This is the last of a little series inspired by some questions. Start at number 1 to get the benefit. These are rungs of a ladder, not self contained, independent postings.
I'm not going to fill the paragraphs with initial capitals every time I mention some aspect of the Highest. I'm not going to worry about differences between he-gods and she-goddesses. Just follow the path of the Supreme Being and pick up on the status without the clues of capitals.
Since there isn’t a neutral in English I shall say he and his for the deity and she and hers is included as a matter of course. Both are always present.
The highest being is pure consciousness and therefore exists in pure freedom from any restrictions of time, space, dimension and all the stuff we regard as part of life. It is all pervading and all knowing and has the power to do or be anything whatever, simply by will.
In mediaeval times the kings of some countries used to disguise themselves and walk about as commoners to see what was really going on. As king they could disguise themselves as anybody. They would just play the part until they wanted to drop it.
In the same way, the undifferentiated divinity sheds his undifferentiated state and accepts differences. Although his various powers appear to have diminished, this is not really the case. It is an appearance only, for the sake of the game, what the Hindus call leela, the game of life.
There are three basic types of limitations that the Supreme Consciousness takes on. English, being the language of merchants and colonizers has no term for them, though its tax regulations have plenty of terms, so I'll have to use the language that is best for spiritual matters, and that is Sanskrit. Limitations in this language are called malas.
The first mala that the Supreme takes on is anaviya mala. As soon as he does this his power of will suffers a contraction, and an illusory consciousness of imperfection arises. He begins to consider himself as a small and imperfect individual.
Contemplate that.
The path of return via IS is going to unwind these separate layers that I'm describing in the Hallowe'en costume of the Most High.
The second mala is mayiya mala. This involves an apparent decrease in knowledge. The all- knowing one becomes overwhelmed by the apparent diversity of all the things he previously knew were one. Dualities begin to be perceived as reality.
The third self imposed mala is karma mala. This one puts an illusory limit on the powers of action. Now the ex-omnipotent is subject to limitations of his organs of action, and he becomes involved in what seem to him to be good and bad actions.
When the power, the Shakti, contracts, the highest consciousness is bound by these limitations. The primal powers of the highest are omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, perfection, immortality and all-pervasiveness.
When all the malas are accepted, the highest being experiences all previous attributes in a reduced condition. Though omniscient he thinks he knows little, though omnipotent he feels helpless in everything but a few small areas. He is bliss itself but gets caught up in pleasure and pain and attachments. He is immortal, but fears death. He is omnipresent, yet regards himself as restricted to a small time and space.
This is your life and my life, until we start on the path of return to our original condition. One great help to us, apart from what we have dealt with in our recent spiritual work is that the reduced Supreme still carries on the essential activities of his original state, although on a smaller scale.
To recognize these activities as they occur begins to free the player from the play and return the powers that were laid aside for the sake of the part.
There are five processes that the highest being carries on without ceasing, for the sake of the creations. These are creating, sustaining, dissolving, concealing, and grace.
That which performs these actions is consciousness and bliss. These actions are the sport, the game of the highest. And he continues to perform these actions even when in reduced circumstances as a god in bondage, as a human.
Let's see how it works for us. Take a look at the system on the cosmic scale and you see immediately the creation, sustenance, and dissolution. It's the major law of material manifestation. All things are born, live a while, and die, returning to the cycles of the game.
Astrologers use this law of observation as the mainstay of their classifications of cardinal, mutable and fixed. Permutate these three with the four elements and you have the 12 signs of the Zodiac and then contemplation under the cherry tree produces the whole of astrology.
That's on the grand scale, the creation of the physical universes. How does concealment and grace fit into the game. The enormous diversity of phenomena, creatures, beings, things, weather, galaxies, everything actually in the spiritual sense is One, as Vivekananda found out when Ramakrishna touched his forehead.
The enlightened being sees all these'ten thousand things,' as the Tao says, as One. That which makes it difficult for us to perceive the Oneness is the divine activity of concealment.
When a moment of insight appears and the mist of illusory perception thins for a moment, that is a moment when grace is in operation. Grace is a gift. It cannot be earned, but everyone can prepare for its appearance. Those who are seekers have already been touched by it. Everyone reading this far is definitely a recipient of grace.
Forget the sanctimonious and unctuous way the theme is presented in many churches. This too is part of a game. Look on it more in the nature of someone giving you help with a hard word in a crossword puzzle that makes it easier to solve, or showing you how to use a European coin operated phone so that you can call somebody when you are in Paris.
