Pharaohs (the time of the Old Testament) and our present Age (the Dawn of the Third Millennium)
third stanza: the Church and the Body of Christ - being a discussion of the future of Christianity as that future development appears out of the Evolution of Consciousness.
fourth stanza:
Moral Grace - a first iteration - being an attempt to
describe and name something very many people already instinctively know
Freedom
- the theme (song) of the
real challenge of modern life -
fifth stanza: Three New Ways - being an examination of the profound and surprising interrelationship between the What Would Jesus Do Movement; the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous; and, Rudolf Steiner's book: The Philosophy of Freedom (also known as, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,) [which stanza also contains, the Shepherd's Tale, the King's Tale and the Healers' Tale]
sixth stanza: in the Absence of the Good - in the Age of Freedom, and in the confusion of the weaknesses of traditional moral authority, what happens when Moral Grace is not present - the Pharmaceutical Industry as an Example
seventh stanza: the Seventh Day of Creation - the problem of freedom seen in the light of the nature of evil, and its relationship to the course of individual human lives (the biography) [which stanza also contains the Fool's Tale (part I)]
eighth stanza:
the Gesture of the History of Civilizations as expressed in both Matter
and Spirit - from whence comes
technology and where is it going, or, the entanglement of the
i-AM in matter, its consequences and its meaning
Love
- the theme (song) of the
deepest hidden potential of the human being -
ninth stanza: the Four Forms of Love - selfless love (Agape); nurturing love (Storge); brother and sisterly love (Phileo); and, erotic and sensual love (Eros).
tenth stanza: the Seventh Day of Creation as an Expression of Love - concerning the role of Divine Love, and human love, in the creation of new social forms, or what we usually call the Fall of one Civilization followed by the Birth of a new one [also contains the Fool's Tale (part II)]
eleventh stanza: entering the Narrow Gate - love as an act of inner husbandry, through the stewardship and discipline of the life of the mind
twelfth
stanza: love and the gift of the word - a demonstration - being a deeper consideration of the relationship
between our inner activity, and our outer acts in speech [also contains
the Fool's Tale (part III)]
Appendices
(some matters requiring a bit of detail,
but which
really didn't belong in the main text)
1) Prayer and Meditation: certain nuances connected to providing the i-AM some rest and time of reflection.
2) Sacrifice of Thoughts: cleaning out the garden of the mind before growing new insights, and other unusual properties of our soul-spirit nexus.
3) Some further thoughts about finding a healthy relationship to the fourth form of love, UnFallen Eros.
4) A few words for those whose faith is in natural science, and/or might consider themselves to be secular humanists.
5) In praise of the virtues of ordinary mind.
6) Confessions.
7) In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship: some more recent thoughts on the relationship between Shepherds (exoteric Christianity, or Faith) and Kings (esoteric Christianity, or Gnosis).
Epilogue: Concerning the immediate future
End Story: Bicycles: a Children's Christmas Story for Adults
Introduction
This introduction is a bit long, but it
is necessary to touch on a number of preliminary points so as to form a
contextual basis for what is in the main text. At the same time,
the reader should feel that there is nothing here that has to be deeply
learned or memorized. In a way we are just going to travel
through an introduction to the landscape
of ideas to be later encountered in this little book, and you
should just enjoy the view and the visit. The nice thing is that
because this is a book, you can always revisit it in whole or in part
as you need.
There is also a lot of unusual or different content in this book - perhaps for some readers too much. Given that reality (of much unusual content), the reader is urged to take only what seems to be of personal value and to discard the rest. Different concepts will resonate more strongly with different readers. Let that resonance, that spark of personal interest, be your guide.
*
If there is a main point in the introduction, it is this:
My own life experience begins as a ordinary Christian, with all its ups and downs, periods of doubt and periods of secure Faith (the Way of the Shepherds). Yet, in the middle of my life I began to learn about Gnosis (the Way of the Kings), something I hadn't expected or been taught to recognize. I discovered that these Ways were not in opposition to each other, but rather belonged together, the older Way (Gnosis/Kings) complementing and completing the younger Way (Faith/Shepherds). Their separation over 2000 years ago was for a purpose, and the contemporary need for the beginning of their rejoining also has a purpose. That, however, is the longer story this book hopes to illuminate.
*
In writing of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis, I am referring to something which is already ongoing in
the present, in human consciousness, albeit mostly instinctively.
This is a complex matter, and in one sense really takes the whole
book to explain. Here we should just have the idea that Faith -
indirect knowledge of God - is different from mere belief; and, that
direct knowledge of God (Gnosis) can be scientific. This
union of Faith and Gnosis then is also the coming natural integration
of what otherwise seems today to be deeply divided, namely Science
(knowledge - Gnosis) and Religion (Faith).
This union is taking place in the
individual consciousness (soul), and requires of us that we faithfully
observe (be scientific about) our own consciousness in order to come to
knowledge of its real nature. What should not be overlooked,
however, is that this union of Gnosis and Faith, or Science and
Religion is really an Art - the Art of conscious (intentional)soul life
or character development.
For a starting point, here is some apt
wisdom from the middle-East: cultivate your thought for thought will become speech;
cultivate your speech for speech will become deeds; cultivate your
deeds for deeds will become character; and cultivate your character,
for character will become destiny.
By the Way of the Fool, I mean to use the term Fool in the same manner as has the anonymous author of Meditations
on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, wherein the Arcanum (the Meditation on) The
Fool is also called Amor,
or Love. This is what then gives this Way its Christ-based
texture, being an act of Love. By using the term human character, I also mean to suggest that this Way, while it has
kinship with Buddhist Enlightenment, is yet different - the Path of
Love being a further evolution of the Path of Compassion [Christ being Essence rather than Being - the goal of the Buddha
at one time]. Since the former is a facet of God becoming human
(for a time), and the latter a facet of the human moving in the
direction of becoming only pure Being
- disappearing into the Source, then the activity - the Teaching of the
Way of Love in human evolution - appears in human history progressively subsequent to the Teaching of the Way of Compassion.] .
This being the case, we should also notice there is a difference
(as well as a relationship) between Compassion and Love, which is why
we have to also consider the term initiation as well as the term
enlightenment.
Without going too far into the matter,
from a certain point of view it is possible to speak of depth spirituality (spiritual practices requiring serious meditation
practice and other acts of intentional self-development) as needing to
be called enlightenment in the East (Asia), initiation in the Center (Europe) and character development in the West (the Americas). With enlightenment we are raising the individual up into spiritual heights.
With initiation we are using the individual to bring down cosmic wisdom
from these same heights. With the development of earthly
character, we are seeking the moral integration of the individual as a member of all communities, both
visible and invisible. The author of this book is after all an
American, and this causes a certain perspective to arise, and a certain
given nature to be in effect.
And, speaking of Buddhism...there is a
kind of technical problem. In a very real sense there is more
than one kind of Buddhism, just as there is more than one kind of
Christianity. In the Cultural West, especially America, these
various versions of Buddhism have made a deep penetration, not all of
which has been to the good. Let us call the more healthy versions
depth Buddhism, and the less healthy (superficial)versions pop-Buddhism
(we can make a similar distinction as regards Christianity - there are depth
aspects and merely pop aspects). Part of the
effort in this book then, is to help the reader distinguish between the
superficial versions of spiritual practice and the depth
versions, as well as to become awake to certain distinctions between
depth Buddhism and depth Christianity.
Now I don't mean to suggest, by the use of the term superficial, any particular human failing. Rather, as we all know, some people only go to Church on Sunday, and others are so devoted to religious practice that they enter a convent or a monastery. This also we all know, for not only is this a teaching in many religious and philosophical texts, it is also a lesson of life: as you sow, so shall you reap. Those who take their religious practice more seriously than others will find inner riches that others cannot yet reach and discover.
The core of the character development
aspect is, however, tied up with the problem of morality - in a manner
that is not easily approached from a traditional frame of reference.
A real focus of this book then is about how we can come to trust
our individual and independent moral judgment (outside of tradition),
and the meaning of that search for both our personal biographies and
the general condition of the world - something that is not a small
topic in any event.
*
The image on the cover is a weaving of seed beads (an artistic effort inspired by the use of such beads by Native America Peoples), which I created around 1977.
Much the same way that cover design is
created out of many many small colored beads, so is the design of this
book created out of individual words - lines of dark upon a page - a
mosaic of ideas set free in trust for the reader to make of it what he
or she will. I am grateful to whomever takes the time to let into
their soul this small offering. Thank you.
*
The words that follow in this small book
then, and the thoughts which seek to live through them, are derived
from the whole of my life. This means that in certain respects I
am a very lucky human being - I have been Graced with a rather
remarkable series of teachings, most of them out of life experience.
But of my own story, my biography, I will write only
occasionally, in the light of the following observation.
Who I am, and what of the truly human I have become (we are not born fully human, but must seek it and become it), is mostly due to all the people I have met in life. I have had the great fortune to encounter at almost every turn wise and loving people. Yes, there have been all the usual personal struggles, even including addiction, but all the ordinary human suffering that I have experienced has been far out weighed by the Grace of a very wise Providence, who placed in my life's path a sequence of teachers and life teachings for which I am not only very grateful, but upon whom I am completely dependent. The best in what I write is born in them, while the worst will be due to my own failings.
All the same, to receive such treasures
into ones soul and spirit is clearly not meant to be for me alone.
It is, in fact, an aspect of age (I was halfway through my 64th
year when the major portions of this book were being written, and I am
66 at the writing of these current revisions) that creates a need to
pass on what has been learned, knowing that it was by such a sharing
from others that ones own life was greatly enriched.
At a certain point in my life, while
reflecting on the nature of these riches entrusted to me, I wrote of
what it was like to receive them using the following words: "Listening to the World Song". Here then, in this book, is a portion of what I
heard - the Story Sung to me by the World Itself, concerning the human
adventure that is each individual's biography, as that biography is
held within a most wise and loving embrace - an embrace which was once
called Divine Providence, and which today we might call: Earthly Human Existence. The meaning of this Earthly Human Existence will be
the principle thought-picture, in this landscape of ideas, to be
brought forward at the end of the main body of the book.
I should also confess that a great deal
of what I write about this Way of the Fool (Love) is based
upon direct personal experience. Very little is just the
repeating of ideas gained from the reading of books, or the shared
wisdom of people I have met. Always it has been my practice to
test pragmatically any suggestion of others as regards spiritual or
inner work. This being the case I have in the main only spoken
from experience, although I frequently quote sources especially the
teachings of Christ as contained in the Gospels. Of all that has
been tested in practice by the way, it is Christ's teachings that have
been the truest, the deepest, and the most practical.
At the same time, the reader should be
able to find here a few indications (stories) describing how a certain understanding came to me
during the course of my biography. Let me here give an example of
the kind of story that I will tell:
In about the year 1979, I was working as a dishwasher in a small restaurant near Lake Merritt in Oakland California. The owner was an unusual and passionate gay man, given to all manner of human excesses coupled with a remarkable generosity. Human beings, somewhat in the nature of stray cats, would come to his attention and he would help them with jobs and money. I was one such stray cat.
One morning when I got to work there was an older gentleman standing in that part of the kitchen where I worked at washing dishes and certain other tasks. The owner, Patrick, had apparently brought this man to the restaurant in order to give him some work. My guess is that Patrick had wanted to give the man money, but the older gentleman being of another generation, his pride probably demanded that he work for this gift. Just to round out the reader's picture of this gentleman - he was tall (a little over six feet) and thin, with short gray hair, and a couple days gray stubble on his unshaven face. He was wearing a threadbare dark blue suit and a white shirt with no tie. He was not dressed for working in a kitchen.
I was introduced to this gentleman upon getting to work and told that he would be doing some tasks. But breakfast was a busy time and I soon was very active, as were all the rest of the employees. As I ran around doing what was expected, the gentleman stood quietly and silently out of the way. Concerned, I asked him if he would like some coffee while he waited, to which he replied: "Yes. Please." I then retrieved a cup from that place where it was produced and which he could not have seen or known he could use. When I handed him the cup he said: "Thank you, I am twice warmed."
I had never
heard this form of speech before, and my facial expression became
clearly quizzical. This he immediately noticed, and then said:
"The hot coffee warms my body, but the kindness of your act warms my
soul."
Such are the lessons with which we are
surrounded in our biographies.
*
A couple more introductory points....
As most everyone knows there are many
translations of the Gospels and other Old and New Testament texts.
Where a particular author has used a text, I will quote it as
used. Where there is a certain reference I need to make, I will
quote from a beautifully bound Bible that I found on sale at a
Monastery, which calls itself the: Catholic
Family Edition of the Holy Bible and was
published in 1953 by John J. Crowley & Co., Inc. of New York.
Where the Gospels in particular are being quoted I will do
something in addition, namely quote the same passage as published in
the book The Unvarnished Gospels by Andy
Gaus. There is a reason for this.
When the Gospels were first written down
(they were oral traditions before being written), they were written in
Greek, the language of scholarship in that Age. As time passed,
and the religion that is Christianity arose, translators began to adapt
the original Greek and to change it to accord with various established
doctrines. So in our time we don't get what was actually written
of the Gospels in their original form in Greek, but rather official
versions and later interpretations that change the original text to
make it consistent with the by then established doctrine. By
adding a translation faithful to the original Greek, it is my hope to
aid the reader to see that perhaps something of the true Mystery has
been sacrificed over the centuries in order to force the text to
conform to someones later invented dogma.
Just to give an example, here is a quote from the preface to The Unvarnished Gospels, which preface was written by one George Witterschein:
"To my eye the most startling
difference between this version and all others I know occurs in the
famous Prologue to John's Gospel. Everyone has heard it: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God
and the Word was God." Now one of the first things I noticed upon
reading this passage in Greek was that it doesn't say "the Word was with God." It says"...and the Word was towards God," or "...was going towards God."
Which is another matter altogether. If the Word
was in motion towards God, instead of being literally and plainly
identical with God, then St. John is introducing the notion of
development (or process, or progression) within the divine nature, as
the explanation for the origin of the created universe! "Movement toward " implies a separation that is in process of being
overcome. The movement of the Word towards God can then be seen
as history: the history of the created universe, going back to its very
beginning, is one of overcoming a separation from God, of a process of
reunification."
{Where I have quoted from The Unvarnished Gospels, this
quote will appear in the text below, in bold and italics - that is in this form.}
One small caveat...The
Unvarnished Gospels is not perfect.
Choices were made and not all those choices were wise.
A reader now awake to this problem will probably want to look to
the Internet or other sources for the further considerations of any
difficult or seemingly ambiguous passages.
*
With reference to modern Biblical scholarship, a field full of worthy effort, I must make some small comments. We have, of course, a long pursuit of the historical Jesus by the world of scholars, some believers and some not. Documents are studied, languages are mastered, papers written and conferences held. In spite of all the valiant efforts made, I do not believe this activity has any hope of finding the truth of who Jesus was, and what those events of 2000 years ago meant then, mean today and will mean on into the future.
True knowledge of this kind comes in only
one way - the practice of the teachings in the Gospels. The essence of
what is to be learned is not found in any text, whether it is the Four
Gospels themselves, the supposed book of Q, or the newly discovered
Gospels of Mary and of Thomas. This essence is only found through
the trials in life that come from struggling to follow in the footsteps
of the Teacher. This knowledge only comes from doing, not from mere belief, reading, study or contemplation
of any text - even the many texts which I will cite below.
Let me come at this again, from a
slightly different direction...
Consider the Gospels of Mary Magdalene
and Thomas, which some today find remarkable, especially since these
two seem to emphasize the teachings of Jesus in ways more familiar to
that kind of spirituality we have been hearing from the Eastern Ways,
such as various forms of Buddhism (such as Zen) or the equally indirect
teachings found in the Sufi Tales. There is a similar enigmatic
quality to these newly discovered Gospels, and a kinship to various
kinds of Gnostic teachings. For those of us made sensitive to
this kind of spirituality, and who have also become hardened or
resistant to the confused religious beliefs of many traditional Christians, there has come to live
in us a hunger for something other than the traditional interpretations
of what the Four Gospels mean.
Consider then the possibility that there
is nothing essentially inconsistent between the Four Gospels, Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John, and the Gospels of Mary and Thomas, or the
teachings of the Gnostics. Suppose, once we enter the realm of doing and not just reading and having beliefs, the light that
inspires all spirituality and all religion begins to shine. This
is a light that shines in and through us, and once alight will itself
illuminate in a new way the Four Gospels themselves, and give rebirth
and resurrection to our understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation.
Lets add here a nuance much discussed in
traditional Christianity, and this is the distinction between works
and grace, for in emphasizing doing
I appear to suggest that works are superior to grace.
It is possible to read many arguments about this problem - are we saved by grace and by faith alone, or are works necessary too. In framing the question this way, something else is added, namely the idea of being saved. However, when I wrote above about doing, what I said essentially was that true knowledge comes only from doing. I was not speaking about being saved. At this point I only want to suggest that there are subtle matters involved, and that this problem of the relationship of knowledge, doing, being saved, grace, faith, gnosis, and belief are worthy of a great deal of thoughtful attention, and ought not in any case be just left aside as matters of mere doctrine and dogma. They must be examined, and made whole with experience.
*
One of the aspects of human nature that
has become somewhat lost and confused to modern human beings,
particularly in the Cultural West, concerns the role of the imagination
in our understanding of existence. I will speak more in the main
text about the imagination in certain specific instances, but here I
just wanted to point to the problem, and also just point at the depths
that can be considered, for example in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
(not as well known as they should be) remarks on primary and secondary
Imagination, from Chapter XIII of his Biographia
Literaria:
"The Imagination then, I consider either as primary
or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be a living
power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in
the finite mind of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I Am.
The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former,
co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the
former in the kind of its agency and differing only in degree, and in
the mode of its operation . It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,
in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible,
yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It
is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially
fixed and dead."
Then there is Coleridge's distinction
between these and Fancy:
"Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play
with, but fixities and finites. The Fancy is indeed no other than
a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it
is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will,
which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the
ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made
from the law of association."
The imagination, as you might now be able
to see, is not well understood in general today, but I will be trying
to bring it more to the fore in the book below where I am going to tell
some stories - in some cases what I explicitly call Tales.
Ordinarily we think of such (Tales)
as fanciful feats of the imagination, and no more real than comic
books. Such is also the view of many concerning Religion, or at
least the reality of the Divine Mystery - what some see as just another
fanciful myth.
Each of us will have to decide the truth
of such things for ourselves. All the same, the reader should
know that the author of these words knows the imagination in a most
intimate fashion, and as something of far greater depth and reality
than the merely fanciful. Our inwardness is joined to another
Inwardness, and the boundary world between our personal mystery and
that far greater Mystery is the imagination. Yes, the world
of the imagination is prone to illusion and fancy, but that comes from
our approach to it, not from its own nature. If we approach it
from a particular direction, as explorers and adventurers - knowing we
enter a place of mystery and awe - then the imagination becomes what it
truly is meant to be - a light-filled bridge between ourselves and the
Divine.
In the imagination we make our first baby steps away from mere sense experience, and turn inward, into realms of mystery and enchantment (something all good authors of the arts of fiction and poetry well understand). Even science travels here, although it has masked its journeys in such sterile (bloodless) terms as hypothesis and theory.
For example, Quantum Theory, the Big Bang
and the Theory of Evolution are products of the human imagination,
albeit falsely treated by many scientists, and even more by the general
public, as known facts.
All the same, with the undisciplined imagination there is darkness
there as well as light - a little illustration, that is, a story:
A man's wife travels into the city with some girlfriends. In the evening, on their way from dinner at their hotel to the theater, the man's wife becomes separated from her friends for a moment and is mugged.
Later, on the train coming into the city to see his wife at the hospital (she may not live), the man closes his eyes and drifts on the sea of his mind. He imagines life without her, and part of him would like that, would like to be free of her shadow side, the side that wants things he can't understand or give, and which often treats him in a way he does not feel he deserves. So he imagines life without her, and the freedom from the necessary pains of relationship and marriage.
After a time someone coughs, which wakes him from his
day-dreaming while riding the sea of his mind, and he now feels guilty.
How could he want her dead, she who bore his children, and gave
herself to him in so many ways over so many years?
We know these dark dreams. We
know that the fanciful and the imaginary are not easily controlled.
There is no logic there of the cold, hard and certain kind.
The imagination is of the blood and the heat, which is full of
life yes, but like life is dark as well. We are right to fear its
siren songs. If we swim in these waters without proper care, we
can end up mad, or in prison, the victim of our own unbridled passions,
or lost in illusions.
This is why some like science and
technology. Not so messy these cool, smooth and controllable
things (as long as we pretend that hypothesis and theory are not of the imagination). Not like love, or
attachment or other matters of the blood and of the heart. That
is the true danger of the imagination - not that it is fanciful, but
rather because it is too real.
About science...
The intersection between religion and
science is part of this book, but as everyone knows that subject is so
huge that I'd have to write a half dozen books to even begin. In
this book - the
Way of the Fool - it should be said that
the process of inner development (Gnosis) referred to here is
completely empirical and objective. The only difference is that
instead of studying the outer sense world, the neophyte scientist of the spirit begins by studying his or her own mind.
In addition, as we know, science and
religion seem to express two completely opposed paradigms or views of
the nature of reality. This book then is also a paradigm - a story
- that seeks to include the essential aspects of both views and hopes
to suggest there can be expressed here a viable (though brief)
synthesis. This paradigm of synthesis will also have qualities
that for
the reader are hypothetical and theoretical.
This book is then, in the same way that the theory of evolution
is a picture in the imagination, something which seeks to explain what is behind known facts. The paradigm expressed
here in this book will explain (again briefly, and as
part of a greater whole) the future integration of science and religion
(through the art of character development) that can be thought by a
mind that has come to know itself empirically and objectively. If
we can learn to understand our own consciousness out of the scientific
spirit, then that understanding - that science of insides - penetrates and changes all the other facts we believe
we understand on the basis of our science of outsides (scientific
materialism), such that religion and art themselves take on new meaning.
As food for thought on this, consider the
implied relationship of these concepts (as lived) : truth, beauty,
goodness / science, art, religion / reason, imagination, devotion.
Or seen another way: truth - science - reason / beauty - art -
imagination / goodness - religion - devotion.
And finally (at long last)...
Mostly this book is descriptive, that is
a synthesis of experienced observations, and not an analysis of
abstract facts, or again it is the result of many years of: Listening to the World Song.
Which is why we come back to character...this book is written mostly to help people understand
(explain) their interior life better, and the relationship of that
interior life to the elements of their biography. How the reader
chooses to act, in the light of this new understanding, will become an
aspect of their character, and thus, their destiny. We are, after
all, artists in the co-creation of our lives, thus the Navajo blessing,
which I now address to my reader: May you walk in Beauty.
**************************
and now, finally, to the main text of
the Way of the Fool...
Moral Grace
- the theme (song) of the central mystery of the modern age -
first stanza
Shepherds and Kings
- a Temporary
parting of Ways -
We have been told that attending the
birth of the Christ Child, besides the immediate family, were two
different groups of human beings, the Shepherds and the Kings.
This element of the story is worthy of deeper study.
These were times of oral culture, and the
Gospels, in spite of all our other uses for them, were originally
stories. This is how wisdom was shared among the common people in
that time, and in fact for most of history. We moderns with our
written literature, and television and videos, have lost sight of the
more essential, more human element. It is really the oral stories
that we share among us as human beings that brings forward wisdom and
human knowledge. Yes, we have all kinds of modern ways, including
the Internet, but the wise reality of life always comes down to our
tales, shared from one to another (c.f. Le Guin's The Telling). At the time of the Gospels few could read, and
most learned all that was learned through being told via speech
(remember the story of the miracle of Pentecost?). With this in
mind then, let us recall the Gospels in the more true way - as wise
tales.
We might also keep in mind, that contrary
to some modern scholarship, it is also very likely that the disciples
of Christ to whom the Four Gospels are attributed, were in fact the
creators of those stories. In an oral culture, these
stories would have been memorized once originally told, and frequently
quite accurately at that. No one would dream of retelling such
stories and adding embellishments. To do so would dishonor
the original speaker, and the story itself; as well as violate the
trust of the listeners. Whether they were told in Greek, or not,
we do not know. All we really know is that when first written down, they were rendered into Greek (the language of
scholarship in that Age), which has now been translated for us in The
Unvarnished Gospels into idiomatic English.
To really appreciate this, we should
imagine ourselves around a hearth, in the evening. The traveler,
who is now our guest, has had his feet washed (he has walked far to
visit us), been fed and allowed to rest. This is the best way to
receive the Gospels - orally, yet in the closeness of family.
All we have to do is read the opening
lines, and the story nature of the Gospels is clear. For example,
Mark 1:1 says: "The
beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God". {The
Beginning of the Good Word of Jesus The Anointed, Son of God} Or, Matthew, after laying out the line of
genealogy peculiar to his Gospel (a quite different genealogy from
Mark), says in 1:18: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.". {The birth
of Jesus the Anointed was like this:}
These are classical forms for the
beginning of a story. I am, by the way, not suggesting anything
about the truth or not of these stories, but rather pointing to
something else. These stories are not meant to be the dry
recitation of facts, but have behind them the intention to render into
words what for the speakers was rooted in the experience of a most sublime mystery.
What this means for us is that there is
nothing superfluous in these stories. Every detail was placed
there for a purpose, and nothing was intended to be simple filler, or
any excess of exaggeration or fancy. And, given that what is
being rendered in the Gospels concerned what the story tellers
conceived as the greatest of Holy Mysteries, we cannot pass by any
element of the story without considering its possible wider meaning.
Nor should we, as is done far too
frequently today, render these Mysteries into rigid meanings and
certainties. The Gospels are meant to evoke Life in our souls, to
enliven us and inspire us, not to kill what lives there with cold
intellectual concepts and arid doctrines inviolate for all time.
