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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Part II
return to the main-page article on "God"
The Gift, Lee Bogle
I've never seen atoms, gamma or radio waves, or the force of gravity; but, as persons of knowledge inform us, there are ways of ascertaining the existence of these.
sight and hearing as impotent witnesses Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the great scientists of history: Some say "you cannot be as sure as you are of sensory experience. I say I can. A physicist is never limited to direct sensory impressions; he has to deal with a multitude of conceptions and things for which he has no physical organ - the dynamical theory of heat, for instance, and of gases, the theories of electricity, of magnetism, of chemical affinity, of cohesion ... [which] lead him into regions where sight and hearing and touch are impotent as direct witnesses, where they are no longer efficient guides."
The five senses can be impotent witnesses of an invisible realm; especially, of ultimate reality.
Jack Bauer's 24
"remind her of the things she used to love" In season 2, episode 14, Jack and Kate are interrogating her sister, Marie. The latter has had a busy day. She has shot her fiance, on their wedding day, no less; murdered two others; aided foreign terrorists with a nuclear bomb; and, just before her arrest, was about to kill her own sibling, Kate. A very busy day. Marie, having been indoctrinated with hate-ideology, mouths fanatical slogans such as "people need to die for things to change." She knows where the bomb is, and Jack needs that information. He strategizes with Kate on how they might break through the heavy miasma of rage enveloping this wretched, lost creature. Jack strikes upon a way for Kate to convince her sister to cooperate: "remind her of the things she used to love."
what you'll be doing for the next million years As I watched this scene from the popular 24, something within me leapt to a realization: "This is just like what Father Benson talked about with his missionary trips to the lower realms. This is what it's like trying to help hate-filled spirit-persons blinded by their own self-loathing and self-pity." Only a perception of good things, and their own self-love, will bring these wayward souls back to sanity.
what's this got to do with romance? In contemplating this "conclusion and summary," I found myself casting about for some unifying concept for the fragments of what has become a considerable body of information. And then I saw Jack confronting Marie.
if you don't know the purpose of the universe, then you don't know Jack Jack shows us how: "remind her of the things she used to love." Only real love will heal the world. Only real love will save each of us. The entire universe was brought into existence for one primary reason. It is meant to be a laboratory, a classroom, wherein creatures made in the image of God might develop and evolve to receive a full inheritance from their Divine Parent(s); might grow to accept what they were meant to be; might become conscious of the true self.
animal brain chemicals vs. magnetic soul-attraction The temporary John-and-Mary union is a combination of fitful immaturity, egoic wanting and needing, brain chemicals on a romp, and instinctual animal response - all quite mammalian. More often than not, this is what passes for romantic love in our world. It is the "love that has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight." True romance is very different. It is based on harmonically calibrated, equally resonating, soul energies; is not temporary but eternal as the soul energies from which they derive. Twin Soul lovers are not bound to each other by transitory brain-chemical affinity. Their mutual attraction is powered by soul-forces akin to magnetism. It's just physics, and like all energy, it cannot be duplicated nor destroyed.
A better analogy than general magnetism might be the tuning fork calibrated to resonate with and excite only a specific other - even though there might be a thousand other forks in the room.
male and female: my, don't they make a lovely couplet Here's what I think. I think the Genesis story suggests that the universe, the physical creation, and reality itself, has been constructed as a kind of Grand Mashal. You will recall the classic mashal-proverb with the two, often antithetical, couplets. The Genesis story leads us to view creation as a series of halves. Jewish scholars Shokek and Leavitt speak to this:
a breaking of The One into The Two "According to ... the first chapter of Genesis, the creation of the world signifies a unique process... a 'breaking' of the One into the Two: In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth... and God divided the Light from Darkness... and God called the light, Day, and the darkness he called Night... "This formula of the creation, i.e., the breaking of the One into the Two, established from the dawn of history the 'opposite couples' of every existent thing... it also established the duality of the human being... God created man in His own image ... Male and Female He created them (Gen. 1: 27)."
the medium is the message I think that the Spirit World, communicating through the psychic-shaman of Genesis 1-3, is telling us that we will be able to discern something about Ultimate Reality - even a glimpse of what God is like - by how creation itself is structured. The mashal-view helps us to perceive.