It is an absolutely essential help on the way. And you have already contacted it, or you would still be operating totally at the Big Mac and large bank balance consciousness, without the concept that anything else may have some importance in life.
What does the human being do that corresponds to it on a human scale? Well, by now you know that each human being creates the world he lives in with the creative power of his mind. When the highest being takes on the game of human he manifests the same objects outside as flash in his consciousness inside. When he perceives different objects in different places in space, and at differing moments in time, that is creation.
At the moment we perceive something, we have created it. When the image of a pay phone vibrates in our mind, we have created the pay phone. In between thoughts we are cosmic. Every time we return to the next thought we recreate our universe. This idea you have already run across, and it is possibly more real than it was. The path of IS leads between the thoughts.
Imagine a rose, as you did in one of the first exercises, if you were ever one of my students. You have created the rose from the substance of consciousness. Change it to a lily. You have dissolved the rose, after sustaining it for a period of time. Consider now that both lily and rose and anything else you can visualize are in fact One, all are manipulated consciousness, a consciousness that is totally unaffected by taking on these different forms.
This is the eternal virgin matter of the alchemists. It takes any form but is still pure, and unaffected in essence by what it has seemingly become, hence virgin.
Now by an act of your own grace you have .removed the concealment of the One in the many. You have just performed consciously the five divine functions.
These five actions you perform continually, and largely without being conscious of them. They are the five actions of the One consciousness that continually creates and sustains the whole cosmos. You perform the same actions in a limited way within your own personal version of universe creation.
When you perform the hearing of the Name method you can watch your thoughts as from a slight distance. Watch them come and change and go and arise in a different form. Do not stop any of them. Do not follow any of them. Just observe them with interest as you would a puppy playing in your neighbor's yard. Whatever the puppy does, you are not going to interfere.
When you watch your mind in this way the thoughts gradually slow down, and you find yourself more and more in the spaces between the thoughts, and between the breaths. This is the real meaning of meditating.
In that space is the ultimate realization. By the effortless effort of witnessing your inner world in this way, after the Name has carried you through the first dense layers, you will eventually become established in that consciousness of which you have previously experienced occasional glimpses. Eventually even the vibration of the Name stops because you are not different from it any longer.
Somewhere in here after the first through the nth reading of these five posts you will see enough to keep you going, if this is the track you want. You are prepared for it, and can do it. But an act of will is required, because the choice, though made possible by grace, is not obligatory. This is the free will aspect that screws up the theologian because he puts it at the wrong place in the process.
The free will is applied by choosing what thoughts you will think, and what beliefs you will allow as laws of your life. And they do not have to be the ones that your family, schools, priests, or public opinion provided for you. They may be, if you were fortunate in that sense, but they can eventually all be conscious choices, not pre-loaded programs.
It is essential to realize that the performance of the work on the Name does not tie you to any particular religion.I have used examples from non-Christian beliefs that are not held by majorities in the U.S., simply because the Christian beliefs contain material that many exiles from those beliefs would consider non applicable to their lives any more.
A huge percentage of most religious activities have nothing to do with spirituality anyway. They are barnacles on the original boat that carried someone across.
You can practice any religion, or none, while being a practitioner of the Name. I know of a rabbi who does this, and he doesn't use a name from the Kabbalah, or the Torah.. I know of a Presbyterian minister of a very important church in New York who does this, using a name from the pantheon of Hinduism, and not the name of Jesus.
I know of an atheist, who doesn't realize that he is so devoted to disproving God that he thinks on him day and night, much more than most religious people. He is on the way to a breakthrough.
God is in every thought and every action. Only duality puts judgment on them. It is never a lousy day. Rain doesn't make it lousy. It's the attitude to the rain. The day is just a day. Since the whole of life must now be more perceptible as a game, it is clear that as long as the company you keep doesn't drag your mind off the path you can belong to any group you want, or to none.
Here is a sutra from the writings of an enlightened being whose path happened to be the path of Kashmir Shaivism. It expresses the ‘just is’ aspect of the world as seen without preferences by the initiate. The feet of the guru have a special meaning to Hindus.
All acts, favorable or otherwise are always performed
By the Lord Himself.
Thus, abiding in you, I wander through the world
With nothing to frustrate the festival
Of the worship of your spotless feet
A Western equivalent would be the Trestleboard statement…‘In all things, great and small, I see the Beauty of the Divine expression.’
Here is a little trick that could help you in becoming attached to the Name, and will make it harder and harder for disruptive thoughts to find an entry way. Many of you have been in Christian ways and disliked them so much that you now find it difficult to think of anything of value in them. The baby went out with the bath water.