We should try to hear them as we once heard them when we were
little children (lest
ye become again little children...), out of a
natural feeling of awe and mystery.
With the picture of the Shepherds and the Kings attending the birth of the Christ Child, we come upon a much overlooked aspect of these Gospel stories - an aspect that can tell us a great deal about our time, and the future. Those, who know the nature of humanity's deep and wise stories, know that just such little details often reflect Archetypes, which when properly appreciated lead us to what are otherwise hidden, or at least less obvious, meanings and truths.
Christ Himself taught frequently using
the image of the Shepherd and his flock, which fact ought to suggest
that it is of no little moment that the birth of Jesus was known to two
quite different classes of human beings. Yet, about Kings, Christ
tells no parables. Moreover, the Shepherds who attended the Birth
in this story knew of the Birth in one way, and the Kings who attended
knew in another. This difference is itself important.
The Kings are described as following a
star (Matthew 2: 7-12), which led them to Bethlehem and the Birth, to
actually seeing the Christ Child. The Shepherds, on the other
hand, experienced an announcement from an Angel, and from this they
then traveled to the place of birth (Luke: 2:8-20).
We can, for example, understand that for
the ancient peoples of this time, a star was part of the vault of
heaven, and not, as we are taught today, a mere object in the sky, no
different from the Sun, and certainly having no being or consciousness.
So in the story, when it was taught that the Kings followed a
star, it was understood that they followed a sign from heaven.
We have here then two ways of coming to
knowledge of the Birth, and these two ways effected two quite different
groups of human beings. The Kings were knowledgeable and wise
(able to understand and follow a sign),
and the Shepherds meek and ordinary. The Kings knew something on
their own out of a wisdom tradition, and the Shepherds had to be told
by an Angel in order to know.
Who were the Kings?
Part of our history of those days has
been forgotten, and it certainly was true that as the early Church grew
into prominence, it went on the attack against the various Mysteries
that had preceded Christianity. Today we call these prior
Mysteries: paganism; and, some treat them as if they were the superstitious
ravings of lunatics. But this is a false revision of the true
history of those days.
In point of fact the Kings were
Priest-Kings, for in those times the ruler-ship of nations and
principalities had often been in the hands of these so-called Pagan
Mysteries. Moreover, these Mysteries practiced disciplines by
which individuals were brought to what is called a state of initiation. A Priest-King, who was an initiate, experienced
directly the sublimity of the Divine. These Mysteries practiced
forms of gnosis - or the direct experiential knowledge of God.
Today, of course, those who consider themselves educated do not believe such a view of ancient times. Even so, it must be understand that the those moderns who harbor such beliefs do not in fact know the truth of this past. It is a kind of negative superstition to assert that something isn't true that we don't really know can't be true. Many assume this, and will often as well hypocritically criticize others for believing in matters that seem outside the scope of being knowable. Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion is one such, for he asserts as not true something he can't prove is not true (not to leave out Sam Harris, and his flawed book: The End of Faith). We will return to this later in the text in considering the deeper implications of fundamentalism (there can be a scientific fundamentalism at the same time there can be a religious fundamentalism).
Now to return to the story
under consideration...
The story tells us indirectly that the
Kings that attended the birth of the Christ Child knew through
initiation (direct gnosis) about the Event in Bethlehem. This is
implied by story of the Star, and the recognition that they were wise and therefore could follow signs (remember, in order to truly understand the story, we have to place our
selves inside the consciousness of the listener of that time).
Thus their knowledge was based, in large part, upon their own
efforts (coupled, of course, with Grace - Grace being an act of the
Divine Mystery reaching down into the human realm). This
supersensible (beyond the senses) knowledge is reflected in the story
by the picture of the Star. The Kings followed their direct
transcendent knowledge - their Star - which then led them to the Birth.
The Shepherds, on the other hand, were
simple and ordinary. Their relationship to the Divine was based
not upon direct personal knowledge, but upon the early soul conditions
of Faith. This then required that they be told through the office of an Angel about this Event.
In this way the Birth was attended by
what is essentially a small class of individuals - namely initiates
(Priest-Kings); and, it was attended by representatives of a much
larger class, namely the ordinary and the lowly - the meek (Shepherds).
Please remember: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth. Matthew 5:4 {The
gentle are in luck, they will inherit the earth.}
In this way the Gospels tell us the story
that there are two ways of knowing about God. One direct,
personal and immediate, and the other indirect and mediated by another
Being, in this case an Angel. These two Ways we will call here:
Gnosis and Faith. I do not, by the way, refer in my use of the
term gnosis in this book in any way to the Gnostic Religion, but only
use the term to refer to the direct personal experience of the Divine
Mystery.
As most everyone knows the Way of Gnosis
disappeared, and during the Middle Ages, to speak of such things was
considered by the Church to be heresy. The Church, founded on the
rock of Peter, and elaborated by the heart of Paul, became a Church
rooted in Faith. Knowledge of the true meaning in the Gospel
stories of the Kings was deliberately forgotten and then lost.
Only the Way of Faith seems to have remained historically visible.
But not really...
For a certain other fact was written into the stories of the Gospels. Most everyone knows that the Matthew, Mark and Luke Gospels were significantly different from the John Gospel. Biblical scholarship has long recognized these differences, and actually creates a separate category for the first three Gospels, calling them the Synoptic Gospels.
The reason for this is plain, once we
understand the meaning in the story of the two groups who attended the
Birth. The Kings were allied with the old Mysteries, and for
Christianity to develop as a new Mystery, the old had to pass away for
a while into the mists of time.
The result is that we have in
Christianity two Ways. The Way of Faith, or Pauline Christianity
and the Way of Gnosis of Johnine Christianity. The Gospel of John
has contained, since the beginning, knowledge of the Way of Gnosis.
In spite of this, most of Christian history has involved the
coming into being of the assumption that the John Gospel was just a
variation of the other three, with the result that a true appreciation
of what is described in John has been lost. [See, for example, a modern
look at the John Gospel, which rediscovers its original meaning: Becoming
Aware of the Logos:
The Way of St. John the Evangelist, by Georg
Kuhlewind.]
Today, what has been forgotten for two
thousand years is returning (with the discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, and the Gospels of Mary and Thomas, for example). The
true meaning of the Gospel story of John has begun to emerge from its
hiding place. Once again there exists knowledge of how to know
God in a personal and direct Way. In reality, this Way was never
truly lost, but mostly had to sacrifice its former preeminence in order
that the Way of Faith could bring forward its gifts, which were new,
and very important for the future.
Consider that Christ said: Blessed are they who have not
seen, and yet have believed. {How lucky
are the ones who never saw but still believed!} John 20:29. The ancient mysteries were mysteries
based upon the gnosis (initiation) of the priests, whose authority then
was accepted by their followers. The Way of Gnosis, the form of
the old Mysteries (with an active and dominant priesthood), had to go
into the background for a time, as part of a long term process which
was to make it possible for human beings to no longer need any kind of
intermediary between themselves and God (many of the patriarchs, kings
and prophets of the Old Testament had direct experiences of the Divine
Mystery - Moses, for example sees the burning bush). All the
same, in the beginning of the history of the Church, a priesthood
remained necessary, but this intermediary priesthood was itself to be
based upon faith, and not any longer upon the old gnosis (initiation).
However, in order to understand in a deeper way why it was
necessary for the Way of Faith to dominate early Christianity, other
considerations must be added.
second stanza
the Evolution of Consciousness
- the meaning of the historical differences between
the time of the Pharaohs (the time of the Old Testament)
and our
present Age (the Dawn of the Third Millennium) -
To understand this next part a little better, let us first examine a question seldom asked: Where was Christ before the events described in the Gospels?
Our Faith is that Christ (the Son) was
sent by the Father to save us - to walk the earth as (or in) a human
being, to eventually be crucified, to die and be buried, and then to be
resurrected. And, in this process to take on the sins (errors) of
the world.
At the same time, Christ certainly existed before this human historical moment. Where then was He? What did He do? Was He known to human beings in some other way?
How did the Magi know of Him? Had
their understanding - their insight, the signs - told them that Christ
was coming? Coming from where?
In the pre-Christian Mysteries, knowledge
of the deeds and the meaning of the Son - of Christ before the time of
the Gospels - was available to those who spent a lifetime in religious
instruction such as led them to initiation - to a consciously created condition of gnosis - direct
experience of the Divine Mystery. This
is the secret of the stream of the pre-Christian Mysteries represented
by the Kings (priest-kings) - the Magi - of the Gospel stories.
So, where was Christ before the Birth? This question we will leave aside, only drawing from it that there might well have been those at that time who knew, and who saw.
This initiation wisdom did not disappear after the Incarnation, but instead stepped aside (sacrificed itself) so that Faith could begin to become the force it is meant to become in human souls (as an aspect of the Evolution of Consciousness). Then in the 20th Century the meaning-essence of the initiation wisdom at one time represented by the Kings in the Gospel stories began to return. What does this modern initiation wisdom have to say to us today? As an example, we will now look toward the work of one such human being.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is a modern
representative of the stream of mystery wisdom once belonging to the
Kings in the Gospel stories. He was an initiate, and had direct
personal experience of the Divine. While it is not necessary to
take my word here on this, it would be wrong for me to pretend that I
know otherwise. However, what we are going to do here is the same
that we did before with the Gospels. We are going to look at some
of the stories that Rudolf Steiner told. No one is required to
believe Steiner was an initiate - I only tell that part of his story so
the reader will know what are my views as regards his status.
Let us now look at some of what Steiner
taught, not as knowledge to be believed on his authority as an
initiate, but rather as a story, from which we are free to draw our own
conclusions. In our Age, the Kings are no longer meant to
dominate, but rather have joined the rest of us at the shared
common ground of our humanity. In fact, deep initiation in our Age is frequently more of a unusual challenge
than a blessing.
[As a small
aside, let me elaborate the nature of this challenge. It is
unusual, as we would all agree, for individuals to have direct
experience of the Divine. In fact, in the modern scientific age,
to assert that one has known God directly is often considered madness,
for to many in science God is not real, but rather a superstition.
Yet, for people of integrity, to deny their experience is
impossible - in point of fact, it is a violation of conscience.
One must be honest about ones experience in this regard (although
some discretion is natural, and there is seldom reason to stand on the
street corner and assert ones religious importance as some kind of
messenger). In fact, in most cases conscience forbids acting as
if one was more special than others because of these experiences.
This direct experience of the Divine then becomes a kind of
weight, where one must choose between honesty about what has been
learned, and ordinary human humility. It is this weight, and its
difficult moral dilemmas regarding when to speak and about what, that
creates the unusual challenge, which itself tends to separate someone
with this particular challenge from the rest of us. Those, who
speak of their authentic spiritual experiences often face subsequently
some sort of trial (another aspect of the challenge), such as either
being seen as mad, or treated with an excess of deference (a hard, but
necessary aspect of the development of character). At the least,
we need to recognize that in our age, those who say they are having
visions are not seen in the same light as ordinary human beings are
seen. In point of fact and in large part because of this
challenge, Steiner attempted to place his life's work (what he called
Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy) on a scientific foundation.
He hoped, that by showing how people could make empirical such
research and find out for themselves, the previously solitary nature of
authentic spiritual experience could be overcome.]
In addition to Steiner, if one chooses,
there are others that can be looked to for conformation about what I
will write below regarding the Evolution of Consciousness such as is
described in his stories. Here are three such books and authors:
Ernst Lehrs' book, Man or
Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the
Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought; Gottfried Richter's book, Art and
Human Consciousness; and, Owen Barfield's
book, Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry.
The story that Steiner tells is long and
complicated, being an attempt to tell a broad history of the whole of
human and spiritual evolution, from the very beginning of Creation to
modern times, and then beyond into the future. Here we are only
going to look at a very narrow aspect of this much greater story.
In the vocabulary that Steiner creates for telling this long story, he speaks of what he calls "cultural epochs." Our present time is one cultural epoch among seven others, which seven is again embedded in larger periods that might be called Ages. We are only going to examine the middle three cultural epochs of the current Age.
The time of the ancient Hebrews and
Egyptians was in Steiner's words the time of the third cultural epoch
of our modern historical era (Age). This epoch extended from
around 2800 BC until about 700 BC (this latter date roughly corresponds
to the founding of Western Civilization), at which point begins the
fourth cultural epoch that goes until around 1400 AD, after which
begins the fifth cultural epoch of the modern era - or our own time.
Each cultural epoch also corresponds to
the development of some particular inner characteristic of human
consciousness. For the third cultural
epoch, humanity developed what Steiner called the sentient soul; for the fourth, the intellectual soul; and in our time (a period that will last until about
3500 AD), we are developing the consciousness soul.
Now these different consciousness (or soul) developments are just
the names that Steiner gives to aspects of human nature in his stories.
They could be called anything, for it is not the name so much,
but the actual nature and experience of the developing inner quality of
being human that is important. This varies, one stage building
upon another, so that while our physical evolution is mostly at rest
(perhaps even starting to enter a time of decay), our inner spiritual
evolution is potentially always ongoing (it is, however, not automatic,
but requires our participation).
Now what makes Steiner's story even
deeper is that each form of soul development has a corresponding social
form. That is, for the sentient soul development
there is a characteristic set of social relationships as well as
historical conditions; for the intellectual soul
development another set of social arrangements and historical
conditions; and, for the consciousness soul a third
characteristic social structure and historical frame of reference.
The reason this is important is that one
can see in history, as we know it, the proof of Steiner's observations.
Our knowledge of the time of the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians
shows us both the outer social forms, and by implication the inner
nature of human consciousness that went with that period of human
evolution. So also with the fourth and fifth cultural epochs.
Steiner's stories in this regard are not inventions, but rather
much deeper and wiser descriptions of the meaning of these periods of
human history, than those ideas we are taught by our current professors
and teachers.
For once we recognize this Evolution of
Consciousness, we also realize that modern humanity tends to mistakenly
fancy that consciousness was the same in the past as it is in the
present, and so our modern teachers describe events in ancient times in
such terms as if those peoples thought, saw, and felt in the same way
we do today, when the real historical facts everywhere suggest the
opposite. The ancients were inwardly different, and those differences are precisely why they
believed and thought differently. They were not any more
stupid or superstitious, but rather had different kind of knowledge, belief and understanding exactly because
they had a different form of consciousness, which also means a quite
different life experience. [knowledge, belief and understanding are quite
different modes or conditions of mind, and will become more important
later when we get into practical inner work.]
Again, let me point to the three authors
mentioned above, Lehrs, Richter, and Barfield. Their researches
will fully support what I have pointed out above regarding the
evolution of consciousness - Lehrs through a history of Science,
Richter through a history of Art, and Barfield through a history of
Language.
I am also not going to go into the
details of the
sentient soul, and the intellectual soul, or any of the greater aspects of the stories that
Steiner tells, because the reader of this book, who wants to, can go to
that source and get it all in a much better way (see Steiner's Theosophy, and Occult
Science: an outline). Rather, I want us
here to have a very narrow focus, and to concentrate on what we all see
right in front of us - outwardly in social life and inwardly in
our own soul life. All the same, a little something needs to be
said before going on.
If one wanted to get some sense of the sentient soul development, then a study of Homer's Iliad and The
Odyssey would be in order. With Homer we can get some sense of
how strongly the people of that historical epoch lived in their life of
sensation, and the extent to which outside Ideas/Ideals, such as the
Gods and love and heroism, influenced this life of powerful sensation,
both inner and outer. On the other hand, the intellectual soul development would have as its book marks: Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas. In this epoch people began to more and more live
more strongly in how their capacity for ideation took hold of
existence, rather than in how much life filled them with sensation.
Oliver Stone's recent film about Alexander the Great gives us a
glimpse of the transition from the time of the sentient soul to the
time of the intellectual soul. There is a great deal more that
could be said, but I will leave that to the other writers I have
mentioned.
The purpose of bringing forward the idea
of the Evolution of Consciousness is to get us to wake up to these
types of changes, and to see that what we experience today is part of a
much larger pattern that can be discovered, if we wish to devote the
time to learning about it. We should also note, in passing, that
the life of sensation is more outward in its soul nature, the life of
the intellect a bit deeper in the soul, and then in the consciousness soul epoch we reach even deeper into our inwardness.
The point here is to recognize that the evolutionary development of
consciousness is taking place with a gesture
such that each progressive stage moves further inward into the depths
of our true being and nature.
These three cultural epochs, being also
part of a much larger set of changes that encompass seven periods in
all - each period lasting about 2100 years, have a special relationship
with each other (if folks are concerned about these number
relationships, just consider that the Creation is Art, and that
music-like whole number relations should not surprise anyone).
The fourth epoch, in which the Christ Events appear at the end of
the first third, is a middle or transitional epoch. While the
third (the time of the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians) epoch and the
fifth epoch (our time) are somewhat mirror images of each other -
social forms, historical processes and cultural structures, that turned
over and inside out in a kind of way during the fourth period. So
we have the third epoch with its social and inner nature, then a
transitional period (the fourth epoch), and then the fifth epoch with
its social and inner nature, that is something of an inversion of the
third epoch.
For example, in terms of social structure
the third epoch was characterized by top down hierarchical social
organizations (priest castes being in charge, whether it was the
Pharaohs of the Egyptians, or the Patriarchs and Kings of the Hebrews).
While the modern epoch is characterized by the end of
hierarchical structures, and the beginning development of bottom up
individualized social forms. In the third epoch, individualism
was not the point, and general soul development the essence, with the
moral order being in the form of laws and rules handed down by the
priests (e.g. Moses and the Ten Commandments), whereas in our time, it
is our individual moral sense of what is right that wants to dominate
and more and more rejects being told what to do by the last remnants of
priest classes.
In Matthew 5:17, as part of the Sermon on
the Mount, Christ explains at one point that: "Do not think that I have come
to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy,
but to fulfill". {Don't
think I came to dissolve the law or the prophets: I didn't come to
dissolve them, I came to fulfill them} Then
later, when He is asked to speak as to which of the Commandments is the
greatest, He explains further this fulfillment in this way, Matthew 22:
37-40 "Jesus
said to him, "This is the greatest and the first commandment.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with
thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind." And the second is like it,
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." On these two commandments
depend the whole Law and the Prophets." {He said
to them, "You are to love your lord God with all your heart and all
your spirit and all your mind. That is the important and first
commandment. The second one is similar: You are to love those
close to you as you love yourself. All the law and all the
prophets hang from these two commands."}
By rendering them (the Law and the
Prophets) into their essence in the admonition to Love God Completely
and Thy Neighbor as Thyself, which when carried out as acts of
individual moral intuition (see later the fourth stanza of this section
of this book, which is more explicit about Moral Grace) brings the Law no longer from the outside inward (from
the outside social community into the inwardness of human beings), but
instead from the inside outward (from the individual moral intuitions
of the human being out into the social community). The Law no longer is to act
upon us, but we are on the way to becoming
(the Evolution of Consciousness) the Law as we act upon each
other. [Yes, this is a very radical idea, but
a lot more in support of it will be written as we go along.]
This change, the Kings of the Gospel
stories understood, for its coming could be seen in the Christ Event
itself. So they followed their in-sight, their star, and offered up their gifts (their Way of
Gnosis) in sacrifice, as symbolized in the story in the images of the
offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
But such gifts could not be completely
sacrificed - gnosis did not disappear as a human capacity
(although Christ recognized its inherent problem "Blessed are
they who have not seen and yet believe" John 20:29 {How lucky
are the ones who never saw but still believed},
a statement which appreciates that there are still those who do "see",
which in modern times, as I said, can be a kind of unusual challenge.).
Only its (gnosis's) social influence had to wane. For in
the age of the
consciousness soul, in the time when
individuals were to think for themselves and make their own individual
moral judgments, no priests as authorities would any longer be needed.
Yet, gnosis itself did not entirely lose its meaning, for what
the Kings had once been still had a role to play for a while, and this
we have to understand next.
As the fourth epoch moved into becoming
the fifth, a certain new Way of seeing the world came into being -
natural philosophy (science). In the 1400's human beings began to
see the natural world for the first time as an object (the on-looker separation, see Lehrs and Barfield above).
Lets look a little more closely at the
idea of the on-looker separation. In Barfields' book Saving the
Appearances: a Study in Idolatry, he
describes humanity's beginning state of consciousness as original participation (the gods were a given and we directly experience them -
that is we felt ourselves as inside nature, the mysteries
and each other to a degree - no individuality). Subsequently we
are brought to a state of separation, pushed out of this original
state, such that around 1400 this separation became so acute that we
felt ourselves completely outside nature, the cosmos and each other.
It is this stage of the Evolution of Consciousness (the on-looker separation) that makes possible natural science. At the same
time the on-looker
separation is but an intermediary stage in
between original
participation (where the Divine was a given)
and final
participation (where we have to choose to
have a free relationship with the Divine). This is, of course,
overly brief and one should read Barfield directly in any event.
The paradigm (world view), which emerged
initially from the on-looker separation (the
scientific spirit will produce other views in the future) would
be called scientific materialism (only matter, no spirit) in the
beginning, and has played a role in helping us to further individualize
and find within ourselves that necessary place out of which to begin to
stand as free human beings - free even from the influence of the
Divine. (For a detailed examination of this change from a certain point
of view, also see Evolution
and the New Gnosis: Anti-establishment Essays on Knowledge, Science,
Religion and Causal Logic, by Don Cruse with
Robert Zimmer)
At the same time, scientific materialism
is a heavy burden for modern consciousness. In social Darwinism
(a kind of social justification for many clearly immoral acts),
scientific materialism turns human being against human being, and
fosters the idea that there are those who are more fit, and therefore
more entitled to survive. In addition, with the image of human
beings as mere animals (something that really can't be maintained if
you look honestly at Art and other cultural achievements), we find that
the idea of who and what we are has descended into great depths -
we no longer see ourselves as the image and likeness of God (the Fall
penetrates even into our world views). But as the Law becomes
something inside us, resting not on moral rules, but rather living in
our own impulses of the heart, opposition to a spiritless world view
(and its terrible social consequences) has appeared everywhere.
What Steiner named the consciousness soul, has
begun (especially in the late 20th Century) to unfold its forces into
our social existence, in Civil Society, in the environmental movement,
in the opposition to elite globalization and many other social and
personal phenomena (see on this theme Jesaiah Ben-Aharon's
remarkable: America's Global Responsibility: individuation,
initiation and threefolding).
Even so, this change taking place all
around us has yet to become fully self aware - to really see and know
itself for what it truly is - or to discover how to overcome scientific
and social materialism as completely as ordinary people need to be able
to overcome it. So, the spiritual essence of the gnosis gesture
of the ancient Kings return for a time, to show that Gnosis still
exists, and that Faith has a partner and a companion in the dance that
is the story and mystery of the Evolution of
Consciousness.
third stanza
the Church and the Body of Christ
being a discussion of the future of Christianity
as that
future develops out of the Evolution of Consciousness
So far we have mostly considered aspects
of the past: a deeper look at the matter of the Kings and the
Shepherds, and a fairly new idea concerning the Evolution of
Consciousness. Let us now look a little more carefully at the
present, and at the fact that today what we call Christianity is
divided into a great many different sects, rites, Churches and other
social forms, that often so strongly disagree with each other over
meaning and doctrine that wars are fought and people killed and
tortured.
It is my view that no single Christian
Church or sect possess, even to a degree, the whole truth of the Nature
of the current iteration of Christianity. Each has bits and
pieces, but we only begin to see that Reality - the current totality -
when we start to integrate into one whole, not only the various
versions of the Ways of Faith (the Ways of the Shepherds), but also the
Ways of Gnosis (the Ways of the Kings). For example, the Catholic
Church in its conception of the Church and the Body of Christ sees one
aspect of a mighty whole, while the Jehovah's Witnesses, in their
peculiar and unique way of practicing the Eucharist, have knowledge of
something of remarkable depth (the Witnesses only practice Communion
one day a year, at Easter, and then one only eats the host if one
believes that one has so far progressed in ones development as to be a
member of the Elect, as prophesied in Revelations. This challenge
to the soul to examine itself with such savage clarity is very good for
us. I make no comment at this point on whether this is what
Christ wanted, only meaning to point out the quite personal test that
such an act makes us face.)
To give a couple other examples: the
Mormons, with their social and community practices have an excellent
grasp of Christ's social teachings as regards the practical application
of Charity to the social community, while those rites in many Black and
gospel singing Churches better understand the nature of Joy and
Celebration in Christianity. I am not saying, by the way, that
only these aspects of each Church is of value, only that one cannot
grasp the totality of present Christianity by only looking at
particular Churches, doctrines or sects, as if any single group
possessed the whole truth.
One way to appreciate this is to
understand that what was originally created following Christ's
Resurrection, as a single Church, soon became, under the influence of
humanity's developing individualism, a multiplicity, eventually
splitting into more and more sects and divisions, until today we almost
have as many versions of Christianity as we have individuals who
practice it. This has even gone so far as to divide into
such a fine set of distinctions, that many individuals, in whom the
fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets lives as an
impulse of the heart, no longer consider themselves Christian at all,
although their every act is Christian through and through (What St.
Paul so beautifully describes in I Corinthians 13: "If I speak in the tongues of
men and of angels, but have not love,..." -
is becoming the essential nature of the human heart, as it finds its
way to its full expression in the Evolution of Consciousness). It
is as if a once unitary ocean of Spirit has fallen to Earth as individual raindrops. (Please recall what
was said above in Witterschein's introduction to The
Unvarnished Gospels concerning the apparently
real meaning of part of the opening lines of the John Gospel - "The movement of the
Word towards God can then be seen as history: the history of the
created universe, going back to its very beginning, is one of
overcoming a separation from God, of a process of reunification.") These fallen individual raindrops, finally
coming to apparent rest in single human hearts, do not stop there or
rest content, but from this heart center then seek naturally for
reintegration with their original Source.