This artwork of the cosmos reminds me of the distant world to which Jodi Foster traveled in Contact. She had received an encrypted message from outer space. The full meaning of its content was to be deciphered not merely as a function of language translation but in terms of proper arrangement and structure of the content itself. I think the Genesis story of Adam and Eve might be something like this. Its surface meaning will take us down a dead-end path of literalism. Much of its message is meant to be extracted by a mashal investigation of "comparing the antithetical couplets." The story tells us that the entire universe, in a metaphorical sense, is arranged as a series of halves, the most mystical and wondrous of which is the very "image of God," the male and female. The little that might be known of God can be deduced by contemplating the grand cosmic scheme of halves all about us; especially, the male and female. They become for us a living antithetical mashal-couplet. And as we compare and contrast the Genesis halves of all creation will will learn something of God.
the ancient wisdom of the East concurs Is it not significant, more than mere coincidence, that the ancient yin-yang symbol speaks in concordance with the Hebrews, of reality undergirded by a matrix of dualistic, antithetical forces? most specifically, male and female.
why this emphasis on the term One Person? It is repeated so often. It must mean something important. We find the words One Person in the canonical gospels; in the Gnostic writings; in the letters of the apostle Paul; we find it even in The Wedding Song, channeled lyrics from the afterlife. We are told (Gen. 2: 24) that the purpose of Adam and Eve's coming together is to "cling" (glue) to each other, to unite the cosmic halves, to return to undifferentiated Oneness. The Wedding Song alters the Genesis wording, replaces "cling" with "travel on": a man shall leave his mother and a woman leave her home, They shall travel on to where the Two shall be as One.
clinging and traveling on refer to a process of Twins becoming One Person It seems safe to suggest that "travel on," for Twin Souls, denotes a process, a spiritual journey. A journey to where? Twins are to begin a journey which will take them to a status of One Person. What does this mean? We have seen that with Gen. 2:24 the flow of the story is interrupted. The psychic-shaman narrator virtually shouts "cut, freeze frame," and, so to speak, walks out to center stage. Under a spotlight, he now addresses the audience directly.
In effect, the message is this: "Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for your kind attention. I must apologize for interrupting the Adam and Eve story, but I thought you would want to know this. Everything that has happened to this point, from Genesis 1:1 to 2:23, was meant to prepare us for something important:
Adam and Eve, male and female, were made in the image of God; however, the copy quality is just a bit smudged Adam and Eve, the fictional progenitors of humankind, the archetypal images of God, represent our vast potential for godliness, for becoming personifications of true love. But, for most, right now, this is more promise than reality. A process of becoming is required; a long spiritual journey for Twins - they are called to "travel on." Why do they need to "travel on"? Because they have not yet arrived. And it will take time. They have not yet become perfected love.
why is the process of growing in godly love spoken of as becoming One Person? Do you recall the children's story of the Little Soul? He wanted to understand the mysteries of life. God told him that he could know the cold only by experiencing the hot; the dark, by knowing the light; the joy, by the sadness. This clash of antithetics, of polar opposites, as a means of furthering understanding, is a very old idea. It is at the heart of ancient Gnosticism, the mashal, and the yin-yang principles. To say that Adam and Eve are to become One Person is another way of saying that these Sacred Two are to become like God who knows no duality. All the best of God is all-pervasive, ubiquitous - there is nothing else. We learned in Gen. 1:26, 27, by inference and by the Hebrew, that God is some sort of undifferentiated Male-Female One-Person Parent. Since the Genesis story introduces us to God as this One-Person Entity, we are led to conclude that Adam and Eve's mandate to become One-Person has something to do with this antecedent idea. They are to become like God. ... like that One-Person Male-Female God.
if the goal for Adam and Eve was to become One Person, why didn't God just keep "the human" in an undifferentiated male-female state? why the separation into individual male and female, only to require them to regain their initial oneness? The psychic-shaman author of Genesis, and part-time Zen Master, is baiting us, forcing us to think, with a series of paradoxical questions. We are to compare and contrast. This is pure mashal investigation. The surface, literalistic meaning will automatically be the wrong one. Let's recall that when Adam first laid eyes on Eve he started gushing like an idiot, "You are just like me! You are me, in another form!" Quite true, but this is the easy part of romantic love. Twin love will be expressed as a sense of The Utter Familiarity: "You are more like me than anyone I've ever known! In your presence, I have come home." So far so good. But despite Adam's initial enthrallment with Eve, these Two failed to understand the importance of their psychological-spiritual differences, the meaning of their essential opposite-sameness (Gen. 2: 25). They needed to understand that they were made to become "a lovely couplet," a living mashal interaction of opposing yin-yang forces. And, like The Little Soul, by their differences, by their differentiation and sweet romantic clash as male and female, they were to experience "the hot and the cold" and "the dark and the light"; and, most importantly, "the selfishness and the love." Eventually, as a result of this romantic dialectic, they would come to deeply understand something new.