However, if you were ever present at a time when the congregation all sang together a hymn that they all knew and liked, that was probably the very best part of the whole service. The reasons are psychological, spiritual, and physiological, and at least you should be aware of them from the viewpoint of making your own rituals, if you follow any kind of spiritual path.
Medical investigations on the psychological and physical condition of Benedictine monks, and others, showed that they were able to function perfectly on three hours sleep, or less, per day IF they chanted for at least six hours per day. This is the observed fact.
The reasons pertain to the areas mentioned before. When you breathe in, your sympathetic nervous system is excited and all the functions of it, increased muscle tone, blood pressure and so forth are stimulated into action.
When you breathe out, the parasympathetic nervous system functions, and a relaxation of muscle tone and a lowering of blood pressure and associated phenomena occur. It's pretty obvious that the parasympathetic set is the set associated with meditation and slowing down the interfering body processes when you want to look inside yourself.
What happens when you chant or sing? You breathe out more than you breathe in. A quick in breath could last you the whole verse of a simple hymn. And the physical act itself thus becomes a spiritual exercise.
Now some of those hymns were much more inspired than a lot of the so-called scriptures. The spirituality of some Christians is not a matter of debate. They were not usually those who held high positions in the Church of course; often indee they were persecuted by those who did, because they ignored the dogma, but they had made the inner contact, which in their case they called Jesus, or Christ.
When you read inspired material it elevates your consciousness. Doing it in a contemplative mood actually could result in your hitting the same level as the person through whom it was written in the first place. It is easier to achieve this result if you understand the language, but that in itself is not an absolute necessity, it just makes it easier.
The contact can be made using inspired words in a language you are not familiar with. If the foreign language is translated by someone at the same level of consciousness as the original writer, then the translation works too.
The Song of Odin is an example of a translated piece of inspired work and many widely used Sanskrit mantras are an example of the untranslated foreign kind. Those who have bothered to learn the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic have also experienced the power of words that came straight from the Presence, as opposed to the translation made by those academics who just knew what the prayer ought to say.
To me, the Warsaw telephone directory has as much power for an English speaker as most of the current translations of the Lord’s Prayer into English. The Aramaic is a marvelous piece of magic and a mantra in itself.
That leaves the inspired material in a language you can understand. Here is how I have used it myself. I shall just give a single example of a piece of inspired poetry in English, that can be sung, that is in almost every hymn book, and can be adapted to dozens of Names. There are many more available in any hymn book of any denomination. Find your own and make it your own.
My own sacred names have two and three syllables respectively so I looked around for an inspired hymn or chant, in English, about the name, that allowed for substitution. A good one was this:
In a believer's ear
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
This was written by a genuine devotee of the Sacred Name, who had made the contact, so you can immediately use it for your own purposes. It is beyond the narrow confines of any set of creeds. Three of the verses are immediately applicable to this method.
Instead of Jesus you can put ANY two syllable name of the divine. For a true devotee it works with: Odin, Rama, Shiva, Mary, Isis, Brigid, Uma, Kali, Shakti, Krishna....at least a hundred that you may already know, one of which may be the one you have chosen.
My other sacred name has three syllables. What to do? Simple arithmetic suggests cutting out one syllable of the first line, if that is possible. In this case it is.
The first line then becomes ‘How sweet the name...Sophia, Innana, Osiris, Maria, Demeter, sounds’ etc. You get the idea.
I use this kind of technique when I go for a walk or drive. Instead of letting the thoughts of the negative collective mind intrude I walk or drive to the rhythm of whichever poem, chant, or hymn I am using that day and come back refreshed spiritually, and untouched by the garbage floating around in the air everywhere.
This is just an example of course. You may have something that appeals to you more. By doing just a little bit of work on it you can make it your own.
There are some very fine prayers around that lend themselves to this kind of adaptation. I refer to, prayers of praise NOT prayers of intercession. Only the foolish pray for SOMETHING, as though their God or Goddess is a withholding being. Nothing is being withheld. It is only our inability to accept, and receive that leaves us in a bereft state.
The only legitimate thing to ask for is the grace to understand or perceive. That is the business of the divine being. Your health, wealth and happiness are not.
God has no interest in your goodness or your badness, only in your spiritual evolution. You don’t even exist in the prayer world until you have made contact. Here is a fine example that anyone can use:
And like a tide you have flowed into me.
The innermost recesses of my spirit are full of you
And all the channels of my soul are made sweet with your presence.
I am utterly content.
In all my being there is no ripple of unrest
For I have opened unto you
The wide gates of my being
And like a tide you have flowed into me.