Now at the beginning of the Christian
Era, what is today's Catholic Church was Christ's Church on the Earth.
But as time passed, more and more this Earthly Church became
Fallen. Only during the Mass anymore does Christ enter into the
Rites of the Catholic Church. The hierarchies and bureaucracy of
the Church have become too Earthly, and with the exception of some
individuals, this institutional Church (but not the laity) has lost its spiritual
connection, and become just another earthly power among other earthly
political and social powers.
[a personal
aside: In reference to the idea above, that Christ only enters the
Catholic Church during the Mass (while always remaining available to
individuals, I am here only reflecting on what He does with regards to
the organized Church), I want to tell the following story. Again,
it is conscience that requires this, so that the reader may know from
where I obtain such thoughts. In about 1986, while I was first
studying Meditations on the Tarot: a Journey into Christian
Hermeticism, I
had an early morning dream (vision), which came to me by Grace {"And it shall come to pass after this that I will pour out
my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
visions." Joel
2:28.}
The following was like a dream: I was walking in a garden, to one side of which was the house in which I was then living, and on the other side of which was a Catholic Church. I was walking with a priest of the Church, and explaining to him why I wanted to become a Catholic (I had not yet done this, or thought of doing this, although 5 years later I did do this). I said to the priest that there were basically two Churches, a pure Heavenly Church, and a fallen Earthly Church, and that during the Mass Christ Descends and brings the two churches into direct contact with each other, and this fact was why I was becoming a Catholic (I did later tell the story of this dream to the priest that oversaw my experience of the Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults, a 9 month process ending with first communion on Easter - so in every way the dream was prophetic).
While I was saying/speaking in the latter part of the dream, I simultaneously had the by Grace vision aspect. Christ had taken me into Himself and then taken me with Him, while He performed this act of Descent and by Grace reintegration, in which temporarily He united the two otherwise separated Churches, the pure Heavenly Church and the fallen Earthly Church, during the Mass.
At this
point, I opened my eyes and discovered myself fully awake and lying in
bed on my back. I stayed there, without moving, without even
thinking, for about a half hour, at rest and completely at peace.
I have never before or after experienced such peace.]
This original hierarchical structure
(Popes, and priests) was a remnant of the hierarchical social order
that once was dominant in the third cultural epoch. The Body of
Christ, the faithful, at the inception of Christianity were still too
child-like within, and needed guidance. But as the fourth epoch
gave way to the fifth, humanity began to leave behind its spiritual
childhood, and the need for an intercessor (a priest) became more and
more superfluous. This is so elsewhere, not just in Christianity,
but also in Buddhism and Islam, for example, - the age of priests,
masters and mullahs is falling aside, and in the time of the consciousness soul (remember this musical interval in the appearance of time
is to last from around 1400 to 3500), moral truth and goodness more and
more belong to the individual to determine.
We can see this quite clearly in today's
sexual crisis in American Catholicism, where it was not the
institutional Church in the form of the priesthood (the Bishops and the
Cardinals) that understood the true nature of the moral dilemma, but
the Body of Christ, the People of the Church who knew what was right
and what was wrong.
The Catholics have a doctrine, which
recognizes that the Holy Spirit moves among the Body of Christ (the
laity). But this doctrine is not so much practiced by the
hierarchical structures, rather it is just given lip service.
They (the priests and bishops) thought to preserve their prestige
and power at great cost to hundreds, if not thousands, of children.
Surely the Mother of God weeps, and the not often seen wrath of
Christ is subtly descending (the wealth of the America Church is
being leached out of it through the legal system as atonement for the
hiding of the violations of innocence) upon the hierarchy of the
American Church for this intolerable crime, and no doubt also upon Rome
for its lack of righteous backbone as regards the same events (in the
ascension to the Throne of Peter of a rigid and backward thinking
theologian, rather than a true pastor - Shepherd - to the faithful,
which ascension is slowly leading to the end of a true Papacy).
[We have also seen in America, a similar fall from grace of many Protestant evangelical Christian leaders over recent years, for the hypocrisy of sexual and financial excess.]
Yet, this Idea, of the Church and the
Body of Christ, has preserved for us something we would do well to
understand.
The situation that existed at the
founding roots of Christianity is now reversed, and Christianity is
becoming (now and into the future) something new. It is the Body
of Christ (the Essence of Law and the Prophets as living in individual
hearts) that is to structure the future nature of any true order in a
social form, such as a Church. The questions of application of
moral absolutism in the ideas regarding abortion and the like, and the
need for priests to remain celibate and for women not to take up the
Celebration of the Mass - all these are fundamentally moral questions,
and are no longer to be questions of doctrine or dogma, but which
instead now belong to the laity (of all churches, sects and rites) -
the Body of Christ - to determine as the Holy Spirit moves in and
through their hearts.
The hierarchically dominated Churches are
dying. And, with their much needed Death, something new can be
resurrected. Out of the Body of Christ (the faithful laity) can
arise a new and true ecumenism - no need for the divisions into
Catholic, or Protestant, or Orthodox or whatever. Moreover, this
is an ecumenism that will transcend even the divisions into
Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism (to name but few). All those old
social forms in which Christianity first lived are now to be cast
aside. A Christianity of the Heart (see Covenant
of the Heart, by Valentin Tomberg) seeks to
express itself, and the only matter of import is the Charitable
recognition of each individual by each other individual and their
mutual companionship as members of the faithful (Shepherds) and direct
knowers of the moral (Kings). What was once divided into two
pieces, as a kind of ancient division of social class, can now be
remade whole as individuals more consciously experience and participate
in the stage of the Evolution of Consciousness we are calling the consciousness soul.
Does this mean that the Rome of popes and
cardinals and bishops should disappear? Or the end of big
hierarchical organization in Protestantism? I don't know. I
do know that it will be the authority of the Body of Christ that is to
authentically anoint any Church functionaries in the future, not the
present fallen functionaries themselves (the real meaning of the Third
Fatima Prophecy - the end of a hierarchically determined Papacy?). The line of true moral authority of the
hierarchical Churches has broken, through the many many failings over
the centuries (selling of indulgences, torture and burning at the stake
of heretics, the inquisition, the turning away for the horrors of the
Holocaust, etc. in Catholicism and the excessive interests in wealth
and sexual hypocrisy in Protestantism), of which the child abuse
scandal in American Catholicism, and the recent fall from grace of a
leading evangelical, are only the most modern examples of a complete
lack of any such true
moral
authority in the institutional hierarchy of
Christian Churches.
For, as we learn more and more to
understand and practice the Moral Grace being described in this first
theme of four stanzas, we will slowly begin to see that we all may come
to possess now, both Faith and Gnosis, which in the age of the consciousness soul are ours alone to understand and apply. The
potential fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets now
resides within, and the gifts once long ago sacrificed by the Kings,
are now treasures that can be found in each human heart.
fourth stanza
Moral Grace - a first iteration
being an attempt to describe and name
something
many people already instinctively know
As spiritual children, it was our need to
be provided moral guidance. Thus, in the early stages of the
Evolution of Consciousness, moral rules and laws predominated. In
Buddhism this took the form of the Eight-Fold Path (right views, etc.),
in Judaism, the Ten Commandments, the Torah and so forth, while
in Christianity, the Parables of Christ and the writings of Paul, and
in Islam, all manner of rules in the Koran coupled with the Idea that all is the Will of Allah (those Christians who find
this Idea disagreeable, should review the mystery of the second petition of the Lord's Prayer: Thy kingdom come, thy will be
done, on earth as it is in heaven).
Yet, in spite of all the rules, human beings have begun to more
and more insist upon their own right to choose. Everywhere the rules are being cast aside, and this rejection of tradition
(while frequently - and wrongly - blamed upon the cultural West)
is really a consequence of a change within the totality of humanity due
to the current phase of the Evolution of Consciousness. Humanity
is stepping out of its spiritual childhood and individuals are claiming
more and more personal responsibility.
What will surprise many, as this
transition unfolds, is that this individual spiritual reality is
clearly recognized in all the various religious writings.
The difference is that when we were children, we saw these
writings through the lens of our need for these writings to provide
certainty of belief and moral guidance. But as the future unfolds
we are to learn to see these same writings with greater maturity, and
as we do so, we will find they also support our current condition and
aspirations.
Yes, there is deep divide between past
and future, which manifests in humanity's religious communities and
cultures, most obviously in Islam. At the same time, we need to
avoid accepting the pictures provided us by Media, and instead speak to
ordinary Muslims. If we do this we will discover that a moderate
and wise interpretation of the Koran is everywhere, but since these
voices make no noise, the Media does not see them. Just as
traditional Judaism has its corresponding esoteric form in Cabala, so
Islam as its corresponding esoteric from in Sufism (the fools of Allah
- God).
Recently I read where one of the authors
of the Left Behind series of novels (undisciplined imagination and
fancy?), was preaching about the Koran and its views on the killing of infidels (non-believers). This is a strangely hypocritical
view, given that this same writer has Christ on His Return (in the
novels), killing those who are not Christian believers. Can any
one tell me what is the difference between these asserted views?
This all raises a rather perplexing
philosophical, religious and social question. If we are no longer
spiritual children, how are we to be moral beings without descending
into some kind of chaos of moral relativism, where there are no rules
anymore at all, just raw animal impulses. This is, by the way, an
excellent question.
Yet, if we are to trust the Divine
Mystery, and have true Faith, then we have been assured that such a question
must have an answer. The very idea that God. the Divine Mystery,
would leave humanity abandoned in some kind of an anarchy of a
moral-less evil and ungodly jungle is to mock the Divine Itself.
Surely there is a Plan, or better yet - Divine order and form to
our existence.
Well duh!, as the young people say today.
The Evolution of Consciousness is the
unfolding of human potential from within outward. Something
inside us, as we unfold our humanity, contains within it just what is
needed. This is why I give it the term: Grace. We possess something as a Gift. If there is
a caveat, it is that we only can unfold it by our own will. It is
latent and can only come to the fore by our practice and our intention.
We have to will to be moral. We have to choose.
The first stage of this is self trust.
We have to have Faith in the Divine within (something appearing
more and more everywhere). Emerson puts it most succinctly, in
his lecture The American Scholar: "In self trust all virtues are
comprehended."
This is, of course, one of the hallmarks
of the epoch of the
consciousness soul - more and more people are
trusting their own moral/spiritual intuitions over any outside agency
or institution. No longer do we accept and tolerate what the
dying hierarchical religious social forms tell us to believe. We
only have confidence in our own judgment - we know something
trustworthy is living inside of us.
In addition, something is going on in our
biographies in this Age. We are being more and more placed in
situations where it is not possible to choose to drop back into a
dependent child-like moral path. Instead the only choice is to
rely on ourselves. Each biography lurches from moral crisis to
moral crisis, where not to choose is not to be allowed. Life
itself insists: Choose! Choose! Choose!
[ Once upon a time, there was a man who became somebody else. His daughter had a vision in which she saw it happen, saw the new spirit and its dark natural companion (the Shadow) enter into her life...and his and theirs.
The man soon saw that he could not stay in the relationship he was in, yet since he had left this family once before, his soul entered a state of moral gridlock and deep depression ensued. One day he began to walk, having lost any ability with his thinking to take hold of things, and found himself walking up a winding road to a quiet hilltop where he prayed sincerely and deeply, for the first time in many years.
Instantly the
depression was lifted in an act of Grace, and he knew that either way
he chose was all right. To not choose was the only flawed way,
for that led to his own descent into illness, perhaps even madness.
But as to the consequences for others - he chose what made him the most whole, and then
from that place of wholeness he was still able to love, even more
deeply than before.]
To appreciate this in its fullness all we
have to do is look at what the artists tell us, with their dramas on
stage, in film and on television, or in the songs the singers sing.
This development is seen everywhere.
For example, one of my favorite
television writers, David E. Kelley (whom I call America's
Shakespeare), he who has penned much of L. A. Law, Chicago Hope, Picket
Fences, The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Public and Boston Legal, has
one of his characters (the Sheriff) in Picket Fences, say at the end of
a particularly difficult day, something on the order of: "there are no moral rules any
more, we are all on our own."
Our very language speaks of this, for
what in the fifties was meant by "do the right thing," became in the sixties "do your own thing." And, of course, there is that very difficult
decision that women face today, that appears to divide people
everywhere into seemingly war-making camps - the right to life, versus
the right to choose.
What this conflict asks is: Can an
individual know what is moral, without outside guidance in the form of
some religious authority's given rules of conduct? And, keep in
mind that those most asserting the right to provide moral guidance, are
the priests of the dying hierarchical organizations. In most
cases it is they who are not yet ready to let go the prestige and power
the claim of such authority grants, while at the same time their
congregations are beginning to know otherwise. And, lest we
ignore this aspect, it will certainly be the case that many will have
no desire to take on the challenge of ambiguity and uncertainty in true
moral choice, and will then want to remain in a co-dependent
relationship with a supposed moral authority. Some will not want
to grown into spiritual maturity.
If, as I have been suggesting, that the
fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets is now emerging
from human hearts, how is that going on, in a practical and observable
way, within the inner forum of individual consciousness?
I will put the essential matter this
way...
The human being has an inner organization of which we have lost (in the age of a spiritless science) a clear knowledge. We simply do not posses a proper language by which to describe this inner landscape, so as to be able to answer the above question in a concrete, realistic and perhaps even scientific fashion. (In fact, it is one of the main social transformations that is going on today, from the bottom up - namely a reaching into language and reinvigorating its capacity to accurately represent our inner realities.)
What concrete reference can there be, in
the age of science, to such terms as soul and spirit?
It is to help us answer this question
that the spiritual essence of the meaning of the Kings (initiates) has,
for a brief time, returned (Steiner was not the only one, but more on
this later).
The spiritual essence of the human being
is properly called the "I-am." Although this term, the "I-am", is
often written in that form, hereinafter in this text I will write it as
follows: i-AM, seeking thereby to remind the reader that the i-AM
is not something which is a mere thing, but is rather something much
much more dynamic. We are, we exist, that is our spiritual
essence. At the same time, we, as i-AMs,
act - we choose. That
capacity to act, to choose, to create, in this we are will-on-fire, so
in giving name to our spirit it is my hope to emphasize this quality by
downplaying our individuality (i), and up-playing our fiery
will (AM). We are verbs, not nouns.
We can also call this i-AM
the ego, but there is a dangerous confusion that can arise when we
consider the differences between Christian gnostic practice in this
regard, and the deeper teachings of Buddhism regarding ego. It
would be going too far to fully resolve this confusion, yet something
needs be said here, for many will naturally have a concern, given their
own encounters with Buddhist thought (especially any form of pop
(superficial) -Buddhism).
At best I can suggest something from
another book it has been my fortune to encounter - the previously
mentioned and anonymously written Meditations
on the Tarot: a journey in to Christian Hermeticism. In this book one will find the following idea,
which I will paraphrase.
Eastern wisdoms consider that the core of
the human being is being, and that the goal of
human development is reached when this core of being
re-integrates itself with the Original Source, or Being.
This is frequently described as a voluntary giving up of ego, or self identity.
According to the author of Meditations, the Christian idea regarding the ego, or the i-AM,
is different. This i-AM is an individual essence
(the human being is created in the image and likeness of God), and the
goal of Christian practice is the meeting of our individual essence
with the Cosmic Individual Essence that is Love. A separate
identity remains (for both), even while we become enveloped within Love
(described in the Gospels in the Parable of the Return of the Prodigal
Son - the Gospel story of re-integration) - essence within Essence. The crucial question is put this way: How can
there be Love if there is not a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love itself
that is to be shared between them? If being
simply merges with Being (out of which arises
identification leading to compassion), there can be no such Love. Yet, if essence is to meet
and know Essence, then the Lover, the Beloved and Love (the phase of development in the Evolution of
Consciousness after compassion) will certainly be.
By the way, I do not believe this apparent conflict (between Buddhism and Christianity) regarding the nature of the ego (or i-AM) is unresolvable. The full Idea of the nature of the resolution simply lies far outside the intended scope of this small book, although certain aspects of this book are meant to contribute to that resolution an a practical level.
Now within the inner forum of our
consciousness (the soul), the i-AM
(the spirit) sits as the essential center (what Steiner describes as
that which we only can refer to when we say the word "I"), while the
rest of consciousness (the unconscious and so forth - all that is
invisible to others, but which each of us knows - at least in part and
with great personal intimacy) could be called the soul. So when
we see another person, we recognize another ego being (another i-AM),
who also has a rich inner (soul) life (see all the books being written
today in an effort to describe soul life, from Gary Zukav's The Seat
of the Soul, to Robert Sardello's Facing the
World with Soul).
This inner life is very complicated, and
materialistic science is only beginning to scratch the surface of its
realities. However, with regard to the moral question we have
been trying to understand and appreciate, the following can be said (at
least at this point in this work):
When the human being poses a moral
question to him or herself ("is this act I contemplate right or wrong in a moral sense?"), we have by Grace the capacity to receive an answer.
In this receiving of an answer we are in that moment (again by
Grace) inwardly Kings. We are Shepherds in that we have the faith
that we can know the answers to moral questions, and Kings when we ask
and inwardly listen and receive. Faith and Gnosis in the Age of the consciousness soul are no longer apart, but are rather united in human
beings that follow the deepest moral sensibilities of their own hearts
(an action which, as it develops and grows, requires and results in
more and more strength of character).
In the next section, we mostly focus on Freedom, but we will begin by examining three specific forms in which knowledge of this union of Faith and Gnosis, via Moral Grace, has appeared in modern Western Culture (it is appearing elsewhere, but below I am just going to refer to matters in the cultural West). In this way we will also come to a deeper and more practical appreciation of what has been, and still is, going on in our Civilization.
Freedom
- the theme (song) of the real challenge of modern life -
fifth stanza
Three New Ways
being an examination of the profound and surprising interrelationship
between the What Would Jesus Do Movement;
the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous; and,
Rudolf Steiner's book: The Philosophy of Freedom
(also known
as, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,)
So far we have come to understand that
the meaning-essence of the Kings of the original Gospel stories has returned - that is that authentic gnosis is once more being taught in Western Culture, even
though this Culture is dominated by Materialistic Science.
Further, many members of the religion that is Christianity want
to believe (perhaps erroneously) that their religion remains firmly
(and only) rooted in Faith. The ancient wisdom of the Kings has
been relegated to a mere paganism, and salvation is now thought to
depend only upon accepting Jesus as our Lord, confessing to being
saved, and/or in a blind obedience to morally bankrupt institutional
hierarchies - the all too often hypocritical priests and preachers, who
claim the right and the authority to tell other individuals what to
believe and how to be moral.
But the world is not ruled, or given
order, by these vain authorities. The world order (as we shall
come to more and more understand) is in quite other Hands. A
claim of moral authority by one person over another person is being replaced by Moral Grace from Above - the Law and the Prophets are becoming the
spiritual treasure of each individual heart.
Next, we shall examine in detail just how the phenomena of modern Culture reveals that with the co-participation of incarnate human beings, Christ is deeply active in our individual lives.
*
Not everyone is the same. This
obvious fact is often overlooked, especially when people want to think
that their personal Way is the very best Way, and all the rest somehow
lesser means or beliefs. Fortunately, in the epoch of the consciousness soul, this tendency may become extinct to a great degree. This is because
one of the items we all first have to learn on our own Path is humility
(what in the John Gospel is demonstrated for us by Christ's "washing of the feet"). The journey through humility then, as lived in
our individual biographies, can soon cause us to clearly realize that
each Thou is to be entirely free to choose their own Way, just as we
recognize our own need to also be free to choose.
Even so, much is accomplished in
communities, and there are three communities that I have come to some
personal knowledge concerning, that can serve as excellent examples of
not only Moral Grace in practice, but of the relationship of Freedom to
that very activity. All the same, we do need to keep in mind the
very legitimate question: Whether it is possible for an individual to have real
moral knowledge, independent of seemingly authoritative and
traditionally acceptable sources, such as religious texts? And, as a necessary corollary question: What does it mean if ones
moral intuitions of the heart conflict with these traditional
authorities?
In modern American Culture, for example, Christian Faith is the foremost religious practice. Surely if God - the Divine Mystery - were to offer something new, something beyond moral rules, He/She/It would certainly not leave out ordinary Christians. This is so. At about the same time that Rudolf Steiner (a King) was publishing his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) in Germany in 1894, in the United States in 1897 was published In His Steps, written by Charles M. Sheldon (a Shepherd), a young minister who was then living in Kansas. The fact of the co-participation of Highest Grace, in the more or less simultaneousness of these writings, is not to be overlooked by the way.
the Shepherd's Tale
This book (In His
Steps) is a fictional (or imaginative)
account (a story) of what happens in a certain church community when a
particular question is faced. This question is: What does it mean
to practice being a Christian, such as is described in the New
Testament (I Peter 2:21) as follows: "For hereunto were ye called:
because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye
should follow in
his steps." (emphasis added) [This being the
first lines of Chapter I of Sheldon's book, and of course the basis for
its title.]
The rest of the book is an effort to work
out this question of Christian practice in quite pragmatic ways.
At the same time at the very beginning, certain aspects of
the book's Idea and its method are laid out very carefully. One of
the central characters, for example, asks this question from the pulpit
in the second Chapter: "I want volunteers from the First Church who will pledge
themselves, earnestly and honestly for an entire year, not to do
anything without first asking the question, "What
would Jesus do?"
And after asking that question, each one will follow Jesus as
exactly as he knows how, no matter what the result may be."
This asking (faith) and knowing (gnosis)
is then elaborated a few pages later, as follows: (a question is
being asked of the minister who made the above challenge, by a
parishioner...)
"I am a little in doubt as to the source of our knowledge
concerning what Jesus would do. Who is to decide for me just what
He would do in my case? It is a different age. There are
many perplexing questions in our civilization that are not mentioned in
the teachings of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?"
"There is no way that I know of," replied the pastor,
"except as we study Jesus through the medium of the Holy Spirit.
You remember what Christ said speaking to His disciples about the
Holy Spirit: "Howbeit when He the spirit of
truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth; for He shall not
speak for Himself but what things soever He shall hear, then shall He
speak; and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come.
He shall glorify me; for He shall take of mine and declare it
unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine;
therefore said I, that He taketh of mine and shall declare it unto to
you." There
is no other test that I know of. We shall all have to decide what
Jesus would do after going to that source of knowledge."
My interjection - the quote above appears
to be from John 16:13-15. Here is a different translation than
the one that Sheldon used of the same passage, but which includes the
sentence before verse 13, that is John 16: 12-15: "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear
them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into
the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he
hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to
come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and
declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I
said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." Since this quote that Sheldon uses here concerns
the process of gnosis ("going to that source of knowledge"),
are we to be surprised that he has chosen to quote from the Gospel of
John (the Gospel of Gnosis)? {I have
much more to say to you, but you can't bear it just yet. But when
the other comes, the breath of truth, he will guide you in the ways of
all truth, because he will not speak on his own, but will speak what he
hears and announce to you what's coming. He will glorify me,
because he will take of what is mine and announce it to you.
Everything the Father has is mine: that's why I said he will take
of what is mine and announce it to you}.]
To continue with Sheldon's book...
"What if others say of us, when we do certain things, that
Jesus would not do so?" asked the superintendent of railroads.
"We cannot prevent that. But we must be absolutely
honest with ourselves. The standard of Christian action cannot
vary in most of our acts."
"And yet what one church member thinks Jesus would do,
another refuses to accept as His probable course of action. What
is to render our conduct uniformly Christ-like? Will it be
possible to reach the same conclusions always in all cases?" asked
President Marsh.
Mr. Maxwell
was silent some time. Then he answered, "No; I don't know that we
can expect that. But when it comes to a genuine, honest,
enlightened following of Jesus' steps, I cannot believe there will be
any confusion either in our own minds or in the judgment of others.
We must be free from fanaticism on one hand and too much caution
on the other. If Jesus' example is the example for the world to
follow, it certainly must be feasible to follow it. But we need
to remember this great fact. After we have asked the Spirit to
tell us what Jesus would do and have received an answer to it, we are
to act regardless of the results to ourselves. Is that understood?"
The process Sheldon seems to understand
is very clear. We are to inwardly ask, and then listen for the
Holy Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do. In this way we are
living out Christ's admonition: "Ask and it shall be given
you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you." Matthew 7:7 {Ask and
you will receive, look and you will find, knock and you will be
admitted.}
So we have, at the beginning of Sheldon's
book, a clear outline of how to practice Moral Grace. In the rest
of the book Sheldon attempts to imagine what actions his characters
might take, and as Sheldon himself is an early Temperance (anti-Saloon)
advocate, the rest of the story has certain odd characteristics
connected to the time and place, and the related dominant cultural
values in which Sheldon himself lived. All the same, his central intuition as to the
method of Moral Grace in action remains
valid, in spite of the limitations of his imagination to flesh it out
in a way with which our modern sensibilities can easily identify.
Now the curious thing is that at the same time a young Shepherd (a pastor in Kansas) was coming to this understanding, a young King (Steiner had been working on this problem from his mid-20's to his early 30's) was drawing the same conclusions, albeit in a quite different context and by a quite different means. Where Sheldon created an imaginative picture (a story), Steiner wrote a book squarely in the German philosophical tradition, in which its remarks on moral life fully paralleled what Sheldon outlined above.