not The Fall but The Rise Their interaction in a dualistic world is the real meaning of "eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." In order for them to advance in understanding, they were required to take such a journey.
They were meant to leave "Paradise," a state of naivete and shallowness, and "travel on" toward spiritual maturity and wholeness. Theirs is not a churchmen's story of "The Fall," but of "The Rise," and then the subjugation of the Small Ego, a temporary state of self-centeredness out of which each would progress - but only with the help of a Twin Soul lover.
You might be interested to know that the ancient Essene gospels interpret the "angel with the flaming sword" at the entrance to The Garden not as deterrent-threat but, like a "candle in the window," God's beacon of light, welcoming the Two back home just as soon as they were able to manage it.
By their dialectic clash of romantic essence, their "giving and receiving, receiving and giving," - which is their spiritual journey, their traveling on together - they will propel each other into ever higher levels of consciousness. How paradoxical! They began as undifferentiated male-female oneness, just like their Male-Female Parent, the ultimate archetypal image of One-Person state of being. But, for Adam and Eve, an initial oneness, by itself, could not help them as it was fraught with a systemic immaturity and spiritual dullness. To overcome this state of illusion, they needed to be separated as individualized male and female that they might interact, clash, as romantic opposites, and thereby come to know, by a process of "traveling on," not only each other, but, primarily, themselves, in relation to agape love. One definition of romantic love, a good one, is that of a process of defining oneself in terms of another person.
the unique counterpartal person
the love that causes one to yearn for another's presence is part of the substrata of the universe, the essential nature of things, an undergirding of Being, a portion of God's own creative essence, a power "so real that it transcends all other forces."
the quest for the unknown, and unknowable, God I will say it again: We know so little about God; other than, what we sense; that, s/he is Love itself. Does the hidden meaning of YHVH indicate that God is a Male-Female Singularity? Does the creation of "the human" as an undifferentiated male-female being, crafted in the image of God, point to the Undifferentiated Parent? Does the "traveling on toward One Person," the purpose of Adam and Eve's life, suggest that this ideal state of existence is one already attained by God? In some sense, we seem to be led to know God as a Male-Female entity. What does this mean? We can't be sure. At the pinnacle of existence, is there a differentiated Father God and Mother God, each with respective anatomical accoutrements? I greatly doubt it. The Spirit-World messages hint to us that God is a One-Person being, containing both male and female energies, but without corporeal existence.
I think Robert Joyce's poetic "giving in a receiving way, receiving in a giving way," offers a glimpse of what this male-female divine nature could mean. It may be true that the closest we shall ever come to seeing the splendiferous face of God might be those times when we are caught in the glorious beatific vision of a Twin-Soul lover's visage.
Why should he not learn something of God when he gazes into her eyes? Why should we count it a strange thing that God would instruct Twins about the highest truths by such indirect means? Do we minimize the grandeur of having been created in the image of God? Why should he not see God in her face? She, herself, is that image of God. Why should he not reckon it the most mystical experience of his life those times when, held in thrall by the intoxicating magic of her eyes, the soothing melody of her voice, the sublime joy emanating from the pureness of her spirit? As attested by so many love-songs, there is substantial reason why men are led to worship and adore the women they love.
you heard it here first: two halves make a whole Two halves make a whole; and two Sacred Lovers, two romantic halves, create for themselves an unparalleled sense of wholeness and joy - with all human desires fulfilled in the Beloved.
who could ask for anything more
The Happenings, I Got Rhythm (1967) “I got my girl, who could ask for anything more.”
And when these two halves, the Sacred Twins, come together, they will finally discover that long sought-for perception of wholeness, of completeness; a sense of, “I got my girl, who could ask for anything more.” All human desires are fulfilled in the Beloved.
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