It is pretty clear that God does not intervene in this world. Despite the anguished prayers of millions for millennia, the things they don't want are increasing all round them, and the things they do want are conspicuously absent.
When, and only when you have touched the divinity within yourself, then that divinity reflects in your world as apparent improvement. Until that time you are a statistic, just as liable to misfortune or fortune as everybody or everything else.
Moreover, there is your karmic account to be paid. Nothing affects this except the connection with what is beyond karma, outside the game. And the way to that connection you now know. My pagan, not to mention heathen blessings on your journey!
I occasionally go to local church services here and there to see if anything is going on. Usually it isn't. During the sermons about the nonsense of original sin, guilt, sacrifice and social works, I keep my inner dialogue going exactly how I wish. The minister's voiced ignorance or dogmatic ranting flows off the teflon barrier of the Name.
During the hymn I sing my own version. Nobody else hears. They can only hear the words they expect. It's an interesting example of being IN a universe but not OF it.
Here at the end of our little canter together are three scenarios to consider. One of them may appeal to you more than the others. Contemplate it. It has your paw print on it and will work best for you.
Since we are still dealing primarily with insights from IS we should start with a very ancient picture about ice. Consider your human consciousness, in its state of ignorance, as a block of ice floating about on a great lake of cosmic consciousness. It seems to be different from the lake, although it is actually made of the same substance as the lake, at a lower level of vibration, a denser form.
As spiritual awareness grows, the effect of it is to dissolve away the human aspects that cause the illusion of separation of ice from lake. The ice realizes, as it were, that it is actually becoming again what it was in the beginning, the lake itself.
It keeps the illusion of separateness until the last particle melts and becomes one with its source. In spiritual practice this is often the moment when the last doubt disappears, and we never can tell if our current doubt is the last one destined to go. Think about that. You may be only one doubt away from getting to where you have always been.
Then there is the lightning flash. I have mentioned in other posts the concept of a lightning flash illuminating the mountain path ahead. Even when the darkness returns we are better off than before, because we now know of the existence of the path ahead of us. Now some people have had that flash in a previous life, and don't get it in this one. They are not necessarily going to have an explosion of light this time around, but they can still find something to learn from the example.
We don't shovel out the darkness when we enter a room. We switch on the light and the darkness just isn't there. The darkness has no power in the presence of the light. You and I could use the analogy of the dimmer switch, and realize that our daily work gradually causes a brightening of the light, until stuff that we once stumbled over is plain to see, and our path becomes clearer and clearer.
One day we get to realize that we actually were the light source ourselves, and the Ragnar riddle about the source of the light that enables us to see our dream will be solved by an experience.
And the last picture is the missing prince or princess story. This happened in India where a king had taken his infant son out for a ride and suddenly saw a magnificent stag. He put his son down by a tree, told him to stay there and he'd be back shortly. Off he went on what turned out to be a long chase, after the stag. The boy got fed up waiting and wandered off and was found by an itinerant tribe of natives who adopted him and brought him up as one of themselves.
The king returned much later, found the boy gone and some tiger marks around and thought that he had been eaten by a tiger. The kingdom mourned for him.
Years later the king's chief minister was asked by the tribe to settle some difficulty and he noticed the boy as being different from the rest of the tribe, and made inquiries.
The boy was restored to his happy father, was bathed and dressed as befitted his rank and was once again a prince.
He was born a prince, spent a little time under the illusion that he was a lesser being, and finally discovered his identity again, as a prince. Girls of course can read 'she' and 'princess' where appropriate.
This is our story. We are all on the Path of Return, somewhere on IS, and will inevitably get back to our previous high status, with the knowledge gained from our experiences outside the palace.
It won't do any harm to contemplate whichever item appeals to you the most. Apply it to the circumstances of your current life and watch the insights flash.
This is about the limit of what I can say to those who are not serious students of the runes. But if it resonates at all, you can benefit tremendously by contemplating the hints, and by reading between the lines as well as on them. My blessings on your efforts. You need only consider who are the gods that your current gods worship to get a glimpse of the infinite progression ahead of you. Happy Trails!
And a Happy Memorial Day weekend to you! And thinking of Memory. The first virtue to be attained on step one of the major initiatory paths, spiritual or magickal, is that of discrimination. Memory is an essential part of discrimination.
Memo:
This applies not only in matters spiritual but also in matters mundane. I have to mention therefore on this Memorial weekend, that when our current President took office the gas in the station down the street was $1.46 a gallon. Today it is $4.29. Mission accomplished?