There is also, due to the differing
nature of their approaches (Sheldon the Shepherd, traveling the Path of
Faith, and Steiner the King, traveling the Path of Gnosis), a
considerable difference in how they framed their understanding of what
I have called here: Moral Grace
For Sheldon the matter was handled in a very pragmatic (and typically American) fashion. It was what worked that concerned him, and his question was: How do we best follow Christ Jesus in practice? For Steiner, a middle European, the need was to express the philosophic Ideal in a form consistent with the dominant paradigm of the 19th Century, Natural Science. Thus, his question was: On what basis can questions, regarding the freedom and moral nature of our inner life, be understood in the Age of Science?
At the same time, in both cases, each was
faced with the reality of human nature, and our actual relationship to
Spirit. They just came at that reality from different directions,
with the result that the same reality ends up being
described in considerably different ways.
the King's Tale
With Steiner, however, we have to take a
somewhat different course than we took with Sheldon. What was a
novel, and an act of the imagination for Sheldon, was for Steiner an
attempt to take an introspective look at the problem of knowledge in a
specific field of formal philosophy (what is called there epistemology), following logical and observational principles modeled
on natural science.
Did you understand that last sentence?
Possibly not, and that is a good example of what will be faced by
most people trying to read Steiner's The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom),
written in German and then translated into English. Because
of this I am going to approach the content in this book of Steiner's
also as a story.
Now keep in mind that this story is
coming from a King, not a Shepherd, that is from someone with direct
experience of the Divine (Gnosis), not a relationship based upon Faith.
According to his autobiography, Steiner began having such
experiences from the time he was eight years old, and these continued
throughout his life. Here we are looking at a book written in his
early 30's, after he had acquired his doctorate degree in philosophy.
His problem was to take his spiritual experience and then root it
in the soundness of the German philosophical tradition, and in the
methods of thinking and observation which were at the basis of natural
science. He looked not for the sometimes vague and beautiful
mysticism of a St. John of the Cross, or a St. Teresa of Avila, but for
the precision and exactitude of pure mathematics and theoretical
physics.
He looked inward, and began to describe,
albeit using the language of philosophy, what exact observation
(introspection) might find within the inner (soul) life of the human
being. In a sense, his description is a map of an invisible
territory, that is only knowable if we ourselves look at the same
invisible place within our own inwardness. The book then consists
of a series of questions one can place before ones self (the map), that
can only be answered when we authentically and objectively observe
ourselves (the actual territory). The book also seeks to draw
this map in as an exact a way as possible, because the goal was to
bring to spiritual inquiry the precision of the adventure of science.
Remember what I said above in discussing the unusual challenge
for those with modern direct experience of the Divine Mystery - the
need to make spiritual experience fit in with the spirit of the Age
(Science), that is to show how it's seeking and achievements can be
repeated by others.
Having followed this map, I will next relate not so much what Steiner describes, but rather my own explorations, using the same language conventions which Steiner used - my own version of the story as seen under the guidance of his map, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) (or what I sometimes want to call: The Philosophy of Free Becoming). [This is by the way, based upon over 35 years of introspective life, for details see Appendix 7: In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship]
Deep in our soul, our spirit asks several
fundamental questions. Here are just a few: What am I? What
is the purpose of existence? What is the truth? How do I
know the truth? Am I a free human being? What does it mean
to be a free human being? Am I a moral human being? How do
I know what is moral? As a
human being, I have desires, hungers, needs and wants. Am I free
when I live out these hungers and wants? Can I choose what I
want? Is my will free, or am I just a creature of appetite and
habit?
On the journey to answering these
questions, Steiner points in the direction of first and foremost
examining the nature of thinking itself, for it is in thinking that we
first pose these questions. Yet, thinking does not exist in a
vacuum, but rather is influenced by our emotional life and by our life
of apparent instincts and hungers. With regard then to acts of
thinking, his map suggests that we notice the difference between
thinking and experience, or what he sometimes calls: concept and
percept. We have experiences, outward in the sense world and
inward in the soul world, and these are percepts (perceptions).
To these experiences (percepts) we attach ideas or concepts -
that is we think at the same time we experience, and the meaning of the experiences, both outer and
inner, is provided by the act of thinking.
For example, in the simplest way we know the names of all manner of objects. This is a tree, that is a car. As we grow, the concepts and ideas we have about something that arises either in the sense world, or inwardly in the soul (such as an experience of an emotion like fear) becomes more complicated. We learn, and in this way our conceptual life deepens, so that someone who is a good cook, or a good car mechanic, will know (think) all manner of things, that someone less experienced will not know (think).
And, just as we can know about outer
world objects, we also can think about inner world objects. A
Tibetan Buddhist, or a contemplative Nun, will have then considerable
knowledge from thinking about the life of meditation and prayer.
Steiner's map suggests that there is a
hierarchy of objects in the soul (mind) as regards our concepts, for
which he uses the terms: mental representations, concepts and ideas.
We just need to remember that the crucial matter is to look at
our own thinking and see how, and if, such names (mental
representation, concepts and ideas) can be related to what we actually
experience when we look within. We are being asked by Steiner, in
taking an approach to introspection out of the scientific spirit, to
make careful observations and fine distinctions.
In this way, and using Steiner's map (the
King's Tale), we begin a journey of detailed examination of our inner
life that can be as exact and precise as that which a scientist comes
to when he examines an unknown compound to determine from which
elements and molecules it has been created. All manner of
objects can be found there, in the mind or inner life, such as (no need
for the reader to know these, I just here give a few
of the names to lay out some of the more general features of this inner
landscape): cultivated feelings, raw emotions, antipathies, sympathies,
likes and dislikes, conscious and unconscious acts of will, mental
representations, concepts, ideas, intuitions, and moral imaginations.
As it is that Steiner is a King, it is
necessarily part of his intention to make this map capable of leading
the reader to the same state of being (gnosis, or what is
sometimes called initiation in the cultural Center, and enlightenment
in the cultural East). The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) is
a map to the inner world created by a King in order that those who
follow it can come, through their own effort at thinking, to authentic
spiritual experience. In the cultural Far West, in the Americas,
this path leads through the development of earthly character (rather than directly at enlightenment or initiation), a matter that will become more clear as our discussion
deepens over the next chapters.
The freedom Steiner wants for us, in
working through his book The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom),
is not political freedom, but what might be called inner
freedom or spiritual freedom. He lays out his map so that we can, by
the growing development of intended and attentive thinking, find our
way through the labyrinth of the conscious and unconscious elements of
our mind to the gateway that lies in the depths of that mind, and which
leads from our own essence (spirit) and inwardness (soul) to the
Essence and Inwardness of the Universe.
Now what I have been calling Moral Grace,
and what Sheldon describes from his view as a Shepherd (asking
ourselves What Would Jesus Do, and then trusting that the Holy Spirit
will bring inwardly to us the answer), is in the King's Tale a
significant feature of the landscape of this inner world of soul, but
not the totality. So we have here from Sheldon, the Shepherd, how
Moral Grace is seen from the point of view of Faith, and now from
Steiner, how Moral Grace is seen from the point of view of Gnosis.
This feature of the inner landscape Steiner has called moral
imagination, which he speaks of in the text in the following ways:
"To be free means to be able of ones own accord to determine by moral imagination those mental pictures (motives) which underlie the action."
"...as a moral being, I am an individual and have laws of my very own."
"Moral action, then, presupposes, in addition to the faculty of having moral ideas (moral intuition) and moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of percepts without violating the natural laws by which these are connected. This ability is called moral technique."
"Moral laws, on the other hand, are first created by us. We cannot apply them until we have created them."
"He [meaning human beings in
general, ed.] has
purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his
concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.
But his action will belong to perceptible reality.
What he achieves will thus be identical with a quite
definite content of perception."
Now in the above quotations, Steiner has
used certain terms which are in other places in his book more fully
elaborated, and which in the quotes above are meant to have a specific
and exact meaning - that is to describe and point out something in the
inner landscape that all can observe and know, such as mental picture,
moral intuition, ideal reasons and so forth. However, rather than
get into a long explanatory elaboration of what Steiner meant, I will
simply now briefly cover this by sharing what I have learned through my
own experience of following this map to the inner landscape of the
soul. This is not meant, by the way, to replace the inner work in
Steiner's text, for the very reading of that text is a developmental
exercise for the soul and spirit of the human being. Here, I am
just endeavoring to sketch out the general Idea of the moral aspect of his book,
so that we can come to see how this way
of seeing the Idea relates also to how Sheldon saw this same Idea (the Idea of Moral Grace).
When I am confronted in life by a
specific moral dilemma, a dilemma that demands of me that I make a
moral choice, there are basically two ways I can go in how in my mind I
consider the problem. One way is to draw from memory some learned
moral ideal, given perhaps by admonitions or rules acquired from a
religious text, or perhaps from a learned relative or teacher.
Another way is to ask myself what I think is the
right thing to do.
More and more in our Age, individuals
have been choosing to do the latter, and to leave aside the former.
Our current state of development in the Evolution of
Consciousness is such that we are learning more and more to trust
(recall Emerson's: In self trust all virtues are comprehended) our own intuitions of what the good is in any specific
situation, than we are any longer willing to trust a rule. The
reason this is so has nothing to do with what critics of this call
moral relativism, and everything to do with an emerging intelligence in
our own being. This personal intelligence (our own moral genius)
actually sees the particular dilemma with greater clarity,
including our own relationship to the question. A rule, on the
other hand, being of an abstract and idealistic nature, does not take
account of the individual characteristics of the situation we are
facing.
The reality is that when a moral dilemma
approaches us, it calls forth to our individual moral intelligence to
respond. This dilemma in our personal biography doesn't say: go
to the library of the mind and look in a book for the right thing to
do. On the contrary, the very personal nature of the dilemma in
our individual biography demands an equally personal response. We have to act. Yet, the conflict naturally arises,
as both the Shepherd (Sheldon) and the King (Steiner) saw at the end of
the 19th Century - how do we know the good in such times of moral crisis?
Sheldon's answer was that we have been
given, in the Gospels, the clear teaching to follow In His
steps, and that in asking What
Would Jesus Do, we frame in ourselves the
necessary first and right question. After which, we trust (have
faith in) the Holy Spirit to bring to us (gnosis - knowledge of) the
answer. Steiner's answer is that we create an inner picture of
the dilemma (a moral imagination), and trust ourselves to experience a
corresponding moral intuition of the good as that is needed in the
moment as regards that particular moral question.
In practice, although the words used to
describe the process are different, it is the same very
human inner
gesture in each case. We frame a
question, and we seek the highest answer in response. And, at the
same time, it is an
inner act of spirit on our part to do this.
We have framed the question inwardly, and looked inwardly
for the answer. Where Sheldon refers to the activity of the Holy
Spirit in the response, Steiner speaks of moral intuition, and by the
term intuition he means the exact same thing - namely that such
intuitions are not merely an isolated inner act, but given that the
human inwardness is a gateway to the Spirit, when we experience a moral
intuition we have a like encounter with Spirit as that referred to by
Sheldon.
[Another way to see this from the point
of view of the Divine Mystery is as follows. The Divine Mystery,
in the form of the Holy Spirit, gives Itself to us. We, It's children, receive from within (Above) via our authentic
seeking questioning, as a free gift in this time, knowledge of the Good
- the Good being some of the very substance of the Divine Mystery. This inner Eucharist is
then Moral Grace in action, or what Sheldon calls the Holy Spirit.
Another way to see this is that it is a kind of dialog between
our undeveloped self, and our highest nature, which we sometimes call
conscience. We then consciously exchange or have conscious
interaction with our conscience on the path to coming to knowledge of
the Good. We seek the conscience, and this seeking becomes a
co-participation in the highest that is within the own soul.
Conscience is the substance of the Divine Mystery
given to us (as a part of us) through an act of Grace from above, via
the within (the
kingdom of heaven is within you - Luke
17:21).]
This all to brief and limited explanation
then is the main characteristic of our Age, which Steiner in his stories calls the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul, and which in
his book Theosophy he describes as
follows:
"By causing the self-existent true and good to come to
life in his inner being, the human being raises himself above the mere
sentient-soul. A light is kindled in her [the soul, ed.] which is imperishable. In so far as the soul lives
in this light, she is a participant in the eternal. With the
eternal she unites her own existence. What the soul carries
within herself of the true and the good is immortal in her. Let
us call that which shines forth in the soul as eternal, the
consciousness soul."
What Sheldon expresses in the question What Would Jesus Do is the seeking by the Faithful after the highest good as
they might be able to come to know it. What Steiner expresses in
the question framed by the moral imagination (the creation of the
picture question of the moral dilemma) is the same inner gesture of
seeking knowledge (Gnosis) of the highest good. Both Sheldon and
Steiner expect the Divine Mystery to participate, and what the one
calls the Holy Spirit, the other calls moral intuition, and again each
means the same thing, for the mind (soul and spirit) of the human being
in reaching inwardly for an answer to the particular moral dilemma
faced by them as an individual, through this reaching one does in fact
come into contact with the Eternal.
This then is the situation of modern
humanity - this possibility to know individually what is moral in any
given particular and personal moral dilemma, and which I have called
here, precisely because the Divine Mystery participates in the creation
of this potential and its activation: Moral Grace. [This situation of
modern humanity is more present in the cultural Far West than
elsewhere, a complicated matter beyond the current scope of inquiry.
Let us just say that a highly developed individuality is a
necessary preliminary stage before the Evolution of Consciousness can
call forth the Moral Grace of the consciousness soul, and that in the
cultural Far West individualism is stronger in the present than in other parts of the world. Other parts of
the world have some of this development, but in general lag behind to a
degree, for the moment. Advancement of this kind - the Evolution
of Consciousness - proceeds in waves as it were, and does not
arrive all at once everywhere.]
It is though an act of Divine Grace that
we possess the capacity to know the Good (the Moral), and the True as
an act of individual question and answering. Moreover it is an
act, which is clearly meant to enable us to be inwardly free of any
confining and limited religious dogma. The days of the authority
of priests, or pastors and preachers (and mullas and masters), to
define individual human moral activity are meant to be over, and it is
the Divine Mystery Itself that has created in us this capacity to seek,
to ask and to find.
Naturally there are many questions, and I
will try to anticipate and answer a few of them next.
We can distinguish the act of knowing what the good (the moral) is in a given situation, from
our acting upon that knowledge (moral technique - or how we carry
out in practice our knowledge of the good). That is, we remain
inwardly free to follow, or not, what we know to be right to do.
This has always been the case, and will always be the case.
Knowledge of the good and the true (What Would Jesus Do) does
not compel. We still must choose to
follow this knowledge. Recall what Sheldon wrote: "After we have asked the
Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do and have received an answer to
it, we are to act regardless of the results to ourselves. Is that
understood?"
While Sheldon, the Shepherd, has
understood then Moral Grace, he has not quite yet understood Freedom.
He still has to preach, and in so doing instructs those who would
take up this activity, that they "are to act regardless of the
results to themselves". Sheldon
understood Moral Grace, but not yet Freedom - that which comes from
distinguishing knowledge of the good from acting upon that knowledge.
People will disagree concerning what is
moral in a given situation, in particular if they approach the
situation as if there were a set of rules that covered all possible
realities. So some will think that all killing or all
abortions are morally wrong, and will judge others, who act contrary to
their rules as regards such actions, as morally incorrect. But
this is not the question really being faced by either Sheldon or
Steiner.
First let us take up abortion for a bit
as an example, since it is question that dominates the world in many
forms and ways.
First, an abortion always takes place
with regard to a particular individual person, and is part of their
individual biography. There is then the moral question that
belongs to them to answer: Do I have an abortion and why? Second,
in a time when many such actions are being taken, those who have as
part of their biography the concern as to what it means to end the life
of a fetus, come up with a personal question of their own: How do I
relate to a world and the culture in which I live, where large numbers
of abortions are happening, which I believe are murder?
As we know, in the case of both questions
there are many individual circumstances and many individual responses.
Some women use abortion as a kind of contraception. Some
women never really ask themselves the essential question. Some
women agonize greatly, and never feel (whatever their decision) that
they made the right choice. Some who oppose abortion generally,
will work to convince the potential mothers to take the baby to term
and at least give it up for adoption. Some others will picket
clinics and try to make their clients and doctors and nurses feel
guilty. Some even commit crimes in order to do what they think
their conscience requires.
In looking at these social facts, we can
see (in spite of what some say is a Truth which all must apply) how in
each individual biography a crisis of choice is confronted with greater
or lesser consciousness. What this shows us is exactly how the
epoch of the consciousness soul is unfolding. None of these
agonizing trials lies outside the concern and interest and support of
the Divine Mystery.
To return to the Shepherd's Tale and the
Kings Tale...
Nowhere in either work is the question
put in such a way that we judge what the other person is doing.
We don't ask What Would Jesus Do, or seek a
moral intuition, about someone else's moral dilemma. We can only
ask these questions about our own moral dilemmas, and the operation of
Moral Grace is such that we can only receive an answer to a question
which is ours alone to ask. The Divine Mystery has not said to us
- look within and I will tell you what other people should morally do.
There are quite clear reasons why this is so.
Each human biography is unique.
Yes, there are many similarities, but each of us is a completely
different individual and our biographies are just as individual.
Simple observation shows us this. This means that a moral
dilemma in my biography, regardless of any superficial comparisons, is
in no way the same as a similar moral dilemma in yours. We are
very much facing our own trials, and because abstract idealstic rules
can't really comprehend the nuances of the distinctions and
differences, we have by Moral Grace the means to know what is right to
do in our particular and unique situation. The Divine Mystery has
created us individuals, and Loves us as individuals and knows that our
needs are also individual.
The broader social implications of this
we will face later, but for now we need to appreciate that Moral Grace
only operates as individual knowledge of the good and the true (What Would Jesus Do), and in no way provides us any abstract rule or code by
which to judge the morality of the other, the Thou (who bears within themselves the same personal Moral
Grace).
We can also do a poor job of asking.
We can be quite inauthentic and dishonest in how we frame the
question, and we can also let ourselves believe we have an answer which
is quite self serving and in error. We are after all quite
human, and there is a good reason the Lord's Prayer contains the plea: "And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil" Matthew
6:13 {And do not put us to the test, but snatch us from the
Evil One's clutches, ...}. The act of
asking the question in an authentic and honest way, and the act of
listening inwardly in a selfless and open fashion, is not an easy act.
Much darkness in us will turn us away from the truth. One
way we can know that the answer is the correct one will be that it asks
of us something we might well not like doing (which truth Sheldon
understood, which is why he tried to insist that the knowledge be acted
upon). True moral activity is often difficult, and frequently
comes with a cost (for a wonderful dramatic elaboration of this
reality, see the film: Pay it
Forward from the book of the same name by
Catherine Ryan Hyde).
Let us pause here a moment and consider
this movie more intimately, for it touches an aspect of moral conduct
which we might describe as being pro-active rather than as re-active.
Normally in life the moral dilemma offered to us by the
individual biography comes toward us in a circumstance of crisis.
The dilemma confronts us. In the movie Pay it
Forward, the teaching intuited there is
framed in such a that in what way or how we can act morally
pro-actively (creatively) in the world other than re-actively (that is
only on the basis of being confronted in crisis).
In the film this pro-active creative
morality (something also common in this Age - see Civil Society,
doctors without borders, etc.) is outlined as follows: First, it
involves a generosity between two strangers (a re-active dilemma
usually involves people we already know). The young boy in the
film (Jesus' age at the Temple?) has been asked by a school teacher to think
of an idea that could change the world.
His life experience is hard, such that he believes "everything sucks". So his idea is to challenge us to do three pro-active moral acts as gifts to three strangers. The moral nature of these acts comes from their generosity, and the fact that it is difficult or hard for us to be this generous is an important aspect of this self-chosen moral conduct.
He is fighting against us accepting the
way things are (or appears to him - everything sucks), and wants us to have faith in the goodness of other
people, such that when we do this act of generosity, we also ask them
to pass it on - to Pay it
Forward. He learns a hard lesson in the
film, that you can't actually fix a person (see the 12 Steps
next below), but the person who is inspired by our generosity, to be
themselves generous in a difficult way to three others, could very well
begin to fix (heal) themselves.
To return to our main theme...
In many ways, however, Moral Grace really
comes down to practice. We have to awaken inwardly and become active
there. Without our willing it, nothing happens. Moral Grace
needs our activity to manifest. We have to sincerely ask, and be
willing to accept the consequences of knowing what the right thing to
do is. We should expect to get it wrong, as often as not, for we
are here speaking of a very subtle and real inner experience, that
requires a certain discipline and silence in the soul in order to have
the right space in which to appear. We will also do actions we
know are wrong. We have asked and been answered and we do not
follow the answer. The activity of the Holy Spirit (moral
intuition) does not beat us over the head inwardly, but is more like a
whisper, that well-known small, still and quiet voice. Knowledge of the Good does
not compel action upon that knowledge.
Here, from my biography, is a story told
to me by someone of quiet personal grace (I will in all probability get
some of the details wrong). This person described to me a
situation where she was sitting watching some children at play, the
children themselves watched over by their mothers. The mothers
chatted and then occasionally acted, not always just looking out for
their own child, but often taking in and acting upon the whole play
situation. Now my friend on occasion sees Angels, and in this
instance an Angel was near where she sitting on a park bench. At
one point the Angel comments as follows "See, do." - in this way highlighting the moral activity (love)
at the center of the overseeing of the play situation by the various
mothers. One first sees, and then does. Now this seeing is
twofold, being both outward and inward. One must take in the
situation - the ordinary call to moral action (see the need to act) and
know the good (see the moral nature of the required act). In
life, this seeing of the situation and the good (the required act) are
often united in an almost seamless way, the one immediately flowing
into the other, or "See, do".
So far then we have considered the Shepherd's Tale and the King's Tale, and seen their
inner correspondence. But life is often lived in many kinds of
harsh circumstances, and some moral problems run deep, such that we
seem almost possessed by evil and demonic forces. As alcoholics
and their families know, for example, demon
rum is terribly destructive, as are all kinds of what we call
addictions and other seemingly unchangeable habits of behavior.
But just as we have heard so far of the wisdom-filled experience
of a Shepherd and a King, so now we come to the wisdom-filled
experience of a couple of Healers, and the development of what are
called: The Twelve Steps, applied in myriad places now, but originally
created as the founding practices of Alcoholics Anonymous.
the Healers' Tale
As an addict in recovery, I can speak
from experience about these kinds of moral dilemmas, which involve deep
and seemingly permanent behavior patterns, whose origin is not easy to
understand, and for which, in a way, there seems to be no cure.
Something exists within the inwardness (the soul), that has to be
learned about and lived with. That's why we say "in recovery," not "recovered." You don't get
over it, like one might remove the symptoms of the common cold.
You only find a means to master it (instead of it mastering you).
In my own thinking I call this process (the Twelve Steps seen as
a whole): the
elevation of the spirit for the mastery of the soul.
What I mean by this, and what the Twelve
Steps can accomplish, is not a direct attack on the root of the problem
of habitual out of control behavior, but rather a kind of process of inner education, by which the
individual, in the company of others, learns to live life on a
different basis than before. Through this learning (the Twelve
Steps), and the social influence of the companionship of others with
similar problems, the individuality (the spirit) learns to hold in
check the demon (my disease) which seems to live permanently within the
depths of our inwardness (the soul). This process involves, among
many other actions, a kind of constant moment to moment, day to day,
brutally honest self-reflection.
The Twelve Steps came into existence
through the meeting, in the early 1930's, of Bill W. and Doctor Bob,
two men whose own struggles with alcoholism had resisted all their
efforts to pass beyond. I'll leave aside the stories of this
meeting, its growth and then its evolution so as to include many
others, as well as its contextual background, which anyone can read
about in what is called: the big book of Alcoholics
Anonymous (at the same time suggesting that
this is a story that everyone would gain from understanding).
Instead, let us just go to the Steps as they are understood today.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought
through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God
as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and
the power to carry that out.
12. Having
had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to
carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all
our affairs.
Now, if the reader will look carefully at
these Twelve Steps, it should be obvious how it is that they too are
inwardly related to the understanding of Moral Grace offered to us by a
Shepherd and a King. At the same time, the Twelve Steps
approach to Moral Grace has to go much deeper than the Shepherd's Tale,
for it undertakes to
transform the basic nature of the individual,
not just seek after an answer to a particular moral question.
Again, like with Sheldon and Steiner, the
language used is different, but still the Healers looked inwardly at
the same reality, and just used the language with which they were most
comfortable to describe what they learned. For example, the
Healers pursued knowledge of His will, but left to the
individual how that was to be understood (as we understand him). Again, they looked within for the highest moral
understanding, all the while recognizing that each individual needed to
interpret this experience in his or her own way.
In addition, they went deeper. They
sought not only to know the moral and the good (God's Will as we understand it), but to transform their character (remove shortcomings). They also sought to redeem the past (make amends), a present action which when done (as those know who
actually practice it) changes you. Nor were these matters to be
abandoned when done, but rather the whole was to represent an acquired
daily spiritual practice, which had the result of leading to a
spiritual awakening.
Keep in mind here what has been said
above about character. The Twelve Steps can be a path of character
transformation, and it is no accident that in
the Far West of world culture, where the Original Peoples valued (and
still value) character above all else, that a spiritual path directed
right at character transformation would naturally arise.
In a very real sense, the Twelve Steps (the Healers' Tale) are a middle realm in between the work of Faith and the
work of Gnosis. Sheldon's version of Moral Grace is the simplest
as goes with his vocation, a Shepherd to the faithful. Steiner's
version is the most complicated, not only being philosophical and
scientific, but the moral question is only part of a much richer map of
the landscape he would have us visit on what is intended as a path of
initiation. With the Twelve Steps, we get something in between.
On the one hand it is clearly not as simple as Sheldon's
imaginative presentation, and on the other not nearly as complicated as
Steiner's map. The Twelve Steps also partake of that remarkable
American quality we know as pragmatism. They are not theoretical
at all, but are worked out entirely from practice - the only question
was/is: what works.
As everyone knows, however, the Twelve Steps are not a panacea. This as well has become understood pragmatically, for it is out of the Twelve Step work that we get the idea of the difference between merely talking the talk, and actually walking the walk. Anyone can learn the vocabulary of What Would Jesus Do, of the Philosophy of Freedom, or of the Twelve Steps. But being able to use the language (talk the talk) is quite different from the pragmatic and intimate personal knowledge of our own inner life that comes from the practical application in life (walking the walk) of these ideas.
*
Before we go on to the next aspect of our
considerations of Freedom, let us weave together the various elements
of our story thus far.
At the beginning of Christianity, there
were two Ways of meeting the Divine Mystery, with the older one
receding, while the newer one comes to the fore. The newer
one, mediated by a priesthood, was the Way of the Shepherds, a Way of
Faith, while the older, direct and personal, was the Way of the Kings,
a Way of Gnosis. At the same time, Christ entered the world in
between two quite different epochs in the Evolution of human
Consciousness - in between the third epoch, characterized by ancient
mysteries and hierarchical social structures, and the fifth epoch,
characterized by individuality, free moral choice and community
transformation arising out of the social commons.
Christ, in mediating between these two epochs - during the fourth epoch, took the Way of the Ancient Hebrews, what the Gospel stories called the Law and the Prophets, and promised their fulfillment - a New Way, and taught us, as individuals, how to accomplish this. But a task such as this is not easy, and does not take place all at once. The Old Way, with its outside rules of moral behavior (top down from an organized priesthood), had to slowly move aside for the New. This direction is pointed out in Christ's saying that the highest commandment was to Love God with all our heart, and all our mind, and all our spirit, with the second like unto it, namely to Love our Neighbor as ourselves.
Christ, as Creator, also added something
to human nature, which we have here been calling Moral Grace.
Rather than morality coming from the outside inward (the third
epoch, the Law and the Prophets), in the future it was to come from the
inside outward (the fifth epoch, the Law and the Prophets fulfilled,
through human freedom). This fact has been captured for us in
three profound Ways, namely through the work of Sheldon (a
Shepherd), brought to life in In His
Steps, through the work of Steiner (a
King), brought to life in The
Philosophy of Freedom, and finally through
the community
work in which the Twelve
Steps live, and in which healing arises out
of practices supported by that brotherhood and sisterhood on which are
shared the agonizing trials in life.
No one needs more proof of the existence
of Moral Grace, than what lives in the following of these three paths,
all of which have the same inner gesture, characterized by Christ
Himself in the promise: "Seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive, knock
an it shall be opened up to you" Matthew 7:7 {Ask and
you will receive, look and you will find, knock and you will be
admitted.}.
All of these Ways recognize that what is
urged is not easy, and this leads to certain yet to be raised questions
that have lurked in the background from the very beginning: What
is the meaning of Evil in human life? And, what is the
significance of the individual biography, as against the vast scope of
history? This brings us first to the:
sixth stanza
in the Absence of the Good*
in the Age of Freedom, and in the confusion of the weaknesses of traditional moral authority, what happens when Moral Grace is
not present - the Pharmaceutical
Industry as an Example
*"evil is the Absence of the Good",
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1272)
The following remarks are an effort to show how that in the Absence of the Good certain profoundly undesirable consequences arise. Certainly in the Pharmaceutical Industry (just one example - these problems are everywhere in our culture), as well as in the practice of medicine, there are many honorable men and women. At the same time, as we all recognize, the drive for profit frequently places any other values into the background. In fact, in our Age, while we could say that many wish to do the Good, most are forced to compromise in order to make a living. As a result the macro decisions of large institutions more and more lack any moral center at all, with all manner of horrible social consequences, both for us as individuals and as members of larger groups. In the case of the Pharmaceutical Industry, those macro decisions made in the Absence of the Good are producing a catastrophic attack on human inner freedom, which it is the intention of the following remarks to illuminate.
One cannot watch television today without
seeing any number of advertisements for drugs, created by and sold to
us by the Pharmaceutical Industry. They are ever present in the
modern world and represent, when understood in their real context, to
be one of the dominant active opponents of human spiritual freedom.
This Industry mostly serves the Dark God Profit, and being
organized in a social form (a Corporation), this Industry is not even
permitted by law to take seriously any service to the idea of what
truly lives in the human being. The law, in its present
degenerate condition, has determined that Corporations owe their
primary duty to their shareholders (profit), and their workers and the
consumers of their products have significance only as an afterthought.
To a degree the deeper fault for this
lies elsewhere, but we are yet not able to open that chapter. Let
us here say this: while it is true that scientific materialism, in that it believes only in matter and never in spirit,
creates the intellectual context for the Pharmaceutical Industry, it
nevertheless is greed (the Absence of the Good) that drives this assault on
human spiritual freedom. This Industry does not have to act the
way that it does, but in the Absence of the Good there can be only one
result. Drugs are created and sold to us that we do not need,
that do not promote either our physical health, or our emotional health
or our spiritual health. They are created in order to make money.
Lies are told and kept about their side-effects. Government
watchdogs, that should protect us, are subverted. And, the
greater portion of the medical profession is seduced into cooperation,
while those healers, who might have a true sense of what we need, are
opposed, attacked and sometimes even jailed.
The totality of behaviors of those who lead and guide the Pharmaceutical Industry
are perfect examples of the Absence of the Good, and its consequences.
Yes, there certainly are moral people in the Industry, but even
these are themselves quite often subverted and seduced in order to
serve the bottom line - the Dark God Profit. We could take a
similar look at the military-industrial complex, or at agribusiness.
The same is true everywhere - in the Absence of the Good, evil is
the result. [In the use of the term "evil" here, keep in mind that
there is a lot more that has to be said about this, such that we will
come to understand that evil has a role in the Creation and is related
to something that has to be called: the Mystery of Evil.]
Let us next look more closely at the
consequences flowing into our shared social life from out of this
particular Industry.
In a very real sense, the human community
that is sold these drugs is seen by this industry merely as a market.
While some thought is given to our real needs, almost no thought
at all is given concerning the wider social consequences. For
example, there was recently (Aug. 22, 2004) an article in the New York
Times Sunday Magazine (Did
Antidepressants Depress Japan, by Kathryn
Schulz) on the entrance of the Pharmaceutical Industry into the
cultural life of Japan, wherein well understood traditional Japanese
spiritual virtues connected with the human grace involved in
melancholy, sadness, and suffering, were labeled as a disease
(depression). [See also A Journey
into the Economy of Melancholy, by Gary
Greenberg in the May 2007 Harper's magazine - a penetrating consideration of the
intersection of scientific thinking about our consciousness, with the
medical and drug industries, all leavened with a wonderfully subtle and
wry sense of humor.]
The basic thinking is that if you are
unhappy, you are ill, and need medication. This has now gone so
far that a President of the United States (in this case George W.
Bush), is now standing behind an effort to test everyone in America for
mental disease (starting with all children - parental consent be
damned), and if found to be ill, to be provided the assumed needed
medication. Following the twisted logic of such efforts by out of
control governments, this assault on our inner freedom in the guise of
drugging us for reasons of presumed mental disease is called: The New Freedom Initiative, after the fashion of newspeak in George Orwell's 1984.
The dark visions of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where books are outlawed and drugs to control emotions mandatory, is well on its way to coming true. Why? Let us repeat this, for it needs to become our cultural mantra - in the Absence of the Good, evil is often the main result. Generally, for the Good to be there, we must consciously insert it.
There will be those that argue, with some
degree of truth, that humanity is greatly benefited by modern medical
discoveries, including many drugs. This is not disputed here.
Who would want to dispute it? But the idea that
everything is perfect, all is well, nothing is wrong is as equally
foolish as asserting no good has come. It
is one thing to use a substance to heal physical illnesses, it is
another thing entirely to define behaviors outside some arbitrary norm
as disease, and then bludgeon with drugs the consciousness of a human
being in order to subdue their inner life of soul and spirit as a means
to making their behavior conform.
It is a question of spiritual (and
sometimes even physical) freedom in the very highest sense.
The fact is there is no true scientific
standard for a great deal of what has over recent years come to be
called mental illness. The diagnosis of mental illness is
subjective in the extreme, and frequently involves a judgment on the
part of a so-called medical professional, who may simply not like the
patient, or find them morally repugnant (an act which our studies of
Moral Grace has shown to be invalid). Lest you think I don't know
about this problem, I have spent 18 years in the field of mental
health, 10 in a for-profit psychiatric facility, and the last 35 years
leading a very introspective life. Both sides of this problem
live in me in a very deep way.
If you want to study a sociological
perspective on this issue, read Deviance
and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness,
by Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider, which describes how all manner of
social behaviors that were considered outside the so-called norm,
became slowly defined as mental illnesses over the last 50 years, and
then became subject to the authority of assumed mental health
professionals. Basically what was done was that the problem of
good and evil was eliminated from the discussion (too elusive for materialistic science), and if the social order (or some small part of
it) found you to be deviating from the norm, the mental health industry
classified you as diseased and gave you drugs.
As someone who has seen from the inside
how this is played out, I can assure you that basically it is a
disaster on multiple levels.
For example, the standard defining text
for mental illnesses, which is called the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (it cleverly gives a
number for each supposed mental disease or sub-category of disease),
contains an alleged illness called: Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
When I grew up we called this having a bad temper, and expected
people to get their act together and learn to control it. Now it
is being asserted that it is a disease, and as such one is really no
longer held morally responsible, can get treatment in a mental hospital
and be given drugs to subdue the excess.
Of course, the drugs seldom work unless there is a lot of overkill, so that the whole personality (remember those side-effects!) is pressed down. If you converse with people taking these medications, many of them don't like the effect, and often stop taking this chemical restraint on their inner life. They'd rather have the problem than the cure.
What frequently happens in mental
hospitals is a violation of medical ethics (first do no harm), in the
name of research and/or assumed to be standard medical practice.
Let me tell a story.
The way the Pharmaceutical business works
is that drugs have to be tested for their efficacy. Granted part
of the demand for testing comes from the government, but mostly this
demand for testing is a consequence of patterns of behavior in the
Industry over the years, where they released badly tested drugs (e.g thalidomide).
In any event, at the hospital where I
worked the Chief of Psychiatry was also a paid consultant to the
Pharmaceutical industry, and oversaw numerous test protocols as these
were carried out at the hospital. The Chief made extra money, the
hospital was able to charge the full costs of the treatment (the
patient ended up with no bill), and various ancillary staff were also
given additional compensation besides their normal salary.
The studies had to be done under the
double blind system, which meant some patients in the test received a
placebo (no medication at all), and no one was to know which were being
tested with the real experimental drug and which patients were
receiving the placebo. Of course to the staff, if the mental
illness was acute (such as schizophrenia), those receiving the placebo
were obvious, since they got sicker and sicker, suffering a great deal
for the period of the test (often at least for a month, sometimes far
longer). Of course the other patients on the ward, and the staff,
suffered as well because of those individuals who were not receiving
any effective medication in order that the test protocols be
scientifically (?) correct. In essence, very ill people, and
their caregivers and companions, are routinely tortured in order that
the testing be done in this assumed correct way (in the Absence of the
Good).
Just to show how cruel this really can
be, consider that the patients have often been already declared
incompetent. This means that they have a conservator, usually a
family member. The family member gets told that the hospital stay
will be free (the seduction), and the harm to the mind of the patient,
if they receive the placebo, is downplayed (the subversion).
None of this, by the way, deals with the
freedom of the acutely ill to choose not to be medicated. Their
right to so choose is there in the law, but in practice it is
frequently by-passed by obtaining permission from the conservator.
Obviously there are mental illnesses that
are real. What I most frequently observed was that the
psychiatrist (the ones who had to diagnose and order drugs), were
basically experimenters. Routinely the originally prescribed
medication was changed, as the doctor hunted around for something that
would give him the desired behavioral effect. First
a certain behavior was consider undesirable, and then various medications
tried until the behavior was altered. In severe cases we admitted we
practiced chemical restraint. What we didn't admit was that in
moderate cases we did the same thing - we restrained the unwanted behavior with chemicals. [Where, in such circumstances and
goals (the insistence upon the change in outer behavior) is the
individual's own sense of their inner being given any weight and
meaning?]
Of course, in order to do this, you have
to first convince a human being that they are ill, that they are
diseased of the mind. In that most intimate aspect of our being -
our soul and spirit, we are assaulted with the socially enforced belief
that something is wrong with us, and it has to be fixed. All this
in the context of a well understood phenomena, called the identified
patient.
Emotional dissonance in the family
generally produces (in our current culture obsessed with mental
illness) someone who will come to the mental health system seeking
treatment (where else can they go?). This is often understood to
be the most mentally healthy individual in the family matrix precisely
because they are self observant enough to want to solve their inner
dilemmas. They are called the identified patient, and the assumption of this paradigm is that the
root of the problem (unless it is the physical nervous system itself
which is broken) most probably lies in those family members who do not
seek treatment. The true illness lies elsewhere and can't be
treated unless the family consents (admits) to a problem.
Today one can hear remarks from so-called
mental health professionals that anywhere from 20% to 40% (or even
higher) of the population of the United States suffers from mental
illness. In spite of the fact that the vocabulary of this
approach no longer uses the term normal (as if there ever was some
standard way of being an individual human being), the
idea of normal is still present. If you deviate from the assumed
standard, you are likely to be called ill, not just recognized as
different and unique. Mostly this fancifully imagined standard
arises out of a comparing of behaviors (ignoring our highly
individualized inner life), with the so-called standard actually being
set by those who have most effectively compromised and conformed
their individuality to social normative pressures.
Such a conclusion, and the related
suggested responses are horribly wrong (in the Absence of the Good).
What makes it all the worse, is that the Pharmaceutical Industry
rides this cultural confusion solely for its own benefit. Not
only do they ride it, they promote it in every way they can. Huge
profits can be made in convincing us that such inner states, for
example, as melancholy, shyness, sadness and suffering are diseases of
the mind.
Certainly many individuals within these
fields and professions seek to act with morality and honor. Yet,
the fact remains that the institutional systems have evolved in the
Absence of the Good, thus producing evil consequences. For
example, over the course of my life, the practice of medicine has
changed from that of holding to the idealistic goal of being a healer,
to becoming a complicated for-profit business. Third parties,
such as the government and insurers, have inserted themselves in
between the patient and the doctor, and over and above this is the idea
(promoted by scientific materialism) that the human
being is a mere mechanism (all matter, no spirit).
Obviously I can't solve this grave
problem here. Nor am I the only observer of modern life who is
awake to these issues. At the same time I can strongly suggest
certain directions to take, and as well some concrete examples that can
be practiced. Since depression is thought to be one of the main
diseases of modern inner life, let me go forward with a brief
discussion of this inner state. In the next stanza, I will come
at this from a more intimate discussion of the nature of evil,
particularly as regards what is called the double or the shadow in the
soul. For now, however, I only want to make more general
observations of our inner life of soul and spirit.
None of what is below is meant to suggest
that no help is available from either talking therapies or various
substances, especially if the therapy is done in the Presence of the
Good, and the substances are natural. Here, however, is
another of those side-trips it would not do to take. What is
below concerns an example of how we as individuals can bring health and
balance to our own minds out of our own will and inner activity (in
freedom). As this book proceeds, other suggestions regarding the
nature and discipline of mind will be put forward.
One of the greatest individuals of human
recorded history is known to us as Gautama Buddha. His teachings
rest on what he called the Four
Noble Truths, of which the first is: Life is Suffering.
What could be more obvious to any
self-honest reflection? We live, and we suffer. We have
moments of joy and moments of sorrow. Those who obtain to even
the smallest degrees of wisdom know that just in these feelings of the
heart we are the most human. Why in the name of the Good would we
ever want to chemically eliminate from our lives our feelings?
Yet, we do. We are being taught
that sadness, melancholy and suffering are a disease. We are
being taught (and sold) that our inner life is not healthy if it
contains such fundamental human moods. Why such insanity?
Why are we taught to want to get rid of that which makes us
human? And even more scary, why are we being forced, against our
wills, to take such a view of our inner and most intimate nature and
being?
Science, in order to maintain the fiction
that all is matter and there is no spirit, has to create a paradigm
that makes of human inner life nothing but biology and chemistry.
If my mood has no connection to my will, to my freedom (see B. F.
Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity),
then I am basically a mechanism, and should be treated as such.
The problem with this view is that everywhere it is rebelled
against. The materialist thinks this principle is a certainty as
an intellectual conclusion, yet never behaves in life as if this were
true. We have it as an idea, but we don't live at all consistent
with this idea.
So our society says: don't suffer, don't be sad, don't be melancholy. Take a pill instead. But you know what's worse? If we get rid of sadness, what happens to joy?
Without doubt there is probably clinical depression caused by a true dysfunction at the level of brain chemistry. Now if you want to not be sad (something you are free to choose or not) or if you are overly sad, and feel depressed, and if some inner voice is telling you that you are unworthy, and unloved, and a failure, it isn't necessary to take a pill and beat up your inner life with some chemical restraint. There are mind sciences of deep wisdom and divine inspiration not unfamiliar with this inner state. Here are some practical suggestions.
The anonymous author of Meditations
on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism, advises that you cross yourself three times, and spit
over your left shoulder. This ritual (an old folk remedy, well
practiced) compels the double (see below, next stanza) to retreat from
its work of inner prosecution.
Much normal depression is also due to the
holding back of mild forms of irritation and anger. We try too
hard to always be nice, and we burden ourselves with the inner
consequence. What I have learned to do is to announce to those
who live intimately with me, that over the next couple of days I am
going to be very cranky, and further that I am going to enjoy it, so
they just better get used to it. I then wander around complaining
in a loud voice about anything at all that passes my fancy to complain
about. I will curse and swear and occasionally insult.
Oddly enough I am having so much fun doing this, that those
around me can't help but like it. It clearly isn't really
personal, but on the contrary quite inspirational and often catching.
If the depression seems more deep, then
prayer is called for. The shadow (again see below) in the soul can be sometimes a bit
more powerful than the i-AM (also see below). In
such a case the intercession of the Divine Mother is a powerful help.
As I go to sleep at night I make a most sincere prayer to Mary
for her aid in helping me overcome this state of excessive inner
turmoil. Always on waking, there is a new sense of inner
freedom before the torments. There is a kind of gap between my
spirit, and the force of these troubles in the soul. I can stand
up to them, and send them packing.
Another recourse, from Dennis Klocek
(author of Weather and Cosmos, Seeking
Spirit Vision and The Seer's
Handbook among a number of other works), is
to inwardly look at the dark mood within, as something that is not-I,
and say several times to this mood in our inner voice: "What is your name?". The dark presence (the shadow-double) cannot
then respond to this question, and is forced to retreat.
I have also found it helpful to
consciously create alternative inner pictures. Suppose I am depressed
(or some other unwanted mood), and I come awake to this condition.
Instead of inwardly passively accepting my given mood, I oppose
it with my own inner will by making a counter-mood picture. For
example, if I think some aspect of the shadow-double is pestering me, I
will imagine a kind of small being, humanoid in form, but all angles
instead of curves, over which I am pouring hot chocolate and tiny
marshmallows.
Or, if I am in a hurry, and I am being
tempted (wouldn't you like an extra scoop of ice cream, wouldn't that
taste good), I will take control of my inner voice and yell there: Get out of here you fraud and
useless piece of maple syrup! It is
very important in doing such work to use humor, for as we get deeper
into understanding the shadow-double within, and its relationship to
our inner freedom, we will find that humor is the best antidote.
To close this stanza on a slightly
different note, lets take the problem of sleep. In our hurried
and harried civilization, many people are going to the Pharmaceutical
Industry to obtain drugs for sleep. This is a bit odd, if you
think about it, in that we ought to be able to sleep when we are tired,
but many people have the experience that while their body is exhausted,
the mind is still rushing about and will not "turn off".
Even in this idea we miss the mark, for to think that the soul-spirit nexus (mind) is something to turn off is to live in a kind of denial of our inner reality. Yet, what do we do?
Rudolf Steiner offered a very interesting
exercise for the end of the day (the Ruckshau). As we lie in bed,
with our mind running at top speed, we take hold of the thinking
activity and turn it in the direction of reviewing our day. We
picture the day backward. We are lying in bed, our body is
beginning to relax, and we take hold of our mind and we expend our will
inwardly in this realm of pure soul and spirit existence, and form
pictures of the day.
This daily review produces two effects.
First it lets us examine our own activity during the day,
something that the rushing mind is already trying to do, if we were to
observe it honestly. Only instead of letting it rush about from
association to association without any discipline, we expend some inner
will forces and remember the day backwards. This review of the
day helps us learn about ourselves. How did we behave? Did
we do the best that we could do? If we failed, what amends might
we make tomorrow? In this review, of course, we are free to
approach it however we want.
The second effect is that we start to
relax the mind. By putting this little amount of will into the
situation of the mind, we give order where it would otherwise remain in
chaos. This is our last amount of will of the day - a sort of desert of the day. If we spend this last amount of will
in an inner
exercise, surprise, we often will fall asleep!
The reason we can't sleep is because at
the same time as our body relaxes, our soul-spirit nexus - our mind -
needs to finish its business, for it is the soul-spirit (our inwardness
and essence) that has been moving the physical body around all day
long. In order to have the right relationship between mind and
body at the end of the day, so that sleep can arise, we need to make
conscious the fruits of the day. When we take a drug to push us
into sleep, we miss out on what is the best part of our day - a kind of
moral digestive process. Here, in the daily review, we nourish
the heart forces which make possible our free acts of moral grace
(below, in the discussion of nurturing love, we will look at this
matter from a slightly different direction, since for many people, they
do not enter and exit sleep alone, but with a partner).
Emphasis needs to be placed here on the
idea of nourish. Just as we feed the body, so we need to feed the
soul, and one of the foods for the soul is to look back on the day and
digest it. We have had a day full of experience, and the more
consciously we can reflect on that daily experience, the more healthy
will become our soul-life. [The best nourishment for the soul is
(obviously) always art and beauty, although that needs to be set to our
own specific tastes, which is why so many crave an encounter with the
Natural World, or want to lose themselves in their favorite music.]
Of course, all the above is to be taken with a grain of salt, while at the same time sincerity of effort and experience will prove to be the best teacher.
What does this mean?
It means that we have to prize our inner freedom more than we accept the dictates of the Pharmaceutical Industry, which in the Absence of the Good would have us believe we are diseased, when we are only and wonderfully human; and, that we need not any longer accept that we have to have all kinds of drugs for the aid of what are really very normal functions (such as sleep). All the same, to appreciate this even more, we have to enter more deeply into the understanding of human existence and the real nature of the Mystery of Evil.
seventh stanza
the Seventh Day of Creation
the problem of freedom seen in the light
of the nature of evil, and its relationship to the course
of
individual human lives (the biography)
Psalm 23
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
Besides restful waters he leads me;
He refreshes my soul.
He guides me in right paths
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil;
For you are at my side
With your rod and your staff'
that give me courage.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Only goodness and kindness follow me
all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
for years to
come.*
[*I can say with assurance that it is
possible to experience life in this fashion, minute by minute, hour by
hour, day by day, year by year - to trust Life knowing (have Faith) that
the Divine Mystery is everywhere Present in all aspects - not only in
the outer circumstances of our biography (the events which help and
challenge), but also in the inner biography (the unfolding of the life
of mind and soul, with its moments of both darkness and light.]
*
We come now to one of the great mysteries
of the modern age - one which considers the nature of history, the
meaning of existence, and the importance of the individual biography.
While there are ideas in natural science that some might construe
to be in conflict with the material presented here, it must be
understood that the scientist does not even really ask the relevant
questions. He has asked other more limited questions, so that
when he gets to questions of the heart and the deep meaning of human
existence, he has no basis in his formalism for what that which in life
can only be described within the language of mystery
and songs of
poetry (as in the 23rd Psalm).
This is what is told to us in the story
of Genesis 2:1-3:
"Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all
their array. On the sixth day God finished the work he had been
doing. and he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had
done. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it
he rested from all his work of creation."
The tendency has been in modern times
among some religious to consider that the term "day",
in the text of the story in Genesis, refers to what we experience as a single day, the twenty-four hours it
takes for the Earth's rotation to return the Sun to more or less its
same position in the sky as in the previous day. This happens
because when it suits our personal agendas, we vainly take our human
perspective and insist the Bible speaks to us only in that same
perspective - absent poetry and mystery (which obviously is the Bible's
real language and song). Others, more awake to the mystery and
poetry of such writings as the Bible, understand that the word day,
in the sense of Genesis, means much larger periods of time, and that
God's creation of the Earth took these great periods of time.
My own thinking leads me to put the
matter this way. The Divine Mystery ceased the greater part of
Its creative activity (rested) at a certain point, after which from
that time forward what had been set in motion determined what was next
to happen; and that among what had been set in motion was the eventual
emergence of human freedom. We don't have to have beliefs to see
this, for surely, if anything is obviously true, we are clearly free to
be moral, or not, create, or not, and destroy, or not, all that has
been previously created by the Divine Mystery.
As the Plains Indians observed in their
Mysteries, the human being is clearly the determiner, the dominant
decision maker among all of the Creation which can be observed.
Rudolf Steiner puts the matter this way, in his book A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception:
"Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of
the Guiding Power of the world when he investigates one or another of
His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own
insight. For
in him the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself.[emphasis
added, ed.]
He does not live as Will somewhere outside of man, He has
renounced His own will in order that all might depend upon the will of
man. If man is to be enabled to become his own lawgiver,
all thought about world-determinations outside of man must be abandoned."
Yet, much religious thinking and doctrine
considers God to be an active presence in our lives. Among
evangelical and fundamentalist Christians there is all manner of
discussion of the doings of God in our time. Not only this, but
from the side of natural science more and more there is coming into
being a kind of biological determinism, in which almost all behavior is
seen as hardwired into the brain, while the brain itself is merely the
creation of a genetic inheritance produced over the eons by natural
selection. Between
many religious then, as well as many scientists, human freedom is
considered secondary to either a determinism of spirit (the will of
God) or a determinism of matter (the will of mindless evolution).
Where is human freedom in the face of these twin and related
prisons?
What is the truth?
Basically, people are going to have to
decide that for themselves. I'll tell you how I see the world -
my story of the world. However, I not only don't expect it
to be believed, I don't want it to be believed. All that is
intended in the Tale below is that the reader be given cause to think for
themselves. Let us go toward this Tale
then, first pausing to consider some additional Emerson (an American
King/Shepherd/Healer) on these very deep questions. From
Emerson's essay Nature: "Nature
is a thought incarnate and turns to thought again as ice becomes water
and then gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping in the form of free thought".
the Fool's Tale
(part I)
The human spirit or i-AM
is eternal. In fact, it seems to be a piece (a child) of the
Father. The Father divided Himself into a multiplicity (all the
Angels, all the i-AMs and so forth), in the process of the Creation, for what
else could He do (God being All) but create out of Himself. When
Christian tradition speaks of the promise of everlasting life, it is
semi-consciously aware of this eternal nature of the essence of the
human being.
As an aside, the reader might note that
when we considered Christ's remarks concerning the question of what was
the greatest commandment, the doctrinally correct Catholic Bible said: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.", while the Unvarnished
Gospels says: "You are to
love your lord God with all your heart and all your spirit and all
your mind".(emphasis added, ed.) In the
doctrinally correct text then, the Greek
word spirit has been changed into soul. Why do you suppose that
was done? Rudolf Steiner suggests that it was a conscious
decision of the Catholic Hierarchy to hide from the faithful the truth
of their Triune Eternal Spirit nature (body, soul and spirit). On the other hand, perhaps this
confusions was authored by the Divine Mystery Itself, Who knew we were
not yet ready to have such knowledge.
There are then two basic forms of
existence: the Earthly existence in which the i-AM
inhabits a physical body, and the Heavenly existence in which the i-AM
is an eternal spirit in a solely spiritual reality. The Shepherds
believe aspects of this through Faith, and the Kings know this directly
through experience (Gnosis).
Earthly physical existence has a purpose,
which is the education of the child - the education of the individual
eternal spirit that is the essence of the human being - the own i-AM.
This divine education is only vaguely similar to our processes of
education, although we could more and more learn to imitate what has
been created. This divine education is of the Highest Art, and
being akin to both music and drama, the Bard was quite right in
suggesting that: "all
the world's a stage...". Human earthly
life is Art, and we cooperate - are co-creative - in this Art through
the gift of freedom.
What this means is that the human
biography is a work of Art, created in cooperation with the Divine
Mystery. Moreover, the real nature of our shared existence is not
seen in history, not in the great events and doings of dominant
individuals, but rather finds its central meaning in the events of the ordinary and everyday individual
biographies. This is because all else passes away (and this too shall pass away), except that which the eternal spirit, or the i-AM,
acquires in the sense that the experiences of our biography change our
nature. We live our lives, acquire experiences that transform us,
and what in us that is transformed lives eternally.
Everything else in earthly existence
passes away.
Now this, while obvious to many, hardly
answers all the questions, of which one of the most important for our
time concerns the nature of evil - what one author put forward as: Why do bad
things happen to good people? (by Melvin
Tinker).
If we appreciate that we have been
spiritual children, and only now are beginning to be mature enough to
understand such a deep question ourselves, then we can also appreciate
why the earlier religious texts, even the Gospels, are not
straightforward in providing an answer. In each successive Age,
we are provided the answers we need, until in this Age we are more or
less now placed on our own, having been given Moral Grace, which
becomes a means not only of knowing (gnosis) the good, but also the
true. Recall that verse I added above when first discussing the
Shepherd's Tale: John 16:12: "I have yet many things to say
to you, but you cannot bear them now." {I have
much more to say to you, but you can't bear it just yet.}
Christianity is not the only Religion in
the world. We get something of a hint in this regard when the
Kings are described in Matthew 2:1 as "Magi came from the East" {wise men
from the East showed up}. As I pointed
out, the Kings were Priest-Kings, or initiates in the ancient (pre-Christian) mysteries. Nowhere should
this suggest they did not possess truth, and it is time to consider, as
Christians, what wisdom might have had to be left aside for a time,
while we were being slowly nurtured into greater spiritual maturity
through the gifts of Faith and of Freedom.
Here are some of the left aside wisdoms: repeated earth lives, karma,
fate, destiny and the real meaning of evil
with special emphasis on the double or shadow
that accompanies in life each individual human i-AM.
St. Paul understood these problems, and hinted about this too in
I Corinthians 13: 8-12: "Charity never fails, whereas prophecies will disappear,
and tongues will cease, and knowledge will be destroyed. For we
know in part and we prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect
has come, that which is imperfect will be done away with. When I
was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a
child. Now that I have become a man, I have to put away the
things of child. We see now through a mirror in an obscure
manner, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I
shall know even as I have been known."
We need to keep in mind that St. Paul on
the road to Damascus was told by Christ that: "...for I have appeared to
thee for this purpose, to appoint thee to be a minister and a witness
to what thou hast seen, and to the visions that thou shalt have of
me;..." Acts 26:16. Christ speaks here
of what Saul becoming Paul has seen and what visions will be given in
the future, and by this shows to us moderns, that in St. Paul we have
already one who has been appointed both Shepherd, King and Healer,
which clearly would have been necessary for the role he was to play in
the founding of the Christian Religion.
So we have both Christ and St. Paul telling us that not all can be said at that time, and that we begin as spiritual children who can later become mature. In this light now let us consider the older views of the East regarding repeated earth lives (reincarnation), karma, fate, destiny and the problem of evil as we might understand these today (keeping in mind that the appearance of these ideas among members of the so-called New Age Movement is considered by many Christian believers to be itself a terrible evil).
"Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord", is something we have heard, and of which St. Paul
writes in Romans Chapter 12. Does this refer to something hidden,
that we have not, until now, been mature enough to understand? {I have
much more to say to you, but you can't bear it just yet.} Here is what I have learned from the study of
modern Kings (initiates).
When the human being dies, the essence -
the i-AM, as well as the inwardness - the soul, survives, and
only the physical body decays, its material substance returning to the
Earth (dust to dust). In the afterlife, following on the
experience of the often reported memory tableau (my life flashed before
my eyes), we enter a realm which the ancients called kamaloka. In this spiritual realm the i-AM
is made to experience that which was done to others during the
biography. If we murdered, we will experience being murdered.
If we abused dozens of children, we will experience what they
experienced. Here, hidden but still real, is God's Divine
Vengeance (Justice), which is to make us experience what we have done
unto others. Christ is telling us this in the Sermon on the Mount
when He says in Matthew 7:12: "Therefore all that you wish men to do to you, even so do
you also to them; for this is the Law and the Prophets." {So
everything you want people to do for you, you do the same for them,
because that's the law and the prophets.}
And, perhaps even more to the point,
Matthew 7:2: "For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged; ..." {...you
will be sentenced to the same sentence that you sentence others,...}. What better description of the kamaloka
experience could there be?
When we are told "vengeance is mine" we are being told that the Father's Justice (in His Idea of the nature of the afterlife) is the best justice, and
we need not take vengeance upon ourselves, for in kamaloka we will
experience what we have done to others. What better justice could
there be?
[We need to distinguish Divine Justice
from human justice. In this book, the Way of
the Fool, I am writing out of the gesture of "render unto God"; and, in a later book (if life grants me the time), the Way of
the Citizen, I will be writing of "render unto Caesar", and there take a look at the meaning of human justice.]
Now following on kamaloka, we enter what
the ancients called lower and higher devachan, a realm of the afterlife
in which we reflect on what we experienced in kamaloka and can then
choose to accept and contribute to that karma and fate in the next
life, which choice will make recompense for the actions and failures of
the current life. Thus we are forgiven 70 times 7 (returned to
life, reborn to continue to learn our lessons) as Christ admonished
Peter, for certainly Christ did not use any arbitrary figure.
Karma is the law of recompense for prior life actions, and
involves our own acceptance of that compensation. Matthew 18:21-22 "Then Peter came up to him and
said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive
him? Up to seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say
to thee seven times, but seventy times seven."
{Then
Peter came up to him and said, "Lord, how many times shall my brother
wrong me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus says to him, "I'm
not telling you up to seven times, I'm telling you up to seventy-seven
times."}
It is out of higher devachan that the
next biography is formed, from our own remorse at the actions in our
former life. This becomes then our karma (the law of recompense)
and our fate (that which must come to us in this life). Yet, it
would be an error to assume that all that is evil, or seems unjust, is
karma or fate. For we remain free in each successive life to
commit new actions of good or evil, and thus create new karma.
Our biographies then contain, not only sufferings and joys
reflecting prior and future lives (for higher devachan lies outside of
time), but also numerous opportunities for new choices with new
consequences. So, for example, for someone to say that a woman
who has been raped is receiving her karma, is to not understand
anything at all.
Not one of us knows how in any
life, our own or others, these matters are being played out, which have
been chosen by us in higher devachan with the aid of the highest
hierarchies. In fact, it is terribly presumptive on our part to
assume that we can know what was decided by another individual during
their afterlife as regards what is to be experienced later.
Moreover, fresh evil is always possible.
Here is the picture so far (that will
alter later, by the way, when we know more about evil): The main
thing to keep in mind is to not look at any biography but your own,
using these ideas of repeated earth lives, karma and fate. Any
thought which suggests that we can perceive for others these matters is
a idea not worthy to have been thought. The point is to
appreciate that what in life we experience as suffering may have as its
background the need of our eternal spirit to receive teaching in the
Divine School which is the biography. It is up to us, and only
us, to recognize and reflect upon the lessons (matters of karma and
fate) of our own life.
Now above I also used the term destiny in addition to that of karma and fate. The term destiny is here meant to point toward that aspect of the biography which is neither karma or fate, but rather represents the results and consequences of our own free actions in this particular life. We weave our destiny in spite of karma and fate. We have to endure karma and fate, but to the extent we overcome those and learn their lessons, we also become capable of creating our own destiny.
Let us now turn forthrightly to the
problem of evil, and not incidentally, the problem of sin.
By the way, the Unvarnished
Gospels do not appear to contain the word
sin. That conception seems to be a later confusion added by
authorities who had other agendas. Here is what Witterschein
wrote in his introduction: ""Sin", for example, connotes a
deep separation between human will and God's will, a kind of flaw in
our makeup that results in our acting wrongly. But the Greek word
hamartia is startlingly different: it
is a term from archery, and means "missing
the mark"!
The very word itself implies a much more optimistic view of human
volition than "sin" does. With hamartia we are talking about something essentially correct in
human nature, a part of us that wants to do what is good and right, but
missed the bull's eye. Our goal is the right one; but
somehow we miss it (Gaus rightly prefers to render hamartia as "mistake" or "doing wrong")."
In the Creation, has the Father brought
forward evil and the possibility of mistake into the world for a
purpose? This has been a paradoxical problem for humanity for a
long time, especially when we consider those forms of evil which seem
so terrible, such as the Holocaust, torture and the theft of innocence
that is created by child abuse. How can a good God author or
allow such suffering?
Well, the first thing to recognize is that God does not make such a choice. What has been created is the possibility of human freedom, as an act of Divine Love. It is that we are loved that we have been offered the possibility of becoming free. It is we, who once freed, that choose to bring evil and error into the world, out of that very freedom.
What God has done is created a loving
Divine Justice - a response to our actions, in that in kamaloka we
experience the suffering we have caused, and in lower and higher
devachan we are offered the opportunity to form our next biography in a
way that makes for recompense. Further, in giving our spirit -
our i-AM - immortality, He has given the victims of our errors
and evil a gift far beyond what they suffer in any individual life.
He has also created us in such a way that those we have harmed
can forgive us (and those who have harmed us can be forgiven). In
the Sermon on the Mount we are given, among so much else, the Lord's
Prayer, in which the fifth petition is: "Forgive us our debts as we
also forgive our debtors." Matthew 6:12 {And
forgive our debts, the same as we forgave the debts that others owed
us.}.
Notice how, like the Golden Rule, this
phrase accounts for the kamaloka experience of the afterlife.
Where we forgive in this life, so we will experience the effect
of that forgiveness in the afterlife. Kamaloka is not just the
experience of the consequences for others of our wrongs and errors, but
it is also the experience of the consequences for others of our
forgiveness and love.
We now need to consider Satan and the
Devil, for if we believe God to be real, than certainly we must believe
that Satan and the Devil are real.
One of the things we know is that Satan and the Devil (these are not the same by the way) are known as tempters. Neither is the author of evil or error anymore than God is. Eve is tempted in the Garden, and Christ is tempted in the Desert. And we...we are constantly tempted also. This then leads us to the double or shadow.
We really face two worlds. One
world is the outer material world we experience through the senses, and
the other world is an inner invisible world that in the beginning we
only know within our own minds - our own soul life. In stepping
out of our spiritual childhood it is the truths and reality of this
inner world that we most need to face, after which we may come to
understand what the true relationship of that inner world is to the
outer world, which we experience through the senses.
For those who seek to follow the Way
of the Fool, in essence it is really an
exploration of this inner world, coupled with learning to understand
the relationship between our actions in this inner world and our
actions in the outer world. Here too Christ pointed a clear
finger in the Sermon on the Mount when he said (among many other
teachings): Matthew 5:28: "But I say to you that anyone
who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed
adultery with her in his heart." {But I say
any man who looks at a woman and really wants her has already slept
with her in his heart.}
Then here, in this next verse later in
the Gospel, is this consideration of the inner world made fully
explicit: Matthew 23: 25-28 "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because
you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but within they are full
of robbery and uncleanness. Thou blind Pharisee! clean first the
inside of the cup and of the dish, that the outside too may be clean.
Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! you who are like
whited sepulchers, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within
are full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. So you also
outwardly appear just to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and
iniquity." {Woe to
you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for cleaning off the rim of
your cup and saucer while on the inside you're bursting with greed and
wild appetites. Blind Pharisee, wash out the inside of the cup
and saucer first, if you want the outside to end up clean! Woe to
you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for being like dusty
monuments that look pretty on the outside but on the inside are full of
the bones of corpses and all kinds of rot. You likewise from the
outside appear to the world to be decent, but inside you're full of
hypocrisy and ways around the law.}
In this way and others, Christ points out
to us that what goes on within is superior to what goes on without.
I only learn to love the outer world toward which my acts of will
unfold, to the extent to which I master the inner world, from which my
outer acts arise. I stand then, in between the outer and inner
worlds, toward both of which I must equally attend.
Let me make of these facts a little
symbolic diagram:
[sense world
< soul (d) < i-AM > (d) soul > spiritual world].
In both directions (<>) the i-AM
is mediated in its relationship to either the sense world or the
spiritual world, through the soul. The soul itself is very
complicated, and the "(d)", which I have placed on
either side of the i-AM, is a symbolic
representation of the double, or what is called the shadow and
sometimes the doppelganger. I will have a lot more to say about the
double/shadow shortly. For the moment we need just to place it as
the nearest companion to the i-AM, in the soul, and as a
participant in the mediation between the i-AM
and the two worlds - the world of the senses and the world of spirit.
Everyone clearly knows something of the
sense world. It is the apparent rules of the sense world that
natural science believes it comprehends, and it is somewhat the rules
of the spiritual world that religions believe they comprehend.
For most of us, this spiritual world is not experienced (no
gnosis), and what we do believe we know of it we know
mostly through our beliefs, which is not the same
as true Faith. About the sense world we seem to know a great deal
(a kind of experimentally based gnosis), but if we were to examine this
presumed knowledge carefully, we would realize that here too there is a
lot of belief. Only this time we have Faith (trust) in the
priests of natural science and their teachings. We have been
taught (educated in) the paradigms (beliefs) of natural science, about which most of those, who do
accept these ideas, do so on the basis of their Faith (trust) in the
methods of science. This Faith, in several of the fundamental so
far elaborated views of science, will turn out to have been of
temporary value. Our Faith in the scientific spirit itself, however, is well founded. [The scientific spirit seeks objectivity, empiricism and repeatable results
with regard to experiments. All such qualities can be obtained in
a properly conducted introspective examination of the own mind
(soul/spirit nexus).]
Culturally, this inward state (Faith in
the methods of natural science and belief it its ideas) exists in many,
while in many others there is Faith in God, and belief in various
counter-images to the beliefs of science. A kind of battle has
arisen, and this book hopes to help the open minded among us to find a
path of wisdom between the labyrinthine extremes of the true believers
in either Religion or Science.
In modern times the inner world is and
has been more and more explored, mostly in the fields of psychology and
psychiatry, wherein that exploration follows or tries to imitate the
methods of natural science. Many books can be found today, which
make a worthy effort to explain consciousness in the terms of the world views of natural science,
suggesting (for example) that consciousness is a product of the
chemistry and electrical aspects of the brain; and, that our behaviors
arise from how the brain has become hardwired over the many eons of
evolution (in the sense of natural selection). We saw above, in
the sixth stanza, how in the Absence of the Good these
fields of inquiry, in practice and application within the
Pharmaceutical Industry, led to evil (the unwarranted chemical
restraint of human inner freedom).
I am not here going to digress into an
elaboration of the problems with these views of natural science
regarding consciousness except to point out the following.
Natural science has only been investigating consciousness (in the
sense of brain physiology) seriously for the last three or four
decades, and it (natural science) really only fully stood on its own
feet, as a method of acquiring knowledge, during the 19th Century.
Thus, it is clear that the considerations of natural science
concerning consciousness are quite young in the history of humanity,
and perhaps can be forgiven for being quite naive.
The fact is that human beings have been
interested in consciousness for all of our existence. In the
process of unfolding this interest, over many millennia, consciousness
has been explored over and over again, with pretty much always the same
result. Human consciousness is spiritual in origin, not material.
It makes no difference whether one studies the teachings of
Tibetan or Zen Buddhism, or Indian Yoga (Hindu Mysticism), or Sufism
(Islamic Mysticism), or the Cabala (Hebrew Mysticism), or
Anthroposophy, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Christian Hermeticism (all
variants of Christian Mysticism). These traditions, some quite
new, but most very old, mature and wise, have known from their
beginnings that consciousness is not based in matter.
We are then, as the future unfolds, beginning that journey by which our understanding of the sense world, and its relationship with the world of spirit, is to be re-founded. Moreover, we are in that particular Age (the 2100 year - 1400 to 3500 - Consciousness Soul Age) where it is through human freedom that each individual i-AM is going to have the opportunity to decide these issues for themselves. No priests, whether of a religious, or a scientific conviction, are any more to be allowed to tell us what to think.
And, it is with this symbolic diagram [sense world < soul (d)
< i-AM >(d) soul > spiritual world] that I want to show the reader where we all stand - in
between the two worlds, and free to decide all meaning on the basis of
our own investigations.
Several years ago, after experiencing a
kind of spontaneous awakening, I faced a very deep riddle. What
was the relationship between my sense experiences (of the outer world)
and my thinking (the nearest aspect of the inner world)? And, in
the solving of this riddle, as a second and equally important question:
what was the relationship of my conscience (my moral sensibilities) to
the process by which I answered these questions?
It is my hope with this book to encourage
everyone to seek the answers to these very fundamental questions for
themselves. In the aid of this then, what is written here has
been carefully from the beginning cast before the reader in the form of
stories and tales, trying as best as I am
able to leave the reader free to find out for themselves (which of
course is why I placed the first part of the Fool's Tale in the section on Freedom).
Nothing is as important as our own
thinking. In this regard then, let us look again at a little
Emerson, from his lecture at Harvard in 1837: The
American Scholar:
Books are the
best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the
right use? What is the one end which all means go to
effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better
never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my
own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one
thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man
is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost
all men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive. The
book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they - let
us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and
not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in
his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux
of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet
flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions,
and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no
custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own
sense of good and fair.
It now remains to add some deeper
considerations of the double or shadow, and in this way to come closer
to the problem of the Mystery of Evil.
Without doubt modern humanity sees evil
everywhere. Recent Presidents of the United States have spoken of
the evil empire, or the axis of evil. War is evil (except,
hypocritically, for that war we author), A serial killer is evil.
Hitler was evil. The Holocaust was evil. Islamic
terrorists are evil. America is the great Satan. The
anti-Christ is soon to take over the world.
Not everyone agrees as to whether a
particular person, thing, event or whatever is evil. Like beauty,
evil seems highly subjective. One man's meat is another
man's poison is the folk wisdom.
Referring to our symbolism, we might say that our perception of evil arises in the soul itself, and is not a function
of that which we see through the senses. or through the eye of the
spirit (true thinking). We most frequently project the judgment
of evil onto something from out of our own inwardness (soul), but the
thing, in itself, is different in essence from how we see it (via our
projection).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ gives
us a very important teaching about this process of projection: Matthew
7: 3-5: Judge
not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye
shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to
you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy
brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out
of thine eye; and behold a beam is in thine own eye? Thou
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt
thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. {Don't
judge, so that you won't be judged; you will be sentenced to the same
sentence that you sentence others, and by whatever standard you measure
you will be measured. Why do you look at the splinter in your
brother's eye but don't notice the log in your own eye? And how
can you say to your brother, 'Let me get that splinter out of your
eye,' with that log there in your own eye? You fake, first get
the log out of your own eye, and then you can see about getting the
splinter out of your brother's eye!}
I am again going to tell something from
my biography, so that it can be seen how what is being said next is
rooted in experience.
In the 1970's, after being out of work
for some time, an opportunity came to me to find work running a
pornographic movie theater in the Tenderloin area of downtown San
Francisco. The wages were small, about $5 an hour, but as the
saying goes, beggars can't be choosers, and I needed work.
For those who don't know, the Tenderloin
is one of San Francisco's darkest areas in terms of sleaze, low level
crime and general poverty. There are sex shops, greasy spoons,
pawn shops, homeless people, street whores, addicts, alcoholics, and
other places and folk that most people from the suburbs would avoid at
any cost. The movie theater was owned by the notorious Mitchell
brothers, and was on that edge of the Tenderloin that touched Market
Street, between about 6th and 8th Street.
For $1.99 one got three movies, which
changed to three different movies every Friday. I worked the
tickets and tiny candy counter, while the only other hired person in
the place was the union projectionist. My shift was three Twelve
hour days, from opening to closing (10 a.m. to 10 p.m.), except half a
fourth day when the other manager and I only worked a half shift each.
This was a regular money maker for the Mitchell brothers. I
never took in less than $800 on a weekday, or $1200 on a Friday or
Saturday.
You can guess who most of our customers were, except during the noon hour on weekdays, when dozens of gay men in suits would come to have mid-day liaisons in the back row seats. Most people would have a hard time in such an environment, for many of us are taught when young that such folk are immoral and degenerate, to say the least.
For me the matter was a bit more
complicated.
At that time in my life, I was very
active in an introspective way, and very much struggling quite
consciously with the problem of the log and the splinter. I could
see arise in my soul all manner of judgments of others and it was a
constant battle inwardly to tame this tendency to judge, sentence and
measure, on the basis of my assumptions of the moral nature of those
coming into the theater. Yet, as an aspect of the miracle of our
biographies, I couldn't have asked for a better social environment in
order to be forced to face this shadow in my own soul - that part of us
that judges, sentences and measures and sees not the human being before
us, but only the log, the judgment we have projected onto the other, the Thou.
It was a wise Providence then that graced
me with this opportunity to see myself with clarity, to see the log, to
struggle with it, to tame it, and then to discover that once set aside,
a small, but wonderful, miracle happened. With the log gone I
began to see the true (and yes, imperfect) human beings as they came
past my ticket counter, and over time the regulars and I would
converse, as people do who have ongoing casual contacts. I
learned things, and began to understand that these folks came to their
lives, not because they were less than human in any way, but rather
because that was where they had to struggle, just as I had to struggle
in my own biography.
I also learned a deeper meaning of
Matthew 25:40: "...as
long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethren, you did
it for me". {Let me
assure you, however much you did it for any of the least important of
these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it for me.} Once I saw past the judgments, sentences and measures, I
began to treat my customers with greater respect, recognizing what
trials and errors had lead them to this place and time, and also
recognizing that much that they had struggled with in their own souls
and biographies, I could never have met and mastered had it been my
karma to face. These folks were not less than me, but braver and
frequently more self honest and human. It was I, with my log, who
was the hypocrite and the fake.
Later, as my biography unfolded further
chapters (as noted in the previous stanza), I ended up spending about
18 years in the trenches of the mental health system, 10 of those
working the graveyard shift in a for-profit mental hospital. Here
too I learned about the shadow in the human being, both my own and that
of others, and how many people, whose lives seem so abnormal, are
nonetheless strong of spirit for having faced trials and tests I know I
would have failed.
Of course, we should not overlook my
addiction to marijuana and related stronger hallucinogens, and the
later struggles in that aspect of my biography to enter the disciplines
of recovery.
Being the philosopher that I am by
nature, I have taken then time to think a great deal over the years
about the Mystery
of Evil, the nature of the human biography,
and the darker aspects of the human being. I have learned not
only from observation of others, but also observation of myself.
From these experiences comes what I write next in this Fool's
Tale (part I).
Let's once again look at the symbolism: [sense world < soul (d)
< i-AM > (d) soul > spiritual world].
We are now going to consider the role of that aspect of our inner
world I have designated with the term "(d)",
meaning the double, or shadow.
As the symbolism suggests, the double is
intimately related to the i-AM. As far as I can
tell, there is no part of the soul life more close to our essence than
this aspect (except for that aspect of the i-AM
which we don't yet ourselves even know, but will learn about as our
future unfolds, and which some try to refer to in making a distinction
between the so-called lower and higher ego). Knowledge of the
double has been around for a long while, but was lost for a time in
Western culture during the middle-ages. It is discussed in many
ways in Native American teachings, and Carl Jung's psychology of
Archetypes tried valiantly to take hold of this reality.
Rudolf Steiner writes of it in great detail, relating the
double to two major figures in his pantheon of Evil, namely Lucifer and
Ahriman. Valentin Tomberg, another anthroposophist (at one time),
discusses the double in his work on Inner
Development, describing three forms of the
double: a luciferic form, an ahrimanic form and a human form. The
anonymous author of Meditations
on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism considers these problems, identifying inner temptation
(the luciferic double) and inner prosecution (the ahrimanic double)
to which he adds a long discussion of what he calls human created
demons, or egregores in Arcanum XV (the meditation on) The Devil. In
this same Arcanum one can also find quoted extensively, a great deal of
Christian teachings concerning this, derived from the work of such
explorers of the authentic spiritual life as St. Teresa of Avila, St.
John of the Cross, Origen, St. Anthony the Great and so forth.
Here is how the shadow is described in a
Native American work: "Waynaboozoo's Spirit Father advised him: 'You have a twin
brother whom you have wondered about and whom you would seek.
This I tell you: he is your other side in all things and in all
ways. He is with you...do not seek him. Do not wish to know
him, but understand him. You will walk in the path of peace...he
would not. You are kind...he is not. You are humble...he is
not. You are generous...he is not. You seek the good in
things...he does not. You shall respect others...he will not.
You will seek the goodness in others...he will not. You are
the light...he is the darkness. Know that he is with you,
understand him.'" From the Mishomis
Book The voice of the Ojibway by
Edw. BentonBanai, 1979.]
What does it mean that the essence of who
we are as individual i-AMs is coupled so intimately
within the soul with something so apparently dark and evil? And,
how much do we ordinary folk, who aspire to walk In His
Steps, and for whom this book is mostly
written, need to know?
If we take up self-development in any
conscious way, we will have to face our own inner darkness; and, much
that Christ taught centers quite clearly on these problems. If we
are to be practicing, in the sense of In His
Steps, we have to relate to these problems,
remembering that Christ Himself was tempted, following the Baptism at
the Jordan, during the 40 days in the Desert.
But more crucially than this, if we wish
to understand human life, our own and that of others, as expressed in
the biography, we must take account of the double. It is said in
many places in fact, that if we are to believe in God, we shall also
have to believe in Satan, for quite clearly Satan has been most
successful to the extent that we forget his existence, and fail to come
to terms with the Fallen hierarchies and their role in the Creation.
Yet, there is a temptation right here in considering the problem of the Pantheon of Evil (Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Ahriman etc.). Such a mental playing with concepts of Evil can be distracting from the real work, which is facing evil within our own lives and biographies, our own inwardness. Contemplating the pantheon of Evil is the problem of the log and the splinter on a larger scale. What we need to do instead is look at what is right in front of us, and which we can deal with, leaving aside too much of a focus on grand cosmological questions that attribute modern social problems to such as the Anti-Christ. We can have far too much theory, and not enough practice. If you really want to understand the Mystery of Evil, study what you can know about yourself before anything else. Otherwise, you will be nothing but a hypocrite and a fake. Take it from one who knows.
St. Paul has given us a great hint, in his remarks about how we will
what we do not wish to do, and how we wish to do what we cannot will.
There can be observed in all our lives the clear fact that our
intentions and desires to do good are frequently frustrated by
something in us that we cannot tame, yet leads us in directions that
bring pain, trials and troubles by the score. As the
Unvarnished Gospels point out: we frequently
miss the mark. Our intentions (our wishes) get subverted on their
way to being willed.
Here then we encounter one of the
functions of the shadow or double. In order to meet in our
biography that which is karma and fate, that which we need to meet in
order to learn what this life is meant to teach us, we have to come to
certain experiences from which we might otherwise shy away.
It is one function of the double to make sure we face our
trials, and so we have weaknesses and flaws, in spite of the best
intentions of our eternal spirit, or i-AM.
The aim (wish) of the will of our i-AM
is true, but we are guided into error in order to experience. In
this sense then the double is our friend, or at the very least a
divinely authored necessity.
The double or shadow is a gift from the
Divine Mystery, that enables the Art of the order and shape of the
individual human biography, such that our biography's context and
texture contains the teachings we individually need to receive. For this reason are we tempted
inwardly - wouldn't this be fun (the luciferic double) and prosecuted
inwardly - that nasty voice that tells us what jerks we are (the
ahrimanic double) and flawed - those character defects we need to
overcome (the human double, or egregores). These
indications, just given about the double by the way, are not meant to
be complete, but only to hint or point in a certain direction, so that
the reader may over time begin to distinguish between that which
appears within as acts of their true i-AM,
and what appears there that is brought by the double and meant to
challenge us.
[From this point onward I am no longer
going to use the term egregores as the equivalent of the human double.
While it may be technically accurate (an egregore is a
self-created psychic parasite - what the heroin addict called: the monkey on my back), as a form of expression the term egregore is lacking
in beauty. I have found over the years that the truth is not only
also good, it is also beautiful. So from this stage forward I
will be using the terms wounds or karma of wounds or self-generated
wound in order to refer to the human created
double.]
What we need to remember, always, is that
what we are confronted with by this inner dynamic is choice. We
are not compelled by the doubles, but encouraged. We, as i-AMs,
still choose. Sure, many will deny this. We like to be able
to say: it was an irresistible impulse, or I couldn't help myself.
But, when we learn to be properly, and brutally, self honest, our
inner moment of choice is and was always there.
The pedophile likes that dark pleasure.
The drunk likes that first drink of the day. Those with a
bad temper like the feeling of power and the rush that accompanies the
release of their passions into violence. We have the capacity to
lie to ourselves above all other lies we tell in life, and certainly we
like to lie to ourselves about these choices and about our true
responsibility.
Let me here make a small aside about
another aspect of mental illness, for many might become confused,
particularly given Christ's method in the case of several healings
wherein demons were cast out. The natural science practices of
medicine are not in error in many cases to find material problems in
the brain as a cause of much that we call mental illness. Rudolf
Steiner remarked that physical symptoms frequently have their true
cause in the soul, while soul problems (dysfunctions of the inner or
mental life) frequently have their true cause in the physical-material.
Let us take schizophrenia as an example.
Modern psychiatry is quite correct to
find material dysfunctions in the brain as a major causal element of
this mental disease. But psychiatry is flawed in thinking that
the voices heard are, however, in all cases hallucinations. The
brain is an organ by which the spiritual takes hold of the material in
a certain way, and when the brain is not healthy, the spiritual cannot
seat itself properly in the physical. Not properly seated in the
physical then, the spirit or i-AM is partially and
improperly across the threshold in the spiritual world, such that
abnormal psychic experiences are the result. What in a healthy
individual would be a balanced relationship, with the doubles and
self-generated wounds in the soul, is now imbalanced, and the voices
are symptomatic of the fact that these aberrant psychic powers have an
untamed access to the i-AM. Such individuals
then, bear in their biography, the difficult and courageous task of
meeting inner experiences without a sound understanding of their nature
(which then explains the descriptions in the Gospels of certain of
Christ's healings).
In the film A
Beautiful Mind, we can find a wonderful
depiction of these realities, provided for us by the honest and careful
observations of the main character, John Nash, a real schizophrenic.
His visual hallucinations were of three main kinds:
First, there was the college roommate, whose playfulness and rowdiness gives us a profound picture of the luciferic double - the tempter; Second, there is the dark spy figure, whose paranoia and domination of Nash shows us the nature of the ahrimanic double - the prosecutor; and Third, there is the little girl, who is the human double - the self created wounds connected to Nash's frequent indulgences in infantile behavior in his social relationships (his lack of humility early in life with reference to his genius).
This film also suggests that were we to
better understand the nature of these inner torments, we might help the
individual find the inner strength and mastery, which led Nash in the
maturity of his life to find a place of balance between his own i-AM
and the double-complex as that lived in his soul. Which balance,
by the way, led him eventually to speak, in his acceptance speech for
the Nobel Prize, so authentically of the importance of love in his own healing and understanding of life.
I can do no more than hint here, but I
did want to point in this additional direction so that people will be
careful in their judgments regarding the details of much that we have
called: mental illness.
Yet, what do we do when the temptation is
so deep, so ongoing, so dark and nasty and consuming of our being and
brings such horrible consequences with it to our families and loved
ones?
Here we come to the created inner demon
or egregore, which I am now calling a self-generated wound.
As suggested above, in an earlier version of this book I
used the term egregore more or less continuously, and having now
decided (getting this ready to be published) that I no longer want to
express this situation this way.
On the road to being an alcoholic, for
example, if that is our karma and fate - or choice, we are tempted by
the double. But over time, within us there comes to be, by our
repeated (almost like a religious Rite) activity, the self-created wound that is evoked by turning again and again to the
dangerous pleasure. It is by repetition that something unwanted (the monkey on my back, my
disease - the wound, a self-created dark entity) grows in the soul. I
grow it by indulging my unrestrained passion. The double may
tempt me, but the wound comes into being through my repeatedly choosing to
consent to the temptation. Yet, as we all know, many find the
strength to overcome the effects of this self-generated wound in the
soul.
It was for healing this that the same
Grace that led Sheldon to write In His
Steps, and Steiner to write The
Philosophy of Freedom, also led two
alcoholics to discover the Twelve
Steps. The Twelve
Steps are a Grace given means by which human
beings, in the company of others with like trials, can learn to face
the weakness of the i-AM in the face of the
temptations, prosecutions, and defects fostered by the doubles, as well
as the wounds created by our repeated giving into the these same
temptations, prosecutions and defects.
Please remember that consciousness is evolving over eons of time, and that only now is humanity stepping out of its spiritual childhood, such that finally we are becoming ready to confront the inner trials and tasks of facing the shadow, which itself has been placed there by the Divine Mystery in order to bring us to those experiences demanded by the law of recompense, or karma. We have chosen badly in the past, and will chose badly in the future, yet the Divine Mystery, in a most Loving Way, has taken account of this.
Obviously more needs to be said, because
some actions are so horrible as to be incomprehensible to most of us.
Ethnic cleansing, for example, an unjustifiable euphemism for the
murder and rape of innocents of another race or culture, seems far
outside anything we can call human at all. Like the Holocaust, we
suspect that there lurks somewhere such darkness of soul and spirit as
to be unnatural in the extreme. We are right to ask: Is it
possible for an apparently human being to sacrifice so completely that
humanness and descend into depths unconscionable? Here we come to
a boundary condition in the Mystery of Evil, wherein the
potential within the i-AM for highest good is
confronted by its same potential for gravest evil. Just how free has the Divine
Mystery created us?
It would seem there are no depths we
cannot plumb, for the very reason that there are also no heights we
cannot achieve. The one cannot exist without the other.
Human evil can go beyond even what the Gods ordain, precisely
because human good can also go beyond what in that realm has yet been
imagined. Freedom is that deep and that
terrible in all its potentials, and this is one of the lessons of WWII
- the one we most wish not to face (there was not only the Holocaust,
there was also the Atomic Bomb).
I can here, as a kind of help in
understanding this, only share a very intimate conversation with the
Divine Mother that occurred during prayer and meditation one day (see
appendix for a discussion of how to combine prayer and meditation in a
practical and pragmatic way). I was in a moment of deep personal
anguish, aware of my own failings, and aware of how much suffering we
humans cause each other. I could not but cry out to the Mother
and the Son, how did They handle it, for surely They
experienced everything we did, not only from our side as evil doers,
but also from the side of our victims. How did They
deal with such horror? Horror that had to come to Them
everyday, and had come and would come to Them
for eons both past and future. My little trials could be nothing
compared to what They must feel. So, filled with this little pain, which
arises just in recognizing the incomprehensible weight and pain They
must feel, so much greater than ever I would experience, I asked: What do You do with this
intolerable pain?
Then, from the very deepest realms Her
voice came, gentle, soothing, almost caressing in its kindness: We turn it into Love.
This then we can understand - that within the Roots of the World, the Divine Mother, and within the Heart of the World, the Son - They first receive into themselves (and take upon Themselves) the sins - the errors - of the world, in the past, in the present and in the future) and then transform even the worst of human evil into Love.
There is more that needs to be said on
this theme, but before we can go deeper into this, we need to take up,
in the same way we first met with Moral Grace and then Freedom, a deeper discussion of
the nature of Love. Once we have some working knowledge of love, we can
then make a whole of what has necessarily, up to this point, had to be
presented in bits and pieces. At the same time, we need to make
one last look at the problem of Freedom, so as to enrich our understanding of human history, on
our way to beginning our considerations of Love.
eighth stanza
the Gesture of the History of Civilizations
as expressed in both Matter and Spirit
from whence comes technology and where is it going,
or, the entanglement of the i-AM in matter,
its
consequences and its meaning
"It matters to me
for matter to be
and that I to matter
do matter"
In our previous discussions of the
Evolution of Consciousness, we have mostly been looking at the insides
of human civilization - at the life of soul and spirit. We need
as well to take account of the outsides - that is how the spirit has
taken hold of matter and molded it for our needs and purposes.
These two streams, one inner and one outer, interact with each
other, and how this interaction is to play out in the future is a very
important consequence of our Freedom. We are now more and more in
charge, as we enter into our spiritual adulthood. Our choices are
to be determinative. Do we bring forward Moral Grace, or do we
found a new civilization (out of the contemporary conditions of social
chaos) that more and more is based upon the Absence of the Good?
We are all aware of the pictures that
natural science has given us. First there is the big bang, some
mysterious event out of which matter and energy appear from nowhere in
the smallest instance of time. First nothing, then everything.
The causal problem is shoved to the other side of this Event.
Why nothing, and then everything, is not known; but it seems that
somehow this is supposed to have happened all by itself.
There is assumed then, in this Event, to
be no consciousness, no being, no meaning. Only matter and energy
with the two seemingly interchangeable. The question of whether
there is space there before the big bang is also not known. Is
there already an infinite emptiness into which the big bang appears as
if by magic? Or is space itself created in this moment of
mystery? Also, what about time? Where does time come from?
Following on this inexplicable event
(inexplicable in the sense of conventional theoretical physics),
everything else that happens in time and space is supposed to flow.
Matter and energy interact and various kinds of substances form.
Over vast amounts of time these dead and empty of consciousness
substances interact and coalesce, until we have stars and planets.
The great heat of this imagined (theoretical) initial event
recedes and all begins to cool (remember, it is not empirically
observed, but imagined). At some point water appears on at least
the Earth, and then by accident the first stirrings of life - some kind
of quasi-organic soup.
Again great time passes. The soup
differentiates into a variety of forms until micro-organisms appear.
Now the mysterious hand of natural selection
begins to work its will. Accidental variations arise, and these
compete, with that which has the best chance of adapting and surviving
passing through this rite of accident and competition. More and
more complexity arises as the eons of evolution run their course.
Then again a great mystery - consciousness appears! The accidental development of the nervous
system and its chemical analogs in the metabolism somehow combine to
produce not only a self-reflective consciousness, but one that
eventually comes to develop languages, tools, cultures and myths.
The accidental substance wakes up, looks
around and thinks! Thought comes into being from
out of nowhere (or so it seems to many). [Recall again Emerson,
from the essay Nature: Nature
is a thought incarnate and turns to thought again as ice becomes water
and then gas. The world is mind precipitated and the volatile
essence is forever escaping in the form of free thought.]
Of course, the views of modern science
are not how human beings always thought about their existence.
Prior to the arrival of materialistic science (as a consequence
of the on-looker
separation stage of the Evolution of
Consciousness - more later...), ancient and wise peoples spoke of Gods
and other Invisible Beings. Where modern physics speaks of the big bang, Genesis says: Let there be Light!
The belief of the modern secular
humanist, for whom religion has no meaning, is that the ancients were
ignorant, and made God in their own image, exporting from their own
experience the myths that have come down to us through the Ages.
God is an invention for many, and a poorly made one at that.
Of course, it hardly is noticed just how
much of the theories of moderns are themselves myth. The mud woke up
and thought, and after thinking of the Gods, decided after a while to
think of a universe without the Gods, perhaps just to have a little
variety?
What have the returned meaning-essence of
the Kings had to say about this problem?
In the tenth stanza in the section on Love below - the Seventh Day of Creation as an Expression of Love - we will investigate in more detail the enchantment of humanity that took place in the years during which science emerged from what some call onlooker-consciousness (a very specific stage in the Evolution of Consciousness). For now, let us just consider the wider context of the differences between ancient and modern myths concerning the origin of the universe and the appearance of human beings in that universe.
Owen Barfield, mention above in reference
to Steiner's work on the Evolution of Consciousness, has himself
studied and reflected with great discipline upon the nature of
language, and what the study of language might reveal. Barfield
has written a small book, which is nonetheless very important: Speaker's
Meaning, in which he examines the history of
meaning and the meaning of history. I will next summarize his
argument, which is subtly and carefully wrought. Please take this
summary with a grain of salt, for almost certainly I will do it poorly,
and one should read this book in any event.
The study of language reveals that
languages have common ways in which they arise and evolve. In
their beginning, the words always refer directly to what lies in the
experience of the culture that is creating the language. Objects
of experience are simply named. This is a fox, that is a tree.
Here we run, now we eat. As languages evolve and grow, the
meanings of words begin to change - these words take on changes in
their meanings as the culture's life and growth itself changes.
For example in English, over a recent period of two hundred
years, the words subject and object exchanged meanings with each other.
Eventually in maturity language becomes metaphorical, so that, for example, where once one might have used
the word sunset to refer only to that event which we experience while
watching the sun set, now this term can be applied metaphorically, such as to speak of the sunset of someones life.
Modern thinkers, under the influence and
the assumptions of natural materialistic science (Barfield calls this
influence in this book: modern taboos), look at history
in the following way. Closest to us in time is recorded history,
history written down as it happened. Then as we go back we have
prehistory, where the memory of events was oral only, which oral
history was itself to some degree remembered and written down in
recorded history. And, before even recorded history, and
prehistory, we have the age of myth. In the time of myth the
various cultures invented the Gods (so it is thought today), and these
myths then become first part of oral history, or prehistory, and then
later are also remembered during the period of recorded history.
According to these same modern thinkers,
these myths were a metaphorical use of language,
done in an effort to explain the inexplicable aspects of human
existence - those nasty questions about the origin of the universe and
the meaning and existence of humanity.
Oops!, says Barfield. The problem with this view, while
convenient and consistent with the theories of materialistic science,
is that it assumes that language can do something it cannot.
Namely, it cannot be metaphorical during its youth,
which youth clearly occurs during the language's, and its culture's,
Age of Myth. Let us go over this again, so as to make it as plain
as possible.
Languages and meaning evolve as follows:
plain meaning (words refer only to experiences), developing meaning
(words changing as to what they refer), and then metaphorical meaning
(words given new, even higher meanings). History, according
to moderns, goes: myth, prehistory, and then recorded history.
The problem, suggests Barfield, is that if myth and plain meaning
are linked up, then what is remembered in myths can only have referred
to something that was in fact experienced!
This view of the history of ancient
cultures seems clearly correct: myth, prehistory and then recorded
history. At the same time, the language which is born in this
same culture will have its youth in the period of myth, at which time
it always and only makes words that refer to experience. This
being the case, this means that the myths of humanity always refer to
real experiences. These languages developed a name for Gods and
other Invisibles precisely because these were part of their experience.
What Steiner as a modern King helps us to
see is that the error in thought that is made by moderns is to assume that the nature of our form of consciousness is the same
as the consciousness of the ancients (we looked at this previously in
stanza two in the part on Moral Grace, when first we took up the
subject of the Evolution of Consciousness). From the experience
of modern Kings we can come to understand that in the time of myth,
consciousness was different. Human beings did not live, as we do
today, in a state of inner darkness. Rather they lived in a state
of dream-like integration - their consciousness united with the
invisible realms. For example, think about the aboriginal peoples
of Australia and their idea of the Dreamtime.
Myths arose because human experience, in
this dreamlike state of integration, named
what was known directly to the type of human consciousness typical of
the time of the creation of that myth.
Now we can begin to find the counter-picture to the one of materialistic science, with its modern myth (fanciful imagination known as the big bang) of matters they have not seen or experienced directly, but only assume based upon that hypothesis (cold hypothetical and theoretical - fanciful - picture) which only sees matter and never spirit.
If we are to truly appreciate history,
without falsifying the age of myth, we can see that more and more
humanity became entangled in matter. And that in fact,
consciousness was there in the beginning (this is what myth teaches),
integrated with the being and activity of the Gods.
So that as matter comes to be, it is accompanied by consciousness
- the two interweaving over the long eons of evolution.
There was no big bang, but there was the
Creation: Let
there be light!
Thus, along with the birth of matter is
the simultaneous birth of the i-AM. Matter is itself enchanted being, a created womb for the unfolding and development of the
i-AM over the ages, for consciousness and will accompany
matter from the beginning. Moreover, what emerges finally in our
time as thought, is the slow condensation and contraction of this
spirit (the i-AM) from its origin in the cosmic periphery into a center -
the individual human being.
That which the natural scientist thinks
today, could only be
thought today, because before today it was
outside us, surrounding us, carrying us forward in the Evolution of our
Consciousness. (See Barfield's Saving the
Appearances: a Study in Idolatry).
Consider for a moment the question of what is thought? We are being taught, under the assumptions of modern biology, that the brain produces thought. But this is not observed. What is observed (known empirically) is that areas of the brain show increased activity in accord with certain invisible things that human beings do, such as feeling and thinking. Further, that in damaged brains, some activity becomes impossible. Mental processes usual in normal consciousness are disturbed. The conclusion is then drawn that the human activity that exists invisibly (we know it in our self-reflective consciousness) has its only origin in the brain or some other biological (matter based) cause.
These conclusions, however, are not observed, but are rather themselves merely thought. A great deal of the content of modern natural science consists of thoughts about what was not and/or cannot be observed. When these thoughts become disconnected from observation, the empirical basis of science is lost, and the temptation to myth making arises.
In a fundamental sense, these thoughts
are the names of matters not seen, and because this is the case, these
thoughts become a modern myth in the sense the we use this term today -
meaning something imaged in a fanciful way to be true, but which was
not empirically observed.
The general justification for the
creation of these neo-myths is that their existence is a reasonable
extension of what has already been empirically observed. So these
neo-myths then arise on a claimed scaffold of logical thought, out of
certain limited acts of empiricism.
To get a sense of this, we have to notice
a phrase frequently found when science is described in media: "leading scientists believe that...". When modern natural science moves beyond its
true empirical limits it becomes more like what some call religion. Observers of modern culture have even give a name
to this trend: scientism; which would be the shared beliefs of scientists and the general public that can't be
empirically supported.
Let us come at this from another
direction.
In the remarkable film, Mind Walk, we have a dramatic dialog between a poet, a politician,
and a theoretical physicist. At one point the physicist describes
matter as follows (more or less, again one should see the original):
Mostly matter is empty space, that is: nothing. An atom is
mostly empty space, and the huge empty space between atoms is far
larger than the space between the parts of atoms. The parts of
atoms are themselves not there in the conventional
sense that people believe. These parts are more like the
geometric intersection of forces. The forces intersect, and a
geometric point of intersecting force arises, having a kind of
stability or pattern and form according to the laws regarding these
various forces. [In quantum theory this stability or pattern is thought not to be fixed until a particular moment in time, c.f.
the fanciful imagination of Shrodinger's Cat.]
The concept is that there is really no substance at all in the way we think of substance due to our sensual experience of matter. The solidity we experience is empty space punctuated with geometric points of the intersection of forces, which again behave according to laws (not all of which are understood by any means).
What are we to make of such a set of
thoughts (concepts)?
One of the problems this points toward, which is not as well understood as it should be, is that this understanding of the nature of matter that can be found living in modern physics is not the idea of matter that is used in modern biology. The concept of matter in evolutionary biology is about forty years behind the concept of matter in physics.
If we turn to the brain, and we realize
that the substance being described by the neurophysiologist is really
not there at all, but rather only exists as an extremely complex field
of intersecting forces that only coalesces into a fixed state at a
particular moment (Shrodinger's Cat, again), such that then we have to
ask a whole other set of questions, such as: How does a complex field of
intersection forces produce thought? Or,
to look at the question from a very interesting direction: Is perhaps this complex
field of intersecting forces itself the result of Thought?
These are serious problems, in that
science is far more ignorant than its practitioners often admit.
Before I offer more of the counter-myth to that of the big bang
and Darwinian evolution, let me speak for a moment about what is called
the geological record. This record provides natural science
with a lot of justifiable evidence for certain of its conclusions.
Let me summarize the record. Layers
of rock cover the earth. These layers have a kind of order, which
is seen correctly as telling us something of the past. As earth
evolution proceeded, these layers built up, and by examining them in
reverse order we know something of the geological and biological
history of the planet. These layers are not continuous, however,
but are broken up by periods in which there is so much chaos - so much
lack of organized forms, that we have no reliable concept of what
happened during that period of time represented by that chaotic layer.
This means that the geological record is
discontinuous - broken up by periods in which what happened left little
or no evidence in the sense of organized form, except and unless we
read the chaos as evidence itself. The ordered layers themselves
also have certain general characteristics, of which the main one is
that the biological forms that begin that organized layer are also the
biological forms that end that layer (this is called in paleontology: stasis). This means that each layer (or period) has the
same basic organisms in the end that it had in the beginning.
The massive changes that can be seen in biological forms between one organized layer and the next organized layer are separated by an intervening layer of chaos (mystery).
Lets make a picture of these processes of
change. We have a layer that has biological forms in it, which
forms it begins and ends with, and then a layer of chaos, and following
that another layer of forms which don't change from the beginning of
the layer to its end, but which are often radically different from that
layer prior to the chaotic layer. If we step outside the
geological record, does anything in modern life follow a similar
pattern? Yes!
In the change from caterpillar to
butterfly we have first a well formed structure (the caterpillar), then
a period of chaos (the formless mass in the chrysalis), and then
another well formed new structure (the butterfly).
So we could look at the geological record
as showing us periods of form, followed by periods of formlessness,
followed again by periods of new form - namely a well known biological
process we know as metamorphosis. What this
suggests is that the whole record is itself a sequence of ordered organic changes - one metamorphosis followed by another.
[One of the implications of this is that what we call rock
(look at those kinds of rocks called colloidal) was itself first
biological - first organic. This means that the organic is not
built up out of dead matter, but the dead matter was produced by the
living processes of the Earth. We already see such a process in
the embryo, where the skeleton only comes into existence from the
living - the hardest parts of the human being are the result of a process in the living, rather than their causal
precedent. Could this same not be true of the Earth, namely that:
The solid,
bone-like Earth is a consequence of something that was previously alive?]
Now metamorphosis is a biological process
in which the organism moves from one form, through chaos, to another
form as part of its own natural order. If the geological record
is a ordered sequence of metamorphosis, then it is continuous from the
beginning to the present - that is: the totality of the geological
record is itself one single organism (existing on a planetary scale) undergoing one
metamorphosis following on another, which as it progresses extrudes
from its living nature some bone-like material which it leaves behind.
The Earth is living, and as it has grown and developed it has
created its own skeleton. The lifeless does not produce the
living, the living leaves behind the lifeless.
Now we have had an assumption (no evidence) that consciousness doesn't arise until the biological forms achieve a certain complexity. This is not an observed phenomena by the way, but rather an concept imposed upon the phenomena. Part of the justification for this is another assumption, which believes that all biological form has left a record of itself. These assumptions twist the meaning that can be derived from the geological record in a certain preconceived direction.
In point of fact, consciousness by its
very nature would never leave a record, since it is not material.
The reality is that we have no idea, from the geological record,
of in what way (or not) that consciousness participated. We have
only assumed it away.
I have not tried above to completely argue away certain ideas. Rather I only wanted to break open our assumptions, so that we can see that maybe, just maybe, materialistic science doesn't really know what it thinks it knows, but rather only believes what it thinks it believes (which are two entirely different states of mind).
Let us now return to what the history of
language teaches us.
If we admit to the wisdom of the age of
myth, we can see that this arrangement we call substance was itself
created out of the consciousness and being of what had to preexist any
creation. Just as the i-AM was created, so was matter
created, each to serve a purpose in the whole of the Creation.
The forces the physicist has discovered are nothing but the will of beings. And the laws the physicist observes are nothing
but the higher rules by which those beings (whose nature is found in
matter) have been organized according to the Divine Mystery.
We have seen, in the Evolution of
Consciousness, that the i-AM is being schooled.
We can now look at outer history, at the History of Civilizations
- the times of the hunter-gatherer, the times of agriculture, the times
of invention and industry - as a gradual emancipation from, coupled with an exploration of the nature of matter. In the beginning, we simply
live off the nature and order of the Creation (the story-memory of the
Garden of Eden), until we assert ourselves against the apparent rules,
and begin to take more and more interest in the Created world, first
transforming it with agriculture and animal husbandry, and then
investigating the nature of substance (matter) itself, and learning to
manipulate that world as well.
Here we also see something deeper about thought itself. Without all the thought that stands behind it, that which follows the pastoral
dream - the remembered Garden - does not work. To take hold of
nature and transform it, proceeds entirely from thought. To analyze nature and seek its rules requires thought. Our whole civilization is filled everywhere with
the consequences of thought. It is, in fact, thought which penetrates, overcomes and transforms substance.
And, keep in mind here the concept
previously mentioned, that thought (genius of spirit) was outside us in
earlier stages of the Evolution of Consciousness, and only now in our
time (the fourth and fifth cultural epochs) has thought (genius of
spirit) individualized and entered into the single human being.
How could what is seen as a mere product
of substance (thought in the way materialistic science conceives it)
find its way to understanding and transforming substance? By
accident? This is nonsense of the most fundamental order, for
there is no logical scaffolding that lets us believe as rational beings
that the inferior can give rise to the superior. We have, for
hundreds of years now, completely misconceived the true nature of both
thought and substance. [into which misconception, as a state of
consciousness, we were enchanted in order to become free of the gods -
see below, the eleventh stanza.]
Our intelligence first lived in the form
of a dreaming of the invisibles, walking the earth, picking the
available fruits, until we more and more wake up in the sense world,
and live less in the dreaming connection to the invisibles. The
world of substance serves this awaking from the dreaming. Our
intelligence - thought - clarifies, and becomes the possession of the
individual. For the ancient Greeks, genius referred to a spirit
outside us that taught and inspired us, while for we moderns genius
refers now to what we ourselves are.
As we press deeper into matter, we become
more individualized. What is at first outside as spiritual
inspiration (the Gods), now becomes the natural capacities of each
individual human being. The law and the prophets were once
outside, and now, they are becoming us. As the i-AM
dances with substance (matter), we grow and become - we experience
directly and personally the Evolution of Consciousness.
Eventually, we find a way to look
objectively (myth free) at matter (the on-looker separation). Genius is now inside us, so we begin to take
matter apart. Free* anymore any experience of the Gods (no
gnosis), we think for ourselves, and invent our own myths (the big bang
and Darwinian evolution). The inner world is now dark, while the
outer world is full of light (where ages ago the outer world was once
in shadow and the inner world filled with light). Faith has
arisen, but even that (since the time of Christ) has become more and
more arid and rigid, leading to inflexible beliefs and fundamentalist
social demands.
*[This Freedom is discussed below in the
section on Love with respect to the reason for the enchantment into materialism.]
Let us review this last point, with a
slightly different emphasis. Our original state of being (and of
consciousness) was such that what we think of as the inner world of
today was light-filled, and the outer world of the senses more in
shadow. We knew the Gods then directly (the Dreamtime). But as part of the Fall, we lost this
connection, and the inner world became more and more dark, while the
outer sense world become more filled with light. This change was
important in the Evolution of Consciousness, for it is necessary for
the development of individuality.
At the time of Christ's Incarnation into
the stream of matter, and as a human being, the Son was set on the path
that was to lead to death (something no aspect of the Divine Mystery
ever before, or ever after, would experience). Also at this time, humanity was still within the
Fall. The inner world was dark and getting darker (gnosis was to
disappear fully, not even initiation would be possible for a time as
the Dark Ages of Western Civilization began), yet Christ reminds us of
this loss of our original state of integration and the possibility of
return, with: "the
kingdom of heaven is within you".
Moreover, He full well knows that we are to descend (Fall)
further, into the state of the on-looker separation ("I
have much more to say to you, but you can't bear it yet").
Yet to save us, we are given the gift of Faith. Even in the darkness then, we are taught to hold true, and are given the powers of the soul that not only have the capacity to hold true (during the darkness of the Fall), but to act true (recall St Paul's remarks about Faith, Hope and Charity).
Let us now return to our main theme, the
relationship of thought to matter...
At a certain point in time, humanity
begins to create, albeit in a very clumsy and childish way. We
take substance and change it. First we simply combine it with
other substances and reform it. We extract it from its
natural places and make it serve our needs. As we do this we
begin to find that substance contains hidden forces, such as the will
of beings constrained by higher law. Yet, we do not recognize
that will, for with the on-looker separation, and the
darkening of our inwardness, we have lost the Gods. Our lamed
thinking has produced a view of the world empty of being
and consciousness. We have a highly technological civilization which
does not understand reality at all.
Even our contemporary history understands
that chemistry (for example) arose from the activity of the Alchemists,
who were (in their essence) the first iteration of the return of
initiation (the stream of Kings) after a necessary absence. There
is no chemistry without the Alchemists, who are falsely accused of
seeking to turn lead into gold, in a material way, when their every
effort and meaning was about turning the lead of the soul into gold -
to overcome the Fall and seek reintegration. Because such views
were heretical (leading to torture and death at the hands of the
Church), they were hidden by the true Alchemists in a metaphorical
language.
Moreover, the leading scientists, which
our edited history of science now pretends was not true, were all
students of alchemy and astrology (Newton, Kepler etc. to name but a
few).
Eventually we abandon the idea of good
and evil (the Absence of the Good), and begin to consume the world.
We set free electricity and magnetism, not knowing we play with
divine fires, until, we touch the very fundament of substance, bursting
its lawful arrangement and making, of the destruction of its divinely
authored order, a weapon - an atom bomb. [Recall that in order to
make a bomb we first have to concentrate in one place tons of what is
otherwise finely distributed throughout the mineral earth, and then
refine that substance in centrifuges more and more intensifying and
isolating it from its natural condition. Then this now intensely
concentrated uranium must further be imploded (forced together in an
even higher density by an explosion), in order to have a bomb.
And, not content with the fires hidden in
basic substance, our play now reaches into the mystery of organic life
itself. Having stolen the truth from our ideas of life, and made
of the Creation a meaningless accident, we now look at the laws and
mysteries of organic life, seeking to turn them to our purposes.
Just as the fundament of substance was cracked wide open in a
childish and impetuous fashion, so now we play with the life order of
substance and put again at risk our own earthly existence, for the
bodies we inhabit are built entirely out of the substances of the
Earth, whose nature and order we now denature and destroy in our
arrogant ignorance.
Yes, our aim is true. We often seek
the Good, in impulses to heal, to feed the multitudes, and solve the
dilemmas of existence. However, and we all know this, at the same
time we do much for selfish purposes, far too much. In fact, our
Civilization - Western Civilization - is in its last days precisely
because we have much too much woven it out of moral corruption.
Seeing only matter and never spirit
(substance is real, but not thought), in our immature arrogance and
ignorance, we violate (rape and plunder) over and over again that true
Womb (the Earth) in which we were to be physically born in order to
experience the life of the senses as a preparation for the development
of our individuality and our birth into spiritual maturity.
How far does this go?
Now we can see the deeper meaning of the
Eucharist. "Take and eat; this is my body...All of you drink of this;
for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is being shed from many
unto the forgiveness of sins." Matthew
26-28 ["Take and eat this: this is my body...Drink from this, all
of you: this is my blood, the blood of the testament, poured out for
many for the forgiveness of wrongs"]
Substance is an aspect of the Divine
Mystery Itself, giving Itself to us the way a Mother and Father
sacrifice their own being, out of Love, to their children. When
shall we learn to truly honor that gift? Yes, it was freely given
by the Divine Mystery for our illumination and edification, but just
when will we consciously receive this gift and once again be grateful
in the same way it was in the long ago Ages of Myth?
Some Christians have taken up a peculiar
relationship to that part of Genesis (1:26) which says: "God said, 'let us make
mankind in our image and likeness; and let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, over all the wild
animals and every creature that crawls on the earth.'" This might misdirect us, if we take dominion to
mean: do whatever you wish. This is, of course, existentially
true - we can do anything (that is our Freedom). But the real
issue is not what can we do, but what should we do, and then by what
measure do we determine the nature of that should (free moral grace, or
by the rules of unrestrained greed and power?)
The true understanding of dominion has been lost over the years, especially since we have come under the influence of natural science. This patriarchal influence has also cut us off, for a time, from a more direct connection to the Divine Feminine. In the section below on Love, regarding the Divine Feminine, and in the appendix where other considerations of Eros are developed (especially the meaning of dominion and surrender) we will gain additional insights into this confusion, which for some Christians leads them to fail to grasp the significance of the environmental movement, with its instinctive understanding of the Eucharist aspect of our true relationship to Nature.
Further, there is some indirect evidence
that dominion may be a mistranslation of the original Hebrew, and that
the more correct translation might well be ...and let them have
communion with the..., - or as is said
in ancient Taoism - be at one with Nature. These - dominion over or communion with
- are, of course, two very different qualities of relationship.
This then is the deep riddle of Freedom - which do we choose: dominion over or communion with; and now we are finally ready to consider the riddle and Mystery of Love.
Love
the theme
(song) of the deepest hidden potential of the human being
ninth stanza
the Four Forms of Love:
selfless love (Agape); nurturing love (Storge);
brother and
sisterly love (Phileo); and, erotic and sensual love (Eros).
In the title to this section I have made
reference to certain classical Greek terms (Agape etc.). It is
not my intention to ground what is about to be written in these ancient
concepts. Rather, I only want to honor the depth of wisdom on
which Western Civilization was founded, by acknowledging that wisdom.
The nature of the human being has changed considerably since the
time of the ancient Greeks (see also the above discussions on the
Evolution of Consciousness). The Civilization founded on their
Genius has reached its last days (we presently live in the time of the
End of Western Civilization). At the same time there are all
manner of good reasons for coming around again to much that they
thought and understood, as long as we recognize that this return is not
a circle that comes upon its own beginning, but is rather a rising
spiral that when it passes that beginning by, does so at a much more
evolved state.
What this means at a practical level is
that the following discussion (as with much before it) is not based
upon some consideration of the Ideals of the Four Forms of Love, but
rather on the most intimate personal experiences within my own
biography, through which I was taught, by a remarkable Grace, in the
practice and the pragmatic understanding of these Forms.
For example, some might consider Agape or
selfless love to bear a special kinship with Divine Love. That
may even have been what the Ancient Greeks had in mind. It is not
what I have in mind, however. Divine Love is, to experience,
quite overwhelming. It is so present and penetrating that one is
tempted to either drown in it (abandon our own ego) or flee from it in
fear. Not, by the way, because the Divine Mystery is calling to
us to drown or to flee in fear, but because until we are truly ready to
experience Divine Love directly, we are easily overcome due to our own
flaws. My personal experiences of Divine Love have shown that
this Grace given Gift is only offered for as long as we can tolerate It. Once It tends to become too much for us, It withdraws Itself out of the same impulse of Love already present.
This being the case, the selfless love of
which I intend to speak here is human in all its dimensions.
Selfless love is the human act of personal sacrifice, in which
the i-AM forgoes any benefit for itself, and only acts for the
benefit of the other, or the Thou. It is this
human love that Christ teaches us in the Gospel lessons. It
is this human love that Christ demonstrated by going to the Cross,
whereas it is Divine Love that brings about the Resurrection - the
re-integration (a goal toward which we hunger and which requires our
co-participation before we can be welcomed home).
Now human love, in its most general sense
in that it expresses itself in Four Forms, is nonetheless one whole.
It is a whole with four faces, or aspects of expression.
From another point of view, it is also Fallen or UnFallen
according to whether the center of its nature is selfless love, for
selfless love itself can never be Fallen (too Earthly). Selfless
human love is always an expression of the divine nature of our i-AM.
It is "Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven" Matthew 6:10 {Let Your
kingdom come, May Your will be seen On the Earth, just as in the sky.}
Another small aside, as regards the term sky. We might think that Christ is misleading us in referring to sky, and that later efforts which substituted the term heaven were more correct. The real problem is understood from an entirely different direction. Later in this book I will discuss how the paradigm of scientific materialism was the result of a kind of divinely authored enchantment of the mind. We moderns don't see the sky to which Christ refers and which his listeners understood, but rather we see the sky which natural science teaches - a sky empty of being and consciousness, concern and delight. We need to relearn to truly see the sky, free of any paradigm, religious, scientific or otherwise.
The fact is that when we see the sky
through the lens of our education, we do not see what is there, but
what we have been taught to see - a place empty of consciousness and
being, and full of abstract forces and processes, without any living
intelligence. If we re-educate ourselves, then we can discover
how to see the sky according to our own intuitive understanding - that
is give it the meaning we decide, and not the meaning imposed upon us by others.
To return now to our main theme...
What this means is that the other three
forms, in order to be UnFallen, must be rooted in their expression in
selfless human love {Your will
be seen}. This is accomplished through
free acts of moral grace (the fulfillment of the law and the prophets
in actions based upon the moral sensibilities of the human heart).
We will come to this point again later, but for now let us return
to our discussion of the Four Forms of Love.
Here is another story from my biography,
which really contains all that I can say from experience about selfless love:
I had a very intimate friend - intimate
in a way hard to understand. Our relationship was such that when
he crossed over, in his early thirties, he was able to leave behind for
me as a gift (with the aid of Grace), the fruit, via memory, of his
whole life (explaining how and why this happened would be going way too
far away from our work here). Now granted this is not the usual
kind of experience we have, but I would be less than honest not to make
reference here, for it was from him that I learned what I know about
how to practice selfless human love.
To make this as clear as possible: I
possess all his memories, and should I want to look at how he lived and
what he thought, I have but to practice the right kind of discipline
and the whole is there for me to experience, in much the same way as we
can all experience our own memories should we care to make the effort.
What he taught me in this way is that he seldom thought of
himself at all, and certainly when with another person he was fully
concentrated on their feelings and needs. He was a natural empath
by the way, and this enabled him to see more clearly the other - the Thou. His biography did occasionally force him to do
for himself, but in the main his nature was such that he always placed
his own needs, wants, feelings and thoughts second to those he was
with. He was also a true innocent, which meant that he lacked
those common impulses to ordinary evil which he found in most others.
Evil was to him a mystery, for there was no way in which he, who
was naturally innocent and selfless, could have empathy with evil (know
it from the inside out). He was then instinctively selfless, and
I am forever in his debt for showing me a living realization of this
human ideal to which to aspire (yes, I do frequently fail).
Now nurturing love
we mostly experience as arising between parent and child, or teacher
and much younger student. At the same time, lovers who hold each
other close during the night, also express this face of love. Our
present day culture has lost much of its connection with this form of
love, mostly through fear and lack of trust, for nurturing love is most
frequently expressed through touch (holding a child in ones lap,
comforting a friend with an embrace, care of the ill and infirm etc.).
This loss of understanding of the touching aspect of nurturing
love in practice has come about mainly because of the influence, on our
decadent and decaying Civilization, of Fallen Eros. Young people
will know little of this, but for those of us awake at the time, the
1980's, with its fear driven panics (largely unwarranted) over the
abuse of children by caregivers, made it impossible any more for
teachers in schools to nurture children, or close relatives either.
Excesses of publicity, and deep confusion (and error) among
so-called professionals in mental health, has driven us away from
appreciating the importance and nature of touch between human beings.
For a teacher in a school to physically nurture a child
(regardless of how deep is the child's need) is seen now (fearfully and
unjustly) as potentially sexual, and therefore dangerous (accusations
of abuse, and threats of law suits). This is a great loss for
both the children and the adults. Of course, the school
environment is not the only social environment that suffers because of
this confusion.
In my biography, I was graced for a time
to be a student of this form of love, as that was carried out and
investigated for a few years in Berkeley California during the early
1970's. An organization of lay therapists, which called itself
Group House, experimented with the use of nurturing touch at a very
high and intelligent level. It was not all that was done there,
but it was a main aspect of that work.
Adults were held like babies by group
leaders and members. People learned to express anger in a playful
way by pushing each other around the room. The accumulated rage
of a lifetime could be released, when the person expressing it was held
tightly, physically, by the dozen or so other members of the group, so
that the anger could be experienced freely, while at the same time
remaining connected to the nurturing physical contact of those others
present about who one cared, and who care about us. The floor of
the group rooms were layered in mattresses, covered with gaily colored
sheets, and with many many colored pillows everywhere. We wore
lose clothes and no shoes, and in this environment for people to sit so
close to each other as to be touching, hip to hip, arm over arm, or
however they wanted to drape themselves in relationship to each other,
was common.
There is a book that I value (others do
not) called Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts
Storm. Here is a quote from the opening section called The Pipe: "The Medicine Wheel Way begins
with the Touching of our Brothers and Sisters. Next it speaks to
us of the Touching of the world around us...".
While the deep wisdom of Native Americans remembers the gift of
touch, though the influence of Fallen Eros (more later) our decaying
White culture has more and more lost a true connection to nurturing
love by an unwarranted sexualization of all touching behaviors.
From this we can understand a little the
nature of the choice offered. If nurturing love
is filled from the inside out with human selfless love,
its Fallen nature (sexualization) can be overcome.
If we turn next to brotherly and sisterly love, we find something that has not yet become so Fallen
(although it is often faked), but remains strong and growing stronger.
Another name for this face (or form) of love is comradeship.
The struggles of life are best endured
when shared. The real secret of Alcoholics Anonymous is not in
the Twelve Steps themselves, but in the community (reread the Twelve
Steps and notice the frequent use of the term we, an approach which is also an essential aspect of the
Lord's Prayer). It is not the i-AM
itself that does this work, but each in the company of others. It
was the Solidarity Movement in Poland that crucially weakened Communism
in eastern Europe. It is associations of social activists and
environmentalists that are combating the worst aspects of our
degenerating culture. Everywhere that human beings join together
to share the burdens of life, brotherly and sisterly love (comradeship) is being expressed.
We should also pay attention to where it
is faked (Fallen), and what problems result. Mostly this occurs
in the work place, and mostly it is faked when it comes from the top
down as an urged tool of management (we have to be a team). At the same time, in the same work place, its
UnFallen form will appear in the solidarity of the workers uniting
against the abuses of management - a management that does not really
want to share the burdens of the work, but rather seeks to dominate and
to profit at the expense of the workers (dominion over, instead of communion with). In our time the faked version of this form
of love dominates our work life, and there is no true comradeship
between the owners and the workers. Yet, please recall what was
said above about the Evolution of Consciousness, and how in our time
top down hierarchical social forms are dying (dominion over), while bottom up social forms are beginning to emerge (communion with).
The faked (or Fallen) form of comradeship
has lost its meaning and utility for the whole (it remains useful for
the selfish and self centered who, possessing power over our lives,
seek to dominate, rather than enrich). Here again in the work
place it will only be when human selfless love penetrates the impulses
to solidarity or teamwork that true comradeship will arise. In
fact, much that the future will unfold depends upon bringing more and
more into the work life, this face of love.
Most of us know a great deal about this
form of love, for we experience it anywhere we find community (such as
a church etc.). The danger is, of course, when single communities
can't find a way to solidarity with other single communities. Why
this is so is frequently a consequence of our having difficulty finding
shared world views, which shared world views make possible the
comradeship of a typical community. Yet, if selfless love really
comes to penetrate individuals in any single community, that community
will then be on the road to learning how to live with other
communities, even though they do not share fully congruent world views.
The fact is that we all share a great deal more than we think,
and the coming changes in social existence, which are to take the form
of various political and environmental crises, will lead us to those
choices (free moral grace) by which we can learn to see our shared
humanity across a broader spectrum of differences than is presently
possible. When there isn't any longer an abundance of food and
water for all, the ideologies and beliefs that tend to separate us will
hopefully become secondary to the need to cooperate for survival.
In a sense, a major characteristic of the
coming crisis in civilization is the conflict between the influence of
the false Darwinian social theory (competition, survival of the
fittest) and free moral impulses (chosen cooperation as our true
natural state). In the Gospels this message is contained in the
Beatitudes, such as: Blessed are the meek [the
truly humble] for
they shall inherit the Earth. [The
television series currently trying to work with this is Jericho, but its general conception of human nature is weak, and
it mostly is written for dramatic tension (thus missing a great
opportunity to show human beings acting more creatively).]
Here is another brief aside, regarding
the meaning of work: There are many kinds of work that are
devalued in our failing civilization and culture. People are
taught, for example, to consider it demeaning to work in fast food
restaurants, or as custodians. All types of labor are thought to
be beneath many, who then judge and look down upon those who serve
below them. If we are to give rebirth to our civilization, one of
the central acts of rebirth will be in the redemption of the meaning of
labor. I don't believe anything more needs to be said here.
In my biography, I learned the most about
comradeship in the work life.
Now I want to undertake a discussion of
Eros, in both its Fallen and UnFallen forms. But preliminary to
that, we need to deepen some of what we previously have discussed
regarding the Four Forms of Love. And, because of the huge
influence of Fallen Eros on our culture, this discussion will have to
be done carefully and take some time and effort on the part of the
reader.
It is possible to make a symbolic cross of these four forms in the following way:
selfless love
nurturing love + comradeship
erotic and
sensual love
Selfless love is more Heavenly in nature,
while erotic and sensual love is more Earthly. It would be wrong,
however, to conceive of erotic and sensual love as something sinful or
base. The Divine Mystery has clearly placed in the hands of the forces of erotic and sensual attraction that power by which
procreation occurs, and by this has entrusted the coming into
incarnation of children to this attractive power (or force) of human
nature.
I don't, by the way, meant to use the
term force metaphorically. We have to appreciate that emotion
and passion bring about movement toward, as well as movement away.
This is a profound power in human relationships. Physics
ignores this force since it can not be quantified, but anyone who is paying attention to their lives, will
have no trouble appreciating the qualities here under consideration.
While selfless love and erotic and
sensual love seem to have a relationship that can be characterized by
heavenly and earthly qualities, nurturing love and comradeship do not.
This symbolic
cross then seems to have both a vertical and
a horizontal dimension. In order to deepen this I will have to
add some matters which for some will seem speculative, but which I can
assure you are also rooted in experience.
Christianity has so far only known much
about what is essentially a patriarchal Trinity: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. We are entering on that time when knowledge of the
matriarchal Trinity: Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul will be added to
our understanding. The anonymous author of Meditations
on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism puts the situation this way in the Arcanum XIX: (the
meditation on) The Sun:
Father
/ \
Daughter--/------\---Holy Soul
\ / \ /
\/ \/
/ \ / \
Son--\---------/-- Holy Spirit
\ /
\ /